Can We Cool the Planet? | NOVA | PBS

rising temperatures bring Earth's ecosystems to a point of no return we cannot go back there is no way back every year the damage is worse we have promising technologies that put solutions within our reach but if we are going far enough we have to have emissions reduce to zero even if we stop emitting co2 we still have the co2 we have already admitted so scientists are building a new set of tools has the power to guarantee a prosperous future our society has to survive we need to reduce the warming effect solutions cutting edge it's going to be revolutionary it's like science fiction there's a globe up there and high risk measures I really hope we never have to do this it's really important that humanity has a back up in a race to discover can we call the

planet

right now in new?

It is a new era in the history of the Earth in which we not only inhabit our

planet

, but we act as administrators of what we live off of. Since the industrial revolution, humanity has been conducting an inadvertent experiment on the Earth's atmosphere, pushing the climate to new extremes. Things are going to get hot. Well, you can. Attitudes have changed rapidly because everyone can see for themselves the climate change that is happening. What is happening is that a child born today will witness throughout his life a planet transformed by rising temperatures. How do we get here each time?

Every time you get in your car, every time you fly a plane, every time you turn on the heat, all of those things are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and if there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there is a higher temperature. and now temperatures have started to rise. If we continue to pump billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, we will eventually literally cook ourselves off from the worst impacts of planetary warming. We need rapid emissions cuts starting now. The developed nations of the world need to abandon the energy industry. system that they now have one that emits nothing zero within 30 years the good news is that we know how to do it, renewable energy is now the cheapest form of electricity on two thirds of the earth's surface and will be everywhere a carbon world -Free energy is coming, but climate impacts are happening faster.

The lasers are in power. There it is, so scientists are opening a second front in the battle. It has the power to bring new technologies that influence the way we fight climate change. Now we have so much data. this is going to be a game changer there are a whole class of solutions to do this job removing co2 from the air this little one this is just the beginning converting co2 from a waste to a resource we see this as a testing ground even extreme measures such as protecting ourselves from the sun, there has been a technical revolution in recent years that is unlike anything we have seen in the previous hundred.

This is a problem with a solution that may take a new wave of climate technology. us the rest of the way to lower the global thermostat we need to look at everything that is out there natural solutions co2 sequestration solar geoengineering there may be this idea out there that no one has thought of and that could be truly transformative

cool

ing the planet means first avoiding getting more CO2 into the atmosphere and then finding ways to remove it, but how much CO2 are we talking about? Imagine you filled the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol steps with coal and piled it all the way to the top of the Washington Monument 10 times that would be a gigaton of coal giga means a billion so that's a billion of tons now we actually burn 10 times that amount of carbon every year, people are actually going to dig that stuff out of the ground 10 billion tons of it and set it on fire in power plants in engines in factories around the world and then , because that carbon reacts with oxygen, 10 gigatons of carbon are burned, but 37 gigatons of CO2 are created at the current rate, that's just one year of CO2. emissions to mitigate the impacts of global warming we need to reduce that number to zero, but there is another problem: the gigatons that came before.

The most important fact about climate change is that the carbon dioxide we emit into the atmosphere stays there for thousands of years. Years, year after year, we live with the carbon dioxide that we have added over time, almost 1,000 metric gigatons since the industrial revolution began, almost everything we emit stays there and will stay there until you do something to remove it, remove CO2 from the air. It sounds futuristic, but it's a problem we've encountered before. Remember Apollo 13. It was about filtering out CO2. That was the big problem: how to get CO2 out of the air. In 1970, after an accident, the Apollo 13 crew aborted a mission. landing on the moon was forced to return to earth in a smaller capsule astronauts faced a big problem you are in confined spaces people exhale co2 you need to eliminate that co2 each exhalation caused carbon dioxide to build up making the air increasingly toxic, okay?

Let's all keep calm, solve the problem, but don't make it worse by assuming the astronauts survived by modifying their air scrubber to remove more carbon dioxide inside the scrubber. The negatively charged sites on the filter become polarized and bind with CO2 removing it from the air. Could something like this work in Earth's atmosphere? There is not much CO2 in the air compared to nitrogen and oxygen. Imagine a box with 10,000 ping-pong balls and four of them are painted black. Those are the CO2 molecules that those four are trying to find. getting balls out of that big box full of ping pong balls it's hard to get co2 out of a spaceship it's one thing getting it out of our atmosphere poses a much bigger challenge it's realistic most people we told we're getting co2 out of the air would say You're crazy, but here you see a large-scale direct air capture plant.

