revolutionary war to establish a republic that resolved the rightss related to the of the federal government versus the rights of state governments. resolve the way to problems related to the rights of women, the rights of native americans, the rights of slaves. at the time of our nation's problems weree insolvable. so our founders created a political system, and political parties, as institutionalized for ongoing debate, which permitted dissent to be not as a treesson act but as a legitimate voice in an endless argument. ae constitution provides framework for debating salient endlessly, if need be. we will not succeed in ending the extinction crisis, in making

renewable energy a foundation of a new energy future. not succeed in any efforts to make the world a more prosperous or just place, for all creatures, great small, unless we more fully master politics. winning more debates, by elections.e of1990, following 27 years imprisonment, nelson mandela ended11 words that apartheid. he said, we can't win a war but we can win an election. he became south africa's first black president with that ended the policy of apartheid. similarly, we can win more elections. and which winning enough elections, we can ensure the

the wondrousof earth.ty of life on and that is, of course, a critically important part of the great transition before us. thank you very much. [applause] >> more now from the american renewable energy summit with a group of scientists discussing climate change and the of category 4ber hurricanes. from aspen, colorado, this is 45 minutes. >> good morning. hope you're ready for some climate science, and i know because those were two great presentations, and we're happy to follow that. you're awake,that because i'm going to put you to work. instead of just listening and instead of me asking questions of the panelists, at the end of want yousentations, i

to do the asking. i want you to be thinking of questions during their presentations. so please write those down and be ready to engage in end of then at the presentations. so my name is cindy schmidt. i'm with the university corporation for atmospheric research. the united nations foundation. and those are two institutions that are funding my project, would like to plug, because i think it could be a good resource for all of you. voices.led climate it's -- the website is climatevoices.org. network of scientists across the country, in all 50 to theirhat are going local communities and are willing to talk to any group those local communities about climate science, about thosee change, in communities, and about what can be done in the community. and these scientists are ready to involve with their fellow citizens there. so please go to

climatevoices.org and take a developing and growing project. this morning i am slighted to be here -- delighted to be here with three distinguished scientists. climatelking about science and the current state of knowledge of climate science. it's notu all know, just the atmosphere that we're worried about. of jigsawreal sort puzzle of land, water, atmosphere, and two of our presenters this morning are ofng to address the state knowledge of that science. and then our final presenter talk about a possible solution that addresses all of those, land, water, and atmosphere. that.ll get started on greg holland is going to be our first speaker. at thesenior scientist national center for atmospheric research in boulder. career is inmic

tropical meteorology with a and climatether extremes and the relationship between the two. you'll hear from his accent that is not from brooklyn. susan avery is going to be our second speaker. she is president and director of the woods hole oceanographic institute. lucky enough to have her on two panels. she was on one yesterday. some of you may have heard her then. the woods hole oceanographic institute is affectionately houi.as and susan used to work at the colorado. of and then also at the institute for research and environmental directed inch she boulder. and those of us in boulder who sorry with her were very when woods hole oceanographic institute stole her. is going to be our final speaker. he's the chief scientist for nasa langley research center where he is responsible for

thesight programs for formulation for several technological areas. dennis holds several patents and has contributed much work on the area of biofuels and biomass as which he'llplaces, be addressing today. please remember to think of those questions. greg.start off with >> cindy, can i have the slide? someone was supposed to get me a clicker. we have the clicker? >> i'll just tell you to go to the next one. that's easy. the title up there. >> oh, that's the clicker! >> cindy is sitting on it. [laughter] part of myt it was chair. i just stole the clipper. ha ha! see the title up the back there. i don't think i'm going to be cindy'squite live up to expectations, because i don't think i can give you a summary of the state of the science in five, ten minutes. is what i would like to do

