WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.240 Good afternoon everybody. My name's Doreen Mallor and I'm from the Jim Bedison and Helen 2 00:00:08.240 --> 00:00:15.060 James Foundation. So welcome to the Adelaide Festival of Ideas. I'm sure that some of you 3 00:00:15.060 --> 00:00:21.140 have been here for a couple of days already. But to this session to be presented by Tim 4 00:00:21.140 --> 00:00:27.240 Jarvis, a recipient of the Jim Bedison and Helen James Award. And he'll be speaking about 5 00:00:27.240 --> 00:00:35.440 2050 and a couple of other things. 2050 of course is a mammoth project, global initiative. 6 00:00:35.860 --> 00:00:41.920 But I want to acknowledge Helen and Jim and their public spirit of generosity during their 7 00:00:41.920 --> 00:00:50.380 lifetimes and beyond. They were two inspiring people who've left quite a legacy. That approach 8 00:00:50.380 --> 00:00:57.220 does reflect their approach to life. And we're very grateful for their vision. Since the 9 00:00:57.220 --> 00:01:05.820 2011 Simone Vernal, Helen's daughter, has worked to establish the foundation and the 10 00:01:05.820 --> 00:01:12.480 award according to their, Helen and Jim's expressed wishes and intent. And it's been 11 00:01:12.480 --> 00:01:17.960 a great pleasure and a privilege for me and for Jeff Purdy to work with her over this 12 00:01:17.960 --> 00:01:23.080 time. Now Simone is in Berlin and Jeff is travelling with his family so they can't be 13 00:01:23.080 --> 00:01:26.080 here today. And they'd love to be but they aren't. 14 00:01:27.220 --> 00:01:32.740 But we are all delighted to see the award in progress and we do appreciate support from 15 00:01:32.740 --> 00:01:38.800 the team at Perpetual as trustees and also the Adelaide Film Festival. With special thanks 16 00:01:38.800 --> 00:01:48.980 to Amanda Duthie leading that team. So Tim, now on with the real show. And over to Tim 17 00:01:48.980 --> 00:01:56.780 Jarvis, environmental scientist, explorer, mountaineer, author and filmmaker and many 18 00:01:56.780 --> 00:01:57.100 others. 19 00:02:02.700 --> 00:02:07.500 Well thank you very much Doreen. I'm not quite sure, I must confess what an oration is. But 20 00:02:08.200 --> 00:02:13.360 I'll speak to you and maybe with a bit more gravitas like the word oration suggests. So 21 00:02:13.360 --> 00:02:17.800 we'll give it a try. Can I first of all say I'm very, very grateful to Bettison James 22 00:02:17.800 --> 00:02:23.140 for the award. It's a tap on the shoulder to say you've been the recipients of support 23 00:02:23.140 --> 00:02:27.200 funding to make a documentary film which will be the ultimate product that comes with it. 24 00:02:27.200 --> 00:02:27.220 And we've got more than $25,000 of the project. So we've got more than $25,000 of the project 25 00:02:27.220 --> 00:02:30.780 that comes out of this project. So absolutely wonderful to get their support. 26 00:02:32.020 --> 00:02:35.140 Today I'll talk to you about 25 Zero. We've only got half an hour to do it. So I'm going 27 00:02:35.140 --> 00:02:38.640 to try to rattle through some of the things we've been doing. I've just come back from 28 00:02:38.640 --> 00:02:43.520 Africa from the project in fact. Where we were climbing Kilimanjaro with a group of 29 00:02:43.520 --> 00:02:48.860 slightly high maintenance social media influencers it has to be said. It'll be pleased to hear. 30 00:02:49.020 --> 00:02:50.420 So all the rumors are true. 31 00:02:51.380 --> 00:02:55.900 But the project was actually inspired by an expedition I did several years ago to retrace 32 00:02:55.900 --> 00:02:57.180 the journey of a gargled urn. A shatter. 33 00:02:57.200 --> 00:03:08.740 For those of you who have heard of Ernest Shackleton, he was a heroic era explorer who had undertaken an expedition to save himself and all of his men from certain death down in the Antarctic in 1916. 34 00:03:08.940 --> 00:03:13.500 His ship, the Endurance, this is a Frank Hurley picture, became stuck in pack ice. 35 00:03:13.700 --> 00:03:23.200 The pack ice closed in around the hull of the ship, crushed the vessel such that only a few months after becoming stuck, the men knew they were never going to sail home on that vessel. 36 00:03:23.200 --> 00:03:30.240 And Shackleton's leadership, which is now taught at many of the world's leading management schools, got them through the most impossible ordeal. 37 00:03:31.280 --> 00:03:38.380 And for that result, Shackleton is now taught at many of the world's leading management schools for his leadership and his understanding of people. 38 00:03:39.920 --> 00:03:49.600 Before I go on, I think the one thing, because I think this is relevant to the broader climate change piece, which is the other hat I normally wear working in the science and policy and trying to communicate climate change. 39 00:03:50.560 --> 00:03:53.080 Shackleton, of all the leadership lessons that... 40 00:03:53.200 --> 00:03:59.360 ...are attributed to him, the key thing, I think, was that he understood that teams are made up of groups of people and that every person is different. 41 00:03:59.500 --> 00:04:06.260 If you want to try and get that group of people to pull as one as part of a singular effort to achieve a singular goal, in their case, saving themselves, 42 00:04:06.700 --> 00:04:10.560 you need to appeal to each one with a slightly different version of the story if you want to get traction. 