We already know what it's like to wear facemasks.

But imagine a world where people have to wear gas masks to play baseball Imagine a world where your favorite beach destination in Florida is now underwater.

Imagine a world where snow is a story that grandparents tell their grandchildren because it's too warm outside Imagine a world where you go outside, and the only green thing you see is a sign on a building.

Imagine a world where clean water is a commodity that people have to fight for on a daily basis.

All these things that we're imagining, one day we might not be imagining them, we might be living them.

I love the outdoors.

I've been outdoors all my life.

So when I see manmade changes that could have been avoided, it really hurts.

In my book, there's nothing more beautiful than a sunrise, or mist coming off the lake..

But looks are deceiving.... My generation, my father's generation, took this beautiful planet and really fouled it up.

I used to fly a big airplane.

Guzzled a bunch of fuel.

Needed it for business.

Or at least I thought I did.

This plane right here is a replica of Eddie Rickenbacker's plane.

Eddie Rickenbacker was a great hero in the first world war.

I finally woke up and said, "Jim, you're part of the problem, you best be part of the solution."

My name is Jim Goodman.

I am 82 years old.

I'm a guy who likes to make things.

I'm basically an engineer.

I had a company that built packaging machinery.

Mostly for food companies and pharmaceutical companies... Now, along with my wife Annie, I'm using what creative juices I have to try to help folks better understand some of the monster climate problems we're facing.

It even inspired me to make this film...

I'm Annie.

I'm Jimmy's wife...

I was probably like most of the population, and didn't take it too seriously.

But Jimmy did...

I think Jimmy's just so filled with ideas, and he acts on his ideas.

Jimmy certainly doesn't shy away from challenges.

In college, he broke the world sit-up record.

He sat up 6,122 times... That's Jimmy.

It started with the fact that we have to figure out different modes of energy.

Everything depends on energy.

And right now, the energy we use is making our climate worse.

There are things we can actually do to solve some of these serious problems.

So, one day he said, "I'm going to build a power tower.

And I'm going to show all different alternative energy in this tower."

And lo and behold, there it was.

What it is is a demonstration of 3 types of alternate energy -energy that doesn't use fossil fuel.

Sunlight operates this one.

Wind operates that one.

And then the bike is another form of human powered energy creation.

This is not a model that you should go home and put in our backyards - it's not for that purpose.

I'm just building this a model to show that there's other source of energy available today that we can use in our homes, in our factories - everywhere.

we're generating energy which is being stored in a battery The larger purpose is to make people understand how simple the solution could be We decided, wouldn't it be great to get young people involved?

The display area is 16 feet this way, 20 feet this way.

Jimmy and I went to a wonderful university, right close to where we live - Northwestern - and put up a sign in the engineering department.

whole idea of the concept is you walk in one door is one person, and hopefully you walk out the other door somewhat changed - that's our goal.

It was just a short blurb: it said, a retired mechanical engineer is doing this project to show the power that renewable energy has.

What are the other numbers?

This one gives you the voltage of the solar panel.

My name is Tess Russell.

I'm from Burr Ridge, Illinois.

I go to Northwestern University and I'm studying environmental engineering.

At my catholic grade school we weren't doing one of the easiest things for the environment, which is recycling.

I got my recycling bin, I made my signs, and I stood there, saying, hey recycle that.

Hey recycle that.

I have always played softball.

I don't want there to be a day where either myself or anyone can't play outside and play softball.

My name's Henry Koch.

I'm from Fort Collins, Colorado, and I'm studying vocal performance and musical theater.

What a day this has been, what a rare mood I'm in.

Why it's almost like being in love.

I love opera and singing.

It demands that I be extremely present in the moment.

My name is Christopher Lee, I'm from Glenview Illinois and I'm a mechanical engineering student.

I'm really proud to be part of the Northwestern Solar Team.

We design and build and ultimately race a fully functioning solar electrical vehicle.

A solar car is a car that can ultimately run from power generated from the sun.

We're not experts - we have a lot to learn.

Knowing that our program was an educational tool, Jim really tasked us with research and really just learn about the topic.

When I try and think back of like what led me down the environmental path, the earliest that I can remember is the Deep Water Horizon oil spill.

When that event occurred, and I saw the mass destruction of the ocean and these animals being covered with oil that was really a very pivotal point in my life.

I think I was around 10 years old when I was first exposed to climate change.

