here because i have to stay in focus. and i will just warn you in case this occurs, beneath your ordinary street clothes you have a uniform for an outfit that represents one of the nfl themes. i don't want you standing up and ripping off your shirt and showing the colors of the minnesota vikings or even the new york jets. so please keep your seats and later on there'll be questions you can stand up and throw things if you want to. i put this slide up because i use it to suggest that we don't know a whole lot about polar bears. and ordinary i would ask for suggestions from the audience as to what is going on here, but i'm going to have to tell you what's going on here. not what you think is what's going on here. some of you may have seen the photograph like this in the book and, in fact, this is the

photograph in the book. and what is going on here, which is as i say indicative of the varying interpretations of polar bears and the way people look at them -- what's going on here actually is that the children that you see are swimming in a pool separated from the bear by a big pane of glass. the bear wasn't going to eat them and the children were very safe. ...

>> were looking for the northwest or the northeast passage. and as they sailed further and further north as you know, they didn't find the northwest or the northeast passage, but what they did find was a lot of whales. that is what began the european whaling industry. and i'll talk about that a little bit more, but in fact, what they also found were these very strange, very unusual snow white bears. now, these were big as you will see. they are big and they look really, really dangerous. as to what people did first, the

first thing they did upon seeing polar bears was they started shooting them. in this picture, which is from the 16th century, you can see, there are two people shooting at ms. bair and there is an ax and the bear. they found the bears to be so dangerous that they killed him more or less regularly. they would sail north looking for well but when they saw polar bears they would shoot them. if they saw a polar bear in the water, they would shoot at it. and they began to build up a mythology of how dangerous these bears were. and they were not really that dangerous. rather, they were curious. they had never seen people before. this is the dominant predator of the arctic. and an animal but probably, even though, probably doesn't know fear as much. they are not afraid of anything. there's nothing out there that would threaten them. so when they saw people, they sniffed around and they went to see what this was. if the people were eating

something or cooking something, that was even more interesting. if the people ronde dogsled, the bears went trailing behind them. and all of these occurrences, were responsible for people shooting bears. they would say the bear came into our camp so we shot a. the bear came into my cant so i shot it. the pair followed by dogsled, so i shot it. and they shot bears by the hundreds. this is horatio nelson, the hero of, but this is before he became the hero. the story goes that he was an ensign aboard the ship in 1777, and they were in the arctic and they saw a polar bear and he decided to go out on the ice and shoot it. his musket misfired, at which point he decided that a good idea would be to clobber it with his musket. which he almost did. but as you look at this re- creation carefully, you will see that the polar bear on one sort

of granite like ice flow, knowles was on another. what is said to have happened, that the i separated and nelson failed to clobber the bear and came back and said words to the effect of oh dear, i wanted to bring his skin back to my father. it turns out that this is an absolutely wrong for. that the painting did not happen. nowhere in knowles biography is the story actually told. but it was built up as nelson was beatified throughout england after trafalgar, so that he was involved in this way with polar bears. and was a hero because of what he did. what happened, as i said with the whaling industry, is whale ships went north and they were looking for bowhead whales, which they had recently discovered, in fact, in the

16th and 17th century. nobody knew about these wells before. they found these great big whales, which were seen as a top of this, i rather skinny bowhead will, but hanging from the rigging in the ship right here is what is called the side of balian. that is the part the object in them mile of the bowhead whale, that strained the food items from the water. this is a painting painted in 1859. it's called chili observations. but i would like it rather because it shows this poor bear essentially watching his fate begin to unfold. this is what happened. people began, largely because they were afraid of them, for no other reason. they didn't need them. they were not terribly edible. and fact, the liver is poisonous and if you eat it it will kill you. people were not the hardly. but anyway, they went up to the arctic looking for whatever they

were looking for. the northwest passage, whales. this is a painting called man proposes god disposes. and it is supposed to be, he never saw this obviously, but it is supposed to be the fate of the franklin x. edition. the franklin expedition was one of the expeditions that when looking for the northwest passage. they were not heard from for ever in fact because they all died, but many expeditions went looking for them, and eventually they found signs of wear they had starved to death and all died. this was painted in an attempt to depict what had happened to them. and you can see that there is a rib cage over here. the bears are tearing up the sales looking terribly vicious and terribly frightening. and this is the way polar bears were perceived until fairly recently. and now we're going to talk a little bit about what's

happening to polar bears, but before i do that, i want to give you some sort of basic polar bear information. what you're looking at is essentially the polar bears habitat. there will be later on, there will be a photograph of something once and some polar bears, what it will be stuffed penguins and stuffed polar bears, little toys to make the point that they don't really live in the same part of the world. and so just at this moment, i will amuse you and we will discuss that again in a moment. this is polar bear country. this is the arctic ocean. this is the shoreline of russia. this is the shoreline of russia. this is russia. this is sweden and finland over