43 00:04:11.140 --> 00:04:14.720 And we seem to have made that mistake with the climate change piece. 44 00:04:14.800 --> 00:04:20.600 I always tend to feel the environment movement, of which I'm very proudly a part, has tended to use guilt and fear for far too long, 45 00:04:20.700 --> 00:04:23.180 rather than hard numbers and compelling stories. 46 00:04:23.200 --> 00:04:30.380 To communicate the message and give a bright beacon that people can move towards, rather than kind of scaring people into acting. 47 00:04:31.860 --> 00:04:33.340 So Shackleton's ship sinks. 48 00:04:33.600 --> 00:04:37.020 He abandons ship into three lifeboats. 49 00:04:37.160 --> 00:04:41.180 These are the boats upon which surf boats are now modelled. 50 00:04:41.680 --> 00:04:44.440 28 men crammed into three of these boats. 51 00:04:44.680 --> 00:04:50.620 And they paddled for their lives from where the ship had gone down to the nearest piece of land for them, 52 00:04:50.660 --> 00:04:52.680 which is a place called Elephant Island. 53 00:04:53.200 --> 00:04:57.380 Elephant Island so-called because of elephant seals, not the kind of trunk variety, obviously. 54 00:04:57.600 --> 00:05:01.840 And they fell ashore and they'd saved themselves as far as they were concerned, but Shackleton knew better. 55 00:05:01.940 --> 00:05:05.260 He knew that no one would rescue them from Elephant Island. 56 00:05:05.360 --> 00:05:07.300 There's no human population, even to this day. 57 00:05:07.660 --> 00:05:11.820 The only thing for it was to get into the most seaworthy of the vessels, 58 00:05:12.500 --> 00:05:16.120 called the James Caird, named after the principal sponsor of the expedition, 59 00:05:16.380 --> 00:05:18.200 as is correct, I suppose, 60 00:05:18.920 --> 00:05:22.420 and sail this thing and paddle it 1500 kilometres across. 61 00:05:23.200 --> 00:05:25.720 The open ocean to try and reach a place where there were people, 62 00:05:26.300 --> 00:05:32.520 where they could raise the alarm and effect a rescue for the 22 men left behind on Elephant Island. 63 00:05:32.920 --> 00:05:34.960 Against all the odds, they made it across the ocean. 64 00:05:35.100 --> 00:05:38.880 They reached South Georgia, the island they were seeking to reach in the deep South Atlantic. 65 00:05:40.020 --> 00:05:43.480 They climbed a mountain range that had never been climbed before, 66 00:05:43.540 --> 00:05:47.820 with no equipment and no maps and no tents and nails pushed through the soles of their boots for grip, 67 00:05:48.480 --> 00:05:49.800 and fell over the finishing line. 68 00:05:49.860 --> 00:05:52.780 They'd been 18 months either in a stricken ship or living on the pack ice. 69 00:05:52.780 --> 00:06:00.040 They'd raised the alarm and rescued all of the men in what has now been described as the greatest survival journey of all time. 70 00:06:00.160 --> 00:06:02.300 And this is something that I recreated. 71 00:06:02.440 --> 00:06:06.600 They chose me because I'd been silly enough to attempt Douglas Mawson's journey. 72 00:06:06.720 --> 00:06:08.180 Mawson's obviously from South Australia. 73 00:06:08.520 --> 00:06:09.540 I'm a similar physique. 74 00:06:09.840 --> 00:06:16.320 They said, why don't you do a journey where you prove that he didn't need to eat the poor guy he was with in order to make it, 75 00:06:16.400 --> 00:06:18.620 and try surviving on the same calories as he had. 76 00:06:18.960 --> 00:06:22.560 So I travelled with an increasingly nervous Russian on the same... 77 00:06:23.080 --> 00:06:24.780 ...rations and can confirm it. 78 00:06:24.820 --> 00:06:28.440 It can be completed in the way in which Mawson said it was, 79 00:06:28.480 --> 00:06:31.280 without the need for any kind of an inverted comma supplementary calories. 80 00:06:33.140 --> 00:06:37.740 And so the prize was to be asked by the Shackleton family if I'd be prepared to do this journey. 81 00:06:37.960 --> 00:06:40.900 I'm not going to go rambling on about Shackleton, but the lessons are really relevant. 82 00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:47.340 I've learnt a lot from delivering often multi-million dollar expeditions that require a lot of risk and a lot of complexity over time 83 00:06:47.340 --> 00:06:52.440 to many different stakeholders, and how some of those lessons can be usefully applied to the climate change. 84 00:06:53.320 --> 00:06:58.800 In the instance of this expedition, trying to rebuild his boat, wear the same old clothes, 85 00:06:58.980 --> 00:07:03.760 learn how to traditionally navigate, eat the same miserable rations as they had available to them at the time, 86 00:07:03.820 --> 00:07:07.440 no cheating, everything done the old way, and reach South Georgia, 87 00:07:07.520 --> 00:07:12.220 you put in place steps and processes, the achievement of which are going to get you to your goal at the end. 88 00:07:12.340 --> 00:07:15.760 Not get you some of the way there, or get you roughly moving in that direction, 89 00:07:16.000 --> 00:07:19.680 but they're designed with a view to obtaining the outcome that you seek. 90 00:07:20.160 --> 00:07:22.760 I only have to look at my participation in the United Nations, 91 00:07:22.780 --> 00:07:25.740 the United Nations climate change talks, infinitely more complex of course, 92 00:07:26.380 --> 00:07:29.860 but we aspirationally want a world where we get to 1.5 degrees Celsius, 93 00:07:30.300 --> 00:07:33.340 or at worst 2 degrees Celsius of warming from where we currently are, 94 00:07:33.780 --> 00:07:36.960 and what do we do? We all beaver away putting together our plans, 95 00:07:37.200 --> 00:07:40.800 and when somebody smart enough, probably McKinsey Consulting or someone like that, 96 00:07:41.440 --> 00:07:44.800 aggregates all the information, they discover actually we're not going to make 1.5 degrees, 97 00:07:45.000 --> 00:07:48.120 we're not going to make 2 degrees, we're going to get to about 3.5 degrees. 