anyway. that is going on. if they hear for the range. he will sign your book twice. thank you for coming. [applause]. nextep from the virginia festival of the book. an author discussion on the environment. good afternoon. how are you. i am a recovering science journalist. what i think it's is good to be a wonderful session of the

book. sponsored by the virginia humanities. on introducing our distinguished authors i wanted to ask you please silence your cell phones. i would also like to think all the thank all the sponsors of the festival including in our particular case. this session is going to be streamed live on charlottesville tv ten local television. and also on the facebook page. it will also be recorded later for broadcast on c-span. when we get to the questions part. your questions can be heard by the audiences outside of this home. so, the session and the festival as a whole is free to all of us. if you enjoy today's session. and there are two ways in which you can help the organizers of the festival. one is to fill out a negotiation form.

and also online. you can also go online and make a contribution to the festival as i say it's definitely not free to produce. in addition books will be available as you can see here on the table. i will leave plenty of time for us. and to meet them and talk to them face-to-face. today's session is something that is a real treat for me. i hope it will be for all of you. it's called forecasng the environment. and i think an equally good title might be the different ways that we think about it. just as much as it is about specific forecasts of the environment. we had two wonderful new books.

the first is called whether an illustrated history. by andrew what can. a very distinguished science writer who has been covering the environments in sustainability. in the resources for almost 30 years now. and he has restarted with much of that times. he is recently just taken up an exciting new position at the national geographic society. to improve the coverage of the environment. and maybe he will tell us a little bit more about that. the new book is called the wizard in the profit. it's a story. it's framed around two very interesting influential scientist.

they had have they've have a huge effect. about that environment. we are very lucky to have these two superb science writers with us. and let me tell you a little bit about how this session will go. since this is after all a festival of the book. i thought it would be appropriate to have them and read a brief passage no more than three to five minutes from his book. get a little bit of his voice in our ears. after that i will ask them some questions to get the ball rolling. by the time they have that part of the program. i will leave plenty of time.

in my first question. why don't you pick a passage first and read some from your book. >> it is a quirky thing. it is the relationship. it is a lot book. we do a book on weather. it's like history of the knowledge. it is amazing the climate change is in there. as we know it now. there are several moments going back to the 1800s. but when i was researching the book i want to make sure i wasn't the bio storage. the knowledge of climate and

weather. it turns out that the oldest reference to climate change in the first representation inwards that the client we have around us can change fundamentally kind of like a bennett franklin. and it was the same in china. in 1088. so he wrote this memoir called dream pool essays. as a regional politician he had been in a village where a riverbank have collapsed. and there was fossilized bamboo there. reflecting on this a couple years later. he said this. under the ground forest of the abuse shoots. with their roots and trunks all complete. and all turned to stone. don't bamboos do not grow in

the province perhaps in very ancient times the claimant was different so that the place was low, damp and gloomy. and it goes on. those kinds of observations excite me so much to have an open mind we see something in nature and you say wow. it's agent. at the capacity for the open mind. and then you go back to history. everyone else before that. it was very turbulent system. there is a fundamental thing. now fast-forward to 1965. the president climate warming. .. ..

that relates to climate, there's the report about it and i won't go through the whole thing. he said something really interesting about what we need to do with our policies. he said, he warned that the environmental impacts of pollution, this was all kinds of solutions at that time were no longer local and would have cumulative consequences requiring shift to proactive policies, something we rarely do and we respond to disasters and then do something, we don't get ahead of the curve, the longer we wait to act, a report to congress, the greater the dangers and larger the problem. large scale of pollution has no respect to political boundaries and effect extend far beyond those who cause it and he said, where is his key line. in the clean air act has been designed even in the 60's, should be improved to permit the

secretary of health education welfare to investigate pollution problems before pollution happens rather than having to wait until the damage occurs as is now the case. and again, a section on climate change from greenhouse gases as well. i sure wish we could figure out a way to have proactive policies, i have been writing about this in every context, after the fact aspect of human behavior is a troubling thing so we will stop there. >> no, thank you very much. in fact, talking about your long history as reporter in the area, we will come back to ask you how your views have changed over that time. >> sure. >> charles, let's hear his book. >> talks about two guys and maybe john will ask you about and i can tell you about, implications of ideas and how they might apply to different environmental and political problems and one of them, a section that talks about energy and how they might apply and this is the very opening

discussion of energy which gives you some idea of the tone of the whole enterprise. first derricks and then broths and brothels. six years later in january 1865, more oil, a lot more oil was found where i was standing. 8 miles away in the almost uninhabitable slopes, within weeks new wells were being dug and spilled petroleum. wagons jolted one after another in muddy tracks out of time, one could be stuck for days. piled the barrels into rafts and broke the dam and profitable business of crude.

