It's nice to be back here. I didn't know whether I was going to make it or not. I live right now in way down East Maine, and I fled the foot of snow behind me. If I sneak back tomorrow, I'll get there before the next one. I'm a marine biologist, and I spent the vast majority of my career studying things that interested maybe 12 people in the world. I loved it because I loved biology, and I love ocean life, and the spectacular beauty of it, and the puzzles of trying to understand it, but about, oh my God, I'm 72, so maybe 35 years ago, I began to realize that everything I'd ever studied had disappeared or was on the way out, and that what I'd taken for granted as nature was something that my children would never see, and so I became very involved in issues, I'd like to say deep issues of ocean conservation, but always from the perspective of the fact that for some weird reason, I actually love the corals and the fishes, and the sponges and the seaweed, and when I gave a TED talk, which has the cheerful title of How We Wreck the Oceans, it was a kind of a lament for the extraordinary damage that we've done to ocean life, but around the last time I was here, I started to realize that although most people sadly don't share my affection for sardines and jellyfish, they have a deep affection for themselves, and that the threats to the ocean life that I love are, if anything, more dangerous to us than they are to the natural life of the oceans, and so this is a very different talk because this talk, you know, the last time I talked about overfishing and coastal pollution and climate change and poor corals dying and all that stuff, you can watch it on your website, but this time I'm gonna talk about all the human beings whose lives are gonna be placed in very severe jeopardy, and if you think about it, the crises, the global crises that are gonna be caused by these events that are going to play out, and that stuff sort of in your business. So let's start right out talking about sea level rise 101. I think this audience knows all this, but you would not believe how many people don't know it, and that's terrifying. Sea level is rising because ice melts when it gets hot and because water gets bigger when it's warmed, and the reason the earth is getting warmer, as you all know, is because of emissions of carbon dioxide. So far, sea level rise has been mostly due to thermal expansion, so about this much globally, the ocean has risen as the water is expanded, as it got warmer, but, you know, at this point, it's really most about melting the ice on the land and God only knows there's a lot of it. None of this is controversial. It was predicted by a guy I once met and I spelled his name wrong, it wasn't Gustav, it was his father, Svante Oranius, who predicted exactly what would happen in his Nobel Prize speech in 1896, so this isn't exactly news. And sea level is rising a lot faster than we thought it would, which is the really sort of scary part. It only rose about seven to eight inches in the last century, it's done more than that, really pretty much up to now. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is an international UN group of distinguished climate scientists, makes projections every few years about how warm the earth will get, how much sea level will rise or whatever, and there's one thing you can say about them, they are consistently conservative. They always get it wrong. They've done so many IPCC reports that it's P less than 0.05 statistically that they will underestimate everything. You see that for sea level rise, the solid lines on the top are the real data. All the lines below in the gray stuff, which is the confidence interval, is the projection of the IPCC. These people have been screamed at for being radicals, they're conservative. They're always too conservative. And sea level is growing, is rising faster and faster, because what's going on is when we warm up the earth, it's not just the temperature, we set off all these chain reactions of events. For example, it used to be in the summer, you know the Northwest Passage for hundreds of years, nobody ever managed to sail across the Arctic Ocean in the summer, now it's sort of a Paseo, you can do it and sell tickets. And the ice is melting really, really fast and it's melting much faster than anybody realize. We understand now why it used to be the ocean, the Arctic Ocean was always white in the summer with the snow on top of the ice and it reflected back the heat, but now there's all this melted ice and seawater below it and the seawater looks black and absorbs more heat instead of reflecting the heat that the snow used to do. And so that heat which is absorbed warms the water even more which means it gets warmer faster, which means more ice melts, which means there's more black surface, which means there's more heat absorbed and blah, blah, blah, and before you know it, there won't be any ice there in the summer in 20 years. And then the other thing which is actually like a horror movie is that methane gas is bubbling out of the permafrost and the lakes and the sea floor of the Arctic Ocean. Methane is 30 times stronger as a greenhouse gas than CO2 and the thawing soils are getting warmer because there's more methane which makes it get hotter, which means there's more and more and more. So these are positive feedbacks and they're a real pain for climate modelers because they make everything nonlinear, but here's what it looks like. On the left, you can clearly see black and white. The more black, the hotter it gets. The more white, the cooler it stays. The white is on the way out, it's gonna get hot and that will be irreversible. And then on the right you see in an Arctic lake this methane gas just bubbling up continuously. You can light a match to it. You gotta have it be a stove and it's just coming out all the time in these vast quantities and it's just gonna keep doing that. And then that's the disappearance of the ice and the Arctic Ocean. I mean, there won't be any there very soon. Okay, so these positive feedbacks drive the modelers nuts because it's all about very complicated, nonlinear dynamics, really difficult mathematics. And we keep, we empiricists, we boring empiricists as opposed to the modelers, we keep finding new feedbacks and then they have to go out and try to figure out how to incorporate those into their models. And as I said before, the IPC scientists were not alarmist, they were too conservative and that's really bad news for half the population. For the United States of America because we lost 20 years that we could have been doing something about this. So how much will sea level rise? Certainly as high as the Naval base at Norfolk and in San Diego where I used to live, you guys are gonna have to move. The latest IPC projection, which is very conservative is for about one to three feet. But what's really bizarre about this latest report is they say we're only two in three confident that it will be within those limits. And that's just bizarre for modern science because what you're saying is there's one third, one in three chance, we don't know what we're talking about and that it could be bigger. And that's the thing we should be worried about because a one in three chance of a terrible outcome is a really bad thing. And I think this is really interesting about all environmental problems.  You go to a plastic surgeon, you say, fix me. The guy says, well, you know, there's a one in 10,000 chance that you might die. You say, I like my face, right? Or you put your kid, your kid goes out to walk to school and somebody tells you there have been a lot of accidents lately. There's a one in 10,000 chance your daughter will die walking to school. You would not accept that.  That common sense has not penetrated anything about the environmental policy of this country or any other country in the world. And it's time to catch on. So why is the confidence so low? I mean, it's, we're really smart. We've got these satellites, we've got all this stuff. How can we be so wrong or so unsure? The problem is Greenland and Antarctica. 80% of all the fresh water on the earth is locked up in Greenland and Antarctica. If Greenland melted tomorrow, sea level would be 23 feet higher. Boom. Okay. All of Antarctica will probably never melt, but if it did, it might be 100 feet higher. Okay. It's very unlikely that all of Greenland's gonna melt in the next 100 years. Very, very unlikely, which is good news, right? But it's incredibly worrying that there are rivers, and I mean rivers of meltwater pouring off of Greenland 24 hours a day. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and maybe a bunch of you in this room have been there, it's absolutely beautiful, beautiful place. You know, sort of down around the Antarctic Peninsula. That ice sheet is unbelievably unstable. It's moving, it's bending, it's burping, it's not happy. And my friends who go down there on cruise, they come back and they say, Jeremy, you would not believe what's going on down there. When it breaks, it will break. It will break suddenly, not gradually.  It's, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has its feet in the bathtub. That was fine as long as it was frozen all the way down to the ground. But now water's getting in underneath. And the water, you know, so it's gonna happen. And when that happens, it'll happen fast and we'll see 10 foot sea level rise in a few years. And we ain't ready for that. I think we've got a few decades, but certainly no more than that. So there are a lot of people who are saying the hell with the IPCC, we're just gonna do it. And this is an example of that. And so this is a very good paper. There are others. And what it shows in the graph is the distribution of probabilities of a particular sea level rise. So it's still the case being conservative that the peak in probability is somewhere around 70 centimeters. But look at this. Look at this broad tail out, out, out to two and a half meters. And we call this kind of skewed distribution fat tailed in the jargon of statistics. And so this means that there's like a 5% chance of something really, really bad happening by 2100. Now we could all say, well, there's a 95% chance that that won't happen. But think about your kid walking to school and then that's not a very acceptable way to think about it. And if that happens, if that 180 centimeter happens, I'll come back to this, but goodbye Miami and goodbye all of Southern Louisiana for starters. And this was published in that distinguished scientific journal called The New York Times, a sort of a communist rag I'm sure. But these data were provided by NOAA and the Geodetic Survey, so they're probably good. If sea level rises five feet, Miami Beach will be completely underwater. That's assuming there are nothing called waves or ripples or storms. Okay, New Orleans 88%, look at this. St. Breedersburg, Cambridge mass, Harvard is toast, Yale is good. Okay, Virginia Beach, you're gonna have to move that base, you really are Miami, et cetera, and it works its way down, but all along the Eastern Gulf Coast, 7% to 10% of it's gonna be gone by 2100. And that's where the rich people live, so maybe we'll pay attention. Okay, but, and this is where it gets really interesting. Oh, I don't wanna blind you. It's really variable. So Galveston, Norfolk and Atlantic City are way up there in rises of 24 to 32, but look at Boston much less and LA is only two. How come LA is only two? Of course it's because it's going up. They got earthquakes, we have sea level rise. It sort of balances out. And so there, I'm sorry, I shouldn't. So there are all these things that are affecting that. The strength of the Gulf Stream is the best understood, the bedrock geology uplift, there