Our Final Warning on the Climate Emergency with Mark Lynas

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: and welcome to climate chat i am your host dan miller and today we have a very special guest mark linus i um i haven't known mark for a long time but i read his book six degrees which came out what 2007 mark yep and it was one of my formative climate books way back when and i got started in climate a little bit before that but i just remember that really being an impactful book for me and i know for many many others so thank you for that you've done a lot since then we'll talk about that as well but to get started for those who um either don't know you from six degrees or or if that's all they know about you maybe you could just spend a minute and just give us a little bit of uh your background and the other things you're working on besides being an author sure [00:01:05] Speaker 2: thanks dan and uh it's a pleasure to be on the show i'm uh quite a fan i've um looked a lot of your previous streams and uh it's just really uh useful i think the the level of depth you go into with your guests is is unusual and uh a lot of a lot of climate stuff is very simplistic and drives me up the wall so seeing so watching a show where you get into numbers and you speak to to experts who are unafraid to really dig into the nuance of things is uh is really special and so it's a particular pleasure to be here with you today um well to give you a bit of background i mean i started off actually as an environmental activist like literally doing direct action off originally against gmo crops which was something i then later had a change of heart about um but also against airport construction road protests you know literally my my then later to be wife called me once uh when she had a medical emergency and i was up a tree uh in wales and was unable to help on that occasion so that's sort of where i cut my teeth and then i i sort of left the movement to be become a a writer in about way back in 2000 and i did a travelogue book about global warming then which was which was published in 2004 and called high tide and it's kind of instructive actually that i had to had to depart and travel around the world and go to tuvalu and peru and alaska to see the impacts of climate change or at least to prove that that climate change was real back then of course very different world from the one where we inhabit today and climate change has come home and and you know visits us all with the impacts every day of our lives now um but then yes so so that that was in 2004 then i went off to do six degrees which was very much a kind of uh scientific uh popular science work and that was my sort of discovery of of kind of my love for science and science communication because actually as a university i i studied history and politics so i'm not people often confuse me with a real scientist and i'm not at all not at least not by any kind of academic background um although in some ways i think that's been a strength because real scientists obviously have a discipline and obviously have a specialism within that discipline and i'm completely unconstrained by any of that so i can opine on i don't know oceanography one minute and tropical carbon cycle the next or something else and actually that's been very useful to me to be sort of a jack of all trades and well probably a master of none but to be able to go quite broadly across all of the different subjects because as you'll know climate change is covers literally everything um you know economy society physics and so on anyway after that i then went off to do another book um i can't remember which order they all come in now but i also wrote a book about my change of heart on gmos called seeds of science and uh that sort of covered the process really where i discovered what science was and the importance of peer review and evidence-based thinking and that was sort of the beginning of my effort really to try to prod my friends and colleagues in the environmental movement to take a more evidence-based and more considered view of things like gmos nuclear power so i've invested a lot of capital in that and actually now we have a a movement called we planet which is now in 20 countries of pro-science environmentalists so that that is that sort of effort which i felt very lonely about originally is now something which is shared by many many people and and a lot of the things which were very controversial then are now fully mainstream i think within the within environmental thinking so it's that's an improvement um i also read a book called a god species way back in like 2013 which considered geoengineering and this idea of humans as planetary stewards if you like and that was based on stuart brand's uh uh sort of epithet of we are as gods and have to get good at it so yeah i took that and sort of tried to figure out what it would mean to be there to be the god species and actually to try to get good at it which is again something you cover a lot of [00:05:11] Speaker 1: course in this show well we're going to actually cover some of the other things that we planet and and the other things you've you're working on currently but one of the things that was so great to have on is uh is to get to ask you a little bit more about six degrees and get an update but i want to do this in a very interesting way thank you for your kind words about my podcast i checked out yours and it's also excellent and uh anyone who's interested in this show will be interested in your program as well and i watched the recent episode where you introduced uh interviewed roger hamlin and uh for those who don't know he founded extinction rebellion he got arrested served time in jail because in england you know the powers that be don't like having climate protests so they made peaceful climate protest illegal and put them in jail and many others and he was talking about that but he's talking about his next movement and his next movement he wants to call four billion dead and that comes from a university of exeter and uh some other group um yeah it comes from the the actuaries reports yeah the actuaries report that's right yeah and they said that if we hit three degrees in 2050 and that's possible we did a whole show on that but even if we don't hit it then we're going to hit it shortly there after uh uh and i said they said 2050 right yeah so 2050 2060 we'll be there and they said if that happens we could have four billion dead and you pushed back during the interview saying you didn't think it was scientific and things and i thought maybe this is the right way to ask you do you have an update on your book three uh six degrees because here's an example of what happens at three and you you weren't uh happy with his answer because maybe you could but you didn't say much about that [00:07:01] Speaker 2: so i'd like you to expand on that no i i didn't and as a podcast host you'll know that often you don't want to push back too aggressively against your guests because you want to try and understand where they're coming from and what their thought processes are and actually i think with with roger i ended up with a much more interesting conversation uh in in that i pushed back gently in so i pointed out that the four billion dead figure from this actuaries report actually says in very large letters at the top this is an illustrative scenario not to be used as a sort of quantitative prediction um and that some of the other scientific papers that he's referred to have been published really by very marginal voices certainly certainly not anything you could consider the mainstream of climate science so if you're going to say that your climate campaign is scientifically informed and scientifically based then you need to uh do more than that i think really in terms of the evidence base for some of the claims that you're making um but he he actually took a different line and said essentially that this was a philosophical uh effort and it was it was about um trying to sort of probe the moral basis of a civilization that could look at effectively risking the extinction of itself because it's so unwilling to to face up to to the vested interests in in a particular industry namely fossil fuels and i think i think that's a a useful and interesting thing to do whether or not and of course who the hell knows whether it's four billion dead or two billion or one billion or not at all i mean you just it's impossible to say because that depends on the rate of change and adaptation and all all of the other things which you'll be very familiar with um but it did yes it did remind me a bit of a bit of six degrees i mean i i tried to avoid uh projections well i tried to put to avoid going too deeply into specifics of numbers of dead because you you just can't you just can't say i mean it's i think it's even difficult to say how many people die from global warming right now um because there's so many there's so many factors and in in some of the metrics in fact things have improved so even while obviously climate change impacts have got worse and that the global temperature is now shooting up the numbers of people who die in climate related disasters has has decreased a lot i think in the last uh probably just the last couple of decades because of adaptation um