oil barrels, oil roads and in the new oil city, population 15,000, conjured out of nothing, first petroleum boom town, no legal existence or official name or anything but petroleum, so much petroleum, every horizontal service with oily mud mixed with snow and had no potholes. caught fired and were rebuild. oil seeped do ordinary fire wells and firefighters dumping water into one of pit holes many fires instead feeding, an inventor developed a wheel that scooped up mud while demonstrating invention at a fire, creator fell into the machine and thrown into the blaze. [laughter] >> in august 1865, seven months

after pit hole strike, more than 300 derricks were operated. people bought and sold drilling lands waiting bricks of cash and the atmosphere with smoke and ash and human beings in chase of money. so many sex workers. that same month a big oil stop flowing, others followed. oil was running out. brothel owners sensitive to customer moves, other left perceptive businessmen follow later. by the spring of 1866 scores of buildings stood empty. pit holes was a year old but already breakdown. 281 people lived there. eight years later, somebody bought the entire town for 4.35. [laughter] >> today not one of pit hole's original structures remains. passed vacant land that once was real estate.

not another soul was in sight. hand signs of vanished buildings, small museum with regular hours stood top of the hill, age of petroleum left. surely pit holes could not imagine this as future, most of them anyway, walking within the city's ruins i find it hard not to wonder whether industrial age was simply not pit hole and much of it doomed when the fuel supply was consumed. stuck in my briefcase as i report, international agencies, paper blizzard of charts and grafts predicting how much energy, still more estimates clogged hard drive of my computer, 37 rise between 2013 and 2035, 37% rise, 61% rise between 2050, 100% for 2050. the numbers differ from one

forecast to the next. every single one the demand went up, sometimes fast and sometimes faster, what would happen if the requisite supply fail today appear if instead the world of 10 billion abruptly ran short. the answer easy to picture, i -- had been certain they were creating prosperous long-lasting tomorrow. centuries from now descendants look back. >> thank you. but for after those two readings, let's start with some questions and i think i will start with you, andrew. one of the things that's most interesting to me about the book is its form, it's not, you know, just words, it's a combination of words and pictures and i wanted to talk to you as somebody who has mostly been a writer about the kind of challenge that is you face in putting together that book, i was going to ask you about how you came up with it but you told us, in fact, the idea came to

you from if publisher. i wonder who you faced when you put together a book with unusual format. >> first key element is visual. i have been a blogger at "the new york times" along with news reporting and i got really focused on this new and unlined environment where if words aren't seen by somebody, you know, the front page used to be something everyone would pick up, that's the way it is. and now you have to find readers, active part of writing is engagement and images are a big part of that. in this book, it fit pretty well in the way i think. and pictures are actually worth a thousand words if not more in many instances and as history of understanding climate is full of imagery, sometimes there weren't imageries, the piece on ben franklin, he's in the book twice, he's the only two-time -- i could have done a whole book

of ben franklin's wisdom and climate but there was one in there about the lighting rod which he invented and the modern lighting rod was based on design, another one when i stirveled with -- stumbled with my wife. she's a writer. there was a dust devil, i struggled to find a picture of ben franklin on a horse. i couldn't find the image. to me the idea of the nuggets as opposed to -- there is a narrative spread which is that knowledge is provisional and it's always a learning journey. it's not a thesis. there's so many thesis out there and i spent decades writing them where i create narrative for the

reader to argue with or absorb and in this case what i'm trying to do is build a template where you can have own exploration and come out on the other end, and change in global warming is embedded in the narrative and that felt to me, i'm tired of trying to convince people, there's actually an item in the book on science that emerged about ten years ago showing that it's normal for us to disagree about global warming. >> right. >> absolutely normal. actually rational. >> there's also research suggesting that's very difficult to change people's mind. >> right. why would i want to write another book that says you should be worried about global warming when i know it isn't going to change people? >> i would like to talk to both of you about that issue, what do you think the issue is and how we should change people's minds or shouldn't, let's go the charles, charles, tell us a little about the two scientist that is provide core narrative a

little bit about who they were. >> i should mention how i came across them because i'm pretty sure this is one of those books where you're writing about two dead guys nobody has ever heard of. [laughter] >> in fact, that was my editor's response. [laughter] >> even though one does have a nobel prize. >> what happened was my daughter was born 19 years ago and if any of you are fathers you know there's entire industry dedicate today convincing you that you had something to do with the birth, they make you attend classes, go to hospital, legio, in that you're so supportive, you're breathing with them, counting, you're doing so important and they throw you out because you're irrelevant which the people who did something mother and baby need rest.