are places going up, right? Places going down and severe storms and these are what we're worried about. That's why they're in bold. Okay. So the Gulf Stream, it's getting warmer so the Gulf Stream is pushing harder to the North. It used to be that the highest sea level rise along the Atlantic Coast was South of Cape Hatteras. Now it's North of Cape Hatteras to here. Total shift because of warming and strengthening of the current. Bedrock geology, you do have some hard rock around here so this might last a while. We got a lot of it in Maine, got a lot of it in Manhattan. That's why the skyscrapers are there. But everything South, New Jersey, all the way to Florida, the whole Gulf Coast is soft sediment that just erodes away. There are places that are going up. They're going up because of tectonics like California, the Sierras, the youngest high mountains practically in the world and glacial rebound, Stockholm is going up. There's a lock system so you can get to the lake beyond Stockholm because when the Vikings founded Stockholm, you could sail out into the Baltic but now the land has risen so much that they have to have a lock for it. And this is Santa Cruz, really beautiful. Earthquake alley, look at the terraces. That's the land that's been lifted up in major earthquakes you don't want to imagine. They're not worried about sea level rise in Santa Cruz but subsidence, I don't know if any of you are from Louisiana. You know, the whole East Coast is sinking. It is sinking because it's a passive margin. The Atlantic is widening, it's slowly falling down. We can live with that but deltas are nose diving down. Half a billion people in the world live on deltas. Think Cairo, think the Ganges, think New Orleans. And the reason the deltas are going down is because we built all those dams upstream to make electricity we didn't need in North Dakota. And so all the mud, which is filling up the lakes behind the dams that they don't know what to do with was supposed to go to New Orleans to keep the delta alive. So it's starved of the sediment it needs. And then the other thing we're doing is we're extracting humongous amounts of fluids from that delta, right? It's called oil and gas and water and nature abhors a vacuum. So when you take it out, it's got a sink. All those earthquakes in Oklahoma that were in the news last week, they're from fracking.  And then the other thing that's weird about New Orleans is all the sediment is organic. You expose it to the air, it burns in the oxygen and it disappears. The land literally oxidizes and disappears, so it's not good. The Mississippi delta is big. 60% of that delta is less than two meters. Two million people live on that delta. One third to one quarter of the wetlands are gone forever. And the thousands of miles of channels for laying the pipelines are erosional. So they start out this wide and they're now as wide as this room. And they're like tumors. They just grow and grow and grow. So the whole delta will be gone by 2100. That's not an exaggeration. That might even be conservative. And then of course there's storms, there's waves, there's catrinas and sandies. I think you know all this stuff about hurricanes, but I guess the really important thing to remember is a hurricane is a heat engine. The whole energy of the storm comes from the heat that's released when the water evaporates, when the sea is sufficiently warm and then that goes up as rain and it goes up as water vapor and comes down as rain and it's like a dynamo. I mean it just keeps going and going and going as long as it has heat to feed it. And the strongest storms are ours. In the whole world the strongest hurricanes or typhoons are in the North Atlantic. They are really strong. I was in that strongest one, Hurricane Allen and Jamaica. And Katrina and Sandy were among the three or four costliest disasters in our country since World War II. And the worry is that they're gonna be stronger and stronger because of warming and how much will that cost us? There's a huge scientific argument about this. I don't wanna really bore you with it. The hero of stronger hurricanes is this great guy at MIT called Kerry Emanuel, a very, very charismatic person. And he defined what he called this power dissipation index in which he pointed out that a very small increase in maximum wind speed will result in the cube of that increase in damage. So the damage will be much higher than the very small increase in wind speed. People don't wanna believe him. It's very controversial.  And we're gonna see this modest but real increase in the power of hurricanes and what's actually made me more wary some, a lot more rain. So storm surge. And I don't know how many of you know the geography of New York City. That's my hometown. But storm surge is the real evil in hurricanes. And it's particularly bad wherever the water's shallow around deltas or where the geometry of the coast more or less dooms the place. So Long Island Sound is 25 kilometers, 15 miles wide in the east. It narrows down to about three kilometers at LaGuardia and Co-op City to about a kilometer or half a kilometer in the East River at the Brooklyn Bridge. So think about all that water was driven into Long Island Sound. And it was like the Bay of Fundy the tides of the Bay of Fundy. There was nowhere to go. And so the only place the water could go because there was this huge force pushing it was to go up and up and up. And the net result was what we all know from Sandy. Now, Emmanuel said it was theCUBE but there's this fascinating economist at Yale named Bill Nordhaus. And he wrote a book called The Climate Casino and he's probably the economics expert on hurricanes and implication of climate change for coastal cities than would be a very cool lecturer, actually. And what he did was go back and look much more carefully as an economist at what Emmanuel did. And so he determined the wind speed of every hurricane and the damages that occurred. And as an economist, he had access to that kind of data. And he concluded that the damages from storms occur at the ninth power of the wind speed. I mean, that's scary. And his explanation for it is that Emmanuel just thought about wind speed. He didn't think about surge and he didn't think about rain and flooding. He was just thinking about wind. And also, he wasn't thinking about the fact that the stuff we build is more and more complicated. If too many people get in the Washington Metro at five o'clock in the afternoon, the car sags and we all have to get out because the crane can't go. Somebody over engineered that system. The twin towers fell because we exceeded their tolerance. And he thinks that in a more mundane way that's why these storms have such a catastrophic cost. He also thought about those fat-tailed distributions in the context of Sandy. And I went and I interviewed him and we had this fascinating conversation. And he sat there and he talked to me about what he called existential events. When we have events that happen that are beyond our experience and all our rules break down, all of our notions of risk and the rest of it. And he made this analogy to Germany in the summer of 1945. And the thing that's really disturbing about that because Katrina was sort of like that on a smaller scale is that in Germany, they still had the land. But with sea level rise, there won't be any land. So when the catastrophe happens, the homes which can't be moved are gone. And so it becomes really, really hard to imagine. And he asked his students this great exercise. You guys should do it here. You're the president of Yale. You're pretty lucky. You're 30, 40 feet above sea level. So it's not so bad. What would you do in three different scenarios? The first one is the tsunami of all tsunamis is coming in 30 minutes. What do you do? You abandon ship. As Nordhaus put it, the students won't leave without their laptops, but you run. Maybe you have a forecast, really smart people at NOAA come and they tell you sea level's gonna rise those 10 feet because of Antarctica, the West Antarctic ice sheet. Breaking up, it's gonna happen in 10 years. What do you do as the president of Yale? Their art collection is worth many billions of dollars. You move it out. You move out the mass spectrometers. You move out everything that's worth a lot of money. You go away.  You run the university and then you come back and see whether it was really true or not. But the third thing which is really relevant to the country is you're confronted with the virtual certainty that Yale will be underwater in 200 years. What do you do? You wait for 195 years? The way we're doing things right now, that's what we do, but you don't do that. And when you think about it, you think about, do I just go to Hampton someplace a little higher? Or do I say the winter's really stinking New Haven and maybe we should move Yale to, I don't know, New Mexico. He's from New Mexico. So we need to do this kind of thing. We need to do this kind of thinking. And the rest of the talk is gonna be about that because one quarter of the population in this country is gonna have to make that decision by 2100. And hopefully we'll do it intelligently and that means three things. We gotta go to school. We have to assimilate and understand the scientific information instead of saying it's not true. And we have to make an objective judgment of the relevance of that information to where we live. And then the third thing we have to do is be willing to act on the information even if we don't like it, right? So that we can do something rational for our own well-being and our neighbors. So here's the way I think about it.  The fate of a people or a place, the fate of the Naval War College will be a function of the magnitude of sea level rise. The local extenuating circumstances, I have no idea what they are here. The cultural and governmental capacity to assimilate the information, well, you guys are great at that, but travel 50 miles and it might be a little different. And then the cultural and governmental capacity to act meaningfully on that data, to do something about it.  And I know that's really abstract, but what we're gonna do is we're gonna make it real by talking about three cities. New York. I'm from right there. It's the third most exposed city worldwide to just a couple of feet of sea level rise according to the OECD. These numbers have changed a little bit. All those new cities in China built on landfill, two feet above sea level there, they're gonna be the tops, but 2007. There's about $2 trillion in exposed assets and 3 million exposed population with an elevation of six feet. And that's what it looked like after Katrina before that sea level had risen. That's the subway at the World Trade Center. That's a lot of taxis. That's a tunnel that, thank God, they didn't get all the way in. And that's out on Long Island because there are waves. So what's the scenario for New York? New York gets it because they have the bitter pill of Sandy. Bloomberg stood up two days later and said, I was wrong. I was underplaying the importance of environmental issues for the city, medical. And there are a lot of discussions. There have been art exhibits in the Museum of Modern Art of parks and wetlands to be built in all the low places so that the city could still be beautiful and how it would adapt. So it's a really good start, but hey, nobody's doing anything, right? I mean, like zoning, people can still build on those barrier islands. They're gonna have to move LaGuardia and Kennedy. That's not a small issue. And fortify all those subways and tunnels, but they'll do it. Maybe it's because I'm a New Yorker, but they're so goddamn wealthy. And Wall Street is so powerful. I mean, half the money that was donated in the last presidential campaign, third came from the Upper East Side, they'll fix it. And so they'll buy a hundred years, but they're lucky.  