You see that it consists of 12 individual modules that capture CO2 from the air. Jan Wurtzbacher is co-founder of Climbing Works, a Swiss startup specializing in what is called direct air. We capture on this side we draw in ambient air with 400 ppm, that is, 400 parts per million of co2 and on the other side we expel around 100 ppm of co2 content, so three quarters are kept inside a filter with chemicals highly reactive compounds called amines that trap even small concentrations of CO2. Heating the filter then breaks the bond, you release the CO2 and can extract pure concentrated CO2 and then start all over again, but generating the energy to do this can produce its own CO2.

Your solution for that is garbage. Here we are at the top. waste incineration plant the reason we are here is the main source of energy for a process of capturing CO2 from the air. The waste heat from the incineration process. The heat that would have been wasted instead heats filters within the assembly that capture nearly 1,500 metric tons of pure CO2 per year, roughly what is expelled from the tailpipes of 300 cars once the CO2 has been removed. from the atmosphere with a direct air capture machine, the question is what to do with it. The big picture is to take one percent of the CO2 out of the atmosphere.

In the next five to ten years that is approximately 400 million tons and storing it underground, could we return the carbon to where we find it underground? There are many rocks near the surface of the Earth that would like to spontaneously unite with CO2. There is enough. These types of minerals could eliminate all atmospheric CO2 many times over. One of the best places to try it is Iceland. Here we are the land of ice and fire. We have rashes. We have earthquakes. Iceland is an island formed by volcanic rock called basalt. We see hustle and bustle like mountains here around me and they actually extend several kilometers downwards.

Basalt is a porous rock that binds easily with co2 for centuries. Sandra's daughter's team Schneiber has found a way to speed up that process. Carpex is the method of capturing CO2 and turning it into stone magic, but it's magic that already happens in nature. carb fix is ​​converting a third of this power plant's CO2 into solid rock in less than two years. The key is the water inside this purifier. CO2 gas dissolves in water to react. with faster basalt this crop is actually just a giant stream of soda the sparkling water is then pumped into the injection wells this is actually my favorite part of the whole thing from here the magic starts to happen this pipe extends over 2000 feet and there we finally release this fluid into the rock once inside the basalt the dissolved co2 reacts with the metals in the rock to form new solid minerals like calcium carbonate once we have injected the co2 into the rock it is there forever and Sandra is looking beyond Iceland to test a direct air capture unit that can absorb CO2.

We don't need a power plant. This can be done anywhere there is a formation to store CO2. What that means is that you can go back and you can reverse the process of emitting carbon dioxide into the air. Negative Emissions technologies such as direct air capture could help reach net zero once humans remove as much CO2 from the atmosphere as they introduce. So why isn't this the definitive answer to our CO2 problem? These technologies are very difficult to scale. To a significant amount of the base module of our direct air capture plant, which is a 40-foot shipping container, to remove one percent of global emissions from the air we would need 750,000 shipping containers, all to remove only half gigatonne of our annual emissions.

Direct air capture is very expensive and it takes energy to suck CO2 out of the air, so I hope you're not imagining that direct air capture sucks up all the fossil fuel emissions in the world because that's not going to happen, we'll need less costs clean energy everywhere before the promise of direct air capture can cover the magnitude of the problem on its own, so some are exploring another idea by recycling our 0.7 emissions correction factor, we need to think about This problem very pragmatically, we can electrify many things, but there are certain parts of the energy system that are extremely difficult to decarbonize.

A good example is aviation. Today you couldn't build a long-distance commercial airplane that could fly on batteries. It would carry too much weight. This is physically impossible. There's no way to avoid it. jet fuel we need to produce fuel that when burned does not emit carbon dioxide eliminate go ahead and rotate aldo steinfeld believes he has found a perfect way we are on target we have shown that we can produce liquid hydrocarbon fuels from two ingredients the light of the sun and the environment there may sound like science fiction or magic, but it's chemistry, it's heat transfer and it's also a lot of engineering.

It also captures CO2 and water from the air and feeds them into a solar reactor. Solar radiation is reflected and concentrated at the focus. by a factor of 5000 it is as if the intensity of 5000 suns, concentrated solar energy drives a reaction that generates a synthetic gas that can then be converted into fuels and here in my hands I have an example of solar methanol when carbon is burned in This Fuel returns to the atmosphere, but since it was collected there, the net CO2 is zero. This is called carbon neutral and hundreds of scientists like Aldo are working to make carbon neutral fuels a reality.