make three points. those three points are, firstly, change?ually is climate and the second point is, how are weather and -- extreme weather and climate systems responding to that climate change? because at the end of the day, it's the extremes that really matter. how can we actually work with society at large, and how does working with society at large help both -- not fix but let us adjust to them and become more resilient to those changes but also to scientistst the understand how they can do their job better? to start with the first one, is climate change, if you look at most newspapers and see thiske that, you lovely curve that goes up at a until aboutr basis, now, then it starts to go off like this. and that's only partly true, theuse if you look at

carbon dioxide in the air, the main greenhouse gas that is changing due to us, it's going up like that. go upe warming did not like that, because up till about putting in we were another gas and aerosol into the air, and that was called sulfates. you can remember the acid rain and all the major ecological problems. we cleaned that up. what had happened before then was those sulfates were a net cooler and you have a net warmer and a net cooler, and they were largely cancelling each other out. so the warming that we're actually seeing is because we smokestacks.e smok it's not accelerated quite rapidly up at a much deeper see in the simple linear curves. when i talk about climate change, that's what i'm actually about.g extremes, there

beinglot of problems with able to predict what happens to extremes. for one simple reason. they don't happen very often. and so there's a big noise level. hard to get a statistical signal. but there are fundamentals that you just can't get away from, is, if you make any changes to the overall distribution, the means and the way the distribution looks, the biggest change is always at the extreme. that the changes are not going to be big, we just need to be able to identify them them down better. and there's another story to this as well, because those extremes actually have other limitations other than climate change. the most extreme thing that can happen is usually happening because it basically used up all the energy there is. you can drive your car, maybe maybe 600 miles, but at about 700 miles, you ain't it anymore unless you put more fuel in it, because

you've used up all the energy. atmosphere works like that. if we look at hurricanes to is what hasthis happened with hurricanes. the bottom curve, bottom axis is number of categories where category 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 i'm sure of.re aware 0 is tropical storms sm. up on the other curve is relative to all hurricanes. focus on the little area on your right-hand side, back in the 60's and 70's when cleaned out the smoke stacks, we had a curve that came down like this. decade since then, it has actually bulged up. of ans been a bit increase out in the category 5 area, but the big differences category 4's. that's because the energy limit has changed a little bit but not fast. capacity to intensity has gone up very rapidly. this is all published information. it's not that we're going to have superhurricanes.

that's the good news. news is we've now got twice as many going on to two and a half times as many 4 and 5 hurricanes as we had before. it happens globally. that's the global result. it also happens to have happened in every ocean base except the pacific. so that's something we're living with now. temperatures. as cindy said, i'm not from brooklyn. i'm from the south country down here. had a horrific january actually the hottest we've ever seen. there were several days in where the temperature exceeded 40 degrees celsius for whole country, not just one station. and there's a lot of talking about it and everything else. decided we'd go and have a look at it. it's actually interesting, temperaturesis the in this particular case on one day.

the really high temperatures you see, greater than 42 celsius. you can see the cooler temperatures around the coast like that. where do you think the records set? well, we can do this two ways. going to show you another slide and say, what happens if i 100% of green here? in other words, double the greenhouse for that situation? will happen?hink well, here's what happened. this is a change. as you can see, we've got around degrees celsius change. and let me -- i guess i can't go back. back.t go but if you remember the area that was there originally, all was up in the center of the country, all the changes down here. thank you. and that's because what's happened is that extreme temperatures haven't gone up. thethe temperatures near to extreme have gone up substantially in frequency, same

as is happening with the hurricanes. and this is also an energetic limitation. it's really hard to get extremes higher. there's not enough greenhouse forming to do that. happen is've seen this. you see some unintended consequences here. north.little bit further it's actually maybe a little bit hotter, maybe a bit cooler. mostly nothing or a little bit cooler. in the southwest, it's just the particular particularity that month. peculiarity that month. but in the content as a total is warming up, the summer monsoon gets more intense and you're bringing more cold, tropical air,cold and wet tropical down into the northern region. these are the sorts of uncertainties you read about in the paper. and people say, well, look, you don't know anything. the answer is we can say about this.ngs that's my second message. my third message goes to how we actually interact with folks like you in a particular -- in