So now let's go, I grew up here. I'm from New York, but I grew up right about here in the highest place in Miami-Dade County, 13 feet above sea level. Miami is the most exposed city in the world, according to the OECD. The average elevation is just a meter. There's three and a half trillion dollars in exposed assets, five million exposed population, and Tampa and St. Petersburg are the same. So if you combine them, it's like 10 million people and 10 trillion dollars exposed. Miami is only 20% flooded, but notice that Miami is two islands with nowhere to go. And the water coming up their butt right there. Because all of this that was the Everglades is now Florida Bay, which extends to Lake Okeechobee. You're from Florida. I took this with my iPhone. I'm very proud of this picture. I lived in a hotel there. I went to first grade in South Beach Elementary School. And then I moved there. And I went to high school in the 50s. And when I was there in the 50s, it was against the law to build homes on Kibis Gain and all these places because everybody knew that when a hurricane happened, the waves broke 10 feet above the island. But a guy named Bibi Roboso fixed that. So they're now all these people connected by the same little causeway that was there when I was a kid. All of these islands you will notice from the natural rugged coastline are landfill. All of these new skyscrapers are built on landfill. All of them have their feet less than three feet above sea level and they're toast. And if it doesn't get you from the ocean, it'll swallow you up.  It was slightly uplifted and limestone dissolves. And so that was a PBS program. This poor guy was sleeping in his bedroom and he disappeared 100 feet down. They never found him. That's a big resort up north in the lakes. This happened in about three days. It's happening everywhere. There's now a sinkhole alert network. I don't want to retire there. And this is a map. Look at this, a map of the sinkhole zones of the state of Florida. So it's being sunk from outside and it's dissolving in the middle. So what's gonna happen in Miami is gonna be massive inundation. Saltwater intrusion is inevitable.  And that was the category two. So the groundwater will be poisoned and all of that. Florida is an outlaw state. They are encouraging the building of these new buildings on landfill. It's official policy. And when the insurance industry, when the reinsurance industry, which I think runs America, said we're not gonna insure any more homes, they said, we'll insure them. Well, that's great, right? There's no money in Florida to pay all those people. There are no realistic evacuation plans. Keybus Kane, a causeway, 100,000 people. And they're the kind of people that say, I'm tougher in any hurricane until they get scared to death, right? And you can imagine the traffic jam. So what we're looking at, and I think I said this when I was here five years ago, is five million climate refugees and the bankruptcy of one of the most important states in the union, in the richest country in the world. It might take 20 or 30 years, but it could happen tomorrow. A real category five like that super hurricane that destroyed the Flagler Railroad and just erased whole parts of South Florida. Okay, and then there's New Orleans, which I've spent a lot of time there now and I've been in all these places. And I love the people and it's just so much fun. But oh my God, they're at sea level or under sea level. You realize and I do, I mean, it's just, you know. You know why we protect it? We protect it because of chemical alley. The entire petrochemical industry of our country has the refineries, the first stop refineries are all along here and you go down the river and it's really interesting. And you see one chemical plant after another. The locals call it Cancer Alley.  But it is one of the most valuable and important places for the US economy. And it can probably make it, but not these people. So most of the Delta and New Orleans are at or below sea level. The Mississippi River, anybody who's been there, you know the river flows 15 feet above the streets because of the levees. Subsidence is so fast that an acre of Louisiana drowns every hour. You project that out, that's more than 35 square kilometers per year, that's 1% of the area of the Delta is disappearing every year and we're measuring it. This isn't theory, this isn't PINKO, whatever, this is just data. Most of the locals actually get it, half of them didn't come back. And when we interview people and we ask them, do you want your children to do what you do? They say, no way. We could sort of hold it off a little bit, we could spend another 10 or $20 billion or something. And we could make the oil companies fill the channels they made and we could build another system of levees that might work once. But there's really only one logical solution and that's to take all that wonderful culture and there's wonderful people who are attached to their homes and uproot them and hopefully move them as a community to some place where they will be safe. And then just keep the city as a transfer station. I mean, you only need 10,000 people to run into support and just forget about it. Economists will tell you that privately. I've talked to three different economists who said, that is the only logical thing to do with New Orleans. It doesn't play well politically. And there it is, I mean, look for yourself. They talk about the highway to nowhere in Alaska but this is my favorite highway to nowhere. It goes to a fishing village. It cost a lot of money to build. All of this 10 years ago was above sea level, all of it.  It's got 10 years, that's their graveyard. And that's a Cyprus forest because the Cyprus forests are sinking as well. Okay, what does all this say? Sea level rise is going faster and faster.  We'll probably never melt all of Antarctica. But the rest of it will go. The train left the station. We're committed to at least three degrees, a permanent global warming for the next 10 or 20,000 years, which is sort of beyond my ability to think. So it's real, it's happening, and it will follow its course to conclusion. So the retreat from the coast is inevitable as the land drowns. And you know, it's really bad and it's really scary, but we're a smart country, we're a rich country. We're a resourceful country. We can handle this. But the only way we can handle it is if we wake up to the realities and begin to think about how we're gonna act on it. There's a lot of really good stuff we could do in the short term as long as we understand it's only for the short term. And we just gotta move fast because if we don't, we're gonna kill lots of people and we're gonna throw away trillions upon trillions of dollars. That made my day. I realize it's a pinko newspaper, but the New York Times and Stanford University say that they have very clear results that the majority of Americans want government action on climate change. That is like such good news. And that includes half of all registered Republicans. It does, hey, you know, that used to be the environmental party of this country. It sort of morphed, but the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act were enacted under Richard Nixon by his assistant, the man who founded the World Wildlife Fund. I mean, there are enormous Teddy Roosevelt National Parks. This shouldn't be a political issue. This should be an issue of governments and supporting people. So the hard part is gonna be to adapt, right?  Well, we can't do very much about what we've already done. We can just make sure it doesn't get even worse than what we've caused. And that's gonna be hard because it means that we're gonna have to give up a lot and adapt to a lot of really serious change. Stop going to Florida to retire. You can go to California, they're going up. Florida's going down. Thank you very much. If you want to get home before the snow. I have a foot coming. So, anybody? I really, really made you feel good, right? There's somebody back there. Sir, Major K.O. Nye, States Marine Corps. Whether your politics are left or right, I agree with the data, sir. Data is the data. And as a scientific minded person myself, I have two questions for you. Number one, what is your opinion that the scientific community could be wrong with their conclusion that climate change is human attributed? And number two, what experiment could be conducted to prove or disprove the hypothesis that climate change is human attributed? Well, we're doing the experiment. We're doing the experiment because we're putting more and more rather than less than less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. You could say it's an N of one, but that's sort of silly. I mean, I think the way to think, I tried to say it very gently in my one-on-one side. A famous physicist at the end of the 19th century wrote a paper predicting exactly what would happen because it was high school physics. The only reason we doubt it now is because of the implications for our way of life. But it wasn't controversial until about 30 years ago when my former colleague, Dave Keeling, who measures, he died recently, but the Keeling curve of carbon dioxide increasing from monoloa, Dave built the instrument to measure that. He was hired by the great Roger Ravel, brought to Scripps to do that so that Roger could balance the carbon cycle. It was just straightforward atmospheric physics and chemistry until somebody in the Department of Energy said, oh, you mean we can't do that? And then it became politicized so that it would never was a political issue until relatively recently. And in science, you never prove anything. You, in science, you try to falsify what you know and you keep trying to falsify it. And if you keep failing, you get to the point where you're really bored and then you call it a law so that everybody can forget about it and move on to something else. Greenhouse warming by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is at the level of a law. It agrees with everything we know about how things work. What was your second question? Thank you for your opinion, sir. The second question, you kind of alluded to it, but it doesn't seem like you can quite possibly do it, is what experiment could be conducted to prove or disprove the hypothesis that climate change is going to happen? Experiments are meaningless unless they're done at the appropriate scale. We only have one earth, so you can't have a control unless you want to make an atmosphere on Mars. You could do a dinky little, you know what the experiment is? Every greenhouse in America, right? I mean, the greenhouse works because of what? Because the sunshine's in it, it can't get out. CO2 is a greenhouse in the atmosphere. Energy comes in, a lot of it can't get out. As we increase the amount of CO2, it's going to get warmer. It's going to do exactly what you could do in a little experimental chamber where you created a little fake atmosphere and everything, but I mean, no scientist would do that. I mean, it's just not worth doing because that's like saying force equals mass times acceleration, it works, right? Artillery works because of classical mechanics. This stuff is what we've been teaching children forever. And besides, if somebody doesn't want to believe it, they're not going to believe it. Look at the, I said I wouldn't talk about this, but look at the vaccine thing.  