Good evening everyone. Welcome and thank you for attending the Patten Foundation lecture featuring Michael Oppenheimer. My name is Re Doherty and I'm the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs. And I'm here just to say a few words about Mr. Patten and the legacy of his bequest in 1931. William Patten of Indianapolis made the gift. $150,000 to establish the Patten Foundation at his Alma mater. At the time, it was the single largest gift ever pledged to the Bloomington campus. Under the terms of the gift which was available upon the death of Mr. Patten in 1936, a visiting professor was chosen each year. Originally, they came to be in residence on our campus for two months or more. The purpose of the appointment was to provide members of the university, students, faculty, and staff the privilege of becoming a personal acquaintance to the visiting professor. While those terms have changed over the years, we now typically have two to three Patten lectures spend a week on our campus and the spirit of his ideals still remain. Patten was a strong believer in public higher education and believed that Indiana University, even a smallish regional university at that time, had the role of enriching the intellectual life of the local community and the state. His gift to establish the Patten Foundation reflects his commitment to supporting that intellectual contribution. Patten was born in 18 67 on a farm in Sullivan County, Indiana. He taught in the county schools before enrolling at Indiana University at the age of 21. He was a diligent student, a competitive orator, and associate editor of the Indiana student newspaper. He received his undergraduate degree in history in 18 93. After graduation, Patten settled in Indianapolis where he made his career in real estate and county politics. The Patten lectures continue to reflect his commitment to Indiana education. A campus wide faculty committee, many of you are here today. Select people of international reputation who are willing and able to share their knowledge with a wide public audience. Lecturers stay on a campus for a week during the academic year, during which they interact with faculty and students both in formal and informal gatherings, and deliver two patent lectures. We are thrilled to have Michael Oppenheimer here as the 2023, 2024 patent lecture. A special thanks to those who enabled this visit to occur. His nominators, Michael Hamburger of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Jesse O'reilly of International Studies. The many departments and units supporting this visit are Earth and Atmospheric Science, Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, Geography, Physics, Anthropology, Kelly School of Business O'neal School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Integrated Program in the Environment, Environmental Resilience Institute, Anthropology, the Ostrom Workshop, Biology, History and Philosophy of Sciences and Medicine, and the More School of Law. I think the committee did an outstanding job of finding someone who could truly relate to so many people on our campus. A special thanks to our Provost and the Provost Office for supporting this event. The Hutton and Wells scholar, the Cox Research Scholars Program, the Emeriti House and the Patten Committee to introduce our esteemed guest. I am happy to present Jesse O'reilly from International Studies. Thank you. Good evening. Over the past few decades, the scope and use of scientific knowledge and environmental problem solving has shifted with changes in the social and political landscape. One of the key players in translating between science and environmental policy in issues ranging from acid rain to the ozone hole to climate change is tonight's patent lecturer Michael Oppenheimer. Professor Oppenheimer is the Albert G Milbank, Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University. Professor Oppenheimer received his Phd in chemical physics from the University of Chicago and spent his early career as an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Dr. Oppenheimer served as a Senior Scientist and then the Chief Scientist of the Environmental Defense Fund in the 1980s and 1990s before moving to Princeton University in 2002. Professor Oppenheimer has had an illustrious scientific career with hundreds of publications and many awards, including the Heinz Award and selection as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has also been a key actor in climate advocacy at the intersection of science and policy. Convened the workshops that formed the scientific basis for the founding of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. He cofounded the Climate Action Network, a widely influential climate activism, non governmental organization. He is the co-editor in chief of the journal Climatic Change. Professor Oppenheimer is also one of the few people to have served on all six of the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winning fourth assessment report. And as the coordinating lead author for the 2011 special report titled Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. Professor Oppenheimer was an early adopter of using his scientific expertise to engage with tricky issues and set the bar high. Early on, he has helped shape the deliberative procedures of the IPCC, while not, as he told me in a 2011 interview we conducted that the IPCC itself may have originated as a Reagan era institution to constrain rogue climate scientists from directly intervening with policymakers. He has consistently pushed the IPCC to sort out seemingly intractable science issues that are highly socially relevant. For example, he walked away from the fourth assessment report, dissatisfied with the IPCC's failure to fully assess sea level rise due to deep uncertainty about how to understand the physical processes of the West Antarctic Ice sheet. He published a policy form piece about the issue in science and then established a new research project with historian of science and patent lecturer Naomioresks and environmental philosopher Dale Jamieson, along with several post doctoral researchers myself included, to study the cultural dynamics of climate science, knowledge, production, and decision making. His willingness to engage with multiple forms of knowing and to take seriously ideas across all disciplines has made the IPCC, and hopefully our decision makers, smarter about how to assess, communicate, and resolve critical climate issues. I personally am thankful for the opportunity to learn from him over the past 15 years, and I am thrilled to welcome him to IU. Please welcome Professor Michael Oppenheimer As he presents to us short memories, long time frames, perverse incentives. How well will we adapt to climate change? Okay, thank you for those two lovely and much too kind introductions. I just want to say to Jesse in return that I've had a lot of students and a lot of post docs. But you win the award as having come to me as basically, as far as I was concerned, a fully mature researcher. And it just fell right into a collaboration rather than me ever teaching you anything. Thank you for that. I want to start off on a positive note because some of what I'm going to say is a bummer, frankly. On the positive. It, oh, by the way no, let me stop first. I want to thank the university and the patent committee for inviting me to do this in the first place. I have to say it's a relief to get outside my own bubble, which basically runs from Princeton to New York. And to see academia, even just academia from another perspective, I always enjoy visiting other universities and looking through our joint venture in totally different eyes. And so it's an incredibly rewarding experience. And I've had a bunch of days so far here, a couple of days, which have been terrific. And I'm looking forward to two more from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for having me out here. As far as the good news is concerned, there's a lot positive going on with regard to climate change. We're in the middle of an energy revolution. The prices of renewable energy have come down. The prices of carbon based energy in many instances no longer competitive with renewable energy. We really are at a point which if we had reached this 20 years ago, I wouldn't even be giving this talk. It would have been basically a waste of time, it wouldn't have been necessary. Unfortunately, things haven't quite played out that way, and we're in a situation where there's essentially a big global warming debt to be paid because we are committed to a substantial amount of additional warming, and it is doubtful, we will meet the targets set in the Paris Agreement, which have been defined as a dangerous level of