tv Fine-tuning the Climate Deutsche Welle October 17, 2020 10:15am-11:01am CEST
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12 people and wounded dozens meanwhile armenia is accused as a vision of continuing to shelter populated areas within the disputed nagorno-karabakh region hundreds have been killed since fighting broke out over the region in september. you're watching think of a need to have more headlines for you at the top of the hour thanks very much for watching. and you hear me now on yes we don't need you and i last year's german chancellor will bring you an angle of madoff and you've never caught have surprise yourself with what is possible who is merkel really what moves and what holds up to 2 people who follow along the way maurice and critics alike join us for metals last august.
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the planet is training and reveal facts of climate change many researchers believe we have to intervene to prevent us from happening which why so many people it might sound a bit like playing god. manipulating oceans seeding clouds. creating a sunshade for the art out of salva these are just some of the ideas. you can't tackle something this scale this scale moving this fast. it's just science modifying our climate is it hubris in iceland researchers have already timed greenhouse gases into stuff on there that you can see you sort of white spots and that's what the c o 2 we injected into the part of the reservoir that's the solution to apply definitely in my opinion this should be the solution to the plight of the large scale. scientists want to interfere with the arts processes.
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can geo engineering save us not just by getting harmful c o 2 out of the atmosphere but also by cooling our planet. we're on our way to meet some researchers pursuing radical ideas. i'm worried that climate change has become a kind of political abstraction people have lost track of the drive to protect their part but there are lots. of harvard university as one of the most controversial climate researchers believes it's high time we had an emergency plan his idea is to create a sort of screen using dust particles which would reflect the sun's rays weakening or even holding global warming. first big pilot project names copecks
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keeps being postponed and there's still not too much opposition. what it hears is that something that might in combination with emissions cuts reduce the overall climate risk maybe substantially that's the evidence we have required calls so the question is to what extent that solar charger reduce climate rest actually harm people if art like extreme storms extreme temperatures sea level rise those are research questions that we don't know the answer to. so called solar radiation management is a gamble little research is being done on the risks and yet it could be a last lifeline when it comes to curbing global warming. in practice it would mean at least 10000 aircraft injecting the stratosphere every 2 years the planes would release sulfur particles as evenly as possible at altitudes of molten 10 kilometers . these particles would reflect one or 2 percent of the incoming sunlight.
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the fact that danced in the stratosphere cools the planet has been shown by powerful volcanic eruptions such as pinatubo in the philippines in 1991. time the global temperature dropped by normal point 4 degrees. in the march and you have to put in there well it depends how much solar we wants so there's no right answer to that but you know the quantity we measured it something like a 1000000 tonnes a year which is that of a well it's a lot of not a lot. it's we're putting billions of tons a year of c o 2 in the atmosphere so one of the ways to think about it is there's a $1000000.00 to $1.00 ratio between the amount of warming power of c o 2 in the atmosphere and the amount of kind of cooling power of say so if you're a gas or some other material in the stratosphere so a 1000000 tons is not technologically a lot it's doesn't cost a lot but it's
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a real direct perturbation to the environment there's a net tell us also that the stratosphere is just a place you should not interfere because it's so sensitive you're speaking as if the alternative is not on interference but the c o 2 is already in the atmosphere even if we cut emissions to 0 tomorrow which is basically impossible but even if we cut emissions very quickly which we could do that doesn't make the climate problem go away and humanity is a long way from 0 emissions once we started pouring some fine into the stratosphere for some change would have to be replaced regularly otherwise temperatures could rise to levels even higher than they would be without the many people ation. for technology transit skeptics. my biggest fear is that climate change will advance to the point where this planet can no longer sustain human life. to his true jang fuse. but so no geo engineering won't change weather
