The Scientist's Warning

(no audio) (no audio) (gentle music) - Hi, nice to meet you.

- Hi.

Bill.

- Hi.

- Hi, there.

(gentle music continues) - He never intended to be the voice and face of saving the planet, so this kind of got thrust upon him.

'Cause I can imagine what it's like to be Bill, he's getting inundated daily from all over the world.

"What can I do?

Have you thought about this?

How can I help?"

- Hi, see you later.

- Good luck.

- Scientists are very cautious about making grand public statements.

(gentle music continues) The problem is that we live in a time when there is so much information available now.

When do we ever come together with what the strong facts or the information about the world really is?

(crowd chattering) - Okay, I'm on.

Can you hear me?

- Scientists are told that their job is not to advocate.

Their job is to find out what is true.

No one ever tells them what advocating means and so they have this broad range of fear.

(gentle music continues) - Brave scientists are coming together and resounding the call.

The imperative is greater now than ever.

For them to do that, I think is a very important civic role.

(gentle music) (crowd chattering) - Bill, to me, is a perfect messenger.

He's not a rabble-rouser.

Instead, he's very moderate.

He has a very soothing delivery.

He's very succinct.

So I think all these qualities make him the perfect messenger of the warning.

(gentle music) - One of the things that Bill Ripple has done is make sure that his beliefs and his actions are matching.

You will see him speaking out in every way he knows how warning people.

He will show us how knowledge is manifested in action.

- What do we need to do?

- Look, urgency, that's our message.

The only thing that gives me hope is that we don't even know enough to say it's too late.

- You are a humble giant and I respect you very much.

Everybody, Bill Ripple.

- Ladies and gentlemen, the star of the show, Bill Ripple.

(crowd cheering) - So tonight I'm gonna talk to you about my personal journey over the last 20 years as a scientist, and I'm gonna bring you up to date where we're at now and where we're going.

(audience applauding) - [Radio Journalist] In Oregon a state of emergency declared as 36 wildfires burn across the state.

A live stream-- - [Radio Reporter] Three dozen fires burning in Oregon, all of them barely contained at this hour.

Dozens of people are missing.

1 in 10 people in that state alone on alert to move.

The city of Talent, Oregon nearly wiped off the map tonight and in California-- (gentle music) - When the fire came through, it came up that gully, came this way, burned across, and burnt up the little North Fork River fast that way.

This did not burn until I believe about two o'clock or 2:30.

So we had more time.

We could've done more.

I wish we would've because we left so much stuff.

(no audio) I lost all of the notes that I base a lot of my books on (gentle music) that I've kept for 50 years and they're gone.

You know, it's like I can't believe that.

But they are, they're gone.

I hope that folks that live in areas like ours see what happened here.

Now, but by the same token, I have to say that I watched what happened to Paradise.

(gentle music continues) Did I learn anything?

No, I did not.

(gentle music continues) And it was a terrible, terrible thing because there was so many lives lost.

(gentle music) - [Reporter] 29 dead, hundreds missing, whole neighborhoods reduced to ruins in Paradise, California, where nearly the entire town has been incinerated by towering flames.

- [Bill] It was during those fires, I decided to write the climate emergency paper that we published in late 2019.

(gentle music continues) And in our climate emergency paper, I wrote the words "untold human suffering".

(gentle music continues) We need to mitigate and try to curb climate change, but at the same time, it's already arrived and we need to adapt to it.

So we have all kinds of needs for political leadership.

(gentle music continues) It gets frustrating to me when I see that science is being disregarded.

So I'm gonna put the emergency brake on.

We need to trust something and if we can't trust science, what are we gonna base our decisions on?

We have a moral obligation to warn humanity.

And I know it's a little scary for scientists to do such a thing.

(gentle music continues) This does not have to be complicated.

Scientists need to have courage to take the risk to speak out about the science and write papers that are understandable to the public and to policymakers.

(gentle music continues) (car engines whirring) (car horns honking) It just about brings tears to my eyes because I've really not have any one champion my cause like you've been doing.

So it's just really special.

So I really appreciate it on providing me a platform to give my a little spiel.