particular, we're interacting with several groups. but i want to show you a slide. slide.a it's an old slide, deliberately so. you look at it. say, well, that was a pretty disaster.rs. what do you think it was? well, here's the headline that goes with that slide. molasses blew up and took out the entire town. my point here is that if we what'sng to actually say happening with climate change, there is another element to the can'tand that is that we just be building buildings in a more rigid, more extreme, able to go another 100 years without falling over, because they will, and they will for a whole bunch reasons we don't understand. so we've been working with groups such as these.

for climateing extremes partnership and rising voices. you heard about rising voices colleagues in the native american community yesterday. and what we're doing is we're just trying to get a dialogue going where we can actually say, hey, this is what's happening how weneed to work out can work with you. and i'm going to give you one theple, which goes back to picture above, that's come out of that, which really makes a big difference to how i do it's making a big difference to how people do planning as well. and that is the concept of graceful failure. we no longer are talking about hundred-year return periods for a building. we're still talking about it but entirely oncusing that. we're saying, what happens if the building falls down or the or the vat of molasses blows up? what you do is build the consequences and recovery there the planning process.

so you say, if it happens, here is what we need to have as part planning process to make sure we can recover quickly. that's what i call resilience. becoming a bit of a buzzword now. i'm sure you'll start to hear a about it. but i want to go further since about alternative energy. i absolutely support alternative energies. go to renewables. let me start by saying that. but it is not a panacea. indeed, there is no doubt that took all of our current energy requirements and the requirements of india and china and the rest of the world, but they're the two gorillas on the block, and turned them all into alternative energies in the sense of wind and solar power, we will make permanent and unknown at this changes to the climate. it won't be necessarily global. it may be global. certainly be

regional. a good example i gave you earlier on was, when we cleaned stacks, we did it for very good reasons. we then accelerated the warming, brings us to this meeting here. we just -- let's say simply took all of the energy for the united states and used wind farms to do it. you can't take that much energy out of the wind systems of the not make some changes. and it's not just going to happen no the united states. in the united states. it will make changes elsewhere. entire sahara desert green, grow trees, whatever we decide to do there, it will change the climate of the world. and it has. example, because the the nile sorry -- valley was once a very fertile region. indried up and that happened conjunction with the onset of the indian summer monsoons.

cindy is giving me a wrap-up here. all i want to do is simply say hope you'llints i go away with. firstly, look carefully what you mean by climate change or what meant by climate change. extremes are going to happen, and in my view, have already happened and i showed you an example. and thirdly, let's keep the dialogue up in a two-way sense, because i think there really will be good things come out of it. thank you. [applause] you.ank thank you, greg. i think greg really sets the sharefor what i want to with you, and, again, i think -- startave the power to this? i guess you do. what i want to do is talk about the fact that this climate jigsaw puzzle that was alluded to, has more components than the atmosphere. there's the total focus on what's happening in the atmosphere, not realizing it's land,osphere, ocean, humanity process going on here.

and so i want to talk about some intersections of these complex things. arctic,appening in the and the triple whammy of what's termsing in the ocean in ocean, acidicatiom. this whammy is affectionately and gaspingarming of the ocean. i'm showing this slide again because i showed it yesterday. several people wanted to see it once more. when you look at the planet from see all of this water and think, oh, it's not going to do anything. it's not going to change. need to worry about it. but in wre al ti, as -- reality, of this waterll off the planet, the amount of water that you have, that really our planetaryt of system, is quite small compared to the volume of the planet

itself. fresh water you have is that second dot there drained off of the larger blue. and then the smaller dot is the available fresh water. so since the next panel is really talking about fresh thought i would show this again to really give you a perspective of how precious this ocean is and the water that we have on this particular planet. it is a critical component of the climate system, because the ocean is the fly wheel of the climate system. it's the memory of the climate system. it basically holds so much of capacity of heat. and in fact i'm going to show you a slide later on here that heat, the most of the excess heat that has gone into of atmosphere as a result carbon dioxide is being taken up by the ocean. let's start first with sea level rise. i want to focus our attention on antarctic ice sheets.