warming. That doesn't mean the end of the world, it doesn't mean the end of humanity. But it does mean that we have an extra burden to deal with over the next several decades. Before we sufficiently in, in emissions. And the way that that's going to have to be dealt with is with climate change, adaptation. And that's what I want to talk about today. The bottom line is we can do it if we work hard enough, get ahead of the problem, and wind up in better shape than we were before in some ways because we're really not very good at dealing with extreme events in the climate system right now. Whether they have to do with climate change or just natural climate, we can do it. We have in the past sometimes done it. Humans are capable of amazing ingenuity and forethought, But if you look at the way we deal with the climate emergencies we're getting into now, we're not thinking far ahead at all, We're not even learning from recent examples, and therefore, at this point, we're falling behind. The big question is, okay, we can do it, will we do it? What I plan to talk about today is explain why there's a problem, not just from a climate change science point of view, but from the point of view of understanding how humans view the climate system, how they view future risk, and what they might or might not be prepared to do about it. Let's go to the first slide just to remind you, there have been some I can't really use this because I don't want to go stand out here every time and point. I'd actually be pointing it myself. The slides are not moving forward, it seems, and somebody in the tech division, they ought to do something about it. I did my part, I pressed the button, they moved forward on my projector. Can we get a fix here? All right. I'll go fill space. In the meantime, if you at all, pay any attention to the news, either through paper or through the web or whatever is your flavor for learning about the news. You know, there have been some extreme events lately. There we go. Again, I don't want to stand here and go like this. It's too awkward. So you'll have to look at the slides and figure out what I'm talking about. One of them that hit me personally, Hurricane Sandy hit me personally. I lost about a few thousand dollar worth of value off the property that I own in Manhattan where I live. And funny, the damage was not that big a deal, but what cost me more time was trying to collect the emergency response funds from the federal government to pay for the damage. And I'm lucky that I could afford to give up, but it had absorbed so much of my time dealing with the bureaucracy. That's supposed to make things easier for people in the wake of it. What it did for me was give me an anecdote, I could tell audiences like you, and it never gave me a penny more recently. Another thing that affected me personally was 2021. In the summer, the remnants of Hurricane Ida, which had originally come up from the Gulf stalled around the Northeast. It dumped incredible amounts of rain. This has happened several times recently. And in New York City, it dumped rain at a rate of about 4 " over 2 hours, which is a lot. And it was a record rainfall. And it had preceded the previous record rainfall, which had only come a few weeks earlier for New York. And 13 people drowned in their bedroom, some of them asleep in their beds, because they lived in below grade apartments. Those apartments, they exist against the city's housing code. Why are they there? They're there because the landlords don't want to improve the situation by improving egress. Some of them have no way to get out except the way the water was coming in. And the other reason is New York City has a big housing shortage. And the city doesn't want to do anything about it because they don't want to lose housing units. And a lot of the people living in those units are poor, undocumented immigrants, and in some cases, refugees, political refugees. And there they were being drowned in a rainstorm. And it resonated with me because my grandmother lived in such an apartment, it had two egresses. She would probably have not drowned had that happened to her. But still, it was something I could imagine it was in the borrow I grew up in Queens. Another thing that's happened are the wildfires. We had not only the wildfires in Canada, which tell us a very interesting lesson. We all knew there were going to be more wildfires and more intense fires because of the combination of heat and drying. This case, however, we did not predict that there would be a smoke pole that would be, you know, essentially toxic and so thick. I mean, you got it here to some extent. I understand. So I remember going out on one of the piers in the Hudson River and we could actually see the smoke coming, the wind shifted or something, and then it just it was like a horror movie of what the aftermath of it was like a nuclear winter. Basically, there was no preparation even though we have very good forecasts and this was foreseen. Nobody in any place that I know of, not just New York, was prepared for this and it was a serious acute public health threat. People stayed indoors. The first couple of days were like the pandemic, where nobody wanted to run into anybody, and instead they didn't want to run into the smoke. And it was shocking. But there's a lesson there which is, no matter how good the science is, when extreme events play out on the ground, all kinds of reverberations occur that you can't have thought of. Why that is, why we can't, our imaginations don't stretch far enough to imagine the things that essentially at some level we could have figured out. I don't know, but you should keep that in mind because adapting to extreme events is just not a straight line from the last five. Every time something happens, something new accompanies it. And another example is the Lehena Wildfire, which created an immense damage, killed a lot of people in Hawaii. And when you scratch each of these stories, you have to ask the question, didn't they know this could happen? And aren't there any measures they could have taken in advance? Was Canada really in a position? I mean, they got huge forest area. They've had forest area forever. They've had wildfire forever. They knew the risk is increasing. Why not? Be prepared. Why did the stuff have to wind up down here? What about Hawaii? If you read the stories, there was a lot of basically dereliction of duty in that case. In each of these cases, it's not a matter of just subpar performance. It's a matter of not doing, in many cases, the easy thing, not doing the cheap thing, not thinking about the future, not thinking about the fact that climate isn't steady anymore. It's dynamic, it's changing. And stuff that you don't want to happen is going to happen more and more. And the same thing goes on the bottom there for the heat wave. There was a heat wave in Europe in 2023, and the estimated deaths were 62,000 There was a heat wave in 2003. And the estimated deaths, we don't know it so well. Somewhere 40-70 thousand. But after that heat wave, everybody said we're not going to let that happen again. Some people got air conditioning. There isn't much in Europe. Some people said, well it's also partly a lifestyle thing. We're, people are going to have to drink more water, not go outside so much, et cetera. People will learn. And in fact, there was a heat wave in France, in a smaller area, but the same place where the 2003 heat wave was centered, where the death rate was lower and everybody got very confident and smug. But then this comes along this summer in a slight centered in more in southern Europe, but still it overlaps. As you can see from these maps, the 2003 heat wave, geography and 63,000 people. How long can that go on? When to deal with extreme heat? We know very well what has to be done and we'll get to that a little later. What goes wrong? Insufficient anticipation of weather that used to be rare at some level, people still don't believe it. It's not that they don't believe in climate change, it's, it's almost more that they don't believe it can happen in their lives. It's more of what it is. You get a situation where, where people just don't take it seriously enough because it hasn't hit them often enough. One of the terrible, sorry, lessons, whether you're talking about governments or individuals, is they have to get clobbered a few times, frankly, before they really start paying attention. There's also insufficient learning from past disasters, whether the disasters that happened to you or disasters that happened nearby. It seems that we get a lot of hurricanes on the East Coast and in the Gulf Coast, they're stronger than they used to be on average, but there doesn't seem to have been much learning about