Seeing the black smoke billowing from smokestacks really engraved the harm that we're doing to this planet.

I remember taking an environmental science class in high school.

I always had a pretty strong connection to the environment.

I didn't realize how badly we were harming it.

That was pretty eye-opening.

Climate change you can think about it in a way as all the pollution emissions that are going up into the air from cars and trucks, from factories and power plants that make our electricity, from burning coal and oil and gas.

Well, that pollution goes up into the air, and it almost creates like a blanket over the Earth that traps the heat inside.

And that heat is like energy.

What that does is it amplifies the so-called greenhouse effect.

The surface of the earth warms.

That's where we live.

And when that happens, we start to see responses in the earth's system, in our weather patterns, in our sea level rise, in our ice sheets.

One of the things that I often hear from people who are a little skeptical about whether our climate is changing because of humans is they'll say, "Well, the climate changes naturally, Dr. Shepherd.

Or we've always had hurricanes."

And I say, "That's correct," but we also know that it's not an "either or proposition": it's an "And" proposition.

What I mean by that is that we know that grass grows naturally.

When we fertilize the soil, that grass grows differently.

There's a naturally varying climate system that now has a human impact on top of it.

So in a sense, we're fertilizing the natural climate system.

People will say, "Oh, it was snowing today.

Or it was cold today.

What do you mean climate change or global warming?"

When I see a snowy day or when I see a cold day in New York in January, that doesn't refute or say that climate change isn't real.

That just tells me it's winter in New York.

We will always have seasons.

Seasons are governed by how the earth moves around the sun.

The earth moves around the sun, and it's tilted on an axis.

And so when the earth is tilted away from the sun, we have winter.

And so that's why we will always have cold seasons.

But what we'll see is within those seasons we'll see changes in the weather patterns.

We'll see changes in the extremes.

T minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, r, 3,2, 1.

And liftoff of Space-shuttle Atlantis...

It's remarkable that we've been so creative to build, you know, rockets that can take us to this vantage point, that same vantage point, has also shown me that we live on a fragile planet that we need to protect, we need to take care of.

It's Spaceship Earth... One of the interesting things about having a space shuttle career as long as mine is that from the flights in 1995 to 2009, I had an opportunity to watch how the earth changed over that period due to us, due to people.

And some of that was the most alarming.

Substantial amounts of the Amazon have been clear-cut...

The Amazon has been called the lungs of the earth because of its enormous capacity to take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen.

If we screw up the system on earth for how carbon dioxide is converted to oxygen, we will suffer as a result.

The speed at which these changes are happening is not allowing biology to keep up.

We need to take care of our planet.

And we need to do it fast.

Things are changing quickly.

So what I want to do is cut strips of these.

We need two parallel ones.

And I would cover from here to here approximately.

The earth is what we have and what we live on.

We're part of it.

It shouldn't be taken for granted I think, and I try not to take it for granted.

If I could tell anyone of my generation anything about climate change, I'd tell them that their actions not matter how small have an impact.

We do play a role in our environment.

We can actively choose to do environmentally conscious activities.

That is a moving sign - a chart if you will of sources used to make electricity.

Coal, which is depicted in black, Red - natural gas.

Third one is nuclear.

Next one is blue, which of course is hydro.

The green one is wind which is really coming up now.

And the final one - yellow - is solar.

You're going to have wind and solar way at the bottom.

Hopefully, in 10 years, this is what it'll look like.

You push a button and they're all gonna readjust... At any rate, here's the diorama.

It's kind of dusty and messy right now.

But this is Coalville.

They're literally taking all the trees, on the top of these mountains - just cutting and dumping them in the valley.

They dig out all the coal, and before it goes to market they've got to wash it in a slurry pond.

Well, a lot of these slurry ponds are beginning to leak: they're polluting the lakes.

Terrible health problems.

So at any rate, this is Coalville, and this is Sunnyvale.

We've got a wind turbine here, we've got another one coming.

And we're going to have them turning.

And this is what we hope it looks like.

If I look at the whole thing, I say this is a choice we have.

We can work this way, and try to make it better, or we can keep going in this direction and just let it get worse.

My sixth-grade science project was 'Can a sixth grader predict the weather?'

I wanted to just study weather.

To this day, I'm fascinated by weather.

But here's the difference: as a young sixth grader, I was naive to the fact that extreme weather can kill people.

