about -- i hate to call it anti-growth. but we have got to stop this unlimited growth paradigm. and this, perhaps, is a system level intervention. the reason that i was at the u.n. last week was buton's been playing with this for about -- i don't know, 25 years. and they're ready to launch it into the world as the -- in preparation for rio plus 20. we haven't talked about the failures of rio 20 years ago. a lot of wonderful things happened 20 years ago. i mean we had negotiated agreements around sustainable development. and then nothing happened. so here it is 20 years later, we're getting ready for rio plus 20. and we need something that is going to push people into action. so this is -- so we're trying

this with the gross national happiness index, which is a very sophisticated index of human progress and development. hopefully we're going to be able -- and i want all of you to help. i'm going to be saying this at every panel i'm on this week. hopefully we'll be able to get this on every agenda at rio, which starts in just, i think about eight weeks, it's in june. so i wanted to mention that. we have to change hearts and minds. and we're trying to figure out how to do this. in the panel that i was on yesterday, i got a question from the floor about how do we change hearts and minds? how do you change the habits and the mind sets of human beings so that there's a possibility for some kind of profound change? and i -- i said to him.

one of the things we're looking at because i'm a complexity scientist is meditation. this is not a question of religion. this is a question of the fact that we can look inside our brains now with our new technology, functional mri. and see the parts of the brain that light up when different activities are introduced. and what we know from the contemplative brain, those who meditate on a regular basis, which we should all be doing, there are changes in the brain that lead us to become -- not just more compassionate, but more in touch with the whole that we are a part of. which is how one of the ways i know we can possibly come back to nature. so i'm going to be talking on my next panel later today. it's a nuclear disarmament --

it's a nuclear weapons panel. because our organization -- our organization brought in -- we do a lot of back channel negotiations. we're testing new process and how you transform diplomacy in these tough issues. and i live in santa fe, new mexico, downwind from los alamos, this was a natural one for us. and we brought -- we had the luxury and the privilege of bringing in the iranians, the koreans, it was three meetings and we put meditation cushions in the room without saying a word. and there were delegates from many cultures in our meeting. every break, every lunch break, those cushions were filled. and we never said a word about it. and the delegates would come back to the negotiations and our negotiations are very open spades. it's one of the things we do

differently. and they would be renewed in some way. even if they'd never sat and meditated for 20 minutes in their lives. and we never suggested they do that. so i had to mention that. we -- one of the techniques that we're testing is futures planning. so we're using scenario building as well. but i think we do it in a little bit different way. what we do is ask those delegates. we say please put the victimization that we're all going through, victimization in the present and the past aside. let's just see if we can come up with a future scenario. ten years from now, 20, 50 years from now. and force you to think about a positive future. let me tell you, it took four meetings before the guys could go there. we are so trapped in the present. trapped is the wrong word to use.

but we want to see if it's possible to a better future. once you go to that positive future, you say i don't know if this is happen, but this is what we came up with. what steps happen? what step happened to get there? that isn't happening now? that's where the creative thinking finally breaks loose. so i wanted to mention that and helping developing countries develop -- get their futures in a more sustainable way. buton, this tiny kingdom is figuring this out and there's light in the world in terms of this tiny little country because they're trying, they're really trying hard to do it differently. they are beginning to succeed.

i want to say -- let me know when i'm out of time. i'm not looking at my watch. we also talk about these multidisciplinary teams of top experts. >> i just got a book called here comes everybody. and i'm a big supporter of occupy wall street. the age of the so-called expert is over. we're all experts now. we all have to come to the table to solve these problems. and leadership emerges everywhere throughout complex systems. they're depressed by hierarchy. because that's still the way the world works. but there's leadership at every level in the system. at the community base, grass roots level. leadership is an emerging property of all complex systems. so if we can promote a broader

leadership, and i know people, a lot of people especially in the press don't understand this idea of a leaderless, self-organizing system, this is what's happening now and this is the future we're going to be able to solve these problems. the expert panel, we mix experts at our negotiations with people who don't know very much about the issue. artists, writers, poets. psychologists. and that makes a real difference in our negotiations. so finally, i wanted to say how grateful i am that the pentagon has discovered that though climate change is a national security issue, it's about time. you know where the money is, guys. where is all the money? it's right there. maybe they'll start putting some new money into some new ideas for how to address these problems. and they're way ahead because