what to do about that. My city, New York, we're still cleaning up from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The clean up is going to go on for another ten or 15 years. That's because it's immensely expensive and there is enough money to do it in a year or two. It's also rather complicated. And what we haven't learned is, okay, what are we going to do to prevent a disaster like that from happening again were a fair amount of money has been spent on doing things like making the subway more floodproof. And that's great. But all of a sudden the pandemic intervenes. Or all of a sudden a war somewhere. Intervenor. All of a sudden, now a refugee crisis intervenes, the job never gets done. The trouble with that is it used to be you could not finish your job, pick it up later. There's lots of infrastructure which construction was interrupted because of financial crises, happens everywhere. But this time the extreme events are going to come closer and closer and closer, and there is no time to delay business as usual will not do. I'll get to the specifics on that in a moment. Then there's insufficient political will. What politician wants to spend billions of dollars, say you're a governor. Billions of dollars protecting the coastal areas of your state when it'll take decades. To get the job done, you'll never get credit for it. And what you'll get credit for in the negative sense is the taxes will have to go up. That's a deadly combination, and of course, is the well known way that that kind of thinking interacts with the electoral cycle. That's what we're fighting against. There are insufficient resources, there are insufficient resources, mainly because most of the resources and revenue raising power at the federal government. But most of the actual implementation has to be done at the state and local level. And the connection between those two is not a smooth and reliable transfer of funding from the revenue source to the people who need it, and that has to be fixed. Serious defect in the way our particular version of the federal system is structured. The sadly, there's insufficient, not just concern but empathy, putting yourself in their place among people who run our governments and people in general, for people who are least able to protect themselves, the least vulnerable. The most outstanding case of that that I know of happened during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, when the city's emergency plan was basically everybody gets in their car and drives out of town. Not a smart plan anyway, because the capacity isn't often there to handle the traffic, but on top of that of people don't have cars or they're sick and they can't drive, or either or they're too poor and they don't have a car, or they don't know anybody who has a car or the person who owns the car got the hell out before they worried whether to pick you up. And there was a lot of that and part of the reason there were so many people stuck in the Superdome is because they didn't have cars and they didn't know where to drive. The city's emergency plan did not take into account what to do with those people. They realized it a little too late and they started to try to do something about it, but the storm was already there. So why? What are the deeper reasons? And before I get to the deeper reasons, let me say the picture isn't all bleak. We're not stupid. We're simply careless, I think. And we do learn over time, and for instance, mortality rates in the US and the whole world in tropical cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones in the Bay of Bengal have decreased. And that's probably due to improved forecasts and improved early warning systems. And the best story about that is Bangladesh, which lost about a half 1 million people in cyclone Bola in 1970, just before the Civil War broke out. Half 1 million people in one storm. Gradually, they got their economy together better. They got their governance, which is the real clue to everything here, better Together, they established a system of early warning. I went there in 1989, and even then, there was at least one video cassette recorder in every village, Even the poorest one that I went down to, some of the poorest ones in the southern, southwestern part of the country where the sea level problem is really bad, sea level rise and now they're a cell phone. Okay. So you could warn people where the hell do they go. So they also built concrete bunkers which are pretty sturdy and we're able to resist the winds and the floods. They're up here on big concrete pillars, and the death rates now in cyclones in that area are about a few thousand instead of a few hundred thousand, it's a major improvement even though a few thousand is not great. And the same type of storm hits and mar all the time. Not necessarily the same storm, but the same type of storm Mary on the east side of the Bay of Bengal. And the death rates, there are tens of thousands. The difference is they have a halfway decent government. I don't want to go wild about how great the Bangladesh government is particularly crappy right now. You're from Bangladesh. Crappy is the wrong word. There are issues, let's put it that way. But Myanmar, if you know what the governance situation there is, it's a total disaster. So there's been improvements. Heat related mortality in the US has decreases, decreased because we can afford to buy air conditioning, the death rates are down. On the other hand, globally, the death rates have probably not gone down because the biggest birth rates in the last few decades have been in place where they can't afford a condition. There's an interesting thing about heat related mortality, which is one of the only disaster related things that we don't recognize usually as a disaster. And where we privatized almost totally the business of protection or resilience against extreme heat. Because if you want to get protection, you buy your own air conditioner. Some cities in some places. During the pandemic in New York. They did it. There was public financing for air air conditions, but that program is over. I don't know whether there's another ongoing continuous program anywhere in the United States that funds air conditioners for poor people. There is funding for electricity bills, which is something, but still it's a pittance compared to what we really, really need to do. This question of privatizing the building of resilience against a particular risk really has very deep equity implications. There are differences, income differences accompanying, often racial differences in who's able to adapt and who just doesn't have the resources. And there are little or no public resources except cooling centers which are established in major cities. But we recently did a study of how those are located, and they are located in a way which has no relation, whatever, in general, to the vulnerable population. Then the question is, how is this going to all play out as climate change accelerates, which it is as sea level rise accelerates and as the US population ages and born, more of us don't drive cars anymore. More and more of us might be living in isolated circumstances and there's nobody to watch out for them and it's hard to evacuate people under those circumstances. Okay. But there's good news. I'm going to pop back and forth as often as I can. The good news is, according to at least one study, which was, it was a good study, was a Blue Ribbon Commission that was gotten together privately, but was quasi public. Bill Gates was on the commission, which I don't agree with everything Bill Gates says, but on this issue, actually paid some attention. Basically you save a lot of money if you invest up front in adaptation, building resilience, it's a lot cheaper than paying for the damages. Afterwards, we're in this insane situation where basically Fema, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, runs the National Flood Insurance Program. It basically ensures 95% of policies related to private residence as opposed to commercial establishments. And it's basically broke, Congress has to shovel the money in. The reason that happens is we let it happen because it is not part of a program designed to build resilience in advance. If you're going to have an insurance program. Insurance rates when they're sane are risk based insurance rates. When they're effective basically give rate reductions or vouchers or something for people who take actions on their own to say put hurricane clips on their port troops and 1 million other things like that. But the National Flood Insurance Program hasn't been run that way. And as a result, your taxpayer money is going to fund stuff which instead, if it funded advanced adaptation, we'd