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and precipitation patterns damage the ozone now and produce more acid rain some studies show some interest for dru geo engineering is worse than climate change itself and even researching the matter is these dangerous governments are watching this closely well companies are watching this closely the military is watching this closely. so there's a political experiment of topping that says you know what what if we could go this route and you're opening up a pathway and the further you go down that pathway and the more you make it seem real so so an experiment is is isn't is is research but it's also political theater you have that you will never stop people from thinking and from searching for ideas and solutions so the idea of engineering is already in the world so you can't stuff that. you can't stop the idea of doing it in airing from existing but but what you can stop is it being considered a good idea many people including me have talked about how an equal solar
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geoengineering is how it would help one place and hurt another but actually in climate models when we put it even amount of solar to a sharing in it seems like really every major region in the world has their climate risk for at least 7 patients with this leads to a planetary wide experiment you have one planet and you're risking the whole planet to do that experiment for sure solar geo actually has risks but not doing so are you measuring also has. a wearing creasing be a factor of climate change we can't accurately predict the consequences of geo engineering. we are on our way to visit an environmental activist who's committed to strengthening nature's own capacity to sound buehler. to know what my biggest fear is. is that the history of the collapse of civilization. is really repetitive. and we're seeing the tail end. of
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one of the. most expansive. civilizations. in human history. in remote south america chris tomkins and her husband doug have given vast areas of land by the nature of together with the governments of chile and argentina they created 13 national parks an area to signs of sorts along. the past was patagonia park since the death of her husband chris tompkins lives here alone. home does to come right on into the house and to please take our shoes off. it's the. local. split the end of the world yeah christine tomkins was head of the outdoor clothing
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company patagonia husband had founded the brands as free and a north face yet in the 1990 s. they left the business well and went on to invest around $350000000.00 in nature conservation i don't believe that technology is some sort of techno fix that will fix all the technology that got us here in the 1st place look if i thought that was even remotely possible in the short term i would say great and then i really do say well then why are you showing up so late. because the party started a long time ago there's no way to turn it back there are no messiahs when it comes to this you can't tackle something of this scale this go moving this fast would just science it would wilson said we should give i think nervous. back to
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nature in this size and scale you do it can then make an ecological difference you can enter these places and you understand what is was could be and that's an enormous enormous contribution. i have begun to see the value in things or major the value of things more by their absence. chris tomkins and imam's the destruction and inequality in the wild in her mind entire regions should be protected from humans and especially from the clutches of the global minds or economy here on earth cannot save us from climate catastrophe probably not but maybe there's more to it than that it's about spacers where natural systems can regenerate where we can say for things that represent life on
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this planet. when. we believe that all life has intrinsic value the 9 human world is struggling and much of the human world is struggling so we see the health of all life on the planet guy in the wrong direction have done for the last 30 years say. they call this. the answer. and it is i am not interested. i don't believe that consists where we want to go is humans are among whom are. not even sure. what does that mean for our approach to fighting climate change
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is it better to leave things alone or to intervene and try to limit warming to give ponds and animals in their present time out to eat zones a chance. in davos a meteorologist is investigating another way of cooling they are. item a no go zones are one of my biggest fears about climate. change is that the oceans supplies will become even more unequal we are droughts floods and especially in terms of our trance that they'll be moved climate refugees and more wars fought because of climate. thinks it's possible to manipulate cloud formation in such a way that global temperatures for the likeliest candidate seem to be cirrus clouds so's there is clouds have a greenhouse effect if they hold more heat radiation in the earth's atmosphere than they reflect sunlight. it's the only type of cloud that we know has
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a warming effect. cirrus after winning streaks of ice cloud for many kilometers above the earth's surface as are to you directly if you got rid of all cirrus clouds you cancel out the doubling in c o 2 levels of the. count's have a big influence on climate and temperature the lower one is cool the un they should definitely stay but serious clowns have a woman a fact they formed when i just knew clearly i am present and yeah right when an airplane's tampines condemns water vapor. cirrus clouds form naturally in cold humid conditions although they do reflect some some bite back into space they only allow some of the thermal radiation from the ark to escape so on balance the heaters are in order to cool the planet cirrus clouds would be prevented from forming like you parts of the atmosphere could be
