former naval meteorologist talks about the impact of climate change on security and policy. then some of the speakers at this weeks washington ideas form, including al gore and mike lee. was >> what is that?

it is a sextant. i thought i heard an answer. navigation, shooting the stars. professors here remember, but i doubt anybody else does. that was my first ship. i got to be navigator. it was the coolest job in the navy. you got to tell the captain where to go. gps or satellite navigation. what you learned as navigator is that you look at all of the

evidence, you look at everything. you do not log on. one thing use any 100%, but you look at everything. is where we are and where we are going. 30 years after i had, driving that around and being navigator during the cold war, the head of the navy asked me to inform the task force on climate change. it was basically, i do not know if there anything to this climate change or not. bunch of another people that say, don't worry about it. you have other things that you should do. you tell me. you are supposed to be the admiral. figured out and let me know what

to do. marching hours. i had two weeks between the time i was told, you're going to theregton and to go up and go to washington and the pentagon. what i used that time to do was to take a look at evidence. and, as john mentioned, my background is a meteorologist. as a meteorologist, we know, especially back when we started doing this over 40 years ago, a long time ago. forecast three-day right was non--trivia. , it isknow the joke is still non-trivial today. but, it was really hard. you can see have the computer models could be really wrong really quickly. you are seeing variations of 20, 30 degrees. bridge after two days. i was a lot like other

meteorologist in the 80's and 90's. look, how can you tell anything. really. how can you tell anything? it was not that i had any particular belief, but from a science point of view i was not convinced we could do this. 2009, i was to told, this is going to be your job. i said, ok. i will put aside my preconceived notions as best i can. biases.an, we have i said, let's put it aside and see what is out here. here are some examples. top left with the air temperatures, this is globally averaged. i know the zahara tsarnaeva graphs but it starts from the 1880's by decade. are smallthese

graphs, but it starts from the 1880's by decade. this is how much ice is left in the late summer. within one week of today is the inimum amount of ice to see the arctic ocean. you can see in the last 30 or 40 years how it is coming down. maybe you say, maybe the temperature record is screwed up. maybe it is because we are building cities, more people, it is not really reflecting what is going on. some people say that. ok. the left one is interesting. in buffalo, virginia, right on the virginia-north carolina border, north of there, this is a neighborhood. they areow many hours underwater or year. again, the numbers themselves are hard to see. the graft starts in 1920. it is a low-lying. they had a few hours then.

but you can see where the graph is going. it tells us the land is going down or the seas are coming up. theses are coming up. munich insurance. they want to stay in business. if you are a big insurance company, the way you stay in business is you get the risk right. the risk tells you how much you charge for the premiums. -- and theure out colors don't mean that much to us right now. but the red stuff is earthquakes tsunamis.oes and i would argue for that 50 years or so, there's not much change. if you just look at the bottom, the red stuff is flat. the other stuff is whether and climate. that is not how many dollars or whatever. this is how many big events do

we have. there is all my evidence. a i go back to being , to meor, the evidence said, i really need to pay attention to this. that is what we told the navy. and the navy said, fine, we will do a task force on climate change. i look to this about a decade ago, give or take. you know, i kind of thought, this is a political thing. the when you look at evidence, you say, ok this is real. i will talk in a couple slides here that kind of show that not only is this real, but when you dig into the science, the science has been known for a long time. it is weird and not regard. god, is not a big, all my we figured out something

different. we figured out the science in the late 19th century and we have been refining it ever since. but the basic science is there. any questions on the evidence and how i approached that? was this all on, that it took? questions about the weather? anything on that? soase use the microphone everybody can hear. >> yeah, i was just wondering, i was curious. let's define catastrophe for the insurance company.

