Transcript
JACK RIVKIN: So let's start with what I will call, what everybody knows. At least I will not make this point as we have seen CO2 emissions on the rise. Sometime this year maybe next year, China in terms of angular emission with pass the United States, but the United States and Europe will continue to be quick emitters for a long time to come. That course will be a very long time before China, in terms of total emissions, gets very close to where US and Europe are in terms of total emission that have been produced by these societies. You can also say that NID is on the rise, but relatively speaking the emissions coming from their growing are still relative to China, and US and Europe are low. So recently I point this out is because carbon dioxide (CO2), or you can just deal with carbons specifically. Carbon is the issue, and it's producing climate change. So I say it is producing global warming. I think it will produce global warming. But the fact is that we are reaching a level of CO2 in the atmosphere that we have never seen on this planet before, at least in the last four hundred thousand years. And that is going to produce change. When I exactly show what the change is, some of the models in the case are warm trend or other changes could be produced as well. The belief is that if we get to a level of 550ppm in the atmosphere, it is a game change in the sense that we have an order. Not an order of magnetic change, but we have a significant enough change in CO2 in the atmosphere and we can't actually model all of the effects that will have on the planet and on every segment within the planet as well.
Even if we start the rise in emissions today, if we are able to think of turning off emissions tomorrow, it's very likely that as we get towards the end of the century, we will see at a minimum 1-3 centigrade rise in temperatures, and more likely even the impact will see 2-4 degrees change in global temperatures. We the United States can live in a fairly high world, so we made this by 1.8 and in terms of degree of Fahrenheit. It is important to do that in the US because anything that is 1 or 2 doesn't see to make a difference to US citizens. But if you are talking about 4 or 5 degrees, even the same temperature change if in the scale they can understand, they begin to believe that this is a problem, to which they have to respond.
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