It can destroy lives.

I have steadily seen a progression in the intensity of hurricanes, in the intensity of rain that falls, the changes in drought frequency and patterns around the world.

Heat waves are more intense.

These are all things that the science are telling us are related to climate change.

One thing that climate change does is it lengthens the dry season -the season in which you have the conditions established that can cause wildfires.

It allows insects to thrive in places where they didn't before.

And so you have things like the pine bark beetle that is killing trees in the American West, and in turn those dead trees provide the kind of fuel when a wildfire happens.

And that in turn can threaten homes and communities like we saw most recently happen in Paradise, California.

A wildfire raging on both ends of California are historic and catastrophic.

North of Sacramento, a record number of homes have been lost.

Searchers bracing for what they may find in the rubble...

I stepped outside to go put my suitcase into my trunk of my car and it was just pitch-black outside.

I had to put, like, a towel around my mouth and my nose to kind of protect me from the ash that was falling down.

We were driving down our street, and a house about 5 doors down from us was completely in flames.

And that was probably the point when I realized just how serious it was.

Turn right onto east First Avenue.

Right now we're going to visit one of the students affected in Paradise who basically lost everything in the Paradise fire.

Hey Sean, very nice to meet you.

I'm Tess.

Thank you so much for having us.

Yeah of course.

Come on in.

We are here and ready for ya.

We moved into this place June 25th.

It was really different at first just because we didn't have anywhere to go.

I had to grow up a lot faster than I realized, and I didn't know how to be an adult, and it was really hard.

I know when I was going to college, I wasn't really ready to leave.

And to have it happen like that - so unexpectedly.

That's hard.

The first, like, 2 or 3 mornings, the weirdest feeling ever was waking up and thinking, oh, I'm back in my own bed, and you come to your senses fully, and you realize that you're in someone else's house.

You're in someone else's bed.

You're sleeping with someone else's sheets.

And you're not in your own house.

You're not in the place that you're used to.

So how you been holding up after the fire?

Recently?

I've been doing pretty well.

I think at first, it was a lot harder.

This is Kate Tickle - this is one of my classmates who we had a couple of classes with.

We had bio, which was fun, in our freshman year... We are headed to our homes in Paradise - or what's left of them at least.

Right, our empty lots in Paradise.

I just remember, like, it started raining ashes.

And at that point I was getting kind of concerned.

Right here is the alaback where Sean and I evacuated...

I was numb, really while we were evacuating.

I wasn't thinking about the danger that I was in.

I was just thinking that we needed to survive.

We needed to get out of here.

I didn't care how we were going to get out.

My house is coming up... Like right here.

Kind of where that road sign is.

Right here?

Yeah.

Right here.

This is my house.

Wow.

I know.

That is weird.

This is our front porch.

And so like, right here would have been a cement area.

And we had a couple of chairs sitting right here.

And then my front door would have been right here.

That whole big area right here - that was our garage.

I would have liked, to just, like, see everything one last time.

I wish that like going back I could have just done that.

You're making me cry.

Wow.

Climate change and the environment is what I'm dedicating my life to.

And I love seeing this because it motivates me so much.

I don't want other people to go through what you went through.

We're headed off to my house, which is down toward the bottom of Paradise.

The first time I went back to my house, it was like a different world.

It was actually something like out of a video game or a movie.

Everything around was like charred gray or black.

I was just kind of remembering the experiences I had in the house.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about Kate!

We just tagged my property - we left our mark on my Paradise - so if we don't come back, at least other people know we're here.

Yes, always here.

Hey Bobcats!

Sean, Yeah!

Stand up and cheer, stand up and cheer, let us know you're here!

Bobcats, Bobcats, go, fight, win!

Paradise was my home.

Paradise was the only place I place I'd ever known, and the best place that I'd ever known...

It was just beautiful.

Losing that was just devastating.

I never, never ever thought anything like that would happen.

I want to thank the garden for allowing us to add this exhibit to your already amazing site.

In this new addition, we hope to inspire young and old to make a difference everyday to help our planet survive... You know the inspiration for this really is the garden.

Environmentally sound, and it;s really a lot of fun.

And it creates wonderful community.

We've got a lot of people to thank, so thank all of you.

Let's get to work.

(clapping) The Glencoe Community garden came into being in 2012 because the temple congregation where I belong decided to honor its 40th year of existence by building a garden that is environmentally conscious.

