"Be wary of the story- don't worry, we can do a green transition and come back down and everything will be fine. Everything is not going to be fine. It's going to be unprecedented. We don't know what form it will take. We do know a lot of severe precipitation events are likely, but in some parts of the world it will also include severe drought and wildfire events."
TRANSCRIPT
of first 20 mins
He's now the second most powerful man in the world who is deliberately sabotaging efforts on the climate front in a way which is insane and heartbreaking and terrifying.
I mean, we've really had a big wakeup call in this country where I'm talking to you from, the UK, the same in France, the same in Spain, unprecedented off the scale levels of heating compared to what people are used to- of anyone selling us the easy story that oh don't worry, you know, we can do a green transition and come back down again and everything will be fine-
Everything is not going to be fine.
The Paris agreement is essentially now dead,
It's really a a zombie agreement; we need to capitalize on that, if I may, and use it as a kind of springboard for helping to prepare people for the very difficult future we're moving into.
What we should actually do is recognize that we have failed, that we have failed to keep temperatures below 1.5°, probably failed to keep them below two; that the Paris agreement has failed, AI is under some threat now; it's quite encouraging to see the rise of struggles against data centers for example; the actual return up the agenda again of tackling the root of the trouble which of course includes tackling the fossil fuel companies.
We need to find effective ways of tackling the power of big money, of fossil fuels, of those forces that are destabilizing our climate.
*Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Science Talk. My name is Dr. Muhammadak; I'm a professor of climate communication and the host of Science Talk.
Today I will be talking to someone who is an environmental philosopher, public intellectual, author of several books, and the founder and the current director of the Climate Majority project. Rupert, thank you so much for your time and good to see you and welcome to SAS talk.
*Good to be here.
*So my overarching question, the starting question, I always struggle with. Where are we with the climate debate as we're ending 2026?
*Oh, well, depends what you mean by the climate debate. In terms of the climate situation, I would say we're in pretty terrible. I expect a very bad conference of the parties, the COP this year, continuing the sequence of bad ones we've had for some time now. I am watching the situation very closely as everyone should be with the super El Nino, the Godzilla El Nino, which of course is strongly fueled by climate breakdown.
It's going to be off the charts terrible. It's going to be absolutely unprecedented. We don't know exactly what form that will take. We do know it's likely to include a lot of severe precipitation events, but it will probably in some parts of the world also include very severe drought and wildfire events.
Meanwhile, we have the most powerful man in the world, maybe, you know, maybe he's now the second most powerful man in the world, who is deliberately sabotaging efforts on the climate front in a way which is insane and heartbreaking and terrifying.
And we have politics in many countries which is not very good for us and we have broader threats as well. So, climate and ecology are intertwined. As I'm sure listeners to this podcast are well aware, our ecological situation more generally is continuing to deteriorate. We are breaking planetary boundaries more than we have done before.
AI is under some threat now. It's quite encouraging to see the rise of struggles against data centers, for example. But basically, the AI revolution is still continuing and is going to be on balance. incredibly bad news for climate ac across the board mostly.
And really one thing I would say which I think is quite important, Muhammad, is that when we're talking now about the climate situation or the climate debate, we can't really just talk about climate anymore, we have to talk about geopolitics about the strait of Hormuz for example, we have to talk about AI in a big way, we have to talk obviously about nature.
So climate is now one crucial part of a larger poly crisis and that poly crisis puts us in very very severe trouble.
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Inner climate response. That's how we adapt, how we build resilience ourselves together to the shared psychological difficulty of what we're facing.
Now some listeners, some viewers will already be thinking oh god this is so bad this is bringing me down. We can talk about what to do about that. The first thing I would say about it is that that itself that reaction itself completely understandable is itself part of what you termed the climate debate. We need to think more about and act more on the difficulty, the understandable difficulty that people have in processing what is going on.
5.05
And we need to understand that that psychological processing, that shared inner work, that difficult effort to accommodate the difficult truth is itself hugely hugely important; and that's one of the reasons why we in the climate majority project focus on it a lot. for example through our initiation of and participation in the inner climate response alliance ICRA which aims to foreground this matter.
So if by climate debate we mean debate about whether climate change is real or whatever, I mean, that's well over now. If by climate debate we mean debate about how serious the situation is, well, it's very very serious; if by climate debate we mean what should we do about it, that of course is where it really starts to get interesting. And I hope we'll be talking quite a lot about that.