this is some of the latest science coming through, what is antarctica in terms of the melting ice sheets. this is an animation i want to show. it goes quickly. it was produced by nasa and an itis mostly covered by ice. it's actually speeding up. what i'm going to show you here is this animation of that process of a flow coming in and the flow coming out. it's color-coded. color-codedin this kor fasteron basically means glacier flows that are happening. antarctica.western you see the inlets there and then the outlets of the glaciers. they are basically rivers of ice. what's happening here is that

warmer water that's happening in the antarctic is coming underneath the ice shoals that you see here. as it comes under this ice, it puts up and reroads the eroadsng points of -- it the glacier. eroads this, the grounding point moves landward. and that unstabilizes. it's not as secure. the glacier begins to fall and surge forward and out into the ocean. the process of this complex interaction between a warming ocean and its ice that is basically cascading and ice into theutting water and eventually melting the ice. amount of sea level

attributed to melting of the western an tire antarctic. so what does that mean? ten feet of sea level rise? let's put it into the context of new york. this is new york city with ten feet of sea level rise. i think the first thing you can see, that you complete the inundated three metropolitan airports. okay? of sea lega level rise 100 years orver so. but in the short term, ten feet inundated new york has happened and already has happened. sandy.ened with sandy is a combination of the small amounts of sea level rise combinedave already, with a storm at a relatively high tide period that gave you two and a half foot storm surges that inundated manhattan. can happen, this intersection of what's happening toa longer term time scale

our climate system along with these extreme events that one is of weathererms patterns. surgeseasily produce like this that we're going to see in the short term. the point is, not only are we going to need to worry about mitigating and clearly climate offnce is telling us get fossil fuel as much as possible, adaptations also an strategy in terms of the engineering of our cities and infrastructure that we have here. adaptation strategies, you can retreat. can we retreat new york? i don't know where it's going to go. maybe to colorado. ha! we can accommodate. we can raise these cities. the 1800's, we raised chicago and seattle. lot easier toas a do in those days than it is today. or you can protect. of debate on, how do you protect? harderprotect with

infrastructure, building walls and seawalls, or do you protect with putting our self-defenses back into place, no longer building on barrier islands, and restoring our mangroves, restoring wetlands. there's a lot of discussion on in coastal communities about exactly how they're going to approach this problem, of a combination of both soft well ases to adapt as hardened strategies. theet me go to the arctic, loss of sea ice is certainly a sentimental feature of climate the arctic. you've seen this graph before. point is, it's not just the sea ice area that's important. the volume of the sea ice. and increasingly, what we're seeing. much, much less ice,lived ice, age-old four to five-year-old ice, and almost all the ice is becoming ice, which melts

rather quickly. there's an uptick in 2013, but an anomaly, you see a lot of wiggles there. our point is that it may have increased the area of ice for that year 2013 but it is still one-year ice. now, arctic ice has an well, let me stop a minute. this is basically a tipping tont with respect issues.ical what does it mean in opening up the arctic. opening up the arctic certainly has a lot of economic potential, has an economic potential in terms of fisheries, in terms of lanes, in terms of oil and gas and other extraction. you know companies are looking at this. i think one of the greatest an oceanography point when, not if an oil spill is going to open, it is when an oil spill is going to

the arctic. and it's not going to come from probably drilling for gas and oil. to come from shipping. if you look at what the response was for deep water horizon and getting down there and trying to clean up an oil spill in an area which is basically mother nature's pretty kind basically, of ways to help clean up that oil spill, compared to what is going to happen to a pristine area that we know little about scientifically, physical ability, easy physical ability to get there, in an easy way, and how clean it up. so there's some real important sort of adaptation strategies or through about the security of what's going to happen in the arctic as this becomes an ice-free area. there's the geopolitical consequences, and economic values that they have. interestingly enough, the

