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so last May I was preparing to go into the field in arctic Alaska and so for many years my research team has been going out into this cold place in May to look at the fish and understand how they move out of the lakes and spring move out into the streams to breed and to feed during the short Alaskan summer and so we had we've gone out into Fairbanks we drove up our 4x4 takes about a day to get up to the North Slope from there came over the mountains and we saw was not the cold winter scene we expected which we really needed to perform our research because what we do is we get out there when they're still still on the ground we use snow machines to get all our heavy equipment out to remote field camps and we also sit there waiting for the fish to come out of the lake so we can catch them tag them understand what they do in the summer and usually where they're in those remote camps just waiting drinking coffee waiting for the fish to come out but when we arrived last May we came over those mountains and we stared across that coastal plain going out to - to the Arctic Ocean and and instead what we saw was not that the snow the white that we expected what we saw was this landscape that was already green with spring so Arctic spring had sprung a month early and the fish that we were trying to study had already left the lakes to go into the streams we couldn't use snow machines to get our heavy equipment out to our field camps anymore in fact we had to have helicopters bringing our supplies and yes this is one of my field team wearing a t-shirt and the Arctic it should have been winter yet and it was already into summer and throughout the Arctic you go go anywhere and you see these holes opening it up and what used to be permafrost and now is not and so ages old permafrost is melting creating these these thermo cars these holes cliffs going into into lakes just melting and you walk up to one and and you just hear all that ice that's been there for a long time melted dripping and hear the clatter of stones that are falling out of that ice that that had been there since the last ice age looks to me when you see these areas that the Arctic is just given up to the heat and it really is and the problem with our fish now is that they go out into these streams and then come come late fall they need to get back into the lakes to survive because the streams will freeze solid and normally there's there's enough water in those streams to allow them to come back into the lakes but as temperatures are warming in the summer strange things are happening in the Arctic so the water levels now drop and so those fish get trapped almost every year now as they try to make it back into the into the lakes and once they're trapped in a small little pool just takes a day or two for the birds and the Bears to eat a captive beef and so these these changes are happening throughout the Arctic and really throughout the world this is just these are just one example of many examples throughout the world of how things are changing drastically in this past year we reached a degree Celsius change in the other's temperature and so no matter how you measure it the temperatures have risen now one degree Celsius and when we got out on to that Arctic plane well we're experienced in was the future because it was the hottest 2015 was the hottest year on record it took us 165 years of pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to reach this threshold of 1 degree Celsius and even with the promises in Paris it will only take us 30 years to add another degree Celsius the temperature so we're looking at two degrees Celsius in just 30 years so welcome to the heat age and many of you have lived your entire lives in the teen age so if you were born after 1985 every month in the world has been hotter than average so you've spent your entire life in the heat age whether you realize it or not and we still have a long time to go probably a hundred years even if we start to try to control emissions right now we will live through this heat age and there are a lot of effects of a teenage so direct effects of sea level rise stronger storms droughts that affect humans directly but there are other effects on nature on biodiversity and some of those effects can have even greater effects on humans their disease crop failures things like that but these are the are the realign gnomes that we have to face and we need to be able to get through the heat age and protect these ecosystems and that biodiversity as much as we can as humans you know we're gonna build sea walls you know we can do things to moderate our ability to survive the each age but many species out there cannot so when it gets a little warmer we can take off our sweater it gets even warmer we can throw on the air-conditioner but this piece of the nature can't do that so take for example this pie cuts a small rabbit lake creature lives in the mountains in western North America lives on these mountain peeps and this species is adapted to live in these really extreme cold mountaintop environment however as the temperatures are rising the species is increasingly at threat of extinction visitor can't move off the mountaintop it goes into the warm valleys it can't withstand that heat even when it gets into the 60s this animal can't shed its fur coat and it starts to to face serious problems and it gets a little hotter and diet the nature is very sensitive to these changes and not only individual species but it's higher systems so this is a marble salamander is a species that lives through winter in ponds and normally it can't survive in a lot of ponds because the ice forms over and there's no more oxygen left but as temperatures are warming this species is able to survive throughout the winter throughout throughout this entire region and you'll notice your one thing you'll notice is is not just you know this the salamander in here but also how green it is look at that green it reminds me of the green when we cut out into the Arctic this is because not only can can the the algae now in that water grow over winter but this predator eats all the herbivores so