If successful, annual net emissions could be reduced by up to 1 billion tonnes is going to be revolutionary, but with these fuels costing up to six times the standard fuel, it's a revolution that has only just begun, but it begs the question: What else can we do by recycling CO2 carbon? It's this amazing building block. It's like those little Lego toys we used to have, only there are four little add-ons so you can put carbon to carbon, carbon to carbon to build all kinds of things. Imagine a world where everything around you is made of carbon. emissions from the products you use every day to the clothes you wear this ad from the xprize foundation presents a future where recycled CO2 shapes our world and a $20 million reward to make it a reality we announce it hey, there's a prize of 20 million dollars out there We are looking for in

nova

tors around the world.

If you know how to convert CO2 into a useful material, consider entering this price. We're trying to help catalyze the entire ecosystem of investor companies of people who can implement these technologies that the Carbon X award has brought about. Five of the finalists are here to put their in

nova

tions to the test. They are setting up shop next to an abundant supply of CO2. They have to take the emissions from anatural gas power plant and convert them into any material they want, from toothpaste to yoga mats to watches, each piece of equipment will be rated on its net CO2 reduction.

You could have a process that uses a lot of CO2 to make your product, but in the end it just produces more CO2 than it uses, okay, we don't want that, yes. We want things that actually reduce CO2 overall. We moved to the site about two weeks ago, a day later, and I think we would have snow here, which would be spending a lot of money. So Sinha is the CEO of carbon recycling technologies or we will cut. We are a carbon technology company that takes carbon emissions and turns them into solid nanomaterial products for use in anything from cutlery to car parts, but to make the biggest impact on CO2 and win this competition, Kapoor focuses on cement.

Cement is an essential component of concrete. glue that holds it together but producing it generates a large amount of co2 cement production represents more than eight percent of the world's annual emissions if all cement producing companies were one country, they would be the third largest emitter in the world the porv process makes co2 a necessary ingredient for concrete and believes it will also reduce the amount of cement concrete manufacturers need. It starts with an industrial waste dust left over from burning coal called fly ash. With the reactor we have behind us, we are expanding and commercializing. anEnhanced fly ash where the fly ash has been chemically activated to capture CO2 as the reactor spins the fly ash.

We inject CO2 ball bearings coated with a catalyst. We speed up the chemical reaction as the ball bearings move up and down. The movement breaks up the fly ash and roughens the surface so that more CO2 can be absorbed as the CO2 penetrates the surface of the fly ash. Forge tunnels along the way. In fact, carbon dioxide has bonded with fly ash to create a nanoparticle with a more reactive surface that binds concrete and strengthens it. with less cement, if concrete producers can use less cement in their production, they could significantly reduce the emissions that come from their industry.

The question remains: is it strong enough for concrete manufacturers to buy it? We just want to make sure the technology is good. and that works very well, one of our local partners is a family-owned concrete company based in Calgary called burnco. Burnco is testing the strength of concrete held together using a porv nanoparticle. When the cylinder breaks, we will read our final pressure there. There are impressive results in normal production, changes of three to four percent are expected and these show double-digit results. It is very encouraging, we are very confident that we can achieve a reduction of up to 10 in the amount of cement used today. but our real goal is to increase that number to 20 or 25, so we started talking about significantly moving the needle on the number of 37 gigatons per year, but even if these new technologies can scale to their full potential, they would only be able to block a fraction of our emissions, the total volume of CO2 we create in the atmosphere is much greater than the volume of any product.

I think people are losing sight of the central issue, which is that we have to reduce net CO2 emissions. The easiest thing, believe it or not, is to burn less carbon, not generate co2 in the first place. Carbon-free energy, such as wind, solar and nuclear power, can reduce the majority of our annual emissions and the rest could be offset by negative emissions technologies that remove co2 from the air. We will reach the day without global celebrations, we will reach net zero. The day we reduce human CO2 emissions to zero. I think it will happen in my lifetime.