and because just because of development and because i mean for example in in bangladesh where i think it was like a quarter of a million people died in in in early 1970s for a cyclone same same kind of cyclone hits bangladesh now and it's you know it's it's dozens of dead because there's warning systems as cyclone shelters there's just infrastructure now um and the same goes really for for human society as a whole so where and how people die is a is to do with all sorts of complicated factors conflict uh aid uh you know economies and so on um so that that's i tended to focus more on the kind of ecological really and the kind of uh and the bigger picture but i think what i don't know i think what what six degrees got right and this was remember i was doing this in 2005 2006 in terms of the original research right what's the focus on tipping points and i talk about in in the in the two to three degree chapter about the risk of the amazon tipping point for example i talk about amark um and interestingly we've also moved into one of the future chapters now we're now we're now living in the well the one and a half degree world um and even when i wrote the updates to six degrees which is this one here called our final warning um it talks about crossing the one degree level in 2015 so that was just 10 years ago and now we've gone forward by half a degree in just the last decade which well i guess it's on our way to two in 20 late 2030s uh 10 years 10 years yes i think i think that at the moment given all of the stuff that you've covered a lot on reflectivity and albedo loss and so on and the accelerated warming i think yeah i mean it seems like we've been unlucky in terms of in terms of climate sensitivity and jim hansen's pointed this out as well and so some of the feedbacks that i talked about in in six degrees are playing out already and i think we can see that in real time so we had uh kevin anderson on the [00:11:31] Speaker 1: program a while ago and i'm i'm sure you know him uh um and uh he famously said in 2010 that four degrees was not compatible with an organized global community was beyond adaption uh devastating to the majority of ecosystems and not stable would lead to higher temperatures and then when he was on the show i asked him about that and and he could well actually uh maybe now it from what we know because that was 2010 from what we know maybe that's three degrees you know maybe instead of four i mean obviously it was quite uncertain as you're mentioning um do you have any feeling like that for your six degree book when you look at what's actually happening and uh um what it is now and of course you've updated it so i'm i didn't i didn't read the update but uh like you have a feel for for what's actually happening now and how that fits into what you were writing so long ago when very little was known about [00:12:30] Speaker 2: the impacts of warming at that time so yeah i mean what's interesting is that we're we're going to avoid the high emissions scenario in terms of human fossil fuel burning so the famous rcp 8.5 which wasn't hadn't even been invented back when i was doing six degrees but the sort of the the scenario of humanity constantly increasing fossil fuel burning throughout the 21st century that's not going to happen so in some ways that's a not quite a best case but a moderate low emission scenario as they were projected but combined with a very high climate sensitivity i think and so we're seeing uh the the tipping points probably coming into play right now already in terms of the arctic in terms of the cloud warming feedback and reflectivity loss and so on so i think for that reason alone we are well and we and we can see with the accelerated rate of planetary heating i don't what is it about 0.4 degrees a decade um so if you if you project that forward and assuming that the current rate of heating isn't just a step change due to sulfate aerosol reductions or something like that if it if it does is ensuring then we're heading straight into we're heading into the five you know four or five degree world by the end of the century um i would expect us in a three degree world by mid-century and two degrees as you say before 2040 and that's that's actually that was that's pretty much tracking the worst case scenario as it [00:13:55] Speaker 1: as i looked at it in six degrees back in 2005. so so that sounds like a final warning uh so what is your final warning and uh what are your thoughts on climate intervention in order to prevent us from reaching these temperatures like you just said we're on track for those things and i assume you're assuming that there is renewable energy scaling up and things like that [00:14:21] Speaker 2: but that yeah oh yeah this is this is with the full decarbonization i mean i don't i don't think anyone can realistically expect the paris agreement to be met through mitigation and obviously the 1.5 uh toast and and two degrees likewise uh you know you'd have to get full global decarbonization with within about 15 years and obviously that's not going to happen we're still probably increasing for i mean fossil fuels emissions increased again last year actually so even if emissions even if the total greenhouse gas emissions are seem to be plateauing over the last year or two uh there's still no sign in a of a sort of definitive peaking of fossil fuels didn't the uk just approve another gas field like just yes although week or so or so yes although the uk's emissions have decreased a lot uh in the last um well last 20 years really initially with the switch from coal to gas and we we have um and more latterly with with renewables and uh some nuclear but uh yeah we you know we have exited coal completely in the uk which is more than we can say for you americans who have seemed to be rushing back to coal thanks to your wonderful president and actually the the us if you look at the um latest carbon figures is pretty much the a real outlier and having increased its emissions last year by over 100 million tons i mean it's just extraordinary how i don't know callous and well i've run out of adjectives really to to describe the intentional emission of of carbon dioxide and the full knowledge of what the impacts are going to be on the but but isn't isn't trump the greenest president we've [00:15:59] Speaker 1: ever had because he's doing two things to help the climate more than those other things are hurting one is he's destroying the economy that that certainly helps lower emissions and also he's raising the price of fossil fuels globally which also greatly uh helps reduce emissions don't you think he's uh [00:16:15] Speaker 2: i mean i'm not saying he did it on purpose no no i mean he's yeah you could you could argue that the the straight to poor moves and the attack on iran is that it's a carbon tax in all but now yeah um and of course trump has handed the the reins of the 21st century clean tech economy to china so the u.s is out of the game on that so yes arguably but at the moment there is also a push to burn more coal and gas and that's that's yielding a lot more a lot more emissions in the u.s but um yeah that that [00:16:44] Speaker 1: wasn't what we were talking about i think we're talking about the uk well we're at a record high emissions and so yeah we're not tracking paris for sure and so you so you think that by the way i think we'll both agree four or five degrees is game over maybe i don't mean like necessarily every single human but you know civil society and things like that that's well it's i actually i've reread six [00:17:12] Speaker 2: degrees because you know when you've written a few books you can't remember what on earth that you're reading back it's almost like it was written by someone else right um but i i do actually review what it would mean to to to to get to a five or six degrees in our in terms of even a kind of runaway runaway hothouse scenario where you could sort i mean it it's i think it's it's comparable with nuclear war actually in terms of its in terms of the the devastation it would mean on human society and the biosphere um and ultimately you could extinct life completely through uh through an accelerated heating process where you you'd have to do what happened with venus and boil off the oceans into the atmosphere initially and have a runaway kind of water they feed back and then lose all the hydrogen out of the top of the atmosphere into the solar wind which you know then plate tectonic shuts down and you get a you get a completely dead planet and as the sun heats up um that's probably the way things will eventually go and you know but we're talking hundreds of millions of years away unless we accelerate the process and do it within a century or two just because we're too done um i hope that wouldn't be the case and as you say it's much more likely that uh that that a direct climate intervention will be necessary to to avoid crossing those tipping points and avoid what seems to be already a potential process of runaway [00:18:32] Speaker 1: feedbacks and do you do you advocate for any particular type of climate intervention i think [00:18:41] Speaker 2: probably the only one worth talking about is uh doing what volcanoes do and a sulfate um srm program um because because it has a combination of well scalability and and low