a lot of jobs are in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture it's friday and earth day joining me tonight for our conversations and great minds is climate scientist and author dr good steak or discuss his latest book which shows how our actions now will determine the fate of its future plus the g.o.p. is the g.o.p. is playing hardball concerning the nation's bottom line we've come to some sort of

agreement with democrats obsessed with possible outcomes insights. and finally democrats are trying to cut off corporate cash in our elections and republicans are freaking out to take a look at a time in american history before corporations could legally buy our politicians. are the ones conversations of great minds i'm joined by a renowned ecologist and paleoclimatologists his work is featured in dozens of scientific journals and periodicals including national geographic currently he teaches at paul smith college in new york as a researcher at maine's climate change institute where brings to the table an interesting new perspective on climate change and the future of our planet he's

also the author of a new book entitled deep future the next one hundred thousand years of life on earth i'm pleased to welcome from our studios in new york dr kurt staver dr stagger welcome. dr stagger can you hear me. dr slager is apparently not here. ok we'll be right back with dr staters tekla. let's not forget that we are in the far right. and.

we never got the says nuclear keep him safe get ready for freedom. if you are here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture a. new website with twenty four seven live streaming news tells us what to do about the

ongoing financial heart unlimited high quality videos for download. stories never mainstream news. so. we listen to. her until such time. as welcome to shell and sell on the alone or shall we part of our desktop to sound the topic now i want to hear audio just does video on our twitter for politicians or please post on you tube every monday and on thursday the show long response is. let your voice be heard.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. the tides conversations of the great minds i'm joined by arena and a renowned ecologist and paleoclimatologists his work is featured in dozens scientific journals and periodicals who have national geographic currently he teaches at paul smith college in new york as a researcher at maine's climate change institute or bring to the table an

interesting new perspective on climate change and the future of the planet he's also the author of a new book titled deep future the next one hundred thousand years of life on earth and please welcome to our studios in new york dr kurt state after state are welcome . thanks for having me thanks for joining us i'm curious what even before i get into what inspired or alleged to write the future what brought you personally into this field. well i've always been interested in the past and interested in the earth and the things that live on it so in graduate school i studied paleoecology in paleo climate which is basically the history of climate in the history of life on earth and which legend to this so what led you to or inspired you to write the future of this current book and again the the the subtitle the next hundred thousand years of life on earth it seems like everybody's only talking about the

next fifty years next hundred or some people think it's going to end in twenty. right yeah exactly well it's the long term time perspective that really got my attention being a climate historian i'm used to looking at thousands of years of change like ice ages coming and going and things like that so i was looking through the scientific literature like i should do as a good scientist and came across some papers. some peer reviewed articles showing long term views of the future which we've never been able to model before and when i saw the time scales on this i was stunned and thought it is amazing i too had thought maybe the global warming would be over in a century or so something like that it turns out it's much much longer than that and we can actually map out the kinds of changes that are coming and it turns out there's a lot more than just global warming coming down the pike. i'd like to get into the details of that you claim that first you claim to be

a converted climate skeptic what does that mean. well i sort of say it tongue in cheek in a way but it's actually true first of all to be a scientists you really should be skeptical that's not seen as a bad thing you basically make your judgments based on the observations and data at hand and so a decade or so ago global warming was really picking up in the media people like me that are used to thinking of natural climate changes and huge natural global warming and cooling in the past we were a little bit skeptical like some of the maybe you'd better call them climate deniers or naysayers are saying that there are natural cycles and how do we really know that it's due to us well the science is in now and we do know that it's because of us for one thing we can look at what those natural processes are in the natural cycles and what we find is that they're really not doing all that much in recent decades while the temperatures are still going up the only other thing

that's really going out with it is the greenhouse gases and that's mostly us so as far as the scientific community is concerned the case is pretty much closed you put on your book that one hundred forty more or less thousand years ago there was a period of of very very warm time shall we say followed by a long ice age followed by now. the whole scene is of the current form time. and i'm curious what is the natural process that keeps flipping our planet back and forth like this. well there are a lot of things going on if you look at the super long time period like since the time of the dinosaurs we've actually been on a cooling trajectory and no one's quite sure why that is the greenhouse gases used to be a lot more abundant than they are now in the last two to three million years it's gotten cool enough now that the polar regions are permanently covered with ice

