Is Climate Collapse Inevitable? with Jem Bendell

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: and welcome to climate chat i'm your host dan miller and today our special guest is jem vendell who is a climate scientist who's been looking at uh climate from a different perspective than many climate scientists and looks at it from the uh idea of collapse which we're going to talk about he wrote a paper in 2018 where he made some predictions some claims that he revisited this year and we're going to start off by talking about that but before we do that i want to remind everyone to please like and subscribe click the notification bell share the program with your friends it really helps get the message out this is a very important message to get out and uh with that i'd first like to start jim welcome and maybe you could start by giving us a little bit of your background [00:00:58] jem vendell: yeah thanks for the invitation uh dan and yeah when you introduced me as a climate scientist i thought oh yeah some people aren't going to like that i call myself an interdisciplinary uh scientist uh because i i so i used to be a full professor of sustainability in a british university but a few years ago i i quit i say i quit in order to actually do more relevant real research and have more freedom in terms of how i talk about it and how i engage with uh with people to learn what to do about the crisis we're in so yeah i i don't go around calling myself a climate scientist i did do climatology in my geography degree in 1993 uh and then i did take a year out of university in 2017 uh from my full-time job in order to look at the climatology directly as i hadn't done for a while and that led me to conclude that things were far worse than what consensus climatology was saying and that kind of like the the the conversation in the media about climate was saying uh but now i'm come i'm i'm joining you from indonesia i'm the convener of something called the meta crisis initiative which is basically helping people to face the inter interconnecting crises of our time and and and respond positively so rather than just being depressed or despairing or denying it's as bad as it is actually trying to think okay it's super bad how do i show up as [00:02:32] Speaker 1: best i can in that context great you've done a lot of things and you have a lot of writings and things and so you have a website link is in the description i do recommend that people check it out a lot of interesting things including stuff we're not going to have a chance to cover today but uh with that i want to just click over here and show that back in 2018 you wrote a paper called deep adaptation a map for navigating climate tragedy and i just want to read the first line from the abstract uh which says the purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of inevitable near-term social collapse due to climate change that's a that's a pretty heavy opening sentence for an abstract and uh so i guess you got a lot of pushback this is 2018 [00:03:27] jem vendell: we're talking about yeah yeah yeah i mean so the speaking now so that's eight years ago um i got a lot of i got i got a lot of response that i hadn't imagined so this paper was uh i wrote it for my field so i was in corporate sustainability as a professor uh and yeah i'd had over 100 publications un reports multiple books i was super passionate about how do we get business and finance to change to meet the challenges of our time uh specifically environmental ones but also human rights and all sorts of other issues so that was my field and then yeah i got freaked out by the news that i was looking at thinking we should not be seeing permafrost melting so fast we should not be seeing these temperature spikes in the arctic with this this will think these were things that i thought i would just see like late in life perhaps um so yeah i needed to take time out to look back because my whole my whole work in corporate sustainability was motivated by the idea that we have time that we can transition to an ecological civilization by people becoming more enlightened in positions of power including in business and banks and the you know so basically the idea of bold but incremental change and and the latest climate data was challenging that paradigm so i took time out to look at it and then i concluded wow it's a lot worse it's happening a lot faster and there's momentum in it so we're going to have catastrophic damage to the environment and therefore our societies and the economies and and i thought for me i was i was i was i was going to quit i was there's no point in working on incremental change anymore um and then when i was doing that i was like wow i can't just disappear i have to tell people why i'm leaving and invite them to see things the way i had concluded them provide the evidence for that and discuss why we're all in denial so those and also provide a framework for talking about it so those were the three things in that deep adaptation paper the the science as i see it why it's worse why we're in denial and how do we begin to try and talk about it and change what we're working on and how we're living and so yeah i i got as you say a backlash but also more than the backlash the backlash only became because of the massive uptake so the massive uptake you know a million downloads of this paper within 18 months it launched what became a deep adaptation movement around the world with deep adaptation groups cropping up and that's because it provided a framework for people to talk about a kind of a darker environmentalism um you know a lot of people had deep critiques of uh the economies and lives we live consumerism industrialism capitalism and so on but but to come along and say no it's game over already this is where we're headed and quite a lot sooner than we thought that was that was different and it gave people an opportunity to express their grief and fear come together so yeah it went way beyond my corporate sustainability profession and that's when the backlash came okay so the backlash came really about 18 months two years after the paper okay i think quite a lot of uh environmental uh policy lobbyists commentators and such like were were annoyed that so many people were talking about yeah but isn't it too late for that [00:07:05] Speaker 1: and so then the backlash came so uh then but earlier this year in august on your um on your website i believe you published this here excuse me it doesn't dispute it but now demonstrable facts about climate change from the consequential deep adaption paper of 2018. so perhaps you could walk us through what these claims are i've actually put them here let me get over here yeah and let's move on to here and don't forget to like and subscribe but i can put everybody like and subscribe i'm really pleased to [00:07:46] jem vendell: have discovered your channel dan and you you don't hold back you you're you want to hear from anyone who's working meaningfully on climate and uh whether the science or the policy implications or even not the implications for for investment and all sorts so yeah uh it's good you do you have this channel so yes everybody like and subscribe um and yeah this this uh thank you for bringing up that essay so what what happened was um i was being interviewed more recently by more mainstream journalists about this issue of are we going to see oh are we already in a situation of climate