cost really so whereas all the other ideas are either a long way off or kind of sci-fi or or restricted in scale like marine cloud brightening or something which you you can do it you know you can you can do in certain ocean at a certain time but you to do that at a planetary level you only have to put in you know you as you know any you know a couple of million tons of sulfur into the into the stratosphere with a few hundred planes and you could bring the temperature down by half a degree or degree or whatever you want really i don't think anyone's imagining that that would be easy uh to to govern or negotiate or launch or anything we're not in a very cooperative frame of mind at the moment geopolitically um but no no i think that should anyone imagine that that should be an indefinite commitment so it has to be paired with full decarbonization and and also cdr carbon dioxide removal but i i think of it in fact i pitched this to dakota greener who was a guest on my my show um recently and uh been online as well yes i mean she's brilliant and but i pitched to her this as a sort of analogy of srm is it's a bit like it's a bit like trying to land a plane when you're going to run out of runway so you want you want to build a bit of additional runway which is not going to be very well not really well constructed it's going to have some potholes but it's a lot better than crashing um and that's pretty much how i see srm whereas the the calls for more aggressive mitigation effectively shutting down the global economy that would be like crashing into the runway so because either way you then lose most of the world's population we can't you know civilization can't survive without fossil fuels at the moment either so we need the time for the transition to play out but we need to to use that time uh to uh to ensure that global tipping points don't drive the carbon cycle and and the planet's heating process out of control [00:20:43] Speaker 1: yeah i'm gonna have wake smith on my program in a few weeks talking about how long it takes what you have to do to get ready for srm that's going to be really interesting yeah i think he has a new book out actually yeah and um okay well there's so much on and all of these subjects to spend an hour and so but i'm trying to not do that and to move on to the the cover the different things here so you're a science advisor to the climate vulnerable forum which is a group of 74 climate vulnerable nations what goals [00:21:15] Speaker 2: is that group pursuing uh well it's 77 nations actually there was some three three more joined at the um at the un general assembly which was the last leaders meeting um yeah and i i'm just i'm just an advisor to that so um you know i'm effectively a consultant and i i try and assist the the secretary general with just updated science and to is you know the the the the real challenge for the climate vulnerable countries is these these are the countries with the least amount of resources um who are really in the front line of climate change impacts uh and and that's not just because of their geographical status because let's say they're small uh island nations or the african countries or their high mountains who are losing countries who are losing their glaciers like nepal um but it's also to do with their probably more to do with their economic status so like i say if they don't have their capacity to withstand shocks uh they don't have um you know they don't have any finance they don't have the kind of emergency systems that you need um then then people people really do suffer and people people die and and and that's so so that their argument off is is a lot for assist for uh finance and then adaptation finance in particular loss and damage finance and and so on because uh given that um we can't avoid now increasing climate shocks and damages uh these these countries have to try to protect their populations and as far as they possibly can is it focused more in finance getting money from other [00:22:49] Speaker 1: countries or do they look at climate intervention and things like that as well well the the chief scientist [00:22:56] Speaker 2: is uh quasi dr quasi cograine who's um a ghanaan climate scientist um and he's leading a whole uh work program which does involve a climate emergency and i think they call it climate emergency and stabilization so that's one of 10 different work streams they're also looking at coral reefs tropical forests and other other critical science science areas so i mean the these these countries in fact they there was a a sentence about this in the late in the leaders declaration that was um so that was put out by all of the different heads of state who comprised the the cbf uh at the um general assembly in in september uh of this year uh they stated their extreme concern actually about the earth's energy imbalance um and how that seems to be leading to accelerated rates of climate warming and they also put on record that they're extremely concerned about this concept of overshoot which seems um almost to suggest that there's a plan right right right yeah that the experts are still in charge and we can just overshoot 1.5 a little bit and i don't think that actually should be reassuring anybody and uh that's that was made very clear in the leader statement that the overshoot is is not acceptable as as a as a plan and it's i think they have a form of language that it's indistinguishable from failure [00:24:17] Speaker 1: when it's ongoing which is exactly right yeah we had adam mckay on a few weeks ago and he talked about the biggest lie in climate and that is that we still have time you know climate's a problem but we still have time it's all related to what you're talking about here because if you were serious about climate you would be doing things right now like you would as fast as you could you would be doing these things but well no but if we by 2050 which kevin anderson says is latin for kicking the can down the road but net zero by 2050 so we get to you know that 2050 do net zero and then we'll do overshoot and we're talking only about things in the future and not things right now that need to be done again we're opening gas fields and we're doing other things that we really shouldn't be doing uh yeah [00:25:04] Speaker 2: and the and the climate vulnerable countries are the world's lowest emitters i mean they have the lowest historical responsibility their per capita emissions are negligible and they have 1.8 billion of the world's poorest people and actually they are pushing very rapidly for clean energy so um the energy think tank ember did a report for the cvf looking at just how rapidly the you know solar and batteries and the whole renewables revolution is taking place and and and often this is because the grids that exist in these countries are deficient or don't don't reach many people or that you know fossil fuel electricity is too expensive already so there's a huge huge uptake of of clean tech and clean energy technology in these or electro tech as ember puts it in these countries which is is certainly a really [00:25:53] Speaker 1: positive trend to see as well so um let's see we're going to just move on a little bit here so i you i saw you had adam door on your program i had adam on as well probably best described as a techno optimist about what what we can do to fight climate change i've also had william reese i don't know if you've had him on but william reese is like the ecological footprint we're currently using 1.6 1.7 earth's worth of renewable resources every year so we're not just spending the interest we're spending the principle and and so consumption is going to lead to collapse even if we solve the emissions crisis so i'm just wondering those are two different views of the world and where do you where do you fit in there what what are your thoughts on those two views of how how you know one is degrowth and one is pro [00:26:47] Speaker 2: growth i guess i think i'm pro growth but not probably as extreme as adam door um in a lot of what the the degrowth people say is well it's based on fallacies and misunderstanding and it's and it's certainly not an economic program that anyone anyone would actually vote for so it's it's it's unimplementable in a democratic context and i think that's actually quite a significant failing for your for anything which is purporting to be a sort of a strategy if you like and it certainly doesn't apply in in developing countries i mean i just talked about the 77 countries of the climate vulnerable forum i mean they're a lot of them are ldc's least developed countries what they need is growth and lots of it and that will make them more resilient to climate change and it also means obviously by definition that their consumption of material resources and energy is going to is going to increase dramatically and there has to be a way to to provide that and de-grothing rich countries is is not tenable either and doesn't even mathematically add up it's it's too small an amount to allow for the growth that's needed in the in the global south um but also like when when you get anything like t growth or recessions or or you know you you then get a retreat into pretty ugly uh social division and the kind of far-right politics that we're seeing at the moment so i think it's