They do not cause senescence and Alzheimer's disease. They saved a million lives. We have a measles epidemic in this country because of a denial of basic scientific information. And we didn't do anything about global warming because of a denial of elementary scientific information. And I think that that poll I showed that two thirds of Americans want a president who will do something about climate change says the discussion's over. Anybody else or are we done? Come on, come on, it wasn't that bad. Somebody there. Sir. Oh, I'm sorry. And then you. It's okay. Keith Maloney. Let's say you're the big guy in the world right now. You make all the decisions. You said to some degree, if I understand you correctly, that we can't go back. So in the case of New York, New Orleans, and Miami, should we just accept where we are and start moving the place? Because there is no going back, it's gonna happen. Or can we reverse it to the point where moving those cities and those resources is not an absolute necessity? Well, that's a really good question. I'm afraid the answer is that it really looks like we're committed to three degrees. And there's all this inertia in the system. And it's not gonna dissipate for a long time. The carbon dioxide that's in the atmosphere will eventually mix into the ocean. And the pH of the ocean will return to what it always was around 8.1. The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere will return to what it always was. It's a kinetics problem because the ocean can't devour the CO2 fast enough. After all, the ocean only mixes vertically on a time scale of 1,000 years. So to get that stuff down and buried where it can interact and be absorbed is gonna take a lot of time. So if we're genuinely committed to three degrees and I think there are a lot of people who say four, then sea level's gonna rise at least 10 feet. It just is. Probably 20, 25. But it's gonna take a long time. And what I was trying to say, and I hope it got across, we shouldn't abandon New York tomorrow. We've got, New York's got 100 years and we can slowly sort of jump over the meadowlands to some place more attractive. They will be underwater. They will be gone. Miami is hopeless. Miami should be abandoned. I mean, how many of you have been in a bad category five that stalled for 48 hours? I have.  You can dump hurricane, Mitch dumped a meter of rain and police in 15 hours. So there's just no hope for those people. I mean, it's tragic. You know, it's the retirement dream. It's all that stuff, but they ought to go. And then as I said about New Orleans, they get it. I mean, there's a huge culture. I hope I'm not being disrespectful about that. There's this, one of the most remarkable cultures I've ever had the privilege of enjoying in my life. In the Delta of Louisiana. Those people are extraordinary. They love where they live. And they're going through a personal catharsis trying to think about this. But they know one thing. They don't want their kids to stay, you know? And so the old folks, if they want to stay, why not? But there's no future in it. I mean, I went to hustle money for my book with a guy at the Baton Rouge Foundation, which guess where it is? And guess where their money comes from? And he asked me what my book was about and I knew I wasn't going to get any money. So I said, my book is about the fact that the Gulf of Mexico will be lapping up on the streets in Baton Rouge in 50 years. And he said, we know that. Well, think about that. There's sort of a cynicism there, you know? So there's this discussion going on, but it's gonna have to go. But why not make it a port? 10,000 really good engineer, port type people, houses built on 25 foot tall, concrete steel reinforced pilings. They can ride it out. They can be helicoptered out on a moment's notice. And they can run the incredibly important port of New Orleans, but people shouldn't live there. They just shouldn't. And we're just gonna have to figure that out. You were over there. Good evening, sir. Colonel Mike DeRosier with the US Army. I'm curious if you are encouraged or discouraged by the political response, the hurricane Sandy, at the federal, state, and local levels? That's a really good question. I'm on the Scientific Advisory Board of NOAA. And we talk a lot about stuff like that. We're doing a strategy review right now about, we know they do the science well. We know the observational systems are amazing. I mean, I don't know if you noticed, they predicted the flurry of tornadoes in Oklahoma 24 hours out. They predicted the exact track of Sandy, five days in advance, and it was on the web. They're good. What they will tell you they're not that good at, and it's a struggle, everybody struggles with it, is how do you get people to listen? How do you get people to understand? And so, on the Scientific Advisory Board, we believe that the biggest challenge that NOAA faces is in the socio-economic realm, not in the scientific realm, that there needs to be a kind of translation service to intelligent people. I mean, all that stuff in my 101 slide, 95% of Americans don't know that, including all the people with PhDs from Harvard and Yale. I mean, it's just appalling. And so, it's a steep curve, and NOAA that is, so the Kathy Sullivan, the new chief administrator, she talks about a weather-ready nation and a more resilient nation. And her concept of resilience is very much in the socio-economic realm. So, getting back to your exact question, it was great. Everybody got it. I mean, they saw what happened. There was this amazing scientific paper that predicted exactly, talking about experiments. That's an experiment. Somebody publishes a paper and says, when the next really bad hurricane comes from the east and homes in on New York, it's gonna be flood city in New York because of the funnel effect in Long Island Sound and exactly what was predicted happened. And Bloomberg listened two years too late, but he listened. And so, yeah, I think it was an incredibly important first step in establishing a respectful conversation among the different parties. Yeah. Hi, sir, Phil Weiskep. So, if I understood correctly, there is something that we really need to watch for and that's this ICE business in Antarctica. What's the name of the place? Because I saw a YouTube video that showed, it said the largest calving event ever in history. This was in the last six months. So, what's the place that normal people need to know that if this happens? Well, this is really difficult for responsible people because you really don't wanna cry wolf. And I sort of brushed over it for time, but how do you model to be fair to the IPCC? You've got a mile thick pile of ice on Greenland. You can't x-ray it and see all the way down. Some satellites get pretty close, but you can't really do it. You know there's torrential rivers running off at the bottom and at the top, and it scares you. But it's probably still a drop in the bucket compared to that mile thick pile of water. On the other hand, if it melts too much in the bottom, it could slide off. So all that stuff's going on in your head and so the high precision modelers say, I can't deal with this and so they don't. That's okay. West Antarctica is a much more tractable problem. And I think the key issue, we know that the last ice age, we came out of the last ice age in like 100 years. So imagine a world with mile high piles of ice in Scandinavia and Canada and where I live in Maine and all the way down to Long Island is the terminal moraine of the ice. And in 100 years, it's flipped. And a colleague of mine at Scripps, a guy named Wolf Burger wrote a paper about how he believes that the reason that happened so fast was because the ice was under sea level. And when seawater got in, it just took off like that. Well, there's seawater under the formerly fully grounded west Antarctica ice sheet. And so yeah, I think we would have a couple of year warning but a couple of year warning for Manhattan is, we gotta watch it. Yeah, you guys are down there all the time. I saw you when I was there. I went as a tourist. I never managed to get a free ride so I went as a tourist. Anybody else? We're done. Oh, sorry. I can't see. Well, it'd be worse for you because you guys live so high above sea level you don't have anything to worry about.  Oh, I'm not a physical oceanographer so I very carefully read the article about the change in the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream of course is born in a very warm area and so warming it up more makes a lot of sense. How much that would affect anything on the other side of the pond when it pushes its way across, I don't know. You people have the best fisheries biologists in the world and I'm sure you've got it all figured out. In the Bering Sea, we're seeing fish stocks that we used to rely on being replaced by other fish stocks. I don't think it's clear that we have a lot to worry about that we'll just eat different fish if we don't overfish them. But the movement of the current it's pretty interesting, right? The Gulf Stream has been there for a long, long time in a very stable configuration and it is on the move. So where it's hammering our East Coast, the strongest used to be in sort of South Carolina and now it's up in the mid-Atlantic states and even up into New England. Of course it's carrying more heat because it's got more heat from the beginning but I don't think Europe has to worry about that. You have to worry about your heatwaves further south but Norway is in a wonderful position. That's why I live in Maine. Thank you all, I hope that. I think we've ruined it. Let's do a couple of quick comments. So thanks very much for what I would offer as a both a stimulating and impactful presentation tonight. I think as you were presenting, I was thinking about it a little bit. I think stimulating maybe in two terms. As you know we study strategy and security issues here and I think over the course of your presentation tonight in terms of strategic thinking, what you've laid out are some of the challenges we face in properly valuing a potential future in terms of decision-making today. The Navy's gonna have a big role. I mean the first time I came here at your invitation, I did my little Miami scenario but what I had been really impressed by was I've done a lot of work in the Caribbean and when that horrible earthquake happened in Haiti the Navy could go in and sort of take care of stuff. You can't do that for Miami. I mean the scale of it is so vastly greater and I think we're also used to thinking about it in other countries and not thinking about it on our own territory and how we're gonna have this very different situation about having to handle crises that we think about being out there somewhere on our own ground. So I hope you will do that. Do it well, do it well. And the presentation was just as you were just alluding to maybe a little U.S. centric tonight and the challenges that you talked about tonight are gonna be challenges faced across the globe with respect to cities and mega-population. I did that, I did that deliberately. I thought, I mean with a different audience I would make it more global. But from a security point of view, think about Bangladesh, these huge proportion of people who live on the Delta. They're boxed in by two countries that are building walls to make sure none of them escape and half their country's gonna disappear and it's gonna disappear in catastrophic storms and are we gonna turn off the TV so nobody can watch? I mean what's gonna happen? It's gonna be horrific. And there are a lot of those. Guayaquil is another Miami and it's growing so fast it's just as many people. It's built on fill on mangrove swamps at sea level and on and on and on and on. So yeah, lots of work in the future. Thank you for again stimulating and as one minor example of the impact, Aaron just informed me of the change in our retirement plans from Cape Hatteras to Asheville I think in North Carolina. So, you do not want to live on a Cape. On behalf of the college sure, thanks again. Oh, you're very welcome. And stimulate North Carolina. Okay, thanks a lot.


