oh in china hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture we could just be eighteen years away from a climate catastrophe a world renowned climate scientist peter waters explain why in just a moment and whether you neal or stan what kind of healthy democracy plays the

national anthem at sports games i ask milk a good dog christian infants big picture pet. from record breaking hurricanes to rampaging wildfires and devastating droughts the evidence to run away climate change is all around us but if you want to see the real warning signs you have to head north and i mean all the way north to the arctic because this is there that the true extent of the threat we face is starting to make itself very very clear joining me now is one of the world's leading experts on sea ice and its interaction with our atmosphere professor peter water is professor emeritus of ocean physics and head of the polar ocean physics group at the university of cambridge he's also the author of a brilliant new book a farewell to ice a report from the arctic professor peter waters welcome back to the program i think

it's great to have you with us so first of all what inspired you to write this book well it was a mixture of personal feelings about the ice which had been studying for forty seven e s. . disappearing on me and that is no longer the same impressive ice cover in the arctic that they used to be and feeling more important about what that's doing to the world and the fact that it's not just a curiosity that the ice is shrinking away but it's having feedbacks which are having a very big impact on many different aspects of the world's climate i've heard the arctic refer to as the refrigerator for the planet not as a place to store your food but as in a temperature regulator how does that mechanism work and how is it being altered or distorted by climate change well the arctic is warming up about two or three times

as fast as the rest of the world and the the way in which it's now failing to do its job it is for instance the fact that the whole arctic ocean used to be covered with ice year round but now it retreats in the summer into a smaller and smaller zone in the middle of the arctic and leaves a huge area around the edges ice free and that area is made up of shallow water and underneath that show the water there's. permafrost leftover from the last ice age below that there's a huge mass of methane so when the. ice shrinks down it's not doing its job of keeping the water cold anymore so that means the water can warm up in the summer because of solar radiation that melts the permafrost and there comes the methane so we've seen very big plumes of methane coming out of the shallow seas

around the arctic now in summer and that that really is represents quite a threat to the climate because methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas a few months back i was in a small board or in tromso norway where the where the cages the big the big. methane investigation center for the arctic funded i believe by the norwegian government and we spoke with a number of the scientists there who who were a little more sanguine about the scenario than you suggesting that there are meth and tropical method genic i forget which is which way the bacteria that eat methane to live off methane and and that they their populations can grow extremely rapidly i mean literally as the methane is coming up through the water column. what are your thoughts on that what's the latest on the science on this i know you know ten fifteen years ago the clathrate gun hypothesis was broadly accepted in there was a lot of concern about it now you've got scientists saying no wait

a minute and you know what i heard in tromso what what's this current state well i think the problem is that the. the norwegian group for instance is working in a place where the water is deep and retained does dissolve in water but it takes a certain amount of time to do it so if you're me thing is coming out of the deep water three four hundred meters deep it dissolves before it reaches the surface you can see the briefing plume coming up from the sea but not getting to the surface whereas where we're looking which is in the russian out say yes the water that's only fifty meters and then the thing just has new channels to dissolve it comes straight out so i think the the the people are saying it's not a big threat the people who are studying it in deep water and not appreciating that in shallow water it comes straight down to the searchers there's such a such a difference one of your colleagues you and i met and spoke at the scripps

institute of oceanography. what maybe a few months back and i met one of your colleagues and he was all over the news last week as saying that the entire human species might be extinct by twenty one hundred if we don't get our act together. i've got heard you speak that directly or die early but what are your thoughts on on some of these worst case scenarios well i think they are. if you're going to say the human race going to be extinct by the twenty first century you have to say how that's going to happen i mean if we can say we're making we creating a planet which is more inimical to life is than it used to be it's it's going to be harder to live on this planet harder to provide enough food for people temperatures are going to be too high there's not going to be enough water all of these things are true but that's going to make life more nor difficult and probably produce

famines and. some sort of breakdown in society but i don't see that it's can actually wipe out the human race in itself you'd have if you're going to say what human race is going to be wiped out you have to say how that's going to happen and as far as i can see the only thing that can do that would be a nuclear war which of course is not that unlikely in itself but anything else is going to produce mayhem and disruption and a very nasty world but very nasty world will still be habitable so this could be civilization being sort of or maybe the k.t. boundary were very very large animals died but animals are size and small or seem to record through. how is that different than the permian were basically anything larger than a dog field to survive well the we don't know how long it took for them to die out and this is. because geology is looking at long times go