just it's just a wrong-headed prescription and this idea of of you know infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible this is also it's just wrong in that nobody's talking about infinite growth of material consumption and we've actually seen peak material consumption in lots of different areas from concrete to steel to to you know fertilizers and so on they're not increasing uh exponentially at all because we're becoming more efficient and even decoupling completely uh so and in fact the electro techs very good at this so you only have to mine most of the even the rare earths and lithium and cobalt and those kinds of things once and then they get endlessly recycled and so even thermodynamically you can have endless growth but the the the input is energy and that that is effectively limitless particularly if you include if you go outside uh outside the planet to tap solar power or include nuclear fission and fusion and so on so i think in in terms of any kind of near-term analysis or prescription the degrowth uh uh sort of prescription is effectively [00:29:08] Speaker 1: useless and probably quite dangerous as well so um shift shifting to something else but because you do have this wide background and climate and look at all the different areas i think you're a really good person to ask this question so i found like doing this show and then what my climate work is that um a we have all the science we need to know that we must now act urgently and dramatically fight climate change we'll get more science but we don't but we have all we need secondly we have all the tools we need to get started acting on climate immediately and urgently so those those two things are true but we're effectively doing nothing right now yeah we're doing some good things but we're also increasing fossil fuel consumption and you know doing things that are totally incompatible with with fighting climate change and i find that to be really interesting we we know what we have to do we can do it and we're not doing it so i just want to get your thoughts on why that is number one and number two if you have [00:30:12] Speaker 2: thoughts on how we can shift that crazy situation i i think it's a it's a sort of complete diffusion of responsibility amongst the entire world population that um my emissions don't have to be paid for uh there's no there's no effective carbon price outside of a couple of uh regional ones like in europe um so it's still free to pollute and that means that there's no carbon price signal through the global market which would drive the transition uh more rapidly so what we're seeing at the moment with decarbonization is it has come about because solar and batteries can actually outcompete fossil fuel infrastructure now certainly across most of the developing world which is why i think the transition will now continue to accelerate and probably the same goes for free v's for electric vehicles um i mean as somebody who's been driving an electric car for well more than five years i certainly wouldn't go back voluntarily to an internal combustion engine and i so so i think these trends are are pretty much unstoppable whatever donald trump is trying to do to own the libs or you know defeat energy workism or whatever nonsense uh is used as justification but it's that there's a lot that we actually don't know how to do we don't know how to decarbonize aviation um shipping's also difficult some chemicals uh con cement probably so i i don't think it's it's quite true to say we know we have all the tools i think we have well to get started yeah to get i noticed your um yes we'll get more we'll get yeah you know you're absolutely right we certainly we don't have all the tools either to get to scale up carbon dioxide removal but um i think you had klaus lachner on the show and he he he made a very good case for by scaling up more stuff gets invented and the cost comes down as you as you as you increase uh by what is it 20 for every doubling yeah um yeah and that's exactly exactly and that that i think would apply to to virtually everything that's needed for decarbonization but you have to have the regulatory environment to push for that there's the power and then that's that's what's failing at the moment and part of the reason is is because the vested interests are so powerful and we're in an age of of oligarchs and kleptocrats and authoritarianism which make it easier than ever uh for the well i don't think it's just the fossil fuel companies the vested interests are much broader than that across the whole economy um to to to hamper the transition and to try to keep the fossil fuel age running for as long as possible and they they actually well i'd say they don't seem to care about the consequences i mean they this is why i don't believe that the moral hazard issue for srm is really an argument because it's it's because it's difficult to decarbonize uh there is denialism about the very existence of the problem if it becomes easier to solve climate change i think more people admit that climate change is real and you can see this throughout you know as a political phenomenon now across across virtually every country where where there's reasonably free elections from brazil to you know to australia to well germany or the u.s are literally no many country now the rights the and the far right have made common cause on denying even the reality of climate change because that's been a political winner given how difficult it is perceived to be to to deal with the issue and also the idea that we're only [00:33:42] Speaker 1: decarbonizing because of climate change doesn't seem to be true that we're decarbonizing because it's cheaper and you know if you really take a look and and so if we if we all of a sudden did srm and it still would be cheaper so it would and also then as you pointed out srm requires that you decarbonize so i mean that's all right that oh you want to you want to do srm you better decarbonize right now you [00:34:07] Speaker 2: know yeah well my theory actually is that mitigation in the conventional sense and srm actually work well together right because mitigation in the kind of conventional prescription can't deliver on the paris agreement goals and probably can't keep us this the right on the right side of of runaway tipping points feedbacks um so so srm can stabilize the temperature while decarbonization and mitigation does its job but if you if you rely just on mitigation then we're not going to stabilize the temperature and we potentially lose the whole battle so okay um in some ways and i think the climate uh rather than seeing srm as a threat because of the the concerns about moral hazard and some of the ideological stuff and that's not to say that srm is proven uh in terms of either its efficacy or its desirability i'm just saying it needs to be to be considered centrally as part of the as part of the whole climate conversation from now on i think good i wonder we're going to bring in our co-host leon [00:35:05] Speaker 1: simon's now he has some further questions for you so let's get leon in here oh yeah you're welcome [00:35:13] Speaker 3: great to see you again i think it was 2010 when we saw each other last um because i read your book i read many of the books but um there's a dutch version of high tide and wow that's from the museum and um i want to show you know this picture very well but i want to show the uh people other people as well let me see yeah works yeah let me go okay um this is a picture your father took in 1980 in uh peru yeah and i i read your book before i was uh i went to travel to latin america visit 12 countries to understand climate change myself when i was 21 years old and um at the time i sent you an email to ask if i could visit this glacier and if you could point me in the right direction um i'll show people pictures i picture i took after when i visited at the time and um it's also here and i think it's really an iconic change um from the picture your father took and then the picture you took and then i took as well um to to see to show this melted glacier and what i also did when i was there was i i walked i think yeah you can see my mouse right i walked here to to get a an impression of the scale of the glacier that melted and it's hard to see but i'm i'm standing here in front of the [00:37:00] Speaker 2: the few remaining snow wow oh wow that's amazing i know i didn't spot that when you uh sent it the [00:37:05] Speaker 3: first time that's incredible it's it's really hard to grasp the scale of this right so well the scale [00:37:13] Speaker 2: of it's large enough that the the original you show the original picture again um when a my father was there working as a geologist actually so they had some drilling equipment just to look at the bedrock on this side of the lake and a piece of that glacier dropped off and caused a tsunami that was big enough to literally to wash some of the drilling equipment into the lake so this yeah it's it's an enormous change actually i'm planning to go but try and go back there again next year and also to go up onto the ridge and see what the higher higher parts of the glacier have um have done in terms of the retreat um but it says sort of in it brings climate home climate change home to me in terms of the generations in my