98 00:07:48.340 --> 00:07:51.940 So we're missing 2 degrees by about 1.5 degrees, 99 00:07:51.940 --> 00:07:55.460 or more than the level by which we've already warmed the planet 100 00:07:55.460 --> 00:07:58.380 as a result of the last couple of hundred years of our activity. 101 00:07:58.540 --> 00:08:03.320 Not exactly a success. My point being, the processes designed to get the outcome 102 00:08:03.320 --> 00:08:06.300 have not been put in place with a view to achieving that outcome. 103 00:08:06.420 --> 00:08:10.060 They've been put in place in parallel to the achievement of that outcome, 104 00:08:10.160 --> 00:08:12.160 and if I did that with expeditioning, I wouldn't get anywhere. 105 00:08:12.880 --> 00:08:17.840 You have to have things that are fit for purpose to get the goal that you seek to achieve, achieved. 106 00:08:17.980 --> 00:08:21.160 And frankly, life at sea, I'm not going to talk about Shackleton for much longer, 107 00:08:21.160 --> 00:08:24.140 because I'm going to segue seamlessly into the next thing, 108 00:08:24.260 --> 00:08:30.220 but it's all about breaking the enormity of the challenge you've set for yourself down into manageable pieces 109 00:08:30.220 --> 00:08:33.040 and periodically rewarding yourself for forward progress. 110 00:08:33.240 --> 00:08:36.220 And if that isn't a metaphor for the climate change piece, 111 00:08:36.320 --> 00:08:41.040 where change is difficult to see, greenhouse gases are invisible, 112 00:08:41.220 --> 00:08:45.180 and so therefore for most people, too intangible to really make a difference, 113 00:08:45.380 --> 00:08:50.300 it's all about trying to find proxies that speak to the person whose behaviour you're seeking to change, 114 00:08:50.300 --> 00:08:52.860 and show them that either the issue is real, 115 00:08:52.940 --> 00:08:55.580 or their behaviour change has made some material difference, 116 00:08:55.780 --> 00:08:58.120 in their world at least, in terms of their contribution. 117 00:08:58.720 --> 00:09:03.300 You're living with six men, by the way, in this little surf boat. 118 00:09:03.480 --> 00:09:04.600 It has no keel. 119 00:09:06.400 --> 00:09:11.160 It's a sea sickness-inducing, violent, unpleasant place in which to try and live. 120 00:09:11.400 --> 00:09:15.260 The deck of the boat is only 40 centimetres above the surface of the sea, 121 00:09:15.340 --> 00:09:18.420 with six men and a tonne of ballast in the form of camera batteries, 122 00:09:18.420 --> 00:09:22.600 in Shackleton's case, rocks, in the bottom of the boat to try and stop it capsizing. 123 00:09:22.980 --> 00:09:27.880 And you can only endure about one hour on the helm until someone relieves you. 124 00:09:28.220 --> 00:09:35.260 You can only endure one hour because you're constantly having waves of 1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius sea water 125 00:09:35.260 --> 00:09:40.560 crashing over you, and you're wearing non-waterproof cotton smocks, woolens and leather boots, 126 00:09:40.680 --> 00:09:43.680 with no hidden neoprene or anything else, no GPS. 127 00:09:44.160 --> 00:09:47.960 A very unpleasant experience, and you warm up by huddling together, 128 00:09:47.960 --> 00:09:52.640 with the other five guys down below deck, spooning with them, 129 00:09:52.760 --> 00:09:55.560 which should have been in our risk assessment, somehow slipped through the net, 130 00:09:55.700 --> 00:09:58.500 but suffice to say, a very difficult undertaking. 131 00:09:59.380 --> 00:10:03.080 And it's all about breaking the enormity of this challenge down into manageable pieces, 132 00:10:03.220 --> 00:10:06.940 and as I say, periodically rewarding yourself for the fact that you've actually made progress. 133 00:10:07.980 --> 00:10:11.600 In the interest of time, compressing what we did, we reached this island, South Georgia. 134 00:10:11.660 --> 00:10:16.360 This is a jewel of a place, with an amazing biodiversity, an amazing glaciated landscape, 135 00:10:16.360 --> 00:10:22.120 92% of the glaciers there are in wide-scale retreats as a result of human-induced climate change, 136 00:10:22.380 --> 00:10:27.680 and the landscape we found versus the one which Shackleton experienced 100 years before us 137 00:10:27.680 --> 00:10:30.340 is very, very different indeed. 138 00:10:30.980 --> 00:10:35.060 Putting it bluntly, you're falling into crevasses a lot more frequently than he did. 139 00:10:35.160 --> 00:10:37.340 The ones that he crossed over would have been full of snow. 140 00:10:37.720 --> 00:10:42.340 For us, these glaciers were very, very heavily denuded and eroded, 141 00:10:42.400 --> 00:10:46.340 and we were falling in all the time, and we traveled, even when visibility was low, 142 00:10:46.360 --> 00:10:46.700 and visibility was zero. 143 00:10:46.820 --> 00:10:50.740 You have to travel to keep moving, to generate heat, to keep yourself alive. 