which they didn't used to be and in this new kind of a beginning of an icehouse state you could say small changes in the way the earth moves around the sun and relative to the sun actually make natural cycles where you bring slight warming or slight cooling to the key polar areas where the ice sheets began and where they start to melt. and so basically you know all you have to do to make an ice age come and go is that you cool down the summers a little bit in the arctic areas of northern canada let's say and more snow falls in the winter than can melt in the summer so it builds up over time and if you give it enough time you build up a giant ice sheet but flows under its own weight and buries places like new york city where i'm sitting right now as it once was. you talk in your book about how we were scheduled for another ice age in about fifty thousand years or another cooling

period and that we may have already smoothed that out with the carbon that we're throwing in the atmosphere right now and yet bad might not be the best thing perhaps it perhaps the wisest thing would have been for us and going forward to hang on to carbon to keep that carbon available for future generations to use if they need to intervene with the climate as it were and. framing this poorly but but you know the concept i'm talking about you can you speak to that. sure yeah actually involving ice ages is another thing that caught my attention because we are these new computer models that kind of show where the carbon goes once we release it they show that ok the oceans are going to soak up and dissolve most of the extra carbon dioxide within a few thousand years but then the rest of it stranded in the air until really really slow geological processes remove it so that we're talking tens of thousands

of years which is enough to interfere with future ice ages as you pointed out so because we understand these natural cycles that cause ice ages we can actually tell when the next one would be and the next one was scheduled to happen around fifty thousand a d. just a slight enough cooling to build up one of those ice sheets and it turns out that even in the best case scenario if we cut back our fossil fuels as quickly as we can . we will have released enough carbon dioxide to leave just enough floating in the air fifty thousand years from now that it will raise the average temperature of the earth just enough to cancel that slight cooling that would have started an ice age so if you're if you're maybe a radicals cynic or something you could say well maybe that's the bright side to something we've done but there's a lot more to the story than that i certainly wouldn't call it a good thing well what is that a lot more of the story of what is

a. high how is your view. different in as much as you're looking at thousands of years of impact from just this last century of carbon that we've been throwing into the atmosphere and and how it will have an impact over tens or arguably as much as one hundred thousand years how is that different from the contemporary on the one hand kind of al gore you know any day now we're all going to be cooked at least that's the of the cartoon character is ation of him we both know it's far more serious and you know more thoughtful than that and on the other hand the different singers you know don't worry be happy the oil companies know what they're doing and just let it burn all the coal they want. right. well the deal about there being a lot more than just the short term stuff i think is really really important because the most shocking thing of all of this i suppose or one of the many

shocking things is that the choice of having these changes lasts as much as one hundred thousand years and having them last many hundreds of thousands of years and being far more extreme he's going to be decided during this century in the next few decades and it really means that we who are alive in the world today are incredibly important in the long term future or what will become the story of humankind. and while al gore and fred singer and others are arguing about it's kind of the fine points of the short term warming the scientific community has been going ahead and showing that there are not only is this real of course but our impacts are way way larger than we thought and our decisions that we make either by doing it on purpose in other words switching away from fossil fuels as quickly as we can which we have a lot of good reasons to do besides plummet or if we just ignore it and plow on

ahead that simple decision one way or the other will echo on down through the ages of the future and there will be more than just the short term warming there are some other things i could talk about his well as when the thing turns around and gets into the recovery mode that will be stressful to well and the early part of this is the acidification the oceans is and you talk about how the oceans are really you know we talk about carbon sinks that's the giant carbon sink and what it does is it modifies the oceans in ways that. may seem irrelevant if you're not in the ocean except for the fact that that's the bottom of a food chain. what what what is the the o.c. any impact of all this carbon dioxide that we're putting into the atmosphere and why can't the oceans sink it out quickly. as i said there's a lot more to the story than just the warming and there's more to the story than