they have the resources and money to do it way ahead looking at these scenarios. so thank you so much. i'm just so grateful, and please pay attention and urge action there and urge the growth national happiness to be on the agenda. thank you so much. >> a huge thank you to our panel. they've given us a lot to work with this morning for an interesting and lively dialogue. before we launch into that, i forgot to introduce myself. i am suzanne jones and i'm a member of your boulder city council. and, one of the prerogatives of being a local elected official, i get to ask the first question. let me just remind you because we are filming this for c-span, whoever asks a question needs to get to the man with the microphone -- the man with the microphone will get to you when we get to questions.

so, i guess, what i mostly wanted to do just to start things off is meryl just flew out provocative ideas. and i wanted to give you guys an opportunity to respond if you would like since we started out with some heavy duty kind of depressing science. and ended on a hopeful we can all solve this together and i want to allow a little inner play here. >> absolutely. and i think that was tremendously encouraging. because i sort of -- i've paid attention to what's been happening. i've been doing this for a while. and the fact this is now emerging with the movement toward sustainability is tremendous. tremendous development. and incredibly encouraging because my personal belief is that people actually despite all the depressing news i just gave you and -- is that people actually are motivated to a positive. and if you want people to move and change then, there should be a positive goal.

because scare tactics don't work on people, they just shut down in general. having a positive goal and a vision of a healthier future, which is what we will be -- i will be talking about that with some panels later in the week in terms of the vision we laid out and changing planet, changing health. but the -- it's just a tremendous to merge this goal of happiness and having meditation as a tool to get there with the larger goals of the sustainable society. so thank you for that. >> my observation would be an experience that i had getting back to the notion that we're relying too much on experts and not enough on the average person out there. i've been struggling with this notion of anthropocene. and so on my facebook page, i

posted a question and sought advice from the various friends i had on facebook. and we had quite a lively discussion about what was a better name for anthroposene, and we had funny names people came up with. but the one we ended up settling on was idiopocene. and that was really the conclusion, i think. if we sat around with a group of scientists to come up with a proper term and i use it quite often. >> i want to quickly comment that i do think that we're somewhat trapped with the index that we used to measure human progress. i think figuring how to effectively replace the current metric with the gross national happiness index or something a lot like that would be just a

spectacular thing and really help us move forward. and we definitely need to move forward on that. so thanks for bringing that up. >> all right. let's turn to questions. you win the prize. >> should i sit? okay. so you talked about -- dan, i know you mentioned that the insurance industry is one of these industries even in a conservative environment like that. they can acknowledge and recognize that this is impacting them economically. you can draw together from 2011 worst loss in history that there is a financial impact. there is a tie together between the ramifications of this and business. and economy, and insurance in turn is turning around.

and they're looking to extrapolate models that will allow them to determine what those will be. how can they change their methodology and get people in the field quicker to mitigate disaster? i know this happens in other industries too. in energy, you see it in supply chains. isn't there a way in which we can almost fight fire with fire a little bit? work towards maybe using some of these new technological tools to extrapolate the economic impacts? and talk in terms of the way that our government sees things today? and that paradigm as we move toward something, maybe happiness, gross domestic good in some way, like a quantifiable positive versus negative ledger to look at by using something like predictive analytics. couldn't you maybe move that model a little further towards the present to be able to say, okay, we can take these models and look at the economic long-term across all these different impacts and bring that

to the table? >> let me try to respond to that if i may. one of the things that happened in the climate debate was we kept talking about the cost of addressing carbon pollution. but the opposition really constrained us from talking about the benefits. and if you look at economics. looking at the costs without the benefits doesn't make much sense. and we have -- one of the things the national wildlife federation is doing right now is we're working with the re-insurance industry to redo our federal flood insurance program. it was a disaster because it does not consider actuarial costs. and in fact, i'm flying out later this afternoon and headed to florida to meet with the re-insurance industry to talk more about this as it impacts florida. the state of florida has had such severe flooding and storms in recent years that they can't -- the insurance industry can't afford to play there anymore because it's too expensive in certain areas in florida. and so the state of the florida decided in its wisdom that it would take up the insurance