tragedy where there's going to be a catastrophic damage to societies from ecological change um and how should we live with that really difficult awareness and but what i noticed is that the um validity of that the that kind of view of the science was being discussed in terms of the debates back in 2020 so like grist magazine for example did a very fair presentation of what deep adaptation as a framework can mean and it doesn't mean giving up it means widening the agenda that we work on um but she the the journalist was debating the merits of deep adaptation on the basis of what was being discussed in 2020 and it was like well hold on there's been so much dramatic change dramatic change in the world's weather just since 2023 and also a dramatic change in what we're seeing published in top peer-reviewed journals so then i thought i better i better go back and actually look at this precise claims in my paper and then compare it to what the data is saying now and what and what the top scientists are saying now and so that's that led to the the essay um okay and i tried to do it in a way with because it's always a bit difficult no one wants someone showing up and saying i was right particularly on something as bad as this there's no fun in that um uh but i thought it was was fair to go through the claims because i wanted to help people see that this this was actually fairly easy to see this eight years ago and to get us to think well why doesn't institutional climatology see these things and what could be the blind spots now um and i've got some ideas on that but yeah let's go through some of those claims all right let's do it so claymore sea level rise is accelerating worldwide yeah so for me i was very interested in this issue because i thought that if sea level is accelerating that's mainly due to um the expansion thermal expansion of the oceans and the uh runoff from on land ice running in to the sea there are a few other small uh adjustments that can come from draining aquifers and such like but the main cause are those two reasons and so therefore and other climatologists have and top ones ramsdorf and others have said that sea level rise isn't it is a is a quite a good general indicator of what's happening with the world's climate um and so i thought well this for me because remember i'm not somebody who's a career climatologist i'm not just in one sort of silo within that field i'm approaching this to see what is most salient to know about the way the world's changing because it's within that framework i choose what to work on and so i thought well what is the what is the biggest signal and for me it was well sea level rise and um there was dispute at the time about the rate of sea level rise um even ipcc documents were at the time in 2018 predicting future sea level rise uh low low scenarios that were lower than the actual current reported back then in 2018 sea level rise so everything was very out of date by the time it reached consensus uh because of the processes at the ipcc and you know okay that's how it worked but i thought okay i want to know so i just looked at the satellite data and there it was sea level rise is accelerating had been for the last few years um now that's just that's just accepted the crucial thing there was the inference i took from that which i talked about i think in the second claim okay let's [00:12:30] Speaker 1: think we go to i think i have to click on this and then go here there we go so yeah climate change is [00:12:36] jem vendell: probably accelerating we talk about that a lot on this program yeah so i therefore took from you know so you have noise in the climate system with uh el nino and volcanic eruptions and all sorts of things that create wobbles up and down and of course you have the natural cycles sun cycle and cosmic rays being disrupted and therefore reducing uh or increasing cloud cover so you have although that natural noise as well as um other factors which we can talk about but um sea level rise is a general indicator and so if it's accelerating climate change is probably accelerating the rate of global heating is probably accelerating and i looked at the data for that and it was there some people would say i was cherry picking it but i think i was just looking at what were the most important signals and for me this issue back then because i was just very focused on carbon greenhouse gases um rather than other factors such as aerosols which we might talk about later i thought okay wow that means that the climate sensitivity for carbon in the atmosphere is higher than what people are saying and we're in a lot we're in a lot bigger mess than what i had assumed when i was just reading newspaper articles about climate because i was too busy doing my day job as a professor in a business school um yeah so do you agree with jim hansen's assessment that ecs uh [00:14:06] Speaker 1: equilibrium climate sensitivity is like four and a half degrees instead of what the ipc is ipcc assumes is like three degrees [00:14:15] jem vendell: or do you look at it yeah it's it's i it's worse than what the ipcc has has said because uh observational data is proving that sure what exactly the climate sensitivity is um yeah i i'm open to cl uh hansen's work and i'm also curious of the critiques of it um it's i would just say that it's it's worse or it's there's greater sensitivity than what's been um factored into the models in the past i think i get some sirens [00:14:50] Speaker 1: there okay claim three natural carbon sinks including forests and oceans will probably decline and some turn into sources of carbon so natural emissions will increase i think your sirens are [00:15:01] jem vendell: perfect for what we're talking about um yeah so for this is this is crucial because it relates to the extent to which uh this is a manageable problem rather than uh a predicament we're in so if we've done so much damage already and there's momentum in the system then we need to start thinking about how can we uh repair uh the system rather than just regulate our emissions doesn't mean we don't stop but also it means we need to get ready personally and collectively practically and psychologically politically as well for real damage to in in the future so um yeah it's it's on this one i mean a paper just came out recently saying that yeah so african forests flipped from being uh sinks to sources there's it's just so much science has come out uh on various different sinks like the um eastern mediterranean was a sink now it's a source um there are some people saying that the amazon has already flipped from from sink to source that one's disputed but yeah it's we're we're it's it's not uh remember these were very annoying statements back in 2018 or mainstream some mainstream climatologists and now it's like yeah shrugged shoulders yeah looks like it it's terrible [00:16:32] Speaker 1: claim claim for self-amplifying feedback threatens further acceleration of heating despite potential emissions cuts [00:16:42] jem vendell: and so this obviously seems a logical extension and i was already pointing to it before um still some people try to argue against this but they do by running very controlled model simulations to try to claim that if suddenly we had net zero tomorrow um then heating would stop now that's been that i debunked that uh many other people who looked at those uh climate uh those those model scenarios have debunked that they ignore