just the climatic changes as you're saying the good part of the story is that the ocean will eventually soak up most of the carbon dioxide but the dark side of that is an entirely different problem that doesn't have much to do with climate it's that when the carbon dioxide dissolves in the seawater it acidifies that it makes carbonic acid and that's already happening we can measure that happening in the oceans now and as that builds up the polar regions where it's cold and there's a lot of the gas going in and the deep sea where that stuff eventually goes yeah that is kind of money a real problem area for any arena life that has the hard parts that can dissolve an acid so anything like corals or crabs or any kind of shellfish you can imagine it could be very much threatened so. we could say well you know if it warms up maybe some people in the polar regions might enjoy those higher temperatures you know it will be a mix of winners and losers it's hard to find what winners there could really be or

what bright side there could be to this ocean acidification problem so that alone should be enough reason to switch from the fossil fuels you talk about this current era being actually something you're calling the anthropocene if i'm pronouncing that right. as opposed to simply the extension of the whole scene what do you mean by that and and well what anybody. it's actually really interesting it's a term that's referring to geologic time a very long time scales and what earth scientists do is go to look at the past and look at major environmental changes and species that have come and gone and they'll sort of block off the history of life for the history of the earth with these geological epochs like the paleo scene and the e.e.o.c. . and as you noted the most recent one is the whole of scene park. but recently eugene storm or another scientists have been noticing that well you know if you

kind of pull yourself away from the here and now and look at our time objective we are humans have become enough of a force of nature with our giant populations that pollutants were spreading all over the world that mass extinctions the moving around of species and of course the climate change by any measure to those would qualify as a geological outlook in the rock records where they say well let's let's maim it after the thing that caused it will name it after people so you can sort of translate the anthropocene as the age of humans and it's being used as a serious technical term now in the scientific community to sort of acknowledge that you've talked about there are basically four ways that we can kill ourselves all off by disease asteroid impact death of the sun a nuclear war the sun is not going to happen if if for a long long time nuclear war pretty unlikely at least to reach all the way down to

the last human in the southern end of the southern continents or southern hemisphere asteroid impacts are going to write off is not you know there are any big enough ones in the solar system that we know of right now to do a dinosaur routine on us and we we have yet to hit a disease that will wipe out our species. it seems in some ways that you're taking kind of the julian simon approach if you're familiar with his his bet with paul ehrlich back in the seventy's. not that not necessarily that will think our way out of these problems but that it's not entirely thomas mellifluous it's not entirely disaster and gloom and doom it's change and our work has to be to anticipate that change rather right. yeah ok all right we're here we're ok you're back with me ok ok yeah

we might i don't know how far you can back up to the oh we can off as we're doing this live but that's fine. i do they're quite the question really the bottom line question is is what. what impacts we were you know it's time of you're talking about the different ways that we could kill ourselves and the basically we we we want you know there's too many of us and we spread too far around the planet as human species to in all probability not vanish what we need to do is prepare for that future for these future changes what are the future changes that you're anticipating based on your science and what kind of preparations should we be making. right well we we we need to realize that the global warming we're in right now in the ocean acidification is just the opening chapter to a much longer story and maybe it helps to describe the graph that really caught my attention for this if you sort of look at the next hundred thousand years it's

basically realizing that the carbon dioxide emissions are eventually going to have to level off and then we verse and what that will produce is a build up of greenhouse gases and a rise of temperature that we're familiar with now but if if you go beyond twenty one hundred eighty which is kind of the limit of how most of us have been thinking you'll see that over the next some time in the next few centuries the temperatures are going to go up and then it's going to lose momentum as we stop emitting so much c o two the carbon dioxide is going to go up and then start coming down and so will the temperatures so there will be a period in a few centuries from now when we have this reversal time that i'm calling the climate whiplash period which will be any every bit as stressful as the warming itself because any adaptive strategies we've had to deal with the warming are going to have to flip into reverse relatively quickly and then we'll go into a cooling period which could also be equally stressful than the last little that

will basically look like a spike where it's been warming a whiplash time and then reversing into the cooling but the recovery won't be complete for a very long time there will be tens of thousands of years and if we release lots of more carbon dioxide hundreds of thousands of years for the full recovery so it will be that the sharp spike coming relatively soon and then a slow ramping off as it slowly recovers so will have the most extreme temperatures are rising the most extreme temperature drop will have the most rapid rise of sea levels possibly hundreds of feet depending on. extreme this yes will have the most extreme acidification of the oceans and will lose the most species all in the next few centuries so that will be the most stressful time until the very end of the story which we mentioned earlier which is when all this finally does level off and come back to normal and then we're going to be facing ice ages again and it