it even if it was quick it would have been probably thousands of years. if we're looking at man we can say it. twenty one hundred we might have a very much of a derelict civilization that can't provide. a stable society for more or less anywhere can't. avoid food for people the. but and that might then lead on to something even worse like warfare that would wipe out the the the race but it would take a long time i think for the whole human race to die die away and so i don't think it's likely that we'll become extinct unless we have a war. but our civilization various civilizations could actually are right this minute as a consequence of climate change facing some very very serious crises the arab

spring i think is a great example that talk about the arctic death spiral this is this is not only a pop literature but in your book what it says well when we started out working in the arctic we were finding that every year the extent of the sea ice go what went down a bit and so the sea ice was gradually shrinking but people weren't considering the fact that as well as shrinking it was thinning as well but i was working from submarines from the early seventy's and each time we went out in the submarine to measure the ice thickness from underneath we'd find the ice was getting thinner so the death spiral is is is where you combine the shrinking of the ice in. from year to year with the thinning of the ice meteor which is more severe in the thinning is such that the the average thickness of the ice is now only half of what

it was twenty years ago so if the if it's thinning by fifty percent and it's shrinking by fifty percent you're down to a quarter of what he used to have so that the death spiral really is a way of representing the volume of ice rather than just the extent of the thickness of the volume so what happens here on at the middle attitudes of planet earth you know in these temperate latitudes. when the refrigerator slash temperature regulator the arctic is no longer functioning appropriately it's not maintaining the jet stream apparently strongly enough are we looking at you know while way more severe weather events dramatically more floods and droughts. you know the earth i mean what what what what should we expect actually given what we know what i think we would be getting the wild weather events and it's interesting that the these extreme weather events in during the winter where you

have alternating extreme heat and extreme cold they date from the year when the first year in which the ice really shrank back in summer two to a low low area that was two thousand and five. and these weather events seem to be due to the fact that with the arctic warming up. move rapidly than the rest of the world the temperature difference between the arctic in the rest of the world goes down and that means that the jet stream which is the boundary between polar air and tropical air is itself down and as it slows down it takes up these big slow moving loads and a load these loads will push problem air into places it shouldn't be and push tropical air into place it shouldn't be so we're getting this these alternating extremes of weather and that's going to continue i mean i don't see the mek if that

mechanism is what's doing it then this can only get worse and that really affects food production because the latitudes where it's happening a very places where we call most of our food so that that's that's a big threat and the other one relating to flooding i think is is is largely due to the fact that sea level is rising at an accelerated rate. which is itself to mainly to the accelerated melt of the greenland ice sheet and the antarctic ice sheet and this means that as sea level rise accelerates we're finding that not only a coastal city is threatened and they will be threatened to the point where some of them will have to be abandoned but also we're getting much more frequent flooding. including extreme flooding of low lying countries like bangladesh and that that's going to be. a very large. course firstly of death and

destruction in the third world but also of the whole. damn foot to the to the economic situation in the first world in the rich world because all that the big cities of this world tend to be poor cities and they very often to have a lot of low lying areas which oh we got it as the the most expensive and most most sought after parts of the city in the us just like that down the hatches yes professor wadhams and it's a pleasure thank you so much facing with mr and the book by the way a farewell to ice this is just extraordinary piece of writing back if that's coming up can republicans really bribe their way to repealing obamacare they're certainly trying more on that in tonight's big picture panel with john mccain and doug christian in just a moment. our

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i'm going to just look at your watch it's hard to see washington post.

here's what people have been saying about redacted in the navy seals exactly just full on awesome stuff that the only show i go out of my way to launch you know a lot of the really packed a punch to sleep yeah mr john all. marjorie americans do the same we are apparently better than blue nothings better and see people you never heard of love redacted the night president of the world bank so very. many seriously send us an e-mail. all the world just dates and all the news companies merely players but what kind of parties are in t. america play r.t. america offers more r.t.

