>> Welcome to Dialogue, a collaboration between WOSU and OSU's John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

I'm Mike Thompson, News Content director for public media and I will moderate our conversation today.

The topic, climate change, the tipping point.

For good or bad, it has been quite the year for science.

Learned how viruses spread, immunologists and public health officials to help.

Safe effective vaccines developed in record time and perseverance rover.

And our attention turning to the biggest problem of all, the warming planet.

Climate change comes as we complete the hottest record.

2020 was barely cooler than 2016.

Ran out of names.

South America saw a severe drought.

Heavy rain and flooding on the Horn of Africa triggered a desert locust outbreak.

And finding ways to slow the steep slide of the carbon monoxide emissions and intensifying the weather events.

We'll look at where we stand over the next hour, how much longer we have to prevent irreversible damage and to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

.

We have two climate experts, Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley Thompson.

They have been study diagnose the earth is warming faster than it has in nearly a million years and human activity is largely the reason why.

We want you to join in this dialogue during our discussion, use the Q & A function on your Zoom, WOSU producer will select the ones most relevant to the discussion and will include those.

Welcome, Lonnie and Ellen.

>> Good morning.

>> A quick point, honored to share their last names, I am not related to the doctors Thompson.

We'll start with you, Ellen.

Where are we right now, the current level of climate change in 2021?

>> Ellen?

>> Muted.

There we go.

>> All right.

Thank you for asking.

Where are we?

Well, we are in experiencing a warming climate.

We talk about global climate change.

But we talk about global warming, people use the term and it's important to talk about when we're talking about the earth warming and the global average temperature on the planet.

Not looking at the temperature you're experiencing any given day, that's your weather, but we are looking at the long term averages.

Our Earth warmed 1.1 degrees centigrade in the last hundred years.

Almost two degrees Fahrenheit.

And it is important to remember that climate change involves more than temperature.

Sea level rise, changes in agricultural activity, water and air pollution, extreme weather event.

Mike already mentioned the wildfires.

Where we are, say the last six years have been the six warmest years on record.

And this past year, 2020 was virtually as warm as 2019.

They were statistically indistinguishable.

This creates for us, for human activities, big problems.

And the problem is part of the problem stems from the fact that we have so many people on our planet.

We had 92 million people to our planet every year and 90% of those people join us in underdeveloped countries.

So, the big issue we have with climate change and the current warming is we know what's driving it and in large measure, we have ideas about what we need to do about it.

But we have to muster the political and social will to address the issue.

>> We'll get to that as the discussion continue.

Lonnie, you say human activity is largely responsible for what we are seeing over the past several hundred years.

When you say largely, how much is human activity to blame?

50%, 60%, 75 percent?

How much in the industrial age.

>> I think we have to look at the fact that the climate has always changed and as a geologist by training, we know there have been times on this planet where we did not have glaciers at all and sea level is higher than it is today.

We live on a world where climate change has happened and more recently, it's driven by orbital forces over the long term, thousands of years.

It's just that recently because of industrialization, humans have become a big factor and that's for two reasons.

One is simply by the number that we have on the planet.

7.8 billion.

Never in the history of our planet have we had so many people, depending on a stable climate and food production and so, we have pushed a lot of the different elements in the system to the extreme.

We have become more vulnerable.

Particularly with the very rapid rise in carbon dioxide and very rapid rise in temperatures, particularly over the last 50 years.

And so, before that, there was an interplay between the natural forcings and human forcings.

And in the last 50 years, we have become the dominant forcing on the planet.

I don't want to guess, but I might say 70 to 80% in the last 50 years.

>> Yeah.

It's so stark.

So over the long term, it's because we have been making steel and burning coal and doing other things, driving cars and Ellen, you look back and your ice cores, you saw what the clean air act did in 1970 in terms of pollution.

Have you seen any signs of hope in the past few decades that we have taken steps to reduce emissions here in the U.S., Europe has done the same, of course the developing world has not.

Anything we have done has been offset by what is happening in the developing world.