will be nice to have some carbon in the ground to release in the far future of people decide they want to try to prevent the next ice age and save themselves from that when you when you look at the history of the human race particularly the new european fossil and cultural history because that's in the northern part of that went through an ice age and the north northern north american when i lived in vermont the the. native americans of that community actually had stories of when the global war on the when the blew up sheets of ice to banish them some geologist the university of vermont actually tracked back their stories as being apparently relatively accurate. these changes these climatic changes produced massive cultural changes and and you know arguably the beginning or the end of agriculture in various places the beginning and end of different species arguably but the neanderthals vanished coincidentally with the with with an ice age how do

we had how do we adapt to these kind of changes what do you have any sense so you put your science fiction head on for a minute what what what will we do what what's it going to look like. well if you look at the past like that for example the native americans let's say or others humans have been through incredible climatic and environmental changes in the past the one of my recent research papers was about a tremendous drought that lasted for centuries throughout southern asia and most of africa near the end of the last ice age probably killed a lot of people were basically when the monsoons failed and yet humankind is so resilient and so adaptable because we're not just subject to the rules of evolution and genetics like other species are but we have things that are sort of on top of that so we sort of make our own habits we make our own tools and you can sort of

see evidence for today i mean people live just about everywhere from at least traditionally newitz could live on floating ice on the arctic ocean you go to the sahara desert there are people living there even with relatively low technology people have lived through bubonic plague although of course many people died from that a lot of people survived so if we're just talking about the human race as an entire species and of course acknowledging the lot of suffering and loss can be coming at us. i'm confident that humankind will adapt and find ways to deal with whatever environmental challenges are faced. and again not to belittle the ethics of this because we're causing these changes to happen and not to belittle the suffering that will go to that i do think it means that there will be humans experiencing all of these changes that we set in motion for the next thousands of years and that's all the more reason to do what we can to make those changes as

small as possible dr stagger we have two or three minutes left here i'm curious your thoughts i was unable to find anywhere in your book about the theory of the great conveyor belt of this ocean of water a warm water there. lows around the southern tip of south africa goes up and and stops basically off the coast of europe and falls back out of the bottom of the ocean and cycles back around it that is keeping northern europe temperate and the possibility that our warming might throw enough warm water particular off greenland or put freshwater rather into the north atlantic that that thermal hailing circulation collapse what are your thoughts on that whole concept that argument that theory and yeah and how this affects it sure it's kind of like a scientists dream when your research reaches the general public and people get interested in what would sort of be an esoteric thing about how climate can change

or that it's happened with this because of a bad suggestion that we could have a sudden shutdown of these currents and then drop europe into a deep freeze the problem with that is in order for that to have happened in the past we needed a lot more ice on the land than we do now we had about two or three times as much ice as we do now the last time that had a gigantic impact so most of that big ice is already gone so as we do have greenland melting let's say and dropping a lot of fresh water in most of the computer models now are suggesting that any slight slowdown or any slight cooling that could result from that is likely to be swapped out by the warming effects of the greenhouse gases so it's interesting in the past it was probably a lot more important than something we'd have to worry about now so if you do want to have an ice age or

a giant cooling the next one was due in about fifty thousand years and we probably stop that too so this this we can set aside that that concern and we just have to figure out how we're going to adapt all this dr kurt stagger thanks so much for being with us tonight. thanks for having me i could hurt stagger the author of the book in the future but next hundred thousand years of life on earth you can watch this conversation as well as all our previous conversations with great minds on the web site conversations with great minds dot com. coming up this week marked the one year anniversary of the b.p. oil spill in the gulf coast so is the government done enough to repair the damage and what are republicans really up to from playing politics with our debt ceiling our nine eleven first responders and job outsourcing tackle those questions next insights weekly wrong but.

let's not be given that we had an apartheid regime right. i think from a beautiful one well. we never government says to fear keep him safe get ready because you know your freedom . you know this.