Extinction and this one is the result of human intervention. This is from the seattle townhall and it is about an hour. [ applause ] thank you very much. I, too, am very impressed such a large number of people are hear on a friday night. I really aappreciate it. I want to introduce you to what is known as an alanal. To believe able to survive in different sorts of habitat. In the case of the hawaiian crows most of the species died out after the human acombrie acombriefb arrived. In hawaii, the first people arrived 1500 years ago and they brought species like the pacific rat that ate up the young of the crows and the eggs. This was the last species that survived into modern time. It is native to the big island. The island of hawaii. It, too, has been under terrible pressure. And by the 1980s the population was so low the state of hawaii began to take the birds into the captivety to stay to save them and this turned out to be lucky because the last wild ones were seen in 2002 and the bird is classified as extinct in the wild. This particular bird was born at a breeding facility on the island of maui. He is quite an odd duck. He was raised by people and doesnt selfidentify as a bird. Or not as a crow, at least. One of the women who cares for him told me he once fell in love with a spoon bill. Because of his, you know, lack of identification with the other crows, he refused to mate with any of the birds at the facility. Now there are a hundred at the facily and there were 50 birds to chose from and he refused them old. He is in his 20s which is very old tr for a bird and his genes are very important. He came to san diego and he is being studied now and they are hoping to use his gamutes to artificially insiminate one of the other crows. She takes this bird and strokes him in a way she is supposed to find exciting. And that, a year ago, i was out in san diego and he had not delivered on this. He introduced me to the bird. And he turned out to be a sexually confused bird. He has this cage that is almost like a suite. And we could stand in it. And he hopped over to us and he definitely recognized durrant. He seemed embarrassed to see her. That maybe a projection, of course, but he seemed to ded t be embarrassed. He brought him hairless mice known as pinkies. He hopped over to peck at them. Crows are very smart and they can imitate human speech. He is a line that says i know and it sounds demeant ment demented but that is what he says. And here we have this crow, one of the very last survivors of his species and people are going to incredible lengths to save this species. They are giving what amounts to hand jobs to crows. And people really do care about animals. And about what Rachel Carson called the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures. But we are in a process of what has been called the sixth extinction. We are drawing more and more species to the brink and over the brink. His knowingness or pseudo knowingness saying i know seemed a reflection on his own tragic situation. I ended up ending the book with his story and he is an emblem for what i am going to talk about. What is the sixth extinction . The implication is there has been five others and that is the case. And what you are looking at in this graph is an analysis of the marine fossil record. It is a bit of a complicated graph but on the bottom, on your left it is time before the present measured in years. 600 million years up to 0 up to the present. The big dips are points with when the number of marine families, we are looking at the marinerecord only here. A family is a group that is just above a genius. It goes species, genius, family. And at the species level the losses were much greater than what is reflected in this graph. These five major mass extinctions and there are many minor extinctions in the record. But these five ones are sometimes referred to as the big five. They are moments when the diversity of life, for some reason, plummeted. Two people have written a lot of on this subject and define it as quotes that eliminate a significant amount of the worlds biodea in a short amount orf time. And it is written swaths of the tree are cut short as if attacked by mass madman. The first of the extinctions, number one, took place at tbout0 million years ago and most of life was confined to the ocean. So it was devastating for marine but not other life. The fifth is the most famous and that is the event that killed off the dinosaurs and most mammals, reptiles, snakes and a lot of groups like terror saurs and i cannot so you a picture but i have a wonderful illustration. There is a broad agreement this is called by an asteroid impact. So those guys are reacting to the asteroid impact. Saying we are in the sixth extinction is serious and the reason we are in the sixth and some say we are only on the verge and maybe we can prevent it and others say it is already here. We are changing the world fast and not unlike an asteroid. I have heard scientist say this time human beings are the asteroid. How are we doing this . How are we changing the world on an asteroidlike scale . There is a lot of ways. But i will focus on three and that is how we are changing the atmosphere, the oceans and what darwin called the principles of geographical distribution. Every year we add 10 metric tons of fuel to the atmosphere. You know this. It is ordinary stuff and i will not belabor it. We drive our cars, we turn on our lights. 7. 