own family and of course lots of people have this story actually al gore used this in the in the original inconvenient truth um movie he even he found me he found me out once out of the blue when i was having a having a curry in oxford and he literally the phone ring you know my mobile phone rang and he said hi this is al gore and i was like yeah yeah of course it is you know it's always one of my friends playing a joke so i didn't didn't take him too seriously for these five minutes [00:38:16] Speaker 3: okay and then he used it he asked you to if he could use it i understand yeah yeah he said can [00:38:22] Speaker 2: i use the photos and of course you and i think i think he misidentifies them as argentina or something in the film but anyway that's a story for another time but um yeah no good good to you good to you leon and um uh i'm yeah keen to to dig in more about um what your thoughts are on on the latest [00:38:38] Speaker 3: situation as well yeah i'm i'm also interested uh this one my first question is how did seeing the these changes around the world um how did how did it help you to to understand climate change better because you didn't just go to peru but you i think you've been in many countries around the world to to see the science you described also happen with your own eyes how important was that to understand [00:39:08] Speaker 2: it and also to communicate it yeah well i i wasn't happy just to be a journalist and just to go and visit these places once either so i actually ended up um working for the president of the maldives muhammad nasheed as climate advisor from 2009 up until well he then was sort of there was a coup and he was ejected from power in 2012 sadly and all sorts of awful things happened but i i did want to at least get involved and the same goes for my for working with the climate vulnerable forum now is at least in trying to help countries in the global south have a have have some some you know to the extent i can give useful advice uh in how to how to look at the climate change issue and how to best deal with it um and yeah i mean i went to tuvalu in 2002 and looked at the impacts of uh of rising sea levels there um coral bleaching was a big issue as well um which we've obviously not seen a lot more of in the intervening period um i've worked on some um coral restoration efforts in the maldives as well as i i used to help with the maldives coral institute and that's doing out planting of hopefully more tolerant coral species and so on but again scale is a challenge there you know you can plant out corals the size of a garden but i think the the current reef extent is well is it like a hundred thousand square kilometers like i might be wrong by an order of magnitude but it's huge and and replacing those by by hand is is obviously completely impossible um so the the challenge i think for all of these these ecosystems is how to how to adapt if at all possible to the current rate of rate of change um so i mean and that's what i think brought me into the stabilization uh debate as well and that we've got to slow down the rate of change i mean it's it's something like two i think it's like two meters a day or something in terms of how rapidly the climate zones are shifting and if you imagine what that does to to ecological assemblages all the different trophic levels plants and animals everything eating everything else and they're all getting completely out of sync in terms of in terms of their spatial distribution seasonality and everything else so we've got to remember that this is uh an ongoing mass extinction of the biosphere as as much as something which is affecting human societies oops my light just fell off [00:41:27] Speaker 3: that's um yeah thank you yeah um and and i think you you you point to um in a way cooling the climate or reducing warming um in a way it feels like you um with both with nuclear power and with with gmos and uh with with srm you you you focus a lot on um subjects that are um hard to um to sell to certain part of the part of the empire especially environmental movement i remember you're reading and please correct me if i'm wrong that you lost also quite some friends when you when you were campaigning for [00:42:15] Speaker 2: nuclear right well uh actually it was worse with worse with gmos because there were people i've been quite close to and literally in the trenches with going out at night destroying gmo crops and then then i turn around a few a few years later and say i got it wrong you're all wrong um you know so you imagine how it felt to them um but i don't think i mean i that was right to change our mind yeah i mean i don't think many sensible people still think that gmos give you cancer or they're bad in any kind of fundamental sense which is what that movement was was focused on um and in fact some of the the more strident anti-gmo people have gone on to become anti-vaccine and so on so the kind of science and technology skeptic side of the green movement is actually now pivoted onto the far right you can see this with um you know rfk junior for example who's probably a sort of the emblematic example so i definitely did not want to be want to be involved with that kind of politics and sort of shifting away from that i think is in some ways it's it's yeah it's been it's been a really important um really important part of my life but i don't just focus on it because i like trolling or annoying people um that i focus on things which are misunderstood uh and and which are i don't know scalable as well um and uh where where the environmental movement has got something badly wrong i think that that's where you need to focus because the road to hell is paved with good intentions you know people who who fundamentally oppose geoengineering at a moral level do so for the best of reasons um and those are the reasons which i used to share and still share to a certain extent um so i try also to i mean this is something i've learned just through getting older to be more respectful of where people currently are you know i've been on a journey on geoengineering too i was i looked up g for geoengineering and my even my 2019 book and it's highly skeptical um and what's made me reconsider that is just the rate of change like the fact that you know the reflectivity crisis is happening and that the planet's heating is now accelerating so dramatically that it looks like the the positive feedbacks are kicking in much earlier than we perhaps hoped would be the case um and and that the climate sensitivity as jim hansen has pointed out many times is is very much at the upper end of the scale yeah yeah i remember uh reaching [00:44:44] Speaker 3: out to you i think it was also 2019 and about these the shipping emission reduction and the put and in the way of course that's unintentional srm right we unintentionally were reflecting a lot of sunlight especially over the oceans which also which are now warming three times as fast as as as about 20 years ago the sea surface temperature increase um and indeed then you said that it was in european um yeah associated with uh with srm talking about that and i i remember we talked about it you're already um at that time and also of course talking a lot about uh nuclear power and um and gmos and and picking your picking [00:45:34] Speaker 2: your fights right uh or battles well i mean the imo thing has become undeniable i mean back then i think you were onto this early by the way and i give you credit for that uh we now we now know that there's a pretty strong likelihood that the imo decision alone has given us probably a couple of tenths of a degree of warming so it's it might well be true to say that that imo decision has breached the paris agreement 1.5 threshold on its own and those those two things came into into force like within days of each other ironically and neither discuss the other i mean they're both complete bubbles i don't think you might have other information but i don't believe that the imo considered the accelerated rate of warming i think they were just looking at the health impacts of sulfur pollution and and likely so of course but there are trade-offs and those trade-offs need to be need to be understood um and and need to be need to be considered um and the same would go i mean ironically if you were to put the sulfur back into shipping fuels even even if you were to do so outside the you know the the areas which are close to coastlines where it can do most damage that would count to do engineering so you couldn't do it so it's it's literally the the moral calculus of this and the legal calculus is it's about intentionality which of course the planet physics doesn't care about that means everything in terms of in terms of our [00:46:51] Speaker 1: psychology and our politics which is this is why i i propose starting a new an advertising company that puts big drink coca-cola clouds up in the stratosphere which just happened to be made out of sulfur particles and uh and therefore since we did it for that purpose to make money and not for any other reason you can do whatever you want to the environment including cooling it and then we take [00:47:14] Speaker 2: care of that issue that's not even that's actually true that's not even a joke if it's a if it's a byproduct of of your intent to do something