u.s.ary lines between the wellussia have been established as a result of the cold war. but it's the other nations that are still arguing what's going on here. >> finally, i'm going to skip this. i'm just going to go to the triple whammy. as carbon dioxide increases, that carbon as carbon monoxide increases and part of it is dissolved in the ocean that means the ph decreases and you have certainly a major habitat consequence associated with that. this is the whole process. there is a lot of research looking at the biological functioning and relationship between ph conditions and ealthy ecosystems. clearly, one of the problem areas is the habitat loss of the coral reef systems and production of mollusks and ability to function. that is the acid issue. the warming issue.

the ocean is warming. okay? most of that heat content is in the ocean. this just shows you the fact that the ocean, the heating we have from the carbon monoxide is ending up most in the ocean. if we didn't have an ocean it would be a lot of a heck more atmospheric heating right now. buffing us right now. the growing oxygen minimum zones in the ocean, my last slide, first this is the surface of the ocean absorbing more heat, warming up. you aren't getting as much oxygen down into the deeper parts of the ocean which is pretty critical because that

different part of the ocean is disassociated with the atmosphere in that deeper part. the only way the lower levels of the ocean are going to get oxygen is through the mixing process. warmer water inhibits that mixing process. you are basically enhancing the ocean minimum zones in the deep ocean and they're going to spread. that has tremendous implications for marine animals that require oxygen such as the tony:. okay? the tony: requires oxygen. they live in the deeper parts of the ocean. without oxygen they're going to run into some trouble here. it does, though, provide a wonderful habitat for jelly fish. if you want to have jelly fish we may have lots of jelly fish because they thrive. this accounts for what we're having on coast with the nurent ading from atmosphere -- basically run off, your pharmaceuticals, whatever, in

the coastal regions, it causes the plankton to bloom and pull the oxygen out of the coastal waters there. as you have these minimum zones increasing in the deep ocean coming up into areas of coastal areas where you already have additional stresses associated with neernt loading you enhance the dead zones in the ocean increasing and we are seeing this as well. so you are this complex feedback system in the complexity of an ocean-land atmosphere system of which science is becoming -- really beginning to come to grips with. we are at a stage where i think it is really important to make that investment in r&d that really looks and studies these complexities. this gives us the information to adapt to a changing world. applause] >> thanks for that overview and statement of some of the

problems. now dennis with address some of those with possible solutions. >> if i could have the charts please. folks yesterday said we have to do something very different and what you're going to see is very different. grown the salt plant, on waste lands, deserts, using sea water irrigation to solve land, water, food, energy, and climate afford bli and soon. all of it. there are two types of plants. fresh water plants and then halophyte, salt water plants used for food and fodder in india and other countries for hundreds of years. a goodly portion of the sahara is capable if we plowed it up and irrigated with the mediterranean and grew halophytes with direct sea water irrigation of producing sufficient biomass to replace all of the carbon fuels,

provide petro chemical feedstock and all the food anybody wants to eat while returning much of the 68% of the fresh water we're now running out of for direct human use. i.e. solves land, water because we're substituting salt water to grow food, solves food because we're growing food. solves energy because we're producing biomass and biofuels at about $50 a barrel. the climate because we're sequestering some 18% of the co2. so conventional wisdom for but lture -- salt is bad with this salt is good. 97% of the sea water -- of the water is sea water. we won't run out of it. it contains a massive number of miep he recalls needed in the human diet which we've just about depleted out of the land.