i'm dazed and i didn't do anything. i'm in the parking lot in the hospital, it occurred to me that when my daughter is my age there were going to be 10 billion people in the earth. how is that going to work? 10 billion people and a whole lot are middle class and they want all the things we want, you know. they are all going to want tobaronio for 10 billion people, how are they going to do? food, water, energy and so forth. i'm a science writer, when i was talking to researchers, i would say after reading, you know, my daughter was just born, what are we going to do? they would give me ideas, after a few years, i was not thinking about a book or anything. something i was thinking about. i realized all the answers were falling into the two broad categories, over here and over here and these names kept coming up of the two guys, one of them

i slightly heard of, one whom i had never heard of and after a while i realized there's a pattern here, wouldn't bit interesting if somebody wrote a book and took a while for me to think maybe i might be that person. and the two people, a guy named norman, the wizard of my title, he's the main figure which we can call the dream revolution, that's the combination of high-yielding seeds, high intensity fertilizer and irrigation that doubled or tripled in 80's and 70's and reason there's fewer as percentage, fewer people in the world hungry than have ever been before. most of the world can feed itself today which something has never been true in human history and large part has to do with revolution, the green revolution that he started. certainly had downsides, but that was upside. and he has become a symbol, if you like as the way we are going to deal with problems, we will turn on the science machine, technology machine and we will

produce more, you know, we will make more and everybody can win. the main figure the only successful ideology that's come out of 20th century, enormously powerful set of ideas and he puts them together in modern form for the first time and fundamental idea that came up with sort of amateur for the interesting which we talked about later, i will try to compress this, the world has limits, the ecological processes that govern the world and we trangress these, it's all about that. it's all about, you know, staying within the boundaries of the earth and different names. that's the basic fundamental idea of the environment and he was the first guy to put it together and this is a whole

powerful stream and if you think about it, the two ideas are the opposite of each other, one is saying produce more, everybody can win, the other is saying, use less, otherwise everybody will lose. >> by the way, quickly there, lineages here. there's been a journey of handoff, the book has great section of the handoff to paul, some of you probably know. but he was direct inspiration for the book. he listened and how can i put this even more power and wrote this -- and the same all the ideas, if you read rachel carson, he was inspiration, a friend of rachel carson, the sandy county almanac. >> well, thank you. it's good that these things are more than just the ideas of two

individuals, they are as you say lineages and sub cultures within our culture. i want to come back to that in a second. first, i wanted to ask andrew, so you talked a little bit about there might be a thread in this book even though there isn't narrative arc per se. >> sure. >> tell us a little bit about have you your views on it have changed during that time? >> back in 20th century we had -- >> all the way back there? >> the model for environmental problems was that there was something wrong and you fix it, all that oil spewing there and we created epa at a time that the bipartisan agreement was the air was smoggy and richard nixon gave the greenest speech any president has ever given in 1970 state of the union address.

go on youtube, it's fascinating. what i learned in going back to retirement, what i've learned through decades about writing of climate change, my first cover story on global warming was 1988, that what it looked like. [laughter] >> used to exist. >> and i finally tracked this down on ebay just this year, my earliest story on climate was about nuclear winter, that was 1985 and -- and back then, what happened with nuclear winter, the cold war and if we burned enough cities we will chill the planet, there's a chapter in the book and then nuclear autumn, more science dug in, where is your headline, where's your cover, make a picture of cover about nuclear autumn? [laughter] >> i start today learn, i started to learn, more science always make things more simpler, pictures like hurricanes in a warming world, the picture used

to be simple in 1988 article. the ones that form have a higher chance of getting into a stronger category, if you're the mayor of coastal city, what does that say to you? hurricanes matter, right? and they still matter, more science doesn't lead to simpler, simpler resolutions and then the other thing i've learned in doing the book too, charles has dug in history in ways that they are so valuable, the guy who is known pretty well among those who have thought about climate change is first winner of nobel prize, not for his work on co2 but in 1896 he wrote a paper, exton of coal, we will burn it and if you don't look at the cultural context of a time like