methane they ignore so many things they assume i don't [00:17:21] Speaker 1: think they ignore my understanding is that methane is offset uh well methane is you get rid of methane and then it's a short-term gas so it actually goes away that's the theory i'm not saying if natural sources continue to accelerate then you're screwed as you're pointing out but that's the theory behind [00:17:42] jem vendell: the the idea i'd be very happy to find the um the paper of uh the the that that was the main one that people like michael mann were then using to argue if we hit net zero then climate heating stops yeah and i analyzed it and published on it and it did include uh a lot of very uh i would argue so untenable it renders the study meaningless uh assumptions i can put that we'll put that in there that'd be great [00:18:17] Speaker 1: that'd be great okay let's go to the next one claim six do not rely entirely on climate computer [00:18:23] jem vendell: you're modeling to assess future risks yeah yeah so that's uh uh for me back when i was doing the paper i was thinking well uh pro you know prior to such a fixation on modeling in climatology um some of the earliest scientists had had said you know in the 80s had said we can't go over one degree warming above pre-industrial because of various dynamics which will amplify it and they also looked at the paleontological records of carbon in the atmosphere and to work out what the the already over 350 parts per million what what the future equilibrium temperature would be and they were they were saying that in the 80s and and of course you know hansen makes a big stir by then writing about that a couple of years ago with equilibrium warming reminding everyone which is already known in the 80s when people were more focused on the paleontological stuff to say where we're headed when nature catches up with what we've done to it um so so yeah because of that i concluded that statement there and yeah absolutely so a paper that just came out in um it's uh let me have a look at where where it just came out in um climate atmospheric science so uh they report a paper a peer review paper reports that we're now 0.4 celsius of global heating per decade which is double what it was 10 years ago yeah we've covered that a lot and it's way and and the latest models cannot simulate that they don't they they even they they work i think at 0.29 for that period the last 10 years or prior to 2025. so um this is greater than even in the worst case scenarios we're already in worse than the worst case scenarios so um yeah so if if we're relying on models we're we're um we're basically uh look so busy looking at our computer screens we're not looking out the window okay i like that uh let's see claim seven global average [00:20:38] Speaker 1: heating above pre-industrial of two degrees celsius is not a smart ceiling to avoid as many heap and heat [00:20:46] jem vendell: amplifiers would already be triggered before then yeah and um there were reasons yeah there's the 2c ceiling is not safe and um there were a variety of reasons for pointing to amplifying feedbacks that the evidence was already there but yeah now consensus climatology on self-amplifying feedbacks and so-called tipping points uh so all the work coming out of exit university yeah they've shown that many tipping points are likely to be tipped by 1.5c not two degrees and there's the concern of the cascading of those tipping points into each other um so like dominoes based climate dominoes basically um so yeah that's that's not a kind of controversial claim now and many people then try and sort of it's the it's the in the world of two thousand logic in logical in the world of logical fantasies it's the this process of retreat to the fort so previously everyone was saying choose degrees c it's the it's the the safe ceiling and then okay maybe 1.5 that's the safe ceiling oh we're going to overshoot 1.5 okay well let's talk about that as a temporary overshoot that that helps us you know somehow reduce like calamity and oh and then let's just refocus on two degrees and then now even we're going to start hearing about temporary overshoot of two degrees already i mean sure for sure right i mean close um and so yeah i i am there's there's so many people who claim to be objective scientists in this where it is so obvious that there's a whole in reframing re-narrativizing in order to try and calm oneself and each other down and maintain this sort of professional veneer of ease and calm and positivity uh and i was saying no sorry it's right to be a dismayed and upset um despairing and then and then from that place we can have more meaningful conversations about what to do now [00:22:55] Speaker 1: sort of reminds me of don't look at we had adam mckay on uh a few weeks ago and he talked about the biggest life which i think you mentioned that we we still have time you know to do these things but just the don't look up idea that we know about this calamity but just just don't look don't don't pay attention to it ignore it i've got to say that some people [00:23:12] jem vendell: think that the implication from this claim here is that therefore we give up and that says more about them than it does about other others like if they feel like they'll give up they just need to allow the pain to sit with them a bit longer and then they'll find a deeper resolve and we keep going [00:23:29] Speaker 1: okay so uh let's see claim eight emissions won't come down so we won't likely stay below 2c [00:23:38] jem vendell: yeah so since then emissions have gone up so there we go there we are boom if you don't have to [00:23:46] Speaker 1: claim nine impacts on agriculture are key and make this matter one of societal relevance including [00:23:52] jem vendell: peace and security yeah so you've got to put your mind back to 2018 and most people when they talked about climate uh they were talking about the environment which is separate from us they were talking about uh something other than the way we live in cities with our aircon or central heating uh they were talking about polar bears and birds they might be talking about maybe some forest fires and um you know some disappointment about how a landscape is changing or how biodiversity is being lost but it was generally not about the food on your plate whether it's there or whether you can afford it and so a massive change happened in 2018 and i'm really i'm really grateful and proud of all the people who decided to help wake everyone up that climate change is an issue for humanity not just the polar bears and i'm really upset about the polar bears but also i'm a little bit more frightened about what it means for us so um yeah and now yeah so if we look at the best modeling of the relationship between climate and food security from EASA and Vienna they just using all the existing models which are very limited in terms of uh things like climate sensitivity um they they modeled that once we have three years over 1.5 degrees c above pre-industrial then uh we can have through things like jet stream blocking multi-bread basket failure for maize corn and maize and of course that will then have knock-on effects on the rest of the cereals market and the rest of food prices i can't quite remember when it's wheat it might be five to ten years of 1.5 where we'll then have a multi-bread basket failure of wheat and then of course that would be super well we can see next year we're