be saving a lot in total basically. The bottom line is that the US in particular, I know something about other countries, but I'm going to focus on the US. The US is not very well organized bureaucratically to handle the situation. Adaptation is basically a minor add on to programs that were built as a post disaster recovery program. As long as you're focused on the last war, you're going to lose the next one and that's the way it is. They don't think ahead, they don't act in advance and, and money for localities to do what they need to do is only available sporadically after a big event like Hurricane Katrina or these wildfires. Then there's a small window of opportunity to do good stuff until political energy and attention goes elsewhere. That's what has to change. So the two big changes I'm going to conclude with, when I get to the conclusion, don't run away yet, is the finance issue getting more money on a continuous, not an episodic basis down to localities and the bureaucracy issue, having an establishment, which act of government, a framework of government, which is actually up to the challenge, we don't have that. So the Biden administration has actually tried to change the finance part of that by making more permanent funding available from the federal government to localities to build resilience in advance of anything bad happening. But it's a pittance compared to the amount thats spent after the fact. You know, we don't have a Congress right now that's particularly friendly to spending money on things that anticipate that the climate will change, or anything else for that matter. And so it's not a good situation. But the Biden administration is trying, on the other hand, several of the programs that were instituted recently, and not all of them just by Biden, actually under Trump, some good stuff was done not by the administration, particularly paying attention, but by the Congress. You know, there's a program called Building Resilient Infrastructure in Communities called Brick. Brick is one of these programs that does channel on a continuing basis, several billion dollar a year down to communities to do stuff in advance. There's actually a requirement in federal law that I think 6% of all disaster after the fact spending has to go to communities in advance. That is, it's labeled specially for climate adaptation, but of course, it only is available after a disaster because something has to trigger it under the Stafford Act. Part of what happens here is that they have a new program. But it turns out the application process for communities to get the money is complicated enough. Poor communities don't have the resources, the expertise, in fact, to fill out the applications for this that they need. It's an incredibly complicated process and they give up, and that discriminates against poor communities. One of my students did her thesis on this in the case she studied. A few communities out on the Washington state Coast, which are very remote, have very poor access to the bigger population centers. And there's a large tribal community out there. Just a lot of them just said, we just don't bother because we don't know how to do it in time. It's a waste of our effort, it's not a priority. That all has to be kept in mind. Then there are some physical reasons why climate adaptation is the why climate adaptation is difficult. It's difficult because the climate is changing rapidly and we're in new situations every day. As long as that's the case, we have to be a little more clever and a little more creative than what we're used to, which just sitting back and knowing the climate isn't going to change very much. And that's the way it was for thousands of years. And that's gone. Some aspects of climate change projection, the sea level rise, the project sea level rise are quite uncertain, particularly if you get beyond year 2050. You may say 2050 a long way. But if you are going to build to make a community resilient, you want to build with 100 year time frame in mind because you're building very expensive infrastructure, you don't want to have to rip it up and rebuild it. So you want to build with some notion of flexibility so you can adjust as the situation changes, which some recognition of what scientists are saying the future will hold. But until very recently, Fema didn't even take into account sea level rise when it decided what was or was not in the flood zone. And as a result, a lot of areas are getting flooded now. They're not in 100 year flood zone but they're getting flooded because part never anticipated in their maps then the lead time to get any of these projects done. If it's a big project, like a surge barrier to protect the coastal area, well, you have to plan it. You have to get the political consensus behind spending the money. You have to get the financing together and have a stream of expenditures which is manageable, which doesn't give you the beg, rest of your financial obligations. This is, if you're all in all, then you have to build the damn thing. One of the quickest, big protections is the surge barrier on the Thames. I don't know if any of you ever saw. It's visible on some flights going into London. It protects the London area from flooding during a high tide or super high tide or a storm surge. That took 29 years from conception to completion. That was fast. Usually one would expect 30, 40 In the Netherlands, they figure 45 years, the worst of all or most complicated of all. There are a bunch of psychological, political and institutional barriers, Ways that we're set up or that we set up our political arrangements which get in the way which I touched on briefly. I'll go into some detail, but let me go over some of the science very quickly just to remind you, this is the way the warming has come at us. The temperatures are in Celsius on the bottom scale. This part of the world is already warm by about one to two degrees Celsius double roughly to get Fahrenheit, far north, including the northern part of the United States called Alaska, has warmed by these amazing amounts which are according to this, like four, some areas, five degrees Celsius. That's world changing for those people, that's why you're seeing stuff like these Canadian fires, for instance, in the far north. This is the fastest warming that's occurred in millennia. It's probably brought human beings to a condition, we are hotter than it's been in the whole history of civilization. 10,000 years, possibly hotter, we don't know exactly than it's been in about the whole history of humanity, which is 200,000 years. It's all happened at a record pace, which you can see. These are measurements of the Earth's temperature from what are called climate proxies. You've got a lot of good people here who work on climate proxies. They're indirect measurements of temperature like tree rings. Then you get this rocket ship going up, which is where we are now. We know that sea level is rising because there are three different types of independent measurements. And basically, the curve is set of all those measurements since about 1,700 If you look again, some are indirect. If you look at the right hand panel, you'll see the way sea level rises accelerated the last two millennia. It was down in around a tenth of a millimeter per year. In the 20th century, it was a little less than 2 millimeters per year. Now it's actually up, this is a little out of date, this graph. It's around 4 millimeters per year. That's a shocking acceleration. And do the math, if you do the math and how much sea level rise that will mean over the next few as it continues to accelerate. It's quite shocking and I'll get to you in a minute. We're able with the climate models to protect temperature. There are high emission scenarios which are the pink, the low emission scenarios which are the blue. There are two kinds of uncertainty. You should never let a scientist talk to you without talking about climate change. Without talking about uncertainty. The projection is uncertain because we don't know what emissions are going to be. Because it depends on what humans and how they behave, and we can't predict how humans are going to behave. And then it also depends on the uncertainties in the climate modeling exercise itself. And those are about equal uncertainties. Future temperature could be, oh, I'm on the sea level graph of that go too far. Future temperature could be, if we get low emissions, it'll be in the blue range. We might just barely make the Paris targets. If we just say hallelujah, let's have a party forget about this global warming stuff. We're up in the red range with climate changes, 45 degrees Celsius, there's nothing to compare it to in any human experience, sea level rise, again, a