[Music]
Hello Blacksburg! All right, good afternoon, my name is
Bill Hopkins, I'm a professor of wildlife conservation in the College of Natural
Resources and Environment, and I'm also the director of the university's
Global Change Center. I'd like to welcome everyone today to
another installment of our public distinguished lecture series. This is put
on every year, sometimes multiple times a year, by the
Global Change Center. it's an event, a number of events that we
do like this are really centered around engaging the community
on issues of great societal importance, typically environmental
issues, and it's wonderful to once again see such a strong turnout
for this important event. I saw a lot of familiar faces, I also see some new faces.
For those of you who don't follow us and haven't been to some of our other events
please check us out and follow us on social media, on our website.
It's up to date, it's kept up to date very frequently and
we're always posting new information. Before we get started I want
to thank the folks who helped to make this event possible.
First of all, the Fralin Life Science Institute.
So Fralin is our academic home at Virginia Tech. They provide most of our
funding. Without them we wouldn't be able to hold
events like this and a lot of the other things that we do.
Also the Virginia Tech Graduate School. They fund our interdisciplinary graduate
education program. A lot of our graduate Ph.D. fellows were
the ones ushering you in today, so thanks guys and gals, that's
much appreciated and I'd also like to acknowledge
Dr. Sterling Nesbitt and Michelle Stocker who were both there in the department of
Geosciences. Some of you may be familiar with them.
They are are a couple of our dinosaur experts at Virginia Tech and they were
instrumental in helping to make contact with our
distinguished guest, Dr. Kirk Johnson, to bring him here to Blacksburg.
I also want to thank the Fralin Life Institute staff, in particular
Gloria Schoenholz. Gloria is the one behind the scenes
handling all the little details the logistics that allow
an event like this to run seamlessly, so thank you Gloria.
And last and certainly not least I always want to give a big shout out to the Lyric Theater.
This is a wonderful venue and we're really
appreciative that they enjoy partnering with us and allowing us
to bring these sorts of important issues and and incredible
scientists to Blacksburg. So with that let's thank the Lyric as
well as all the other donors and staff that I mentioned.
[Applause]
So two quick housekeeping items before I introduce
our distinguished guest. At the end of the talk there will be some time
for questions and answers. I ask that if you
can project your voice that you stand up and project loudly so that we can hear
you clearly. Even better we'll have two microphones
set up up here in the front and if you're
able to come up to the mic and ask your question that'd be great so that
everybody can hear it. And I do ask that you be respectful
of everyone's time. I'm sure a number of folks are going to ask questions so try
to just limit your questioning to one please and also
the Lyric we have to always negotiate our timing on these events.
They'll have another event right after this tonight and so
after the question and answer session there'll be a book signing in the
lobby there's books for sale and Dr. Johnson will be out there to sign books,
but we will need to be completely out of the building by 5:40 so the Lyric can
set up for another event. So please cooperate with us so that we
don't make the Lyric mad and they won't let us come back.
Okay, so it is my pleasure today to introduce
our spring 2018 distinguished lecturer, Dr. Kirk Johnson,
who is the Sant director of the Smithsonian's National Museum
of Natural History. The National Museum as many of you may know
is one of the two largest of the 19 Smithsonian museums within the
institution. It houses more than 145 million
specimens, which makes it by far the single largest
natural history collection in the world.
This collection serves as a phenomenal resource for research.
In 2017 alone -- I find this to be pretty amazing--
Smithsonian scientists published more than 760
scientific research papers and in that same year, last year alone
they described 275 new species. The national museum is also the single
most visited natural history museum in the world
receive somewhere around seven seven million visitors each year.
I'm sure that many of you have visited the museum
and had wonderful experiences at this national treasure.
Talking with Dr. Johnson, I was reflecting on the first time I went. I was in
seventh grade and took a bus from Atlanta to Washington DC.
You know, one of those typical grade school trips
and hands down the trip to the museum is the one thing that I remember from that
trip, and to this day when I go to DC and I visit the museum I can remember a few
of the places where I stood as a seventh grader,
stood in awe of some of the things they had on display. So it impacted me
deeply and iIm sure many of you as well. One of the things that I really admire
about Dr. Johnson is that he has successfully combined his
deep passions for beautiful places, fossils, people, and
museums into a truly unique and remarkable
career. Dr. Johnson received a bachelor's degree
in geology and fine art from Amherst College,
a masters in geology and paleobotany from the University of Pennsylvania,
and in the same two disciplines he received his Ph.D. from Yale University.
Before arriving in DC, Dr. Johnson spent
22 years at the Denver museum of nature and science
where he served as the vice president of research and collections
as well as the chief curator and he wore some other hats their in early years as well.
Over the course of his career he has
used the fossil record to track the evolution of species,
describe extinction events, describe past changes in global climate,
and to reconstruct ancient landscapes, just to name a few highlights.
His work includes expeditions all around the world that have located more than
1400 different fossil sites including magnificent finds right here
in the United States. Some of you may be familiar with the
highly publicized Snowmastodon project. He led that project
near Snowmass, Colorado where they uncovered everything from insects and
plants to mastodons, mammoths, and ground sloths, but Dr. Johnson is much
more than just a great scientist and that's
one of the reasons why he's here with us today.
As you know the Global Change Center part of our core mission is to
communicate important scientific issues with the
public and so we welcome him here today not just as a great
scientist but also as someone who has dedicated his career
to sharing the excitement of scientific discovery with citizens of
the world. Dr. Johnson has published numerous
popular books about geology and dinosaurs, there's one great one out
there for sale in the lobby including another one on the snow
mastodon project that I just mentioned. He's been involved with numerous
television specials, including a Nova special entitled ice age death trap.
In 2016 he received the Kavli science journalism award
for hosting the three-part Nova series Making North America,
and just last year he hosted a PBS special that many of you I think saw the
great yellowstone thaw. It's no surprise that because of his
international leadership as a scientist as a science communicator
and of course as an international leader in the museum community Dr. Johnson has
sometimes been referred to by many of his colleagues
as the rock star of paleontology.
Please join me in giving a warm Blacksburg welcome to our distinguished
guest, Dr. Kirk Johnson.
[Applause]
Thank you Bill and hello everyone, it is a pleasure to be in Blacksburg.