It is feasible, but that day we have not completely solved the climate problem. What we have done is stop making it worse. The problem that persists is heat. The temperature of the Earth is determined by the heat that enters from the sun and the heat that leaves by radiation to space every day. CO2 from our past emissions traps energy in the Earth system. the same amount of energy as 500,000 of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima detonating at the same time that heat is altering our climate what will it be like when you know that three months of the year 115 degrees when vast ecosystems have become extinct people are going to push because to do something about respect and many fear that the Earth is approaching a tipping point that will trigger rapid change, the uncertainties that keep me awake at night are what if we are not doing enough and there is some monster lurking behind the door that suddenly? goes out into the world among us it is a good idea for humanity to have some kind of backup technology, something to do if we are surprised in a very, very dangerous way, some think the backup could be solar geoengineering, it is a way to intercept the sunlight arriving. enter the planet to

cool

it the central idea is that humans could deliberately alter the Earth's energy balance to offset some of the warming and climate changes that come from greenhouse gases geoengineering the climate is a controversial idea but nature can show us examples of where we could start clouds the cloud is just water that condenses into particles into small droplets these collections of droplets are in effect floating solar reflectors clouds play a very important role in controlling the climate because they control the reflectivity of the planet, especially over the ocean. you go from sunlight hitting a very dark surface where much of the sunlight is absorbed, to sunlight hitting an extremely bright surface that reflects much of that sunlight back into space.

Sarah Dougherty of the Sea Cloud Lighting Project is working on a way to enhance that effect. We add really small sea salt particles to clouds in a way that significantly increases their brightness and we do it on enough of the ocean surface to have a significant impact on global temperature, but how do we produce salt water particles and launch them towards the clouds? What we need is a nozzle like you'd see on some kind of snow blower, except the particles we want to produce are about one-thousandth the width of a human hair, so Sarah is working with an engineer who knows everything about spraying machines. super. fine drops a concept developer of the first inkjet printers in a different life i was an engineer and physicist and i could no longer enjoy retirement and just sit there and watch what happens once you know what's going to happen or What could happen, you can't just sit back and say yes, I'm going to enjoy life Armand and his team of retired scientists have been developing a cloud-clearing machine for more than 10 years.

They have self-financed this research in a borrowed laboratory. The space park is a really good place for them. Because of our history with the Palo Alto Aerosol Park/Research Center, we have infused the Marine Cloud Lighting project with new expertise and cutting-edge tools. Here Kate Murphy can make sprays from almost anything. This is our deep conditioner. Aerosols are tiny particles suspended in the air. It's ketchup for the clouds, they're not going to spray ketchup, but Kate can help the team design a nozzle to spray salt water. Let me give you some water. Alright. Kate's experience will help optimize the size and speed of particles to propel them. in marine clouds, so she will redesign the nozzle based on her computational fluid dynamics.

We hope to understand the effect of multiple nozzles, so we would want to measure things like the speed and direction that these crisscrossing laser beams can help reveal. If our mons nozzle will reach the mark, the lasers are on, it seems our signal is pretty good, so can you measure the vertical velocity? Do you have a measure of that? That would be of great interest to us. The park will be working on development. a complete spray system and then we would want to go out into real atmospheric conditions on the other side of the world. Outdoor research has already begun.

Armand and the team have shared their ideas with researchers in Australia who are testing cloud glow as a way to cool. The waters surrounding the project's threatened coral reef are specific and local, but some estimate that cloud glow on a global scale could offset all the heat trapped by our CO2 emissions. It will probably take 15 to 20 years to do the whole process. the research involved in understanding the big effect we could have by illuminating clouds and also what all the side effects could be. Those side effects are not well understood and could include alterations in ecosystems and rainfall patterns.

More research is needed. We have children we have. grandchildren, we are doing it for their future, you know and, frankly, we are all in this together, whether you have children or not, we are more than just individuals that our society has to survive, we are facing a problem that is getting worse, not better, right? need? consider more extreme measures in 15 or 20 years humanity may find itself at a point where the impacts are so great that there is a great demand for rapid action to prepare frank is now beginning to investigate a controversial technology that goes beyond illuminating the clouds would illuminate the entire planet by placing particles in the stratosphere could reflect some sunlight into space reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface and cooling the planet the effect would be immediate we know that this works because every time a large volcano explodes and injects aerosols into the stratosphere the planet cools that's the idea behind engineering solutions it's like drawing a curtain over the face of the earth the first time you hear about this you think well it sounds like a really bad idea how could not go wrong?

What we're doing to the climate as humans, that's really starting to seem pretty scary and crazy and really worrying to me as well. The fact is that CO2 is in the atmosphere, without a time machine, we can't make it go away, we want it to go away in the long term. run carbon removal but during the time when concentrations are high we may want to share solar geography to reduce climate risk all of that is hard for us yeah that's exactly what I want and then there's the balloon up there, Frank and David's team. is designing the first experiment of its kind called Scopex to investigate the impacts of solar geoengineering.