2 billion people on the planet and it adds up. When we burn fossil fuel, we are taking carbon that was buried over the earth over the correspondence course of hundreds of years and putting it into atmosphere. So we are running backwards at a highspeed. A process that took hundreds of years to one in one direction and we are running it in the other in a matter of centuries. If you came to earth, you canou conclude the fundamental purpose is to affect this transfer as quickly as possible. Seeing how much carbon week we can get from the ground and put it up into air. If they were measuring this process, they would say we are doing a good job. We are measuring this process. We are doing this from hawaii, from a place called the mona observe tory and it is on a huge volcanic mountain. I am sure most of you have seen this. This is what is known as the healing curve. This is Carbon Monoxide levels measured for over 50 years. On the y axis, up and down, is it in parts per million and time is on the bottom. That saw tooth pattern is a seasonal component. In the winter, when trees of the Northern Hemisphere drop leaves the levels go up and in the Northern Hemisphere summer we get lower levels because they take it out of the air and the levels fall. And you may have read that co2 levels reached 400 parts per million and that is true they did at the end of last winter. But they have sense dropped over to summer and they are in the rising part of the curve. 396 parts per million. And this saw tooth is going to continue and it will couple years it will never be before 400 parts per million and it will keep rising as long as we continue to put co2 in the atmosphere and we show no signs of slowing down. If we want to see how well we are doing on this process in a longer scale we have to go back to ice core records. Here is a record of co2 from an ice core that was drilled on t antartica. And it is years of snow laid down year after year there that never melted. Time is Going Forward from left to right. That is 800,000 years ago in the lefthand corner. In this ice cores are bubbles of past atmospheres that scientist have figured out how to expract and analyze and those up and down patterns you are seeing the co2 level on the up and down axis there. The up and down saw tooth things are ice ages. Co2 levels are low and the ice creeps down in places Like Washington state and creeps back up. And when the arrival of people around 200,000 years ago. This is eight glace cycles. And you can see they were never above 300 parts per million until recently and now they are rising into a vertical line straight up. If we want to go further back the ice runs back, but there are other ways of teasing out ancient atmospheres from the evidence we have. For example, from the shells of marine creatures that dropped to the bottom of the see and have been preserved for millions of years. These methods are not as exact but they give us a pretty good picture. And if we want co2 levels as high as today we have to go back to 20 million years ago. And if we keep pouring this into atmosphere, we could reach their levels by mid century and if we keep going we can see levels as high as 15th century by the end of the certainry. I am not give you the Global Warming spiel because you know it. But this is basic geophysics. This heat trapping under the earths has been understood since the 1950s. This is called a spectro monitor. Kendal designed this do look at the properties of different gases. When testing carbon dioxide, we realized he found out something very important. Carbon dioxide is transparent and doesnt let light through but it is party opeek in the infra red area. So heat that would go back to space gets block. And he realized that is what kept the earth warmer than what it would be if we had an atmosphere with no greenhouse houses. That is called the natural greenhouse affect. If we had no Greenhouse Gases in the atmosphere, our climate would be frozen and the average would be about 0 degrees. This has been understood for a century and a half. Now news here. If you know co2 is heat trapping and we are raising them rapidly you would expect average Global Temperatures to be going up and that is what is happening. This next slide isnt a slide. It is a video made by nasa and all you need to know to understand it is that as the colors get warmer, you know what we consider warmer, yellow and orange, temperatures are warmer and when they are blue, temperatures are colder. This is a reconstruction of Global Temperatures going back to the 1980s done by nasa. That is pretty drawmatic. What does all this mean dramatic for living things . The icon of what it means to be an animal in the warming world the polar bear. Polar bears hunt off the ice which is very rapidly disappearing. One of the points i make in the book and it isnt really my point it is a point made by the scientist i went out with. The changes of Climate Change are likely to be more devastating in the tropics and there are a couple reasons. One of which is the tropics are where the most animals live. If you think of trees. Canadas boil forest is the largest intact forest left on the planet. It covers a billion acres and there is only about 20 species of trees you can find. Here we are in a cloud forest in the andes in peru from about 12,000 feet. And some scientist here named miles silman who works at Wake Forest University laid out tree plots along the ridge and each plot is exactly two and a half acres. And in each plot you can get a hundred different species of trees in just two and a half acres. So five times as many species as you get in a billion acres in the canadians forest. That shows you there is a whole lot more species living in the tropics. And what