here, is iceland, greenland. the north pole is approximately over here. this is where polar bears lippa. now i will identify the goal for you, but i wanted to identify this spot down here. we're going to go there pretty soon. a polar bear populations are the world have been more or less arbitrarily divided into 19 different populations. and as you can see, they all kind of bought up one against another. so it's not altogether sure that one of the population is going to wander into another area and become a polar bear and another population. but the ability to segregate the polar bears, at least technically, gives us some idea of how many there are. in other words, you can count, although polar bears are very difficult to count, you can estimate the number of polar bears in this area. you insert estimate the number of polar bears and the south

hudson bay because we'll talk about that in a minute. in greenland, and along the russian coastline, which is there. so what we've come up with is roughly a population of 22000 polar bears. as i said, i'm going to talk a little bit about the biology of polar bears, and this as you can tell, i hope, is not polar bears. these are russian brown bears. they also are known, the same species, the same species as the grizzly bear and north america. but these are russian brown bears but it doesn't matter because they are russian brown bears, but i wanted to show you the difference between brown bears and polar bears. it is believed that polar bears are descended from brown bears. that somewhere along the line, the timing is still not very clear, but somewhere along the line, say within 500,000 years,

a population of brown bears wandered and then adapted to life in the arctic. it's a very serious adaptation, as you will see, because if you look at these bears you will see that they have a lot of characteristics that polar bears don't have a. and so look within at the size of the ears, the size of the face. the color of the bear which is quite obvious in very small contrast to the area in which it lives. and then take a look at this. this is what happened to those brown bears. presumably. it's not altogether clear that this is the way it worked, but for the sake of this argument let's say that polar bears are descended from brown bears. they have smaller is. they have longer noses. they have hair on the soles of their feet that they are actually larger. the largest ones are larger than brown bears.

and of course the most significant difference you can see fairly easy, is they are white. polar bears segregate by sex. for most of their lives. only coming together to be. polar bears, males have nothing to do with the raising of the cubs. the females having been an pregnant at some point, big again in the snow and remain in that den, not eating at all for perhaps as long as eight months. they subsist on their stored fat, and they get the fat, these are faddy, blubbery animals. that is why they are so big. but they get that fat from eating, and we will talk pretty much about what ee in a minute. but by eating the fat of the seals. that's what they live on.

because they are so highly specialized, they are in trouble. anyway, the females give birth to two cubs, which you see little tiny cubs soon but they are about the size of a rabbit. and the female nurses them without eating anything, without coming out of the did for several months, until they are big enough to come out on the ice. and then she comes out immediately and starts hunting. during that time, the male had nothing whatever to do with the females. and the males never hibernate. there's no point in hibernating up there. there's no point. what they do as they walk and walk and they walk. a polar bear, male, in his lifetime and cover 100,000 mil 100,000 miles. they walk largely because they're looking for something to eat, and the secondary benefit if they find a receptive female,

that's fine. they walk this way and they walk. the difference of course, and i will not point it out regularly, but the difference of the male is much bigger than the female. the largest mail ever weighed, waited 2165 pounds. the largest female weighs about eight or 900 pounds that even when they are pregnant, just before they go into the den and they lose a lot of that weight, saving up to nurse their cubs. they not only walk, but they swim. and they are accomplished swimmers. they are not very fast and they are not very agile. swimmers. so they don't hunt in the water. they use the water as a way to get -- swimming as a way to get from one place to another, from one piece of land to another. they can swim a lot. they are known -- they have been found 60 miles from the nearest land, which means this bears whims without stopping.

there's no point in stopping and the water. they can swim for 60 miles. perhaps as much as 100. they need to find someplace to get back to. they are also very good at sleeping. this is a photograph of a bear taken in churchill. that there went to sleep. only its nose stayed out and it was more than happy slipping under the snow, as this bear was quite obviously happy sleeping on the ice. the other thing that polar bears look for, and they need to do a lot of it, they look for something to each. these are a mother and -- this is a mother and two cubs, and they are feeding on a wall with carcass. but mostly the creature that the animals, the polar bears the dog is the ceo. this goes back to some extent in this museum, because some of you can go back to this museum. this is the old polar bear

diorama, in a museum. is here. you will see the new one and a couple of seconds, but it is here because i want you to get a pretty good look at the ceo. this seal is called a ribbon seal. quite often, in fact, in this museum as well as others, quite often the ribbon seal is used as the prey animal for the polar bear. why? because it is a pretty spectacular looking seal, it has these strikes on. this is the new north pole, really not northville, but the new repainted background. it's the same bear by the way. the same ceo. but this is what's out there now and the hall. there's probably not an actual history museum in the world of any size that doesn't have a diorama like this. a polar bear and ceo, blood on the ice and you're supposed to understand what this all means. ribbon seal again. this is the denver museum of natural history. and chilling something that doesn't actually occur very

often. that is to say, mom and dad and the two kids having a snack. what happens more often is if a male polar bear, whether the father come tonight, if a male polar bear comes upon a scene like this, and he is not coming up on. is sitting. but what he would do is chase all the other bears away. he is much bigger than they are. and if he caught them, he would eat them as well as the seal. this is the actual prey of the polar bear. called a wing seal here about this big. and they are seals of the iceberg they are known as i seals, and they breed in den's that they made in the pack ice pick they dig the dance and they give birth and then the baby remains there and the muslims off to the. she comes back. meanwhile, the polar bear is waiting on the ice, or waiting at the breathing hole and will

