[inaudible conversations] hello. My name is bob im associate professor of Political Science thank you for coming. It is my distinct pleasure to welcome jeff with the distinct honor of being the most prolific speaker in the environmental studies this is his third 1i would love to tell him if he speaks here two more times than he can come here for free. He isnt here so we have to go with that. I met him a number of years ago we were both waiting for our kids to come out of school and i think he was a reporter for Rolling Stone and my friend said this is jeff he is working on a book and i said what is it about . He said coal. I thought to myself i am a little disappointed writer of Rolling Stone writing about cole but he said it is how the internet 21st century is powered by coal then i thought it was weird that i got my copy big cold the dirty secret behind the Energy Future and if you read that it is gripping to tell the story on this really long train and i stayed up until 2 00 oclock in the morning reading it. And then i said what you working on now . Something about geospatial or geo engineering change in the climate and i thought that is a little crazy but that became the next book winning the grand prize award this is amazing of these environmental challenges of geo engineering so since then i have learned to say what you working on really i just want the answer to be something because when i talk about his books that this book is a fantastic read i have given it to all my friends telling everybody to read it but there is amazing knack about finding the interesting angle to tell the complicated and complicated story so you feel like you are there on the glacier or on the train. Second, the tremendous intellectual humility about Environmental Issues. So the politics and economics and environment there are no simple answers so to ask interesting questions and then you finish reading his books there is no easy solution besides changing light bulbs that is not the answer so we really need to think deep what you want for yourself and your children. [applause] thank you so much. That was very nice of you. It is so great to be here. I have been on the road an insane amount been to mexico city, richmond, d. C. , and boston talking about the book it is great to be home to see a lot of familiar faces and i am just very grateful to talk with all of you tonight so it is weird, let me say to make an argument that this isnt a distant faroff micro problem happening decades down the road but it is happening right now around the world with coastal cities washing out roads and damages from storms and hurricanes and the impact will only accelerate. Hundreds of millions of people in cities that have been flooded out of their homes making the refugee crisis look like a high school prom. Now become scuba diving sites the beachwear you kissed your boyfriend or girlfriend will disappear where they took the first man to the moon to be launched the first shots of the civil war finishing beneath the waves and so will a lot of other places that we care a lot about. So before i go into the moral of the talk it is a little we are talking about that here where 300 feet above sea level and 100 miles from the coast a very different experience than talking about in miami listening to the waves outside and they will lose all of their value in their 10 milliondollar condos everybody is worried about losing their house investment. But i could turn the talk wise saratoga is a great place for the future and invest in real estate now and in the near future there will be a lot of people selling houses on the jersey shore and moving am not a Financial Advisor but if i were i might be suggesting you think about real estate. But one thing i have learned about this book nowhere is immune to the Sea Level Rise may be oklahoma but i just want to show you a picture of albany. The hudson river and the yellow area will likely flood frequently by the end of the century. That is a long way away but this is 100 miles so what is one thing that is important to think about it isnt just about the beaches because as the water goes up it pushes water to weird hasnt done before changing the river flow in the waves and things that we dont think about when we think about Sea Level Rise. So this is just to say even though we are high and mighty we are not. So now i will talk about my life i have basically 15 years i have been writing about Climate Change and all kinds of things this is just an example of one story on fracking i have written about about coal industry and fracking i knew about Sea Level Rise as an issue because i talk about it but it never really occurred to me that it was distant and off on the horizon but then the hurricane hit i was not in new york for Hurricane Sandy but i went down right after and of course on the Lower East Side the flooded city and as a journalist i knew i would write about this but how . So they said one way to think about it as a dress rehearsal for Sea Level Rise. I said what do you mean . Water on the Lower East Side that is what the projections are for the end of the century. So imagine the water comes in but doesnt go out. So i was like that is mind blowing so really do that same thought experiment in miami. Just go. So i did. I went to miami and this is what i saw when i got there. This is not a hurricane or a category five storm this is normal high tide at miami beach for about 36 hours i was there i realized what a story. This is incredible because unlike new york that has high ground or allied granite to build the walls that 70 of Miamidade County or south florida is all flat incredibly valuable real estate all the condos are on the beaches it is all board built on porous limestones of you build the seawall the water will go underneath it see you cannot build a fence. This is for the whole miamidade region so to figure out this was remarkable in the