they have done in the pots is tagged and measured every tree with a diameter over four inches. And this leads to another reason why tropical species have a lot more to use with Climate Change and as much to use as arctic species and that is that tropical species tend to inhabit these very specific climatic conditions. As we were hiking down that ridge i showed you before miles said to me find a leaf with an interesting shape as we go down this trail and watch it as we go down. And you are only going to see this leaf for a couple hundred meters because that is the range of this tree and the only place you will find this tree. They are very adapted to very specific conditions. And the whole point of this is to see what happens to the trees as the andes warm and they are warming quickly. To track the climatic conditions they were used to, they would have to be moving up the mountains by several meters per year. Trees dont move, but they do you know, put out seeds and then those seeds can survive at higher and higher elevations. What they found, the experiment has been running a decade, the earlier results suggest a few species are moving fast enough to track the climate but only a few. Most are not. And a lot are not moving at all. They are just sitting there. These tree communities which have tended to be very stable because the climate is stable are going to break apart. We will have different trees moving at different rates and what is going to happen to the creatures that are also adapted to living in these communities . That is a difficult question to answer. Insects, birds and mammals. It is hard to tag insect. Trees have the advantage because they stay in the same place all of the time. But as miles pointed out, unfortunately we will find out what happens to these species because we are running this gigantic experiment. And another question that arises when you think about what happens to the tropics as the speci species move up is what is going to happen to the low lands . What is going to move into the tropical lowlands or will they empty out . We dont have an answer right now but unfortunately we will find out. Global warming isnt the only effect of pouring co2 into the air. It has a more significant affect on what it douse to the oceans. The oceans have taken in about a third of the mount and that is about 130 billion metric tons and the acidity of the ocean has increased around 30 . And the details of this phenomenon which is known as Ocean Acidification is a bit complicated and i am not going to get into the nittygritty but if you dissolve co2 in water you get a weak acid. If you had as a coke this afternoon you were drinking it. If you add enough of this too ocean you will change the chemistry and this affects a lot of Different Properties of the water. But one of the key things it does is makes it harder for organisms that build shells from the mineral calcium carbonate. It doesnt exist in the water. Animals have to assemble it and we are making it harder. Many animals do this and they are so plentiful that they turn the water this milky white color at certain times of the year. Shellfish, sea urgent, star fish. And that is a great star fish on the groweat barrier reef. And once again there is a lot of work being done to answer this question because some of the animals are the very bottom of the food change. And one of the big concerns is what is going to happen to coral reefs because they support these incredib incredible eco systems as anyone who has been on a thriving reef knows. This is the island on off the Great Barrier reef. Researcher here at the island were trying to look at what is going to happen to corals as we continue to pour co2 in the catter. And they turn out to be docile research subjects. You can break off a piece of the reef, glue it to a tile, and put it in a tub and it has what it needs, it will sit there quitely and go on doing whatever corals do. They are bubling in Different Levels of Different Levels of the carbon dioxide. And there are many studios going on around the world. Their studies suggest around the middle of the century the reef building corals will not be able to keep up and keep going. And they will just stop growing and there are a lot of forces to break this down. A lot eats at the reefs and there is storms and just erosion. So reefs need to always be growing in the sense to stay even. This is a quote from a British Marine biologist saying it is likely reefs will be the first in the modern era to be extinct extinct. And another way we are changing the planet is by moving the species all over the world. You are all familiar with animals making a land everywhere else. This is the asian carp. They are filter feeder and go through everything in the water. It isnt good for native fish and there is a lot of fear they are making their ways to the great lakes. And in fact, just last Month Congress asked for a study, some of the Congress People from around the great lakes asked the army core of engineers of what it would take to try to keep these carp from getting into the great lake and the army core of engineers released their plan for how they could maybe keep the carp out of lake and the price tag of that was 18 billion. So this is another species from asia. This is the emerald ash bore and he does what his name suggest. He bores into ash tree and the results a usually fatal. If you live in the northeast you see these signs saying please dont move firewood and that is to precent the spread of this bug. He is a very worrisome relatively recent arrival. And not all Invasive Species are from asia. This guy is from eastern europe. He is a zebra muscle. All of these species were transported from a place far away. And in the new place they had no enemies so they proliferated and difficult very well. Moving species around the world is something we do everything day. Often on purpose. Many people have plants that are nonnative species and many have pets that are. But more often we do it on accident. Every day in the balanced water of super tankers we are moving thousands of species. This is ordinary to us. But when you think about it is something that is very new and unusual. Without a lot of help, a landbased species cant cross an ocean and a marine species similarly cant cross a con continent and this is another way we are running history ba backwards and at a highspeed. 