lot of uncertainty. Maybe Jess will give us a lecture, one of these days on the data curve. I'm not going to spill any of her very interesting findings, but basically over this century, it looks like it's going to be in the range of a two to 1 meter, which is itself quite a lot of difference. We should hope that we're in the blue curve range, a half a meter. But it could be if all the uncertainties break in the wrong direction up in the one a two and even 28 Atlanta, I think something jumped there on the things are moving fast. I told you things are moving fast. But remember, risk is not just about these averages. Risk is about heat waves, extreme rainstorms, which we're getting a lot of lately, coastal, high water, In other words, flood levels along the coast, flood levels inland where we're getting from freshwater. Which is probably going to be a lot more of a problem for you here than what happens along the coast 600 miles away, and drought in agricultural. See, I didn't touch anything. I, the timer must be G. This is going to make me move faster actually, which is good. The point is, the time between damaging events is shrinking, and that means the time allowed for recovery is shrinking. If the events are coming closer and closer together, there's less time to recover when one hits before the next one hits, which means if you're unlucky, you never recover. And I'm not just talking about one hurricane and then another, or one heat wave and then another. I'm talking about maybe a hurricane with one set of damage and then a big flood from a rainstorm with another set of damage, and then a heat wave with another set of damage. And what do we do? Where do we get the resources you become? There's evidence that you get into a state when the events come closer and closer together, where basically depresses your economy permanently and kills people permanently because you never are in a position to set things upright and you're falling further and further behind. That's the problem, and that's the way I think about the problem these days. It's not just the warming, it's not just the extreme events. It's the compression or as some people call the compound, which is making stuff happen more frequently, which is very damaging. Which necessitates working hard on repairing stuff quickly before the next thing happens. The worst case, I know about that. Well, let me give you a few. These are heat, extreme heat, okay? This is global average, so it's not really applicable to any one place. Once and 50 year heatwave, that's a big deal, It kills people back in the end of the 19th century, happened every 50 years, twice a century, roughly. Okay. If you do it probabilistically, it's a little more complicated. Statisticians don't throw stones at me. I know what I'm talking about there. It happened again. Okay? Then gradually you get more of them. That's what the red balls are, as opposed to the pink ones. Once in 50 years, in the 19th century, once per decade with strong climate policy, even if we meet the Paris targets once per decade, we'll get that what used to be a once per 50 year heat wave. And then if we don't make the Paris targets and things get out of control and we wind up, by the end of the century, anywhere near four degrees, It's nearly once per year. Event that used to happen once every 50 years, happens once per year. Think about that. Think about how we're going to get enough protection for poor people, for everybody. Sea level rise. Same thing. What causes extreme sea level? Get a coastal storm, it's a low pressure system. It literally pulls up the ocean surface and it rotates the water around on the East Coast towards the coast. Same thing happens in the Gulf Coast that causes storm surge. High tides also cause high water at the coast. It turns out that for this stuff, the flood, let me back up, the benchmark flood levels, but the Natural flood insurance program worries about once per century, 0.01 probability. Okay. They don't happen very often. I ben, in the middle of them, they shut down the city for a day. It messes things up, of course, hundreds of millions of dollars. The projections are that as sea level rises, you reach those flood levels more and more often, of course, because you're working off the higher sea level and you're adding the surge and the high tide on top of that. And what happens is that the once in a century event that I just spoke about in many areas on the Gulf and East Coast and the West Coast happens once a year by 2050. Once in a century event comes once a year by 2050. Then at many places by 2,100 Most places at the global coasts and the US coasts have once in a century event every year on average. Which means the once in 500 year event, the really nasty stuff happens more often too. Maybe it only happens once every 20 years, which some of them will. I've got a place by place table of this, but they create proportionally a hell of a lot more damage. It's that kind of compression that we really haven't figured out how to deal with extreme heat. This is a map of where the extreme heat is most likely to occur. This, by the way, is a very rough scale of resolution. So it looks like the United States gets off easy. In fact, if you look at the chart, you can get 100 days of which there are projected excess heat That's over much of the east and two thirds which is like much of the summer. But the areas that really get hit are the areas in red and orange. And those are the areas, those tend to be areas where the populations are growing fast and when the populations are cool, they don't have the capacity to deal with it. Now, let me go back to the question of, okay, so how do we change this? One of the most remarkable events in modern European history was a North Sea storm in 1953, which killed several hundred people in the London area and about 2000 people in the Netherlands. That storm was probably 100 years storm. But Europe wasn't prepared for it. Why wasn't Europe prepared for it? Well, the 20th century, if you think the 21st century is going to be bad, the 20th century suck completely. I mean, war, World War one, Depression, World War two, Cold War, You know, who had the resources coming out of World War Two? Northern Europe was decimated. They didn't think, they hadn't thought too much about repairing anything for a long time and at least some of the countries. And the result was this in the Netherlands. But there was a positive result too. That is, as I said before, really nasty events. Get the system moving and what happened? They built that Thames barrier, which is protected London. And the vaunted Dutch defenses weren't so vaunted after World War Two. And they modernize them and they are probably the best in the world. The way some people think about that, see they did it. And the way I think about it is even the Dutch had to be clobbered before then. I've got one example from New York. Say I love this. I show this repeatedly. I see this in my dreams. It's such a perfect example. Each bar is the flood level at the Battery in New York City. The battery southern tip of Manhattan. It shows the water level height. Don't worry about the actual numbers. The dash line going across near the top is the level at which salt water gets into the subway. Salt water is not supposed to get into the subway. The subway is always called the life flood in New York City. Salt water gets in and if it stays long enough, it corrodes a signal system which is 100 years old in many places and which you can't go into a hardware store and buy it off the shelf. They like to try to keep saltwater out of the system. There had never been salt water in the system and there was only significant freshwater flood once. What happened? Nine of those events are below the dash line. One event, Hurricane Sandy, goes right above the dash line. Now you could say, okay, so what's the big deal? Hurricane Sandy was much bigger than any other flood, you know? It was an exception. Don't worry. They saved the subway. The workers got down there, pumped the water out. They saved the thing. The salt water didn't do as much damage to the wiring. It did a hell of a lot of damage to the tunnel, which is still being repaired. But what you really should do is look at the other nine stores, each of them came almost all of them came within a foot or a foot and a half or less. Some of them within inches of flooding the subway. And this is not news, This is something that they themselves drew is they knew this. And yet they did not one damn thing about it. There was no plan to protect the low lying subway stations that could get flooded. And they knew sea level was rising. The dark blue is the contribution of sea level rise to the flood levels. By that time, it's