I'm really excited to speak at a global change group
because as a museum guy I think about change a lot and
what the present state of the world is doing is making
paleontologists into futurists and that's kind of where i find myself
this is the name of our museum strategic plan natural history in the age of
humans sort of the colloquial for what we call
the anthropocene this amazing period in the last couple hundred years where
humanity has suddenly sprouted wings and occupied the entire planet in ways it's
never done before i come to this from the perspective of
being a lifelong museum lover and the reason i love
museums so much is that they are amazing places it's the place where our
culture keeps its memory of the planet it's the
three-dimensional memory of the planet and when you walk into a museum
depending on the museum you see amazing things and my
particular favorite museum experience is this room in paris
it's cuvier's museum and it has skeletons of all the
mammals in the world at that time known and one glance
at this room explains the concept of evolution to you that
all vertebrates are variations on a theme and that kind of
knowledge in a place like this can only be had in a place like this so
museums started in the 16th century as people started
collecting things but then it became pretty clear they
weren't just places for things to be studied by experts but
there was a need for them to be shared with the public and the very first
director of the national museum the museum that i'm presently the director
of the first director is this guy george
brown good he lived a short but very impactful life he died at the age of
45 after serving as the director of the museum for 15 years and he was what they
called the new museum man his view was that museums really had to
pursue three specific missions specimen preservation scientific
research and publication and public education the idea that
people should be able to come see museums
and that approach to museums has stuck ever since he was tremendously
influential in making museums into places for the public but also
places where we preserve the treasures of our culture
and where those treasures were studied by experts
these three elements the three legs of the stool audience
collections and research or just communication new knowledge and valued
objects and that's the way i think about museums
and i'm always trying to optimize those things whenever i work with my staff i'm
like i'm spinning these three plates simultaneously
i want to preserve our collections and grow them i want to do amazing
scientific research and i want to share with the public
by any means necessary what this new museum movement did was it
spurred the formation of museums around the world and what you see here are the
major museums of the world in parentheses is their founding date
and then their second sort of when they first win the
building they are today and you see that there's a big
efflorescence of these museums that happen between say 1880 and 1920.
that was the time when these great big national museums were spreading up
across europe and north america the smithsonian
uh founded in 1846 1881 it opened the arts and industries building that was
the building that was taken over by george brown good and uh he went to
chicago in 1891 and said hey guys you got to think about building a museum in
chicago and so they built the field museum and
here's the opening day of the field museum in 1921
and you see what what you see here so clearly a couple things that these
museums were temples to nature they were built
like greek temples intimidating to some people but they
really are a worship of the natural world and humans place in it
and you can see what the audience is doing they're streaming in in 1921 to
this amazing new attraction so the museums are
about something and they are for someone they're about the natural world that
humans place in it and they're for the people that live in this world so
they always have to tune themselves between those things so
in addition to talking about george brown good i want to share with you the
story of a 19th century museum visitor this guy herbert pierce roughly a
contemporary of george brown good born in england in
1879 he was a sheep herder this is not how he
normally dressed he's very dandied up here
known as gold watch fob he's on his way um and at the age of 17 he immigrated to
the united states to wyoming he became a cowboy eventually
got a ranch and started raising sheep in wyoming
and here is this ranch today it's full of fossils it's good properties full of
fossils and he got married about 1918
to this woman lucille shaw her family had moved from marquette michigan to
denver colorado in 1908 when the denver museum opened
its doors for the first time then called the carter museum in denver
she was 15 years old and likely went to the opening of this museum so here is a
sort of a immigrant cowboy a school teacher from denver
a new museum they had five kids and uh the kids would also attend these
museums and one of the things that is striking
about these early museums we tend to think that we invented conservation
we're thinking about preservation of nature but in fact many
one of the reasons that many of these museums were founded was that people
realized that humans are already endangering
nature nothing amplifies this more than the fact that the first
specimen in the colorado museum collection in 1908
this bison was also from the last bison herd in colorado
they had extirpated bison and grizzlies from colorado
and this is literally they went to the last little herd of bison and shot two
of them and had them and brought them to the
collection because they knew the bison were endangered
so it's just like a horrible thing to think about but they really realized
that they were already chopping down the trees for mine
timbers they were really affecting the landscape then we tend to think of
ourselves in that mode we're paying attention to
what humanity is doing to the natural world
but that was clearly part of the impetus for making these museums happen in the
first place they also found amazing things and
brought them to people's view and i think about these museums as the only
place in our culture where we can see real direct evidence of past worlds
imagine a world of that dinosaurs that's a world without museums
here's a gigantic beautiful mammoth from nebraska that was installed in the
denver museum in 1920. so herbert and his wife libby had uh
five kids and uh it's pretty cool i actually found
evidence that she traveled back from wyoming to
washington dc the postmark is 1939 on this letter
there's a letter to her two of her sons in uh casper wyoming
the youngest kid was uh cowgirl and katie joe
and you can see she's wearing little chaps he's not girl from the 1930s
and remember went on to be a very successful
uh shipper of um sheep and cattle in nebraska and by the time
he was in his 80s it was the 1960s is what he looked like and this is uh
that same guy who saw from 1879. this the guy that was 21 years old at the
turn of the century he was a very much a 19th century
contemporary of george brown good and there were 26 directors between
george brown good and me but what's amazing about this guy is
he's my grandfather and that's me
now that's weird because he was old when he had my mom and my mom was old when
she had me which means i literally have a grandfather who was 21
years old in 1900 all that to say is that most of those
museums were found between 1870 and 1920 and we think that was a long time ago
but it's not a long time at all it's just for me father's generation
and you think that museums have been around for a long time think again they
are recent innovations and time has flown i mean time has
really gone past but there we are you can remember that i
showed you that his picture he had a gold watch fob
there's the gold watch and i have there i am fondling his gold watch and
i've got that watch
now because geologists are very tuned into
time because we have the time of the planet to work
we have 4.567 billion years of time so right out of the gate museums are
thinking in two time scales the time scales of human
cultural evolution the infancy and the time scale of planet earth
this is the most amazing curve there is that delivers
this is the human population curve for the last 20 000 years
and you can see that for 20 000 years people couldn't do much
in terms of growing the population they did make cities and things like that
but something happened around 1880 or 1800 that caused the shape of that
curve to change dramatically because you can actually map your own family
onto this curve and when you do it's a shocking thing because
there's what it looks like when my grandfather was
born in 1879 or 1.8 people billion people when my mom was born in 1929
there were two billion people when i was born in 1960 there were three billion
people when my nephew and niece were born in
2012 there were seven billion people and this
is the most amazing fact my nephew and ease are six years old
right now and 500 million people have been added
to the global population since they were born in 2012.