>> the question is what is it a catastrophe on that? i think it was the magnitude. they said, no, we will count everything. that is how a did it. yes? >> thank you for being here, first of all. some people don't believe in climate change because there is no agnostic evidence, like we do not have data from -- so, how do you do that? admiral titley: so the question of is there really enough evidence. it's kind of interesting, one -- one of my colleagues at penn

state is a professor. climate.aleo he tries to do back before temperature records. using tree rings, basically, he does a lot with tree rings and. you can drill into ice core and that can get you back about half a million years. you look at things like, what kind of tolerance get blown around. using all of those kinds of records, and you have to be careful and calibrate them and you must understand, just because you see something, doing all of that kind of hard science stuff, the details of the science allows us to extend these records back several thousand years. you may or may not of heard some thing called the hockey stick.

the last 50den, years, they are going up. stickd of has this hockey shape to it. -- p theou hear the next layer down, you can use paleot is called the record. that is consistent with a long. of climate stability and now, quite rapid change. john? when the navy asked you to form this task force on climate change and look into it, they from theing at this perspective of a national security concern that the navy might be involved in. i was wondering, where they thinking about climate change as something that would have an oract on how it operated,

were they thinking about how climate change would exacerbate conflict in the world in many ways and therefore basically require the navy to act. did they have an overacting sense that climate change could be a situation where an exasperated tensions between nations, or were they thinking about it in a more local, tactical way, that climate how the navyaffect operated in the article or something like that? titley: that is an interesting question. back when i was asked to do this, though. i is i was running the navy's weather and forecasting system in mississippi. i was minding my own business and got the call from the head of the navy. a lieutenant, she

said, sir, we call him the chief of navy operations, she was like, why is this guy calling my boss? so, you are thinking. what would you be thinking? if the president of the university is calling one of you guys? what did i do wrong, right? so, that is the first thought. the second thought is, i don't know how it would work here, but usually if it is the number one guy calling, that is ok. if it is the number two guy, like the deputy of the provost or the executive vice president, those are usually the guys and cows who get to say, you're not doing so good here, let's make a change. so it's the number one guy. and he basically said, john, to your point, it was about the arctic. specifically, the navy, when they asked me to go up, they taskd me to form an arctic flows. what i did in those two weeks that i had between going up and

having to tell the navy what was ableng to do, is i to show enough evidence to say, bosses, you know, yes, the arctic we need to look at this is one of the nearest-term changes going on and it has potential very significant ways the navy would operate. i call it, opening up a fifth ocean for the first time in hundreds of years. last time he found a new motion was because of columbus. i also said, this is really just a harbinger of things to come. and, the arctic is the leading edge of this climate issue, which is going to affect the military. not just the u.s. navy, but the military in many ways. i did not say exactly how. there had been concurrently to me, a think tank. it used to many center for naval

analysis, but now it is just known as cna, i'm not allowed to say the center for naval analysis anymore, i don't know why. of retired bunch three and four stars. they came out with a report, in an independent report, not part of it than on. basically said climate change was going to be a threat multiplier. if any of you remember the old baff commercial. we don't make stuff, really make it better. climate change is the opposite of that. takes an existing change and makes it worse. we sat in the arab spring, worsening it now crescent in syria. there is a poster he will go through in the plenary section linking this. -- there is a horrible story i will go through in the plenary -- linkingk in the

this. we have a massive refugee issue in europe. it is a causal chain of events. one thing leads to another leads to another. you can think of those links in the chain. if you break a link, you no outcome.ve a bad climate is only one of the links -- in the chain. you could argue if you did not have president assad, if you had a decent government and syria they might be able to deal with some of the changes. they may not have tried to become self-sufficient in food in the 1970's, which means, everybody grow your on food. sounds good, but if you don't have enough water, what happens? he is above the ground water. and that is ok until you get a bad job, which is what they have and now they have no groundwater and other way, in the iraq war, more than one million iraqis

went into syria. so that was a big issue. now you have the farmers who cannot grow anything because they've used all the water a end is hotter and drier. to that a climate link and there is no plan b or plan c or plan d. they have gone into the cities and the whole place collapse. and it is run by the sky, assad, who is not who you want as your president. have a horrific situation in the middle east. climate is one of those contributing factor doors. i say this because i cringe when i see the headline, climate change caused isis. one of the was contributing factors. we got a bad drought in california, arguably the worst in hundreds of years, but we do not have isis in california. yet. we don't have a isis in

