In the 1990s, the science of climate change was rapidly evolving. By the middle and later years of the decade, most climate scientists realized that many of their more comforting assumptions of the previous decade were wrong. These now-defunct assumptions included the belief that climate changed slowly, that the great ice sheets were stable as was the permafrost (which stores staggering amounts of greenhouse gasses), and that sea-level rise would only become a threat far in the future. Only tiny portions of the public, however, were aware of any of this.

Today we find ourselves at a significant inflection point in the unfolding tragedy of human-caused climate change. Decades of public indifference are giving way to mounting alarm as changes related to global warming impose costs on homeowners in flood and fire zones, on farmers, and municipalities. In recent years, we’ve also seen a new type of refugee — migrants, uprooted from their homes by a climate running amok. Businesses, which for most of the past 30 years thought attempts to deal with climate change would hurt their profits, are now realizing that climate change itself poses a more significant threat to their future.

How did we let things get to this point? Where are we now? And where are we headed?

In this session, Eugene Linden will unpack the various forces that drained the urgency from an issue that many scientists have long viewed as the dominant issue of our time. Tracing back to the 90s, Linden takes his audience on an insightful journey detailing how and why we, as a collective society, let the word dither rather than take action, where we are currently in the climate story, and whether it is too late for us to take action.

The fragility of the global food situation has been brought home by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Disruptions of planting and exports from this breadbasket mean that tens of millions face famine within the next few months, and the head of the UN’s World Food Programme said on 60 Minutes that the organization is going to have to divert food from the malnourished to feed the starving, and further worries about where they are going to get the supplies to meet their current obligations. The situation facing the world from climate change is far graver. The population is expected to grow by 3.6 billion between now and 2100, but even the best-case scenarios from the latest IPCC report estimate that yields will drop on every major staple crop. Do not look for new agricultural lands to save the day – most of the fertile land is already under plow. And even if there was more land to convert to farmland, we lack enough freshwater for irrigation. That is the stark reality: more people, less food. Actions needed include changes in diet, better use of existing water, and, most importantly, the breeding of crops better equipped to survive water stress, heat, disease, and other challenges associated with climate change. In other words, the key to feeding the next billions is a new agricultural revolution, and all of this has to be done without further poisoning the landscape and harming the earth’s beleaguered ecosystems. Having set the challenges and the context, the core of this talk will focus on how gene editing will power this fourth agricultural revolution. 

In 1998, Eugene Linden published The Future in Plain Sight: The Rise of True Believers and Other Clues to the Coming Instability. In the book, he posited nine, long wave-length, destabilizing factors that were so deeply integrated into modern society that they could not be neutered. Linden described these factors – market volatility, the rise of megacities, pressures for migration in a fully occupied world, the ever-widening wage gap, climate instability, ecosystem breakdown, limits on freshwater, the ever-growing risk of pandemics, and the rise of religious radicalism – and then offered scenarios describing how these factors and their interaction might transform life in the year 2050.

Fast-forward to 2021 and we’ve already suffered destabilizing episodes involving all but one of these factors. 9/11 revealed the destructive power of religious fanaticism, and subsequent related shocks continue to this day. The meltdown of 2008 showed how volatile markets in a tightly-coupled financial system could bring the world economy to the brink of collapse. The wage gap, bad in 1998 and far more extreme today, has led to the rise of extreme populists in Europe, the U.S., and South America. Daily headlines document the decline of ecosystems, as well as the costs imposed by an ever-more unstable climate. Ever greater demands on freshwater are destabilizing nations and regions around the world.

Finally, and right now, the COVID-19 pushed the world to the brink of depression. This new disease provided a warning about the one factor that has not yet become destabilizing – the rise of mega-cities. This talk will explore these factors, why so many have come to pass over the past two decades, and then look forward to what they portend in the years to come.

For the first two and a half decades of the global warming era, the dominating attitudes and actions of the business and financial community ranged from apathy to active efforts to delay or defeat political action. The latter included initiatives to undermine public perceptions of the scientific consensus. Over the past few years, however, this has begun changing. Extraordinary losses related to wildfires, floods, rising sea levels, and storms have led to dramatic losses related to natural events – about $225 billion worldwide in 2018. And the derivative impacts, such as the bankruptcy of California utility giant PG&E, have prompted a question in the minds of financial risk analysts:

If 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit warming since 1880 could bring about a steep rise in economic losses, what might a 5.4-degree rise cost? The answer is many times the 0.5% hit to U.S. GDP that Nobel-prize-winning economist William Nordhaus predicted in 1993 as a climate-related reduction in output in the U.S. for the year 2100.

Join Eugene Linden as he focuses on underappreciated aspects of climate change: the role of business and finance in shaping the climate change story, and the dawning appreciation in both those communities that climate change itself poses a greater threat to future profits than actions that might be taken to avert it.

In this session, Linden will detail some of the impacts associated with climate change that will propagate through the U.S. economy over the short and longer-term. His audience will also realize the parallels between what global warming might bring about, and what happened in 2007-2009 when rising mortgage defaults started a daisy-chain reaction throughout the financial system, threatening the viability of the U.S. banking system and bringing insurance giant AIG to the brink of insolvency. Once the U.S. purged the financial excesses that led to the crash, there was breathing room to recover. Linden argues there will be no such respites as global temperatures rise. As climate change tightens its grip, natural calamities and their derivative impacts will come ever faster.

The world has changed since Eugene Linden started writing about animal intelligence in the 1970s. Back then, the presumption was that only humans were conscious and animals were little more than windup toys. Today we know that’s wrong.

Back then, studies showed glimpses of awareness and the ability to understand and use language. But what’s really happened is that those first studies opened the eyes of both scientists and the public to the notion that some degree of awareness is widely spread through the animal kingdom, and a lot of abilities previously thought to be uniquely human (i.e., using language, tool-making, lying, joking, and even Machiavellian planning) also show up in a wide variety of animals. The cast of characters demonstrating such abilities started with the usual suspects, such as chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, and dolphins, but has since expanded to include elephants, parrots, crows, cockatoos, orcas, and some astonishing creatures such as octopus.

In this session, Linden shares the extraordinary stories and case studies of animals showing higher mental abilities – metacognition, engineering skills, toolmaking, deception, and planning – all seemingly bundled into a series of actions. The real question is: Can we believe it? Join Eugene Linden in this fascinating discussion to explore and decide for yourself.