Is that fair to say, Ellen?

>> It's a global atmosphere, global pollution.

Pollution someplace ends up someplace else.

When I say pollution, it's the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity.

What we don't want to do is get into finger pointing.

We want to work collectively of all of the various countries and thank goodness we rejoined the Paris climate accord, which is very good for us.

But maybe I have just going to step back for a second and just remind people that the intergovernmental panel on climate change, that has issued a number of reports starting 30 years ago, concluded with 90% confidence that the warming we have seen in the second half of the 20th century and now in the 21st century is due to the emission of greenhouse gases and human modification of Earth's surface.

>> Lonnie, climate scientists agree on the cause.

60% of the U.S. population agree.

60% isn't bad, but it's not 97.

How do we get that 60% number up.

>> I think a lot of that has to come with trying to understand people, human beings and I have spent quite a bit of time over the last ten years interacting with behavior analysts, people who study us and why we do anything.

And I think we can learn a lot about just human beings and why we respond to some things and not to others.

But it's the other thing that's become very clear to me, it's not so much the data, you got to have the data to back up any a claims.

But it's more about the narrative when it comes to communicating the importance of climate change to all of us and our future.

Fortunately, we are in a time now where climate change is no longer in the future.

It's actually here and now.

And more and more people are observing this with their own eyes.

And humans being humans, when we see it, we believe it.

And we're now, unfortunately also seeing the detrimental consequences of those changes, to individuals and to companies and we all live on this planet and we have to find a way in which we can operate together and for this particular issue, this has to be a global effort.

>> Ellen, is it the problem is just too big?

I mean, 7.8 billion people, one of 7.8 billion.

What could I do to to solve this problem?

Is it just that it's so hard for each individual to wrap their head around how I personally can turn this trend, mitigate this trend, slow this trend.

Is it to too big for people to grasp how they can help?

>> I'll jump in and say, I am sure that people who study this or read about it and try to educate themselves do get the feeling of being overwhelmed.

It is an overwhelming problem and it's overwhelming for the climate scientists as well.

Doesn't mean that it's hopeless.

But it does mean as Lonnie mentioned, it's going to require a concerted effort on the part of virtually everyone, contributing to the solutions in the best, in the way they can do that best.

And there are a variety of solutions.

And we like to say in climate science, there's no silver bullets, but there's a lot of silver buckshot.

That means, there is not one thing that any of us can do, no magic wand, but lots of small actions that people can take.

But there are also big actions that people can take as well.

When they engage in collective action.

For example, I teach an honors course here at Ohio State on global climate change.

And after that, I tell my students, 15 weeks they heard about climate change and getting to know the subject well, that there are two very important tools that every individual has that they can brick to bear on this issue.

And one is the dollar you spend and the vote that you cast.

Because if we don't have economic and political will, and an assistance not just from our government, but the governments of the world, economically, socially, et cetera, we won't tackle this problem.

>> Go ahead.

Welcoming your questions as with continue this conversation and if you have a question, use the Q & A function on your Zoom.

If you are bashful or somebody else has already asked the question you want to ask, hit the vote up and it will rise and we'll give them preference if they're relevant to our discussion.

The Diana, what questions do we have?

>> A lot of correspond two questions.

CO2 question.

How can we reduce the amount in our atmosphere and what programs are in place right now?

>> Lonnie, want to take a stab at that one?

>> I was look at Microsoft's projection.

They plan to become carbon negative by 2030.

And part of that is in reducing their emissions and the other part of it is developing the technology for carbon capture.

And certainly, there are very bright people working on this issue.

But at the same time, we can't depend on that until it actually becomes a reality.

We have to do what we can do right now in order to buy time for technological developments to come along that will allow us to actually I mean, this would be a great solution if we can pull the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

>> What things are scientists looking at?

How do we do that?

I know it's a ways off and still developing this technology and it might change.

How do you do that?

How do you capture carbon out of the atmosphere and once you capture it, what do you do with it?

>> Mike, you hit on the big problem.