just ponder that half a billion people added in the last six years this curve
from a biological point of view does not look particularly good
whenever you see a curve or set up like that you know something is going to
happen and that's why scientists are a little
bit edgy these days because we've changed the world
dramatically in the last hundred years because there's so many
of us and they're going to be so many more of us eventually that curve is
going to flatten out somewhere around 2050 given our
demographics maybe around 10 or 11 billion people
and you can make a pretty compelling argument for the next 20 or 30 years
with the most important 20 or 30 years of the history of humans existence
that means that you in the room can be agents of change in a positive way to
make sure that 20 or 30 years works out well instead of in its
horrible manner and i would argue that the 20th century
we just passed what we need to the 2000 centuries of homo sapiens
tenure on this planet and there's we've been around as a species for two
thousand centuries of course there's this recent
discovery that might have pushed it back to three thousand
centuries but you know on the order of three hundred thousand years
but we've been around for a long time and it just happens that you
and i are alive at the moment when peak human happens you've heard of peak oil
many of you will live to see peak human the time when the population curve on
humanity peaks out and starts to gradually go down ponder that
for a moment you live in a unique time in the history
of our species and everybody ever tells you uh this is
sort of natural trans and this is kind of normal
this is not normal this is very unusual
look what happened in the 19th century this is a pretty cool chart
it may be hard to read from where you are but this shares 1900
to 2005. this is percentage of u.s households
so you go back to when my grandfather was 21 years old here
people didn't really have telephones cars stoves radios refrigerators
electricity clothes washers clothes dryers air conditioning dishwashers
microwaves televisions computers cell phones vcrs or the internet
all that's happened since my grandfather came to america
in 1896. so things changed dramatically this particular little
diagram i saw on a wall the other week and it's a little diagram taken december
8th 1982 just after i graduated from college
this is a diagram of darpanet the precursor to the internet
every one of these nodes has two to three computers on it
and that's the entirety of the internet in 1982.
that's changed a little bit you want global change
so i i look at the anthropocene and the anthropocene is the
geologist jargon for the age of humans i prefer to call
the age of humans but a lot of people use the term anthropocene the epoch of
humans there's some debate about when the epoch
of humans begins some people won't argue that it's
the beginning of fossil fuel use like people would argue that it's the
creation of atomic bombs other people would argue that it's the expansion of
trade in the end of world war two that caused
the great acceleration of resource use but i look at the anthropocene as having
two distinct components at the basin 1.0 to me
is the direct impact of humanity on the planet this would be things like
building cities and building highways and plowing fields and so here's an
example of anthropocene 1.0 here's a chunk of rainforest in
bolivia in 1975 same chunk of rainforest in 2003.
it went from being a tropical rainforest to being farmers fields
and that's because individual humans with intent went down and chopped down
the trees and planted crops they just wanted to live their life i'm
not blaming them but they did willfully change the landscape
directly by their own hand anthropocene 2.0
is a different beast altogether at the basin 2.0
is the indirect impact of humanity things that happen as an
unintended consequence of our existence in the planet
and perhaps the best example of anthropocene 2.0
is our impact on the atmosphere and there is this remarkable curve that
shows the concentration of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere and there's a guy named charles keeling who worked at scripps
who in the late 50s decided he would start measuring the concentration of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to set up a baseline to understand if
carbon dioxide was actually changing and you started down here 1957
started measuring on the top of mauna loa and hawaii his logic was
you're on the top of a mountain in the middle of pacific it's pretty pure air
it's pretty well mixed we should be able to measure the
concentration and there's not a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere this is
in parts per million when he started he
measured his first measurement was on the order of
315 parts per million but it was known at that time and it's
been known for over a century that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and
the more there is in the atmosphere the warmer
the atmosphere gets so in theory you add more carbon
dioxide you warm the climate thus the term global warming and what
you see in this curve is there's a strong seasonal effect because
there's more plants in the northern hemisphere than the southern hemisphere
and as the seasons change you have more drawdown of co2 in the northern
hemisphere during the spring and summer so the summer in the northern hemisphere
draws down the co2 and the winter exceeds back up and he
noticed right away that the temp the co2 was actually going up steadily
there's the summer winter summer winter thing but the actual
increase was happening pretty dramatically enough it went
for the last almost 60 years and just two days ago on uh valentine's day
it was 408.26 parts per million so it's gone from 315 to 410 which is
more or less a 25 increase since you started measuring for
me i look at this curve in a different way
i look at it as my life because i was born right then
my parents met right there they had me right there
i graduated from college right there i got married right there
i'm standing here talking to you right here so that's my life
any time the composition of the atmosphere of a planet
changes during the time of a lifespan like mine
you should probably pay attention to that there's something going on
and what you look at and say why is that happening and it's pretty clear that
this is a direct impact of the combustion of fossil fuels over
the last 57 years by humanity and the direct impact of that manifests
itself in the form of warmer global climates
the best measure of that i think is the arctic sea ice if you've never been to
the arctic the sea ice is an amazing thing to see here's the arctic ocean
and in september the arctic sea ice reaches its minimum
in the winter um because this is the end of the long summer in the winter the sea
ice will grow back out it'll grow all the way down to about here in the bering
sea it'll go all the way down all of hudson's baylor covered in ice
this whole area will be covered in ice but this is the minimum this is at the
very end of the summer when the sea ice has melted all the way back
and in 1979 we got a nice satellite up that could actually look down and
measure arctic sea ice and measure its extent and this is what
it looked like in september of 1980 two years before i first went to the
arctic my first experience in the arctic was
here in 1982.