going to be up at 1.7 1.8 uh you know next year so yeah so with the first year over what depending on where you put the baseline some people would say it's been unfairly moved but um uh 1.5 2024 i think was the first year we had a whole year over 1.5 and then in 26 we're back to i think probably this year will be over and 27 will be something we're going to be over we're awful so we're at 1.5 already for sure yeah exactly so if you if you um you know but this is yeah this is uh it's like it's 1.5 as a as a descriptor of a whole year on average worldwide for three years in a row we will get a multi-bread basket failure in maize and many countries depend on imports of cereals uh so some countries would be badly affected and basically people who work on these issues have been a bit scared and changing food security policies in countries around the world for the last two years here in indonesia they have sadly it just means they're cutting down more rainforests to put in rice fields but um okay yeah people who work on these things know this okay they don't need to listen to the nonsense of the deniers or the people who water down the message are we going to claim 10 countries [00:27:02] Speaker 1: will turn to carbon capture technologies that won't make a significant impact and waste huge resources of course we just had uh klaus lachner on a few weeks ago father carbon capture and his basic point was we can have as much carbon capture as you want as long as you have policy that requires it and if you don't you're just you know nothing's going to happen because it's free to pollute and why pay to not pollute when it's free to pollute but but i want to make another point because you did this in 2018 and then after this or was it around the same time that the ipcc then started sticking secretly not not really secretly but sticking carbon capture in uh their emission scenario so they could still say we could [00:27:45] jem vendell: stay under two when do you know when that happened i wasn't sure yeah so so what i was pointing at here is that so i um although i'm an interdisciplinary scientist uh i i'm i'm a specialist in critical social theory and critical discourse analysis and what that means is i i i analyze how we we see the world according to our culture according to our frames and the stories of ourselves and existence stories of how we know what we can know stories of what exists fancy words for that are ontology epistemology methodology discourse so i i therefore when i was looking at the science i was beginning to see okay the reason why all these things that i've just mentioned the previous nine claims are sort of not being made or are being made but hidden not part of the consensus is that people are sticking to a public narrative and the public narrative is this is a problem that can be managed by industrial capital societies um and that we can fix it with the right technology we still have time we we don't have to panic we don't have to have any revolutionary change we don't have to rethink our culture our politics our economics our philosophy of life um we don't have to move into a triage where we're actually going to have to make the richer people share more you know none of that awkward stuff no no no no no we're just going to fix this with as being you know technocrats and that was the the mainstream narrative some people call it eco-modernism um and it still exists but but i saw it and i thought well from that paradigm how are they going to deal with what i'm seeing and it's like oh well they'll just come up with some sort of technological hail mary you know we'll just we'll just we'll just fix it with but the problem was is the amount of energy required for these machines and so unless there's some massive breakthrough there with uh you know whatever new energy technology is or whatever uh carbon stripping i mean i i there are ways of doing this differently so i'm not against i'm not other nature-based engineering uh as a field to examine and experiment with in safe ways to involve stakeholders in the very process of imagining what should be tested and uh and we we don't want to leave it just to people driven by either the profit motive or geopolitics we need a broader civil society engagement in these things but i just thought now the simplest thing for people stuck in the paradigm we'll just say we'll flip on a few carbon capture machines and we'll get back to something okay manageable and that's what that's what's happened the ipcc started squeezing in i don't know did they do it maybe in the in the in the october 2018 1.5 [00:30:40] Speaker 1: report i can't remember when it started appearing but they started sticking it in so they could claim that we can still stay under two yeah but uh anyone interested in more details on this listen to our program with klaus lachner from about a month ago or so okay okay yeah you should let's watch it too claim 11 societal collapse is a reasonable expectation of the impacts from climate change [00:31:05] jem vendell: when interacting with other factors yeah so this is the bit that uh upset a lot of people um and it is the part of the paper where i think it's a fair a fair discussion which is um i am reaching a conclusion that climate change is going so fast and that we have an economic and political system which is requiring and rewarding the expansion of economic activity uh so it is we we don't have a social socioeconomic political system that is ready to quickly shrink our consumption of the world's resources or shrink our pollution of the planet uh and so we're going to shoot through planetary boundaries and what does that mean it means that our society is unsustainable and that therefore it will break down and if it breaks down in a way that can't be fixed and restarted to be what it looked like in the past then i think the best term for that is societal collapse now the problem is it's a very loaded term it's a very emotive term and people think of it some kind of event sudden event like a building suddenly collapses when actually um as i looked at it more over the years i realized that societal collapses and uh is a is a is typically in the past quite a slow process it's about the breaking of the the foundations of a society where they can't then be fixed so you go back to what was before so that was the claim in the paper which yeah it upset a lot of people because also i said that um my personal view is that the collapse was now inevitable subsequent to 2018 i looked at it more and i realized there's data to suggest that we've we've all we've already entered a process of societal collapse in many countries around the world and it's not to do with specific factors for those societies this is because of uh global processes so um yeah i'm still sticking with the societal collapse as a reason we're going [00:33:23] Speaker 1: to talk about this a little bit more after we get through the final claim here oh so i should say on [00:33:29] jem vendell: that one is that many other people are saying this so even even on our show critics like michael michael mann um who would just reject my work out of hand in in the past he's now put his name to the uh 2026 world climate update with other top scientists and they say that we're already in a catastrophic situation which is beyond our ability to respond i could even find the quote here we are witnessing the rapids destabilization of the earth's climate system