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seeded with desert danced for example the ice nuclei would grow faster become larger and fall to earth as the radiation balance would change and the temperature would drop a little. live for the whatevers have the advantage of sahara dust would be that we know. so it wouldn't do too much to the ecosystem it would have no side effects of. that when it comes to testing this method out a small scale test would get lost amid the noise of natural variability of the clouds as you know you would really have to do something on a very large scale to see if it worked i'm not sure that that would be possible political. because who would make the decisions which bodies would decide which individual countries would do something like this is the land good as it was my home. and in any case who would benefit from it
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in order to answer that question or they can no man wants to learn a lot more about clown. this measuring device attached to a balloon using a laser to examine individual cloud particles it's not clear that thinning out serious counts in central europe would have an overall benefit and if the seeding was done incorrectly it might cause even more cirrus to form but perhaps this method of halting warming would be effective in the far north. it would definitely make sense to seed arctic cirrus clouds especially in the winter. olympics because we have no sunlight during the winter months and so it would really just be canceling out their warming effects and yes we want to preserve the arctic sea us of course but there are economic interests in the arctic being never so who wins out thus convincing. manipulating the
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warming serious pound to still theory but making funder ground rain down in order to prevent damage from hail has long been practiced in germany so called hail fires like all get macone show that weather isn't just a question of things so what's in there horgan. you've got the liquid. and acetone solution with 3 percent silver iodide. should get there is too much at all you have got a pump and a valve controlled from inside or behind is the combustion chamber and there's an added miser nozzle where the mixture ignites the room. these days people across the won't manipulate the weather china has a huge government agency that sends rockets into the clown's how and whether the silver iodide works hasn't been conclusively proven it probably creates more ice
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crystals which become rain more quickly since launch scale hail damage in the area around. in 2006 there have been no more instances in the region which the talk will lead to the figure that because of turbulence the plane gets pulled up towards and also pushed downwards that can cause stalling you have to make sure the structure doesn't get overloaded avoid that the clouds don't pull you into areas where you aren't in control and i mean you have a. whole good macone flies where other pilots wouldn't he tries to spread the silver iodide into updrafts that way it can rise and get distributed into the cloud from a bomb. in one sense climate is nothing but the sum of weather events to change the climate weather has to be manipulated on a large scale and permanently hail fires only and to influence weather on
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a local level. but beyond that vibration it's what we're doing isn't exactly geo engineering or if it's more like protection we're trying to change the material state from solid to liquid in that sense the impact on the atmosphere is relatively small. giving but in general would say i don't think it's a good idea to interfere with the. there globally. that. one on. my list but the guys they're letting a genie out of the bottle and it could have its revenge if things change to the point where people can't control it anymore i don't think anyone wants to experience that. people will probably be prepared to take bigger and bigger risks as the effects of climate change while some. graziers are mounting everywhere like the on edge here in the swiss alps the mountains
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a crumbling. village on the sickly a monteverdi one day when i think of the climate and global warming i also think of all these steep mountains where rock falls and landslides can happen i worry about the people who live there and. switzerland is one of the european countries most affected by climate change. only if you want to glacier yes you know who go to that song has been observing the on match for a long time over the last 6 to 8 years the gracie amount has again accelerated enormously did so well to decide the glaciers terminus has receded 3 kilometers sense 870 now it loses an average of 50 or 60 meters of links a year to meet the police sometimes 101 who'll listen this size fits all how many years until it's completely gone shrewdness. based on models i think in 80