It's all a big problem, but an important question is, where do you put it?

CO2, when it's admitted to the atmosphere stays in the atmosphere for decades to thousands of years.

Many people don't realize that the CO2 or the carbon dioxide that we emit into the atmosphere today, of that, 30% or roughly a third will still be in the atmosphere a hundred years from now and 25% of it will still be in the atmosphere a thousand years from now.

And so, this idea of carbon capture, this is a route that we have to take.

I am not aware of very many demonstration projects.

Right now, there are a number of smaller demonstration projects, one going on in Canada on CO2 extraction.

But then, where do you put it?

And there's a lot of discussion in the scientific and the engineering communities about this because you have to ensure that it's going to stay sequestered wherever you put it for thousands of years if we're going to solve the problem.

>> Lonnie, you hear about burying it, power plants, stick it in the ground.

Is it too simplistic?

You can't put it in the ocean.

Can't put it in space.

Have to put it in the ground I guess.

>> Actually, the oil industry developed technology to extract the carbon dioxide that comes up with oil and then pumping it back into the ground and actually increasing the productivity because of the pressure that that puts back into the reservoir.

I think and I know they do this regularly in the North Sea.

Capture that CO2 and put it back in.

As long as if you think about it, the Earth has stored the oil and gas in these natural reservoirs and clearly, they do exist and if you can put the carbon dioxide back into a sealed reservoir, that's one way to get it out of the atmosphere and out of harm's way as far as life on the planet.

>> Find a country or place that is willing, that's another thing with zoning.

Never ending.

Thought nuclear waste was a problem.

Getting to the the climate the title of this conversation is tipping point.

Is there a tipping point or a spectrum where we can whatever we do, won't be enough.

Is there a tipping point and are we close to it?

>> We have multiple.

If some tipping points are more severe than others meaning they may happen quickly and the ramifications could be very severe, there might be other tipping points that we pass over gradually and in that event, we may have the opportunity to reverse the system, back across the tipping point.

The tipping points that concern us the most are such things as the continued melting of the along with the fringes of the polar ice sheets.

Antarctic, west, and the Greenland ice sheet.

And the melting of mountain glaciers.

That effects the water for the people down stream of those glaciers.

And there's discussion about the potential loss of the Amazon rain forest.

That would be another massive tipping point for the world.

Trying to think of some others.

Lonnie?

There aren't many but the pandemic and a pandemic for example could create a tipping point.

Fortunately with this one, we were able to get vaccines ready within a year.

We're concerned about moving into a world where we have more extreme weather events.

And disruption of monsoon systems.

The monsoons bring much needed rain to heavily populated regions of the southern part of Asia.

>> What are you watching?

>> Sorry.

What was the question.

>> There are many canaries in many coal mines.

What do you see as a tipping point that is near to us?

>> I think one thing we have to be concerned about, the glaciers, the mountain glaciers.

We have passed the tipping point for many of them.

In our system, unfortunately there is a lag between what we do today and when you get the full response of ice sheets and oceans.

And therefore, we won't exceed the total impact of what we have done for 25 to 30 years.

Unfortunately, that means that most of the mountain glaciers that I spent my life studying are going to disappear and this has tremendous ramifications for people who live down stream and depend on that mountain melt in the spring and in times of drought.

And big ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica and the and concern about west Antarctica.

Some below sea level.

And there's been a massive wasting of particularly along the tweets glacier and plan Allen bay in west Antarctica.

And unfortunately, once you move past the point that keeps that ice sheet stable, the ocean waters will erode the base of this ice sheet and you could potentially actually have a collapse of the west Antarctic ice shoot.

Five or six meters of water tied up in that ice.

And what we talk about society and human beings, learning about the rate at which the change takes place.

If we can, we can adapt and migrate.

One of our unfortunate things about human beings is that we have over 50% of our largest cities on coastlines.

Therefore, all that infrastructure and the things we have built over the last 300 years start to become more and more at risk as sea level rises.

