Peter: This is the most important issue of humanity, like ever, the risk of a Hothouse Earth, because that's completely unsurvivable. We cannot survive a Hothouse Earth. The paper explains very well, as the 2018 did, that the risk is determined by the feedbacks. Multiple amplifying feedbacks.
Herb: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Climate Emergency Forum. I'm Herb Simmens, the author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future. You know, we've been on for a few years talking about the climate emergency, and I suspect that maybe the most emergent of the emergencies is the degree to which the climate remains in the control of humanity. And more and more evidence seems to suggest that's a questionable assumption. And recently, just last week, a commentary came out in a publication called One Earth entitled The Risk of a Hot House Earth Trajectory.
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Link: The Risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory https://www.cell.com/one-Earth/fulltext/S2590-3322%2825%2900391-4
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And what we thought is we would focus today on this commentary and talk about it and what's behind it and what it means. I'm just going to read two or three sentences from the abstract to set the stage. It starts out by saying,
"Earth's climate is now departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia. Crossing critical temperature thresholds may trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks and tipping dynamics that amplify warming and destabilize distant Earth system components. We are leaving the stable conditions of the Holocene and entering a period of unprecedented climate change beyond the natural interglacial envelope with outcomes that are difficult to predict."
A very sobering message and one that we'll talk about, but first I want to encourage everybody to like our channel, to subscribe, to go to our website, climateemergencyforum.org. We would appreciate your donations. Leave us your comments, your suggestions for future programs. And at the end of this program, as at the end of all of our programs, we hope you'll stay to the end as I'll be focusing on what we call the climate three, three of the big stories that have made the news in the past week.
With that, we have our two regular panelists, Peter Carter and Paul Beckwith. And today, welcome Peter. Welcome Paul. I'd like to start with you, Peter. Floor is yours.
Peter: Thanks Herb. So this is really my favorite, horrible, nasty topic on climate change. So I'm very glad that Bill Ripple and colleagues published this paper because hopefully it reminded the world that we are, in my view at least, on track. Our trajectory is towards Hothouse Earth. The last time this was covered, and it was covered very, very well indeed, was in 2018. And that was by the late Will Steffen and colleagues. To me, that's the most important paper ever, and this one complemented very well. So the media picked it up slightly. The Guardian and independent in the UK, but I didn't see anything else in the media.
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This is the most important issue of humanity
This is the most important issue of humanity
This is the most important issue of humanity
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This is the most important issue of humanity, like ever, the risk of a Hothouse Earth, because that's completely unsurvivable. We cannot survive a Hothouse Earth. The paper explains very well, as the 2018 did, that the risk is determined by the feedbacks. Multiple amplifying feedbacks. I wanted to mention, the paper does mention that present commitments have us on course for 2.8 degrees C, and that's way above a trigger for a Hothouse Earth. The 2018 paper came down with 2 degrees C as the risk, the threshold that could trigger into a Hothouse Earth. So that's still very, very important because, we are definitely on track for 2 degrees C, and on track for 2 degrees C very soon. James Hansen's latest communication was to expect 2 degrees C in the 2030s, not 2050, which is what we had all assumed before.
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Dec 26 at Heating Planet blog
+1.7 C by 2027 Analysis of James Hansen year-end prediction- READ & WATCH Paul Beckwith Dec 22 vlog w transcript at Heating Planet blog
"James Hansen posted a prediction for global average temperature to reach +1.7 C by 2027. I project we will likely pass 2 degrees C by 2032 or 2032. So much for Paris targets." WATCH & READ James Hansen Year-End Blog: Global Average Temperatures We Expect Over Next Couple Years, Dec 22 transcript+ below
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So they mention all the tipping points. So in addition to the amplifying feedbacks, many of which are tipping points themselves, they mention several other tipping points, and that's just fine. They don't mention carbon sinks, and that's really important, because carbon sinks absorb about 50% of our CO2 emissions, and there are signs that they're beginning to lose efficiency. So that is a huge risk contribution to Hothouse Earth. I was frustrated, as I often am, that they did not mention summer sea ice. They only had winter sea ice, and this has sort of been the way that the science has gone for several years, and obviously it's complete nonsense. The IPCC has said that sea ice was reversible. No. You put everything in in a nutshell. The problem actually comes from the loss of the sea ice, because the sea ice is the tipping point of all tipping points, because it boosts all the other ones.