about a foot, maybe a little more. Some of these things, obviously one of these days were going to flood and they'd never lifted a finger. Now after Sandy, they finally started the process and protected some of the volable stations. And you really have to ask yourself, what are these people thinking? These are people who actually can plan ahead. Planned ahead, they build what's called a third water tunnel, which allows us to close the other two water tunnels which bring water down from the catskills and repair them. We know they're leaking, So rather than watching them collapse, the city in 1970 started the process of building a third water tunnel. They just finished it 23 years ago. It does take 50 years to build these big projects and so I know they can do it, but they just didn't think about doing it for coastal protection. Why? I'm sure there's some very lovely political science story that could be written. I just don't know what it is. The bottom line on this is we know what to do. Lower left hand corner of those Bangladesh bunkers. Upper right, upper left hand corner is a picture I took in Cambodia. People build houses on stilts, that's the way they live. This is not news to human beings that flooding could be a real problem. And then the way we've done it in New Orleans with these monumental and monumentally expensive flood protection, New Orleans is an exception, there's not much. If you love New Orleans, you don't want it to disappear. And it happens to be ten feet below sea level. There aren't many options. Okay. We know what to do, none of it is easy. One way to do it is do nothing. And that's kindly called unwise by new there's build protection, build a surge barrier, build a bulkhead, build something. But it's costly and you can't do it at all places. You cannot protect every inch of the coast. Third way is called accommodation. Do something temporary, like raise your house a few feet or use the basement as a flood buffer zone, but don't put anything valuable down there. That is a temporary measure because sea level is going to just keep rising. This applies to not just sea level rise, but the inland flood you have to worry about because they're getting more intense and you're going to have the same problems we have on the coast. Then there's called advance, which means building out to build into the flood area, but raise the land. That's controversial because cities do that, and then they think, oh, we can raise revenue from the new land we created. That'll pay for the project, great. But it only pays for the project if you put development on new elevated land and then you're just putting more places in harm's way because you're putting them very close to the hazard. Thos if you're going to build out, they should be buffer zone. They should be there to be used by children playing soccer or whatever, people barbecuing when there's no flood in sight. But they should be able to take a flood, they should have drainage under them and you get the water out and then you could start using it again in a few days or a week or two weeks. But at least nothing got wrecked. But of course, people who run, governments are hungry for revenue. The proposals that have come recently have said, let's build a big development on top of the Bulkhead Retreat. Retreat is a solution we're starting to implement. That means getting people to hell out of flood zone. One of the first implementations was in the Mississippi, in the Midwest a few decades ago. And it worked. Cleared out certain areas, they're buffer zones now. They're what they originally were before people lived in that area. Namely the temporarily flooded. But they can take it, nothing gets destroyed, people don't die. Then there's so called ecosystem based approaches which are promising like wetland enhancement, but we don't know enough about them yet. There are a lot of experiments going on there being implemented at a scale which will give us the right information over years. By the way, does anybody be keeping track of the time? Because I was supposed to and I didn't hit the button here. All right. So I figure I have about ten more minutes left. People got patients for 10 minutes. All right? Okay. Because I got to get the solving. Yeah, I forgot to write that part. Okay. So we've got barriers that are psychological. I spoke about that a little bit. We talked about the North Sea storm. You get hit, you act Hurricane Sandy had the same effect in New York. Hurricanes always had that effect. They had the effect in Florida. Hurricane you think of Florida as not a state that does land use planning very effectively, but in fact, Hurricane Andrew in 1995, I think it was a tremendous windstorm category five, I think when it came ashore, destroyed an area. Luckily for Miami, it wound up south of Miami, and the area was devastated, but not heavily populated. But it did lead to updating of the building code, which is unusual for Florida. Florida does not have the most relaxed building codes. Now, it's a question of enforcement, which with the current governor, the politically perverse incentive is the one I mentioned before, which is people don't want to spend money unless they're going to get a lot of political credit. For the shape of this problem, it's hard to see how you make that credit happen. And the governance structure, again, the problems I pointed out with the federal system, the multi layer, the various layers interfering with each other and in some cases, not supplying the resources. That sums up that the psychological obstacles, infrequent events that you were infrequent and now frequent, we're going to learn, but we're going to learn by being hit by boom again and again. That's a hard way to learn a lesson. But maybe it's what has to be. People forget, people don't remember. I live in the southern half of Manhattan. We got shut down. The electricity went off for four days. The Sandy was a member of the event. The people that live uptown and talk to them sometimes see, oh, yeah, what was that? They barely remember. This is true everywhere. The National Flood Insurance Program, poorly structured the election cycle. The bottom line is, there's just no incentive anywhere in the system for either policymakers or households to do the right thing, and we've got to change that. We've got to straighten out the multiple overlapping jurisdictions, which I'll show you in a minute. Somehow, we have to make it a more balanced system between revenue and obligation. I said the second point about the money going from the jurisdiction that raises the money to the jurisdiction that has to do the job. Then we're fighting in trying to change the bureaucracy against Fema, which is in the Department of Homeland Security. And is a dug in bureaucracy which is very hard to change. And it's overmatched even by the US. Army Corps of Engineers, which is the entity that does the implementation of some of these projects. But the locals have to chip in too. These are big institutions and they're hard to change is one of the lessons with our scientific institutions. To institutions don't like to change, but this is a job that will not be done, right, unless we find a way to change the institutions. And again, some of it is a problem with the US system of adaptation. From the report to the President by the Council of Economic Advisers. And it shows you the span of where the legal responsibility is for what. And land use planning is heavily at the state and local level with almost no federal jurisdiction. It's one of the weird things about the federal system. And then you go up, you can look at all the elements that some of the responsibilities are shared and some are most heavily at the federal level. But for instance, the land use stuff. The federal government made earthquake a model earthquake code. They can't enforce it because they don't do building codes. That's not their responsibility. But individual municipalities don't have the resources to bring the experts together to figure out a code. So they follow the federal code. So the federal government can wield its voluntary influence too. And they should be doing that for building codes, for instance. Even that minor step would be a major improvement in the situation. So if I were fixing the situation, the first thing I would do would straighten out the finances. Make sure there's not just an episodic flow of money, but a continual, reliable source of funding of known quantities over decades that states can draw on either or grants. Because if you don't have a source of funding, you're never going to start a big infrastructure project, to my mind is a single biggest obstacle. We've got to reform the federal government so that there's essentially one adaptation