In 2015, China accounted for 36% of the world’s investments in renewables.Įlon Musk is building a gigafactory with Tesla that will produce an enormous amount of sustainable energy when completed. Partly because of large-scale social unrest, the Chinese government is rapidly investing in renewable energy. Read More: 5 Reasons Cow Farts Matter (and Could Destroy the World)Ħ) China is the world’s biggest polluter, but it also invests the most in sustainable energy. Conversely, 1% of that land is used to grow crops for humans.Ĭows continuously emit methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon, as they go about their days. Seventy percent of this land is used to grow feed for cattle. In the US, 47% of land is dedicated to food production. Putting all of these people “on the grid” will dramatically increase its environmental impact - unless the shift is made with sustainable energy.Ĭows both consume a lot of resources, and emit lots of dangerous greenhouse gases. This means that there are 700 million people not yet relying on electricity for this task. If they collapse, that means a billion people will have to find an alternative source of food.Ĥ) 700 million Indians cook with biomass, aka cow dung.īecause electricity and access to sources of heat are unavailable to hundreds of millions of Indians, they cook food with cow dung that generates heat. It’s likely that reefs will vanish in the decades ahead, reversing a billion years of evolution.Ĭoral reefs are incredibly vibrant ecosystems, fostering a vast range of species and providing food for a billion people around the world. Both events make it harder for coral reefs to form and stay alive. Read More: 9 Ways the World Might Look Different by 2100ģ) 50% of all coral has been lost in the past 30 years.Īs oceans absorb CO2, they become warmer and go through a process of acidification. This will lead to catastrophic droughts, the collapse of agricultural belts, the collapse of marine ecosystems, severe storms, and much more. “If it goes away, that’s going to change currents, that’s going to change weather patterns, it’s going to make droughts more catastrophic.”Ģ) The last time the Earth was four degrees celsius warmer was 4 million years ago.Ĭurrent trends suggest that the Earth will warm by more than 4 degrees through man-made climate change. The Arctic “is like the air conditioning for the Northern Hemisphere,” says Dr. If Greenland were to melt, it alone would raise global sea levels by several feet. As more of the country’s ice turns to water, more sunlight is absorbed, causing more heating, causing more melting, and so on.

Ice reflects sunlight water absorbs sunlight. Greenland is close to entering an irreversible feedback loop of melting. Here are nine takeaways from that journey:ġ) Greenland and the Arctic are on track to melt entirely. He travels to the Sumatran rainforest, at-risk island nations, the Arctic, Greenland, India, China, Miami, and many other places that are being disrupted by climate change right now. So DiCaprio darts around the globe to give people as broad a view as possible. Trying to understand the problem bit by bit is, as the NASA astronaut Piers Seller says in the film, “like being an ant trying to understand how an elephant looks by crawling all over the elephant.” It’s an attempt to zoom out of the daily bombardment of news stories to help people appreciate the scale of climate change. His new, free-to-stream documentary, “ Before the Flood,” is in many ways a culmination of his advocacy.

11, 2016 Update: 'Before the Flood' is no longer available on YouTube for free, but you can see it on the following streaming platforms: Amazon Video, Vudu, YouTube ($2.99), Google Play ($2.99), and Hulu.Įver since the late ‘90s, Leonardo DiCaprio has been talking about a warming atmosphere, rising sea levels, forest fires, and endangered wildlife.

Before the flood