144 00:10:51.020 --> 00:10:56.220 That's the way the equation works, and you fall into those crevasses quite simply because you don't see them. 145 00:10:56.320 --> 00:11:03.660 And this happened about 20 times between three of us over the course of the 34-kilometer crossing of the mountains. 146 00:11:04.700 --> 00:11:09.380 And as I say, the landscape, sadly, is very different from that which Shackleton experienced. 147 00:11:09.560 --> 00:11:10.380 This is not Shackleton. 148 00:11:10.560 --> 00:11:15.600 This is a guy called Duncan Cass, who went there and crossed the mountains of South Georgia 149 00:11:15.600 --> 00:11:22.620 in 1956, so 40 years after Shackleton, 60 years before I took the shot that I took. 150 00:11:22.800 --> 00:11:27.640 And I tried to get to the same position as Duncan Cass was on the end of the final glacier. 151 00:11:27.900 --> 00:11:32.120 It was the final barrier for Shackleton and his men reaching the whaling station 152 00:11:32.120 --> 00:11:35.460 to raise the alarm and try and save everyone. 153 00:11:35.620 --> 00:11:39.280 And I think you'll see there's been a significant amount of change. 154 00:11:39.420 --> 00:11:42.000 If I could turn that camera around and point it back up the valley, 155 00:11:42.080 --> 00:11:45.460 you'd have about a five-kilometer retreat back up the valley. 156 00:11:45.600 --> 00:11:52.160 And as I've said, South Georgia in a state of really wide-scale retreat. 157 00:11:52.560 --> 00:11:55.380 And just to give you an idea, hopefully this little clip will work. 158 00:11:55.480 --> 00:11:59.820 It's the final sequence of myself and my one colleague who made it across the mountains 159 00:11:59.820 --> 00:12:04.180 to try and reach the whaling station that Shackleton reached 100 years before us, 160 00:12:04.240 --> 00:12:09.500 looking down at the valley that used to have the glacier that was this barrier for him 161 00:12:09.500 --> 00:12:10.640 that he needed to cross. 162 00:12:10.780 --> 00:12:14.740 And in our instance, we looked down, and there it was as a lake. 163 00:12:14.740 --> 00:12:19.820 We're coming down. This is a very, very unpleasant steep descent. 164 00:12:19.880 --> 00:12:24.520 By the way, it's about 1,000 foot, 300 meters of very technical mountaineering going straight down. 165 00:12:24.640 --> 00:12:27.920 You're wearing leather boots with these nails pushed through the soles for grip, 166 00:12:27.960 --> 00:12:30.140 and they're wet, and you have one length of rope, 167 00:12:30.260 --> 00:12:34.480 and there was where the glacier used to be, now a lake, unfortunately. 168 00:12:36.060 --> 00:12:40.460 Now, I go to the polar regions a lot, and they're great places full of ice, 169 00:12:40.520 --> 00:12:44.100 and ice melting is a very simple way of showing, 170 00:12:44.100 --> 00:12:46.420 showing an otherwise intangible issue like climate change. 171 00:12:46.720 --> 00:12:48.820 I'm not the first person to come up with that idea. 172 00:12:49.000 --> 00:12:52.680 It's a nice way of doing it, if you can attribute the change to what we're doing. 173 00:12:52.820 --> 00:12:56.920 You can say, well, that glacier is melted because of human-induced climate change, etc., etc., 174 00:12:56.920 --> 00:12:57.360 and it's visual. 175 00:12:57.740 --> 00:13:01.460 The problem with the Antarctic is the scale of the place is vast. 176 00:13:02.320 --> 00:13:05.820 It is 14 million square kilometers in physical extent. 177 00:13:06.060 --> 00:13:10.800 Australia is 7.6, so Antarctica is getting on for twice the size. 178 00:13:10.900 --> 00:13:12.700 The average ice thickness, average, 179 00:13:12.700 --> 00:13:17.800 is 2050 meters, so you've got 2 kilometers average thickness of ice 180 00:13:17.800 --> 00:13:19.580 on a place twice the size of Australia. 181 00:13:19.760 --> 00:13:25.600 You have 28 million cubic kilometers of ice in the Antarctic ice cap. 182 00:13:26.320 --> 00:13:28.500 97% of the world's water is in the ocean, 183 00:13:28.580 --> 00:13:32.300 and the remaining 3%, 2% is in the Antarctic ice cap, 184 00:13:32.460 --> 00:13:35.800 and 7.2 billion of us survive on the remaining 1%, 185 00:13:35.800 --> 00:13:38.820 and a quarter of that is in Lake Baikal in northern Russia. 186 00:13:38.980 --> 00:13:42.140 So, no wonder we're always arguing, 187 00:13:42.140 --> 00:13:44.440 forget the Murray-Darling Basin, but on a global scale, 188 00:13:44.500 --> 00:13:47.280 about access to water. It's a major issue. 189 00:13:47.500 --> 00:13:51.840 This shot here was a shot taken of my bid to cross Antarctica 190 00:13:51.840 --> 00:13:54.140 one side to the other on foot, unsupported, 191 00:13:54.200 --> 00:13:56.700 which is what Shackleton was trying to do before his ship sank. 192 00:13:57.020 --> 00:13:59.440 And that's about 600 kilometers from the South Pole, 193 00:13:59.460 --> 00:14:01.920 and I'm coming out of the screen towards you, 194 00:14:02.020 --> 00:14:05.040 and I put this shot up there because that mountain is the last one I saw. 195 00:14:05.560 --> 00:14:08.040 Only the top 150 meters sticks out of the ice, 196 00:14:08.060 --> 00:14:11.580 the other 3,000 meters, so that's 1,000 meters bigger, 197 00:14:12.140 --> 00:14:14.880 than Kosciuszko is buried beneath the ice. 198 00:14:14.960 --> 00:14:17.340 Indeed, there are mountains between where that shot is taken 199 00:14:17.340 --> 00:14:20.580 and the South Pole still 600 km away, massive mountains, 200 00:14:20.780 --> 00:14:24.380 all of them physically too small to poke through the ice, 201 00:14:24.400 --> 00:14:27.520 so you're walking literally over the summits of those mountains. 