bureaucracy run by something like an adaptation czar. This model doesn't always work, sometimes it falls on its face. Department of Homeland Security. As an example of the last time we tried to reorganize the Federal government by sticking different pieces from different departments together didn't work very well. Actually, we should get Fema out of there and create a Department of Climate Resilience or something, or something equivalent. Doesn't necessarily have to be cabinet level, but it has to have influence within the federal government. And we have to embed the, the notion of equity that we can't go on building systems that fund activities like disaster relief or hopefully adaptation that have unequal outcomes. We just shouldn't be doing that. We should build insurance systems and this is the private sectors responsibility part which give incentives like lower rates. If you actually do something positive to protect your home, that's not done in any consistent way. In the US system, even with driving a car, you get cut rates. If you can prove you were a safe driver with regard to your home, not so much. And then, but dealing with the perverse political incentives that, that's above my pay grade. We're going to let the political scientists in the audience figure that out. And then very important I put it off separately, is legitimizing retreat. Because we're going to have to retreat whether it's from inland areas that get flooded, fire prone areas, coastal areas, the whole place is not going to be habitable anymore. We can't afford to make it habitable everywhere. We have to realize that sometimes the best way is to pull out. But it has to be done fairly. The Army Corps of Engineers retreat funding. Essentially, the decision to protect an area from flooding, whether it's coastal or inland, is to do a cost benefit analysis dollar and cents on the value of the property they got to protect. The buy demonstrator is trying to change that. We'll see if they actually can do it. What that means is automatically, poor people have to move and rich people get a nice big wall to protect them. That kind of thing shouldn't be going on. So what's the bottom line? The bottom line is the more extreme events are going to be arriving and faster and faster. But if we can get emissions under control, that whole process will slow down and eventually stabilize, giving us a chance. So, it's very important we get as close as we can to the Paris targets. They don't indicate the end of the world, they're just good benchmarks and we should try to stay not too far away from them and maybe one of these days get below them. Again, it's possible that the events getting closer and closer together will stimulate the political will to make these changes. Or it could be we're too slow about the whole thing forever. The result is no true recovery ever. A permanent depression of the US economy from all of this. A permanent ongoing loss of life. And basically, many governments, like the Florida government, which now has to run the insurance system down there, threatened to get bankrupted in the process. That's it. I don't know if that's a particularly elevating message, but it is true that humans have faced nasty stuff before of their own cause that they were responsible for and managed to find a way out of it. And I'm an optimist that One of those things. And there's going to be, there's going to be some tough times in the next few decades, but I think we'll come out the other end wiser, and hopefully better for the experience. Thank you. So I've been told to run my own Q and I session, so anybody who wants to ask a question, there are microphones there and there run up to the microphones and ask me if you're too stunned or irritated by what I said. I understand that you can open the home but Okay, good. Yes. Thank you for an insightful talk that was very interesting and useful. My question, and I hope I'm not preempting the message that you want to talk about on Thursday, but I was glad to hear you say that you don't see the end of the world or the end of civilization. The climate emergency is an emergency. But not the emergency that ends civilization, perhaps. But what about thresholds? Are we no longer worried about permafrost melting or methane being released? Those kind of positive feedbacks that could lead to total catastrophe. Are we no longer worried about? You can still worry about them. I'll give you permission. They are possibilities. They are happening. At some rate, we just don't have enough information yet to do serious calculations or estimates and projections on some of them. They are to some extent taken into account in the climate projections I showed you. They could raise the ultimate warming above those projections by another degree, degree and a half. Things could be worse than what I showed you. But I'm sorry, I have to suck on logic in my throat. Get my view is there's been some progress, the projections of what human beings are already doing. That's not a projection, the fact of what human beings, what governments are already doing to try to change the emissions trends and we expect them to do in the future, even under a relatively a hum scenario for what governments are capable of doing, really have lowered the worst case projections in combination with the fact that there has been new estimates of how fast you can exploit fossil fuel reserves, let's say we ignore everything, all this, we just try to dig, dig, dig, burn, bird burn. You can't do it as fast as we think. The experts on those scenarios say the top warming is no longer thought to be about six degrees during this century. The range of likely outcomes but more like 4.5 five degrees, That's good. Part of that is again, policy and part we mis estimated how fast we could wreck the world and yeah, there's some good news, There's some bad news, There's no news, questions that can't be answered. But that's the way things often are and you have to, it's a mull through situation where we're starting to actually do positive things. You should take some heart in that and then do the best you can to make sure that in your local community, and also nationally and at the state level, that the things that need to get done actually get done. If there ever was a time on this of political action, it's now because the doors are open, actually, in a way they never were before. Hello, my name is Emma Develco and I'm a senior here. Thank you so much for coming out and talking with us. I was really curious. You mentioned talking about how some people lack, maybe the concern or empathy for those who are vulnerable, or even just their neighbors. The people down the street who are suffering from the impacts of climate change. You mentioned human psychology also as one of the things that can be worked on in the future. Many of the adaptation strategies that people discuss these days, very tangible impacts. Maybe building a flood wall or retreating, for example, how As the people in this room, but also maybe us as college students. How can we work to increase people's empathy for other people? Is that something you think is possible in the short term? And how can maybe science and scientific solutions be used as a mechanism to increase this empathy? When I give a T day, which obviously covers a range of disciplines, some of them I know in my sleep I read. I read the papers and I understand that some of them are at the fringes of my expertise, and I don't like to make it up, so I don't have an answer for you. What I have observed and been told by my psychologist colleagues is that experiments which test the spatial and temporal range of people's concerns are shockingly short. People are myopic, they basically, it's partly because life is tough in a lot of ways and they just don't want to deal with stuff that's somewhat hypothetical in some cases in terms of how it'll affect them. Even to the extent of if you ask people, do they care what their children, what the world their children is living in? When those kids are 50 years old, they don't really give a shit, basically. It's bad and it's surprising. I think I care about what the world my kids are going to be living in, but that's the way things are and I don't know how to change that. There's a lot of discussion of norms and getting people to watch what other people are doing and behaving accordingly. But the whole business of how norms can be changed is there's a lot of uncertainty. So I don't want to tread in those waters. If you want, I can connect you with a colleague of mine who's an expert, I'm sure. I know you have people here who know about this stuff. Again, thank you for the talk and I'm glad you were able to inject a slight bit of optimism at the end. But