roll the clock forward september of 2012 there's your arctic sea ice minimum and
what's happening here and it's happening faster than anybody expected
is that we're going to get a new ocean and
today the arctic ocean is not passable but probably the next 15 or 20 years and
the u.s navy has been working on this we're going to get an ocean back we're
getting an ocean that you can actually navigate ships through
and once this peels back you'll be able to take a ship from taiwan around here
and there to rotterdam and cut off about 50 days of ocean travel compared to
going around the panama canal so we as a world are going to get a new
ocean and we see already intense interest from
the geopolitical point of view because first of all here's russia russia have
been doing a number of military exercises in the high arctic
the u.s navy has plotted out a big report that shows
the sea lanes opening up over the next 20 years
south korea is building icebreakers south korea is not an arctic nation but
south korea is a major shipping nation and the trade is with europe so they're
building the ability to come through here
and go out there the united states only has one icebreaker we just
allocated funds to build a second one but right now both south korea and china
are building icebreakers faster than we're building icebreakers because
they're seeing the economic opportunity and of course if you melt
off the sea ice you up on the arctic shelf
for oil and gas exploration and this is the largest unexplored area in the world
for oil and glass gas exploration so ironically as the
burning of fossil fuels warms the climate which causes the sea
ice to melt the melting of the sea ice makes it
possible to drill more oil and gas and the issue here is that if we don't
stop drilling oil and gas we can continue warming the atmosphere
and the question is how far do you get how
much can you warm the atmosphere excellent question all right let's go
back to museums for a little bit i'll come back to that question
museums are kind of cool because they actually operate on two time scales
the stuff they have in the museums reflects the history of life on our
planet fossils biologic organisms that
themselves are the evidence of evolution on the planet we
keep fossils and rocks the rocks tell about
the dynamic history of planet earth plate tectonics volcanism
and we have the remains of human cultures as well so we have this long
history of the planet but museums have been around for a short
period of time and they've been collecting for a short period of time so
they're collecting the evidence of change over the last
couple hundred years as well so it matters when you collect something
in 1800 or 1900 or 2000 because the impact of humanity has changed over
that time so those two separate time scales
are in play this is the denver museum of nature and science where i work for
22 years in denver colorado it's the same museum that libby
went to visit in 1908 when she was 15 years old that little museum was
swallowed up by a much larger museum the original building still inside that
structure and this museum is known for its dioramas
there they're these cool weird museum things where you go out and collect some
plants and animals and recreate them inside a museum setting so it's a museum
trick and museums used to do these things
because we didn't used to have televisions
or tourism or travel people would go to places like africa they'd bring the
animals and plants back and they'd build a little
vignette inside the museum what a place looked like
and literally a place like denver would say we're going to bring the world to
denver by way of dioramas and over its 100 years of history the
denver museum built 104 dioramas they're still there on display you can
go see them today they're amazing things and here's for instance the walrus
diorama but what's cool about these dioramas is
they really were real places people went to that real place at a
certain point in time they went to the western side of alaska
in 1921 and they shot that poor walrus and
brought it back and built that diorama so
these dioramas actually are time capsules of that museum time scale
and uh here's one of the yupik eskimo guides that took the museum up there in
1921 and notice these some siberian yupik eskimos live
on the west coast of alaska they actually consider themselves to be
walrus they're animus and so you can see he's got his
walrus tusk thing a lot of them will actually wear an ivory lip plug they
elaborate so he literally he thinks he is a walrus and that helps
him hunt walrus and he's very thankful that his brother walruses sustain his
livelihood but these are walrus people and the walrus people took the museum
people hunting walrus in 1922. and there's that walrus pulled up on the
beach those people are still there if you go
to st lawrence island the walrus people still live there they're still hunting
walrus but things are changing the sea ice is
melting back walruses or ice animals the world of
these the wallace people has been eroded by
the indirect impact of humanity or anthropocene 2.0
that's happening all around the world one of the things we do at the museum
is pay attention to human cultures right now there are
six thousand languages spoken in the world
something like ninety percent of those languages will go extinct in the next
50 or 60 years as those cultures stop using those languages and start using
more global languages so human cultures themselves are
experiencing the same pressures that biodiversity is experiencing that
pressure of the human impact which is causing the extinction
of not only species but cultures here's just a sampling of
the denver dioramas that were from colorado and about
10 years ago we said hey wait a minute these are real places let's go back and
find those real places and see how they've changed
let's see what's different in the landscapes today than it was when the
darwin was made so we found for instance this place there's the
coyote diorama there's the coyote diorama place
it's pretty amazing and some of them were really good fits and some of them
were different this one was a pretty amazing one this
big boulder field up on top of one of the colorado rocky mountains you find
the exact same spot almost we couldn't quite get the boulders
so it was always a test of how accurate were the artists
here's one where you can see the power lines running across
the field of view so we relocated most of these things and some of the places
there was just gone there's like a city where the diorama used to be
the other part of the time scale not humanity's recent history but earth's
long history is the dominion of paleontologists whose
native habitat are museums thank you sterling for
inviting me to this event because it's great to be here and thank
you michelle his paleontologists are the keepers of deep time on our
planet we were the shovel ready science we basically dig our way back in time
and we find incredible things we find the remains of ancient forests we find
the remains of ancient creatures i mean here's a here's a fossil site
that we found in 1994 up in canada it's in 75 million year old
rocks we were digging fossil leaves here but
we kept going down in our our whole world digging we came across
this thing which looked surprisingly like a beautiful skull
which was attached to this thing one of the most complete dinosaurs ever found
in north america at the bottom of one of these holes an
incidental discovery and this is the key thing about
paleontology you never know what you're going to find but you know you won't
find anything if you don't go looking for it
and that's the that's why the intractable pull of paleontology keep
this always going out and digging for more things because
we have just begun to scratch the surface of the world's
history i mean there have not been that many paleontologists
we haven't been around for that long and there's a huge planet so
we know all of us paleontologists know the best things remain to be discovered
and if you're a paleontologist you think of the world in a different way than
most people you might look at this and think oh
there's a coal mine i would say hmm that's not a coal mine that's the
remains of an ancient swamp or you might look through this fossil
prom found in the coastline of alaska and go what is that thing
it's clearly evidence of an ancient palm forest in alaska and if you want two
words that signify climate change how about
palm frond and alaska that's three words palm and alaska
so my friend ray troll calls this time travel with a shovel we legitimately can
go back in time with a shovel and reconstruct ancient worlds and when
we do that we can understand then the spectrum of
what our planet has been through we can understand the earth's history
and put together the question i asked you earlier was like how much
could you warm up the planet how much could you cool down the planet what are
the extremes of experience in earth's past