At the heart, one more thing from me before I go back to you. At the heart of our response to that question in the climate majority project is to say that we have now the foreground adaptation, strategic adaptation to the trouble that we're in. It's far too late to do anything less or anything else. And also what I described a moment ago, inner adaptation, right? Inner climate response. That's how we adapt, how we build resilience ourselves together to the shared psychological difficulty of what we're facing.
*So, you said a lot. We'll come back to some of the things you just outlined. And that's that's exactly what I meant by the climate debate. Where are we and what are the concerns and where the things are going and what to do about it. We'll talk about that too. the recent very recent I think last week the UNB United Nation Environmental Program launched a new report called limiting overshoot and are there ways to still stay 1.5? I think some of the the not suggestions but concerns in the report that it's kind of too late already. We were going to pass that and some people would argue that we already did over the last 3 years 2024, 2025 and now 2026. What do you make of that report?
*Well, let me start with a terminological and technical point, Muhammad. So overshoot means the exceeding of 1.5° centigrade of average global overheat and then it supposedly means coming back down again. Now, I'm very questioning of that idea of coming back down again. Of course, that's what I would like us to do. Do I think it's likely that that's going to happen? Well, no, I don't.
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The Paris agreement is essentially now dead,
It's really a zombie agreement; we need to capitalize on that
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And so, I think that the framing of this whole discussion and of this report in particular is really quite problematic.
It gives people a false sense of complacency. And that false sense of complacency is much the same as the complacency which was encouraged for years by people saying, "Oh yes, we can still stay below 1.5 degrees of average global overheat when it was already clear that we could not." And indeed to take up a point you made in your question, my view is very much that it is clear that we have already exceeded 1.5 degrees of global overheat if you think about how to measure that in the right way.
So one way of putting that point my colleague Richard Betts makes quite well in a well-known important recent piece is that, along with others, is that if you're calculating where we're actually at in terms of global temperature rise, it's no good looking at it over the last 10 years; you need to think about it in relation to now.
Well how do you do that in a way which doesn't just kind of get randomly perturbed by where we are in the La Nina cycle or whatever.
Well, if you're going to do it in an over time way, then you need to think about the next 10 years as well. But hang on, we don't actually obviously have measurements yet over the next 10 years, but we can project roughly where we're headed.
And where we're headed is up.
It's up.
I mean, we could be seeing ridiculous temperature rises.
For example, as a result of this El Nino, which will last for a while and have a lasting impact. If you look at the curve, it doesn't look good at all.
So I say we have already passed 1.5 degrees of average global overheat. We are very likely not to come back down again from that at least not for a very long time. The only way probably that gets to change is if we take the enormous and in my view utterly stupid risk of some wild and massive geoengineering program.
So to come back to the report I don't find it credible; I'm afraid what we have to do, we have to keep getting realer about the predicament that we are in.
Only if we act on the basis of where we actually are will we do the right kinds of things and will we do enough.
And as I say that starts with strategic adaptation. And it goes on to questions such as how can we intervene in nature and of course in markets and with governments and so forth in order to drastically reduce the amount of heating that we are continuing to contribute to the world.
Everybody knows this, right? But to get obsessed with the with the dangerous idea, it's dangerous because it's probably not going to happen, that we are overshooting and that we're going to come smoothly and quickly back down again is not the way to do it.
10.20
*Yeah. And I'm also a very cautious optimist. I don't think that's going to happen. If we were that smart, we should have reached that point in the first place. Before we start the conversation on on coming back just just to clarify something and playing devil's advocate role here, I completely agree with what you just said; but is it realistic to project yes you can project emissions you can project certain things- but the geopolitics and overall political attitude- who who would have projected what the current administration in the US is doing, who would have projected AI and data center boom, who would have projected covid for instance.
So like looking at the other things, not only the emissions, what we emit in the atmosphere, but the other factors which play a huge role how we tackle this crisis. Is it realistic to project? Do we have those models and sophistication that would kind of you know maybe put every possible worst and and best scenario and then project?
*Well look you're absolutely right that there are vast uncertainties here absolutely incalculably vast uncertainties; and if I may say so I've always been one of the first to make that point; that's why I argue very strongly for following the precautionary principle and have done for many years; and this world has blatantly failed to follow the precautionary principle; but we can always start trying to follow it better. We ought to try to be ready for diverse possible futures including crucially worst case scenarios. That's really a lot of the point of the work that I've done over the years with my friend and colleague Nashim Talib.