Okay, it's Friday, 4th of June and probably a familiar face you've now come to recognise. Mike Ivey is with us. How's it going Mike? Very good. Good morning. Good. I was just complimenting Mike on his new camera. So he's looking good and he's sounding good and his side. That's recommended by you, Anthony. I mean, getting the lights and the camera now also got this new microphone. It's been a bit of a journey, but I feel like finally I'm getting to a point where it's coming together, as you rightly said, just in time for going back to the office. So such are these things. But look, I've got Mike back because for those who've been with Dampfire Live community for a while, Mike's quite kindly come on a couple of times over the last couple of months and he's talked specifically about COVID-19. Because it is a fairly complicated thing to try and track and make sense of. There's a lot of moving parts, particularly on a global scale. And there's no better person to get us up to speed than Mike. So he's kindly put together some slides which I can distribute as well to everyone I'll attach to the video. So a Q&A and the chat box open. So as we go, absolutely feel free to leave a comment, question, anything like that. We're both here to help so happy to do so. But to kick things off, Mike, let me share. Page one. Okay, fantastic. We'll start quite narrowly with the UK and the Delta variant, which I'll come on to explain in a second, but I think towards the end we'll sort of open it out because there are repercussions, implications for the global community as well as the UK. So, so starting with the first slide. We have the World Health Organization has decided that they want to sort of change the names of all the different variants of the different COVID variants, which is, which is fair enough. So, rather than use the country of origin, which it thinks leads to stigmatization and rather than use the scientific name, which it thinks is confusing. It's decided to use the sort of Greek alphabet to define the various variants of the COVID-19 so I can pretty much guarantee the national UK press will not refer to the World Health Organization's name. I'm sure they get much more readership through calling it the Indian or Chinese virus than they ever do through the who name. But there we go. I think we might say disagree. I mean, I do you feel stigmatized by by the Kent variant as an inhabitant of Kent. Do you know it is funny because you know why should something be called an Indian or Chinese but then saying Kent is okay but I do know that obviously I have some Chinese family, some who do live in Britain and I have had people tell me about racism they have actually confronted or been being met with because of none other than being Chinese. And my wife went back to Belfast to see her parents last week. And she said she said there was a guy there who's perfectly lovely and obviously my wife is Islamic as her all of her close friends are Islamic as well when she goes back home. I mean, this is an Irish chap hanging out with them. Yeah, then he's refusing to go to the Chinese takeaway now because the Chinese virus, which I thought, crikey are we actually is this is actually real but I guess it is but appropriate to rename, I feel. Yeah, okay.  I mean, I think that I think Trump did a lot around that a lot to sort of stigmatize the Chinese with the way he politicized it. I don't feel quite the same about the other variants but you know I accept what you're saying and you know maybe in the long run it is simpler and better to use these Greek names so long as we see if it adds confusion or not we just have to see. But certainly for the purposes of this presentation, I will probably get confused and mixed up but we will try and use the Greek name. So the Kent variant, the UK variant is now alpha, the South Africa, the B1351 is the beta, Brazil the P1 is gamma, and India, the Indian variant which is the main topic of this presentation will be the B16172 is the delta. So, okay, so we can go to the next next page. So, thinking about the delta, the Indian variant, the problem for the UK and potentially the rest of the world. One of the things about the UK is, is we know more about it and we know more about the degree to which it's penetrated the population, because we do so much more sequencing genome sequencing here, approximately 50% of the world genome sequencing is done in the UK. We know more than a lot of other countries about the prevalence of these different variants, it's not that we're just somehow, you know, somehow these variants crop up more here they penetrate here more or that they originate here more since we know more about them. And the problem, the main problem with this, this delta variant is it's got two traits which are potentially in combination problematic so we know it's more transmissible than the ancestral variant, or, which is the original virus. And we know it's more transmissible than the, the, the alpha the Kent variant. And in combination with that it seems to have a degree of added immune escape. So it can sort of potentially penetrate vaccines and overcome immunity that people might already have from prior infection. Now, as we learn more about the immune escape. It's potentially more worrying and we'll come on to that in a second. The interesting thing, the most interesting, one of the most interesting things on this particular chart is if you're looking at the B1351, which is the South African variant, is this is the variant that has the most amount of immune escape. That's the bad news with this variant. The good news is it's not very transmissible. So wherever it, it has started to appear, it quickly, it's quickly died out as it's been out competed by other variants. So there have been little clusters in the UK, the South African variant, but it can't compete against either the alpha variant, or the Delta variant so it's tended to die away, which is extremely good news, because potentially, in terms of its ability to overcome vaccine systems or escape the protection given by vaccines, it's the most dangerous variant, but so far so good on the South African one. But as I say, the worry at the minute is the Delta variant, which is very transmissible and has a reasonable degree of immune evasiveness. Okay, so public health England have been sort of producing regular updates on on the Delta variant, and we're getting a clearer picture of how much more transmissible it is than the Kent the alpha variant. And the latest figures I was looking at yesterday, they're suggesting potentially between 60 to 70% more transmissibility, if that's a word. So it's quite, it's quite a lot more than that is comfortable, actually, so the original estimates was something like 30 to 60, but that sort of edged up in the latest public health England estimates. So we now know we suspect it's much more transmissible than the Kent variant. The other problem or another problem is, we think that if you do get it so not only more likely to get it. If you do get it, you're more likely to get seriously ill. So two problems more transmissible, more likely to cause serious illness. And we also know that from the, the figures published by by the government that there's this degree of vaccine escape. The AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines seem to be only 33 to 50% effective after one dose. The Pfizer vaccine is 90% effective after two doses at two weeks, but the Astra vaccine is only 60% effective after two doses at two weeks. Now the majority of vaccines vaccinations in this country using the Astra vaccine. So 60% effectiveness potentially causes a problem. There is the scope for some good news here in that the, the way the AstraZeneca vaccine works using this adenovirus vector, the vector itself seems over a period of time to confer a degree of immunity so the suggestion is that the 60% effectiveness at two weeks should continue to increase. And I've seen estimates of, you know, 80 to 90% over a period of 12 weeks, but we don't know we don't have the data yet so that's, that's an estimate. And that's a sort of, you know, we hope that that's what's going to happen, but we don't have the data yet. The reason for thinking that is if we know that, that after the first dose, the effectiveness of the Astra vaccine increases and that's one of the reasons that there was a 12 week gap between the first and second doses is we knew from the days we had that the effectiveness of the vaccine increased over that period and they could safely leave it. Not only could they save the year until 12 weeks there was a benefit to leaving the second vaccination at 12 weeks. So we're hoping we don't know that the 60% effectiveness figure will increase. Okay. So the problem with all of this, the increased transmissibility, the potential to cause more serious illness and the potential for vaccine escape means that there is scope here for increased hospitalizations and deaths. Okay, go to the next slide. Okay. There's a very clever mathematician called James Ward who is on Twitter and I'll put his Twitter handle in the, in the room after this, after I finished doing this but he's, he's done various modeling of what might happen with the delta variant, depending on what the government does. It's very, very clever stuff. This is the base model which he did two weeks ago, when there was a suggestion that the data variant was 50 to 60% more transmissible and he took the middle figure of 55. So it may be a slight underestimate if the delta variant is 70% more transmissible but it's not going to be so far out. So, so this is his, his model, assuming a 55% increase in transmission rates over the alpha variants. So what might happen if the government goes ahead and stage four on June 21, I decided to open up the economy altogether. And in this scenario, he's saying that there may be a 30, maybe 34,000 additional deaths caused primarily by the, the alpha, sorry the delta variants. So if you look at the graph underneath, you'll see that we get what's called nano so go back, go back to the graph at the bottom. Yeah, you'll see that in the autumn, you've got this big, what he calls exit wave. The last wave will get a COVID, but it's a substantial wave of peaking in October at 25,000 hospitalizations a week, slightly less than the second wave in January, but it's still a fairly chunky wave of hospitalizations. And that actually, that surprises me in a, in a bad situation way. That looks quite, quite large that peak. Yes, it's fairly scary. But this, what he's done is he's a very, very clever guy and and his Twitter thread is really worth reading as I'll put the details in the chat room. Yeah, cool. So, so yeah, so he's plugged in, you know, once you've plugged in the extra transmissibility, the scope to get more ill, the vaccine escape, the immunity escape if you already had, say the original COVID, the wild COVID, you know the chances of being re infected and so on and so forth. Once you plug all of that in, these are the figures he comes out with so. So this is if the government decides to go ahead. So it's, it's potentially pretty scary. And at 25,000 hospitalizations a week, it's fairly significant. Okay. So in the, in the incoming slides, we are aware of yet the timetable of the resupply of vaccines because I know when we last spoke that was the big issue, the lack of support. So, so we'll, yeah, if you, if you go on to the next slide, I'll talk a little bit about that supply. Yeah. So, the government has a fairly difficult decision to make about June 21. And there's a there's a, there's a political decision. And I'll see, before that happens, there's a sort of scientific decision or scientific advice.  