The only place I see the conversation getting complicated is where we do a risk assessment if you take these particles out. What happens when they return? What happening when? It gets into the environment. Are we putting people in danger? there are many things we might need to know where the existing experimental record is bad we actually need to go out and make measurements the plan is to launch a balloon 100 feet into the stratosphere and release a plume of reflective aerosols we want to expel the calcium carbonate particles , for example, and then go back through this column and see if the air evolution is the way we predict it based on our lab results.

This is a very small scale experiment and, in fact, the amount of material we are emitting is less than that emitted by a normal airplane flight. The scope may be small, but many fear that large-scale manipulation of Earth's atmosphere could trigger a cascade of dangerous unintended consequences that will spread around the world. On the planet, nothing in our scientific capacity allows us to understand the complexity of the interactions that would occur; It's not just that it reduces temperature, but what are some of the other effects on the hydrological cycle or on heat waves and droughts. a large scale manipulation of the earth's atmosphere, what happens if things go wrong, scopex is designed to begin to answer those questions, but there may be effects beyond the physical that no experiment can predict if we think this solution exists, then people may think it doesn't matter if you are polluting the planet, the root of the concern is that solar geometry and research, no matter how well intentioned, will be used as an excuse for big fossil fuels to fight emissions cuts .

It's like a dystopian sci-fi novel or something where we continue to belch all this CO2 into the atmosphere, but hey, it's okay because we have these little umbrellas that, you know, hide us from the sun. Sharing solar energy does not free us from the ethical and physical requirement to reduce emissions, but with so much uncertainty, some think it is better to invest in a different type of machine, one developed in nature's own laboratory over millions of years and with a recordproven safe extraction of gigatonnes of CO2 from trees. I go on a hike through a forest I have a tendency to look up and say well, oh, that tree is about 60 feet tall and then I try to calculate in my head, okay, how much carbon is stored in that tree, I think this is good lola fata jimbo is a research scientist at nasa sweet goddard space flight center has power limit things work she and her team are about to see these ancient trees with a new green light lights there is carbon around us yes you think of trees as a machine, then trees would be a carbon capture machine, when we look at trees, about half of that weight is carbon.

Lola and her team want to know how much carbon is stored in this entire forest so they can measure each and every tree. They are using a special type of laser tool we are using a terrestrial laser scanner that fires billions of laser pulses every second and then measures the distance from the instrument to what is around it the data we get generates a cloud of points thousands of millions of data points form a three-dimensional measurement of the volume of the forest and the carbon stored inside is so dense that it almost looks like a photograph, it's like science fiction this scan may seem like reality but this is data that reveals that in an area the size of a football field these trees store approximately 150 tonnes of carbon, all extracted from air leading Tom Crowther to ask: could we include trees in the race to reduce CO2?

Our lab is urgently trying to figure out how to increase forest area around the world to capture as much carbon as possible in the fight. against climate change tom's findings began with a surprising discovery we thought there were around 400 billion trees on the planet but we showed that there are actually around three trillion trees there are more trees on the surface of our planet than stars on the great galaxy The question is how many more trees could we add to understand the global forest system? We need to map many things. We need to know where the forests are, where the forests could be.

We collect our data from millions of places around the world where scientists have been on the ground evaluating ecosystem data, such as leaf fall patterns in forests around the world. I'm trying to understand the seasonal rhythm of plants. Microscopic organisms like tiny worms that feed on the soil beneath trees. In this clearing there are millions and millions of nematodes living in the soil decades of satellite data on factors like rainfall and temperature, when I look at ecosystems most of the time I do it from the top down and with all that data we can begin to View patterns around the world using remote systems.

By detecting information from satellites and machine learning technologies, we can generate maps that can predict which regions can support new trees and which cannot. This truly is a data revolution, the detail is astonishing and the potential for new forests is enormous outside of urban and agricultural areas, there is room for approximately 2.5 billion acres of forest. The area we identified is equivalent to the size of the United States, so there is a huge area available for restoration, enough room for billions of new trees, all absorbing CO2. the air, if we restored a trillion trees, the right types of trees in the right types of soils and grew them to full health, they could store an additional 205 gigatons of carbon, to put that in context, we have released almost 660 gigatons of carbon. carbon in Earth's systems since human industrial activity began restoring global forests, and conserving the vital forests we have today could remove much of that excess carbon.

