Climate Change Through Bill Nye’s Eyes | Nat Geo Live

So I just to talk briefly about me. I took one class as an elective from Carl Sagan, a long time ago. What he was talking about was something he a phrase that he loved: Comparative climatology. So we compared the climate of Mars with the climate of Venus with the climate of the Earth.

Then along about this time with Pollock, he was working on this computer model of the Earth's climate. The big concern then was nuclear winter. So the premise of the bit was that if you exploded enough nuclear weapons in a short enough amount of time, you would put enough debris in the atmosphere to affect the world's climate. This turned out to be a pretty reasonable idea, really.

Then Walter Alvarez Adel found this crater of Chicxulub, Mexico, that is almost certainly the crater that this giant impactor, or comet or meteorite, wiped out the ancient dinosaurs. The ancient dinosaurs might have been having trouble with volcanism, with volcanoes in India, but the asteroids would finish them off.

So you guys at Lafayette Elementary School, Mrs. McGonigle read to us from a book when I was in second grade. The reason the ancient dinosaurs disappeared is because the mammals took all their food and the dinosaurs died. And you guys, come on, just come on! Like, I'm a Tyrannosaurus, okay? Wait, I'm sorry, I'm a Tyrannosaurus and there's a rabbit, you know? That's it. I mean, it’s over in a moment!

And she knew that. She just—she even she knows this is lame. So to the young people here, I say it wasn't that long ago that this discovery was made. It was in my lifetime. I was an adult. I was out paying taxes, I had a job. And now, I mean, some of you were here in the year 2000 when Al Gore had this big environmental agenda. But it wasn't enough to convince voters overwhelmingly to some boredom.

The world would be very different if he had been elected. And so I claimed that this next election in 2016 is another huge turning point for us. You guys, you have to be optimistic. And I don't mean you look at the world through so-called rose-colored glasses and you're delusional. You have to believe that the problem can be solved, or you're not going to do anything about it.

The guy who is inspiring me right now does not exist. Mark Watney is the fictional character in "The Martian" who solves all these problems. He solves all these problems through science. And so, at least at the main level, the problems that we have with climate change are going to be solved through technology.