swipe the seal out of the breathing hole and feed on it. so the diorama is pretty accurate, except for the actual seal species. the dioramas are pretty active. what they do is they feed on these i seals, and because they feed on the ice fields and only on seals of one kind or another, they are called obligate carnivores which means they only eat meat and fat. they eat nothing else. as you can imagine, there's not very much else to eat out there. nothing grows on the polarize so they can't eat plants and berries and shrubs in things. and so they are designed, and i use the term, they are designed to eat only meat. we will talk about this, but if the source of their eating disappears, they are going to be in very, very serious trouble. another species that they feed on occasionally is called the

bearded seal. and the bearded seal is a lot bigger. the bearded seal can be eight or 10 feet long. there's no creature, and you will see that any minute, there is no creature that a polar bear cannot take down. walruses, this is the fino obviously. and the baby, but walruses can get two-way 4000 pounds. roughly twice as much as the biggest polar bear. polar bears can take these babies down. and if you look at this, this walrus, you will see at least as far as the adult evil is concerned, there is some formidable task. number two, it doesn't have a whole lot of places where you can get out. walrus skin is about two or 3 inches thick and difficult to pierce with your teeth. i have tried it. i know. but polar bears can do it. polar bears can kill untold walruses. here's a photograph of an encounter. there are films. i have seen them, polar bears

killing walruses. that walrus is not as big as there. they also feed on whale carcass. but the reason they feed on carrion is not because but they are able to be done kerry because they probably have the best sense of smell of any animal in the world. they can smell, so could you, and rotting whale 20 miles away. but what you can do that they can do is they can smell through 3 feet of ice. then they smashed the ice. not necessary 3-d. but they keep pounding on an tobit breakthrough and they reach in or stick their heads in and grab the ceo. it is very important for them to be able to have a seals to eat them. there is nothing else there for them to eat except occasional well carcass. and the bear is feeding on it. the bear had nothing to do with

the killing of the whale. it is beyond even the strongest polar bear. we will talk a minute about polar bears and zoos because this is the way people began to learn about polar bears. this is actually not confined, and exhibit as it looks. it's just the background of those bars. i wanted to use this photograph just to suggest bears and zoos. but what happens at the turn of the last century, it may end invented the idea of putting animals in zoos in there, and approximation of their own habitat. this is in berlin. he built this tear garden which was a zoo but had what he called these panoramas. this is the arctic panoramic. and it had reindeer in and it had seals and it had a polar bear. had polar bears and it.

the first time that polar bears were ever exhibited in something that looked even remotely like their own habitat as opposed to a cage. i show you this photograph because it is a representative of what was my most life-threatening expedition. i went by subway from my apartment to the central park zoo, and that's were i took this photograph. this is a bear called goss and the central park zoo. he is, as you can tell, rather happy. he has this rather nice swimming pool, and this is also the same there. he has a girlfriend there called ida. some of you may remember that gas, or the polar bear at the central park zoo would swim around in circles that everyone was working was losing his mind. they brought him a girlfriend and cured him right up. what has happened to me is

fascinating, and that is that polar bears at the same time that they are seen as threatening by some people, anyway, threatening arctic predatory, also are probably the cutest animals on earth. and this creates a bit of a conflict and how you're supposed to think about polar bears. this is the first bear cub about which a country went crazy. the bear cub was born in the london zoo in 1954, and the bear was called broom is. little baby bear was called broom is. broom is made the whole country of england insein. everybody in england wanted to go see broomus, the little baby bear at the london zoo. i told you i would show you what little baby bear sluglike. this is a zoo. this happens to be stripped are but baby polar bears are about the size of a rabbit when they are more.

they stay in the den and a nurse for three or four months before they are large enough to come out. this is again the mother brings her cut out. but what happens sometimes in these zoos is that the mother for reasons that we don't quite understand, the mother will abandon the cut. this is an abandoned cub in denver. the denver zoo had to polar bears that were abandoned by their mother in the zoo. they were born in the zoo and then they were left on the ice by the mother. turned around and went back in the den they built for her. so they went in and rescued the bears, and they raise them by hand. they bottle-fed but there's. the bears were called klondike and so. and the same thing happened in denver. everybody went crazy over these two baby bear comes. they made a film about a. they sold every conceivable kind

of stuff to bear. and those who made a fortune on klondike and snow. after a while these adorable little cubs grow up. this is klondike. klondike now in a zoo in san diego. and not quite as cute as he was before. but this sort of thing keeps happening. and it's fairly obvious why it keeps happening. and this is a real polar bear. almost, i don't want to get into this, but i would defy you and you would say a puppy and a baby pan or something, but this is right up there with the cutest animal on earth. this is what they look like. and when people get really carried away, that's the same bear by the way as the one you just saw, when people get really carried away, the whole country of germany went insane over a bear called knute. and they put him on the cover of vanity fair. this particular photograph was taken by the famous celebrity