our time has a very different perception of that issue, then his time, the turn of the 20th century, in 1906 he wrote a book, he became pretty famous guy, he wrote a book about all of this and this passage that i quote in here tells us something about how the culture of your time can shape how you look at information. he said by the influence of the increasing percentage of crar -- carbonic acid, c02, especially as regards to colder regions of the world, he's from sweden. >> he thought global warming was great. >> much more abundant crops for the present for mankind. that was the function of that moment in history when it was industrial power carbonization is your friend. even in 1958, roger rovelle,

famous scientist quoted often by al gore, he was equivical would have adverse or positive consequences. >> right. >> so, you know, assigns communicator, you -- i think it's really important to keep track of those cultural aspects. >> so in a way what you are saying things have become less clear over time or at least less black and white. >> the other thing you learn is certain questions about global warming that remain deeply uncertain and happen to be the ones that matter most to people. how hot is it going to be, the range has not changed since 1979, before i wrote my story, the range of warming from a doubling of c02 in the atmosphere has been about the same. >> projected rain. >> known unknowable. don't assume that five more years of science -- >> yeah. >> too complicated. it's about cloud particles and

things that are beyond understanding and looks like they are beyond -- kind of like there's a chapter on weather forecasting, a forecast beyond 14 days is basically impossible. new-- numerically impossible. conrad lauren -- no, ed lawrence at mit, '62. i can't call them chapters, nuggets in the book, he demonstrated mathematically if you run a simulation, you make a tinny change in the beginning, the initial factor in a weather forecast, you end up with a fundamental chaotic result, there's no way around it. it's not predictable beyond 14 days, that's the whole basis for chaos theory which is many other systems including financials -- >> do i want to come back at the end to talk about how urgent you think the problems are and what

we should be doing about it and precise the knowledge is, i want to talk about charles mann. you talked about tendency and sub cultures, lineage that is go far beyond the two individuals, could you tell us a little bit more about the two tend -- tendency. i was curious where you think they come from since they're not about two individuals. >> they fundamentally come from values, one of the things that i concluded from is that many environmental disputes, you know, they sort, we discuss them as they are sort of factual as what we are really arguing about is a factual matter, you know, is climate change occurring or, in fact, what they are really fight for our values and people self-perceptions and so it's very typical for what people i call wizards, what they imagine is basically everybody, they see working on the farm, you should

liberate people from drug-free and everybody should live in the city where they could have maximum independence and liberty and maximize human potential and we should all go to college and do this. and trade is, you know, and travel and globalization is like a great thing and then the other folks are much more focused on -- they see these giant cities and the giant institutions necessary to make them work and giant utilities and so forth as fundamentally off human scale, you know, antidemocratic, antihuman, and that we should live, this is the city of thomas jefferson. this is very much a descendant of the dispute between jefferson and hamilton, probably the only city in the united states where you can say that. [laughter] >> you guys notice, right? this is awesome. no, i did this once in, you know, new york city and i mentioned jefferson and hamilton, i said, oh, dear, they have no idea what i'm talking about.

i got this sign of myself, martian, you are my people. [laughter] >> so anyway, this is very much descendant of the kind of disputes, environmental movement, saw nature as a tool box, a set of things that are free for us to use in whatever way we want fit. it has meaning in and of itself that nature has integrity to it and we shouldn't mess it up, all these values are, i think, underneath these disputes and part of the season is they are untractable. >> i agree with that. sort of as a follow-up question, i wanted to ask you, what do you think of the relative strengths of the two world views in our society today? >> it's interestingly. i would say the -- one way to put it would be the wizards are winning politically and the -- >> they have more money or --

>> the wizards, you know, the undeniable power of scientists and technological discoveries and the mobilization like the second world, made it easier to flight along that track and as we were along the track, people adhered to the view benefited from it. i think the money came sort of as a consequence, effect rather than cause, but bubbling underneath is the -- is the profits and they have much more -- i mean, how many movies are there about environmentalists versus virtual industrialists? [laughter] >> right? >> and so the culture -- you have this sort of odd opposition between the political, winners and cultural winners. not clear to me which is stronger. >> interesting, interesting.