And so, a lot of in the past when we have natural climate change, plants and animals, they would just migrate.

They don't build infrastructure like we do.

Suddenly, we have lots of risk to a lot of different coastal regions on this planet.

>> Let's have some more questions from our audience.

Diana?

>> We talked about the impact of climate change kind of around the world.

But what about central Ohio, examples of climate change?

>> Who wants to take a stab at that one.

>> I would say we see it in the increase in precipitation.

And look at that over the years and extreme events.

The extreme events have big implications for cities and your storm sewer supply.

They were developed based on some mean established by past climate and when we start getting these extremes and we are starting to have more and more damage, flood damage, in cities and this is of course, for the farmers, these are big issues.

Ellen, you might want to add to that?

>> Well, I'm sure that if we had any farmers on the call, they could certainly tell you that they're seeing these differences.

I think Lonnie mentioned the extreme weather.

People don't realize the importance of the amount and intensity of the rain for farmers, especially in the spring when they are trying to get the crops into the field.

Later in the season, moving to the warmer, drier part of the year toward harvest, we have issues there, the intense rainfall that essentially beats the soil so that with the water that falls or the precipitation more run off and might have more water, but it's not doing the work that the water needs to do to bring the crops to the point of harvest.

>> I think one of the things for the layperson for climate and weather.

I think it's like mood and personality.

The mood is your weather and personality is the climate.

Is that >> We have a talk we give.

The dog and the dog walker.

Everyone loves their dogs.

A dram with a person and a dog on the leash.

The person is going from point A to point B.

Like this.

But the dog is on the leash and the dog bounces up and down, round and round, runs over here to visit a fire hydrant or follow the trail of some little animal that it's smelling, so the climate is moving more gradually and the dog or the weather is bouncing around.

We can think of the dog walker as the climate.

Kind of sets the basic direction in which our climate system is moving, whether we're in a longer-term warming trend or cooling trend and the dog bouncing all around is the weather.

For climatologists, they take a 30 year average of temperature and precipitation, and some other indicators.

And that 30 year mean or average is called climatology.

That gives you a sense of the climate whereas what we observe from day to day is our weather.

>> Speaking of 30 years, the consensus is, we have to get to zero emissions by 2050, 29 years from now.

Lonnie is that realistic, and what happens if we don't get to zero emissions?

Humans are not contributing to the overall emissions increase in the atmosphere?

>> I think probably to put it into perspective, we just came off of 2020, a pandemic year for the planet and actually, carbon dioxide and our global atmosphere rose by 2.6 parts per million by volume.

Even the economic downturn that caused the caused by the pandemic was not enough to reverse the direction that carbon dioxide has been following ever since it was starting to be measured in 1958 in Mauna Loa.

Now 414 parts per million.

And when he started, it was 315 in 1958.

Unfortunately, when you look at that curve, you see that not only is it rising, it's actually accelerating.

And it's generally thought that 2020, the total carbon emission, industrial emissions would reduced by about 7% globally.

And yet, there's enough activity going on in the planet that the amount increased.

You get an idea of the scale of change that is actually required.

And I have I always have an issue in how do you present this to student sentence because in order to make a change, you have to believe that that change is going to make a difference.

And clearly, I would say that we are at a stage where in a period of time, we have been studying this issue of climate for over 40 years now.

And I first testified in front of the U.S. senate in 1992, along with other climatologists on the issue of climate change.

Unfortunately, we continued and the rate of change is continuing to increase.

But it's gotten to the point where it is now occurring on a time scale where human beings do respond.

We respond we're not very good at responding to something that's going to happen in the future.

Ten, 20, 50 years out in the future.

And that's generally the way climate change had been perceived.

But as human beings, we respond on the here and now.

And unfortunately, climate change is no longer in the future.

We all see it.

And because of that, people are now starting to get concerned.

And companies are getting concerned.

Stockholders are getting concerns.

You have to have there's a risk.

A big risk in climate change.

During the period of 2017 2019, one of the biggest insurance companies in the world that insures insurance companies, they lost $210 billion a year due to weather related issues.