photographer annie leibowitz for the cover of vanity fair, in german as you can tell. but not to be outdone, the american vanity fair put and andy leibowitz -- not a single photograph, but a pair on the cover. this is leonardo dicaprio. this is knute again, but what actually happened is that annie leibowitz over to your left, taking a picture. but what they did was they photographed leonhard on an ice flow in iceland, and then she again, any, combined the two pictures for that vanity fair cover. and admitted it. i thought that was quite wonderful that they would. because obviously, it would have been rather difficult if this happened on this eissler. so they staged it and admitted. this is knute now. and i've seen another photograph

of knute which has a much dirtier than this. there's no particular reason why he is not white except maybe he is not easy to base any more. i'm sort. i didn't want to go that way. what's happening here? heading the wrong way for some reason. hang on. okay. we're going to take a little trip to churchill, manitoba, which i've identified by a star there, which is the place in -- almost the only place in a world where you can see polar bears more polar bears more or less regularly. i have been there a couple of times. i flew there last year. prior to that i went on a train from winnipeg, which is a nice long utterly boring train ride. anyway, that's where churchill is. when you get to churchill, you can check into a hotel and you go and get on -- in a buggy and

you go out on the tundra. and you see the bills i can't bears. this is a mother and two cups. you stay in the tundra buggy, if you can. there's a lot of mythology about what happens to the bears or the people in churchill if they are in these tundra buggies because they are afraid of bears will begin. the bears are just curious. but what it is is a marvelous opportunity for polar bear photography. annexes the photographs were all taken in churchill. you can see the bears huddled in the snow there. whenever you see bears, pictures of bears with brush in the background, they are taking in churchill because george was fairly far south for polar bears. these are all, again, churchill photographs. now these are it turns out all males. what happens in churchill is this. they wait. the bears weight or hudson bay

to freeze, and when it gets strong enough, the ice is strong enough for them to walk on, they leave churchill and they go out on the ice and they go hunting and begin wandering around, until the ice starts to melt and then they returned to the land on churchill. and they wait for the ice to freeze again. the bears in churchill are in trouble. because the ice is freezing, hudson bay is freezing later and later. that means it takes them longer to find enough food, if they can't find enough food that females can't stand up and feed their cups. so the melting ice has a direct affect, in fact, on all polar bears as we have seen. but mostly, directly on the bears in churchill because you can watch this happening. this is a shot of a polar bear swimming taken the last time i was in churchill. and also, i took this shot the last time i was in churchill.

i was on another bus. we were coming from the airport, and i was the lecture on this trip. and my job, eventually, was going to be when we got into the ice and were crossing the hudson bay and going into a bit. my job, there's a bear over there and i was going to tell them about bears, cubs, polar ice cubs and that kind of thing. but certainly not before we got to the ice. so we get on a bus and i stand up in the front of the bus, more or less the way i am standing up in front of this buzz, and i say well, i introduced was a. i tell them who i was and why we were there. i said don't expect to see any polar bears now. immediately, somebody from the side of the bus shouts polar bear. and this bear was meandering along the roadway didn't belong. but it is an interesting shot i think because what it is is a very rare image of a white bear in green grass.

you don't see that very often. . .

>> it means that we will be losing an entire ecosystem. not just losing polar bears and whales and wolves, but losing an entire ecosystem. it's as if you went to sleep tonight, and when you woke up the news -- if you could fit it in between the tiger woods story -- the news would say, australia is gone. this is an ecosystem that effects the entire planet and effects the weather in the entire planet, on the entire planet. so when this goes -- it's not even a question of if, but when it goes, things will change. they will not change for the better, they will change for the worse. so what does that mean for human beings? it means we may not be able to stop this, we may go to copenhagen, and we say say let's vote for this or let's vote to vote for this at some other time, let's cap emissions, see if we can slow this down, but the chances are we won't.

the chances are they won't be coming out of copenhagen a massive intention to stop global warming. there'll be a lot of talking about it, but it's not going to happen easily, it's not going to happen quickly. so what we're looking at here is not necessarily the the elimination of the human race immediately, but we're sure looking at the elimination of the polar bear. this is the cover of "newsweek". the polar bear got itself, with a lot of effort on the part of the bears and, by the way, a lot of objections from sarah palin, got itself listed as an endangered species which means you cannot shoot them in the united states. people can shoot them in canada and in russia and greenland, and you can't shoot them in america. that's what the -- you can't even bring in carcasses or souvenirs of the polar bear that you shot somewhere else. you can't bring them into the united states.

now i'm going to show you a little story. i met somebody in the audience know who was on this very trip that i'm about to tell you about. we were on the ship in the background, a russian ice breaker, and those of you who saw there was a russian ice breaker stranded in the arctic, in the antarctic, i'm sorry, a couple of weeks ago was the sister ship of this one. and it looks very much like this, like a block of flats on a discharge as somebody said. it's not a particularly graceful ship, and we were all -- we live inside the cabins up on the upper deck here. it was kind of neat. and it had a huge, marvelous bridge from which we could see anything. the point of this trip, i was one of the leaders, we were going to the north pole. when you travel in this part of the world and you see bears off in the distance, as i said, it's usually over there you see that white thing moving? that's the bear. well, this is somewhat closer. we had a bear that came this