It boosts the permafrost thaw, methane and CO2, it boosts the peat lands and wetlands subarctic, which actually wasn't in this paper, but that's considerable because they are now being activated, and also of course Greenland ice sheet. The paper does mention AMOC. I think quite rightly said, you know, that that's a low risk, but it's a long long long long term risk. However recent research suggests that it might be a lot worse. The trigger of AMOC may be just decades away, even though an AMOC collapse would not happen for hundreds of years. Now this paper was actually good on that, because it took us beyond 2100, and it took us to 22, 2300.
The limit of 2100 that the IPCC and the science gives is a big mistake, because things don't stop at 2100. They continue for hundreds and hundreds more years. I want to mention the IPCC AR6, because it's so very simple. If you go to the Reasoners for Concern, called the Burning Embers, you'll find large-scale singular events. And you can see that they start at 1.5 degrees C, and they are high high high risk at two degrees C.
My message would be that two degrees C is what this paper calls the point of no return. They do mention the point of no return, and that's what we have to avoid, and that means stopping fossil fuel emissions and other emissions on an immediate basis.
Herb: Thank you, Peter. Let me turn it over to Paul. Paul Beckwith, good to see you, Paul, the floor is yours.
Paul: Thank you. I'd like to just echo some of Peter's thoughts. He mentioned James Hansen's work. It's great that Bill Ripple and his group put together a paper like they just released on a regular basis, so this is not their first work. Every year they're publishing and updating their findings.
If you look at the acceleration of climate change and warming, we're experiencing temperature increases of about half a degree per decade, so we're at 1.5 Celsius, essentially. So you can just do the math. We'll be hitting two degrees roughly 2036 or so. That's according to Hansen and some other papers, but the main consensus, the IPCC, et cetera, they say two degrees by more like 2050, but I think their numbers will be updated the next time they publish reports and so on. So if we reach two degrees by 2036 in 10 years, we're going to reach 2.5 by 2046, and we'll reach three degrees Celsius by about 2056.
There's nothing to say that that linear increase of 0.5 degrees a decade won't change to something even more as there's more and more tipping points put into question. Of course, this is assuming that we just continue on business as usual and don't deploy solar radiation management to cool the planet because we all know that if a large volcano goes off. Planet can cool a half degree or a degree for three to five years. I've just picked up a couple books that are relevant to trying to have some optimism in the face of this dire news. One is called Positive Tipping Points by Timothy Lenton, just published in 2026, and I picked up a copy yesterday. And then the other book was Clearing the Air by Hannah Ritchie, data scientist. Just picked up that book yesterday, and I think one of the really bright spots is with all the nonsense and anti-climate change and misinformation coming from the US, a very bright point is what China is doing.
10.02
You know, they're not talking, they're just taking action and just building tremendous infrastructure for solar and wind and battery storage and electric cars, basically with some of the US policies, which we'll be talking about in a subsequent video when we talk about retreat from climate action. You know, I'll just touch on that. I mean, this report, as Peter said, the Bill Ripple report and Hansen reports, should hit top of the line news and be on talk shows and be covered widespread by legacy media, not just be a story, sort of a flash in the pan. The paper's published, there's hardly a peep in mainstream media. And this is part of an ongoing thing that's happening.
[I think the Epstein files are a distraction from this and other much more critical news stories right now; so far nobody agrees with me. -ke ]
You know, if you remember back to 2021, the climate emergency was declared by many countries et cetera, but you can't maintain the state of emergency. I mean, a state of emergency, it has a time, a shelf time, you know, if you declare an emergency and you're still here, nothing's really happening, you know, a few things are happening maybe personally, but if your life continues and years later, I mean, you think, was it really an emergency when it was declared? So it's part of the way we respond to stress. Like if there's a stressor on an individual, you know, you're stressed initially, but then eventually your body, you kind of accept that something's different. You know, you don't maintain a high level of stress. I mean, we have a fight and flight sort of thing within our human nature. You know, you see a bear in the woods starts chasing you, you know, the adrenaline picks up and you get this agitated state, but there's no way you can maintain that or it would kill you. So you kind of get used to it. And this is what's happening because reports on climate change and the urgency have dropped significantly in the media since they peaked in about 2021. So it's all part of the reason why this paper hasn't had the visibility that it should have.
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[Meanwhile Americans know all about Epstein and the billionaires he snared with his girls. Please excuse the interruption.]
