Astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson Discusses Climate Change

“The sun, over its life, has gotten about 30% more luminous since it was born,” and he added “Earth's tilt on its axis, actually bobs up and down and it's not always the same distance from the Sun, we have the elliptical orbit. ”Tyson said that all creates slow changes, over hundreds of thousands of years, but he said our extreme weather now is on a much faster timeline.

“The extreme weather we are seeing has been hoisted, thrust upon us, over a timescale of decades. At most centuries, not millennia,” and Tyson said the reason for those faster changes is completely due to what’s happening on Earth, not in space. “You can't blame the universe on what we're seeing, no,” he said. Tyson pointed out that to meet its energy needs, society mined fossil fuels from the ground A major element in those fuels is carbon and Tyson said when that carbon hits the air, it destabilizes it.

He said greenhouse gasses that are released can negatively impact the climate and melt the ice caps. “You realize if you lose the ice caps on Greenland, and on Antarctica, the two largest ice sheets in the world, the water levels of the ocean will rise to the Statue of Liberty's left elbow,” he said. “What will it take for people to recognize that a community of scientists are learning objective truths about the natural world and that you can benefit from knowing about it?” he said.

Tyson has been talking about this for years, in fact in 2017 he told CNN that he had no patience for those who, as he put it, “cherry pick” scientific studies according to their belief system.“ The press will sometimes find a single paper, and say, ‘Oh here’s a new truth, if this study holds it.’ But an emergent scientific truth, for it to become an objective truth, a truth that is true whether or not you believe in it, it requires more than one scientific paper,” he said.

“It requires a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences,” he added. “That’s what we have with climate change, as induced by human conduct.” Tyson said he was gravely concerned that by engaging in debates over the existence of climate change, as opposed to discussions on how best to tackle it, the country was wasting valuable time and resources.

“The day two politicians are arguing about whether science is true, it means nothing gets done. Nothing,” he said. “It’s the beginning of the end of an informed democracy, as I’ve said many times. What I’d rather happen is you recognize what is scientifically truth, then you have your political debate.” Tyson told CNN that he believed that the longer the delay when it comes to responding to the ongoing threat of climate change, the bleaker the outcome. And perhaps, he hazarded, it was already even too late.

“I worry that we might not be able to recover from this because all our greatest cities are on the oceans and water’s edges, historically for commerce and transportation,” he said. “And as storms kick in, as water levels rise, they are the first to go,” he said. “And we don’t have a system – we don’t have a civilization with the capacity to pick up a city and move it inland 20 miles. That’s – this is happening faster than our ability to respond. That could have huge economic consequences.” Tyson claims that the consequences of man-made global warming are already upon us, as evidenced by “heightened flooding of coastal cities, mass death of ocean reefs caused by ocean warming, increase in intensity of catastrophic storms, lethal heat waves and droughts, and runaway wildfires of unprecedented magnitude.

”Minimizing global climate change is necessary to secure a better future for our planet and to ensure that it remains habitable for all humans, animals, and plants. The steps to solve this challenging problem rely heavily on changing the ways industries produce and consume energy. He told Penguin Books in 2018: “Climate change will not make Earth uninhabitable, climate change will make Earth a living hell. “In fact, I live in New York City, where we have the Statue of Liberty, holding the declaration of independence in her left arm and in her right arm the torch.“ If the water ice that is on land melts, the ocean level would rise to reach her left elbow, so that takes out all of New York City and every other coastal city that we’ve spent thousands of years building.

The problem is that we have a socialized system of Energy use where a few big companies make billions of profit while the masses spend trillions of dollars trying to fix what they keep trying to break, THE PLANET! The economic cost of using carbon fuels from a study by Deloitte Economic Institute is as follows. Deloitte's most recent analysis shows that insufficient action on climate change could cost the U.S. economy $25.5 trillion in the next 50 years. A loss of this scale is equivalent to nearly 7% of GDP or $2 trillion in 2070 alone. And over the next 50 years, nearly 100,000 jobs could disappear each year due to climate damage. Another way to look at this is the US alone would gain three to four Trillion by 2070 if it decided to go green. The only thing stopping us is ignorance and greed that the poor and middle class will have to pay for!

One of the answers to our problem is something quite easy to do and that is to use carbon neutral fuel! Carbon-neutral fuel is fuel which produces no net-greenhouse gas emissions or carbon footprint. In practice, this usually means fuels that are made using carbon dioxide (CO2) as a feedstock. Proposed carbon-neutral fuels can broadly be grouped into synthetic fuels, which are made by chemically hydrogenating carbon dioxide, and biofuels like algea, algal biofuel, or algal oil is an alternative to liquid fossil fuels that uses algae as its source of energy-rich oils. which are produced using natural CO2-consuming processes like photosynthesis.

The carbon dioxide used to make synthetic fuels may be directly captured from the air, recycled from power plant flue exhaust gas or derived from carbonic acid in seawater. Common examples of synthetic fuels include ammonia and methane,[although more complex hydrocarbons such as jet fuelhave also been successfully synthesized artificially. In addition to being carbon neutral, such renewable fuels can alleviate the costs and dependency issues of imported fossil fuels without requiring either electrification of the vehicle fleet or conversion to hydrogen or other fuels, enabling continued compatible and affordable vehicles. In order to be truly carbon-neutral, any energy required for the process must be itself be carbon-neutral or emissions-free, like renewable energy.