these pieces are very sensitive to small changes in climate and they can magnify those effects across the entire ecosystem to completely change it a few years ago you go into this pond and then be completely completely clear but as this predator has gained a foothold it changed the entire crew bed and I've looked across all the information out there to understand the risks of climate change for extinctions and assemble into this graph so so basically what this shows is that the more the earth warms there's this accelerated risk of extinctions throughout the world this is based on the current information we have and so I currently about three percent of species on earth are endangered we get to the target of two degrees Celsius which we hope we can do looks increasingly difficult look at about five percent of species one in 20 are at risk and if we continue on our current trajectory of emissions we will get to 16 percent of species in the world at risk of extinction what that means is you go outside today and you look and you count six different species and one of those could be at risk of disappearing and so this is the best information we have right now this is hundreds of studies that have been done but unfortunately it's not our best understanding so we need to make these predictions to understand which of those she's not risked so we can protect them but I'm saying that that information is not so good because we've got hundreds of years of information about biology and how things react to environment and that's not in those models these are basic models that that are used in statistics to extrapolate and do all those things that we say you're not really supposed to do he's supposed to understand causation right and so these models are excluding the realistic movement of those species so they are assuming that species can can generally move the same but we know that for example that pika does not have the capacity to move very far whereas something like a wolf can move great distances isn't it and move with their climate these models are excluding species interactions so think back to that salamander larvae and it's huge impacts on other species in the ecosystem almost all those models neglect this key feature of nature and then almost all the models exclude evolution all right and an evolution is a real bright spot here I mean they could save many species if they can adapt to these new climates and yet again it's not in our current understanding so what does this means is that we we need to develop these these predictive abilities to protect which species are at risk just like weather forecasts have improved with really good positive mechanistic models that now can predict the weather far in advance with great accuracy and and we can do this we can build these models we have the skills to do that you know this is just a screenshot from from one of the models that I built showing you distributions of species moving across space in response to climate change some can move faster some can can only move to a certain degree and we can look at those effects in these models you know as much as we can build realistic video games right increasingly so realistic we could build these models for species and and and see how they respond to climate change but but there's one problem and that's that we almost always lack the information to put in those models we know so little about the world and it's its species you know there are there are some species of economic concern we know all these piece of information like their their ability to evolve there's their interaction with other species but almost all species on earth we lack critical information to put into these these great models and we can build so you know the problem right now is not anything to do with our our ability to to predict or ability to build better models it's that we don't have information on these on the species around the world millions of species and so my challenge for you is in our world is to develop an effort not unlike that which was used to to predict imma change in the first place this was an effort that took people that were in climate science around the world thousands of people came together to build really good models of climate change and and develop the information needed to go into those models and for that that there was the Nobel Peace Prize that was was given to them we need a similar effort to predict the effects of climate change now on the natural environment and a lot of this is going to get down to what I call boots binoculars and beakers we need to get out there and figure out how those fish move across the landscape figure out how climates will will alter the distribution as a species alter the interactions among species and this is a hard thing but we can do it we can get out there we can measure these important pieces of information put them to models and really understand what is at risk what we could lose if we don't start now to preserve those parts of our ecosystem biodiversity provides lots of benefits to humans it provides us with medicines it provides us with new technologies nature is solved just basically everything out there through adaptation over over millions of years and it provides us with all sorts of foods and economic products but for me it's not just that because I want my children and my children's children to still have that experience of going out in nature this is my son experience in a wood frog for the first time I think we owe it to future generations to try to protect as many species many ecosystems as we can during the global heat image we're trying to do that now in the Arctic so but everything is changing so quickly it's hard to even be able to to do that so we don't have much time so this year my field team is already left to go into the Arctic a full month early because this year is even hotter than the last and so we face this global heat age and what we need to do to preserve those those few those millions of species out there that are at risk is we need to understand their properties understand what they do and in the end we'll be able to keep those systems intact for future generations