Ted Talks

06/04/2025

So where climate realism is concerned, I have some questions. Is it realistic to ignore the one to two billion climate refugees that the climate scientists are warning us will cross international borders and have to move inside their own nations by 2050 because of the climate crisis? You know, the temperatures keep going up. 10 hottest years were the last 10.

Last year, 2024, was the hottest year in all of history. Yesterday in parts of the Persian Gulf, 52.6 degrees. And for those of us who use Fahrenheit, 126.7 degrees. A few days ago in Pakistan, 50.5 degrees. That’s 122.9 in Fahrenheit. And they’re telling us that as the temperatures go up and the humidity goes up, the few areas in the world today that are labeled physiologically unlivable for human beings are due to expand quite dramatically by 2070, unless we act to cover all of these vast, heavily populated areas.

Is it realistic to ignore this crisis? Look at what a few million climate refugees have done to promote authoritarianism and ultranationalism. How can we handle one to two billion in the next 25 years? Already here in Kenya, there are 800,000 refugees, 300,000 of them in this place where, of course, the USAID cuts are now cutting the food aid 70 percent. Is that what they mean by adaptation?

We have to also ask if it’s realistic to ignore the devastating damage predicted to the global economy. Whole regions of the world are becoming uninsurable.

We see this in my country where people are having their insurance canceled. They can’t get it renewed. We have seen predictions that we could lose 25 trillion dollars in the next 25 years, just from the loss of the value of global housing properties. And over the next half century, according to Deloitte, it would cost the economy 178 trillion dollars if we don’t act. But if we do act, we can add to the global economy by 43 trillion dollars.

Is it realistic to ignore the fact that right now, Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice every single hour? In Antarctica, decade by decade, the ice melting has accelerated. We’ve seen the doubling of the pace of sea level rise in the last 20 years, and the predictions are that it’s going to continue dramatically. Is it realistic to ignore the rapidly increasing climate crisis, extreme events that are occurring, practically every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.

We lost 3.5 trillion dollars just in the last decade. And you know, the fact that these scientists were absolutely correct decades ago, when they predicted these exact consequences should cause us to pay a little more attention to what they’re predicting is in store for us in the years ahead, if we do not act. The drought last year and continuing, at some level, in the Amazon it’s the worst drought in the history, of the Brazilian Amazon. 90 percent of the Amazon River in Colombia went dry. This is the third year in a row that we’ve had these massive fires in Canada.