And we ought to be seeking to build down the systemic and indeed existential risk to which we are making ourselves vulnerable by what we've been doing as a species, as a civilization for quite a long time now.
So yes, there are very severe limits on the extent to which we can predict the future. And that goes also of course for people who rightly in my view lean into the likelihood of that we're now on a societal collapse trajectory. I think that that's very much where we are. I think it's now overwhelmingly likely that we will endure some kind of collapse.
But how quickly will that happen? Nobody knows. How irrevocable will it be? Nobody knows. How soon will it happen? Nobody knows. Anyone who tells you they know the answer to any of these questions whether they think collapse is going to happen or not is not a helpful commentator frankly in my view.
Having said all that, we can make reasonable guesses about where we actually are, and about a range of scenarios into which we are heading, by looking at things like the projection of various models into the future, by considering worst case scenarios; but by not only looking at those- and that's the sense in which I say it is a very reasonable guess that the global temperature is very likely to carry on increasing, possibly quite sharply, for quite a while; and in that context we want to be wary of anyone selling us the easy story that oh don't worry you know we can do a green transition and come back down again and everything will be fine. Everything is not going to be fine.
*Yeah. So, speaking of the global heating, this past summer, recent few months ago, Europe has seen or experienced extraordinary summer, right, of heat. and I don't remember like kind of you know this level of heat over the last two decades at least.
At the same time, India was also experiencing a week of big heat wave where thousands of people died. Yeah, but in Europe some calculations say between 20 to 35,000 people have died and the media is talking about that.
My first question to you is how concerned are you with that level of heat wave hitting Europe across many countries; but at the same time there is no outrage about India's heat wave. All we're seeing is mostly Europe but not many other countries who are going through the same kind of level of heat.
15.01
*Well, yeah, I think that your question is completely fair. There should be terrible concern and indeed outrage about what's happened to India this summerand of course what's happened recently in Nepal about what is projected for the Indian subcontinent and for Australasia and for Africa over the next year.
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We can project roughly where we're headed.
And where we're headed is up.
It's up. I mean, we could be seeing ridiculous temperature rises
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Let's also remember that it is as a general rule and this is completely general across humanity. It is easy for people to understand bad things when they happen when they happen close to them. So it's not so surprising that Europeans have been mostly very concerned with their own extreme heat waves partly because they have been truly extreme.
I mean we've really had a big wakeup call in this country where I'm talking to you from, the UK, the same in France the same in Spain. unprecedented off the scale levels of heating compared to what people are used to, right?
And that is a benchmark worth considering. It's terrible what's been happening to India this summer and of course a lot of poor people really struggling to cope with it, having few resources to cope with it. But at least India had one thing going for it, which is some of what happened this summer was closer to the lived experience of Indians than some of what has happened this summer isclose to the lived experience of people in Britain and in France.
But look, at the end of the day, I think rather than these kind of games of of comparison, I think what we ought to take a little bit of heart from is the fact that the events of this summer have functioned as something of a wakeup call across Europe, across Asia, and indeed across the world. And I think the debate has changed. We need to capitalize on that if I may and use it as a kind of springboard for helping to prepare people for the very difficult future we're moving into and in particular the very difficult future that we're going to experience over the next 12 months with this insane terrible El Nino event.
So, I have a little bit of active hope that what's happened this summer, horrendous though it is, contains a kind of a silver lining because it gives people like you and me and people watching this and if you will, politicians, campaigners, etc., it gives us all a kind of springboard for being able to do more of what we need to do now and to do it quite fast; and I would urge everyone watching this, if they're not already doing so, to ask where what is that in my case. Is that giving some of my money to a good cause if you happen to be someone who has got real money? And by a good cause, I mean something like preparation, adaptation for the future that we're moving into. Is it getting more involved in campaigning or in politics? Is it local resilience building work? For many people, that will be what it is.
That's what we talk about in our strategic adaptation for emergency resilience work, our safer work. This is our safer report which you can get for free as with all our reports on the climate majority project website. Whatever it is, however it is that you can contribute, if you're not already doing so, if you're spending most of your time sitting behind a screen watching other people talking or whatever, now is the time to get involved because consciousness is changing and because the need is very pressing.
And in that way, the horrendous deaths of people across the world this summer are possibly going to have at least some kind of beneficial effect; and maybe they will prevent even larger numbers of such deaths in the future.
18.54 END OF TRANSCRIPT video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocpTV62fUQs&t=55s
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