202 00:14:27.660 --> 00:14:31.200 There is a range the size of the European Alps buried under the ice. 203 00:14:31.260 --> 00:14:34.040 None of the summit's physically big enough to poke through. 204 00:14:34.260 --> 00:14:37.000 My point, long-winded though it may be, 205 00:14:37.600 --> 00:14:41.620 is that the scale of the place makes it very difficult for you to show 206 00:14:42.140 --> 00:14:42.480 the change. 207 00:14:42.640 --> 00:14:44.500 You could lose 100 meters of thickness of ice, 208 00:14:44.580 --> 00:14:45.900 which we haven't done, but if you did, 209 00:14:46.000 --> 00:14:49.120 you wouldn't be able to easily show it visually. 210 00:14:49.580 --> 00:14:51.740 And humans, seeing is believing. 211 00:14:51.960 --> 00:14:53.900 We're very visual, we need to see things, 212 00:14:54.060 --> 00:14:57.080 which is one of the many reasons why the climate change piece 213 00:14:57.080 --> 00:14:58.820 has been so difficult for many people, 214 00:14:58.900 --> 00:15:02.080 because you can't see greenhouse gas, therefore is it real? 215 00:15:02.160 --> 00:15:05.020 You need to find a proxy that speaks to people. 216 00:15:05.700 --> 00:15:10.780 So the challenge was to find a place where the change is evident, 217 00:15:12.140 --> 00:15:14.080 and where you have human interest stories. 218 00:15:14.120 --> 00:15:17.040 You have no human population in the Antarctic either. 219 00:15:17.120 --> 00:15:21.800 It's difficult to get too touchy-feely about scientists doing work on bases, 220 00:15:22.020 --> 00:15:24.220 with all considerable respect to scientists. 221 00:15:24.400 --> 00:15:26.940 There are 10,000 or so in the heat of the Antarctic summer, 222 00:15:27.060 --> 00:15:31.100 but there isn't a human population of people being adversely impacted 223 00:15:31.100 --> 00:15:32.580 by the effects of climate change. 224 00:15:32.720 --> 00:15:34.060 So you need to find somewhere else. 225 00:15:34.220 --> 00:15:36.100 And there is a place, and it's the equator, 226 00:15:36.720 --> 00:15:40.600 wherein probably you have 25 mountains that have a glacier, 227 00:15:40.660 --> 00:15:42.120 but within roughly 15 miles of the equator, 228 00:15:42.140 --> 00:15:44.180 in a quarter of a century, in some cases far less, 229 00:15:44.240 --> 00:15:47.140 those glaciers will be gone as a result of climate change. 230 00:15:47.380 --> 00:15:51.300 So the project name, 25.0, is a simple play on those two sets of numbers. 231 00:15:51.420 --> 00:15:54.400 25 mountains, zero latitude, 25 years, no more ice. 232 00:15:54.880 --> 00:15:59.840 And it's unashamedly a project which looks to communicate the science 233 00:15:59.840 --> 00:16:03.040 to people who wouldn't otherwise listen, using adventure as the hook. 234 00:16:03.160 --> 00:16:06.380 And the media, frankly, who are a little bit tired of hockey-stick-shaped curves 235 00:16:06.380 --> 00:16:07.680 and Al Gore-style presentations, 236 00:16:07.940 --> 00:16:11.880 they need some other means by which they can get interested in the subject. 237 00:16:12.140 --> 00:16:38.940 but 238 00:16:38.940 --> 00:16:43.860 the island of Papua New Guinea. The Indonesians call it Puncak Jaya, that means victory peak. 239 00:16:44.540 --> 00:16:50.500 Jan Carstens, the Dutch explorer in the 17th century, had spotted it and swore blind that 240 00:16:50.500 --> 00:16:53.840 there were mountains with ice on them in the interior there at the equator. And of course, 241 00:16:53.840 --> 00:16:58.000 he was laughed out of the house and of course subsequently discovered that there was indeed 242 00:16:58.000 --> 00:17:04.080 ice on those mountains. You go west and you reach East Africa and you have five mountains there. 243 00:17:04.080 --> 00:17:10.780 Three in the Rwenzuri on the left-hand side, in Galiama, Duwone and Kianja. In Galiama is also 244 00:17:10.780 --> 00:17:16.280 known as Mount Stanley. Stanley, of course, famously encountered Dr. Livingston, I presume, 245 00:17:16.460 --> 00:17:21.780 on his bid to find out what had happened to him. And you have Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. 246 00:17:22.020 --> 00:17:28.860 The three on the left are in the Albertine Rift, this incredibly biodiversity-rich watershed 247 00:17:28.860 --> 00:17:33.200 for Africa. It's the left-hand 248 00:17:33.200 --> 00:17:34.060 broad-legged mountain range of Mount Kianja. 249 00:17:34.080 --> 00:17:38.340 It's the right-hand branch of the African Rift Valley. If anyone's been watching those programs 250 00:17:38.340 --> 00:17:43.060 on Sunday nights about unsolved murders, as one does, there was one about Diane Fossey and she 251 00:17:43.060 --> 00:17:47.960 was in the Virunga Mountains, which is also in the Albertine Rift. You then go to South America 252 00:17:47.960 --> 00:17:52.760 and you have five mountains in Colombia that we've not been able to get to yet due to a combination 253 00:17:52.760 --> 00:18:00.840 of political and seismic uncertainty. And the other 14 mountains are in Ecuador, indeed. Ecuador 254 00:18:00.840 --> 00:18:04.060 is just the Spanish for equator and it's right on the left-hand side of the Rwanda. 