And that was twice as high as it was ten years earlier.

They kept this record since 1980.

And they see the cost that climate change is having on all different areas of human existence.

I think that the realization is not only in the science, but in the fact that people now observe it and there are consequences that are currently being paid for not having dealt with this issue earlier.

But going forward, I do believe we can make a difference and companies and look at companies like General Motors provide by 2035?

They plan to have all electric cars.

No more Diesel or gasoline.

Got it is la and all these new technologies.

And in a time where solar and wind production, the cost per megawatt hour is now lower than oil and nuclear and some of our much lower than coal and some of our fossil fuels.

The technology is coming along and this gives us hope and it also gives us a path forward for the future.

>> Let's get to another question from our audience.

>> You mentioned a couple of these things.

People are asking, what are the top three or five things that we can do to reduce the CO2 most rapidly.

>> Let's start with Ellen.

What's one thing we can do?

>> That's a very tough question.

Because I guess it depends on who the ìweî are.

If we are talking about the we as individuals, then the things that we can do, big things might be to engage with our politicians who make the essentially the policies that are going to drive the investments in alternative energies and clean air.

We talk about temperature, but we have a problem with air pollution and water pollution, all of these need to be addressed.

There is no single thing that any one of us can do to solve the problem.

It's going to take all of us.

But take the individual.

There are many small activities, this is your silver buckshot that we can be more attentive to the energy that we consume, how we consume it.

Simple things like don't go off and leave your computer sitting overnight.

And walk out of the room, turn off the lights.

Change light bulbs to LED.

It's a lot of energy to produce a pound of beef.

Less to produce a pound or chicken or less to produce a pound of rice.

What if we change the eating style?

Our menu?

What if we decide that we don't have to have a new certain most shiny object every year?

There's we live in the U.S., a really extravagant lifestyle.

80% of the people who live in the world live in developing countries.

So, there is a lot that can be done by the mega economies in terms of individual actions.

In the final analysis, it's really going to take the politics and the economics of different countries working together.

Because this problem has gone on for far too long.

And I would like to come back and point to one point that came up.

And Lonnie was talking about, when sea level rises, got so many people living on the coast and people can just migrate.

In the United States, we're not that populous.

We're the third most populous country, but a tremendous amount of land.

What do we do with countries that are also coastal countries, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, et cetera.

Those most countries are not opening borders to environmental refugees.

That's another big issue.

I'm trying to point out the scope of the problem, not to demoralize people or give people the sense that it's hopeless, but we all have to contribute.

And we will contribute to the solutions in different ways.

>> That brings up a point that this is a global problem and this past week, President Biden said he wanted to cut emissions by 2030, earlier than what President Obama promised.

U.S. is back in the accord and want a leading role.

Others are not.

China, Russia, Australia even, they don't have the same targets that we have.

How do we do this, should we do this alone or should we wait for other countries to join us?

What is your opinion on how we can get these countries to coordinate and work together?

>> I would say that I believe that first of all, we can work together.

I mean, this is something that certainly we realized with our field programs.

Often our field operations consist of say, working in Tibet, we have a field team made up of Chinese and Russian, people from South America, Tibetans, and we don't all believe the same, don't have the same background, but we can focus on a problem.

And an objective and we can deliver on that.

And so, I think this is the way you have to look at the climate change issue.

Yes, we all have different systems, but we can focus on this common objective.

And if you take countries like we as a nation, we have been very fortunate.

We have been able to build our economy on oil and gas and coal before we knew the problems of burning so much fuel.

And putting that carbon into the atmosphere.

A lot of countries are coming along at a much lower state than we are.

But I truly believe that from working from China, they are putting huge resources into all these alternative energies because they realize that with 1.4 billion people, there's no way they're going to be able to meet their energy needs of the future based on the energy sources of the past.

And to me, there's a huge economic transition that's taking place.

And we are very fortunate to live in a country where we can play a leading role in that transition and developing that technology that will be used around the world.