so start today we all know that the earth is
very cold on the top and the bottom and very warm in the middle
that's where taught in school because the sun hits the middle of the continent
around the equator it's the warm tropics bounded by very
dry close latitudes bounded by very frigid polar regions and we think that's
where that's what we know we have a very
frigid planet top bottom and a very warm planet in the middle and it
turns out that that's the way it is today
but it's not always been that way and it turns out that our planet goes through
two kinds of major climate cycles we call it
ice house earth we're in ice house right now and during ice house earth you have
polar ice sheets there's also something called greenhouse
earth and when you have greenhouse earth you have no ice at all the poles and you
have forests at the poles that's unimaginable for us
because we've never lived in greenhouse earth actually as a paleontologist i
have by with my shovel i go dig into
greenhouse earth and i can actually see the reins of this ancient world
i want to share a few examples with you but i'll start first with ice house
earth because in ice house earth you get both cold and
really cold conditions and sorry about the graph but this shows the last 600
million years of earth history 600 this is the present
over here and these blue bars are times in those
ice house earth when you have polar ice caps
and right away you see that ice house earth these blue bars
is much less frequent than greenhouse earth these big white swaths
in fact about 85 of earth history is greenhouse earth and about 15 percent
is ice house the height of the bar shows you the latitude to which the ice
descended so here's the north pole or south pole um
here's the latitude of what about blacksburg around there there
are times 300 million years ago when there were ice sheets at this latitude
so you get those very extreme ice periods they come down
in ice house earth you have two conditions
cool periods we're in one of those right now we're in a cool period
in isos earth and cold periods in cold periods
the ice sheets come down and meet you where you live
so here's where we are today you can see greenland is covered by an ice cap
eighteen thousand years ago north america looked like that
it actually came all the way down to mid-latitudes and it buried seattle and
chicago and new york and boston didn't quite get down to
virginia but it got awful close you can see where it goes and if you go
back and look at this you can see that the topography of north america today
varies squarely and obviously shows the footprint
of that ice sheet those lakes hudson's bay hudson's bay is just the middle of
the thick ice sheet that was pushed down by the weight of the ice
it's coming back up now it's not all the way back up so it's literally the
footprint of that ice sheet that ice sheet came
and went like 20 times during the last ice age
glacial interglacial glacial interglacial
glacial that's the the twoing and frying of ice house
earth and that's our planet we're used to that we're not so used to the ice
where we live and in fact i'm from seattle if you've
been to seattle it's a thing called the space needle which is 600 feet tall
18 000 years ago there were 3 000 feet of ice in seattle
3 000 feet of ice in downtown seattle that's only 18 000 years ago which is
chump change in time for geologists humans were walking
around in europe 18 000 years ago they were making art in
the caves in las go thirty five thousand years ago
and eighteen thousand years ago seattle was under 3000 feet of ice
that shows you how cold it can get now i'll show you how warm it can get
but first a quick little digression to snowmask because i can't help myself
one of the cool things about working in museums is when somebody finds something
amazing they call you i can't
state how cool that is to be the person that gets the phone call when something
cool happens it's so amazing to be sitting in your
office answering some boring email and somebody calls them say
hey i think i found a mastodon excellent i'll be right over
i mean it was a very pleasant experience this happened to me on october
of 2010 i was sitting in my office and somebody called and said i think i found
the mastodon and they were working in snowmass
colorado this is the ski area of snowmass how many of you been to
snowmass colorado not enough for it to quite but like half a dozen or two dozen
maybe there's a little town of snowmass there's a ski mountain all the ski runs
and here is a weird little thing it's actually a
snow covered iced over lake and there's a
round hill that goes all the way around it called ziggler reservoir
just a shower pond in fact when doug ziegler bought the property in 1964
there was no lake there at all but he had given two cases of beer to a
bulldozer operator who plowed up a little dam right there
and they filled it up with water and made a nice little lake out of it
so it wasn't a lake when he bought that but it was a lake when we got to it
and the town of snowmass was having trouble because in the
winter ski season they have thousands of people that come to the hotels
they have a large need for water for flushing toilets and taking showers and
stuff like that and also for making snow for the
mountain if it doesn't snow enough so they kind of deal with disease and
said hey how about if we um buy the rights to your lake we'll
drain the lake we'll dig it out make it a lot deeper so we can store more water
in it put a little dam there you can have your
lake back it won't look any different to you but we have water we can use
in the course of the winter when all the tourists are here and douglas is like
that's great i'll do that they gave them a bunch of money
they drained the lake and started pushing dirt around and here they are
on like day three of pushing dirt and this is what is called
a group of construction people who are very unhappy
because they had pushed their bulldozer right through the skeleton of a mammoth
it was a complete mammoth and like ribs and tusks came over the top of the
bulldozer blade and the bulldozer operator was like almost
scared and the performer came over and he said this is not a cow
and there's no way we can convince anybody that there's a cow we're going
to call somebody so they called me and i rushed up there
and by this time they were pulling ivory tusks out of the dirt
lots of them and it was very clearly an amazing ice age site so we responded
in force the shovel army but at some point we had
many 300 people working on this dig and we dug we kind of deal with them we
would get the project the dig done in time to let them finish our construction
project on time and under budget and we had just this amazing thing where
we were digging and we on average found an ice age bone for every yard of soil
we moved we moved 6000 yards of soil we got 6500
bones they're the remains of 50 mastodons 12 mammoths
eight ground sloths four giant bison just amazing things and it was
wholly routine to see something like that happening
some gigantic leg bone coming out of the ground and just you know up
loaded up people are so excited all the diggers
like usually when you're digging fossils it's a lot of hard work you might find a
little broken thing here you're digging like oh it's a
mastodon skull how lovely let's pull it out
and we found this remarkable thing seven foot wide
fossil bison skull um recently published as
evidence of one of the earliest bison to come into north america from asia
found these different animals bison mastodon
mammoths camels horses deer and ground sloths
amazing group of animals and what was really cool was
as we did the work as we did the fossils we were doing the science and this site
actually had a record that went back from about
130 000 years ago to about 50 000 years ago
which meant that it was went from being a time that was warmer than today
to a time that was colder than today so we actually had a nice little climate
marker in colorado we're able to reconstruct the landscape
here's when it's colder than today and the ice made the lake
then it got warmer than today and the sloths and giant bison the mastodons are
there then they get colder than the day and
the mammoths came into the landscape and then it's the lake today with black
bears so you guys this really cool high
elevation climate record of a glacial interglacial period during
the ice age
the greenhouse earth is way different greenhouse earth
is a very foreign and unusual time for all of us
because none of us have lived in a world where there are no polar ice caps
there's forests in the arctic and no one of us really imagined it
because even the early explorers who found coal
scenes up in the arctic are like why are there coal seams in the arctic
but then when people learned about plate tectonics said oh maybe the continents
just drifted up there after the coal was deposited
but then people started doing work and realizing now the continents are in
their position and there really are these really warm