to come back to you, we were talking about long trajectory and the way you see things; let's go to a question that will lead to the audiences being able to participate with us, what do you think are the most urgent issues that are facing us in relation to the environment and how serious do you think they are and what do you think are the best options because you talked about your experience with science don't shu -- show that they clarify and a lot of uncertainty, tell us how you come down on the issues today, pressing political issues of the day that have to do with the environment. >> yeah, some of the words in there, political issues and the environment, there's a presumption that politics can solve environmental problems like climate change. the evidence cuts against that when you look whether we had republican or democratic administrations, admissions of co2 have gone up and up. as charles noted, we like energy

and we have a system that evolved over generations to be the system we now have and transitions in energy are really slow. there's another guy most people never heard of, smil, who is the world's kind of sit on the top of the mountain yoda for energy history. there's a book called energy transition. it's a very thick book. bill gates loves it. i love it. >> not really reader friendly. >> can really lead to some fond moments. energy transitions are slow. he says this over and over again. so cleaning up conventional pollution from power plants was simple, cleaning up cfc, spray can stuff that's damaging the ozone layer but tinny part of

economy whether you switch to cfc or that kind of thing. c02 remains large part of global activity and i spend time in parts of the world in rural india where valuing no energy or where it's charcoal that's coming from a nearby forest or where a woman has to spend 3 hours of her energy collecting wood along the rural road in india to heat bath water not let alone cook dinner. it's for convenience and so i don't expect political solution and that doesn't mean i just sit back and -- what was the other thing? capitulator and urgency and patience. roll those two words around your head for a second. urgency and patience, what does that lead to? to me it leads to sustained

engagement. these are generational challenges. it took century or more to get fossilized, it will take time to get decarbonized, that requires innovation, requires some young person to pursue a next generation nuclear power plant, requires another person to be a bill successor and considering what an endowment should include on a university. it's all of that stuff. it involves teachers like my wife, environmental teachers are willing to step back from the political parts of this and study the human journey and finds way forward, national geographic society, the money that would be invested in story telling is on the three things, they have lenses. geographic, you know. it's changing planet, human journey and wildlife and wild places. they are really just one lens.

that's this moment. >> right. >> how do we make a human journey on this changing planet that can be resilient and respectable is the fundamental thing and the answer to this wizard, it's not wizard versus profit, it's wizard plus profit. we we will always have different views of facts. in the book there's a mini chapter on science. any psychologist in the room? anyone? there must be one psychologist. yeah. .. ..

the way we do things. >> i don't think that is quite -- >> simply baldly laying it out won't do because people need to feel listened to but you need - people are learning to perform from conversations, not lectures. >> that is why i became a blogger. >> someone will ask charles his views of the same issue.

one interesting thing about the book, the differences in how these worldviews or the profits you play out. i wonder if you could bring us in capsule form. powder profit approach the area. >> there is amazingly little freshwater in the world. that is all the world's water. that is the world's available freshwater. that is the world's biggest environmental problem. it is not just in faraway places, the entire us west has problems. florida has problems as the water rises and contaminates groundwater, aquifers are being ruined on the east coast, it is

all over the world. there isn't enough public attention to it. it is a huge issue. one of the problems is a split between the people who do pay attention to it and the wizards typically say no problem, just have gigantic desalination plants, take california which has this 5 year drought and is about to head into another one. their plan is for more than 20 enormous multibillion-dollar desalination plants sure to funnel in water and only one large untamed river system in the whole pl. sacramento and a plan, multibillion-dollar tunnel to channel all the water to the south perimeter from the north to the south. all these pose severe

environmental risks. there's an amazing a lot of salt in saltwater and it causes problems and if it goes back into the ocean that causes problems, no one knows what to do with it. draining all the water out of a giant river system leads to many undesirable consequences, big city in the world loses a third of its water to leaks. cape town, south africa nearly ran out of water. it loses 40% of its water to leaks and they still haven't

fixed it. philadelphia loses 40% of its water. >> that doesn't surprise me. >> have a fancy name for having desert plants instead of lawns in southern california. and put a brick in the tank, they don't have to build huge multibillion-dollar, the wizards say you are asking millions of people to change their habits? screw you. you are imposing big government, let's just make more water. there is a fight, each suing each other and nothing gets done and that is playing out all over the world. >> it comes down to values, how we think people ought to live. thank you very much. i promised there would be lots of time to ask questions of these two distinguished science