re-insurance business. so it's going to underwrite the insurance. the problem with that, they can't afford to do that. it's a terrible way of allocating risk and it's headed for a complete collapse at some point when they get a bad storm. we're going to make the point in florida if they're going to underpin with actiuarial standards. that needs to happen. it's one of the ways we begin to put the real cost on the table. i can tell you for certain, the re-insurance industry gets the climate changes, the real up and coming threat. if you look at some of the papers that they've published. they're talking about a 1% increase every year in damage and cost to the re-insurance industry which ultimately went back to all of us. we're paying increased insurance rates as a result of the damage that's occurring now. and that assumes there's not

going to be a dramatic shift in storm events. and so we're betting on a gradual 1% increase per year, but that may, in fact, not be real itself. >> i want to add a couple points to what larry said. you mentioned predictive analytics and i'm not entirely familiar with the some of the analytics of the insurance industry, but what i do know is what my co-author worked on, which is catastrophe modelling and with the insurance industry. to better predict the kind of extreme events. it's all about predicting risk and pricing properly. that's the whole business model. so that's one thing i wanted to mention. another bigger picture in terms of a positive view economically. is there a positive vision we can move towards? it's a little bit dated now from six or seven years ago, but the

stern review did that, if you're familiar to the stern review. he was a chief economist for the world bank. and put together a major economic report about -- it was issued in 2005 -- the punch line is by investing 1% of the global gnp, you end up with preventing much more damage down the road. and 1% is something that we as a world could afford then and can still afford. so the investment we need to make is not overwhelming. we can do it. that's a bigger picture beyond the insurance industry. back to the insurance industry, i want to make one more point, which is that what -- and the more the insurance industry advocates the better. the re-insurance industry has been fairly strong in advocating even though it is a conservative culture. but they know about this. and they are working at this. but the associations of insurance companies -- i don't

get the impression that they are pushing for climate action as much as the reinsurers are. i could be wrong. they may have changed in the last few years, if so, correct me. one thing that the insurance industry could do and has historically done and played a positive role in society is push for rules and regulations and laws that reduce risk. for example, insurers are the reasons we have fire safety codes, building codes, you know, reasons for things like seat belts. i mean, those are things that insurers have always been for because it's in their business interest to do so. so if the insurance industry as a whole, which is a, you know, one of the world's largest industries, i think the world's largest, massive, could take a more active role and really advocate and look at the big picture and advocate for strong climate action. well, you're protecting your own interests going forward. and if you want to have a

business in 40 years. at some point, things become uninsurable. in the flood insurance example, it's a great example of that. if things become uninsurable, then the market shrinks, right? so insurers have a very strong interest in pushing for strong climate action and moving towards sustainability. so i would certainly encourage anyone in that industry and people know a lot more about it than i do, but to really push for that. >> and then -- >> to all industries to say couldn't other industries use the predictive analytics to more quickly ascertain what their long-term costs are going to be in making short-term decisions? it seems like dogma and pure economics. you know, we're caught in the gridlock. why doesn't -- why don't other people look at economics in a long-term fashion like that? >> i think we're on to something here. i think about the insurance

industry also. but i also know that we are in and future. i don't know about predictive an lytics, but i know something about nonlinear mathematics. not that i'm a math matician, but i worked with nonlinear math maticians for four years. you cannot predict what's going to happen. if we continue to think that we can, because we have new patterns emerging now. i sometimes call the science of complexity the science of emergence and sometimes i call it the science of surprise. abrupt climate change would be one of those. this is in the system that nobody can predict because the patterns are emerging and we have never seen these before. if we can let go a little bit about the need as human beings,

once again change our mental models and our need to control and predict, we may come up with new ideas if we focus on that. prediction. i think we can lose the opportunity for creative thinking. the other thing is i agree with you that the insurance agents, the insurance business can be a catalyst for pushing ways to make ourselves safer in this new climate paradigm. that's a way that people can change their habits. that's a huge change for people. that's the role i think of the insurance industry. but trying to use an lytic predictive methods i think will fail. >> how about another question. mary? >> i have a couple of questions.