80% of nutrients required for agriculture in proximity to a large number of desert and dry areas. 40% of the land worldwide is waste land, has a lot of sun light and barackish/saline ground water. you don't have to pump ocean water. you can pump saline ground water. in the sahara there is one that is absolutely huge. we can utilize these to solve our problems. the characteristics of this wasteland, halophyte sea water, no asoshable salt buildup, produces a cooler surface, produces fresh water, rain downwind. in the sahara, you could put rain back in the middle east and regrow the cedars of lebanon and stop the decertification of the sub sahara. we have a plethora of

wastelands and sea water to solve what we have now. there's about 10,000 metro halophytes and 25% of the irrigated lands now perfected because the aquifers we're now pumping including the one down in texas and oklahoma are in fact becoming saline. the characteristics, the yields this and it to produces the entire spectrum, seeds, fruits, roots, tubers, grains, foliage, wood, oils, berries, gums, resins, pulp, ich in energy, salt penalty, 35% saline water already grows this stuff. use it for food, fodder, biomass, energy, petro chemical, feed stock, wood, co2 secretion and wildlife habitat. for centuries there's been a uccessful saline brakish water

agriculture with no buildup and nations are now growing halophytes for food and fodder. wastelands are a massive possibility to do this. western australia, persian gulf, middle east, sahara, southwest u.s. including west texas, and the anaconda in south america and many others. the current efforts in the u.a.e., boeing is growing halophytes for airplane fuel. i worked with the state department. there is an operation down there -- farms in northern mexico are growing fuel. there are several others that are in the formative stages. so utilize the opportunity -- the opportunity is utilizing wastelands and deserts, inexpensive land. utilize sea water which is extremely pottable and inexpensive. grow halophytes, massive

amounts of food and biomass for petro chemical food stock and green fuels while sequestering about 18% of the co2 afford bli with existing technology. start now. 10 to 20 years up you fix land, water, food, energy, and climate. thank you. [ applause] >> thank you, dennis. thanks to all three of you for those great presentations. do we have questions? yes, john? >> the presumption which i think we all share is that climate change is real. my question is about plication of your science to reality, being that we have a gubernatorial election coming up in which one candidate says that climate change is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated and the other who claims to be a scientist saying the science is unclear.

so my question to you all is what can you do to affect the leadership in this state and what can we do to help you? because our governor claims to be a scientist and claims that there is no significant proof of aspergenic caused climate change. it's just crazy. i know your objectivity keeps you in a certain rem of being scientific but there is too much at stake. we need advocacy and we need to support that advocacy. [ applause] >> i'll start off. you heard yesterday that the climate change politics is driven largely by the financial aspects in the real world. and recently the renewables are punching through a parody and so the financial business is in fact becoming very successful. half of the new generation

worldwide is now renewables and one of the previous speakers this morning went into this. okay? so it's actually not the concern about climate i think, which is going to change things the way some of us would like to see it go. i think it's the favorable financial aspects which are just about here. >> you talked a little bit about other countries being involved with halophyte development. do you see that in the u.s.? do you see some attention to that now in the u.s.? >> yeah. halophytes in the u.s. were actually started out of university of arizona. there is a major effort in the university of delaware. d.o.e. down in oak ridge has some halophyte work. we are, you know, becoming far more successful with this. the entrepreneur that actually

started the major sea water farms operation in the horn of africa and is working now with united arab emirates came out of arizona. >> greg, you wanted to address john's question? >> yes. very quickly, i spent many years working diligently with politicians and i woke up after a while i was getting nowhere. it's not because they're idiots. they're actually very smart people. they have an agenda and it's driven by two things. it's driven by the people in this room and they're also driven by who gives them the money to get elected. you have to simply understand that. you can do all of the logical o arguments you like. ou are running up against that political reality. a few years ago we started not to do that. that is where for example the rising voices and engineering for climate extremes came out of. let me give you two examples of where that is now affecting the political process.