else then geoengineering would be fine yeah well because we [00:47:23] Speaker 1: are doing geoengineering right now as exactly out on a massive scale i mean not a little scale like killing people a year with the fossil fuel pollution cooling the earth by half to one degree right now [00:47:35] Speaker 2: which is something the opponents don't don't recognize i mean i know there's a lot of a lot of opposition to even mentioning the reflectivity crisis issue for example because it's seen as a slippery slope towards the discussion of srm which is seen as still you know toxic and illegitimate and and i guess it is to some extent because it would mean recognizing the fact that we've been doing geoengineering already for decades and that there's at least half a degree of um sulfate masking still in the system potentially i don't know maybe leon or dan you can tell me if i'm wrong about this [00:48:08] Speaker 3: maybe even more right well the warming from the desulfurization that has happened until now uh is also still materializing and of course that's because of the greenhouse gas forcing on there was mask i we always have to point that out that the greenhouse gas warming was masked even as we as we wrote in the global warming in the pipeline paper potentially already for six thousand years the the aerosols associated with burning and uh with with land uh changes um could have mask already have a lot of uh of greenhouse gas work and now of course we rapidly desulfurize both coal plants and and and shipping and it takes a very long time for that for that war that increase in that forcing to materialize especially over the oceans because because the high heat capacity of the oceans right so we [00:49:10] Speaker 2: seem we seem to be in a worst case scenario here where we're removing the sulfur and keeping the fossil fuel whereas i think the the projections always imagined that we'd be decarbonizing at the same rate as we'd be desulfurizing if that's even a thing but i mean i don't know whether that means that we will unmask the full half a degree or so as we get to net zero or not um or you know if so whether that's actually included in in the warming projections i i'm i'm confused because my my my belief was that this is what models were for and you didn't have to do it in your head and add half a degree here and a quarter of a degree there and stuff like that which often seems to be the case at these conferences but so either the models are not are not wrong are not tuned properly or um you know or or it's [00:49:51] Speaker 3: included and i just don't realize it's included i think it's not uh what what's often especially reasonably is not included is is the reduction in aerosols so regional one is much higher and also the uh what especially those the models that of course are simple models they pretend that aerosols are homogeneously spread around to around the world and then if you would you if you take out one source like shipping there will be and in in the ipcc methodology even uh it's even compensated by the increase in forest fires believe it or not because the increase in forest fires increases aerosols and of course the desulfurization decreases aerosols so if you look at the updated um forcings from aerosols from uh forest red all with with their annual indicators uh papers even the the aerosol forcing is more negative than than than a few years ago because of these increases in forest fires so in a way as i describe it that they assume that the aerosol from forest fires are all from arson and hobogenously spread around the planet but the greenhouse gases of course emissions from forest fires they're natural and they are not attributed to if they don't even increase the atmospheric concentration in a way in the models because they will hypothetically be up uh be taken up again by the biosphere but that's not of course [00:51:28] Speaker 2: reality well that's a silver lining isn't it that as we see the collapse of the world's rainforest we'll get temporary cooling from aerosols from wildfire smoke yay in the model in the model [00:51:37] Speaker 3: i shall sleep well tonight okay yeah yeah the model reality is is good actually you see you mentioned [00:51:44] Speaker 1: something earlier about how the people are against um srm don't take certain things into account and i was going to look at what's going on in the model and i was looking at what's going on in the model i was looking at what's going on in the model and i was looking at what's going on in the model and i was looking at what's going on in the model and i was looking at what's going on in the model and i was looking at what's going on in the model and i was looking at what's going on in the model and i was looking at what's going on in the model and i was looking at what's going on in the model and i was looking at what's going on in the model and i was looking at what's going on in the model and and what do you since you wrote this book to help people understand what that means what is your feeling today on i don't know is it optimism bias or something where people seem to not really taking and we're talking about climate people here right we're talking about people involving climate but they don't really take into account the reality of what can happen at these higher temperatures [00:52:35] Speaker 2: do you agree with that or thoughts on that yeah i i think it's misinformation i mean climate scientists are political animals just like everyone else and um so i think these are political perspectives that then become scientized in terms of how they're justified but they're just as illogical and and misinformed as your average anybody else's position would be on this so i just i think it is just yeah it's it's because there is a bias against considering um srm i i mean the the solar solar engineering has been a toxic third rail issue for a long time i mean that's why i had to make a nod to it in my books i think as well is that i was captive with that same that same thinking um and and the the reason why i'm reconsidering is because it's literally the only tool in the box now which can avoid uh potentially runaway global warming um that there is nothing else mitigation can't do it cdr can't do it in time either so there's literally nothing else and if we are to avoid heading into the kind of scenarios that i painted in in six degrees three degrees and above then um we have to consider srm it might not work it might not be feasible it may not be deployable it might not be governable and all of these other things but just to just rule it out in a kind of a priori way and say this is illegitimate to even consider and discuss is is is thoughtless and it's sad to see very um high level climate scientists doing this but they do it because as things currently stand they consider it more of a reputational risk to freely consider this than than they do to well then you might expect if they would actually be logical in terms of how they thought about it okay hey we're going to bring we're going to bring in [00:54:19] Speaker 1: some of our comods stacy and eli for a couple questions and then stacy will add a few questions from the youtube live audience so let's switch here and uh let me go here and invite stacy in hey stacy welcome [00:54:35] Speaker 2: oh you're the your the cats aren't there yeah where's your cat stacy i consider you a full fully fully [00:54:41] Speaker 4: fledged cat lady so i absolutely am and i am not with them today today this is um moving weekend so they are at my old place um just a mile or so from here and but next week i'll be all set up and um they should um be hopefully um acclimated and joining as well so sorry to disappoint mark you're one of the [00:55:05] Speaker 2: yes um thank you so much for being here this is a great discussion um i i will do a just a little [00:55:18] Speaker 4: housekeeping that um uh dan ran it across and um he tries to mention it and um going south was um pushing for us but please hit the like and subscribe button so that um we get this important message out to more people and i just want to chime in um some of the discussion about srm and some of my favorite people it's um none of us want to do it it's it's viewed as chemotherapy um and as mark mentioned i i think he's a little more skeptical than what we typically are because we look at pinatubo and and think how much different could it be and leon's work on aerosols etc it's it just seems like it might help and not hurt nearly as much as what we're doing all the time what we've been doing since the cars started rolling off the assembly line um you know in the late 1800s so um we are not proponents we just don't no one's stopping um which leads into another question that somebody was mentioning about renewables so mark what what's your thought on renewables friend or foe oh friend very much so [00:56:31] Speaker 2: i'm very bullish on on on all renewables possibly with the exception of large hydro which i think has unacceptable ecological impacts on river ecosystems but in terms of uh solar batteries winds uh i think that's probably the best news we've had on climate for the last well decade or two decades is uh how rapidly they've come down in price and how much they can be part of the climate solution and how they can do so at a