close to the ship, and it was right alongside the ship, and we were on the rail of the ship shooting. this'll give you an good how long ago -- idea how long ago it was, we were shooting rolls of film of this bear. i shot the photograph of this bear. i was looking straight down at a bear from a height of at least 25 feet. this is a big ship. but anyway, i got this magical photograph, then the bear turned around and started walking away. it's the same bear, by the say. this is, for those of you who would like to look what the north pole looks like, this is it. there is no pole, we brought one, and when we got to 90 north, everybody stood out there with a pole that said 90 north at the north pole. but what's important about this image is not that i'm standing there like a baffoon, but rather what i'm standing on. this is the north pole. it's september 24, 1994, and at

the north pole it's solid ice. it's not solid ice, there was ice about 8 feet thick. and what we actually did, the russian seamen from the ship chopped a hole in the ice, and some foolish people -- of which i was one -- stripped down to their skivvies and jumped into the water at the north pole. they had tied a rope around our waist individually in case we decided to go for a little swim they could pull us in quickly. so we went for a swim at the north pole, but we went under the ice. now, that was 1994. in 2000 this is the same red ice breaker that you saw before leading the ship, and it's a nuclear ice breaker. that's the north pole in 2000. the north pole in 2000 was water. of course, the north pole was always underwater. there's no land there, so there's a point h on the globe where it's about 13,000 feet

deep, but the north pole is, in this case, no ice. same time of year, no ice. and this was one of the first times that anybody had realized that we were losing the immediate north polar icecap. what does this mean to bears? well, it means if there's no ice, the bears have to keep swimming to look for ice for seals. they can't catch them in the water. they don't swim fast enough, and they're not agile enough in the water to catch a swimming seal, so they have to catch them on the ice. and if the ice is disappearing, what the bears do is they go for a swim hoping to find some ice that has some seals on it. this is not a photograph -- i'll tell you right now -- this is not a photograph of a polar bear setting out to its doom. it's a bear swimming to another ice floe, but i'm using it as an indication of bears swimming and

swimming. i'm sure you will see in this photograph which purports to show bears stranded on an ice floe and doomed because of it, but they're not really. it was just a formation of ice that they'd climbed on. but the the ideas of bears constantly swimming was a very important part of al gore's inconvenient truth book and movie because the book had photographs of real bears in it, but the movie had an animation of bears swimming to their doom. in other words, if there's no ice, they keep swimming until they drown. whether they can swim for 60 miles or 100 miles, they can't swim forever, so they swim until they drown presumably. so this is the photograph that i wanted and did, in fact, put on the cover of the book. i didn't take it, and i found it in an alaska stock photo organization. but it seemed to me to be

indicative of the fate of the polar bear. this is, obviously, taken from some sort of a veses -- vessel. the bear is swimming, the bear looks somewhat disturbed at being chased by a boat of some sort. and the bear is in the water. and so from this photograph i essentially designed a jacket. this is not the jacket of the book. this was my design. but you can see that i wanted to call it the book, the polar bear and global warming, but my editors -- always wiser than i about things like this -- decided that this probably wouldn't, it would probably scare people off. it would sound too pedantic, it would sound too threatening to think they were going to read a lot of graphs and things about the disappearing icecap. so while the book doesn't have very many graphs in it, it has a whole lot about the disappearing

icecap. and in recent years, the book was finished about a year ago, and it takes that long to put something like this together, but in recent years nothing has changed all that much. nothing has gotten better for the bear or for the planet for that matter. so as mark said, it happened not because i intended it this way, but it happened to be a particularly timely subject. and i'm really happy -- happy probably isn't the right word -- i'm relieved to know that the book came out when it was necessary. because it has a lot in it about what's happening to the bears as well as all the cute photographs of kanoot and the rest of the stars of "vanity fair" and what not. but it is the story of the bear as representative of what's happening in the world today and also the bear itself so we can

understand by focusing on an animal that we know instead of some large image of i don't know anything about the polar icecap. and besides, what does that have to do with me? well, it has a lot to do with you, but the bear itself is the example of this. i found this in a most, a most surprising place. i'd picked up a kurt vonnegut book about a year ago, and i found this quote from kurt vonnegut. i'll read it to you, but i know you can read it. even as i speak, the very last polar bear may be dying of hunger on account of climate change, on account of us. and i will sure miss the polar bears. their babies are so warm and cuddly and trusting, just like ours. thank you. [applause]

there's going to be a microphone passed to the questioner because they want to be able to hear you on booktv. >> richard, is the decline of the ice cover in antarctica matching the arctic, or are they at different rates? >> now for the first time i don't have to repeat the question. the rate is approximately the same, but the terrain is -- not terrain, but it is different because antarctica's a continent. it has an ice sheet that covers the entire continent virtually whereas the arctic is an b ocean surrounded by land. there are glaciers in the arctic, in greenland, in iceland, there are glaciers in

canada, in alaska, these glaciers are melting. the glaciers in the antarctic are also melting. both places are suffering great ice losses as we speak, and ice losses that are not going to be reparable. >> hi, richard. it said that when it's very hot out, you should wear white clothes, and when it's very cold, you should wear black because the white -- the black absorbs the sun. so why is the polar bear white? you would think he'd be black to be warmer. >> well, doctor, let me recommend the berbers of the sahara desert to you and recommend to you that they wear, of all things, black. it absorbs heat, but it doesn't