california. because we have governance. we have safety nets. we have ways to mitigate this, at least for now, whereas syria did not. so, i hope that answers that, john. we started off kind of narrow. i tried to broaden the scope of what our task force could look at. i have kind of talked about some of these things. let me step down a little more. i will talk about this. this is a graph. i did not have the colors on it. we know on powerpoint, if it is in color in most pictures. you guys aren't sages. in silence, if somebody shows , it is like, this is great. this is very simple. theed a graph to brief heads of the world navy. about 70 heads of navy in part,

rhode island, a couple falls ago. it really does not even have a whole lot of saying things like "climate" on it. this is the home, don't tell me temperatures rising by two degrees or three degrees or tell me the system is changing, tell me what it means to the military. so, this is kind of, i will apologize but not apologize, it is an military-it is. militaryeze. the ice is melting. it is coming out and in astounding rate. sometime in the 20 30's, we will see several weeks each year in which there is basically no sea ice in the arctic. which is an amazing trend in your lifetime.

even 10 or 15 years ago, people thought that would take at least a century or a couple centuries to happen. rather than happen in centuries, it is happening much faster. talk about all the implications that means to a navy. disaster relief, a lot of people talk about a big typhoon in the pacific. the u.s. navy sense ships. send troops. flies that is called humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. but, it is the disaster relief. i have that in green. honestly, certainly western militaries, the japanese military, the chinese military is getting better at this. a lot of militaries can do this pretty easily. enough, youdoing it will get a capacity issue. it is easy to do. level, like rising sea

droughts, forest fires. those are coming up in the longer term. i have that yellow color there. but, at least for the bases, it is probably still a few decades out before we see the big effect. but the things i have an yellow to orange, the arctic is changing very fast, as i mentioned. you now have russia that has certainly built up their capabilities. intentions are, frankly, much harder to understand. there is a lot of bellicose rhetoric coming out of russia. how much of that is for internal consumption? how much of that is for doing other things, and how much of that is like, hey, we mean it. i am of the view we cannot just discount this entirely because, a little pup is, what was the

nation that just invaded an independent sovereign nation? oh yes. that would be russia. you cannot ignore all the bombastic rhetoric because they have invaded places. recently. so, the arctic is a wildcard. then, the security threats. these geos security threats. like arab spring. that is happening right now. any questions on this? yes? the question was, has the navy's done anything in response to this analysis? of navy has a couple of things out and the department of defense, which the navy as part of, has kind of, since i have left, it has sort of taken over

a lot of this. high level of documentation. strategic plans. to do.s as far as what i would say on the disaster relief, we have that covered. they are thinking through what they will do. as you recapitalize infrastructure, how do you build it so it needs less fresh water. power have its own supply. it can be more resilient. you understand where the critical dependencies are. if it is near the ocean, you are almost part of a town. put hardou no good to levees around a base if your workforce lives in the town. you are shunting the raptor out of your basic hand into their kitchen. you're not going to have a workforce. to trys a pilot project

to put all of the pieces of government, the federal, regional, local government together. it is being funded by the white house. differentdded up 36 agencies. they must play nice together because they are all going to sink or swim to gather down there. they have at least realized that, they cannot have their own independent solution. the geostrategic risk is something the department of defense can needs to continue to really inc. about. good work on the bases and on infrastructure. they need to continue to think seriously about the geostrategic risk. that is the serious one. you were paradoxically look least like climate issues at will have the biggest threats.

are talking about how flooding is going to be a big issue. what about more heavily populated issues -- places. houston, new orleans, and so on. what are the plans? louis is atand st. nice place to live. , as weoing to be continue through the 21st century and certainly into the 22nd century, this is going to be a huge issue. you will see it in the science literature. there is a lot of debate about how much sea level we going to see in the year 2100. intergovernmental panel on climate change. they are very conservative. .hey are talking about two feet there is something called the national climate assessment. it says it is going to be between six inches and seven

feet. my responses, my mother could tell me that. as we keep going, the consensus is becoming more and more like, about three feet. i think a lot of people are missing that the oceans are not going to stop melting in the year 2100. that is as far as our projections go. keeps accelerating. so, long term, i will honestly be dead by the time this is an issue. you ladies and gents who are students now, you will be my age or older when this is really becoming an issue. kidding,children, no are going to have a massive issue on this. weyou know how much money spent redoing the levees after katrina? 14.6 billion dollars.