writers. i am in sure you have loads of questions after the introduction. we need to get your voice into it, please raise your hands and i will call on you and wait for the microphone to be brought to you to ask your question. in the back row. >> this is very fascinating. i see a paradox i would like you to try to resolve which is you said it is about values and science. you said it is a fact that it is values versus science. when you talk about the conflict too, i am a realist. it seems to me that to make decisions that will actually allow us to flourish we have to know the level of gas, what we do know, social science is also

a science, just knowledge. how do we go about getting not just, we understand this, but what doesn't work is someone who has a real doctrine, strict religious person, strict communist, strict libertarian but if someone is willing, everything is a matter of fact to solve the problem, how do you deal with that issue? even in politics? >> charles said before i said my solution was blogging, knowing who you are talking with and finding areas of common grounds. i am a middle child. biologically. i have always been trying to figure out ways to get people who diverge wildly on things to find something going forward and it is always there.

it is too long a story. there was a journalist for cnn in 2015 who went to a county in oklahoma, sociologists have done surveys, this is the most skeptical county in america on global warming, the oil patch. it is on youtube, oklahoma, client -- climb and hunter, and it was because it starts out when talking about climate, only god controls the environment and woman says i hear al gore's name is a cuss word, okay, this is great. the guy who says god controls the environment who owns an oil company says we have solar panels on half our roofs and want to do the whole thing because i want to get off the

grid entirely. i -- my jaw dropped. it is completely explicable. he is libertarian, doesn't want to be beholden to a utility. if he can do it himself, he doesn't want to be beholden to hillary clinton either. if you went into that town, you need to be worried about global warming as i am and if you are not you are denier, you completely miss there are these powerful allies on that case renewable energy, who might have a completely different reason for not pursuing it but by starting an assumption, and unscientific assumption that you need to convince the whole world that global warming is a crisis, you not only miss people like him but alienate them. >> i apologize, i mentioned in another book, my college

philosopher, a philosophy professor, he would send me books, you got to read this. a number had big impacts, they can't write, they can think. what the government -- when you have a real conversation with somebody, that is the only time you can change people's minds. how do people approach a real conversation? they don't listen for your arguments. does this person directly someplace i want to go? people want to know what values we share. a huge impact to think about, the whole goal is to say i am not trying to drag you someplace you don't want to go. for some people who are opposed to climate change is because they think there is a hidden

agenda and the stuff is nonsense and what they are trying to do is drag me someplace i don't want to go and it is all too often true. there is to give an example a book by a woman named naomi klein who says capitalism is the ultimate cause. they see this as an attempt to impose socialism on the. i hate socialism, therefore this is a pretext to listen to it and this was exactly the wrong way to convince people, there is a hidden agenda, she hates capitalism and don't want to impose socialism. what i want to do is lay it out in a way that says as much as possible, somewhere more about this, i'm not trying to tell

you what to do. >> we are a rare species appear. >> we are under the illusion. >> skeptics, a good species. >> all three of you are communicators. i wonder if social media is the communications tool. i am curious how that phenomena in is impacting this conversation for good or bad. >> there is a tremendous phenomena in on twitter that most social media is familiar with, for people to let loose and blurred stuff incautiously. like hit, send. that is almost always a

mistake. 140 hastily chosen characters to say what you think and you are possessed by emotion at the time and it is easy for people to mistake you. these are valuable tools. i'm careful about what i post. i rarely post something. i use a tool that i usually post them two or 20 days later so i can say do i want to put this out? i try to self edit. social media is almost antithetical to self editing. >> it is a new terrain. i got excited about it. the concept of in the early 20 tube century, a theologian and

russian geochemist came up with, we are creating a planet of the mind as our technology and connectedness advance and i thought the newest sphere, this is something to increase empathy so people can care as they do, the drowned refugee children you never would have known about. my son knows more, at 10 years old he knew more about south sudan than vietnam. there is the upside potential of connectedness but we have seen the downside, it can be co-opted as has happened in various ways. my sense, i created a course called blogging a better planet where student had to create a blog with a function of making

the world a better place and it requires testing and at the local level, more facebooky people man snapchat people. my son likes snapchat but on facebook the upside is there, magically created a website where - and find out what it was. there is a great potential just like anything else. and the downside is will. these horrible videos, and

disenchanted wackos to organize. not everyone should be involved but it is a crucial part of writing. everyone used to read the new york times book review and many still do and the way you find out is increasingly through these channels and the last thing relates to the psychology, the psychological issues. when you do that recognize you are in a bubble. and you are in a cell membrane in the world outside that is many colors and stuff that gets through your filters, and the capacity once a day to poke your head - you might not have thought about.