I have a question which is not so optimistic. Part of the problem with generating the political will to get sustainable funding, for example, is not just what you raised, the question of getting credit for it, but there's also a paralysis by uncertainty among some politicians and also among some scientists who advise those politicians. I agree with you that eventually the solution to that will be politicians, citizens get clobbered by frequent events. I wish I was more optimistic, but when I look at what's happening with school shootings in this country, which are getting more and more frequent, the response from politicians is often, well, we can't make policy while we're dealing with a crisis. When the frequency gets high, you're always dealing with a crisis. I'm not sure what the way out is. Well, I was having that discussion at lunch with one of your wonderful faculty and two of them. Actually, there's an analogy there, first of all, there is no clear answer to it. We'll see is basically what the answer is. But I thought about it, it's a little like the situation with the fossil fuel companies, which have the resources to keep fighting against doing anything on this. The problem with the gun situation, it's partly the cultural thing, but most of it is probably that the gun industry is funding the political side, just like the fossil fuel industry has dumped huge amounts of resources into fighting the political fight. That's what you have to figure out how to get at, and it's not going to be easy to stop. But you might regard it, these things are essentially literally in the gun case, these are fights to the death. And it's the same thing with climate change. They're very serious. I'm not suggesting anybody should be out there killing anybody over it. But metaphorically, in the political arena, there are people who, or in the economic arena, people who are going to lose power, people who are going to gain power. And so, it's a very, very nasty struggle. It's unfortunate that it has to play out at a time when there are so many other things going on and the country is so split, it makes it hard. But we'll come back in 20 years and see all I can tell you. I hope we're both around to see it. Thank you for your talk with Professor Oppenheimer, building off the question about uncertainty. You are trained as a physical scientist, you're very good at physical science and communicating that science. And I'm curious how you think about communicating uncertainty without exacerbating this sort of psychological barrier you talked about in your talk. Because that can be paralyzing and I'm curious how you personally deal with it or how you think, what best practices might be for community. I personally deal with it by telling the truth, telling what I know, and not hiding the uncertainties. And I always go out of my way in any talk to talk about what the uncertainties are. A lot of people come up to me afterwards and say, I'm glad you said that it helped convince them. Actually, I'm a scientist and so I'm, my brain is tattooed with the notion that if you stick to what you know is the truth, it'll work out well in the long run. What else am I going to believe? That's part of telling the truth is talking about the uncertainties. And you talk about it clearly. You talk about cases. We're all uncertain about a lot of things and yet we take actions anyway. Stem them like just buying insurance is a simple example. You don't know you're ever going to be hit by lightning, but you can assure yourself against it. I think the average person can understand that because in their lives they are micro risk managers. They have to deal with risk. And a lot of stuff they deal with is uncertain. I don't think it's all that alien. And for me, it works. You hear me? I am a sophomore and I want to thank you for your time. So I was wondering as like an individual now, being a college student, like what can I do like now? And then looking towards the future to help try and combat climate change. I mean, the easy answers and they haven't changed very much. Are, you know, organized, get involved in the politics. Don't be afraid to be an activist. I was an activist for 20 years, in between two parts of my academic career. And it didn't hurt me, It helped me, and it helped me get a job at an Igague University. It helped me understand the forces that I was trying to change. It help me understand politics. There are downsides If you mismanaged being an activist and you can go too far and you can also burn out by convincing yourself, you can solve every problem in the world tomorrow. There's a lot of, there are downsides, but if you try to keep level headed, it's a great positive thing. I'm really happy I spent much of my adult life that way. The other things you can do with the usual look at what causes greenhouse gas emissions. Don't live in Mcmansion, drive a car which gets high fuel economy. Put solar cells on your roof if it's feasible, plant a forest watch. You don't eat a beat. Heavy diet is a good one, which is not that hard to do. There's a whole list and to start doing them, nobody's perfect. I'm not perfect by any means. You're not perfect. You probably never be perfect. We're not saints, but you can try and you can make progress. If everybody did that, it's not that it'll solve the problem, but it gets everybody aware, it changes. Norma's the easiest way for me to put it. Professor, thanks so much for your talk. One of the things I saw in your last slide was legitimizing more inland retreat. And I'm curious how both in institution the retreat goes here too. I mean, it's not just going inland, it's moving somewhere. If you've got floods here and you're in a permanently floodable zone, you got to think about it. I'm just curious, like how can it seems like a logical and inevitable step, but how do you kind of like rationalize that at the institutional and personal level, where you're telling people, especially in a richer country, that you have to get up and move when at least like for example in the United States, we'd have a better chance at affording adaptation costs. Well, first of all, there are retreat programs that are paid for by the federal and state governments. And they give people a choice. They don't go in and say you have to move. The ones that are compulsory are essentially not directly compulsory. But the Army Corps of Engineer Engineers say, coming in and saying, I'm not going to build flood defenses here because the land isn't worth it. You're on your own. And then you make your own decision about where you're going to move. I think over time, the incentives to help people, particularly people who can't afford it but are in a hazardous situation to make the right decision is helpful to unbias the system so the funding doesn't go disproportionately to wealthy communities is another way. Things that are regarded as fair are more likely to get citizen cooperation. What you don't want to do is you want to be careful that you don't wind up with communities essentially disemboweled by some people leaving, maybe half the other people staying. And then there isn't enough tax base to keep up the infrastructure, the sewage, electricity, et cetera. So there has to be some really careful thought being put into how to do that on a large scale. But I will say that experiments are being done now. Thank you. Yes, we can make this the last getting. Go ahead. Thank you for your speech. Really a lot of great information here. You mentioned earlier that five degrees of warming is being something that you can project and are looking towards. And from my legitimate understanding, that's still catastrophic. And a lot of this discussion was focused on the United States and how we would address this. But I was left concerned on how other nations that are less fortunate and less have less resources available, such like Venezuela, Sudan, India, Libya would even be able to address this in a manner that is somewhat equitable. And I'd love to hear how we might be able to go about that. That's a question I probably will deal with. Thursday night, it's called the issue of loss and damage is how do you rectify the imbalance between the countries that caused historically most of the problem and the countries that have very skimpy emissions and don't have the resources to protect themselves. I'll just say tonight that's an ongoing discussion which is going to obstruct any further international agreements on anything at the climate negotiations except talking about how to fix the problem. So I'm convinced that we'll get a better solution than we currently have. So let's come to my talk Thursday. Looking forward to it. Thank you. Okay. I guess that's it. Thank you very much. That was.