He provides statistics: The 10 warmest years in history were in the last 14 years. Then he shows a series of later space photographs, clearly indicating that glaciers and lakes are shrinking, snows are melting, shorelines are retreating.
He shows the famous photograph "Earthrise," taken from space by the first American astronauts. The documentary is based on a speech he has been developing for six years, and is supported by dramatic visuals. They came from Central America, where like many areas in the tropics and subtropics, the combination of these elevated temperatures and droughts and rain bombs from the disruption of the water cycle are driving people away from their homes because they don’t have anything to eat.He stands on a stage before a vast screen, in front of an audience. We got a lot of them on the southern border of Texas and of the U.S. There-last year there were four times as many climate refugees as there were all the refugees from wars and conflicts. And that’s why a lot of them are already migrating. And that is why there are so many areas that are now in danger of becoming literally unlivable, where human beings can’t survive for more than two or three hours outdoors. We’ve seen the heat index reach 165 degrees in some places-the combination of heat and humidity. We’ve now seen temperatures 125 degrees and above. The hottest seven years were the last seven years. Now, last year was the hottest year ever measured with instruments. And I think it’s one of the reasons for this wave of populist authoritarianism that is threatening democracy and capitalism.Īnd those two lines you saw in that graph, they show the lockstep relationship between CO2 and temperature. But my political experience tells me that too many, too soon can trigger xenophobic reactions. We’re-I’ve talked to and welcomed the refugees, and I think that’s correct. Think of the destabilizing effect that has on political equilibria around the country. The United Nations says that we may have 1 billion climate refugees by the middle of this century. The cumulative amount that lingers there, as Alexandria said, now traps as much extra heat every day as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours. That’s where all the greenhouse gases congregate. If you could drive a car straight up in the air at interstate highway speeds, you’d get to the top of that blue line in about five minutes. You see a picture of the troposphere from the space station behind me, it’s so thin.
We are now putting 162 million tons of man-made global warming pollution into the sky as if it’s an open sewer.
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