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years it'll be a long way so really tiny like a bit of blue isn't it maybe your heart lead us to think when it hurts to think of a glacier like this which is huge and very beautiful and picture at meetings on. the effects of. the mounting grain santa isn't just an i spent a problem a mountain where on the most frugal has started to move an incredible 150000000 cubic meters of rock has become to slide. since 2012 it's happening faster and faster cracks of foam and dozens of meters deep in time mountain could come down on the glazier before humans began warming the won't the on that was about 400 meters thick a field that is 400 meters of ice gives about 30 bars of pressure so
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that 30 bar pushed against the mountain because that pressure is now gone as the glaciers melted the mountain is sliding down to the glaciers terminus so it's just sliding away which turns its own unimaginable forces. it's almost 2 kilometers wide and 1.3 kilometers long and then everything is moving that's unbelievably big that orse. had so listens to the mountains using geophones g.p.s. devices measure the displacement while satellites observe with radar 'd even if the great catastrophe combi stopped the swiss want to be prepared when the mountain collapses they spend 200 $50000000.00 swiss francs a year on securing them mountains this is still only. enough for us as nationalists what's happening is extremely striking because you rarely see it it's unbelievable that new fractures are occurring not only in existing weak areas but
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also right across the goodnights the hard. nature is telling us something saying don't turn the heat up any more right right like we're being shown how it will be if we keep on like this yeah i suppose. getting the genie back into the bottle here is no easy thing in peru researches are asking how the oceans might help us avert a climate catastrophe that would turn and so on the ocean is such a fascinating. and beautiful habitat impacts on the society worry that my grandchildren won't be able to experience it and its beauty in all its richness and for literally. 4 marine research or 3 bezout the plan isn't to cool off by reducing some light not to mitigate the greenhouse effect itself. he wants to influence the oceans in such
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a way that they absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and so reduce the very thing that causes temperatures to rise. there's an age to go so to do choicest i'm excited about the idea as a person to go many people it might sound a bit like playing god let's but after all we change so much on land. deviates our larvae are wildly active and don't think twice about land clearing here or creating another manmade ecosystem their system of power but when it comes to the sea we find it hard to say why we shouldn't make sensible changes for those. the oceans are already a gigantic c o 2 reservoir 50 times larger than the atmosphere they already absorb a quarter of our greenhouse gases is that the limits of the oceans potential or is
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it possible to make them do a little more. than. just . rivers our heads and international research group of 60 scientists and technicians they want to understand how climate change is affecting the special current system off peru. that. does best it was the best thing we can do now is to really tap these options and not wait any longer because in 10 years we're going to have to start and. blowing them in 10 years we'll have to begin climate engineering measuring these so-called negative emission technologies somehow getting c o 2 from the atmosphere and storing it somewhere else otherwise we're not going to achieve the climate target set in paris technically not to have a. good idea is to want to officially create a system like the natural one caused by the homebuilt current off peru which
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ensures rich algae growth fish and other marine animals benefit to a smaller government it's an incredibly productive system here nutrient rich water from the depths is brought up through what's called upwelling that creates a lot of phytoplankton growth leading to a very efficient food chain the vault. could it be replicated as a kind of global and conditioning system to access the deep water hoses up to 100 meters long would be lowered into the sea. the cold nutrition rich wants i would be pumped up points floating wind turbines could provide the required energy. when it reaches the surface the deep water would cool the half but above all it would fertilize the op unless out of. time tom would begin to grow absorbing c o 2 from the ass and when it die and it would take the greenhouse gas with it into
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the depths. there's already a lot of upwelling here but the question is could we do it in regions that are completely unproductive today we call them oceanic deserts they're not dry but they're nutrient poor so nothing grows they make up a good 50 percent of the oceans these so-called deserts. the idea we're looking into is this if you artificially create upwelling there you could absorb more c o 2 and you could also boost the fishing yoked. there would have to be thousands of these systems in the us. to make a real difference. as military force or free bazaar shows us his experimental sent ops the aim of his research is to better understand marine food chang's.