(gentle music) I could tell you a little bit more about myself.

I grew up in the 1950s in a rural low income farming family in South Dakota.

(gentle music continues) The Vietnam War was going on and it was time for me to go to college or the war, and my dad sold part of the farm.

Nobody else in my family has a college degree.

I just loved going to the university library and reading and doing research.

Looking back, I think rural America, you know, this was not too bad of a place to grow up.

And now as an adult, I still like riding my bike and going to baseball games and roaming around in the woods and the prairie.

I guess the pattern and the trend continues.

(gentle music continues) (birds chirping) Well, as a child, I just loved going out into the woods by myself and I just felt rejuvenated when I would spend time in nature.

When it came time to go to school, it was just natural for me to think about pursuing an education where I could actually study nature.

An ecologist is one that studies the interrelationships among species.

There's all of these interactions that go on in ecology, and we are able to look at parts of those interactions.

So nature can be very complex and it's really amazingly perfect.

(gentle music) Well, this is the animal that changed my life.

I typically work in Yellowstone National Park studying gray wolves and their effects on the environment.

I became aware of this mystery with the aspen trees.

The aspen trees were disappearing and there were arguments amongst the scientists as to what was going on with the aspen.

So we did a tree ring study by coring into the side of some of the trees and pulling out these cores.

And then we counted the rings and we found something that was just life changing for me.

By the 1920s, we saw the last wolves, and then soon after that, the aspen trees just shut down.

(gentle music continues) That's when we made this discovery that the aspen trees and their recruitment and regeneration and the success of aspen is dependent upon a large carnivore, the gray wolf.

(gentle music continues) So then we developed what's called a trophic cascades hypothesis.

But for some of you that may be too scientific and technical.

So just think of the ripple effect and you'll be okay.

Where the wolves affect the elk and the elk affect the aspen.

Therefore, indirectly wolves affect aspen.

So it goes from predator to prey to plants.

See nature's all interconnected.

(bright music) (bright music continues) It is a perfect natural experiment.

Wolves were brought back in the 1990s, and we looked to see if trees would start to grow taller as we hypothesized.

And sure enough, in many places, they are growing taller.

(bright music continues) (no audio) (books thudding on table) I started explaining the Yellowstone story to the popular press that led me to the idea of maybe it's really important to try to communicate science to the public.

(pages crinkling) And I feel like I have a knack for it.

I like to write short papers.

I like to have the text understandable to the public.

(birds chirping) I want to put in figures in my papers that can be understood in a matter of seconds.

(birds chirping) And I actually ended up liking talking to reporters in the mass media.

- A climate study endorsed by 11,000 scientists-- - For more than 150 countries-- - Have banded together to warn of untold suffering.

- Untold human suffering if climate change is not addressed.

- They're claiming the earth is in a climate emergency.

- They wrote that the climate crisis is accelerating faster than most scientists expected.

(Journalist speaking foreign language) - William Ripple from Oregon State University, one of the lead authors of this study.

Ecology professor William Ripple.

- We're just starting to see storms becoming more intense.

- These emergencies or these climate warnings have been given for a long time now.

I mean, some of the first warnings were given over 40 years ago, and we've tracked the data over the last 40 years and it doesn't paint a great picture.

(Zoom call ringing) - Thomas, it's great to visit with you again today.

Can you give me a briefing on the Australian bush fires?

- [Thomas] Yes, these are absolutely devastating, catastrophic events that have wiped out millions of hectares of mostly bushland that made fighting them difficult.

But it also meant these fires have literally wiped out entire ecosystems.

What we've seen following these fire events is huge numbers of carcasses strewn all across our landscapes.

(somber music) - [Reporter] People don't really understand it until you actually see it coming at you in a wall of flame.

- Man is having a terrible time trying to stop what mother nature is doing to us, but this would definitely be the worst fire season that I've seen.

(somber music continues) - It's unknown, I guess at this stage, how any of the animal populations survived.

Who we've lost.

What threatened plants and animals we've lost.

(somber music continues) - So what we saw recently was not normal.

Imagine you're driving down this curvy road that used to be covered by lush vegetation, and all of a sudden everything is bare, everything is black.