259 million years ago all of the land masses were clumped together in a giant climate that has been called pangia. They broke up and started to drift apart and form the world as we know it today. And by bringing together and transporting the issues and bringing together the lineages that have been living separately for tens of thousands of years we are bringing this together again and are creating a newer version of the older one. And the vast majority of them dont survieve in a new place ad many survive but coexist peacefully with what is there. But if you are moving thousands of species around the planet every day. If even a tiny portion of them have a disastrous affect they are going to start adding up. This is the panamanian golden frog. It used to be considered a lucky symbol in panama. It is technically a toad. It is very poisonous. It is a lucky symbol. It used to be printed on lottery tickets in panama. Then around, i guess it was around ten years now, maybe more, maybe 15, the prfrogs in n panama disappeared and people started realizing it was a disease known by the short name bd. It is fungus. It appeared in a lot of parts of the world. In central america, in south america, in australia, and in europe more or less at the same time. And that is a pretty clear indication that it was moved around by people. You know, know one knows exactly how. But one of the theories is it was moved around by the african claud frog and that was used as a pregnancy test in the 1950s. If you inject the frog with the women of a pregnant lady that frog would lay eggs in a couple hours. So doctors used to keep these frogs in their office. And did people get tired of them and let them go . And now there are naturalized populations in different parts of the world. And they carry this fungus, but they are not affected by it. That is one theory how we might have transported this disease around the world. People realized this was one of the things killing the frogs and they could watch this fungus that was moving east and killing the frogs in an easterly direction. Some scientist tried to get out in front of the disease and try to save a panamanian golden frog population. A biologist scooped them out of the rain forest so they could survive and they had nowhere to put them and they quite literally ended up living in a hotel. They rushed to build a center. This is called the elvia conversation tr now and it is one of the few places you should see panamanian golden frogs. They are now classified as extinct in the wild. This is where i begin this book. With the story, i worked my way from the end of the book to the beginning. I begin with the story of the panamanian golden frog and the wonderful story of the frog hotel as it has been called. You could say this is a heartening story. It shows people are concerned about other species once again to use carsons phrase about the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures. And in the course of this writing this book, i spent a lot of time with people who devoted their entire life to this cause. Barbara durant and others were ordinary people. When i went to the Conversation Center there were a lot of volunteers from the state to help and when they took the frag frogs from the rain forest and put them in the hotel they needed people to be out in the field and collect bugs and people from all over the world volunteered their time and their resources basically. Even people who, you know, who are not part directly of efforts like this, you know give lots of money to groups like the World Wildlife fund, defenders of wildlife, National Wildlife federation and groups that to wonderful work. I would like to say what is going to make the difference is we need more people involved in effortss like that. But that unfortunately, wouldnt be true to the book. So one of the central points of the book and my talk tonight is that caring is not really the issue. It doesnt really matter how we feel about this. It doesnt matter how much we are concerned about it. What matters is we are changing the world. That is what makes us like an asteroid. And unless and until we confront that we are this world changing force, i am afraid we are not confronting the problem. Thanks very much. [ applause ] all right. Folks we have 15 minutes for questions and would like to get through many as we can. So keep it brief and in the form of a question. Please come to one of the two microphones on either side. In your talk of extinction you left out one species that is sitting here tonight. And i would like you to Say Something about that. People do seem to be concerned about the state of people. And i understand that. Some of my best friends are people. And i want to say that i very consciously avoid talk about that. But i guess there is two ways to look