Osصön, mihi wnaeth y gweithdoch yn upward
yw 3 London. 1804 was the first time the world population broke a billion and it took well over 100 years to stick another billion on.
Having said that, it took a little less than 40 years to stick another billion on and then only 14 years.
And as you can see, we're whacking through at an incremental rate. This is a staggering rate of population growth.
Those people use stuff and you can measure stuff they use as GDP, which is the amount of money in this case per capita,
which the average global citizen has available to and passes through their hands each year.
And you'll see that number has gone up colossally per capita, but remember of course the population has gone up enormously too.
So global economy, probably 600 billion in 1800 and modern day dollars, 4,000 billion 1950.
And we're up to well over 36 trillion even by 1950.
Each of those dollars is underpinned by things.
It's natural resources that are being used, whether it be gold or tin or mercury or lead or trees or air or water.
That's what's underpinning this massive growth.
And the impacts therefore are enormous. This is the collapse in seafood species around the world.
You'll see they are plummeting.
The long-term trend, if it follows that it is, there won't be any edible seafood species left in the planet by the time you people are late middle aged.
It's not just fish. We've got to feed those people with grain.
On the slide on the left hand side, you've got world grain production and consumption. Massive increases.
It's got to be, can't do that on unfertilised land.
That means absolutely shed loads of fertiliser being made, all of which actually is derived from fossil fuel by and large.
But humans are greedy. We don't just like to eat grain, we like to eat meat.
So if you look at world population in the orange bars, which is what we've seen before, you'll see that world meat consumption is rising much quicker than world population is.
Because as population grows and people get more affluent, those people want to start eating meat.
Lots more cattle.
To give water to the cattle and to water the crops needs a lot of water.
It takes around 1,000 litres of water to get a litre of milk by the time you've watered the crops, fed them to a cow and the cow has been drinking.
To get a kilo of wheat is well over 1,350.
A kilogram of rice, very water-intensive 3,000, but it takes over 15,000 litres of water to get one kilogram of meat.
Massive consumption.
Consequently water is scarce.
A lot of this map you can see actually is uninhabitable and you can't graze stuff on it anyway, the Arctic being an ocean for instance.
But if you look at the areas in red, pink and yellow, these are already under severe water stress or sufficient scarcity.
It means we use more land.
So let's take out the bits of land here that you can't grow things on, the Arctic Ocean and the far part of the Antarctic.
Let's take out the areas that are desert where they're cold desert or hot desert.
Let's take out the areas in which there's agricultural economies already at work.
Let's look at actively harvested land under active agricultural management.
The grey is all that's left.
And what are those? They're rainforests. That's why rainforests are being cut down because we've run out of land to grow other stuff on or graze cattle.
All of this, massive amount of economic energy going in creates enormous amount of an economic industrial base.
70,000 new chemicals existence.
By the time you're 10, you've got 35,000 chemicals in your body that never ever existed on the planet naturally.
1,000 new chemicals are created the world has never seen before every year and we're producing well over 4 trillion kilograms of toxic waste a year.
This is destroying our ecosystem.
We're losing three species an hour of known index species that was in the year 2000 and I'll pause just for 15 seconds to let you read this from the Living Planet Index 2008.
This is the fastest mass extinction the planet has ever seen on the fossil record probably by a factor of 10,000 fold and you're in the middle of it right now.
And this is not over millions of years. This is over half my lifetime because I'm 50.
We've had mass extinctions before.
What happens though is when an ecosystem is under pressure, you only got to tap it and it starts collapsing.
So even the 1990s, American natural historians were saying this is a massive mass extinction already and that's before other things have started to happen.
The big pulse which will cause massive collapse will be climate change.
The climate changes because the earth's orbit changes from more elliptical to more spherical or cylindrical.
There's a 41,000 year tilt in axis cycle for that.
There's a 26,000 year cycle what's known as procession of the axis which is like where a top is beginning to come to rest and it starts spinning like this.
And you've got sunspot cycles which some ate to me we go from ice ages to warm periods around every 100,000 years.
But if you start sticking greenhouse gases in like carbon dioxide, what they do is they let shortwave radiation through and they trap longwave radiation which is heat.
You stick more on, the world will get hotter and it is because we're burning a lot of fossil fuel.
Fossil fuels laid down in 350 million year period and you can view coal as fossilised salad really.
Oil, coal and gas are just nothing more than carbon stored and we're burning them quickly.