do you know how much money we have it into miami or new york or houston since then? basically, nothing. so, great. childa became the poster for a little while. he dumped a kind of money into their. him we have watched a asked which, in fact it was just doing the research, in about two or three decades, that levee system is not going to be big enough to deal with sea levels rise. ask for are going to another 10 billion or $20 billion. you have houston, you have miami, not to mention jacksonville. be that seagoing to level over time is the dominant issue. it is going to take time to get there. near-term, the security threat in the arctic is going to

dominate this issue. but, you are right. sea level rise issue, especially as get into the 21st century and the 22nd century, unless we get really serious about carbon mitigation, getting , this isn fuels now what is going to happen. i tell people, the ice does not caucus with the democrats are you can. it does not watch nbc or fox or c-span. the ice just melts. it does not care about our politics. it is just melting. a question? if i can get you to be up on the microphone now please. >> i was wondering if the united states had any particular special interest in the arctic

besides threats from russia. i do not know why you would be investing so much money. we do have kind of impending threats at home. rear adm. titley: question is, why should we care about the arctic? is it a fair paraphrase? given that we have a lot of other issues. would sayp to now, i you have accurately summarized u.s. policy in the arctic. do some nice science up there. we are recognized as a science has a neurotic but we have not been any infrastructure. i'm not know if any of you have been up the arctic or not, there's not much out there. just not much up there. the issues are going to be that the shipping routes really will be moving up there. not today, not tomorrow, but they will be moving up there. i'm sure everybody knows, they are the warehouse of the world.

you don't have warehouses anymore, we have container ships. our economy shuts down if those ships and those shipping routes do not keep going. that will affect not only people in the words, but everybody who makes staff or once to sell stuff, including farmers in the midwest. so, the shipping routes are one. you can argue whether we should or should not be looking for more fossil fuels, that if the policy is to continue to look for fossil fuels, the arctic is one of the places where there is still a lot. no you could, a gain, make some credible arguments that the risks are extremely high in the arctic. the costs are high. but we're going to have to see. what are the alternatives and we need to get serious. i will argue only need to get serious about that.

there are certainly other minerals up there. i see a lot of tourism growing up there. through some is a big driver in economies. we see much increased tourism growing up there. the other part is, it is sovereign u.s. territory. you mentioned the security as part of that. we do not just say, the coast guard is out of money so we're going to lutz are in a anybody who wants to have it. we do not so bad. i would do that with arctic? here's a question. secretary johnson is coming tomorrow. ask them this. spend, sir, all of these billions of dollars to harden our photos in the lower 48, when basically you have no clue what is going on in alaska. anybody could walk into alaska, get themselves an airline ticket with a made-up driver license and you can fly alaska airlines

into the united states. boom. you know? there is no well. i drove around it. so, it is u.s.-sovereign territory and we should treat it as such. it is not just like, oh yeah that and the president went to and now we forgot where he went. those are issues in the u.s. arctic. appearcture i have a that looks like it did not. this is an island. anybody know where it is? to the northeast of greenland. ofis norwegian kind territory. there is something called the ofaty of it that came out world war i. it says, basically it is norwegian but anybody else who signs the treaty can be there. so like, the russians are there.

ill-define to has control of the waters. the norwegians think they do but they are not sure. up there aregs interesting. we have a bunch of communications and electronic satellites that go around the earth called polar orbits. this is so close to the north point, you can control the satellites every time they go over the north. that is what these domes are. there are about 60 dems on this potato and they have a workforce, they have -- there domes on this plateau. do we have any international affairs students are? political scientist? we all know about nato.