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I mean, it's, as Peter says, it's crucial information. So why is society continuing to ignore it, I guess?
Herb: Thanks Paul. And I think what you're, what you're raising brings up the issue of the relevance of the Climate emergency Forum. If in fact sort of we're burning out our nervous systems, you know, I agree with you, emergency is a defined period of time as opposed to what often people are calling the long emergency. So what I want to ask the two of you, I want to try to get back to, it's really important we try to hone in and define as clearly as we can for our viewers, what in the world we mean, what in the world more importantly, the authors mean by the title being the risk of a hot house Earth trajectory. So they say the risk. They don't say we are in a hot house Earth trajectory. They start by saying the Earth's climate is now departing and use similar language. So the train is sort of leaving the station, if you will. Can we be more specific? The science allows us to be more specific on this existentially critical question. Let me start with Peter.
Peter: This paper and science in general actually doesn't do risk because it does probability projected by models that doesn't include magnitude. The actuaries, the association of actuaries in the UK, they have a proper climate risk index and it's published every year, there was one published this year. So we have to get onto that because that makes the risk hugely increased, massively increased. As Paul said, yeah, we're going to be at two degrees and more than two degrees that puts us on a hot house Earth trajectory for sure.
And our emissions, and this paper does mention emissions, emissions definitely put us on a hot house Earth trajectory.
Herb: Okay. So let me just turn it back to Paul. First I want to say that we did do a program some months ago on the actuaries report. So we're focused on it and I agree with Peter how important and how that has a different framing. And I think the distinction, as you point out, Peter, between risk and probability is very important. But Paul, any response to what Peter said or my question?
Paul: Of course, risk is the probability of occurrence times the impacts if the actual thing occurs. And the impacts are the entire planet, right? The impacts are enormous. And up until recently, the risk has been very small. So this is why the uncertainty is so high, you know, multiply a small number by a large number, there's huge uncertainty. But the climate risks are increasing more and more, and therefore the risks are going way, way up. And humanity's response is very, very weak thus far.
This is why the hope I have is that we will go to ways to cool the planet on a large scale and many people are against that, but it's being talked about more and more. You know, we're seeing the impacts, we're seeing extreme weather events, we're seeing places flooding and wildfires and, you know, you don't have to look very far or very long to get billion dollar disasters somewhere in the globe due to extreme weather caused by climate change.
Herb: Great. Thanks, Paul. Let me turn it back to Peter for the sort of the second part of our program and give us some more perspective, your perspective on this paper and the larger implications of which there are enormous implications, as you pointed out, Peter.
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a global suicide scenario
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Peter: Well, the implication, and of course scientists are not allowed to say anything like this, is that we're on a global suicide scenario, that's the implication. The control that is being exerted by governments and corporations is a powerful control. And that control is increasing our emissions every year, so that increases the acceleration of global warming. And the main point, I think, is the acceleration that was in the paper, and they put numbers on it. And since mid-century, the global warming rate has increased sixfold. So global warming now is six times faster than it was, and also the great Forster and team update, they again have said that the rate of global warming is unprecedented in our record.
Herb: You said something a minute or so ago that perked my ears up. You said global suicide scenario. I don't say this tongue-in-cheek, I say this with my tongue outside my cheek or inside, wherever it's supposed to be, that I literally think that the IPCC should label one of its scenarios in its next round. Let's be honest about it. We have all this scientific jargon that even those of us who aren't scientists and try to understand it often takes us years to understand about SSPs and 2.1, this and that, that, and all the rest of that.
[KE Also for most Americans you need to explain this in Fahrenheit honestly. Americans ain't that smart right now. Including me]
Herb: But I will urge us to ask them to do a global suicide scenario and see how close we are to it. What do you think about that, Peter?
Peter: Yeah, that's excellent, because, you know, they're always changing the scenarios. The scenarios are difficult enough to understand. Every five years they change them, so we have to relearn the scenarios. Their projections don't really change at all. So the scenarios back in 2001, we can use those, and we're still on this suicide scenario. So I really agree with you that we must at least have one scenario that people can understand, and I suggest two scenarios.
What we can do in the best case in which we put all our efforts into immediate, that would be useful, but also the worst case should be called the suicide scenario, because that's where we're at. That's what our governments are doing.
Herb: Yeah. Well, maybe we ought to think about starting a campaign or urging our viewers to start a campaign, a plain English or whatever language they're familiar with,
[!YES!]
campaign for the COPs and the IPCCs and the scientific journals. This is too important to obscure with obscure language. With that, let me turn it over to Paul.