deposits up there and this is 50 million years ago a time
called the eocene when um and i'm going to take you to
this place this is ellsmere island there's the arctic circle there's the
northernmost tree right there that's the tree line so
we're about two thousand miles north of the nearest tree in elsewhere island
and i went there in 1984 and 85 with this woman this is mary dawson from the
carnegie institute amazing uh female explorer of the high
arctic she's the first person to ever find
vertebrate fossils that weren't ice age vertebrate fossils anywhere in the
arctic and published an amazing paper in nature
in 1975 after this discovery and you can see it's just baron tundra
out there and we would be flown up and dropped off on this island that's the
size of england but has one small eskimo village
one small weather station and that's it it's the size of england
and it was unexplored and it was just this
massive huge landscape we'd walk around the landscape
and encounter things like this and this is a continental ice sheet it's hard to
see what's going on but there's a 300 foot high waterfall right there
that's a chunk of ice lying on land like the chunks of ice
lay on top of boston 18 000 years ago there i am for scale
and we flew around in helicopters and found this very weird deposits
of coal thick coal seams these crumbly white rocks
are actually tree trunks big tree trunks we haven't found whole
forests and uh we found the fossil leaves of one
of the trees this is madison the don redwood you've got some growing
on campus here it's a it's a warm temperate tree but here it
is at latitude 84 north this thing is kind of hard to
recognize but it's the center of a lotus leaf so here's a diorama we built the
american museum in new york showing this dense arctic
forest with a mammal called the griffith on
lotus we found crocodiles it was warm in the polar north so warm
that there couldn't be even ice in the middle of the winter up there
in 2005 there was a similar and related study where
a european and american group went into the middle of the arctic ocean and they
drilled the sea floor as they do scientists go out in ships
they drill holes into the seafloor they bring up cores of sediment
the sediment records layers of positions going back in time and you
extract from the sediment the shells of plankton forearm that
carry climate signals they do us all around the world but
these guys let's go to the middle of the arctic ocean and see what we find they
drilled the core down in the middle of the arctic ocean
on what's called the la monash off ridge and brought up a section of rock that
was 50 to 47 million years old and what they found
in the core was not fossilized marine plankton
but they found fossilized fern spores a very specific kind of fern a fern
called azola very seen it grows in tropical waterways
it's a floating aquatic fern and here's a um
lake in amazonia covered by azola ferns that's what the arctic ocean looked like
50 million years ago in a warm world we have instead of
frozen landscapes you have fresh water runoff
you have a closed arctic basin the arctic ocean
becomes a freshwater lake lying on top of a saltwater ocean
and on top of that freshwater lake are floating some tropical ferns
that's the warm world now what's interesting about that is when you think
about this curve as you the question you will ask yourself is
if how much co2 does it take to go from ice house earth back to
greenhouse earth and that's the sixty four thousand dollar question
we're not talking about two degrees centigrade increase we're talking about
six degrees centigrade it's like what does it take to get to a world
that throws us out of the ice house condition we're presently into a
greenhouse condition and that to me is one of the most
interesting and possibly challenging concepts about
global warming is we're all trying to keep it under two
degrees of warming but the past evidence from planet earth
and the fossil record shows that it's quite possible to have six or seven
degrees of warming and it's happened in the past through natural causes
and are we in fact titrating our climate with enough co2 to make it happen
in a human time scale and that's the whole point of the anthropocene is that
humans have now become a geologic force there's
enough of us doing enough things in our anthropocene
2.0 way that we are a force of nature
now i'll just close the brief advertisement for the national museum of
natural history because why not you should go visit us
on the mall a couple of key points our nation wraps itself in museums
that's a good thing there's the argument for education and
preservation embedded in that thing there's 19 museums nine research
centers the national zoo the museum that i have the honor to
oversee is the largest in the world and it's got this incredible collection an
incredible visitation and incredible staff
and it's a a place for learning it's the largest informal
science education venue on the planet and it allows me to do great things like
this that deputize 300 junior paleontologists in front of
the giant elephant people see the ocean hall they see all
sorts of different things they've never seen before that helps
them understand the planet they live on in humans
interaction people can observe the evolution of our human species through
time in the hall of human origins we tackle challenging topics like genome
we have a new exhibit opened about emerging infectious diseases that
opens in may we take on these complicated topics and
pull them apart so people can understand them
we didn't have a t-rex when i got there but now we do
we fedex it from montana
and it's going to be installed in 477 days from today you will be able to see
the new dinosaur exhibit and there's our t-rex it's going to be
awesome 477 days from today but realize that the staff of the museum
work all across the globe they do research
on land and at sea in the mountains they have all sorts of active explorations
this is not a dead museum this is an active museum driven by
a dedicated staff of researchers who are monitoring tropical griefs
monitoring forests here's our newest herpetologist working in the forest of
west africa here's one of our marine biologists who studies
animals that live a thousand feet below the surface in the open ocean
things that no one's ever seen before incredible
things here's one of entomologists fogging a tree and collecting insect
samples from the rainforests in peru here we are salvaging
a gray whale on the coast of whidbey allen in washington state
we have the national whale collection with literally dozens of complete
whale skeletons we monitor all the world's volcanoes
there are 1554 active volcanoes on the planet right now
and we publish an updated list of the activity of all those volcanoes
and here's where our samples come from you see they're pretty much global with
the market exception of russia
um and then the collections themselves are unbelievable
behind the scenes here's what 145 million means here's our anthropology
collections and our fossil collections and our mineralogy collections and our
plant collections and our algae collections and our shell
collections and our bone collections and our butterfly collections and our bird
collections and our whale collection and our mosquito collection
it's an amazing place we just acquired 10 million specimens of the usda's
national parasite collection and with it a fabulous new parasite curator anna
phillips we're presently scanning the national
herbarium which has five million objects in it and we're pushing him through at a
rate of six thousand a day to have a digitized record of the national
herbarium on this conveyor belt we've just built a biorepository which
has the capacity for 5 million samples of frozen tissue because we've
realized that every species has a genome and the
genomics of biodiversity is where the future of
medicine likely is maybe the future of food
maybe how we tackle emerging infectious diseases there's lots of real practical
outcomes from having frozen tissue of all the species on
planet earth and i'll leave you with this shot because it's
something that only happened in a museum we're the only people in the planet that
cat scan giant with that i'll stop and answer
questions thank you
there's a hand up back there yes
hot um the question was if the greenhouse earth
the poles were warm what was it like at the equator it's an excellent question
and it's a question no one thought to ask
until we had the evidence for warm poles and then we went back and said okay what
is the evidence for temperature at the equator
and there's not a lot of direct evidence but what it looks like is that
when the earth warms it does asymmetrically that is to say that the
poles warm much faster than the equator and it looks like and here i'll give you
the actual numbers today the temperature at the north pole
the mean average annual temperature the north
pole is minus 30 degrees that's the average for the whole year