at it. If you had to pick an organism that seems to do well living with people it would be people. We seem to be quite good at basically taking over the resources, the niches, and the habitats of other organisms. We live on every continent and habitat and we are adaptable and clever. If i were betting on a species to survive, i think i would bet on humans. But the other answer to that is that one of the lessons of the record and it is one of the reasons by i do look and spend a lot of time in the book looking at what we can learn from the past mass extinctions and that is past success is no indication of future. The dinosaurs were very successful and dominated the world for a very long period. When the rules change, and we are changing the rules, you dont know where things are going to end. So those are two somewhat contradictory answers. But that is sort of the best i can do. How serious a problem do you think the spred of foreign genes from the gmo crops to other plants such as the bt gene and the roundup resistant genes . I dont know. I mean the short answer to that is i dont know. And the longer issues all are a couple issues sort of involved there. And you know one of the big stories that came out in recent weeks, for example, and that a lot of the gmo crops in the midwest that have been modified so they can withstand you know very heavy duty herbicides, the herbicide as killing off the milk weed in the midwest and that is leading to the dramatic plunge of the monarch butterfly. So there are things that dont have to do with the crops, but more what are we pouring on them and Chemicals Using that then have the affects on different species that depend on the plants that we call weeds that are needed to survive. There are a lot of issues in there. And i am not enough of an expert to unpack all of them. You brought up the issue of people caring and said that is not enough. But i guess the question is what do you think is causing this whole situation . Climate change, destruction of species, etc. Because the whole question of humans caring. There is tremendous sentiment to stop this and interact with nature in an entirely different way but it is limited and squashed by a system that operates in a total opposite way that is driven by competitiveness. There is potential for people to live in a different way with natures and be caretakers of the planet but it is restrained and controlled. I want to know what you think the solution it. Another point, that i didnt get into in the book, but i do in the book, is the question of when did we begin this project . When people look back at, for example, north america, we used to have a lot of fantastic creatures that are not here and havent been for thousands of years. It isnt just a recent phenomen phenomenon. The early people to Research American did end a lot of these fabious creatures like the mammoths and the giant sloths. If you had a no reproductive rate you didnt survive early contact even with a small number of people using simple weapons. People are this unique creature that can innovate in ways that am much faster than other creatures can adapt to. I am sorry to say and sad to say that seems to be something we have been doing for a very long. It has now ramped up with the discovery of using fossil fuels and 7 billion people on the planet. I dont want to say there is not a way to do it better because there is. But the question of whether with 7 billion people on the planet we are using a lot of resources organisms use and how we sustain ourselves is something i have yet to see i have seen someone provide a good answer for and i cannot provide a good answer tonight. Thanks for a wonderful talk and your wonderful work. I hope you dont mind a personal question. You took a look at the Climate Change, you are a parent and like all of us who are, you have a deep stake in the future, how do you keep from disspare . I could answer that in a lot of different ways. The most honest way is that everyone sort of compartme compartmentalizes. People work in Emergency Rooms and they work with dying and suffering people and go home and play with kids. So we have all the ability to see certain dark truths about life in general and put them aside to lead our daily lives and maybe that is part of the problem with all of us. But that is true of me, too. And i think that this is material is sobering but it isnt any more sobering than what we know about humanity for a long, long time. There have been american dark episodes in the life of our species and we kept going. My grandparents were refugees from nazi germany and they kept go so how is that . [ applause ] thank you for a wonderful talk. I heard it, i think you were given an interview on npr and you said by the end of the century, a lot of our Large Mammals will have been extinct and that is a very thought. When you think about it, it does really scare me to bits. But i came up here to say if we look around the room, i am sure everyone in here has been to high school or finished high school and been to college and had a good education. And how can we fix the planet if we cannot fix our own species and we have so much of the population in want, and famine and war. How will we help the plant if we have children walking miles to get their face in water and scrape food off the ground to eat. How are we going to move forward and do that . What do you think . Well, i think, that these are the questions of our century and beyond because all are tremendous issues obviously of global equity. This is one of the issues at the heart of trying to mitigate Climate