Tim Spector of the Zoe project who probably have the large largest amount of privately accumulated Delta data about the virus is talking about a third ripple, as opposed to a wave, and he doesn't see anything to worry about. Some scientists agree with him. Lots of scientists take the sort of more pessimistic view that we're in for a really, really big third wave. So, one of the problems is that the government may have when it comes to make a decision is the scientific advice rather than being cohesive and coherent may be fairly mixed. It's going to be really, really tough decision to make, I think, about what we do on June 21. They've done the first thing they've done correctly is just sort of shunted the decision down along the road to June 14. So I think they were going to make the decision earlier, but they've moved it to June 14, which is a clever thing to do. And I think they'll just wait for as long as possible to get all this data in about hospital. They'll be emphasizing data over dates all the way in the meantime, I guess, so soften the delay if it happens. Yes, exactly. So the arguments for the government going ahead with opening up stage four on June 21 is, well, well, the death rate is still incredibly low. That's for 1% of all deaths. And at the weekend, it was a slight statistical anomaly, but there was a day with no deaths in the UK, which we haven't had since, I don't know, before the pandemic started, I don't know. Yes, yeah, it was, yeah. So, so, you know, so it's very difficult to say, politically, I think to say, right, we're not, we're not going to go ahead and open up where you've literally got, hang on a minute. You know, you just had no deaths you've got a handful of people dying every day. You know, politically it's quite difficult to justify. And you've got people like Steve Baker in the Conservative Party, but very, very anti-lockdown and want to open up as quickly as possible. And they're quite, there are others like him, so they, you know, there is a wing of the Conservative Party that doesn't want any more delays. So those people have to be sort of talked around, I suppose, in order to stop any sort of dissenting difficulty within the Conservative Party. So, so that's, you know, politically, it's difficult to stop, I think, this, this, this given what I've said about people like Steve Baker and commitments in terms of what you've told travel companies, what you've told the general public, you know, politically, I think it's very difficult to stop this, this opening up without really, really good reasons. And therefore continuing on June 21st is, is the NHS can cope. So, so in the scenario which I just gave you, you know, 25,000 hospitalizations in the autumn, the peak, you know, it's not great, but the NHS can cope. And I think it's called right at the beginning, beginning of this process that, that the one of the driving factors was, was not overwhelming NHS. And although it would cause difficulties for the NHS, the NHS should be able to cope. And then we come on to what you what you're referring to, which is this sort of vaccination. So, the government is, is desperately trying to increase the pace of vaccination in order to get as many people as possible to have their second doses. And the reason for this is as on one of the earlier slides is, there's a big difference between the effects of the of the Delta variant on people who've had one vaccination, as opposed to two vaccinations I it appears that you get a relatively low degree of vaccination with one, one dose. So, you know, we can see that the government is desperately trying to increase the pace, particularly of second vaccinations to get everybody over the age of 50, and everybody with an underlying health condition, vaccinated with two doses by June 21 seems to be the goal. Yeah. And helping them with that is that does seem to be increased vaccine supply. The last week, which 31st May on the charts bottom there, and there's something like 5 million doses made available in the UK, which is above the base of three to four. So we what we think is happening here we don't know is the base AstraZeneca supply which is UK supply is two to two and a half million doses a week. So, if we, if we think last week was two and a half million AstraZeneca doses, then we've got two and a half million MRNA doses coming in, and presumably the bulk Pfizer, but potentially quite a few Moderna vaccines. Now there hasn't been a lot of Moderna in the UK, partly because there's been problems with the production plant in Switzerland, but the hope is that that Moderna supply is now coming on stream. And this, if this supply of MRNA vaccines continues, it will enable the government to keep up this pace of vaccination and also quickly vaccinate younger people who it doesn't want to give the Astro vaccine to for because of the blood clot risks. So this potentially is good news. And we just have to see how this pans out the next two or three weeks. So if this vaccine supply continues at this elevated level, the M the increased supply of MRNA vaccines will mean that you can move quickly down the younger cohort to inoculate to vaccinate them as quickly as possible. Yeah, I'll keep you posted with the I'm getting my first vaccine on Wednesday. So they give me not too far it's in Kent so not too far from where I am in Tumbridge Wells so just up the road. Are you under the age of 40. I am indeed yeah. I'm at the top end I'm 38. So I'm on the fence should get the Pfizer or the Moderna so that'd be interesting to see if you get a Moderna. That'd be really interesting because I think that that would be evidence that there's more Moderna coming on stream. The figures we have from from Wales and Scotland, who published these these figures, and it's infuriating that the British government is almost with the English. The data for England is really infuriating. Every sort of country in Europe publishes data, well publishes data, but but England doesn't so we have to sort of guess extrapolate what everyone else is doing. So we know that there are Moderna vaccines coming now and treat in increased quantities in Scotland and Wales and the assumption is happening in England to but we don't know because the government won't tell us. So we'll be interested to see if you get the Moderna vaccine. Okay, so, so these are reasons for for going ahead with with stage four. So go to the next slide. And then the, you know, the arguments against going ahead and stage four, the government opening up is what what we knew about the Delta variant is that initially it was confined to sort of small clusters. And there are clusters with large British Asian populations clusters of multi generational households clusters of communities that work work, unvaccinated, and also communities that which an extent deprived in the sense that there are people, people who were going out to work putting themselves at risk and going out to work, rather than working from home. So all of these factors sort of combined to make this sort of these these local clusters. So the evidence from the last week seems to be that the virus, the Delta variant has sort of broken out of these clusters, and is now just spreading generally in the population. And what one of the problems is politically doing local lockdowns is actually quite difficult now because the government is very wary about being seen to sort of acts solely in areas of the north or so in areas which which I have high immigrant populations. It doesn't really want to go there so rather than do these local lockdowns it's sort of, it's probably letting it go and I think it was, it had suggested it was going to, they're going to be travel bands to these areas which are also a wave of sort of protests so quickly, quickly back down so there are no travel bands within the UK, but I think it probably would like to do that. It's not going to happen. So, so I think having broken out the evidence now seems to be that the Delta variant has broken out, and it's now spreading quite widely. So the third point there is the economy now is simply more resilient and the economic imperative for going ahead stage four is perhaps less than less than it was. The economy doesn't seem to be doing too badly, and with the latest sort of loosening. It seems to be doing pretty well actually it's as if people have found a big difference between the first lockdown second lockdown is people seem to have found ways of working. They've found a way of functioning in a way that it didn't in the first lockdown, and Sunak who is who is the guy who the chancellor who is has the purse strings apparently is is fairly relaxed about a two week postponement and the decision. So he was quoted by Sebastian Payne, an FT journalist saying, you know, if we have to wait another two weeks to find out what's going on, he's happy about it. And I, you know, you can all make the bus he's the guy that matters. Another argument for going for going against the government going ahead is this is is the NHS so having said that the NHS can deal with the Delta variant. We're trying to do other things so there's a huge backlog of routine cases so things like, you know, hips and knees that weren't done last year, which you've got to be done. So the NHS is currently trying to get on top of this backlist. And in addition to these routine cases, there is apparently a large number of complicated cases like cancers, where people didn't come forward during the during the last year, because they were scared of going into hospitals they push off, making decisions or reporting symptoms because of their fear of going to hospital, but they're coming forward now. And a lot of these cases are very complicated and requiring increased hospital stays. So hospitals are rapidly filling up with the with the routine cases which there's a backlog for and these complicated cancer cases that have been sort of bubbling away for a year and not being treated. So, so there's a decision here which you need to make is you can't the NHS is not able to do both the NHS cannot cope with a huge influx of COVID patients and do this other stuff. So what do you want the NHS to do. The NHS is explicitly said, we want to do this we want to concentrate on routine cases and these complicated cases, so we can get on top of this, you know, get on top of the backlog caused by COVID so. So the government has to bear that in mind and that's that's a reason for not opening up more than it is, it is currently. Young people are now the primary transmission source of COVID. And if you delay for two or four weeks the opening up, if, as I suggested there's this increase in mRNA supply, you may be able to to get on top of vaccinating these younger people with these with these vaccines. And that should just mean that if you do when you do finding open up, you just got more of these young people vaccinated, and hence, less of them to transmit the virus. So that may go into the government thinking. Okay, so go to the next slide. Okay. So I, I don't know what the government's going to do I honestly don't have a clue and perhaps we can talk about that in a minute and I mean I, I've. I am perhaps starting to lean to the idea that it will postpone for a few weeks the opening up, but we can have a chat in a second. There is now a massive complication. If that wasn't bad enough with this so called Nepal variant. People have seen yesterday that Portugal was moved off the green list. And the reason for that is the discovery that in Portugal. The Indian variant and this so called Nepal variant are starting to increase. In fact, they've doubled over the last week in Portugal and scientists