america personally. in many ways the news landscape is just like the feel real news fake news good actors bad actors and in the end you could never you're on. so much parking all the world stage all the world's a stage all the world's a stage and we are definitely a player. with their latest push to repeal obamacare on life support now the maine senator susan collins has come out against it how low are republicans willing to go to make their billionaire backers happy fast and its big picture panel.

for of tonight's big picture panel are neil mccabe of big league politics dot com and political commentator doug christian thank you both for being with us or big league politics it's a new gig new new site patrick ali a colleague of mine from breitbart started it naipaul i officially joined them october first oh good i'm pretty sure patrick's been on the show which of the best now thanks very much look and great having you here done toilet pleasure you know you're not a brand new venture but yeah ok so so let's get into this one public hearing republicans are holding before their latest attempt to repeal obamacare was the scene of massive protests this morning as hundreds of activists descended on the dirksen senate offices to try and stop a bill that if passed would result in millions of americans losing their health insurance according to the c b o meanwhile the two senators spearheading this awful legislation are getting so desperate they are now literally trying to buy their

colleagues support lindsey graham and bill cassidy have just updated their obamacare repeal bill to include more federal funding for arizona kentucky alaska and maine all states with senators who are either leaning against the bill or have explicitly said they'll vote no so in other words republicans are trying to bribe their way to a successful repeal of obamacare how craven are these guys willing to get in order to meet the needs of their billion dollars i am shocked that this kind of shenanigan. it is going on in capitol hill so it's unbelievable i have it's unbelievable time i have just broken i have just bought a new riot shocks that any political party would get behind legislation that is that is only supported by twenty two roughly twenty percent of americans and actively opposed by over seventy percent well there is another way and that is if you're going to give obamacare basically to a few states why not give care to all fifty states or i'd just repeal the whole

thing and then negotiate with the democrats to find something that works like what well i mean there are some things there probably there's probably some good ideas to single payer. and by the way there i mean there was a little bit of time for republicans to come up with a plan every time what was the twenty fifteen bill which all the republican voters know but it's twenty years you know the twenty fifteen bill was voted on by every republican senator every republican congressman but what happened is in march is paul ryan and his staff wrote a new secret bill with the insurance companies and that the last minute sort of swapped it out and frankly all of the nastiness and talks is that toxicity from this debate flows from that paul ryan decision to swap that insurance bailout bill for what everyone wanted to be more honest not to do so accuse your

dishonesty is not what i meant but just kind of more blunt and on the face of it to say that what is driving this thing is a whole bunch of misinformation we had sarah palin talking about death panels that didn't exist. you know chuck grassley the other the center was out there promoting that idea in addition to that you had you had the koch brothers with their their new campus thing you know with well i worked out so doctor with the speculum in the know but i think about johnson the cobra. spent a trillion dollars but and then where are they now but the point is that that's so much of the stuff i'm not speaking specifically necessarily about the ads that the coax were running but so much of the information that was being presented on right wing talk radio and on fox news was not only wrong but was lives what we do know a lot a lot but what is a fact two things i want to mention what is a fact is that there are millions of americans and small businesses that are paying higher deductibles and higher premiums but they're lower than they would have been if it wasn't for obamacare i don't know that you don't actually know that actually

according to the c.e.o. all going to see you know predicts a lot of things starting american medical association court i mean according to absolutely everybody the only people who are saying what you're saying are partisan republicans not while health policy wasn't supporting it to my second point let's just say that if we went back to two thousand and seven and looked at the c b o projections ten years forwards of the federal budget and compared where we are now i think you'd see a disparity so i mean the c b o it's guesses but it doesn't always guess well more often right there but the other thing is like when you have these mandated benefits like you know the essential benefits it basically clogs up and loads it up it doesn't it you should be able to free up the ability to write a song i want to be able to buy a policy that doesn't include emergency rooms for example or doesn't include search of a maternity care wait a bit more. please that are women human yeah or i what i said there and i want to go to existing addition a woman is being a female would be