255 00:18:04.080 --> 00:18:08.100 It's the same as Ecuador but it's in the equator. Cotopaxi, Chimborazo, a lot of really iconic mountains, 256 00:18:08.420 --> 00:18:12.560 lots of interesting stories, lots of powerful images. And the beauty of these mountains, 257 00:18:12.820 --> 00:18:17.560 if one wants to look at human-induced climate change as a thing of beauty, is that the glaciers 258 00:18:17.560 --> 00:18:22.420 are surrounded by landscapes which are predominantly green or brown. Any changes in the glacier 259 00:18:22.420 --> 00:18:26.780 are very, very clearly seen. There isn't a lot of noise, snow and ice around to obscure 260 00:18:26.780 --> 00:18:32.260 the visuals and it's a very powerful way of showing the issue. In Ecuador, you have the 261 00:18:32.260 --> 00:18:34.060 added factor that the climate changes are very, very important. It's the fact that you 262 00:18:34.060 --> 00:18:37.880 have a lot of water supply. Many of these glaciers, the periodic seasonal melt during 263 00:18:37.880 --> 00:18:42.520 the drier periods, provide the water supply for many of Ecuador's cities. In fact, Quito, 264 00:18:42.720 --> 00:18:49.180 the capital, gets 25% of its water supply from the periodic melt of the glaciers around 265 00:18:49.180 --> 00:18:55.580 Cotopaxi. So it's a very real, very real issue indeed. In fact, the project should 266 00:18:55.580 --> 00:19:02.040 be called 21-0 because we've lost four. There are only 21 left out of the 25. And so the 267 00:19:02.040 --> 00:19:03.480 plan was simple. 268 00:19:04.060 --> 00:19:12.460 It initiated in 2015. I'm the ambassador for WWF here in Australia when I'm not climbing 269 00:19:12.460 --> 00:19:18.160 and doing various other things. And they endorsed the project. And the idea initially was to 270 00:19:18.160 --> 00:19:22.520 make a bit of a song and dance at the COP21 climate change talks in Paris in December 271 00:19:22.520 --> 00:19:29.000 15. The world was sitting on a knife edge. Was this going to be a really meaningful climate 272 00:19:29.000 --> 00:19:34.040 change conference or were we going to kind of pull back from the edge and go back to 273 00:19:34.060 --> 00:19:38.840 the beginning and pull our punches and not get the deal achieved? And Paris was all about 274 00:19:38.840 --> 00:19:44.440 what the climate change deal post-2020, post-Quito looks like. We're currently under what is 275 00:19:44.440 --> 00:19:49.720 called the Kyoto Protocol, 2020 onwards. What's the global climate change deal look like we 276 00:19:49.720 --> 00:19:54.940 all sign up to? And that's what Paris in December 15 was about. So we beamed into the summits 277 00:19:54.940 --> 00:20:02.640 of Paris. We had a simple logo. The logo was rather dramatically in a ration style. It 278 00:20:02.640 --> 00:20:03.880 was either the mountains. 279 00:20:07.560 --> 00:20:18.360 Well made 280 00:20:24.800 --> 00:20:28.580 the film was going to be one of the principal products to get these messages and stories 281 00:20:28.580 --> 00:20:32.920 and statistics out there. I'm showing things anecdotally. I'm a climber 282 00:20:32.920 --> 00:20:36.700 but I am a scientist and I always reference anything I say anecdotally with 283 00:20:36.700 --> 00:20:40.740 peer-reviewed science. So it's not just a climber going on a jolly saying, look 284 00:20:40.740 --> 00:20:44.820 there's a glacier, it's melting, it must be down to human-induced climate change. I'm always 285 00:20:44.820 --> 00:20:48.860 backing up anything I say with the evidence to support whatever it is 286 00:20:48.860 --> 00:20:51.960 that I say. And we started off 287 00:20:51.960 --> 00:20:56.540 going up Carstens Pyramid and the goal was to be there on 288 00:20:56.540 --> 00:21:00.660 day one of the Paris climate talks in December 15. 289 00:21:01.000 --> 00:21:04.300 Now it's not easy to get to. It's five or six days of fairly 290 00:21:04.300 --> 00:21:07.520 tortuous trekking through jungle. 291 00:21:08.080 --> 00:21:12.540 For want of a better description, obviously it goes up through different vegetation zones but you start very 292 00:21:12.540 --> 00:21:16.560 much in kind of, you're taking your anti-malarials at the bottom and by the top 293 00:21:16.560 --> 00:21:20.600 it's a lot colder obviously. There's a separatist movement in West 294 00:21:20.600 --> 00:21:20.980 Papua. 295 00:21:21.960 --> 00:21:31.620 It's not a big deal but it's a real challenge to get in there. We needed to be there by day one of the climate change talks. We were going to beam in from the summit endorsed by several governments. 296 00:21:31.840 --> 00:21:38.960 Interestingly, Uganda. Uganda I could understand because Uganda are very worried about losing the ice in the 297 00:21:38.960 --> 00:21:51.740 Rwenzori Mountains. The Rwenzori Mountains ice provides one of the main sources of water for the headwaters of the Nile and so they're very very concerned. It's a huge biodiversity hotspot. Nigeria with the other government and I think Nigeria 298 00:21:51.740 --> 00:21:58.280 did it out of a sort of a sense of guilt perhaps but being a petrochemical state they felt they should endorse what we were doing. 