This is a really massive carbon reduction solution and we knew this was going to be a huge flash in the pan, but these findings also made it feel like the study is causing a lot of debate, on the one hand a lot of people are talking about the carbon restoration potential. strength, on the other hand, I would say a lot of people are very upset about it. The uncertainty about the amount of carbon stored in trees is so high that we can't really make informed recommendations about how many trees we need to plant. Lola wants to use new technology from NASA to fill in those areas of uncertainty with the concrete data we have.

More than 20 Earth observation satellites right now from NASA alone observe our planet Earth, but what we're seeing is all in two dimensions. What we are missing here is the third dimension. Enter a powerful new tool called Jedi with the same laser technology used in its ground-based scanners. Lola can get a three-dimensional measure of forest carbon from the international space station. Jedi means research into global ecosystem dynamics, which is what you're seeing here. About the size of a refrigerator, you can see the lasers shooting From the bottom of the instrument towards the surface of the planet, we can see a complete profile of the plant materials.

The game changer here is that it will be a near-global data set for the first time. Jedi will provide clearer insight into the carbon that new forests could store, but equally important, it can identify the old forest carbon that we need to preserve. Forests are really important for our water supply. Forests protect us from the heat. The forests breathe. They breathe in some way, just as we do when much of the carbon is lost. ecosystem services that forests provide and that have a direct impact on people's well-being, but in an increasingly populated planet, trees are not the only living beings that compete for land, we already use all our agricultural land to feed our current and future population.

In 30 years the demand for food will double if land is taken to solve the climate problem, another problem is created. Is there a solution that can solve more than one problem at a time? Some people are looking for ways forests can help slow climate change. our research is a little different than that we are looking at grasslands i want to have enough so we can do experiments in california wendy silver is looking for a way to reduce co2 right where we grow our food grasslands from the earth this is a beautiful classic annual grasslands grasslands grow in places where there is drought for part of the year and these grasses have developed excellent tools to obtain water, particularly by growing more roots and every time the plants invest a lot of their energy in the roots it is like injecting carbon into the soil, but tilling frees it. that carbon and degrades the soil and producing our food creates even more problems, we all eat food every day, we have to grow that food and we create a lot of organic waste in the process, when the organic waste is deposited in a landfill or in a mud pond creates an oxygen-deprived environment favorable to certain microbes that in turn produce methane, a greenhouse gas 34 times more powerful than co2, we are trying to address three major problems, waste that degrades health of soil and climate change, we came up with something relatively simple: Composting food waste is rotated regularly by adding oxygen to the mix and keeping methane-producing microbes at bay.

Create this organic, nutrient-rich resource as a slow-release fertilizer that helps plants grow by turning waste into a nutritious compost that can boost plant growth and potentially become huge. extensions of Earth's food crops into a carbon storage giant we now have 10 years of data showing that a single application of compost to the soil surface can have a long-term impact on plant growth and increase storage Carbon and Soils Wendy's research shows that a single layer of compost can increase plant growth by up to 78 and increase soil carbon by up to 37 percent over three years. The real challenge is extrapolating from small soil samples in the field to large chunks of California or the world.

An enormous challenge as the search for solutions continues in the coming decades, stopping our emissions remains the most urgent challenge today. If we really did nothing to limit carbon emissions, we would have climate changes as large as the changes from the glacial period to the interglacial. saying and doing that in a human life with enormous potential impacts, the more mess we make, the bigger the mess we will have to clean up; Today we can decide whether we continue down this path or dramatically take our economy off of coal, oil and gas, every great transformative solution starts with something small, it starts with a couple of people talking, they make a small version, they make a bigger version, more people They pile up, this is a solution, but we need thousands of solutions if we want to address climate change, there is no magic solution that will solve this problem.

The main challenge we have is that these transitions do not happen overnight. We already have the tools. but we really need to start moving we need better transportation systems we need solar energy, wind energy and water energy and probably nuclear energy we need to plant trees we need to manage our farms better we need direct air capture I think we probably need it all we need to start really looking what can be scaled up and sustained for decades, if not centuries, that's the challenge here, but it's an incredibly important challenge 15 years ago, no one would have predicted that emissions in developed countries around the world wouldn't decline fast enough yet, but That gives me hope and should give everyone hope that with a combined power of human ingenuity.

In fact, we can solve this problem to order this program on DVD, visit the pbs store or call 1-800 play pbs. Nova episodes are available with passport. nova is also available on amazon prime video.