Paul: Yeah. I mean, in your next edition of Climate Vocabulary, you know, you can add this scenario. And I mean, the jargon they changed to for the scenarios was these SSPs, shared sustainable pathways or whatever. So it's really obscuring the issue. People often ask me, what do you think is going to happen over the next five years? And if you look at what Hansen is talking about, you know, let's look back a couple of years. We had a strong El Niño. We hit one point six degrees Celsius above pre-industrial. It weakened a bit. We backed off to about 1.4. And then the previous year we had 1.5. So the last three years, on average, we've been over 1.5. So what's going to happen? We've been in a bit of a La Niña, the cooling version. And all signs are pointing to another El Niño returning towards the end of this year.
And if that happens over the next few years, we're going to rocket up to probably 1.7 or 1.8 even. Probably with the fluctuation, we'll reach that two degrees by mid 2030s in about a decade. But I think in the next couple of years, we're going to see some big swings and huge record temperatures. And one of the reasons for the uncertainty in these forecasts is that we're having a lot more difficulty predicting El Niños and La Niñas.
So there is a professor at University of California, Irvine, Jin-Yi Yu, who's been studying ENSOs for decades. And I attended a talk just earlier today, actually called The Changing El Niño in the 21st Century. So in the 20th century, you typically have a La Niña, an El Niño, La Niña, El Niño.
20.00
And the change would be, you know, every three, four or five years, you know, two to seven year cycle. And the El Niños were mostly the warming water off South America. Well, now what we're seeing is the pattern seems to have changed. And the warming water is mostly in the Central Pacific. It's not developing off the coast of South America. It has to do with the Walker circulation reacting with the ocean temperature in the 20th century. And now it's more like the Rossby waves, jet streams are interacting with the water. So the characteristics of the of the ENSO have changed. I don't think there's any question.
So it's become more difficult to predict.
And what it means is that we can get back to back El Niños, we can have an El Niño and then another one and another one without the intervening La Niña cooling period. So it's becoming more erratic and harder to predict. So it really looks like we're going to be setting new temperature records globally in the next few years. So that adds some uncertainty.
But this is a signature that's on top of the overall warming, which is continuing as long as greenhouse gases continue to skyrocket up, which they're doing. I mean, we're setting new records, the curves are concave up, not concave down, we're not slowing down, we're speeding up. Whether the media talks about it less or whatever, the climate doesn't care. We're skyrocketing upwards at very rapid rates.
Herb: Well, yeah, you're describing the kind of additional complexity of this other forcing that you've just described. I want to sort of ask both of you, you know, again, our viewers are watching and listening and scratching their heads if they're still saying if they're, you know, still here if they haven't just left for the nearest bar or pub to, you know, sort of try to minimize the pain of what we're saying, the implications of what we're saying. But, you know, it's one thing for us and many, many other people to be exhorting governments and everybody to, you know, reduce fossil fuels. But my question to the two of you is, is what is the realistic impact, let's say, over the next 10 years, we actually start reducing emissions not, you know, not in some kind of magical level, but at least, you know, a much more aggressive amount than we have the past 20 years. Will that make any real difference on the hothouse trajectory or will we need, as Paul has said, and I, you know, I tend to agree with you on this, Paul, strongly that the answer without ignoring emissions is direct cooling through various means of sunshine reflection and so forth. But, you know, what can we expect? Are we sort of past the point where emissions can do much good? Let me start with Paul.
Paul: Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of short term pain. And I think that that short term pain may actually propel some action. And I'm talking about things even like inflation, food inflation, prices of food have skyrocketed just in the last few years. And, you know, some people say, well, it's the economy or it's this or that. But the bottom, the root cause of the food inflation is reduction of production and that reduction of production is from climate change, extreme weather events. So the latest as of yesterday, I just read an article that coffee, which originated in Ecuador many years ago, many thousands of years ago, we're going to run into extreme scarcity due to climate events, weather events, and therefore prices will continue to rise at much faster than inflation rates. Herb: Can I just sort of interrupt? We've talked about these before, and I think it's really important. I think we all notice at the grocery store.
My question more was what realistically can an aggressive regime of successful emission reductions over the next whatever number of years, 10 years, 15 years, can it make a noticeable difference in avoiding or minimizing this hothouse Earth trajectory? Or are we at the point where emission reductions, because of all the things we've talked about for years here, still need to be done. It's not being the place in and saying don't do them, but that the impact will be not enough to sort of get us through this.