city that i love did not have a good prognosis for the 21st century. So i wrote a book goodbye miami as a subtle title. [laughter] basically how the miami as we know it today will not exist by the end of the century. I have been speaking about that over three years i still believe that is true it doesnt mean it will vanish but as we know it today will be gone i dont know what will emerge but if you can imagine during that transformation. But the reception of the piece i got a lot of attention for the piece anson hit contracts from the Real Estate Industry as they were tracking me through the airport they were not thrilled with my thesis but it realized we realize it isnt just a miami problem so what are all these people doing about it . That is when i put myself on the book now it has been a couple of years so what will happen . What are people doing . And that is what this book is about so i took a helicopter flying around to look at the icemelt in greenland basically those two big i. C. E. Cubes at the other end of the earth are melting in that melt water is going into the ocean to raise the seas so it has everything to do with greenland and arctic. I went with this guy you may recognize him to the Norfolk Naval base the biggest naval base in the world and was secretary carry understands Sea Level Rise very well had an extraordinary experience on the 250th anniversary of the marine corps on the marine ship that secretary carry understands the issues very well and said how much time does this base have it as were 75000 people are employed in key to our operations. In the base commander said between 20 and 50 years. So within 20 years it will be essentially inoperable. Empty classroom in a school in alaska in the Arctic Circle in two little plastic blue chairs with with hand made snow flakes hanging above us talking to the president of the United States about Climate Change. It was really an extraordinary moments especially extraordinary when you think about that conversation with our current president. [laughter] i went to legos which was a very enlightening part of my trip because legos is many of you know one of the largest cities in africa some 20 Million People about a half, of a half Million People live in these water slums in the lagoon around legos. And going there was really eye opening to me partly because i loved everyone i met there but also because really made me see problem Sea Level Rise and all of the stuff that were with talking about tonight and that i wrote about in my book is really a problem of modern life. Of advance civilization as we know it all of the infrastructure weve built on the coast like hotel it is and roads and railroads and airports and everything. Thinking that oh, the waters here and land is there and never going to change. Well it is changing and it is changing fast and fool in legos can deal with this no problem because they didnt do that. And so you talked to people who live in legos about four feet of sea level theyre like i dont care give me an answer ill raise up a little bit and weal be fine. Not a problem for them and that was really an enlightening kind of understanding for me. Is was seeing that i went to venice which was had, of course, the famous thinking city. Venice good news is that vern nice is no longer sinking theyve fixed that. The bad news is that the water is coming up. And i had the amazing experience of sitting in san marco half way through the book knowing all about city level rise and what i was there for having a cappuccino, and just sitting there and all of a sudden as im drinking my cap cheen no water starts running into san marco and i was like what is going on . And i realized it was high tide and not every high tide but often it runs into san marco and within an hour, there was eight inches in water in san marco and city officials and people continued on their way. Galoshes on and venice is this is all happening sort of in real time before your eyes. It is pretty incredible. And they were try aring to build a barrier to stop this which was not going to work well which i can talk about later too. Marshall islands. Marshall islands is a place where Sea Level Rise is not a problem for real estate. Its a problem of exposensual existence their country is going under water as many other island states and theyre having conversation about things like is our nation still a nation if we dont have any land . Is there still a Marshall Island if we get like you know 700 acres in texas then we all move there is is there still a march and what happened what do we do somewhat becomes of us . And, of course, you know, theres the flood of refugees that are going to be coming off of a lot of these places, our enormous problem for going to be and already are a problem for the rest of the world in thinking about whats going to happen to these people, and there are also an incredible force in the paris climate tbreement enforcing a tougher agreement because of the kind of moral leverage they had by basically looking at china and e. U. Saying not only it you drop Nuclear Bombs on us for 18 years during cold war but because you guys are all driving your suvs and burning a lot coal youre putting you know drowning our island. You owe us something. And that kind of worked in it and helped drive a much tougher agreement for that kind of conversation is just going to continue as time goes on. So just let me talk about the five things that i learned when i did all of this reporting for this book an kind of think about that. So the one important thing that i learned is that hurricanes are like roulette and Sea Level Rise is like gravity. By that i mean we think of, you know, hurricanes and whoever rises all of that stuff that happens on beach and you know kind of the same but theyre different and we know. But theyre not. Theyre incredibly different so all you all know when a hurricane is coming we all