We grow upwards of 3500 pounds of beautiful vegetables every year that we give away to local areas in need.

This will go in here.

This is a solar hot water heater.

Oh wow.

In this area, there will be a diorama.

I was thrilled to have climate change activists Isabella Johnson and Anya Sastry join us for the power tower installation.

Oh, thank you for coming.

They're high school leaders, working to rally other students to take a stand.

Demanding that those in power do more to protect the health of our planet.

I am Anya.

I'm the national outreach director for the youth climate strike.

I think we both started out in the movement together.

Yeah, definitely.

And we kind of help each other out.

We've just done so much in the movement, and she's part of the national team.

And it's just like really cool.

She's definitely like one of my activist best friends.

You do this all along side school?

Yeah.

I think that one thing that's very unique about our generation is that we are able to evolve in our ideas and our goals.

This isn't like only like environmental issues, but it's like a human rights issue.

I think the most important people we can do is to get young people to care about the environment at every level.

It was really nice meeting you.

Our future.

Yeah.

Thirty years ago, we should have started dealing with this problem, but we didn't.

Which means that today we better get moving.

Now!

This is our garden - the first thing we built...

These are all the cucumbers... And then this is the new area - right here.

When people come in, this is kind of a crazy little train set I built.

In honor of you, I hung a globe.

that's for you.

John.

You'll just put a sign up that says Spaceship Earth.

Everything we put in the atmosphere stays in the atmosphere.

There are some things we can do as individuals.

One example that I studied with my kids for a science fair project is how much extra gas do we burn going through a drive-thru?

And it turns out if you're using a drive-thru, you're using 30% more gas, which means 30% more greenhouse gas emissions than if you were to stop, turn off the engine and walk in.

Or even just turn off the engine when the cars stopped instead of idling.

One of things that we talk about as climate scientists are something called tipping points.

If you think about a rubber-band and you stretch a rubber-band, it will snap back.

But at some point, if you stretch it too much, it won't snap back.

It loses its elasticity.

There are these things in our climate system that we worry about that won't snap back if they reach the tipping point.

What we see here is NASA satellite data showing the changes in arctic sea ice from the last several decades.

And if you look closely, the white ice represents ice that should always be there.

But what we see happening in this animation is that when we move from the late 80s up to the current century, we see less sea ice and in fact it almost disappears as we get later in the period.

The other thing that we see as we lose sea ice in the arctic, we begin to see changes in our jet stream patterns.

The jet stream is a very important part of our atmosphere that governs our weather patterns.

The changes in the arctic don't just stay in the arctic.

They have impact all around the planet.

And that's what we see.

When that ice melts-- it can't always refreeze itself in the winter.

The winter seasons are getting shorter and shorter.

And so what you have is the sea levels rising.

And when you think about how many people live along the coasts all around the world-- whose homes are in danger already.

We're seeing storm surges and flooding coming from sea level rise.

Even though we have so much water covering our planet, only a very, very small percentage of it is useable for drinking water.

Climate change has exacerbated the water issue, especially in places life Africa - where these climates have become even more dry than they were already.

I believe that some of the next great wars will be fought over water.

Water is essential to life.

And if we don't have adequate water supply, adequate water availability or adequate water quality, you start to see degradation of people's health-- losses in production of food and even conflict that could lead to war.

So, over the course of my research into water I came across a high schooler who has a very interesting project.

Hi there.

My name's Henry.

Hi there.

Henry.

Nice to meet you.

So, this is a model of a laundry to lawn system.

So, it's a method of taking the gray water from your laundry and putting it out to irrigation.

My name is Shreya Ramachandran.

I am 16 years old.

I am a junior at American High School, which is a public high school in Fremont, California.

It all started about four years ago at the peak of California's drought.

In California, the worst drought that state has faced in decades has gotten even worse.

I was doing archery at the time, so I visited the county of Tulare for an archery competition.

And there, people's wells had completely run dry - leaving them waterless essentially.

I wanted to try-- figure out, like, what the best way to make an impact would be.

That's when I stumbled upon grey water.

It's any water that's been used once and can be used again.

In California, 30% of the water used in a household is for outdoor purposes.

So by reusing graywater.

For that, you're saving huge amount s of water.

And it's a super simple system.

So, the graywater comes out from your laundry, then it flows out here to a mulch basin at the base of the tree or the plant that you want to water.

