Instant Genius - Climate breakdown, with Prof Bill McGuire

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

In this episode of Instant Genius, McGuire explains why it is now practically impossible for us to keep climate change on the right side of the 1.5-degree target set by the Paris Agreement, what the Earth could look like in 2100 and what we can still do to mitigate the worst impacts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials,

delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com. to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Jason Goodyear,

commissioner editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. With COP 27, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, currently in full swing, the headlines are ablaze with grave warnings about the future of the planet's climate. But how dire is the situation?

And what can we do about it? In this episode, we speak to Bill McGuire, professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. He explains why it's now practically impossible for us to keep rising global temperatures on the right side of the 1.5 degree target set by the Paris Agreement, what the world could look like in 2100 and what we can still do to mitigate the worst impacts. So several years ago the Paris Agreement stated that we need to keep global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels or below. So in a way this is kind of old news, but I think it's worth going over again.

So first of all, when we talk about pre-industrial levels, what are we talking about? And why did we decide on this 1.5 degree target? Pre-industrial really means before the Industrial Revolution got going and before huge quantities of carbon dioxide started to be pumped into the atmosphere by human activities. So that's what that means. Actually, the biggest increase in CO2 is since sort of 1850, so we don't really have to go all the way back to the Industrial Revolution to see the increase. But 1.5 degrees C global average temperature rise is equated to the dangerous climate change guardrail. So the idea is, if we go above that, then we're going to be in real trouble. But it is an arbitrary figure. I mean, nobody knows it's going to be any better at 1.4 or 1.3. And in fact, if you talk to the 33 million Pakistan is displaced in the floods this year, they may say, well, dangerous climate changes here already. So, you know, it is equated with

that guardrail, but it is an arbitrary number. So a lot of people talk about this, the ship sort of sailing on this target now, and I believe that's kind of your opinion. So what is your opinion on this target? And is it even of any value anymore? I don't think it is. And I'm not sure it was ever any value, to be honest. If we're going to stick this side of one and a half degrees, we're going to need to see emissions fall by 45% in seven and a bit years. Now, But in theory, that's possible. But in the real world, that's just not going to happen. So one and a half degrees has gone.

But one of the issues with one and a half degrees is it's been used to cover up in action, if you like, by fossil fuel companies and governments. Because right up until now and for the next few years, I'll say, it's fine, we can act. We still got time to act. We're not at one and a half degrees yet. So it's being used as a sort of fig leaf to allow emissions to continue to be pumped out. What we need to do is fight for every point to one of a degree. degree C. Every point one counts just as much as every other. So we shouldn't get hung up on

a target, particularly a target that it's now dead in the water. Yeah, so that's interesting. I was going to ask that. So some people might say, well, you know, a couple of decimal points. You know, what's the difference? How bad can it possibly be just a couple of decimal points? But you just mentioned, though, that's really important. Can you sort of break that down for me, how important just these 0.1 of a degree is? Well, if we just look back over the last five years of the explosion in extreme weather, now that's arrived sort of very, very suddenly with another 0.1 or so over degree C rise. The global average temperature rise for the last five years averages about just a fraction of the 1.3

compared to pre-industrial times. And it hasn't gone up that much in the last five years. But we've seen our world transformed, especially in summer with the heat waves and the wildfires and the floods. So 0.1 degree doesn't sound like a lot, but percentage-wise, it is a significant amount of the rise. So your book's called Hot House Earth and Inhabitants Guide. And in the book, you prefer to use the term climate breakdown rather than perhaps more common terms such as climate change or global warming. So why have you chosen that particular phrase? Well, there are two phrases, really. I mean, there's global heating and climate breakdown instead of global warming and climate change. And the reasons for that are, one, we're not just seeing