And so, I think I also believe that if you take a herd of cows, all running toward a cliff, but you happen to know that there's a cliff out there and you have a way of slowing down your part of the pack, you don't want to all bail over the cliff.

You know.

It's if you the other part is if you have support of like 196 countries who signed on the accord, but if you look at the big players of carbon emissions, to me, I always thought it would be more efficient to get China, India, the U.S., some of these big economies to sit down and come up with a plan on how to move forward, meeting these requirements and it's like all industry.

You think about getting an appliance like a refrigerator and the energy requirements for making it efficient.

Companies are global, they are going to build that refrigerator to meet the highest standards because they want to sell that product everywhere.

And likewise, I think that if you have the big players going in the same direction, then I think you could really change the current path that we're all on.

>> We saw that with California car emission standards.

Lowered the standards and car makers wanted to sell to that populous state.

Got the California standards in our cars, even if we live in Ohio or Nebraska.

Next question?

>> We get a lot of emissions, but natural world.

The effect is a big reason.

The deforestation comes to minds.

What is in what are the hope that these practices can be curt tailed?

>> Want to take that, Lonnie?

>> I'll let Ellen.

>> If you're thinking about a way, just take the United States and the with way we essentially have denuded, I like that word, deforestation.

And think of Columbus.

When we came to Columbus, it was a smaller town in 1971 and Sawmill and Dublin was the country.

We would take a ride out there for a Sunday drive and now, of course, we all know what it looks like.

The type of activities, the plowing up our fields, our meadows, deforesting and turning that into parking lots, just one example.

If you take a meadow and you cover it with asphalt or concrete and put up a shopping mall, not only have you lost land that essentially can take up carbon dioxide, by the vegetation that's growing on it, that can help reduce flooding by the soil allowing water to percolate in, but you're also changing the hydrology.

You are making the climate around that parking lot warmer and drier.

Than if you had left the vegetation.

Changing the nature of our of the Earth's surface can have very detrimental effects.

They say that human activity globally now moves more sediment than the combined sediment that's moved by all the major rivers.

We, human beings, and our activities, we are the most powerful geomorphic force on the planet.

We change the as fast as on the planet more than any activity.

>> That brings up a question of the haves and the have nots.

Was largely deforested.

Cut everything down in the 17th and 18th century to feed us and the world.

And Amazon, Brazil is doing the same to create agriculture.

Content want them to cut down the trees.

And look at us, you cut yours down.

What how do you address those valid concerns?

What do we do to convince other countries to not do what we did basically.

>> That's an excellent question.

I have gone down to the Amazon into the new towns that are being built and see the families, all the families, they're worried about feeding the family at the end of the week.

Only see the world in front of them.

You can't blame them for it's a matter of survival.

I think that nonetheless, when you look at the Amazon and the basin and the rain forest, almost the size of the contiguous United States.

Huge area.

And a lot of models show that if request lose just by deforestation, if we were to lose 40% of the forest, it would pass a tipping point and the problem is in the Amazon, 50% of the water that falls through these tropical storms goes into the atmosphere through evaporation.

And that keeps the whole area moist, but once you start cutting those for cattle fields and soybean fields, you don't have that process, you're interfering with that natural process in that part of the world and there's a tipping point out there.

And putting climate change in, that is placed in some models between the loss of 20 25% of the forest and we have already lost more than 17% through deforestation.

And that bigger impact, because that system is so important as a carbon sink or planet taking in the carbon and sequestering it.

And you have to make it.

How do you convince?

You have to make it economically viable, more viable to save the forest than to cut the forest.

There's a lot of agencies out there actually working on this.

They are paying people to buy reserve areas.

And a lot of private lending going into that type of activity.

Ellen and I grew up in West Virginia.

We certainly understand the needs of families, for the importance of coal mining for that state.

The fact is, the maximum number of coal miners worked there in 1924.

And the number of coal miners have been going down ever since.

And still, coal mining is an important part of the economy of that state.