299 00:21:58.500 --> 00:22:10.000 Being endorsed at the climate change talks means that your project gets seen by the government attendees and not just the media and the NGOs who are the other two main groups of people who go. 300 00:22:10.120 --> 00:22:21.400 That's extremely important because there's no point getting your message in front of your peers. They already agree with you and the media can, dare I say it, be fickle. You're not necessarily going to get a look in. 301 00:22:21.400 --> 00:22:29.360 You get a government endorsed press conference and you know that everyone who's in attendance will see it. So we need to get to the top of the first mountain by day one. 302 00:22:30.140 --> 00:22:39.220 There it is. It's on the right hand side. It used to have a glacier itself. It doesn't now. The glaciers that remain are on its flanks. 303 00:22:39.600 --> 00:22:46.620 And the summit of Carstens Pyramid or Puncak Dar on the right provides you with the best vantage point of those glaciers. 304 00:22:46.740 --> 00:22:51.380 And more importantly it's the place from which all of the historical images of those glaciers have been taken. 305 00:22:51.400 --> 00:23:06.100 The ice has been there about 13,000 years. We know that. Everything around there is like a geography textbook in terms of glacial, corries, tarns, lakes, U-shaped valleys, all the kind of stuff as a geographer I remember from the textbooks. 306 00:23:06.740 --> 00:23:11.500 And the only thing absent is the medium that caused it, the ice. 307 00:23:12.240 --> 00:23:18.500 The climate itself is very technically demanding. It's one of the seven summits. It's the most technically challenging of the seven summits. 308 00:23:18.560 --> 00:23:21.380 You go straight up that face up to the top and then along a rock. 309 00:23:21.400 --> 00:23:23.380 And you're on the ridge line with plenty of opportunities to kill yourself. 310 00:23:23.600 --> 00:23:25.340 So it's not to be taken lightly. 311 00:23:25.680 --> 00:23:29.620 But it does provide a spectacular climate, a really great vantage point of the mountains. 312 00:23:29.860 --> 00:23:33.220 And I put this shot in in no way disrespectfully to the local people. 313 00:23:33.400 --> 00:23:35.780 This is how they were clad. They are the Dhani people. 314 00:23:36.040 --> 00:23:41.440 And this is the negotiation process about them providing a portering service to us for the mountain. 315 00:23:41.560 --> 00:23:50.540 You have to, quite rightly, enlist the help of the local people to actually find your way to the mountain and to carry some of your provisions up there. 316 00:23:50.540 --> 00:23:54.140 And this whole process was taken extremely, extremely seriously. 317 00:23:54.720 --> 00:23:58.180 And the mountain itself, as I say, is not for the faint-hearted. 318 00:23:58.340 --> 00:24:07.680 It's strewn with ropes that previous expeditions have put up there to scale and navigate complicated sections. 319 00:24:08.320 --> 00:24:11.180 And you're not sure how good those ropes are. 320 00:24:11.320 --> 00:24:17.660 And you'd find yourself clipping into a rope, climbing up using your ascender, which is a device that allows you to go up but not go down. 321 00:24:17.660 --> 00:24:21.120 And you'd get to the top of the section in the flickering light of your head torch. 322 00:24:21.220 --> 00:24:25.020 You'd find that the rope was just held on by a couple of strands and wouldn't have held you had you fallen. 323 00:24:25.860 --> 00:24:30.920 And there are things like this, a Tyrolean traverse across 500-meter descent. 324 00:24:31.480 --> 00:24:34.720 So there's some really kind of challenging sections to reach the summit. 325 00:24:34.860 --> 00:24:37.840 And this is the summit. This is Ed Wardle, the cameraman that I was with. 326 00:24:38.240 --> 00:24:39.880 We filmed our piece on the summit. 327 00:24:40.200 --> 00:24:47.000 We got out our in-mass satellite unit, like a little laptop, pointed it in the direction of the conference sort of thing. 328 00:24:47.000 --> 00:24:52.400 Pressed send and out went our plea about the need to do something about the issue. 329 00:24:52.480 --> 00:24:56.140 And it wasn't just a look. We have a problem. We have a climate change issue. Please sort it out. 330 00:24:56.180 --> 00:25:05.740 It was a list of fairly well thought through asks that we'd signed off on with WWF before we went about the kinds of things we wanted to see in the new agreement. 331 00:25:05.840 --> 00:25:08.460 And these are the glaciers. On the right-hand side you have the Carstens. 332 00:25:08.880 --> 00:25:13.020 And the three on the left are the west and the north, North Wall, Thurn. 333 00:25:13.140 --> 00:25:16.860 And they're literally 80, 90 meters long. 334 00:25:16.900 --> 00:25:16.980 Yeah. 335 00:25:17.000 --> 00:25:21.020 And they've perhaps got six to eight years left before they've gone all together. 336 00:25:21.120 --> 00:25:24.220 Lonnie Thompson from the University of Ohio is the main expert on these. 337 00:25:24.320 --> 00:25:33.940 And we quote and cite a lot of his work in trying to bring the work of these academics to the attention of the broader public. 338 00:25:34.320 --> 00:25:37.820 And this gives you an idea of the mountain from above. 339 00:25:37.920 --> 00:25:39.500 Just to give you an idea, that's the summit. 340 00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:42.280 And you're looking down on this vertically from above. 341 00:25:42.780 --> 00:25:45.660 And this is the ice as it used to be in 1936. 342 00:25:45.660 --> 00:25:48.000 This ice across this section here. 343 00:25:48.180 --> 00:25:52.800 This thing here, sadly, is the Grasberg copper gold mine. 344 00:25:52.940 --> 00:25:55.800 That's growing. The glaciers are shrinking. The gold mine is growing. 