Paul: I'm 100% convinced that we need cooling of the planet to buy us time to do these emission reductions to avoid crossing tipping points. If we just do emission reductions alone, I think we're going to be crossing a whole bunch of these tipping points and it's going to propel us to a much warmer, more dangerous world.
Herb: Well, that's succinct and clear. Peter, what are your thoughts on that?
Peter: Well, I can answer your question directly because the IPCC AR6 actually specifically answers it. And it may be quite surprising, especially to some experts. So they answer the question, what happens if we initiate an immediate strong mitigation? And what happens is that the global temperature only slows down. So it doesn't stabilize for 20 to 30 years. So that is the commitment that we have to bear in mind and make a priority in all our policy making. And of course, that's not being done at all. On the still controversial issue of geoengineering, well, at the minimum, we have to cool the Arctic because I've already mentioned the Arctic sea ice and when that goes, there's a huge increase in radiative forcing in the Arctic and maybe some globally as well. And that's pushing the methane and carbon dioxide from the permafrost and the wetlands even faster. And once that starts in the permafrost, that's irreversible. You can't go back on that apart from, I guess, cooling the planet. But no geoengineering is going to work unless global emissions are in decline at the same time. And the reason is that you're still piling heat into the oceans. And we've got this unbelievable amount of heat in the oceans, which is accelerating. It's going all the way to the bottom of the oceans now. So you need a Manhattan Project. That's my view, because we need more technology. We need more science.
Herb: And so what I'm hearing from both Peter and Paul is that we need both. We need everything. It's all hands on deck. It's you know, not everything indiscriminately. Some things may have disastrous side effects, but we need direct cooling. We need aggressive emission reductions. We need aggressive carbon renewal. But Paul, you have characterized as the three legged bar stool. I call it the triad. There's lots of different terms for it. But it's everything. And in the absence of everything, is it fair to say we'll have nothing in a few decades or at least nothing, nothing that reflects or is anything similar to the life that those of us on the planet are living right now?
With that, I want to thank Peter and Paul for really how much more important can a discussion can be, even though we've just scratched the surface on whether we're entering and what we can do about a hot house Earth trajectory.
NEWS
And at this point, I take a couple of minutes, as I always do, take three minutes, one minute each on three of the big climate stories of the day. And first, let me go to a country with the name of Ethiopia. And while this is not something that immediately occurred, there was a story about it recently that Ethiopia is the first nation on the planet to ban imports of fossil fuel vehicles. First they did it with cars. And then a few months ago, they did it with trucks. Yes, it is a full, complete, total ban. They did it as much for economic reasons. They were spending six billion dollars a year on fossil fuel. And that money now stays in the country, at least most of it does. But I think when people say, oh, well, that's impractical, that's this or that, go to look at Ethiopia and see what they've done and how they've done it. So that's number one.
And number two, here we go, is we mentioned just a few minutes ago about three degrees of heating were coming our way. Well, there was a story in The Guardian just a day or two ago. The European Union's Climate Advisory Board has called for the countries in the EU to prepare for a, quote, catastrophic three degrees C of global heating. A member of the Scientific Advisory Board said Europe was already paying a price for its lack of preparation. It's a daunting task, but they said it's a doable task. It's not rocket science. Reuters notes that climate change has made Europe the world's fastest warming continent there. And so here we have a situation where we have to prepare for this. At the same time, we can't be complacent and give up on emission reductions and everything else to try to minimize that consequence.
But it's coming.
And it's, you know, as you guys have talked about, it's here sooner rather than later. Interestingly, we've talked before about the endangerment finding that Donald Trump, our president of the United States, basically is trying to eliminate so that we won't be able to regulate carbon dioxide. Well, there was a story and also in Bloomberg about how the oil and gas companies may do worse by doing that, because that provided some predictability. If that endangerment finding goes away, and we won't know for sure for many years as a result of court decisions, oil and gas companies will be subject to all sorts of lawsuits that they're protected against right now and regulations by the states in the United States. We have this crazy situation where half our states are aggressive and will regulate and the other half will look the other way. So all these things are maybe not quite as simple as may seem on the surface. With that, let me thank our conversation today, our Peter and Paul. We hope that you will like and subscribe to our program. And we look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you very much. ***https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TxwEkK__cg
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