norway is part of nato. what is article five? he raised her hand, what is article five? who else can tell me? exactly. an attack on one is an attack on all. i'm proposing, but that is it. you have this area not totally defined. norway thinks it is theirs. russians have a settlement on here. russians go and poke at the norwegians pretty hard. the norwegians find out the deputy prime minister of russia, under sanctions because of the ukraine incident, was there. how did they find out? through the media. they were not really happy. do you think the deputy prime minister of russia just accidentally ended up there? no. it was a message.

this is what the message -- the russians do. they poke. they look for spirits and scenes in the alliance. increased human activity, strategic space, and now it is grounded zero in the russia versus europe. pushing and shoving matches going on. everybody says the russians would not be that them. we will not be that dumb. you know? that is what was said before world war i, right person nobody would be that dumb. but we did. what did i have learned in 32 years in the navy is, never underestimate the power of the to make miscalculations. so? >> syamsul huda, i am diverging the conversation, but knowing very well from your study, and from what i've heard, we clearly

understand the direct and our climate is heading. a statementheard that was made. it said, if insects were to die onorrow, life honors -- life earth would cease to exist. if humans were to die tomorrow, life on earth would flourish. the question is, how can we as humans reverse our climate or can we slow down the inevitable? ok. adm. titley: a great question. the answer is, yes we can. if we want to. if we decide we have the will. and, that is, you know, that is the great question. where we have the will? sometimes we see that people are collectively pretty smart and we

do some pretty smart things. unfortunately, we also have seen where people are caught the blade not so smart. i wrote an op-ed last summer. i called it "ghosts of the to have aelated it european power got themselves in world war i, which everybody said could not happen and all of this. that there is a tremendous amount of hubris and ignoring the risks. we ended up with an awful situation. up, i brought this slide because it brings to mind, what can we do. the first thing we know is, if you want to go viral on the internet you need cute cats. that i do not have cute cats. but i have a llama. llma. is for learn.

there is a 16 page document with a lot of figures and it. it is written at grade 11 are grade 12 level. if people read that, you would know everything the general public needs to know about climate change. is not good enough, the national academy and rural society put out a 30-page thing written at the 12th grade level. now you are up to the 99th percentile of knowledge. so, it is not like, oh my god. no. there is literally the amount of time you would spend on two commutes, you can read enough to have a working knowledge. a sufficient working citizens knowledge of climate. i'm not trying to troll for people to get master's degrees at penn state or anything. l" is local action.

?hat can you do we moved from washington dc, to penn state. i got a budget. our choices were, we can ever really big, nice has that was about six or seven miles away from the university and not drive every day, or we could have a smaller, somewhat older house within walking distance of my office. that is what we chose. we have been able to, as time and finance has allowed, to upgrade the windows. we found a couple pieces, the pennsylvania style of architecture, no insulation. we put in insulation, that really helps. we basically tried to build it so it is energy-efficient. i do not know that to i can get solar on it. i think i have to knock a neighbor's house down, they do

not seem very happy about that but then i would have southern exposure. they are grumpy about that, but we may not do that. but ok, there are things you can do when you buy your next car. inc. about the gas mileage. not saying you have to have a bicycle and get rid of whatever. if you are working on a farm, you probably need a pickup truck. ok. that is fair. if all you are doing is taking your kids to the hockey game and the soccer game and you are in jacksonville, florida where it never snows, maybe you do not big a pickup truck or a suv. maybe you can have something that gets 30 5, 40, 45 miles to the gallon. this is not, live in a cave and where a hair shirt or anything. you can you do? does a ton of stuff. in rough terms, we as americans, we almost about one third of our

energy, one third of our food, one third of our food -- matter. roughly. i try to think of, what little things can i do that sort of knocks that down. am i perfect? no way. i wouldn't last person to sam perfect. but we try to work on that. there is local work you can do. i realize is geeky. we do not do enough to monitor the earth in a time series may have things are changing. if you do not know how things are changing, it is hard to say how they are changing. so, the "m" is monitoring. his advocacy. the way i look at this is, whenever you have an opportunity to engage and elected officials at any level from federal and down, my question is, sir ma'am,

what are you doing to stabilize the climate? do you support the neutral carbon tax, it is like dating 10 run, do not ask a yes or no question. it is an open-ended question. you might get a thoughtful answer, but even if you do not get a thoughtful answer, but you get is somewhere in the back of that politicians blamed it has registered. oh, this one kid enough to ask about this. if enough of us do, congress probably will not lead on this issue, but they can be read. they will follow the voters because they want to get to reelect it. i hate to say it, but right now this issue does not register that much. few people committed. and you think it is all b-you -know-what.