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he calls the floating ranks calls on. this is what artificial systems for the op whiling of deep water would look like. to share a smoke pot technically speaking it's possible the question is whether we want to do it the potential of the oceans is huge the supply of nutrients in the ocean depths is virtually an exhaustible not so on our ship. or free because our hopes that a significant portion of human made greenhouse gases could be absorbed into the oceans in this way his experiments have already yielded an important finding in order to absorb more c o 2 venues transported upwards from the deep water the pumps and the hose systems should be repeatedly switched on and off this technique would achieve a 4 fold increase in the c o 2 uptake of the oceans in these areas as a positive sign to fact fish populations would also be stimulated. but
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nothing stays on the seabed forever it would be a case of buying time time we desperately need so far governments have an engaged with the topic of geo engineering there are important questions to be answered like who would decide what measures to pursue who would pay is the un the right institution so what i'm worried about is that my granddaughter who is just 2 months old she will live to the end of the century and i don't want her to live in a world where somebody else decides to spray into the stratosphere and. the planet without asking her. passion on lives on lake geneva he was the right hand man to u.n. secretary general ban ki moon now he had some nongovernmental initiative by team to increase the political awareness of geo engineering. scientific technical engineering issues related to these new technologies are sometimes quite
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challenging but the governance issues are even more challenging this is part of the culture of managing climate risks that we have to think about and we need options probably and we need more and we need them sooner because we are in for. individual nations manipulated solar radiation on their own yet last passion or fear is that it could unbalance the climate in other countries. and you know what is that plausible scenario is that a country that is baby badly affected by climate change for example a group of small island countries will fix it if they decide to do it and solar radiation modification is at least a direct costs scientists tell us it's not that expensive so as a medium sized country could do it and wealthy individual could do it to save the
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world could be done by a major nation today yes. which brings in problems right of course that's there but but that's true of all sorts of things so there are lots of things in this world that could be done you know utterly day that are done david you're going to look people say and i and say the u.s. government you know will do this unilaterally but it will be fair to the whole world you know i don't i don't think about this i don't think that's just that's a realistic scenario doesn't lead to it's unable to take advantage of the weather is something that of course gives the nation an advantage if they can do it isn't. i think it's already being done today because the moment he see to allow us to make it rain then the water that might have been bound for a neighboring country is gone up by one call you have a company. that can go you know in the same way that arms dealers go around the world and say oh well if you want to if you want to be safe you know buyer technology. such unilateral efforts could jeopardize the
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climate of a neighboring country although the intergovernmental panel on climate change has warned of the risks it doesn't rule out geo engineering as a last result. is something the intergovernmental panel on climate change says must in order to prevent global temperatures from rising century after century. all c o 2 that humanity has released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels has to be removed. we've come to iceland to find out how. iceland's not just geothermal power plant it's already being achieved on a small scale. what i'm most afraid of when it comes to climate change is not we will have a large city local refugee problem not it will turn nations against each other this
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is class whisper klein while tests it's technology it's like a vacuum with circuit in here this c.e.o. to. sort of stick to our surface of a specific chemical it's in this unit there on the. and then we get the c o 23 years out on this site. so it all comes through here and it lowers it from $400.00 parts per 1000000 from 2 to less than $100.00 to less than $100.00 yeah ok . that's really how i mean the concentration of c o 2 is a very little in the air. but still to it's rather little. which makes your. i think a bigger technological challenge than cuts in c o 2 from point sources. c o 2 filters in a similar way there's nothing new about crime watch technology the chemical processor some based on mains derivatives of ammonia that combined with c
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o 2 when the i mean math a full day heated then they release the c o 2 for final storage the process is repeated thousands of times but the method called carbon capture is very energy intensive each ton of c o 2 filtered from the yeah requires 2 and a half pounds and can alter hours of energy a huge amount so it only makes sense in places with lots of excess renewable energy all white state like here in iceland with its infinite geothermal energy. where you magic on earth where we have hundreds of thousands of these machines yeah i can mr graham yeah. i can i can imagine such a world where we start to think only locate those units we had we have the favorable theological conditions but of course the c.r.c.
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test to make sense of course but i mean i guess we have to we have to thank big and we have to act big if we are to be successful in getting one to. match one be cheap each ton of c o 2 filtered by climb rocks costs about $500.00 euro and want them where do we put it the researchers in iceland have found a spectacular with a copper thinks experiment the 1st step is to dissolve for c o 2 and won't water like soda so we inject down to your lawn with there are 2 or 2 kilometers. on top of the aft so it's 800 meter of groundwater. meaning what we have very high pressure much higher pressure than in here needed to keep everything dissolved into there more or less there's a there's a lid of 0. this came here and then we have the
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the very exciting chemistry happening as well because what it quickly the c o 2 interacts with the purcell for us so in less than 2 years it's turned into a new type of rock and you know once it's rock it's just rock it's not going anywhere. contains lots of calcium magnesium and i am these minerals react with the greenhouse gas theoretical sort of the capacity of a soft on earth are the a minimum an order of magnitude larger than c o 2 that we would emit if we would were all fossil fuel available. which we hope will never happen so far just 12000 tons of c o 2 power yeah are buried here. to make a difference the number would have to be in the billions concern for the state of the art is want striving scientists and conservationists might chris tompkins.