this is no longer a warning for the future it is a diagnosis of the present with changes unfolding faster than our ability to respond that was in [00:34:13] Speaker 1: bios that's from the paper not from michael's lips directly that's that's that he signed on to the [00:34:18] jem vendell: paper right in the paper which he is a co-author of right we had him on the program too a long time ago and i'll have him come off he didn't come off so last year last year he was still stating that climate change is not accelerating him and catherine hayhoe had it yeah yeah yeah well we know yeah [00:34:38] Speaker 1: absolutely um so the last one uh near client claim 12 near-term human extinction risk is something to take seriously as we assess priorities for action yeah so in 2018 there were some people who would call them [00:34:53] jem vendell: who were labeled doomers and were saying that this this is also bad we've got inevitable near-term human extinction and that even carried an acronym like it was it was there was like a quite a following for guy mcpherson and other people who were who were concluding near-term human extinction is inevitable and they were dismissed out of hand by many scientists and my looking at the science in 2018 led me to think that they have a point that actually things could go super bad and i disagreed with them in a number of areas like uh there was a claim that if societies broke down and that we couldn't maintain the 400 plus nuclear power stations and bring them to cold shutdown or maintain them locally and therefore if they melted down that would irradiate the planet and would all die from cancer there was no uh there was no um logical explication of that process it was just like a like suddenly someone felt that way okay and i wrote to guy and i said so can you give me the explanation of how this happens and and and it was he was just talking about radiation on other planets and stuff and it's like no no no can we just you're making a massive claim okay so basically yes we've got some real worries about methane on the ocean floor and we do see that there's more and more evidence to show that it's even more of a concern because the methane hydrates the calthrates they do migrate across the arctic floor and they therefore can move into shallower areas it's all quite worrying because therefore a massive methane injection could come uh and not be absorbed by the water column it is possible um so we need to be very alert to it and we need to um not just make it a like like obscene put it off the agenda off the table because it's too frightening so um so yeah guy mcfrey when you [00:36:55] Speaker 1: wrote your 2018 paper he predicted that we would be extinct this year so we have two more months to go to meet his prediction if we're all going to be we have to all die very quickly yes so i think he overdoes it quite a bit but i don't but i agree with you that there's a real risk of it and forget that risk but you just said societal collapse to me that's enough that's enough serious risk to yeah you know you don't have to go all the way to extinction you're right and the crucial thing i was trying to [00:37:25] jem vendell: uh say in the essay uh from this year is that these things were very disputed back eight years ago but now you even have the british society of actuaries saying that um with the the where we're headed about three degrees we'll have four billion people dead as in dying younger than uh would otherwise and so um i don't quite know how they worked out the four billion dead figure maybe i should look into it um maybe someone can come on your program and explain how the actuaries came up with that but um so that that is societal collapse i mean to have half the population go that's worse that's mega [00:38:04] Speaker 1: death so um so i think yeah i think i mentioned earlier but i i i looked at your claims i started i wanted to make a checklist of which ones mainstream climate scientists agree with today and i really only got past two sea level rises accelerating and climate change is accelerating and again still some dispute but i would say you know a lot at least at this this year uh a lot of them would agree but the rest um so they so they're looking at the same data you're looking at why do you think even today with your update that mainstream scientists don't put it together like you're putting it [00:38:45] jem vendell: together what what's happening right um so yeah so many of the claims are those those 12 claims like so so there are mainstream career climatologists so employed at universities working full-time publishing peer-reviewed journals who do uh make the same claims now but you're right they're not um the consensus uh and also many top climatologists when being interviewed in the media do not uh speak to these claims and also the sort of the the climate elite in terms of policy the people who are who are famous for their efforts on climate but are not climatologists um christina christiana figure is among them who are not speaking these claims um and so that's another issue to talk about like why would why would they not be um i think actually i'll speak to that first i think because they are um busy just the same way i was super busy within a paradigm i was i was convinced until 2018 i had a lot of work to do to help uh bend the emissions curve and uh buy a small time to transition to an ecological civilization and i best do that by working with business and banks and with the un and and that's all you know that that's you're super busy you're managing people you're you're doing funding applications you're going to conferences you're teaching students you're doing all manner of stuff busy busy busy so a lot of the people the climate glitterati the most famous people who speak to people around the world on climate are busy and they are operating within the paradigm i used to operate in which is that we can fix this we've got time um and so we just need more technology more money more leadership and more awareness and education um yeah so that's one reason and then that brings us on to the question you about why would climate professional career climate scientists not more of them see these things as i've as i see them well it's the age-old problem of institutionalized science wherever the field whatever the field is and whatever the era any field of inquiry becomes institutionalized becomes siloed and becomes self-referential so that you are interested in what have you what have you found so far and what's the new research to to build on what you found so far in your narrow silo and and also beyond that you're interested in and where does it get funded from and so yeah it was once the the once the story of uh carbon dioxide is the prime driver of climate change became the norm um then the and once everyone was amazed at the power of models and modeling and once people didn't want to hear that oh uh we can't really solve this within the same the current economic expansionist economic system whereas all the money are going to go tweaking all the latest models like and so everyone just focuses on that and and and so i come in as someone who just wants to what is most salient to know for helping me work out how to use my spend my time as a as an environmental professional um but the crucial thing is if you are coming from outside a discipline you do need to know how to read the research and so i had that through