very well at a lower cost than fossil fuels so um i'm old enough to remember when google had a program called rec which was like renewables energy cheaper than coal or something which failed because at that time renewables were not cheaper than coal now they are and that's something that i think we we should all be grateful for and you mentioned pinatubo by the way i actually have a have a piece of have a pinatubo rock here which is it's a it's my version of a little prayer book that i take to bed every night then hopefully maybe one maybe one day pinus maybe maybe pinatubo has given us given us an answer and um that's something that we'll yeah be able to be able to look at and [00:57:36] Speaker 4: learn i agree on both counts the um the only thing i would i would um push back for our friends on the um on the renewables is something we've covered a lot and that is about jevon's paradox we haven't reduced our fossil fuel consumption we've only it's only replaced demand i believe is that increased demand sorry it's increased demand for energy consumption we haven't lost the fossil fuels we've been burning do you think there's anything we can do to sort of nudge that along or is that [00:58:08] Speaker 2: inaccurate it it's it's it's sort of a little bit inaccurate we did a paper on this and me and um crazy crow grain actually in and ellis in nature um it was a commentary not a proper black period paper but it did make the point that um uh it kind of coined this term of clean energy shift which is if you increase clean energy faster uh than than energy demand then you will squeeze fossil fuels out of the system just as a sort of mathematical certainty and that is sort of beginning to happen it's certainly happening with electricity now so uh the increase in in clean energy is enough to to be displacing fossil from that from the electricity system because it is faster than the rise in electricity demand and we need that to be across across the whole economy obviously so i don't set too much door with the whole jevins paradox efficiency thing we're not trying to constrain energy consumption overall here we just have to build out clean energy much faster than energy demand is rising okay hey let's [00:59:04] Speaker 1: bring in eli for a question and then and stacia we'll get back to you with some youtube and eli welcome [00:59:10] Speaker 5: thanks dan uh so two questions for you um the first um you you uh described um uh stratospheric sulfate aerosols as the practical um approach to srm um if uh you were presented with a compelling argument that uh space-based srm uh could be uh both uh uh cost competitive and uh scale um in a similar uh window [00:59:42] Speaker 2: um would you start considering that oh look i don't dismiss anything and i think if you if you if there was to be a sort of so sunlight reflection method if you're going to say that if that's what srm stands for uh and you were going to intentionally uh reflect some sunlight doing it indefinitely with sulfur isn't great i mean it does affect the ozone layer it does mean you've got sulfate uh particles falling down through the atmosphere it's likely maybe changes the color of the sky a tiny teeny bit things like that which aren't actually very nice um and you've got to keep on flying planes all the time to do it uh you might have i don't know if there's issues with supply of sulfur or or whatever but it it would certainly make no there aren't okay thanks leon um it would be a lot better to to do this in in space at the lagrange point or something but um i can't see that as feasible within within a decadal time scale so it's probably up there with with cdr um it's probably less vulnerable to a termination shock um because it's sat there in space but at the same time you'd also would want to be able to dismantle it let's say if there was a super volcano or something and you want to or or you've fully decarbonized and you want to get rid of the thing so uh yeah it's it's absolutely part of the consideration but not in the very immediate in the immediate and by which i mean [01:01:02] Speaker 5: decades or uh the architecture that i'm working on actually would offer dynamic control in real time right um and uh so so hopefully we can discuss that again in the future the other question is uh relates very closely to a lot of immediate politics around the world um which are really heavily impacted by climate and will be more so uh with the super el nino driving up uh uh uh um the cost of food and reducing food availability in a lot of places the world food program for example has had to cut back on what it is planning to deliver in aid to a lot of very hungry people this year while at the same time uh we have the protests in paris which are cost of living um but they are uh those the things that they are protesting you're going to be impacted much more significantly by what climate is going to do france has already seen the beginning of it uh in the u.s um we have an election where there seems to be uh potentially uh a wave of um of understanding across uh the political spectrum that uh um the cost of living is is uh you know going getting out of reach for for more people faster than they expect and this is again before some climate effects that we know are coming this year due to super el nino uh um take full effect so i'm wondering if you see um any opportunities to to connect in in the in the zeitgeist right of these these pro protests and and and political shifts around the world um the connection with climate and how these movements which are you know reaching for various different approaches um uh really have to think about climate and and doing things that have been off the table uh for a long [01:03:08] Speaker 2: time well the the world food program isn't cutting back because there's a world shortage of food it's cutting back because it has a shortage of funding and that's a matter of choice in terms of governmental spending um and you can see what what happened with usaidaid which was destroyed by what the world's first trillionaire i mean if anything was more emblematic of our times i can't think of one we have a world which is so desperately unequal that a tiny proportion of the world's people are now taking more and more of the the world's economic resources and that's what's driving the cost of living crisis nothing else and that's a that's a political choice um and that i slightly agree with naomi klein about this i think we're seeing a shift towards fascism now i think the us effectively has a fascist government with donald trump we might see a fascist government in but there's one in italy we might see one in france uh the next presidential election and what what the drivers of the far right are is effectively punching downwards so they they act on behalf of the the billionaires and the oligarchs and they rather than rather than blaming the the super rich for having taken away things which people need for their for their cost of living they you try they try and get you to blame uh people who are even worse off like people of color or immigrants or something and that's sadly been very very effective but it's been it's an age-old thing that uh that that the super rich do is to try and get you to is to try and divide societies and try and get you to blame people who are even worse off than you are and we have to fight back against that so these aren't just these aren't just scientific issues politics is absolutely the heart of it and that's what's corroding our democracy as well that the the move towards global authoritarianism i think is very is all mixed up on with with the the just how dramatic inequality [01:05:01] Speaker 3: is now got in in western societies do you think that will increase with the only your decrease and with further disasters well i mean of course maybe not the four billion but can you imagine that a big death toll um could maybe bring some positive change or do you think it will be worse [01:05:30] Speaker 2: uh i wouldn't uh yeah i don't think a death toll ever brings positive change sadly uh for everyone involved and uh so that's not something i don't think we can look to but um i mean the last comparable you drove was a trillion and a half or something in terms of economic damages and those damages are largely concentrated in developing countries um so when the food price goes up which it will do if there are constraints then of course it's people the the poor end of the spectrum in in global south mega cities who suffer not not not people in rich countries who can always outbid uh the poor on the you know spot market of major global commodities um so i think i think it's going to be a really tough year uh we're going to potentially see what a global temperature of 1.7 1.8 next year possibly hitting two degrees for a moment i think that will i mean on that will have a impact on the climate conversation as well i think more and more people are going to realize that that we are into well into positive tipping points uh and positive feedback territory now um and and that becomes less and less deniable for the kind of conventional climate space um but we have to try and rediscover some kind of sense of solidarity we have to learn to help each other out i don't think a kind of lifeboat economics where you're pulling up