transmit the heat. polar bears have a white coat not necessarily to keep them any warmer than the brown bear's coat, but they have a white coat, and again, b this gives a certain determinism to evolution which doesn't really exist. they didn't develop a white coat so that they could help sneak up on seals, but it helps. it helps a lot if you are a white animal in a white environment. it doesn't enable you to stand out so much from your prey. so it isn't so much to keep them warm or cold, it's to allow them to blend into the environment. >> how much time do we have with the ice the way it's going? how much -- [inaudible] >> that's an interesting question. how much longer do the polar bears actually have? the ice is scheduled, and this is a variable certainly, but they're looking at a century of

the polar icecap under the present conditions. in a century, the polar icecap will be gone. will that mean all the polar bears are gone? probably not. what will happen is some of the polar bears will conceivably adapt to a different region to live in. they will not turn back into brown bears. evolution does not work backwards. you cannot reacquire traits that you've lost. you being a polar bear in this case or any other animal. it doesn't happen that way. you can't turn polar bears back into brown bears. they might exist in a different fashion, they will not be the polar bears that we know. and this, of course, is not an unusual event in evolutionary history. a lot of things disappear and become modified or become modified and then disappear, and other creatures replace them. we will lose polar bears as we

know them, we can cannot tell whether they will adapt and become something else. animals that don't adapt to a changing -- this is one of the determinants of extinction. animals that do not adapt to a changing environment become extinct, and they've been doing that for millions of years, it's not a surprise. so if the polar bear fails to adapt and the environment is certainly changing, we will lose the polar bears. and as i say, a century seems to be the outside limit of the polar icecap at the moment. >> do you know how much -- do you know how much ice there is left? >> how much ice? in terms of a percentage or in term thes of cubic footage? >> percentage. >> there's probably something on the -- it changes from year to year because what happens with polar ice is it melts, and then it freezes again.

there is something on the order of 60% of the polar icecap left. and it isn't -- 2007 was the worst year in history for the polar icecap. 2008 was a little better. you can't use that to say, ha, ha, global warming isn't really happening because there was more ice in -- 2009 was, also, a really bad year. so i think we're down to somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% and declining. >> hi. besides, you know, contacting our politicians and donating money to certain causes, what advice can you give to the people who will live past this time to do something here and now? >> the only advice i can give you, i'd like to be able to tell you to send money to somebody and fund the national resources dependence council and other

groups, all these people are fighting for the preservation of animals and habitats of all kinds. the best advice i think i can give you is to accept the concept that things change, that we will lose rain forests and icecaps and coral reefs, we're losing them now. the fact is that a lot of these areas, rain forests, coral reefs, certainly polar icecaps, don't have a lot of people. now, the polar icecaps and, for that matter, the rain forests and coral reefs don't have people on them, but the others have indigenous people who live there. they are in trouble as well. the people who depend on the rain forest or the ice for their food are also in trouble. so the advice, and it isn't very heartening and i recognize that, the advice is to understand that things change. things will always change. we are in an enormous period of flux now, and to accept the

concept of evolutionary modification is the best advice i can give you. we cannot hold everything in the place we would like to keep it. it just never was possible and never will be possible. there are some animals that are threatened and endangered, and people work round the clock trying to save things like whooping cranes and california condors, and they did, in fact, save the bison which was down -- there were 100 bison left in 1904, and now you hear about people raising them for beef and shooting them in yellowstone, doing whatever they're doing. but they were rescued. now, things have certainly changed for the pieson. there -- bison. there used to be millions of them trampling the great plains. then they were down to 100, and now they're on reserves. so they have changed. what will happen is the polar bear will change, all these creatures will change. the advice i give you is to

understand the concept of change. we will lose some things, we've lost things in our own lifetime. we will lose more, and i'm sorry that that's the message here, but it is heartening only in that you begin to understand the complexity of the world you live in. it's not just us and the subways here, it's a lot more than that. everything that happens, for whom the bell tolls turns out to be a very, very useful way to look at life. >> [inaudible] >> how many polar bears are left right now? >> say it again? >> how many polar bears are left right now? >> how many are left? about 22,000. >> [inaudible] >> i hate to ask a second question, but the person next to me wouldn't ask it for me. >> she's bashful, is she? >> right. why churchill? >> they don't eat anything there. i was going to make a silly

remark, and i won't. churchill because it's a good place to wait, if you're a polar bear, it's a good place to wait for the ice to freeze. they eat nothing in churchill. they sometimes get the bar gang, they don't -- garbage, they don't eat the people, but it's a convenient place for bears that hunt on hudson bay. hudson bay is a very, very large occasionally frozen area, and the bears have been there from time immemorial or however long bears have been around, and they found it a nice place to wait. it's, unfortunately, also a nice place -- or fortunately -- a nice place for people to look at polar bears. but there's no explanation for why there and why not toronto or why not -- it's just because that's where the bears ended up. they like it there. >> mark has the last question. >> richard, a long time ago people discovered antarctica, and people have been exploring