methodological training um not only in my undergrad but also my postgrad i did you know methodology courses uh and i'd stayed in touch with reading some science over the years so i was able to read it but the crucial thing was i would spot i would spot um narratives and frames i'll give you the most obvious one is um if we talk about the climate immediately most of us will look up in the sky and we'll think it's therefore there's some kind of assumption it's it's weather up there when actually the oceans determine our climate and therefore let's rephrase that the oceans are the climate like 90 of all the energy coming in from the sun is absorbed into the oceans um and if we look at the planet the pacific there's more pacific than there is territory on the planet and yet we call it planet earth so we've got these very deep frames in our thought thought we we are a terrestrial species we think of the planet earth not planet pacific we think of the climate as up there in the sky rather than down there in the oceans so for me i was very interested in what are the oceanographers telling us because when i did my climatology studies at cambridge university in 1993 it was the oceanographers who were the climatologists um and so i naturally went and looked also oceanography and and so yeah the um the least wrong climatologists in the world are two australian oceanographers who i think published a paper in 2017 that said that according to pacific ocean dynamics uh we're likely to pass 1.5c uh around 2025. so i didn't know about that back then i missed that paper um because it's difficult to spot the signal amongst the flood of publications which are coming out of the paradigm that's dominant and so i missed that paper from those oceanographers even though i already knew that was really important to look primarily at the oceans to understand climate dynamics so um so it's it's really subtle at that level as well so it's personal psychology the siloing the institutionalizing where the funding is path dependency you do you know you're skilled in one area so you'll do more in that area um all these things uh and unfortunately people then they can get a bit annoyed with outsiders like me coming in and saying something different and getting some attention for it uh so there's this other thing it's called in sociology it's called occupational closure and there are positive sides to occupational closure you want to know that there are accreditations for dentists you know when i go to a dentist here i want to know that i think you don't want anyone to call themselves a dentist um but it also means that new ideas amazing ideas disruptive innovations from outside of dentistry might be ignored for a lot longer than they should be and so there are pros and cons of occupational closure with climate we're dealing with something that if we get it wrong we don't get a second chance that's true so um [00:45:53] Speaker 1: so you mentioned changing a little bit here you mentioned carbon capture before but what are your thoughts on the possibility of climate restoration see cdr is part of that but also solar geoengineering is part of that nature-based solutions i mean there's a whole swarm of them but just do you think that's something worthy of pursuing or do you think it won't help no i think it's it's it's it's really important [00:46:18] jem vendell: to um for people who care about climate um no matter where you are in terms of professionally uh to then look at this issue of climate restoration um so i'm i became known since 2018 in terms of adaptation to the changes underway and to come but what sort of brought me out of retirement in the last 18 months is the realization that my previous work overlooked the biohydrological cycles the role of uh large natural forests and healthy oceans in seeding clouds not just regionally but also globally so so the most sort of poetic example of this is that you've got snow in tibet with a bit of pollen or bacteria from the amazon so the healthy large forests help drive the world's hydrological cycle and clouds depending on the height but especially also depending on what what what they cover whether it's what what the albedo is of the earth's surface but particularly clouds over oceans are really important for reflecting uh the incoming sunlight and so it yeah we've we've we've polluted the oceans the phytoplankton that seed clouds are in decline we've destroyed forests where even the irony is digging up more of environmental forests in the name of the green transition for the metals and rare earths we need an urgent nature restoration agenda as a key part of the climate fight so it's not a separate issue because we love biodiversity and pretty forests and we like healthy oceans it's actually part of the climate fight and so natural climate cooling has been overlooked and it was overlooked by me it's overlooked in general and so that's also why i making these arguments it's not to say i was right you were wrong it's to say there were institutionalized science mistakes back then and institutionalized science is making the mistake now with having carbon goggles we need to also look at uh how clouds cool climate and of course the other stuff that you've been uh presenting on your channel which is really important is how cleaning up uh fuels worldwide is also reducing cloud seeding um aerosol from dirty fuels and particularly over the pacific that's a real issue in terms of heat absorption so what does that mean it doesn't necessarily mean we start going back to dirty fuel um although there could be an argument for that um it means we have to look at how all the things we can do to help um restore cloud cover i prefer to bring more attention to the natural restoring the natural processes um and i've written about that and i presented about that um and so yeah i really encourage more attention to that so people could go to the climate cooling initiatives to look at that but yeah i i'm not an expert on the other ways that we could be seeding clouds like marine cloud brightening um i'm very dubious of some things like stratospheric aerosol injection i i don't like the the idea that these conversations are being had by experts with uh bureaucrats and venture capitalists alone and where you seem so you seem to have civil society just rejecting the whole topic i think we need far more open dialogue about uh the process of innovation and experimentation it needs to be involving society and transparent because um it yeah there could there could be really well there will there would be real dangers from certain things and also you'll end up with lots of conspiracy theories as well if it's not chemtrails and things yeah no we've covered that a lot and we're going to [00:50:37] Speaker 1: actually have in two weeks uh uh sr sai expert on as well we we covered that every every different way on this on this program i and i agree with you that yeah so if you look at it transparent what's [00:50:51] jem vendell: what's what's happening yeah there was a big conference in iceland just uh a week or two ago but the civil society participation was piecemeal uh perhaps tokenistic and yeah we need something something bigger than that we need a broader conversation um it's it's almost like a global civil society uh through the un but also through independent uh non non-governmental processes needs to be involved in this not just in uh like they need to be involved