first, the last rising voices meeting, americans wrote directly into the presidential system saying, here is what has to happen. it's no longer me talking about it but all the indians in america and hawaiians in hawaii doing that. that's what they listen to. the second thing is that the financial industry gets a bad rap as we saw in many cases but the insurance and the financial industry again working with people like us have actually come to a united nations agreement. we're starting next year. every company in the u.s. and other parts of the world that have shareholders, in other words publicly listed, has to put in their sensitivity and their problems that they may have with climate change and severe weather and similar things that come out of it. the world is moving in that direction not because the politicians are taking us that way. because the people that elect the politicians are taking us that way. >> and let me just add to the

conversation a little bit about voices. i mean, scientists are a small percentage of the population. it's your voices that have to come through. let me just tell you a little bit about massachusetts. maybe you can actually concretely look, tell your gubernatorial people, look what's happening in massachusetts. so in massachusetts, there has been a very concerted effort to put in place an agenda for a green economy, green and blue economy. the governor has done it. the state legislature has done it. there are resources that have been put into investments that have been done. we are beginning to see results already in terms of economic development. this is where you have to -- you have to talk about it in terms of financial terms. you have to talk about it in terms of human terms. you don't talk about it in terms of science terms. there are things happening here in colorado that shows the climate is changing. regardless of what you, if you

believe in it or not the climate is changing. we have to get away from this business of basically just talking at the scientific level and instead casting it in terms of economic development, human stories, and basically what's happened to the environment as a whole. massachusetts has had success years in a period of five years. take a look. go on the website. alk to people there. >> a question from mr. bushnell. halophytes sound too good to be true. many of the middle eastern countries that struggle with food have lots of money. why does the list not show saudi arabia for example? it sounds too good to be true. convince me that it's not. >> i have worked with the saudis.

the saudis called me up and said they're worried after they run out of oil what's their economy going to be? i worked with the people in the province of alberta for the same reason and i asked whether they had any sand. i asked whether they had sea water. they had sea water. i said, have i got a deal for you. the last time i saw the saudis were going down the street looking into halophytes. the middle east was on my chart. that's one of the major areas. again, for energy. > one more question. >> my name is steven hoffman. i'm really honored to be here. i live in boulder. i work in natural and organic foods and i'm working on the colorado ballot initiative to label g.m.a. foods in our state. i was very curious when you brought up the dead zone

because it's actually caused by agriculture driven by genetic engineering and is all the synthetic nitrate fertilizer that just poisons the water of toledo, ohio. call that a dead zone too because it's an algae bloom. it's caused by g.m.o. agriculture. we think g.m.o. agriculture and conventional agriculture in general contributes 30% of the greenhouse gases to global warming. interestingly enough and i'm very interested in your halophyte conversation because according to rode al institute organic food and farming puts so much carbon back into healthy living organic soils that it can actually sequester more carbon than is being released in our atmosphere. so there actually are open source low cost solutions to sequestering carbon and it has to do with agriculture. agriculture as we practice it today which is why we want to label g.m.o.'s is because that agriculture has killed the soils releasing all the carbon and is atmosphere

really contributing to climate change. thank you very much. >> a lot of the issues that are going on internationally, i wanted to ask about as scientists that you are, what is your thoughts on fukushima and how come the government doesn't tell the truth? i'm talking even about the u.n., the effects of what's going on with fukushima, what's going on in the pacific ocean, the deaths occurring. why doesn't that knowledge ever come out to the main stream public how it's affecting us now? how it's affecting global warming. >> anybody want to take that?

it's a little more out out -- >> i'll talk about fukushima only in the context of the radio act ive release into the ocean. that's associated with it. if you really want some good, concrete information very straight forward, evidence based information, go to our website and look at the center for marine and radioactive activity just published. we have a scientist who immediately when the tsunami hit and the meltdown in fukushima happened realized this was probably the largest ccidental release of radioactive -- into the ocean. we worked very hard and it wasn't through the government or anything we got funding to get into japanese waters and off japan waters to be tracing this and basically who came to the rescue for that funding was a private foundation, betty