there, and somehow we all kind of decided that nobody would own antarctica. you mention in your book that, of course, the same sort of thing happened, planting an american flag on the moon didn't give the united states ownership of the moon. what is strategically different about b the arctic polar regions that you've got russia planting a flag on the bottom of the sea and claiming it's theirs, canada may actually be looking forward to having an open northwest passage that makes the panama canal redundant. is there something historically that's happened there that puts this under greater lack of cooperation amongst nations? >> in the arctic? >> yes. >> i guess it's just simple chawf anymore. everybody wants their piece of the pie, and it turns out to be not unlike a pie the way it's actually divided. if you have a seacoast on the arctic ocean, you have a claim

under the law, you have a claim to certain treasures of that ocean. they belong to you. and what the russians did was they planted a flag at the north pole claiming that the ridge ran up to the north pole and, therefore, russia ran up to the north pole and, therefore, all that underwater real estate belonged to them. that's being contested, and the argument against it was just planting a flag on the moon doesn't mean that we own the moon, although i suspect there are people who would like to argue that we do. it is, it is very contentious simply because countries are always contentious. and by the way, the antarctic was declared many, many years ago declared off limits for any kind of development. there's now a proposal being put forth suggesting that maybe that wasn't such a good idea, maybe we ought to allow mineral drilling in the antarctic. and there probably is a lot of stuff to be found in the

antarctic, so people -- nations get greedy. and in the process of getting greedy, excuse me, in the process of getting greedy they are trampling not only the rights of the people who happen to live there, but the animals who happen to live there. and as i say, they are probably the last consideration of politicians, certainly they're the last consideration of politicians who represent oil companies. there's a lot of oil up there. there's a lot of oil up there, and nobody's going to let something silly like a polar bear stand in the way of drilling for it. ..

>> our approach is independent publishing teams that are created and on for no real, are focusing on books that work for specific needs and we provide a platform for them to succeed. >> what are some of the groups underneath persius? >> we have a publishing agreement with the weinstein company for publishing books.

we have an arrangement with the daily brown company. we are doing a book called attack of the wingnut. it is undermining america or hijacking america. so we run a full, big range of publishers. civic and you have public affairs, basic books. >> that's right. >> what's your influence? how do you interact with it? >> the thing that's most exciting is to get really involved in the books themselves. anyone in this business gets excited about that. so right now for example i'm reading a history book which is one of our publishers. is called the last founding father. it's about james monroe, who the author says was the greatest president of the united states, after george washington. and makes the argument to support a. that's the kind of book i really love to thank mike teeth into and get excited about.

but in my role on dealing with things that go beyond the individual book. so it's dealing with the digital revolution, how that's going to affect publishing, or the big booksellers. >> digital revolution. how is it affecting your business? i don't that's a four hour answer, but give us 30 seconds. >> writes. i think it's very exciting because basically what it's doing is lowering the barriers to marketing. so it makes it easier to connect consumers, readers with a publisher. to us it's a very exciting development. >> david steinberger is the present of the perseus you can watch the last founding father at booktv.org. >> next the skeptical environmental as guide to global warming. bjorn lomborg argues that global warming is a problem but not a catastrophe. the author said there is to the issue. from the seattle town hall, this

is about an hour and 15 minutes. >> thank you very much. it's a pleasure to be here, and a pleasure to be especially in seattle and give you this topic i should warn you i'm used to walking around. apparently we're stuck with with this microphone so you will see me fidgeting around. yes, it is important and that's why i called this "cool it." it is important to cool our conversation to have a rational conversation about how things with global warming. but i don't want to call our passion. i want to direct our passion so we weren't about the right things and we weren't about them in the right manner. i want us to start thinking about smartly how can we deal with the world's major problems, including climate change. this is the topic today. but to give you a sense of where i'm going, i don't want you to cool your passion. i want to make sure we direct our passion in the right way. basically, if i were to summarize what i try to say in

just one line, if you are bound on falling asleep. at least they awake through this one. this is really what i think summarizes the points i tried to make. it is to say to thank. first of all, we need to get a sense of proportion. if we wildly overestimate -- if we wild underestimate issues were unlikely to make a judgment. that's important. at the end of the day we have to make priorty. lots of problems in the world, not enough money. we don't fix all good things and therefore we have to have a conversation about what should we do first. where can we do an absolute enormous amount of good and where can we do a little good. this is really just the idea of saying if we have a conversation that based on very scary scenarios and very one-sided arguments, it's unlikely that we will make new judgments that we will make good priorty. because at the end of the day,

if someone comes up to and put the gun to your head and says give me your money, you don't than around and think about other uses of your money. you just hand over your money. we should have begun to our heads. we should have the best information available to make the judgment. that's what i'd like to talk about today. that's what i'd like to try to present to you, especially on climate change. my point here is to make for very simple points. on global warming. global warming is a huge issue but i think in many ways we can condense it to just those four points. that's of course the discussion i think everybody's involved in an climate change debate as well. this is where i give testimony to congress. and i think al gore is just as much into talking about how should we deal with the issues. and of course i disagree with some points on al gore but we'll get back to that. the main point is how should we