at the the in the very process of tech innovation like in consultation like where should the funding go what issues should we look at first um because otherwise we're just playing playing catch-up and we've seen with things like the nuclear industry and with ai if you just let the profit motive and geopolitics shape tech development then you end up with all sorts of uh big risks we don't seem to do a good job of thinking forward about what the [00:51:54] Speaker 1: risk could be we just try it out then when we run into a problem we try to fix it and with climate we're we're up against something we don't people don't understand that you don't get to reverse it [00:52:05] jem vendell: easily so yeah so also i'm i'm also quite supportive of mere so the we had various different reflective surfaces that can be used at ground level some people would say that's more to do with adaptation really because it's about local cooling local um and it would be a so so that they do it to do for [00:52:24] Speaker 1: earth cooling you'd need mirrors that literally the area of the united states [00:52:29] jem vendell: yeah maybe three times that or something i when when i first talked to so yay tao came up he he read the deep adaptation paper and then he wrote to me from harvard saying he's quitting his job there's a few people who did that and he's done amazing work but um i wrote back to him back then that had been 29 2020 maybe and i said how how can we try and restore the polar ice caps like how can we do stuff because it's the temper differentials that's meddling with the jet streams like the reduced temperature differentials and the problem was yeah it was a real technical challenge and so he's looked at other things but i still think that for me i'd love to know how we can repair the arctic in a safe way okay um so [00:53:20] Speaker 1: mentioned societal clap maybe it's already begun but there's going to be a time when we kind of know what's happening you know where the general public is aware of it when do you think that is is that it says within our lifetime but is it in 10 years 50 years uh you know what's what's your feeling [00:53:40] jem vendell: so in my in my last book breaking together came out in 2023 i looked the first half of the book is all looking at the data around societal collapse and i concluded that um main indicators things like health um crime all sorts of things uh they'd started plateauing or even going down in the majority of countries on all continents in the world since 2015 um and i used the human development index i used numbo quality of life indices uh and so although we kind of assume the narrative of our times and in the media and all around us is of sort of perpetual human progress and any setbacks are just like uh mistakes or misfortunes that will be overcome whether it's the 2008 financial crisis or the covert pandemic there's this narrative of we then get back to progress um the data says otherwise the data says that human progress in general has been plateauing or going down since 2015 so i concluded therefore that we are already in a process of a creeping collapse of modern societies and in some places it's and for some people it's experienced in a much more shocking painful way so you can find you know situations around the world whether it's in nepal or pakistan where climate disasters uh have wiped out communities but also the way that you know people who are watching these videos you know hello um food inflation um or perhaps just you didn't expect um your kids your grandkids to be living with their parents still in their 30s um or you know there are various different indicators of how normal life is breaking down uh you didn't expect maybe your best friend to suddenly sound like a fascist and and and hate brown people and that not be able to stop talking about how your country is under threat from foreigners or poor people like like obsessively um these for me are all indicators of a kind of social derangement that comes from unprocessed grief and fear so um i predicted this uh in the past i even predicted it when i first gave a speech on deep adaptation in 2016 so 10 years ago where i said maybe we need to start looking at it might be too late and if we don't maybe things will all go a bit mad and i i talked about that at a at a conference um but it was all in the realm of maybe i wasn't certain on it and so now i think yeah people have unprocessed difficult emotions and that's leading to quite some kind of uh derangement and people can be manipulated by opportunists and so we know that the billionaire class a whole bunch of them are funding ethno-nationalisms uh and sort of reactionary views on things um and why it's because we'll blame each other rather than demand um changes in the economic political system to be more fair to triage the resources as we're about to go through a real [00:56:57] Speaker 1: tough time for humanity so on your site and in your writings and in your talks you also spend a lot of time talking about how people should deal with this situation of facing societal collapse what are sort of high level what what are some of the things you recommend people do in terms of how they [00:57:15] jem vendell: look at their life how they live their life um so we're all in a different situation um many people are just too busy to look at this stuff closely so i've always said the first thing to do is don't just take my word for it or someone else's word for it on a video or a blog try and make time for it so for me it took years for me to finally carve out time to look at it um so okay just carve out time to look at it so you could read like the first half of my book breaking together and then now we've got you know you can use deep seek a lot more environmentally friendly than chat gpt and the rest to to query these ideas and come to your own sense of reality because it's true if you agree with the view that i have it will change your life it will make maybe it will turn up the cognitive dissonance such that you won't really be able to do the same job anymore that you will really rethink what to do with the rest of your life and so first of all you need to be confident about it so take the time to do that and then secondly don't be don't don't push this away because you fear difficult emotions there are so many people who have had a period of anxiety and grief and some despair but looking back they wouldn't want it any other way it was transformative for them and they're really happy with how they live now and i'm one of those people i'm happy that i quit my job for life i'm happy that i started an organic farm school i'm happy that i learned guitar and now host devotional me singing circles i'm happy that i co-run meditation retreats i'm happy that i had time in my life to keep paying attention to the science and realize that i had overlooked natural climate cooling processes through nature's restorative capabilities so i'm i'm i wouldn't want to be the super busy mba leading um globe trotting corporate sustainability professor i was and so so many people have a similar story to tell about how allowing the painful reality in transform them and they're happy with who they are now indeed i even think i'm a nicer person to the people i know because i'm in less of a rush to try and fight the cognitive dissonance and save the planet through mba programs like phew so um one more so that's my general thing because how