that is the cultural reality, that is the way it is, are long gone. you got to do the work to find out the way it is. >> any other questions? the gentleman over here. >> i think the world is under the impression this is a slow and inexorable change, this climate happening is going slowly. i know there is evidence, national geographic, reindeer herding, having in their tundra environment, russia and siberia, having methane explosions coming up from the ground and this same basic dynamic is happening in alaska where permafrost is melting.

has there been research done to quantify what the methane quantity might be, the greenhouse gas that the acceleration of warming in the northern hemisphere would strike me, i look at it as a near-term problem, not a long-term problem. >> do you live right here in the area? there is a guy named howard schapiro i spent time with at the university yesterday. he study the tundra. we are talking about methane volcanoes. he knows a lot. the key question is is it a positive feedback that makes a little warming a little more or a tipping point that could lead to large-scale releases of gas? so far the evidence cuts

against the latter because there are global mechanisms for testing methane levels in the amateur all around the world so at different latitudes, the most emissions seem to be in the tropics from cultivation and agriculture and beef but mostly things like rice. that is reassuring, not so much coming from fracking as well. badly designed or operated wells release methane. the other thing is it is a powerful but very transient gas, 6 years in the atmosphere before the grades into co2 which has a warming effect but is much smaller. interesting by. >> the issue, fairly large issue, rice is the world's most important foodstuff that people in asia eat. a lot of work on that.

and to genetically engineer. the methane is released, muck in the bottom, you don't have as much of that. there is an organization called the international rice research institute which is working on that. there are also if it's by progress to say huge cultures of rice are not what we should be eating, we should eat a more diverse diet and we shouldn't be planting all this to begin with. and that would be another approach to it. one of the hard parts about his is the system is so complicated that it is difficult to know what is going on.

to measure more methane coming up, off the coast of scandinavia. a bunch of scandinavian scientists tried to measure the impacts of what would happen and there's more methane from the warming of coastal waters but it was bubbling up, bringing up sediments from the bottom including huge growth of microorganisms that were sucking down enormous amounts of carbon dioxide so in this coastal area the net effect of climate change, increasing level of methane was negative, lowering temperatures. a total surprise to them. one of the difficulties in thinking about this is we don't know lots of stuff. >> there is another guy here who wrote some great books, chapter, 7000 years ago, have done the work as we began to

change the climate 7000 years ago as agriculture and rice particularly, release in methane, paleoclimatology shows pretty convincingly, he is right here in the area too. >> more questions in the front? >> so you mentioned in your introduction how political factors, the best ways for change. haven't been successful because they have continued rising regardless of political party.

you also mentioned patience and urgency but i am curious what you guys think are the driving factors, to affect the long-term action that is necessary on this issue. >> you look around the world, even though in her sure is your enemy, there is tons going on. what is good is diversity. most of us in this room unlike you who grow up in the last century have us and we are going to march into the future and change will happen. that has to happen but china has a different set of policies for how to pursue a post-carbon

economy. they do things that can only happen in sign-on scales we can't imagine and here in the united states we are more fractious, and research basic science and research locally. china is about to catch us and that is resulting in breakthroughs every day. we pay attention to elon musk but everything he has and is based on technology that came from basic science, the space race and the cold war. solar, battery technologies in the space shuttle and all that kind of thing. is happening, it is too which is why there needs to be attention to investing in science related to agriculture and energy systems, making sure we don't know everything. something people your age to do and convincing a neighborhood to be more energy efficient.

>> the way we peru's energy, there's a huge set of institutions and social and cultural built-up. and the reason for them and so forth. similarly there is a huge set of institutions and think about the civil rights movement, what it did was on all of the above strategy that sued people, it protested, filed legislation, and there needs to be local action, state action and one of the striking things about it is politicians pay no price for opposing it or giving lip service, it is not a potent

political issue. they look and there's a bunch of urgent issues and what they typically do is go to the one that is ringing the loudest bell and the when it is the most illiterate political pressure in the same way if you are an overburdened person in office you exercise triage and pretty easy to to triage environmental issues. california had a severe drought for five years and not one protest against lawns. even though every experts could tell you 70% of the water in southern california's is on lawns there is no anti-grass movement. if you believe and don't want to have giant structures wrecking, that is what you're protesting, the lawns. >> the la times used remote

sentencing for households, violating egregiously violating water use. >> without political movement, without people literally in the streets, it matters and if you think there are limits movement in -- the declaration of sentiments and they were ridiculed, they wore their white things and talked about how silly very were and legislation and unremitting pressure on multiple levels. >> howard epstein, and the university of virginia.