If we go back to my great grandfather's time, first oil well was drilled, first domestic light bulb 104 years ago.
No electric circuits to plug them into, bit of a waste of time.
Only 10 miles of concreted road a little over 100 years ago in North America, first commercial jet ticket a little over 50 years ago, first home PC 1973 by which time I was already a teenager.
Last year that's what we were consuming.
Monumental amount of energy goes into producing these things and monumental amount of energy goes into running these things.
Net result of that, we're burning this at the moment, a second and that amount is going up increasingly quickly.
That's what we've burned since 1950 in billions of tons of CO2.
The blue area is the total amount of CO2 we've released.
A fifth of that will still be in the atmosphere in 33,000 years time.
It doesn't go away once you get it out.
We're chopping down rain forests as I've explained which would normally be sequestering carbon.
Net result, around 3.2 billion tonnes of CO2 released a year.
The next three years chopping down rain forests will release as much calm dark side as every single aeroplane ticket ever sold since the days of the Wright brothers up to the year 2025.
This is a catastrophe.
All that gas is going into an atmosphere which if you rolled it up at standard temperature and pressure would be that size compared to earth.
Your atmosphere is very small indeed and if you put a lot of stuff in to a small atmosphere the concentration screams upwards.
It traps heat and you can detect that.
You can measure earth's temperature from satellites.
You can also see what's happening for instance to ice caps as they start melting in this case between 1980 and 2003.
CO2 concentrations are rising fast.
Politicians, and that means generally grown-ups are doing absolutely nothing meaningful about this at all.
This was the impact of the Kyoto protocol.
Actually if you plot the maths things have accelerated since then.
We are in the midst of this mass extinction.
When climate change starts kicking in it's going to get a lot worse in your lifetimes.
And it will produce disease, plague, pestilence, famine and war.
If we look at extreme weather events, reputable United Nations type resources you'll see they're going up.
Because global warming produces extreme weather events, tornadoes, fires and so forth.
This was the impact just of the forest fires that we had last year.
And of course that was following on at the same time from the floods in Pakistan.
And these figures beg a belief don't they?
These are enormous impacts. A fifth the Pakistan's land area under water from flooding.
And that result of that is that you can't grow the crops upon which that big population depends.
Food prices go up, food prices go up, poor people can't afford to buy grain.
They start starving, when they start starving they start fighting wars.
And that's really what the trigger for the Arab Spring was this year was food prices.
And even the Pentagon in 2003 were warning of the fact that there are going to be significant wars in your lifetime, in your own backyard.
Okay, this is what's coming. It's happening now, it's coming your direction.
And this is June notice.
Right, so I think I'm vaguely on time, I am. Good.
So the questions then, well the first thing to put the pitch to you.
Adults, my generation have no solutions to any of these problems.
That's a fact. There is no issue worldwide being addressed about population control.
There's nothing about agrarian economies, what we're growing, how we grow it, where we grow it.
There's nothing at all about meat. There is no world policy at all on greenhouse gas emissions.
There's no action being taken on these things at all.
So the questions that I think you should come up with or should might think about are, is it down to you as individuals?
Do you recycle your paper switch your light bulbs out where a jumper in the winter and try to go vegetarian?
Is the issue national? Should you be kicking the rear end out of your government and you'll meet some of the government advisers this afternoon, I hope?
Should it be international? Should you all be getting together to say the youth of the world will not take this anymore and you will do something?
In which case what's the answer? Is it political or is it economic?
If it's economic, at the moment, it costs around 768 grams of CO2 per dollar spent on GDP, you've got to get that down to six.
So whatever solution you've got to come up with, you've got to come up with something that has that sort of scale of impact and that's just on the greenhouse gases.
The answer might be scientific, it could be that you've got to communicate, it could be that you should be pressuring for nuclear power, for wind barrages, for solar wind turbines or concentrated solar power.
There's no national or international agreement about what should be done.
You might say keep burning fossil fuels, are we going to store it, store the CO2, is carbon capture and storage? That would be an option.
Some people talk about geoengineering, you spray particles in to reflect more sunlight away, for instance on the greenhouse gas emissions.
But you need to come up with some answers to all of those problems and each of those problems does not act on its own, they're all integrated.
Just to reiterate, adults are not implementing any solutions to this and you guys and girls are going to be in dreadful trouble if you don't put some solutions on the table.
There you go, thank you very much indeed.