345 00:25:56.560 --> 00:25:59.160 And it's gradually encroaching upon the mountain. 346 00:25:59.260 --> 00:26:04.660 In fact, they're pretty confident there's some very rich ore veins under Carstens Pyramid itself. 347 00:26:04.720 --> 00:26:09.020 So it may yet be mined before climate change claims the glaciers. 348 00:26:09.160 --> 00:26:14.120 But just to give you an idea of the change we've seen since 1936. 349 00:26:15.260 --> 00:26:17.420 We've seen a pretty pronounced reduction. 350 00:26:18.960 --> 00:26:23.840 And I think it fair to say that, you know, five or six years there won't be any ice left. 351 00:26:23.920 --> 00:26:25.940 And I asked the locals through various translators. 352 00:26:25.960 --> 00:26:32.140 I spoke in English to the Indonesian guide who in Bahasa Malay then communicated with the Dani locals. 353 00:26:32.320 --> 00:26:34.300 And said, you know, what are you going to do when the ice is gone? 354 00:26:34.400 --> 00:26:36.840 And they kind of laughed it off and said, well, that won't happen. 355 00:26:37.340 --> 00:26:39.100 And I said, well, you know, I beg to differ. 356 00:26:39.180 --> 00:26:43.580 But sadly, I think we are going to see that ice vanish altogether. 357 00:26:44.120 --> 00:26:48.660 We then hot-footed it as a team to the Rwenzori Mountains in Africa. 358 00:26:49.000 --> 00:26:51.920 The key thing about climate change talks is they last 12 days. 359 00:26:52.040 --> 00:26:53.660 The first six days are the bureaucrats. 360 00:26:53.740 --> 00:26:55.720 The second six days the politicians turn up. 361 00:26:55.960 --> 00:27:00.600 The first six days is all about massaging text into a form the politicians can see. 362 00:27:01.000 --> 00:27:03.960 And hopefully, by the end of a further six days, sign off on. 363 00:27:04.120 --> 00:27:06.620 So the crucial days are day one, day six, day 12. 364 00:27:07.200 --> 00:27:08.960 Day one, get your message out there. 365 00:27:09.020 --> 00:27:10.340 Day six, keep them honest. 366 00:27:11.420 --> 00:27:14.080 Day 12, see whether we've reached a deal. 367 00:27:14.120 --> 00:27:16.080 And if so, comment accordingly. 368 00:27:16.760 --> 00:27:20.840 The Rwenzori, as I say, are on the border between Congo over here and Uganda here. 369 00:27:21.520 --> 00:27:25.420 All of these lakes, Lake Albert, this is Lake George, this is Lake Edward, 370 00:27:25.520 --> 00:27:31.020 they're all in the western arm of the African Rift Valley and what is called the Albertine Rift. 371 00:27:31.300 --> 00:27:34.920 The Rwenzori are an amazing biodiversity hotspot. 372 00:27:35.140 --> 00:27:40.400 And the water, the runoff from the glaciers, feeds Lake George, which feeds Lake Edward, 373 00:27:40.500 --> 00:27:43.960 which feeds the Semliki River, which forms the border with Congo. 374 00:27:44.120 --> 00:27:47.920 And goes back into Lake Albert and then north to the Nile. 375 00:27:47.980 --> 00:27:50.280 So they're one of the major sources of the Nile. 376 00:27:50.360 --> 00:27:51.880 The Virunga Mountains are just down here. 377 00:27:52.280 --> 00:27:56.560 We have the mountain gorillas and various other communities of amazing primates. 378 00:27:56.620 --> 00:27:59.580 So it's a very, very biodiversity rich area. 379 00:27:59.880 --> 00:28:02.920 And what the United Nations Environment Programme calls a water tower. 380 00:28:03.100 --> 00:28:09.720 So it's one of these areas in Africa which supports a lot of downstream resources in terms of water. 381 00:28:10.000 --> 00:28:13.160 We went there following in the footsteps of the Duke of Abruzzi. 382 00:28:13.160 --> 00:28:16.460 Who went there in 1906 to climb mountains. 383 00:28:16.580 --> 00:28:19.720 He'd heard about them from Stanley, who met Livingston. 384 00:28:20.360 --> 00:28:23.120 Stanley had heard about them and he'd been there but he'd never climbed them. 385 00:28:23.620 --> 00:28:25.760 And he in turn had heard about them from Ptolemy, 386 00:28:25.840 --> 00:28:31.380 the Greek traveller from 1500 years prior who'd heard of them but never seen them. 387 00:28:31.760 --> 00:28:33.560 So Ptolemy heard of them, never saw them. 388 00:28:33.620 --> 00:28:35.080 Stanley saw them, didn't climb them. 389 00:28:35.440 --> 00:28:40.560 And the Duke of Abruzzi, who obviously was a petty aristocrat with too much time on his hands, 390 00:28:40.620 --> 00:28:43.020 and actually a very good mountaineer, went up there in 1906. 391 00:28:43.160 --> 00:28:45.140 And we followed in his footsteps. 392 00:28:45.320 --> 00:28:47.040 His team was 180 porters. 393 00:28:47.280 --> 00:28:48.240 We had 40. 394 00:28:48.720 --> 00:28:51.400 I'm not quite sure we had so many people but they were there really. 395 00:28:51.540 --> 00:28:53.680 A wonderful addition to the team. 396 00:28:53.860 --> 00:28:58.400 And again, it's about putting back into the local economy as much as anything. 397 00:28:58.660 --> 00:29:01.860 And the goal was to get to the top of a mountain called Mount Baker. 398 00:29:02.840 --> 00:29:03.600 Western name. 399 00:29:03.760 --> 00:29:10.220 And take a picture of Ngalliama, Mount Stanley from the same position that the Duke of Abruzzi had done in 1906. 400 00:29:10.780 --> 00:29:13.140 And run a little transition showing how each mountain was built. 401 00:29:13.160 --> 00:29:15.620