>> way back. >> 1985, the air war college national security advisor, prof. was asked to be there to talk about national security, it goes along with what you are saying and michael creighton rose an article, why are we scaring ourselves? we constantly have something that is the big threat, y2k or china, people writing books about going to war with china. a couple years ago when i moved back your gasoline was almost $4 a gallon and now we are fracking. you don't hear much about fracking anymore, reducing earthquakes in oklahoma and such, a big water issue we don't hear much about.

hoping you have some comments on that. >> that is the flow of history. i wrote a piece on my blog, one of the last things i wrote before i left the times, and information agency, the output of the energy department, had a thing on gas production, no longer calling natural gas than conventional. and that is what happened through time. a shifting baseline, psychological reality i had never appreciated, the arctic of my youth is not the arctic of youth today. when i grew up bears were being shot, now it is the ice is retreating and there are ships everywhere. i wrote a piece at the times a day i realized arctic shipping

is boring. that was the headline. our perception of what is a problem revolves in time and that is because we invest in things was the wizards keep coming up with new -- >> when there is a new technology, fracking is an example, there are idiots, one of the weird things about fracking is it is cheap so you get a consortium of three dentists to pool their spare change, there are states, oklahoma, the idea you would start people from randomly drilling holes in the earth is unbelievable. any dentist in oklahoma, if -- hundreds of thousands of wells and earthquakes, they discover university of oklahoma has a great geological department of geology, it is seismically

unstable. this is not hard to deal with. you can listen to geologists and say it is seismically unstable, don't drill there so that is what pennsylvania has done. they are much poor at regulating water because they have rivers in oklahoma, good at regulating water and you wish you would put them in a blender and -- >> that is called federal policy. >> people make mistakes and learn and that is part of the reason, fracking is generally done better than it was 10 years ago, there are still some problems but the egregious stuff, as a friend in oklahoma put it, get -- you run out of dentists. >> we will wrap it up if there is one more. the gentleman in the front. >> thank you for coming.

>> i read an article recently, don't know if it is true, about predicting a new set of sunspot minimum like we had several hundred years ago, enough to create a minor ice age like when the sinews to freeze. it might delay our need to address some of the fears of global warming by 50 years or more. could you comment? >> there's a chapter in my book on the solar minimum. the problem is it is like earthquakes. everyone is looking to know, how do you know of a little earthquake is a preamble to a big one or not? sunspot activity is still chaotic enough, there are cycles that are well-established, 11 year cycle, but knowing when you are at the beginning of a grand

minimum means you have to know million your timescale of what the sun has been doing to have a sense of pattern and that is not there. even though galileo and others were looking at sunspots a long time ago, it is a turbulent thing and it is unpredictable. if we relax, it even more co2 into the atmosphere when we come out of that minimum, a much warmer climate, related to geo-engineering, if we look a volcano like particle in the air, that is a transitory thing and if you do that for 30 or 40 years, suppose we have a global recession and realize we don't have the money to do it suddenly you have this built-up heating potential from the co2 added at the same time and unpredictable consequence.

it is an important factor, is the possibility that -- scientific capacities observe things, the sun is important, think this has some kind of whim. there was a solar flare in 1859 that made telegraph paper catch fire because an electric charge went through the wires which if that happens today it would be a $2 trillion effect on the global economy. that could happen tomorrow. pay attention to the world. you can't know everything. keep basic science going. without that we are less like to believe and if you are a wizard or a profit, we are living in a world that is suffused with modernity and the things that matter whether it is medicine or technology, we will have an interesting ride through this century. >> a nice note to end on.

a terrific science writer. thank you. >> plenty of time to buy and save books. [in honorable conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> next up a discussion on the establishment of the defense advanced research projects agency. this is from the virginia festival of the book, an annual festival that takes place in 70 venues across charlottesville and all the moral county.