the first one is about, i'm wondering why the population predictions remain the came despite the projections for more disasters and more inpuckuous diseases. my second question has to do with how do we overcome the barriers to contemplation when we have so much standing in the way like the ear buds and the cell phones and other distractions. those are the two questions. >> who wants to tackle the first one? >> this is from a nonsense perspective, but the idea that the population will go to 9 billion will be a modelling done by the un and others. i think getting back to this

notion that we may not be fully aware of what's in store for us depending on catastrophic things or changing behavior as we stabilize more aggressively in light of changing climactic and world conditions. i have seen in mi lifetime when i was born, we had about three billion people and now we are seven billion people. in my lifetime i have seen more than a doubling of the population. there is an incredible engine to push the number upward. because we were able to find food and prove the conditions of people around the world, we have seen an acceleration and provide medical treatment around the world. we have seen a real change. i don't put a lot of weight in that nine billion, but i believe we will be seeing an increase on that. that's as much as i can say.

we will learn more as we go forward. there is a fundamental shift that this planet, about 40% of the total energy from photo synthetic processing is going into human population. we are now gobbling up more and more of the natural reserves of the planet. less and less being left behind for other species. i think that's more fundamental and high level question. how far can humans go before we start to collapse the system? how much land can we devote agriculture to aggressive forced management and that sort of thing without disrupting the fibers of the ecosystem. >> let me take the second question. >> that was the second question about how we get people to be

contemplative. there all kind of ways to do that. you can do that here. that's a form of medication, i believe. we have to get the ear buds out of our ears for a little while and off our computers for a little while. for me, it's a part of daily lifelike brushing my teeth. i think if it becomes habitual, it becomes something that's easier to do. harder for kids. harder for kids, but in the neuroscience world, the fact that this helps kids down regulate is the term they use from all the things coming at them is helpful for changing behavior. we keep trying as gently as we can. i have six grandchildren here in boulder and i don't live here.

i was touched about the birth of his first grandchild and think about my six grandchildren in boulder all the time. what their future is going to be like and i'm grateful that they live in a place where people meditate. . >> i like reflecting on your question and certainly so much of what happened has been enabled and catalyzed by the use of those technologies. the portable communications technologies have been a powerful catalyst for change. they are not always, of course, but tremendous potential for the move to use those approaches and move beyond the expert-based systems that kept people down. in that example, it was all

about the nonexperts and the people. younger people in many cases picking up and relating to one another and moving forward. a pretty powerful change. i don't know if it will apply in this space we are discussing here or not. >> the solution to problems really caught on is in science and other fields. it's catching on. pretty amazing successes and a few months ago, scientists tried to determine the structure of a new protein from the hiv virus for a long time. and they ended up working with gaming scientists and put it out

there and had dozens of people around the world. it became a puzzle that saw the structure of the protein in three weeks. they hadn't been able to do it. that's a pretty dramatic example of what that case gyming as well, but crowd sourcing can accomplish. in addition communication, that's an important tool in dealing with the stss. we need everybody on board and everybody's thinking too. we are all intelligent people and we need all of them. >> other questions down here in front. >> i used to study the economics of time mobilization and i would like to ask the panel and everybody here to reflect on the question of whether the threat posed by climate change is

bigger or smaller than the threat that hitler posed to civilization many decades ago. what i give you as my answer, climate change is the worse threat than adolph hitler was. if that were correct, then it would have enormous implications to the way we think about cost and the economics of response to the climate change problem. when the u.s. got involved in world war ii, its way of thinking about economics turned over became arguably right side up again. namely that we started to think about not the money and the financing, but what the real system could do. what can the real productive system do when it has to respond to an enormous challenge. in my view we have to go to that economics in order to cope with the climate