watch tv like is it beginning to swing to the left and to the west and go to new york towards gulf or go over to the east and go up to the o or to west coast and go to west coast of florida and wheres it going to go. Curve out and come if in, in virginia whenever and since of roulette and preparing for a hurricane 20 years you have how luckily number you feel. With Sea Level Rise. Sea level ruse is putting more wart in the bathtub the water comes up everywhere. All a around the world comes up in different rates and different places from reasons like it going to if you want, but it is bairvegly like filling up a bathtub and it doesnt go away. It comes up and it doesnt go away so its not like oh, this flooding it will be okay. The water will recede no it doesnt. And this is just to show that you know, you know this is the fossils here in saratoga this was the bottom of the sea only about 500 million years ago. But this relationship between the water and the land is very dynamic right this is where the east coast coastline dark it line is where the coast was last time co2 levels are where they were two years ago 10 million years ago. You can see that places like, you know, the whole west the east coast there charleston, you know savannah all of those places their coast was several hundred miles back. And thats when it is where they were right now. So you could are argue that this is where were going, depending how fast were going to get there at todays co2 level and it changes. This is an area of florida called summer haven where there used behind houses there used to be a road used to be able to drive up the back of these houses. But ow yo cant anymore because the quarter has come up so much. That its the houses are now in the sea. And this is kind of the kind of thing it doesnt go away theres different tides but water has risen. And theres been erosion and other factors. But its fund mentally different idea of living in water than having, you know, floods once and a while as and thats what Sea Level Rise really is. But the big question is how much and how fast . Its really important point to point out here that i didnt call this book the water will come unless we all drive tesla or unless we all buy solar put solar panels on our roof. One of the hard things to grasp is that no matter what we do with cutting carbon, Sea Level Rise is going to happen. It can change the trajectory of it slightly. We can take maybe maybe happen a little bit less of a pace. Maybe we can take off the maybe not quite as high depending how u fast emissions. But all of the heat thats built up in planet has set this thing in motion. Thats why book is called quarter will come. It is going to happen so question is how high and how fast . Besides theres only chart only to one and one chart i promise. Only one so frifer me but i think it is important because when i was first i had my Hurricane Sandy ocean moment. Anybody who cares when they realize whats at stake i have had 20 moments but it was within of them. It was this idea that Sea Level Rise is a long slow curve. You know you can sit on the beach for a month an watch water and it doesnt get any higher and it is just this sort of you know gradual thing no. We know from whats happened in the past that Sea Level Rises goes in pulses. And im going to talk about why that is in a minute. But there are very good reputable geological evidence in the past we have had 13 et too of Sea Level Rise in a single century and you can imagine what that would do to our coastline and intercoastal cities in place like miami that they would actually be aquariums then. So this is not something that is gradually a curve and thats i want to show you so right now ten years ago scientists had high end of what the ocean the water, the seas will rise by the end of the century with about three feet. Now its because of dynamic ill talk about in a second in antarctica it is more like 7 feet thats the high end. This is by the end of the century. And, of course, keeps going. Thats just a number a place around a place to stop to think about. So i want to just show you what seven peats feet means for a couple of places. This is these are basic models you know this is just a bathtub model they call it fill in water for elevation it gives you an idea so this is miami today. And this is miami with seven feet of Sea Level Rise. And what you can see that one of the things that really disturbs me that i really, really highlight whenever i talk about this book is that, its obvious that miami beach would be at risk and go underwater thats the doesnt surprise anybody. But surprising that water comes in from the other side too and basically coming in from the everglades thats what i talk about because the risk of Sea Level Rise is much more complex than what we know and i write about this in my book but theres a lot of people who live in sweet water all of that who have no idea who are working class these are all bairvegly working class neighborhoods. Have own houses, spend their lives has in their houses have no idea that their houses are at risk. That their safety is at risk. And that is something that is sort of one michael message img to get out is that. So lets look at charleston. Charleston byebye right water pushing up through all of those low areas and throw out you know theres deltalike areas. How about boston. Back bay, airport, m. I. T. , harvard, right . This is 7 feet this is like within the envelope of what science says can happen had by the time, you know, my daughter is old. Some down mitigated by this givers you an idea of the risk. But now i want to be do one sort of science moment. To talk about why these numbers have gotten bigger from what scientists are saying can happen. And why i talk about these pulses in the, that it is not necessarily a gradual rise. Theres in this Sea Level Rise story im not a catastrophe but theres a doomsday mechan