And the water flows out into his outflow box right here.

And there it is.

I'm really excited this.

When I get my own laundry system one day and my own garden, this is definitely going in.

The problem that I found was that many of the soaps and detergents that we use in our house have harmful chemicals.

The first actual eureka moment was when I found out about soap nuts was from my grandma.

They're a berry from the Indian soap berry.

You put them in water.

They release soap.

And I was like, "Oh my god."

We can actually reuse these soap nuts that you've been having for generations in India," and in other parts of the world, and use them to combat this modern global solution.

No one's ever tested the greywater from soap nuts.

So I just took it upon myself to do that.

I was like, I'm going to do that if no else is going to.

When I first started doing my research, I was 11 or 12.

At that age, no one really thinks that you have the know-how to make the changes that you say you say want to do.

I tested on soil and plant nutrients.

I made sure that irrigation with grey water didn't lead to contamination of harmful chemicals.

Didn't affect the soil microbiome.

Essentially what I found was that grey water reuse is safe.

People just had no idea what grey water was.

My name is Shreya.

Today we're going to talk a little bit about water conservation and water recycling.

I realized that if we want to get that society-wide change, then we need to get as many people involved in it as possible.

So we just learned about how their using water in their homes and designing their own water filters based on the materials provided them.

I wish I had something like this when I was this age.

If we teach kids how their small actions can lead to a huge environmental impact, then they're more likely to develop those healthy water habits in their everyday lives.

You're all super-amazing.

So, I'm sure that when you go home, you're going to talk to your parents and say, "Mom and Dad, I think we need to conserve more water in our home."

I had the opportunity to travel to Sweden.

and basically elevate the work that I'm doing, Just for the 16 -year-old fun-loving person in me, I was in a whole new country with really cool new people, and there was snow.

So, I was super happy.

So, I'm just recording some sounds here with the intention of possibly using them in a musical context...

I think there's a lot of detail in these natural environments that we can hear if we can be up close to them.

I think there's a lot of beauty in it too, so...

...I think my generation and the younger generations - we wield a lot of power when it comes to climate change.

It's our turn to do something different.

Thousands of Chicagoans joined a student led global led strike against climate change.

The global protest that is underway right now.

Students and workers all around the world are flooding the streets...

Many of these protests from around the world were actually spearheaded by a 16-year-old girl in Sweden.

Her name is Greta... Today she has singlehandedly managed to galvanize millions of protestors all around the world.

This is the biggest climate strike ever in history.

And why?

Because this is an emergency.

Our house is on fire.

What do we want?

Crowd replies... My generation, today we are making history....

I wish we did not have to strike.

I wish we could be learning in the classroom right now instead of...

This is truly an exciting day for us.

We're going to take our first group through our exhibit.

My name is Christopher Lee.

You can call me Chris... ...to actually have them realize that they themselves can make a difference.

So the first thing I want to show you guys is this little diorama in the front.

This left side is here to show.

You guys the bad effects of climate change.

My hope, and I believe it's true... that young people really are going to get involved.

And I think they will be the answer here.

So, what do you guys notice about this side compared to the other side?

There's solar panels...

Exactly, yeah.

If you guys not touch the diorama, that would be perfect.

It's really important for young people to take ownership of the planet - to individually and collectively get involved.

This kind of shows the breakdown of our current energy sources.

Where do you see coal and natural gas in 2040?

At the bottom.

Yeah, at the bottom.

Can we activate people to take the kind of action that we know that we need?

This is a really important fight.

If we don't act soon, what will happen, guys?

Children: The oceans will continue to rise.

Forrest fires will be more damaging.

The scientists are sounding the alarm.

We have a crisis here and we need to act.

Myself and my generation, we created this problem, so we're handing it off to you to solve it.

My concern for climate change, it definitely influenced what I do on a day-to-day basis.

In 20 years, I see myself as an engineer... How was it in there?

Pretty good.

It was hot.

...hopefully designing new energy solution that stays away from oil entirely.

My hope is that there will come a day where the only options out there are ones that don't despoil the environment.

It's pretty miraculous to think about: of all the stars and the planets out in the universe, all of this has been created.

The detail and the harmony in the natural world... it's self-sustaining.

Now humans can alter that - and we have - and it's no longer self-sustaining.

But I think there is sense in my generation that change is on the horizon.