a pretty i don't want her attorney to insurance do you actually think do you think we should have insurance the covers everything except testicular and prostate cancer well then that's not insurance don't that's my point so it's just a better it's just we're just it's just it's not a business like insurance is a business going to your it should be in fact what it was you just be welfare you read read read. while you did your borenstein essay about history of insurance and just. find out that in fact it was in fact really pushed as the as a nonprofit idea through churches originally well i mean the mess we have now comes from world war two because it was a tax head you know it was you know that's that's true but all right well you know it was true little bit but but there was a huge debate with the wall to root the. g.m. over how insurance was going to end them and we ended up with the end of three exists and is a victim of that i don't disagree i want to move move you know here around two

hundred n.f.l. players took a need in the national anthem yesterday a massive display of solidarity against racism that came just a few days after donald trump made disparaging comments about collin capper nick the former san francisco forty nine er's quarterback whose refusal to stand for the anthem got him blackballed from the league at a rally in alabama friday trump called capper tic an s o b and so the players like him who don't stand for the national anthem quote should be fired and quote so why are players even standing for the national anthem in the first place until two thousand and nine they actually stayed in a locker room all these decades all the actually stayed in a locker room while the anthem was sung isn't this kind of cheap reactionary and militaristic pseudo patriotism better suited to north korea than are ostensibly democratic republic i mean as alex smith of the kansas city chiefs asked why is trump being more critical of these players than he was of the neo nazis in

charlottesville that's the question that is the question why is the n.f.l. and their owners why are they being you know why are they getting in a tizzy over this and not to message me when most of our players are the they that they did a lot of work on to let me just say ah what they're doing with these players are doing is offensive it's a noxious to you to me and millions of other people and so mostly white people i'm not sure that ok there's a lot of people i served with who are not white who are very upset about this but it has nothing to do. it's absolutely says nothing to do with the flag it has nothing to do is also respect with that no way meals. how is that disrespectful turn your back is disrespectful kneeling i. don't mean i don't mean you i don't know what is here and what when are you going to ride where your boys tend ride with when you proposed to your bride did you neal know we're walking and a parking lot just a little bit out of me but still i mean come on you mean being you neal right do you meet the pope you kurtz are you pretending that you didn't know you're supposed

to stand for the national anthem as it were during a writing class what else are we going to produce out in the constitution no it's i obviously said in fact it's it wasn't in the n.f.l. until two thousand and it's something that i based our all aimed to do it and spend seven million baseball has always had out it's always been part of the baseball opener was her name was paul no it was not i mean that was that was out about football i know what i was going to say was i was right about which side of the fifty's there was that horrible why not that's only about seventy years yeah ok so seventy years of tradition doesn't make but ninety one is that i am insulted me and they're deliberately insulting us they're not all holding you they are testing racism and what is more american than protesting wrongs they are responsible for how their message is received tom they're adults they are professionals they are responsible for how their message is received and when they have recently why they say well the radio when they hear her if so added up we're out of time here but christians and as well for good reason sir and that's the way it is tonight and

don't forget democracy is not a spectator sport get out there get active tag you're it. and. we're not about america. were are. was yeah

well i'm sure you didn't know this past weekend you probably saw the some of the wall to wall hurricane or more reporting it was mostly a name vapid coverage like this you know when you can alter it and you can surround yourself with couch cushions you know if you can spot and a brick structure well we're back on the story of the big bad wolf the people who live in the struggle their houses are usually the stories of people who live in stone structures like this letter. who literally jumping the american population down the nursery rivals. very seriously there was there was very little mention of climate change ecological collapse you know you know people often say that we're the frauds right in the slowly boiling pot of water but we're worse we're frogs in the slowly boiling pot of water with program porters standing there and all of this can come toward me and. i can feel a little sweat on my breath oh ok so some say stay in your all those and generally

it's not so boiling out here ok. so i decided to offer fix the corporate media hurricane coverage if you look on the right. word here is the way to really make it five. so a lot out there you know you'll see this is actually it looks like. irma. the strongest atlantic hurricane ever recorded and said that often mexico in the caribbean sea is dark just close by. donkey an eighty five mile per hour winds for the longest duration ever recorded impromptu perhaps the largest evacuation and ever in the u.s. just two weeks ago hurricane harvey was the largest rain event to ever hit in the continental united.