When you talk about implementation of sustainable technology and new ways of energy, we need to invest in those areas where people are going to be displaced from the jobs that they currently support their families on.

This has to be done in a very thought out and meaningful way in order to get people to buy in on these changes.

The fact is, we all live on this planet and all of our resources and futures are intertwined with what happens to the climate going forward.

>> Another question from our audience?

Diana?

>> I think it's really interesting.

Someone is asking, how we dealt with the pandemic, people on all sides of things.

Do you think it's possibly for people to come together in a democracy to address climate change?

>> Yes.

>> I certainly hope so.

>> What gives you hope?

>> Lonnie, were you going to jump in on that one?

>> I was going to say yes.

And look at what's happening.

And look at the history of human beings and all the times that we think things are impossible, and things are impossible only until they become possible.

And there's all kinds of examples of this.

And if you go back and it's not that we haven't gone through energy transformations in the past.

Go back 200 years, houses were heated by fireplace and by wood.

Whole industry of cuttings stones for fireplaces and wood to heat the homes.

And when Franklin came along with this energy efficient steel stove, the first reaction was that that heat put out by that stove was not healthy, not good for you and anyone who stands in front of a fireplace, and that's your source of heat, burn on one side and freeze on the other.

The reality is that change, anything that's already in place, whoever is involved in that is going to fight, resist the next change coming along.

You can resist it, but in the end, the change comes.

It happens.

And in the case of energy, this will happen.

It's already been demonstrated.

Since 2009, coming up to the present, how rapidly the cost of electricity coming from wind and solar has come down.

And I expect that to continue.

And then it becomes a matter of economics.

If you can produce a product using power that's cheaper than your old source of power, you're going to switch because you're going to be more competitive in a global market.

These changes are taking place and so, I have always been optimistic that when we have to, we do the right thing.

>> Ellen, what gives you hope?

>> I have become hopeful when I get out and I talk to everyday people.

Because it what I learn is how similar we all are and how much we have in common.

We are passionate about the same things.

Families, well being and education for our children and the only thing that's different is the way we go about, the ability to acquire that.

And I want to come back to one point in your question about how do we get the world working together.

And I think it is understanding our common humanity and recognizing that one of the root causes of our inability to address climate change from a global perspective is poverty.

And we have to have a global war on poverty.

Because if we look at where the resources are misused, we were talking about that for example in the Amazon, or the resources elsewhere.

Or the U.S. when we were denuding, the forest that used to cover the eastern part of the U.S..

It was poverty.

People needed resources.

And what we have to do is help lift people out of poverty.

We have to share resources, we have to provide technology.

We have to allow countries to leapfrog technology.

Lonnie is talking about the development of technology.

In Tibet, you didn't see any phone lines go up.

They went straight from no phones to cell phones.

And we were talking about the nuclear the fact that the Chinese are building so many nuclear power plants.

I just read in Forbes, they're planning hundreds of nuclear power plants.

And phase the technology was developed right here in the U.S.. And so, we have to share our technology with other countries and allow them to not make the mistakes that the United States and England and the more developed countries made over the last few centuries.

But if we don't address the poverty issue, the fact that we have one and a half billion people on the planet with no access to reliable L, we have to electrify the world.

We have to do it in a different way.

Look at different energies as a different type of commodity.

And get that deployed however we can in areas where it was most desperately needed.

People will destroy their environment if that is their only way to feed their family, clothe their family, and have some reasonable level or standard of living.

>> All right.

It's a big problem.

What gives me hope is we have folks like Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley Thompson who are out there every day, working to bring this message, to have dialogues and the folks joining us today.

Appreciate your work on this and appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to join us today.

Hope you can get back on the mountains and glaciers soon so you can get back to work there and in your lab.

Thank you for joining us today.

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you for joining us here on Dialogue.

That wraps up our season.

We'll have more next fall.

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Short survey coming up, we encourage you to take it.

On the behalf of doctors Thompson, thank you for joining us and joining us for this session of dialogue.

Have a good day.