it is like watching the dishwasher slush around. we have to have enough advocacy to say, this is important. especially in places where you have a politician in the center or center right, so that they feel like they are not going to get fired by the voters of they stick their hand up and say, you know, maybe we need to look at this thing. there is a guy named bob english. he was a congressman in upstate south carolina. know, ande said, you here's hard-core conservative. he can quote the bible with the best of them, about kind of stuff. he said, you know, maybe the science guys are not crazy. maybe we should at least figure out what they are saying. and, basically, the voters gave him a blindfold and a cigarette and they shot him in the next primary. so now he is a climate hero, but a climate hero out of a job.

or lose, out of congress. i love you other people on the center or the right said, i don't want to be bob english. that was not any fun. so, we're the ones who are going to ultimately provide that advocacy. we know intellectually this is super important for the long-term. if we ignore it today, tomorrow, ok. but, it is super important. but, it is going to be for us in our system of government to give the congress enough top cover so that they can take this and not get fired by their electorate. so, that is my way more than two cents worth that answers that. yes ma'am? >> [no audio]

hi, i was wondering what policies you would like to see in the united states. >> the first thing to know is, i would not be able to get elected as. catcher so does not matter what that is. i would at least explore our, and i don't do the detailed policies, so i should probably not even say anything but i will. you know, i would explore some of the ideas like citizens climate lobby. the revenue neutral carbon tax. if you really constructed so that it is revenue neutral, can you convince folks that think throughout our government is too big or should not be bigger, that bad money goes back to people who really do need help with their energy. at the same time, basically,

probably remove subsidies for renewables. at the same time, remove subsidies for fossil fuels. there are big-time subsidies for fast and furious, oil, call. have some sort of fair price for the kind of damage that the carbon pollution is doing. you know. so we are sort of dumping the trash. you see the monte python movies of medieval times. people dumping the trash up their doorstep. that is kind of what we have been doing. we have not been picking up the trash for 150 years. man, woman, and child, every day generates about 100 and two pounds of carbon dioxide pollution. when you average it all out. that is the kind of number. so, you know, that is a lot. we have not done anything with

the trash. dispose of it. it is just out there. we cannot see it, we can't touch it. so we do not see it that way, but it is a lot. it has been harming the that i cared again, about the ecosystem? because ultimately, people depend on that. if the bugs go away, that is bad. if it is just people that go right, maybe not quite so bad. there is real harm to the things that sustain us. freshwater. to have productive agriculture. the ability to have our cities and centers of commerce in places that we know are not going to get totally flooded out by the ocean. all of those things. i am writing something right now, hopefully it will be published next week, that says,

you know, we are a carbon tax today. that $60 billion for sandy. tax we kind of a carbon are paying today. the question is, audrey going to pay a carbon tax that we vote on, or are we just going to keep paying carbon taxes after the fact? we know we're going to do it. we're not going to rockaway from new york city. we are not going to walk away from los angeles. we're not going to walk away from napa, california. los angeles. pick your place. we're going to pay. we can decide how we are going to pay, or we can be told how to pay after the fact. i would start with that. it may not be the best policy, but i would start the discussion with that. sir? we will go.