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but her approach to preserving the beauty of nature could hardly be more different she wants swathes of nature to be restored as much as possible to the way they were before human intervention. so when we bought this ranch. all of the local were forced into the high grounds because this was all used for grazing lifestyle. so this was a big fight. between ranchers and conservationists and still it's in argentina. that. bridge you see when i go serious competitors and. they want to get rid of you everywhere around the world there's this inherent conflict between conservation so. it happens almost everywhere really. the
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patagonian park shows want challenges have to be overcome to turn back the clock and save what could still be sanct. 600 kilometers of fences had to be removed 30000 sheep soem roads dismantled and trees planted. it took more than 10 years just for the grassers to return. bringing back negative animals has proven to be difficult. there's now been success with the endangered and deer humus also back. after species have to be bred back into the area. here on the argentinian border of the park but only to south america are being raised. nando's. they had completely disappeared from this area.
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the creatures are flying close they have 5 or so they are only to warm them through the chilly patagonian winter. $6970.00 ready been released into the wild the plan is for a population of $100.00 it requires huge effort to retrieve what was once lost. the impacts of climate change the loss of top predators and how that is a cascading effect over all habitat and how it affects human. well being as well all those things. it's not something that is going to happen the future is happening now you know a lot of people don't believe that's true but then not believing in doesn't make it
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he's less true are we going to survive actually if you look at the process we've been through to the earth the damage i don't think that's the question i think that's a very anthropocentric question are we going to survive i don't think all of us will why is that why are we doing this. as the question and all the answers at the moment anyway lead me to think that where willing to risk everything so that we can have a 2nd refrigerator i have now you know and that's why people young people and old people are in the streets. because how dare you as that says. and chris tompkins himself has now exemption
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if the younger generation isn't to end up being forced into using geo engineering then climate protection efforts must increase dramatically. and yet the very prospect of technical solutions could stine me efforts to carbon c o 2 emissions it's a certainty that some people who want to fight it has dimensions or it's like a big oil or false originations make exploit the work we're doing exaggerating how well this works falsely true enough with lies and claim that we don't need to cut emissions that's of course complete nonsense we do have to cut emissions but i don't think the fact that people will put it we explored this a little bit is a reason that we should you know hear no evil see no evil try and pretend there's nothing here. he's got the call from the moon i haven't given up hope that will turn things around in time then is the end if we do i think it would be
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responsible to do some geo engineering for a time all just to flatten this peak of the warming a little bit as we used to have albums at the top i'd say temporary solar radiation management because removing c o 2 from the atmosphere will have to be done over a long time as all the cea to leave a message has to be taken out of the atmosphere would have been to steal engineering the term geo engineering is a misnomer most of it will never understand it in terms of going in there like engineers has to feel our way and learn as we go and we'll have to be able to stop at any time without it coming back to bite us all still that's a basic that siren to toss out so i'll only consider such measures if we know for sure we can stop without negative consequences down a tiny suv optima trusts us as are most of the sciences and ambiguous existing measures on to not to keep the. i'm stable so it's probably only a matter of time until roger gold geoengineering comes into play how will we
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park in the next few years it's really sort of thought to have been pointed out how things one moment in mind are not good we are ready to drastically change. our way of living on the idea was to museums. put a lot of effort into movies and authors i thought available but we need to acquire that. huge scale and if we do that we are that we will be successful. to destroy beauty to to destroy wholeness. to come around. to contests just are still strapped up and it's going to change. the breakdown of social structure sinister and settle. in on and there is a bonus to the good stuff. rest in all of us in the end
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the light of climate change. africa today. what's in store. for the future. for the major cities to get insight. enter. the funny so against the coronavirus pandemic. where does science stand. and what new findings have researchers made. information and background into. the corona up to. 19 special. monday to friday on t w. this
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is day devaney news live from berlin mania and as the vision try to overnight missile strikes multiple civilians are killed or injured in their sleep as fighting flares up the gyno of the disputed region of nagorno-karabakh bringing with it fears that last week's russian brokered cease fire has all but broken down also coming up the riot place in thailand crackdown on protesters defying a ban on demonstrations and the prime minister shrugs up the mounting him to quit well look at what's next for the democracy movement.
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