Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers
Gavin Schmidt: Doctor's Orders
Season 2010 Episode 9 | 1m 59s | Video has closed captioning.
Gavin Schmidt: Doctor's Orders
Aired: 01/21/10
Problems Playing Video? | Closed Captioning
Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers
Season 2010 Episode 9 | 1m 59s | Video has closed captioning.
Gavin Schmidt: Doctor's Orders
Aired: 01/21/10
Problems Playing Video? | Closed Captioning
(logo whooshing) - The scientists who are studying the climate are very much in the same boat as a doctor who you go and see and he says, "Well, you're slightly overweight.
Your cholesterol is high and you don't exercise enough.
If you continue down this road, you're gonna be in trouble."
And the patient doesn't want to hear this.
He goes to another doctor, he goes to another doctor, and each doctor tells him pretty much the same thing.
For the patients, it's like, I realize I should probably lose a little bit of weight and I should really do more exercise.
But it's not an acute problem.
It's not like they've broken their arm and they need to get it fixed today.
It can always be started tomorrow.
There's lots of people who don't take their doctor's advice and who get fatter and who do get diabetes and who do die of heart attacks.
(upbeat music) And so what we have is a very similar situation with climate change.
The scientists who are studying the climate are telling the planet, "You need to get off your carbon diet, right?
You need to be doing something a little bit more renewable."
And people are saying, well, I'll start that tomorrow.
I'll just build a couple more power stations and say, yeah, that's great but this is what's gonna happen.
- This global warming fact or fiction- - Changes that we're seeing in the climates are outside of what we would expect.
These things are really happening now.
- The carbon dark side, the greenhouse gas issue is there every day, every year, every decade.
And it isn't gonna go away unless we really think strongly about how to make it go away.
(logo whooshing)