Like someone had cut a mine through the area, it was just completely black, dead.

It's horrific, absolutely horrific.

(somber music continues) - Have you been contacted by the Australian press, since you're a co-author on the "Scientist's Warning"?

- I was inundated with requests from media in Australia.

It was during the first week in Australia where bushfires were elevated to like catastrophic level.

(gentle music) - It all started back in February of 2017 when I was feeling especially concerned about the global environment in climate change.

Seeing this global wildlife endangerment was a turning point in my life from a field ecologist to also a science and conservation advocate.

I asked myself, "What can I do?

I'm just one person, an individual.

I'm feeling a little bit helpless at this point."

So that's when I came across the 1992 "World Scientist Warning to Humanity".

So I thought maybe I could write a letter to humanity.

That turned into the "World Scientist's Warning to Humanity, A Second Notice."

(gentle music continues) I led a paper tracking the environmental status of many different variables over time, because we have all these powerful data.

We have obligations to tell the truth and to speak it, even if it might not be popular.

- For whatever reason, people either do or don't accept the signs and therefore you get different attacks.

Following the "Scientist's Warning", I ended up getting quite a lot of hate mail and death threats.

- I was worried about my employer's response to my conservation advocacy.

But once the OSU administration found out what I was doing, they decided to give me an award for the "Scientist's Warning".

(audience cheering) Can you believe that?

(audience cheering continues) Well, that was an extremely eye-opening experience for me because at the point of finishing the paper, I asked a colleague, "Well, should we get signatories on this?"

I sent the paper to 40 scientists that I know.

Within 48 hours, 1200 scientists had signed the paper.

So there are now 21,000 scientists endorsing this call to action.

(exciting music) (pens signing paper) (exciting music continues) (pens signing paper continues) (Zoom call ringing) - Good morning.

- What time is it over there?

- 8:00 AM.

- Does the climate change that you're seeing in your country sometimes keep you awake at night?

How are you feeling about the whole situation over there?

(tense music) - Because we work with people in the southwest, I traveled to Sundarbans quite a lot.

You actually see people suffering.

(tense music continues) - The problem is even worse in the developing world, such as in Bangladesh.

It's got a very high population density.

Most of the country is less than five meters above sea level.

(tense music continues) - You know, you see all this water around you, but you can't drink it.

That's the first issue I would say, that degrades your quality of life even more than the storms and the tigers, because that's something that you're facing every day of your life.

(somber music continues) - Anybody who accepts climate change as a reality accepts human induced impacts of climate change as a reality also has to accept that every one of us has a responsibility towards those who are suffering because of our emissions.

Bangladesh is really very much at the forefront of trying to figure out how to tackle climate change.

It's no longer just being a vulnerable country and sitting idle.

(traffic whirring) (car horns honking) Resilience is a part of our culture, supporting each other, helping each other.

In that sense, I'd say Bangladesh has a much higher degree of what I would call social capital.

People just wanting to help each other.

(gentle music) - [Bushra] Every day they have to come here around three to four hours.

They come here for water and they go back.

Just before sunset, maybe an hour before sunset, it almost doubles.

Or even at night, people have to come and some of them bring their small children from far away, especially because there's no place to keep them.

So it, it just, it doesn't impact only themselves, you know, it also impacts their household.

It's a huge chunk of time that is taken away from their day.

These are the people who are impacted by climate change.

(somber music continues) (birds chirping) - The public is really important in terms of natural resource management.

They make decisions on who they elect, and those policy makers make decisions on what happens with the wildlife and the natural resources and pretty much the entire environment.

(birds chirping) So I think it all makes sense in terms of my evolution as a scientist to go from purely doing field research and publishing papers to doing more of this conservation science where I'm interested in the policy makers and the public actually grasping what we're finding.

She said now would be a pretty good time for me to speak with the governor.

- Hey, how are you doing?

- Governor, good to see you.

I have a little gift for you here.

Just have some science papers.

- I wanna thank Dr. Ripple for speaking up.

Many in the scientific community for decades have been a little bit reluctant.

Can we give him a round of applause for speaking truth to power what he's done?

