i want to talk to you about swimming across the north pole across the most northern place in the whole world and perhaps the best place to start is with my late father
he was a great storyteller he could tell a story about an event and so you felt you were absolutely there at the moment
loud and the light was so intense that he actually had to put his hands in front of his face to protect his eyes and he said that he could actually see an
of his fingers because the light was so bright and i know that watching that atomic bomb going off had a very very big impact on my late father
every holiday i had as a young boy was in a national park what he was trying to do with me was to inspire me to protect the world and show me just how fragile the world is he also told me
i really really wanted to go to the arctic there was something about that place which drew me to it and well sometimes it takes a long time for a dream to come true but seven years ago i went to the arctic
for the first time and it was so beautiful that i've been back there ever since for the last seven years i love the place
but i have seen that place change beyond all description just in that short period of time i have seen polar bears walking across very very thin ice in search of food
i have swum in front of glaciers which have retreated so much and i have also every year seen less and less sea ice
and i wanted the world to know what was happening up there in the two years before my swim twenty three percent of the arctic sea ice cover
just melted away and i wanted to really shake the lapels of world leaders to get them to understand what is happening
so i decided to do this symbolic swim at the top of the world in a place which should be frozen over but which now is rapidly unfreezing
and the message was very clear climate change is for real and we need to do something about it and we need to do something about it right now
well swimming across the north pole it's not an ordinary thing to do i mean just to put it in perspective
the passengers who fell off the titanic fell into water of just five degrees centigrade fresh water freezes at zero
and the water at the north pole is minus one point seven it's fucking freezing
i'm sorry but there is no other way to describe it
and so i had to assemble an incredible team around me to help me with this task i
it couldn't be further from the truth for me
and i then went and did a huge amount of training swimming in icy water backwards and forwards but the most important thing was to train my mind to prepare myself for what was going to happen
and i had to visualize the swim i had to see it from the beginning all the way to the end i had to taste the salt water in my mouth i had to see my coach screaming for me
in my mind
and then after a year of training i felt ready i felt confident that i could actually do this swim so myself and the five members of the team we hitched a ride on an icebreaker which was going to the north pole
and on day four we decided to just do a quick five minute test swim i had never swum in water of minus one point seven degrees before
the ice and i then got into my swimming costume and i dived into the sea i have never in my life felt anything like that moment
i could barely breathe i was gasping for air i was hyperventilating so much and within seconds my hands were numb and it was the paradox is that you're in freezing cold water but actually you're on fire
i swam as hard as i could for five minutes i remember just trying to get out of the water i climbed out of the ice and i remember taking the goggles off my face and looking down at my hands
in sheer shock because my fingers had swollen so much that they were like sausages and they were swollen so much i couldn't even close them
what had happened is that we are made partially of water and when water freezes it expands and so what had actually happened is that the cells in my fingers
had frozen and expanded and they had burst and i was in so much agony i immediately got rushed onto the ship
and into a hot shower and i remember standingunderneath the hot shower and trying to defrost my fingers and i thought
in two days time i was going to do this swim across the north pole i was going to try and do a twenty minute swim for one kilometer across the north pole
and this dream which i had had ever since i was a young boy with my father was just going out the window there is no possibility that this was going to happen
and i remember then getting out of the shower and realizing i couldn't even feel my hands and for a swimmer you need to feel your hands because you need to be able to grab the water and pull it through with you
the next morning i woke up and i was in such a state of depression and all i could think about was
for those of you who don't know him he 's the great british explorer a number of years ago he tried to ski all the way to the north pole he accidentally fell through the ice into the sea and after just three minutes in that water
he went to a local hospital and there they said ran there is no possibility of us being able to save these fingers we are going to actually have to take them off and ran
and all i could think of was if that happened to ran after three minutes and i can feel my hands after five minutes
what on earth is going to happen if i try twenty minutes at the very best i'm going to end up losing some fingers and at worst i didn't even want to think about it
we carried on sailing through the ice packs towards the north pole and my close friend david saw the way i was thinking and he came up to me and he said lewis i've known you since you were eighteen years old
i've known you and i know lewis deep down right deep down here that you are going to make this swim
i so believe in you lewis i've seen the way you've been training and i realize the reason why you're going to do this this is such an important swim
we stand at a very very important moment in this history and you're going to make a symbolic swim here
to try to shake the lapels of world leaders lewis have the courage to go in there because we are going to look after you every moment of
and i just i got so much confidence from him saying that because he knew me so well
so we carried on sailing and we arrived at the north pole and we stopped the ship and it was just as the scientists had predicted there were open patches of sea everywhere
and i went down into my cabin and i put on my swimming costume and then the doctor strapped on a chest monitor which measures my core body temperature and my heart rate and then we walked out onto the ice
and i remember looking into the ice and there were big chunks of white ice in there and the water
completely black i had never seen black water before and it is four thousand two hundred meters deep
ice
sailing out of harbor now and it's at this stage
one can have a bit of a wobble
just looks so gray around here and looks so
think that in thirty forty years they could become extinct it's a very frightening very
years of training and planning and preparation
here and do my swim it's
i'd just like to end off by just saying this it took my four months again to feel my hands but was it worth it yes absolutely it was there are very very few people who don't know now about what is happening in the arctic
and people ask me lewis what can we do about climate change and i say to them i think we need to do three things the first thing we need to do is we need to break this problem down into manageable chunks
you saw during that video all those flags those flags represented the countries from which my team came from and equally when it comes to climate change
every single country is going to have to make cuts britain america japan south africa the congo all of us together we're all on the same ship together
the second thing we need to do is we need to just look back at how far we have come in such a short period of time
i remember just a few years ago speaking about climate change and people heckling me in the back and saying it doesn't even
i've just come back from giving a series of speeches in some of the poorest townships in south africa to young children as young as ten years old
five children sitting behind a desk and even in those poorest conditions they all had a very very good grasp
of climate change we need to believe in ourselves now is the time to believe we've come a long way
doing good but the most important thing we must do is i think we must all walk to the end
our lives and turn around and ask ourselves a most fundamental question and that is
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