in the UK are very worried about this Nepal variant. The reason they're worried is that it combines the worst aspect of the beta South African variant, which is its ability to escape vaccines. It also has the worst feature of the Delta variant, which is, it's incredibly transmissible. So it's a sort of nightmare scenario potentially transmissibility, plus the ability to defeat vaccines. The reason for this is it's the Delta vaccine by the transmissible Indian, so the Delta virus, the transmissible Indian virus, combined with this B1351 mutation, which is highlighted in red is the K417N. It's a mutation that gives the South African variant the ability to defeat vaccines. And this mutated mutation has combined with the Indian mutation, the Delta mutation, the Delta virus sorry to produce the Nepal variant. And in particular, the K417N mutation appears to be able to defeat the AstraZeneca vaccine. So it's a very, very worrying development. You've almost, I had an opinion, based on the pros and cons of the previous two slides and now you might have tipped me over the edge. But you will be hearing a lot over the next few weeks about the Nepal variant because it is potentially a nightmare scenario, particularly for the UK, which has a very, very high degree of reliance on the AstraZeneca vaccine. So we don't know yet for sure, but certainly the reason that Portugal was booted off the green list was because suddenly the appearance of what people in this country, what Grant Shaps was calling the Nepal variant. I mean, World Health Organization said we haven't heard of the Nepal variant. But this is what it is. So it's, it's the worst of the Delta variant and the worst of the South African beta variant. And we just can't watch this very, very closely. But in it. Yeah, sorry, go on. Now I suspect, so there are problems here. I suspect traveling Europe can be very, very difficult this summer now. I wouldn't book a holiday if you think you're doing it. And everything that is reported in the UK. We know, we know about it because of the genome sequencing, but all of these variants, the Indian, sorry, the Delta variant and now the Nepal variant will appear in Europe, and they will cause problems for Europe. Maybe a little bit behind, but it's going to happen. So I think, I think, yeah, I think travel this summer is going to be tricky. And I think, potentially this this variant may complicate the picture for for opening up in the UK on the 21st. Do we have any idea about the numbers of Nepal virus yet at all. In this country, I think it's less than 100 so far. And I don't know the absolute numbers in Portugal. I'm the only reason the Portuguese know about it is actually their genome sequencing is actually pretty good too. And I think also they made a mistake in telling people that they had it because suddenly, you know, the UK is thinking, oh my God, you know, we don't want, you know, we don't want UK travelers going there now. So if they kept their mouth shut, you know, we wouldn't have known about it. It almost feels like in a very naive, unscientific way in my mind. This is how viruses behave. I mean, their success is built upon adaptation or mutation in this case. Yes. And it's almost like a battle between penetrating humans to then transmit and spread themselves as a enemy, let's call it and then us as the other side of the battle being we vex vaccinate, and it cannot spread beyond that individual, let's say in a very simplistic way but so almost felt like it most feels like this was inevitable in a way that as we reopen and global travel does tentatively start to resume and people start to move around the globe again. That someone in geographic location a is going to inevitably meet someone from location be and the virus is a clever clever little chap right it's going to it's going to adapt over time but where are we with the booster shop of things like these people have got two shots because it because this isn't going to go away right I mean covert is long term and surely there'll be evolutions beyond Nepal I'm sure we'll run out of countries we can rename these things over a period of time but well this will be an ongoing thing right as a risk factor. Yes, I think I think whether the couple things that I mean the reason it's called Nepal is is. Sorry Mike I think I just muted you by accident you have to click on mute again sorry. Should be on the top of your zoo that's it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, the reason it's called the Nepal variant is I think it was first sequenced in Japan when 15 travelers turned up from Nepal. They were quarantined. They were tested and they were the first to be found with this, this particular variant I think I think that's why it's called the poor variant. Yeah, I mean there are two things. I think I mean, commonly, we're led to believe that as viruses get as viruses mutate, they become less lethal, or less, you know, less infectious with was always the idea that we would talk about viruses but it doesn't seem to be the case here. It's almost like the virus is acting like survival of the fittest. It had a really good performance in wave one, and therefore we adapted and we did a good job of vaccinating on a global level to a certain extent. Yeah, and it's now had to evolve in a way to stay alive. Yeah, and what it does so is it kills off, yeah, the less transmissible that's not useful for its survival. And it's got more, you know, if you can combine the potency as you say in South Africa with the transmissibility of India. Yeah, it's just, it's just kind of refining itself into a better weather in that sense. That's right. And I think the encouraging thing is actually wherever these mutations have occurred, I was reading something. Yeah, do you know how many mutations there are? Can you give me a guess? I'm going to imagine there's a lot, but perhaps we don't know about all of them. Well, we know about a fair few. There are something like 350,000. Of course, a lot of them are irrelevant.  But essentially, it seems that wherever the viruses appeared and mutated, it's taken similar directions, you know, it's always turned right in the spike protein, you know, and then you've always had similar mutations in outbreaks, thousands of miles away, which have had nothing to do with each other. So the good news may be that there are only a limited number of useful mutations it can make to survive and prosper. That may be the good news. But as I said, most concerning at the minute is this idea of the South African beta variant and the Indian Delta variant, and going quickly on to boosters. I mean, there's a whole thing you can do on boosters, but maybe another day. You know, I think we know that the government is now working frantically with AstraZeneca to produce a booster that works against the South African variant. And I think we now know why there's an urgency about that. And there are other vaccine programs in place. So the UK government is has a deal with Novavax, the Novavax vaccine is fairly useful against the beta variant. It has a deal with Valneva, who are working in Scotland to produce a variant, or to produce a vaccine that works across the whole range of coronavirus, which actually might be the golden ticket out of here if they can get it to work. So, so it will crush the whole virus, not just the spike protein. And then the other, the other company in place is the working with UK government is working with German company whose name eludes me but they're building an mRNA vaccine with a German company based on the sort of sequencing data. So the UK government is giving sequencing data so that they can sort of put together this complicated mRNA vaccine, which are hopefully dealing with all variants. So, so I think we're going to get booster shots, whether it's in the autumn or spring, I don't know, but it is going to happen. So it's a going back to the UK government. There was a point there where you said about the banning of travel, which we've really kind of softly seen with Portugal and some other areas. And then the roadmap of the 21st of June in the reopening. And for those other reasons that you covered. I mean, what I find difficult, or let's say would be palatable to put to the public would be no travel and the rollover of lockdown. I wonder if the management here is that they're going to restrict the travel to stop inbound mixing of introduction of new variants whilst they can work on then. As you say, speeding up this newly deployed supply and whatever form it might be. But then, perhaps rolling, or perhaps going ahead on the 21st of June is what I was going to say, sticking to that date. I find it hard that they if they start pulling away from travel. And they go into like a rollover. It's a difficult one to spin on those different fronts that you said I just find I don't know how the internally in the Conservative Party or publicly that that that would fly. My counter argument for myself is whenever I, you know, as a consumer as a citizen, I go out to town. Things are pretty normal in the current state of lockdown and actually, even if we had a renewed state, I mean look, if I want to go to a restaurant or a pub, I got a book, it's a pain, but I can go to the pub like it's not a problem. And so on the flip side, kind of playing devil's advocate, perhaps it's more palatable now than it would have ever have been because there's actual current status of lockdown feels pretty open at this point. And I think I think that that's right. I mean, for you and I, you know, life is is actually not bad, you know, but but if you're working in hospitality, if you're working in the airline sector, if you're running a holiday company, that sector of the of the economy. If we don't open up on June 21, and that that sector even if it's a small sector is is going to continue to be in trouble. And you know, Michael O'Leary was sounding off this morning on behalf of Brian air. So, so it's, yeah, it's going to cause a massive problem for the leisure and hospitality industry. Of course, we don't feel that because we're not part of those industries so so we can. So any insight as to potential, I guess this would be calculated from the data, like from James Ward, for example, he mentioned as a mathematician looking at all the variables but if there is an extension what does that extension look like, what type of time frame are we looking at there to roll that over to then revisit that.  So he said he could live with another I think I misunderstood. I thought he was referring to the fact that delaying the decision about June 21. And I know for two weeks to say, yeah, yeah, you'll know, but he's actually said he's comfortable with a two week extension beyond the 21st. Let me have a look. Because if that is the case, and that's coming from him, as he said. And he's probably going to be the most in the know about, as she said, he said a reopening so this is according to spastic pain of teaching journalists. So he's relaxed over a two week delay to reopening. Okay, well I think that's a done deal then. It'll be rolled for two weeks, I mean, I do see benefit in that I mean my wife who's five years younger than me she's also already received a letter a week and a half ago to book in for the vaccination so it's already down as you said they're trying to accelerate that vaccination phase. I mean, people in there, literally late 2030s now getting the call so it's quickly gone from like, you know, the 50s to then the 40s and it's going straight down that they've really tried to push it so I think a two week period buys them. If you're right and that supply side picks up quite a big difference in fact. I think it does. Yes. But and maybe that's the way, the way it will happen is, is, yeah, we're going to open up in another two weeks but you're still not going on holiday.  