>> at mention about reducing fossil fuel consumption or reducing co2 levels. my question is, do we have a viable alternative? fuelser than using fossil , we use it for so many other things. is there a way we could have a viable alternative? me see, doitley: let i have that slide in the step? it will be in the next one. at on there we look is a couple things. despite what we have been doing, a lot of the renewables are becoming competitive on price. much of that is subsidies? it is hard to disentangle. by themselves, it is getting close. i would, and maybe this gets

back to your question, if i were king for a day, which i will never be. the united at how states, over the last 50-60 years, when we have a problem, and we also may have a problem, we tend to invest our research and development to try to fix that problem. so there is a graph and i am afraid i do not have it in this is maintained by the national organization for advancement of the united states. but i know this sounds geeky. that it is, and it is color coded, you can see almost to the day when president kennedy said, we are going to go to the moon. and then you see the investment. -- thatsee in the 1973

we put a lot of money into investing in energy, then it all went away. so, we have a lot of rhetoric. look at the money. when you look at the budget, we have not done much. when we say we have a problem, we need to fix something. if you invest heavily, by and large you can drive this down. we are not going to do that at 200 million or 300 million a year. we not going to get there.

time for the bonus round. >> i found it interesting, we're talking about how climate change creates conflict globally. it is an inherently a global phenomenon. an issue that affects everyone on earth. i am thinking that there should be more of a synergistic attitude toward climate change. it is great that we can get the public involved and reduce by little bit. it is great, but i feel like this is a global crisis. we need to be talking to other countries as well. i know we have global conferences, but those are rather ineffective. you have other suggestions,

how can we really you not countries to fight the issue. rear adm. titley: the united states is now number two. we're not even the largest single country. china has surpassed us. it is a belief that america can still lead the world in many things. cases, iorld in large was talking about whether we invest down to small-scale actions and supporting congress. so we look like we have a unified position to the outside world. our, i think then, puts negotiators and our senior

politicians in a much stronger position to say, ok, this is what we're doing. we are serious. will we share the technology? if you want to set a big, hairy goal, it is like, how, by the we assure 2110, could non-carbon-based power to every theon on this planet at level of what an average european has today? can you do that? can you not do that? out, and ito figure is not only the building of non- carbon, it is how do you start? how do you move it? those are areas where we could invest. it starts at home with credibility. otherwise it is talk, talk, talk and you guys are not doing anything.

use american leadership. maybe that sounds clonic, but i do believe america can still lead but we have to have credibility to do that. we cannot be the laggard and tell everybody else they should be fixing the problem. how are we doing? one last question? any last questions? sir? the previouste question, because it brings us back to something i wanted to ask a number of minutes ago. climatengs us to a change as a scientific problem, political problem, economic element. there is a problem for the following reason. if miami or houston face rising sea level, we have the

technology to respond. had as my adoptive country money to respond. so, my house in the netherlands below sea level and i was not fearing for my life. a number of countries is severely threatened by rising sea levels have neither the sea level for you. i would appreciate you commenting on this. the amount to mention of climate change. >> the reason i but the slide up, i think we have seen, and i labeled it good news and intentionally, we have seen in the last couple of years more and more different groups, from their expect of, including the moral perspective, and i work

with the school called catholic covenant, a layperson, a super guy runs it. the pope obviously had his and cyclical come out. encyclical come out. you would say, this is what it means if you are a follower of catholic teaching. same thing with evangelicals. i am doing a panel with some so what i'm seeing, and that moral and religious component, that is 12:00. if you go around, for insurance reasons, another moral component -- it is a symbol that i use -- it is the divestment of fossil

fuels from universities. you know, harvard did that. the president of harvard, my personal opinion, was pretty condescending to the people who started that. she said, don't worry children. we know what we are doing. for kelly, the student said no, i don't think you do. their 20 keep pushing on that. the health aspect, i talk about the security aspect. signs,s some dramatic you don't believe all my data? go watch that, it is impressive. but yet, i do have my polar bear floating on the ice, because talking about this issue -- we have been doing it for decades. business, theisky business guys are saying we have to know the price. we have to know this. i think it is very useful to coming and these talking to their stakeholders with great ability, we are all coming to the same answer that we have to deal with this.

short term, we will have to adapt. long-term, we have to get ourselves off carbon. -- iwise, the consequences think i was saying it at lunch. the earth will be fine. but the ecosystems may not make it. but we will make it. is that it? thank you very much. i appreciate it. [applause] >> on the next washington journal, left wing reports discussesul brandus the russian airstrikes in syria. the christian science monitor reviews the house gop leadership elections and has the latest