(audience applauding) - Okay, any thoughts, Peter?

- Well, Bruce, I think things are changing for the better.

(inspiring music continues) - Oh, wait, wait, Peter!

- What?

- Over here.

- Oh, yeah.

- Oh, I thought that was an elk.

- It's a butt of a cow.

(Bill laughing) - I've seen elk right here.

- Yeah, no.

- You know, I wanted to ask you about our "Scientist's Warning" paper.

Do you know of any way I could get that in front of members of Congress?

- [Peter] Sure, I'm trying to remember, it's not very long.

- [Bill] No, it's 1500 words can be read in eight minutes, seven minutes.

- [Peter] I can put it in the Congressional Record.

- Wow, that would be great!

- Sure.

(gentle music) (striker's chanting) - [Strike Organizer] We're having all the speakers just stand probably on that side.

- Okay.

- Right up there.

- Hello there.

(crowd cheering) My name is Bill Ripple and I'm a scientist.

(crowd cheering) My parents wanted to hear my opinion on things.

So as a kid, I was advocating for my position.

That may have been a factor in the way I feel comfortable expressing my opinion based on scientific data today.

Even though it can be risky.

(strikers chanting) - I believe that scientists have an obligation to find out what is true, what is the case based on the very best research.

Then the obligation is to take that knowledge and put it in the hands of people who can put it to work and make sure that the information doesn't just reach other scientists, but that it gets to the people and to the decision-makers.

- To have the courage of your conviction to stand your ground and speak up, we need more of that, not just in the academy, we need more of it in the country.

Given that we're talking about issues of the imperative of addressing climate change, of dealing with some of the horrific conditions that we and the rest of the world are headed toward, one can't possibly speak out too loudly or too often.

(gentle music) - We are now the cause of a mass extinction that now threatens us.

We're the highest predator on the food chain, and if we undermine the underpinnings of the way that life exists, then who do we think is going to be most vulnerable to this?

It's us.

- And I'd like to welcome up Bill Ripple again.

- I work as a scientist studying everything from ecology to climate change.

Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any great existential threat and tell it like it is.

(gentle music continues) - I would love to see a movement of scientists where it just becomes common that scientists are out there working in communities and out there with the press and out there with the political leaders and really much more engaged.

And sometimes I feel like I just wanna shake humanity and say, "Okay, do something!

(gentle music continues) The scientific data are in."

So what I'm gonna ask you to say is "all hands on deck".

Got that?

What do we need?

- All hands on deck!

- A little louder!

What do we need to do?

- All hands on deck!

- I'll see you in the streets.

Thank you.

(crowd cheering) Are we gonna be a howling success?

Are you guys ready tonight?

Why don't we send to congress a nice loud howl of wolves so everybody can hear.

- Are you ready?

(audience howling) (audience howling continues) (wolves howling) (gentle music) - [Interviewer] Do you get nervous in front of a crowd of this size?

Or do you feel like, you know-- - Oh, I'm pretty good.

- [Interviewer] So when you published this thing, did you think, uh... - No idea.

(chuckles) (crickets chirping) (crickets chirping continues) (crickets chirping continues) - Let's give it a try, okay.

(no audio) After decades of analyzing data, reading the literature, publishing articles, and teaching, I have concluded that scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn of any catastrophic threats to humanity.

And in plain terms, tell it like it is.

(gentle music) In particular, world citizens need to know that-- - Business as usual-- - With the ever expanding human enterprise is unsustainable.

- Unsustainable.

- Is unsustainable.

- We must act fast and make progress-- - With quick, bold-- - And transformative change.

- Transformative change.

- To avoid untold-- - Avoid untold suffering.

- Scientists must deliver honest-- - And sometimes even uncomfortable truths-- - To those in power-- - Speaking truth to power-- - Truth to power.

- Speaking truth to power will have a significant influence-- - On policymakers and outcomes.

- [Thomas] The collective voice of many scientists-- - Can help turn knowledge into action.

- [All] As scientists, we pledge to stand together to affect positive change while making a commitment to speak out about threats-- - [Bill] To life on planet earth.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music fades) (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (no audio) (no audio)