Change is those of us in this country and in the developed world who created the problem to a large extent it is going to be borne by people who did little to contribute to it. And what is the fair and equitable way to deal with that something i dont know. But the question of how we can improve the lives of People Living in poverty and try to peserve the many other species that depend on us not using their resources. Lifting people from poverty tends the take resources. This is a question i cannot answer it but it is the question that will occupy us or should occupy us for the rest of this century and it will impenge on us more and more. Both the inequity and what we are doing to other species. I dont think the situation is going to continue on as it is right now. Two more questions. Thank you for your field notes book and your no impact man article a couple years ago. Can we anticipate sudden extinction events that may help the tell the story in a why the weather events have helped . That is an interesting question and i dont know the answer to that. It is sort of like be careful what you wish for that is for sure. But i dont know the answer. It is a good question. And i just dont know the answer. Thank you for your presentation. So i had a couple questions. One of them, during the presentation you were saying that different scientist thought about how deep we were in the situation. What do you think about that . Do you think we have take an step too far and it is irreversib irreversible . If you look at how many species we have driven extinct and how many on the verge you would say this is a serious situation. But it isnt the end cretaceous. It isnt the death of the dinosaur or 75 percent of the species on the planet. But when you look at real scenario and how much global population increases and resources people will use and how much more co2 will be dumped in the ocean. Then you say that is taking us to dangerous territory and if you project out and out the longer out we go the more and more uncertain our projections become. People who have looked at, for example, things like measuring the rate at which creatures are going from vulnerable and threatened and then extinct would say the rate they are happening is we are in a major extinction event. People have tried to look at different ways to calculate that and come up with different answers. And i cannot tell you where we are in that process. It is one of those things millions of years whoever is looking at the fossil record knows but it is difficult to know while doing it. So, at the end, you said caring isnt enough. We have to manually make a change. But earlier on you said that some leading factors toward the six extinction were seven billion people using light and driving and such. Do you think that us manually making a change would make a big enough change so as to not be impacted by all of the lights and cars and such . What i was trying to say is your good intentions are not enough. We need to confront at the point where you know, something is on the verge of extinction and we preserve a remnant population that is a noble thing to do but we need to confront the root cause as it were of what was going on. And those are very big and they are many. It isnt just one. It isnt just Climate Change. There is a host of ways in which we are changing the planet on a geological scale so much you have probably heard we should rename the time we live in. We official live in the time before the ice age after people because people have replaced the great forces of geology of the past. These are big things. It isnt about spending more time helping the money or donating even though those things with great and i recommend them but it is matter of getting our minds around ways in which what we are doing that seems ordinary is just changing the planet on a permanent bases. Thank you. Thanks a lot. [ applause ] if you would like to get a book signed, we will line up in front of the stage right here. On the next washington journal we will look at the Financial Disclosure statements for candidates on how much money they are raising. The chairman of the federal election committee, lee goodman, will join us on how his case has been effected by the changes. And Keith Johnson will focus on the role natural gas plays with russia and europe. Senator goldwater just talked about carrying the aircraft and as was pointed out, well, we figured it to be over there have told them about that on wednesday morning and that goldwater will try to spring it in such a way that it looks like you were wrong and i was wrong in saying this. Historic audio from the aftermath to overthrow cuban leader fidel castro saturday at 6 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan radio in washington dc at 90. 1 fm on cspan. Org and xm radio channel 120. And a final invention, James Barrett examines the threat of runaway Artificial Intelligence. Mr. Barrett spoke about his book in annapolis maryland. This is 50 minutes. [applause] hello, i am James Barrett and i would like to thank everyone for inviting me here and i think this is such a great story. We remember when books were only sold in bookstores. So to me a kind of captures the wild mysterious bookstores that i knew when i was a kid. [laughter] that such a rich experience and that is what this one is. And obviously it is such a great Meeting Place for people. So i want to thank people for inviting me today. I have written a book about Artificial Intelligence and my job and ive made a lot of friends that you might have seen on the National Geographic channel