at the equator it's plus 30 degrees centigrade so that's
60 degrees of centigrade difference during
the warmth of the easing the equator was only 5 degrees warmer
it was 35 but the poles were like 10 to 15 degrees so you've taken a steep
gradient and flattened it out and raised the middle just a little bit
even so it looks like parts of the equator were too warm for certain things
to happen like too warm for coral reefs for instance
as we're starting to see now as you warm the world's oceans you make it
inhabitable for coral reefs it doesn't mean life can't happen there
it's just different kinds of life but it's a world that we have seen
and if we go back to it it's going to be a very different world than the one that
our culture evolved in that's the key point
yeah thank you so much dr johnson for your fantastic
talk i admire your optimism first of all and
second i just i'm really curious that as a curator how does public
interest in climate change set the smithsonian's agenda
for creation in other words what's that relationship like between public
interest and then the kinds of questions that you
ask and represent as a curator at smithsonian thank you so
that's that's a key question because um as you may have
noticed climate change has become a somewhat
polarized political topic in our nation um
and it's it's an unfortunate thing because it's really a set of scientific
observations that have been politicized and uh one of
the nice things about being the smithsonian's national museum is
that we are a a political nonpartisan organization
so we're allowed to run right down the straight line of what are the facts
ma'am now the question is how do you
communicate climate change to the public is an interesting one because there have
been a series of museum exhibits about climate change
the american museum of new york did one the the
monterey bay aquarium did one and you have to be careful how you talk about
climate change because you can scare people pretty badly
like people get very scared and as a general rule museums don't like to
scare people really badly like this is a social
learning experience you go to your family friends
you don't really want to go and that's why there aren't usually
museums that are very scary now an example of a different museum would be
the holocaust museum there they actually do want to scare you badly because they
thought never again do we want to have a
holocaust the intention there is to like terrify you about
how bad the holocaust was and to ensure that it's not going to happen again
in a natural history museum where a lot of our audience is kids
we don't really want to scare people and the other point is
we don't really know what the future is going to be i mean
we have agency in this we have the ability to do things about the planet
we have the ability to ameliorate our carbon emissions we have the ability to
get onto alternate fuel sources and ultimately
what we've learned in the last century is as an unexpected byproduct of the
great advances of the industrial age and carbon fuel combustion is that
there's an unintended consequence of burning fossil fuels
we didn't realize that now we do now it's time to say okay
let's phase ourselves off fossil fuels we are actually running out of them
anyway because we've used so many we've used
about half of the known coral resources that we have
so if we continue using it at our present rate we're going to run out of
them anyway the arguments like let's stop using them
before we make the climate warm if we could figure out how to get
more sustainable energy sources in and it's not an easy
challenge because we use a lot of fossil fuel right now
one thing you should know is that most people aren't particularly literate
about fossil fuels in terms of their own
personal use but here's just a quick little
primer for you a gallon of gasoline weighs about six and a half pounds
of that six and a half pounds about five pounds or elemental carbon
when you burn the gallon of gas the carbon molecules combine with oxygen
molecules and you get 18 pounds of carbon dioxide gas
it says it's an odorless gas you don't notice it
if your car emitted its carbon pollution as a solid
every gallon of gas would give you five pounds of charcoal briquettes
think about that every gallon of gas five pounds of briquettes
it would just be like your horse even horse manure
right we wouldn't have this problem if carbon dioxide was a noticeable thing
but it's not noticeable odorless invisible gas so no one thinks
about what happens to the gas that goes into the car but every gallon of gas
five pounds of briquettes or 18 pounds of carbon dioxide gas
so we're all in it together and we need to solve it together but that's you know
this it's a real interesting dilemma that
we're in because we are so so tied to the use of carbon fuels right
now and it's very hard for us to see a way
out of it yeah i have a question which may be may
call for a scary answer in the long run uh the the problem of the tip over from
a regime when of of the ice planet earth iso ice earth and the
greenhouse earth for example we don't know how much methane there is
that's going to be released by the process of warming methane is
about 40 times more efficient than carbon dioxide in
warming right but lasts much shorter time in the atmosphere
what sort what sorts of mechanisms have the geologists been able to
to play with to figure out do they do we know if there are
uh situations that would lead to a positive feedback loop it would be very
hard to get out of yeah it's in the problem is it's been a
long time since we came out of an ice house earth
into a greenhouse earth if you look at that chart i showed you
the last time we went from ice house to greenhouse is actually 300 million years
ago back in the sterling nesbit time it's a
long time ago because you know the last time we had a big ice
age was in the permian period and when the permian ended we
warmed into the end permian and then to the mesozoic so that was the last time
it came out of an ice house worth into a greenhouse earth long greenhouse
earth then we went into an ice house earth
about 35 million years ago we've been there for 35 million years
intensely icy until recently so we're running an experiment that we
haven't run for 300 million years and 300 million years ago almost nothing
on planet earth was the way it is today because 300 million years is a lot of
evolution the main types of plants and animals
didn't exist then is now we also don't have very good resolution
of what happened in that time because it's 300 million years ago
so it's a little sketchy to know what the tipping point is
for or if there is a tipping point and i think
you know this is one of the things that makes scientists a little bit nervous
that we don't know what happens but if we do go to a greenhouse earth the
primary initial impact is going to be the loss
of the polar ice caps and they'll you know one thing we do
know is that 120 000 years ago during an interglacial just between the cool cold
period we lost most of the ice in greenland you
lose most of the ice in greenland you get about 20 plus feet of sea level rise
so the question then becomes how fast does that happen
and the resolution is not good enough on the ice cores to say how fast it
happened plus or minus human time frame so we're
in this very curious situation where we are doing things that
are going to have global impact and we're doing possibly
in the time that it matters to us and if you just think the reason i told you
about my grandfather was that he was a man of the 19th century we're
people of 21st century there are people in this room many of
you who are going to be people of the 22nd century
you'll live to see the year 2100. don't hear people talking about the 22nd
century very often but if you are millennial chances are pretty good
you'll live to see the 22nd century so you're going to see the next 75 years
of this play out 85 years of this play out and it's going
to be a very um interesting world that happens there
and i think what is so compelling for things like
the global change center is like this isn't just a thing this is this is
really something that needs dedicated and forceful study and
dedicated and forceful action to figure out what's going to happen and
get the best science into it and then apply what we can do
from a social perspective to engineer our way forward into this new world
because we're going into a new world and the question really back to your
question is it a scary world or not i don't even know
i don't think anybody does because humans are incredibly resourceful
what we do know is that we're going to change the world
and some of the victims will be the biodiversity that we treasure
and cherish so it's a time when humanity is actually making the play
and we're right in the middle of it
is that optimistic of pessimism
so the question is about the younger dryas which is
an episode that happened when the last ice age was ending