you respond is up to you you may decide to just grow more veg or you may decide to go you know join extinction rebellion or you may decide to do what you're doing dan in in helping new technologies to try and cool the planet or help people adapt i mean you're doing interesting things very interesting things no i agree i mean i've been doing this for [01:00:13] Speaker 1: a very long time over 20 years and i back then it was like kind of mind shattering to think about because i knew i came to the same conclusion you did uh you know a long time ago and and then it was weird and you'll still know that and no one else is reacting but i decided that also communicating the risk is something that's important for everyone to understand and that's what we're doing today so that's that's great yeah one more question before we go on to eli where for another question is you consider yourself a doomster i understand and what is that and how does it compare to a doomer [01:00:49] jem vendell: yeah do tell me if there's any issue with the recording um no it's okay there's a little bit of [01:00:54] Speaker 1: feedback but i think it's it's okay i'm going to mute while you're talking so okay um because i could just [01:01:02] jem vendell: check if anyone else is on the internet um and causing an issue because it you froze i think it's fine okay so yeah i call myself a doomster um it's slightly cheeky but if the the suffix stir generally means master of um so gangster master of the gang or um hipster is someone who's super cool and uh super hip master of being hip so it's master of doom or um so mastering doom which means you're not just afflicted by your awareness you are integrating it and living your life to the maximum because of it so doomers generally uh some of them who use the term themselves but also some people who use the term as a pejorative are implying that someone is being afflicted by the world view and they're limiting who they are they're limiting their contribution to society they're kind of retreating into negativity so i wanted to say a doomster is actually someone who sees the world in that way but is integrating it and becoming bigger and better more expansive because of their awareness very good i like that i like [01:02:14] Speaker 1: that a lot um by the way for everyone listening this is a recorded program so we're not going to go to live questions but we do have eli here for a question and eli welcome hi thanks dan a question and two [01:02:26] Speaker 3: comments to for a jump to respond to um so regarding your claim for uh it's not just amplifying feedbacks but the climate dominoes you you mentioned uh cascades of self-amplifying feedbacks are the biggest uh but also the most uncertain threats because of that do you agree that preparing the few available uh options that actually address that uh of srm and albedo enhancement um be they become more more urgent necessities uh do you do you agree that they become more urgent and if so what do you see as the best strategies to [01:03:08] jem vendell: advance them so um yeah thank you for the question and yeah that's super important so that's really good you bring it um i yes yes you're right that the the now we have the possibility and some people would even say probability of uh tipping points cascading into each other taking us into a catastrophic scenario which will not just break down societies in a slow way but even threaten the future of any organized form of civilization uh or even possibly worse means that it would be bizarre if we didn't give more time and resource for exploring what forms of intervention uh might help in that context now i know that if you talk about this at the moment it's almost like a very morally laden uh discourse where people will say oh that's awful you're going to endorse the uh the use of technology in a way that could threaten humanity because of a threat to humanity and you're not learning the lessons of how the technosphere messed up the planet and i'm very sympathetic to that critique but my answer to that critique is we need a transparent process where civil society is involved in the very process of considering and developing innovations and the protocols and governance of experimenting with them and learning from those experiments so i'm saying let's open this up now i know that some experts in this field will worry about that but but i don't see any other way of doing it legitimately um so i mentioned before like we're seeing already with ai that the rush to try and win driven by uh the desires of investment capital on the one hand and geopolitical conflict on the other or the imagined conflict in the future is is not leading to the most prudent technological development decisions um and we're beginning to see the consequences of that and we don't know how bad it could become so for me it's the same therefore with with um with how we go about looking at emergency interventions in a situation of [01:05:42] Speaker 3: abrupt climate change um the the comments now while you're uh in my opinion anyway your epistemic analysis of the discourse is likely correct um that doesn't imply that it's safe to take cdr or srm off the table whether or not the processes of getting to them are perfect usually i'm the one bringing up clathrate so i'm really glad that you did um compare and contrast the situation of facing that with and without srm and in particular uh the effects of that on the prospects of restoring natural systems which i think is everybody's goal everybody who's thought about this deeply [01:06:25] jem vendell: um so yeah in the deep adaptation paper in 2018 i called for more research on emergency climate repair and i even said that it looks like certain types are already fairly obviously safe like marine cloud uh brightening um and uh because they just disappear like you you you you're not coping with a lasting intervention um so there are certain things that could be done already so i was i i i i think there's stuff that should be done already um and i was saying that even before what we've seen in the crazy weather temperature spikes in the last three years so um yes um and then what was the other oh i would disagree that that everyone wants to repair and restore nature no um we've got for example city leadership um whereby they are now thinking about oh my god our our city is becoming unlivable it's super hot none of them are talking about how from a city leadership perspective you should be trying to repair restore grow regenerate a large forest in your hinterland as a mechanism for climate cooling they're not doing that it's not seen [01:07:40] Speaker 1: as a climate intervention it's not and it must be but thank you uh eli and uh jem thank you so much for your your participation today but also for the work you're doing to sort of help us see the broader picture that it's sometimes very hard to see something we're trying to accomplish here on climate chat and it was really interesting discussion thanks for for making the time for us and uh send me all those links and we'll put them in the video description i will do once you talk the papers that you mentioned [01:08:13] jem vendell: so we can include those and i'll i'll have a look at the uh some of the other videos that you've [01:08:17] Speaker 1: mentioned as we chatted thanks very good so anyway everyone don't forget to like and subscribe and we will see you next time bye bye thanks everyone