deal with climate change. the first point i'm going to make is global warming is real and it is man-made. stop. let's get that on the table. i think it is an incontrovertible. i don't think we can have a conversation, it's a natural variation. its left wing hoax or something. no, no. global warming is real but it is man-made and we need to get to that point. we need to stop having this conversation about it is all a hoax. it is happening. climate change is real, and we should thank al gore for having put it on the agenda. i think that's perhaps the most relevant for having put the agenda so clergy american people. and gotten away from the hoax point to saying yes this is a real problem. i would argue that our best information comes in general from the un climate panel. this is by no means an unproblematic institution. i just got a new computer so

apparently it is acting up a little bit. but basically the best information does come from the panel. but this doesn't mean this is an unproblematic source of information. it's the best we have and one of the best institutions that we have tried to organize to accomplish andamans amount of massive amount of information of this very complicated subject. a likely temperature rise that we're going to seek to give you a sample, this is a medium scenario for the year 2100. it is 4.7 degrees fahrenheit. this is the a1gp scenario for the un climate panel. there's a range and again, i'm one of the points i tried to make the range in the lower end, lower than what we are seeing here than we expect us to do less if it's going to be high, then we should do more. but it's still in the range of that topic and that's why i'm

going because it gives a much better and easy way to have a conversation about what we should do. the total cost of global warming is not trivial. it's estimated around 15 -- sorry, $16 trillion. that's a huge amount of money. let's make sure we get this right. on the other hand, we also need to get a sense of proportion. this is by no means the all the fine issue of the 21st century. the 21st century does not work is about $3 quadrillion. so global warming is about half a percentage point of the problem of climate change. it's a problem but it is not the end of the world. we will get back to that. so what i think we need to do is say yes this is happening. it is a serious problem. it is one of the problems will have in the 21st century. we also need to start having a conversation about how do we deal with this smartly. how do we do this in the best possible way. yes, global warming is happening

and is man-made. the second point is the consequences are exaggerated and i would argue that leads to bad judgment. that is important. we over what about some of these issues of not having the correct assessment of the problem of the problem. and there again we also have to say yes, al gore has gotten it away. it's all a hoax but perhaps too much to the point of saying all my gosh, it's unmitigated catastrophe. it is not a hoax. it is not a catastrophe. it is a problem. one of the main problems will have to fix in the 21st century. let me just give you, this is one of the things outdoors said. he was in many ways were the most clear examples we have in the western world. you read is everywhere in papers and everywhere else. the planetary emergency as he called and he quotes, this is from the film, the pr for the

film. we have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that can this band are anti-planet into a tailspin, beyond anything we have ever experienced. i think most of us have recognized this from the newspapers that we read. the experiences we have. this a sort of become standard language of very serious and drastic consequences that we're likely to see from climate change. and i would like to start having a conversation about does is actually reflect what we know. let's try to take for central issues. let's try to look at some of these claims that typically, i would be more than happy to take questions later on. let's get a sense of a proportion. let's take a look at the sea level rise, hurricane and malaya and get a sense also, is a crack in the sense of how big this problem is what we are being presented with. and also is cutting carbon

emissions the likely best answer to those problems? let's try and take a look at a high mortality with the. the idea that we're going to see more heat waves as temperature rises on the planet. that's absolutely true. we will see more people dying of heat waves. and we should realize that and we should very clearly point that out. in the u.k. estimate by 2016 we will see about more heat deaths each year. we need to know that. but we also need to point out as temperatures rise we will see fewer cold ways. and that is too important point. more people die from cold than die from heat and most countries around the world. so what we're likely to see is more people of bird deaths from cold that extra deaths from heat. at one point. the second point being that global warming has a tendency to increase low temperatures more than it increases high temperatures. that is, that we see a reduction

in the distribution of temperature and increases over the coming century. so as temperatures increase in the u.k., it's also estimate that by 2050 we will see about 20000 fewer cold gas. i would argue that we are not likely to make good judgments if we only hear that 2000 more people are going to die, that we don't hear that 20000 fewer people are going to die in the same time. it's unlikely we have the right piece of information. actually if you look at this on a global level, this is the first time the panel did not do this but this is the first time the public, the first study indicated what is the actual outcome if you look at this for the entire globe. it turns out for the vast number global cold of death outwait after he gets. we are talking not a trivial number and estimate is about 1.4 million fewer deaths by 2050.

it's important to say if we just had this piece of information, the indication would be to say cool, we should go get some more global warming. that's not what i'm saying. i'm not saying that global warming in general is good for us. i'm saying we need to have an understanding global warming is likely be good and bad but overall global warming will be more bad that it will be good. however, this particular instance exactly the other way around. and we need to be open to understand that actually do something about global warming it means that will reduce the number of extra deaths but we will see more cold just not avoid and we need to be honest about that. we need to come out and say this is reality, not just give biased information about what's going to happen. and that of course also points us in the direction, saying what shall we do about it. if we ask you want to the people, most people talk about the biggest heat wave that we've seen was that he way in august 2003 in europe.