and there was a sudden cooling again there was a warming followed by the
cooling there's an idea that an asteroid impact
struck and caused that to happen and it happened more or less about the time
when a bunch of large animals like mastodons went
extinct so there's sort of three separate stories there
a warming out of a glaciation and asteroid impact and mammoth and macedon
extinction and i actually it's a pretty interesting
thing because that's a time of pretty rapid warming too
coming out of the underdress it warms quite rapidly so it's a it's worth
studying but one of the things we know is that when
ice sheets melt this is obvious when ice sheets melt you
get a lot of water and ice sheets also make big dams so if
you melt and make a lot of water part of the ice sheet the water can be backed up
behind ice dams and ice dams are bad dams because if you
put a lot of water behind the ice dam the ice dam floats because
ice is loaded lighter than water when an ice dam floats all the water breaks out
catastrophically and floods the landscape
and the best example is in eastern washington where
an ice lobe pushed down from canada into the lake ponderay region and the lake
missoula lake built up behind that got to a depth of a couple thousand feet
and then floated the dam and a wall of water came across washington state
and carved huge canyons flooded out to the sea
and the ice came back in and it happened again again it happened again
when that happens you can release a huge amount of cold fresh water
off the land and dump it into the ocean and that's one of the good arguments for
how you cool the younger dry ice is you have flood a
whole bunch of icy water fresh water onto the surface of the
ocean evidence for the asteroid impact at that
time not particularly compelling to me or a
lot of my colleagues i would say maybe not evidence for the
extinction of mammoths and mastodons we certainly have many examples where we
find mammoths and mastodons with spear points embedded in their ribs
and evidence they were barbecued humans get to north america around 14 000 years
ago the mammoths of mastodons lots of
evidence of barbecuing the world is also warming so ecosystems
are shifting so it's probably some combination
of climate warming and barbecuing they got the mammoths
thank you for what you do um as most of us who are here know there's a
war against science and there's a university near here that
has a dinosaur my understanding is in their lobby with
the date of 6000 years
how would you change your talk how would you
deal with that kind of ignorance when there is a concerted movement to
say that you're a liar well you know i always say that first of all i grew up
as a creationist my parents are creationists and so i
have a lot of you know i grew up in that community and
i learned a lot about evolution by people telling me that it was wrong
which is very useful because when people present you a lot of evidence sometimes
you can go actually i think that might just with
the opposite of what you're saying as a result since many creationists are
family and friends i tend to not look at them as ignorant people but just
well-meaning people that have got their information maybe not fully formed and
so i spent a lot of time talking to churches about
you know what how do you think about evolution why why do you think this is
the case why do you think it's 6 000 years in a
respectful way and i think that the key point is our
country has gotten so polarized and nothing good comes from fighting so
i'm very much a fan of respectful dialogue with people you
disagree with and it's hard sometimes because
sometimes those people are very rude to you
but another way to change people's minds by yelling at them
or calling them ignorant or deplorable or whatever the case may be i think it's
it's that we've got to fight our way back and what what we've seen here
in the most disappointing way in the last 30 or 40 years is
the enlightenment of 300 years ago has lost ground
and it's time for the enlightenment just to take that ground back because
ultimately rational thought and rational observation is the way forward on planet
earth it's not fighting about whether or not
dinosaurs are six thousand years old or not
and i think that's my approach is to be calm
and peaceful and respectful and talk to people that disagree with you
and see if you can convince them because that's the way it's going to move
forward and it's it's been disappointing to watch it happen i won't
i won't disagree with you on that point but we have to
empower science and support science because
that's where the knowledge of our planet comes from and we've lost a lot of
ground on that space too i talked spent the whole day talking to faculty and
students at the university and one of the things
we've noticed is that the federal science agencies are being
defunded now this and it's it's time really for
scientists to become politicians and argue as politicians and it's time
for people in general to support science as
the endeavor of how we understand planet earth so it's i think it's going to have
to be in a democracy a ground-up movement where where the
enlightenment comes back and takes back the ground we've lost in
the last 30 years yeah i think this might be a relevant
question to what you're talking about now
um so it seems like museums today are playing really the same role that good
kind of outlined but would you one add any other roles to what you think
museums should or the smithsonian should play
and what do you think about how issue how much of an issue advocate the
smithsonian should be and also just researchers within your
institution yeah no i think those are really good
questions because i'm obviously operating in 19th century
institution and should i operate it like it was operated in the 19th century is a
very valid question and actually there's two parts here one
is i'm a little bit stressed out about the
future too but i actually get to run a big museum so
i can aim the museum to where i think it makes the most good
that's good there are some museum directors now who are saying
our museum should be oriented towards conservation for instance that might be
one approach you could take or do you suggest you could make them
into advocacy oriented things but remember right now we're so
polarized that if you advocate for one thing all
you're doing is getting into a fight which is why i find being assiduously
political and nonpartisan is the way to go because
i don't want to send anybody away i want to watch the entire audience of the
planet to come to the museum and there have an
experience that helps them understand how science works and how to
get engaged in helping science move forward so i
actually think the museum is still a perfectly serviceable tool in the 21st
century and just to give you an example the
dinosaur exhibit that we're opening we know that dinosaur exhibits are super
popular with kids is different than all previous tennessee
exhibits because it doesn't end in the past our exhibit actually goes into the
future so what it does is it puts humanity in
the story of human evolution and the whole story of human
civilization in context the planet's history in context the warm
periods of the cold periods in context of the ice ages in context of
the extinctions and it shows how humans have become a
geological force and then it kind of challenges the
visitors to imagine a future i do think that the way we get out of
this is by smart people imagining a desirable
future and then building a plan to get to that
future that to me is the answer to the whole thing
i went there sunday actually for the first time i tried to go before
and um i have to say that uh i was kind of curious what i would actually see
there because there's the creationist museum in kentucky which is
a fairly heavy dose of hokum but the bible museum is interesting
because the bible does exist it's the most published book and it is a museum
about the bible i actually found the museum to
be i mean it's a 600 million dollar museum
so they spared no expense making a good museum and it is actually a good museum
and i'm going to go back again and go through more carefully but
i actually would say that i liked my experience at the museum of the
bible it didn't overly proselytize it told a
pretty amazing story of of writing and if you think about it the
bible is sort of one continuous set of how writing and publishing arcs through
western civilization it's very explicitly a museum about
western civilization there's not a lot of discussion of buddha or anything else
in there but it is it is um a interesting museum
and i would say that i expected to be annoyed and i left not so annoyed
it's a positive review
i hate to do this but we've got to stay on track so we have a little bit of time
for book signing before they close the doors on us
i want to thank everybody for coming out today some excellent questions very
engaging answers and please join me in thanking dr kirk
johnson