TED Salon: It's Getting Hot in Here

Last night's TED salon on global warming--"Hot Science: Radical Ideas to Combat Climate Change"-- was long on global problems, but short on everyday solutions.

Featured speakers at the conference--held at the Asia Society on Park Avenue in Manhattan, and sponsored by Condé Nast Portfolio and BMW--painted a dire picture of global warming, but "solutions" to this problem remain elusive. Avoiding hopelessness on this issue was a major theme of the evening.

Russ George, C.E.O. of Planktos, which describes itself as a for-profit ecorestoration company based in San Francisco, colorfully warned that if humans don't address global warming, "the planet will reboot and give us the blue screen of death."

Princeton scientist Michael Oppenheimer didn't mince words either, as he described the now familiar story about human-caused global temperature increases. He said his biggest concern is melting ice at the Earth's poles.

"Parts of Antarctica are disappearing," he said, as he pointed to a slide showing a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island that has disappeared in the last few years.

"Melting ice causes a feedback, amplifying global warming," Oppenheimer said, as he warned of a 10-foot rise in sea levels over the next century.

Oppenheimer told the audience the solution to this problem--if it is to be found--will most likely not come from governments. Private industry must lead.

"You can't count on the government to save you from global warming," he said.

In one presentation, Juan Enriquez, the C.E.O. of Biotechonomy, a biotech venture capital firm in Boston, sought to illustrate the link between energy and biology.

"Bioenergy is oil, it is gas, it is coal," he said, as he suggested that what we call fossil fuels be viewed as "processed" organic matter. "Hydrocarbons are concentrated sunlight. Coal is concentrated plant life."

Enriquez argued that humans have gone about harvesting this "concentrated sunlight" in an inefficient and ecologically irresponsible way. But he didn't suggest a solution to global warming any more than the earlier speakers did.

Not that the entire evening was without fun. Portfolio.com took a test drive around the block in one of the hydrogen-powered BMWs during a break in the conference. Using a switch located on the steering wheel, the BMW test-driver toggled back and forth between hydrogen power and regular gas power.

"We're running out of hydrogen," the BMW driver remarked, of the world's most plentiful element. A hydrogen filling station on the Upper East Side wasn't immediately apparent. Luckily, BMW's still run on good old gasoline.

by Sam Gustin