But there are so many variables and and you know it's really, it's really tough and you know Boris's instincts. So I think all against this, in terms of stop, you know, Boris would just want to open up that's where his instinct is. But I don't know. I don't know. But in Boris fashion, I think he's bought himself big enough buffer where he can be, he can make that call to delay and whether that whether that being because of the situation of the opposition parties or not but I just think that he's he's built that image of the number of things that have materialized through his so far term. I don't think other people could have possibly quite got away with but he has due to him as a personality and I think also the opposition. We had this conversation before you know he's a unique politician. He's a lucky politician. You know, at the minute, he's getting the credit for the vaccine rather. Actually, it's an interesting thing about the UK in general is is incumbency in Scotland Wales and England have been very helpful to the to all of the administrations in terms of getting elected so you know, you know, Sturgeon did very well in Scotland and Drake would stand very well in Wales because he's perceived to have had a very, very good pandemic. Yeah. Well, let's let's wrap it up there. I'm just conscious of your time. So, yeah, I know we've got non fun payrolls in just a short while. So, yeah. We can do boosters at a later date as we get more information but I think boosters are going to happen. And if the Delta variant and the Nepal variant do become troublesome, then they'll happen in New York. Yeah, well I think I think the next conversation for sure is, we are going to open up at some point, whether it's this month next month whenever it's going to happen. At that point, there probably will be a meaningful wave. Anyway, that's going to hit as the day to suggest in the autumn so I guess at that point of the trajectory then showing we're on that path. I'm sure it'll be due for us to have another conversation to see how the land lies then so you have you haven't booked holiday. No, I'm the only place I'm going is Dorset to a camp site. So, yeah, where are you going. So, yeah, as ever being unplanned for these things my wife takes care of all of the artillery so I have no idea the actual place if they have been shown and there's a nice seafood restaurant right on the little coastal lines so that's what I'm looking forward to. Very wise I think. Yeah. Cool. All right. Thanks very much Mike as ever. All right. Thanks a lot.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to NewsClick and People's Dispatch. Today we have with us, Robertus Robert, who is a lecturer in sociology at the State University of Jakarta in Indonesia. Robertus' work is on human rights, political thought, looks very carefully at events in Indonesia, which has in recent months been inflamed by popular protest against the president Jojo Vidodod. Robertus, welcome to NewsClick and People's Dispatch. Thank you, Fijais. Hello, everyone. Nice to meet you there, Fijais. Nice to have you. Last year, in September, there was a brief wave of anti-corruption protests, reformacy, decor rupsy, that sort of petered out. And then this year, Jojo Vidodod put forward a deregulation law in the middle of the pandemic. Robertus, the protests have been quite significant against this law. Could you walk us through a little bit this year of protests against the government of Jojo Vidodod? I think the most important thing coming from the protests is that the protests reflecting the re-emergence of the social movement, the civil society and the social movement in Indonesia. This political, this social movement is very important why?  And I think almost five to six years of Indonesian society was divided by these two camps. And it seems that there is no chance for the third new political political agent, political actor coming from Indonesian politics. So the re-emergence, the emergence of the student protests and civil society protests in 2019 is a good sign that it's go beyond these two the old polarization of Indonesian politics after 2014 and 2019's presidential election. So this is the significance of the social movement in 2019 in Indonesia, I think. This is the relevance of that protest. And the second character of the relevance of that protest is the movement is breaking through the old political partition in Indonesia you know that in the old traditions there is a stigma, there is a partitions between for example civil society, student and labor movement. The old political idea in Indonesia is always trying to separate student civil society and labor movement. In 2019 and 2020 this kind of political partition is disappeared because the student, the civil society and the labor movement is they can come together as a unity, as a one political element in society. So I think this is the most significant science in Indonesia's social movement today I think. So just to pick up on that, I mean yes, I understand that it's often the case that the student movement, you know idealistic young students and then the labor movement, patient, long-term development of confidence in the working class, there is often an attempt to keep these two apart. It's true I was seeing lots of images even of workers alongside students in the current protest. Was this because of the issues at stake, the deregulation law that brought these elements together or is there a political process that has brought them together? In other words, is it just because of what the president is trying to push that they are both on the street together or is there an emergence of a new kind of historical block in Indonesia? No, that's very good questions by you, Vijay. I think Indonesia is both. Yeah, the first is this is a response to the political regimes they're trying to withdraw all the political reformation that Indonesia had since 1998. But the second is the possibility to break through all the political, all political partition is also is an outcome of the old civil society tradition in Indonesia that's still maintained by some political civil society organizations in Indonesia. For example, the role of the old and resilient civil society organization just like Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation, Contrast, this is contrast to Indonesian Corruption Watch and Lokataru, this kind of this organization they have a long-standing position in Indonesian civil society. So it seems that they have a resiliency by creating the new generations of political cadre or something like that. So in this kind of actor, this kind of organization, they go to the several regions in Indonesia trying to build grassroot and link up with the student and the other organization in the local. So this is, I think this is also a factor for the re-emergence of the social movement in 2019 and 2020, I think.  Large number of small-scale manufacturing has been taking place in Indonesia at the lower end of the value chain and goods then of course go and get exported elsewhere, including shoe companies producing Nike and so on. When you say, for instance, labor is back on the streets, the working class is protesting and so on, what sectors of labor are back on the street? Are we seeing workers from these low-end manufacturing units on the street or is this more the old organized labor? What kind of fractions of labor are participating in this protest wave? Mostly, it's the manufactured labor. Indonesia is facing also de-manufacturizations, but this is what is left in Indonesia's labor structure at this time, I think. So, but in terms of the political history, labor movement is one of the most successful political organizations that emerge after the reformation. So, it tackles the political stigma coming from the 1965, associating labor with the communisms. In Indonesia, if you stigmatize by this political labeling, then you don't have any political future if you stigmatize by this labeling. For more than 30 years, Indonesian labor movement stigmatized by this kind of political labeling, and after the reformation, labor can go beyond this political stigmatized, and they can create the new political organizations that can deliver the political demand freely. So, from this process, I think labor movement in Indonesia is one of the most consolidated social organizations in terms of the democratic political force in Indonesia, I think. Because of that new law, now they are facing the new challenge, I think, because they are facing really the new liberal political agenda coming from this new law. The most crucial part of the law is in the new law, let's say in a simple way, the idea of the new laws in terms of labor, in relation with the labor is that the flexibility, the idea of flexibility in the economic process that makes the state and the company do the easy firing and easy hiring. So, the response from labor is so massive with the big magnitudes expressing that they know exactly what they are facing in the new law. You know, it's so interesting, Robert, as to hear you talk about the labor movement in Indonesia, because the general press reports about this wave of protests from 2019 to now neglects completely the labor question that there are working class organizations, you know, they'll mention deregulation and even what's known as labor market reform, you know, which means an attack on labor. But it's so interesting to hear you talk about the labor movement as a major participant. I know that you have written about the stagnation of democracy. It's a very interesting concept, Robert, is the stagnation of democracy and the, you know, regression of democracy in Indonesia, even this means the democratic institutions and so on. Could you briefly tell us a little bit about this stagnation and this regression of democracy in your country? Yeah, well, some experts, they usually use the, you know, the liberal democracy in the Qatar, just like the decreasing of the free speech in Indonesia, which is true, and the decreasing of the internet freedom in Indonesia. They are true, but I think it is only a symptom, you know. The problem in Indonesia today is that there is a return of the, there's two kinds of challenges in that sense. The first is the returning of the new developmentalisms, the new neoliberal developmentalisms in Indonesia. It expressed in terms of the political behavior of the elite in coming from the idea of the economic pragmatisms coming from the presidents. In his presidency, he's put too much stress on the infrastructure and economic development. And because of that, he's trying to suppress the political freedoms. So this kind of idea is just like the idea from the developmentalism enduring in 1970s coming from the American scholar, who I forget, who have an idea that to make an economic growth, you have to make a political stability. So this kind of, this kind of old traditional and conservative ideas coming back to Indonesia. And this is the main factor of why Indonesian democracy is decreasing. That's not Samuel Huntington, is it? Political stability, whatever, political order in something, something, something. He argued that dictatorships are good for the third world because you'll see development with the dictatorship. And so back the coup d'etat in 1965, one of the great crimes of American history. Roberto, it's been a great pleasure to talk with you, to learn about what's happening in Indonesia. We're going to keep an eye on developments there because this is not, as you know, as you well know, Roberto, this is not over. Thanks for joining us at NewsClick and People's Dispatch.


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