As someone on the chat says, Richard Alley is “brilliant and twitchy.” More kindly, he’s an animated speaker. He shows photos of his ice-drilling expedition to Greenland. Is there global warming? Yes. He runs through the evidence. The biggest cause is fossil guels: The typical US driver buys 100 pounds of gasoline per week. We’re burning fossil fuels a million times faster than nature created them. Global warming is a natural trend but we’re making it much worse.

Most of the effects of global warming are negative for humans, he says. Some high-latitude economies will do better. But, it could dry up the grain-belt, kill off a whole bunch of species, raise sea-level and spread tropical diseases. [Ok, overall, I’m against global warming.]

It’s hard to make it better but easy to make it worse.

He hypothesizes that the climate moves by staggering up and down. He shows a chart that shows that in the Ice Age, the temperature staggered but the CO2 level changed rather smoothly. Possible conclusion: Now that CO2 is rising again, we should perhaps expect big swings in temperature.

He shows satellite photos of the ice sheets in Antarctica. They’re melting. These are just small ones. But it’s possible the large ones will melt. Goodbye Florida.

We can do things about this. We can put CO2 into the ground, we can conserve, we can use solar. It might take 1% of the world’s economy ($250B/year) to clean this up. Someone could make a ton of money doing this. , he says. [Yet another good presentation. And, great Tufte-esque display of numeric info, as someone on the chat pointed out.]

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