you know trying to try and letting other people drown while you save yourself is is is is well a of course it's not viable it's not moral either um but but if we're to if you're even to believe in a climate intervention issue that has to be a joint project for virtually the whole world everyone has to be behind it um and it has to be it's a public good it has to be on behalf of everybody it has to be democratically mandated um for it to work so we need we need we need a return to a kind of politics i think where we can uh find rediscover solidarity and and caring and trust and all the things that have been lost in in the kind of corrosive uh far-right politics that have really so harmed uh western democracies in the last 20 years [01:07:39] Speaker 1: hey uh stacy do you let's do one or two questions from the chat do you did you sure yeah there's a lot [01:07:46] Speaker 4: um i i do want to answer one we're not talking about blowing up volcanoes it's just that um volcanoes happen to be similar to srm in terms of effects but we're not going to cause that um so um so oh and another comment that was very salient about um the equity conversation um and death toll it depends on who dies because if it happens in wealthier countries it gets more attention like it has in europe versus we all know um when it's india or africa it's it may not even make the news um one question here this was 10 15 if you marked it um jeffrey asked how do we get out of the frame of mind that globally average temperature anomaly is the determinant of our personal wellness [01:08:40] Speaker 1: i would say which is a good question for you mark given your book well it was sort of yeah it was sort of [01:08:47] Speaker 2: to combat that kind of thinking that i wrote six degrees to start with um because a couple of degrees here or there don't sound like much and i think that is a problem with the very the concept of global average temperature as well because as a as a metric and as a political target or organizing principle in that we we understand it because we're we're well-informed climate people who specialize in this issue we understand what it means but it doesn't mean anything to most people um and by definition nobody experiences global average temperature right that's the whole point of it it's not it's not it's not something anyone experiences it's averaged out so uh i think that does make it less salient um and and that is a problem um but at the same time i think it's what we've got and so i would defend 1.5 um i did defend 1.5 until we breached it and i would defend two degrees as well and i and it happens to be a useful uh i mean two degrees was these are political targets they they were chosen by political leaders in in 2015 in the paris agreement uh i think i think the language is well below two degrees and with efforts to to keep temperature at 1.5 um the efforts have not been sufficient um but we can still stabilize the temperature at two degrees well not with mitigation but we i guess we could if we did a climate an srm style climate intervention but the the paris targets i think were useful as an as an anchor point for that reason and also because the tipping points seem to kick in around two degrees and certainly above two degrees so it's uh it turns out that it's a it's it's a reasonably useful scientific measure as well um do you disagree dan you seem to be no no no no no no i i i think tipping points [01:10:35] Speaker 1: even at 1.5 i mean i think right for some of them i mean and also melting ice people don't get it that even if you you know stabilize yeah i think i think i think it's still too hot for many for the ice exactly [01:10:47] Speaker 2: yeah i think i think we're probably over agreement tipping point for example i think we're probably over a west antarctic ice sheet typically it's just it's just that these these are quite slow in terms of the actual rate of which these these systems can fully collapse but that doesn't probably go for the amazon or may not go for amok either and and and obviously not for the arctic i mean the the the um the final disappearance date of summertime arctic sea ice i expect to come within probably the next 10 years [01:11:14] Speaker 1: okay how about uh we finish up with uh it's kind of it sounds like a joke question but it's actually a real one and that's what i was gonna pick you stacy so assuming uh we have uh we have to address land changes meat farming and other general societal changes along with srm do pets including dogs and cats [01:11:34] Speaker 2: have to go genuine question mark any thoughts on on that well um i mean yeah you're a cat lady so you should i mean cats are caps are obligate carnivores they they they don't take well to vegetarian diets dogs a bit more so humans are fully able to deal with vegetarian and vegan diets by the way they don't need to eat meat at all and uh humans are larger consumers of meat than pets so actually one of the things i do want to see um not just for climate reasons but i think for the benefit of the planet's ecology is much wider availability of plant-based alternatives to meat including cultured meat as well another area where the vested interest in the in livestock industry have been fighting back to try and stop these things even being labeled accurately um but yeah it's uh it's it's an important it's an important issue it's a issue of private personal morality as well but if we were to if we were to transition to away from livestock farming on a large scale globally then you would be able to see large go rewilding um and that goes for the oceans as well i think we need to we certainly need to stop industrial fishing um and uh the the the planet's ecology would be much better able to adapt to the rates of climate change which are happening as well if that were to if that were to be the case [01:12:52] Speaker 1: and two points on on on that one i just saw an article like last in the last week about how cultured meat one of the first commercial markets is going to be cat food because it gets it gets over so many of the issues that they have to deal with to make it for humans um and what was uh oh and then the cover of this week's new york times magas sunday magazine is a picture of salmon in a package and it says that this is farmed salmon and it's much worse for the environment than we thought something like that there's so there's a whole article on that on this week uh mark um by the way i want to reiterate uh uh anyone listening to this program to check out mark's uh podcast and there is a link to his home page in the description which will get you through his books his podcasts and all of those kinds of things so definitely check it out he has a lot of the guests we've had on climate chat as we've already discussed a little bit here and mark i i want to thank you again for all the work you've been doing for a very very long time um helping me get started in in the climate world and when i was just getting going there in the early 2000s me and things like that what's that and me and you and uh many [01:14:06] Speaker 2: many others i'm sure it's it's it's funny actually i i get it i get this a lot with six degrees and um my sort of rather annoying thing is so well what didn't you read by the why didn't you read my other books but actually i've i've take i've stopped doing that and i'm actually very deeply grateful that um something i've i've written however long ago has has you know for one reason or another influenced people into into pursuing more you know doing more work on climate so you know what i think it was [01:14:34] Speaker 1: so you get started in climate and you start realizing that there's all these climate models and then there's all these interactions and everything and and the science is focused kind of on that area and then along comes a book and says in very straightforward simple terms this is what happens when we hit these temperatures and keep in mind the science community was not talking about that except in very very broad you know oh it's going to be bad or things will melt i mean that kind of thing if you came along and gave us some goal posts or whatever and say and we're and you extrapolate what that would actually mean and it put a sort of a human face on the climate science at that time and now and now we're getting to see it a little more real time but that wasn't true back then [01:15:26] Speaker 2: exactly now we're now we're living it well my next book will be doing the same thing hopefully for srm so you heard it here first oh when's it coming out yeah i'm actually started writing it yet so it's gonna be um yeah middle uh mid-2028 i think is uh is the publication date that's currently scheduled [01:15:46] Speaker 1: okay so uh so mark thanks again for being on the program really appreciate it again thanks for all all you're doing we're gonna have to have you back talk about your srm book and uh for everyone else we have a great set of shows lined up the next three weeks so uh make sure as stacy said you hit uh like and subscribe hit the notification bell so you don't miss these share the programs with your friends so we spread the word on these really important subjects and to everyone we will see you next time thanks mark [01:16:18] Speaker 2: thanks thank you very much goodbye bye