warming, we're seeing rapid heating of our planet. And two, the climate isn't just changing. Change could be for the better as well as for the worse. We're not seeing anything for the better. It's breaking down. Clearly it's breaking down. We can all just look around us and see that happening now. So if we rewind a little bit then, you know, how have we found ourselves in this position? How has it got on this diet? I mean, people have been talking about this for decades. Well, it's massively frustrating. I mean, we're on COP 27 now. So that's 27 years since the first major international climate conference. If you plot the timing of those meetings against a curve of fossil fuel emissions, they make no difference at all. Emissions carry on going on and on and on

upwards. They've just been talking shops. They've been promises. They've been pledges. But the bottom line is emissions and they continue to rise. And I think that's because on the one part fossil fuel corporations will burn every damn thing they can get hold of given the chance. And on the other hand, world governments just don't understand how bad climate breakdown is set to be. You know, many of them think, oh, it'll be a bit hotter, maybe sea levels will rise a bit, but they have no idea of the massive threat multiplier effects of climate breakdown. Yeah, so that brings me on to what I was going to ask next then. So, you know, as you say, people might say, well, oh, you know, it's going to get a bit hotter. Fine, we'll have noiser summers in the UK. But rising temperatures and shifting climates, they have an impact on all sorts of global systems. And you mentioned there. First of, a lot of people talk about melting glaciers and sea level rise. So what's the current situation with that? What are we looking at there? Well, the first thing is that the temperature rise we see is a global average.

And at the poles, both north and south, you're seeing temperatures rise four or five times more quickly. So you're getting massive melting now at the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets and even East Antarctica. And it looks as if sea level rise is doubling about every 20 years or so. It's gone from just over a millimeter right up to 1990 to half a centimeter now a year. Now, if it's doubling every 20 years, and you know, you're looking. looking at 2040, a centimeter a year, 2062 centimeters, 2084 centimeters, that's putting you on track for getting off for two meters by the end of the century. Two meters will bring the sea into Boston, into Spalding, of these UK towns that are on flatland, quite a long way from

the sea now, but we'll be threatened by it in 80 years' time. So, you know, that's a big issue. Yeah, so currently a lot of people are talking about these low-lying countries such as Fiji or whatever, of being in sort of imminent danger. But the problem's going to get a lot worse, isn't it, than that, as you mentioned there? Absolutely. I mean, if we look back in time at periods when carbon dioxide levels have been around about what they are now

and where temperatures have been what they are now, sea levels have been anything from six to nine to 20 metres higher. So even if we stop emissions now, it's likely that sea level rise will continue for many centuries and that we'll eventually see several metres of sea level rise, which will flood every coastal town. and a city. So sort of moving on from sea levels then, how about weather systems? You know, a lot of people here in the UK often speak of the Gulf Stream and things like that.

How are these things being interrupted by, as you say, climate breakdown? Well, there's a couple of things worth stressing here. First of all, the jet stream, which keeps the cold air in the Arctic and the warmer air out, is looks as if it's starting to fail, starting to wobble about all over the place. And that means that we can see these alternating episodes of very hot, conditions and then extremely cold conditions as well as the Arctic air plunges southwards. And then secondly, you have this whole issue with the Gulf Stream of related currents, which keep the UK and Europe warmer than it would otherwise be. The Gulf Stream is almost now entirely unstable, a recent research paper showed,

and could shut down at any time, which would mean we would suffer much colder conditions, at least for a time, anyway, where we live. It wouldn't stop global heating, but it would have a big impact on weather patterns across the globe. This could happen, if you look back in time, and when it happened before, this could happen over a period of a few months, incredibly quickly. So sort of speaking as it is, an English person, we love talking about the weather. And recently, it's been very unseasonably wet, almost. So, you know, what's happening there? Is this, having, is our emissions in Exeter, having an influence on the rainfall in this, these sort of weather systems?

Well, there's something called an attribution study, which looks at specific. instances of extreme weather and then looks at the likelihood of them happening if we didn't have human-made climate breakdown. And you can see in hundreds and hundreds of cases, and many of the extreme weather events wouldn't have happened without global heating. And that's reflected right across the world, certainly in the UK climate, in terms of the fact there's more extreme rainfall now, so you get more rain in shorter periods. That's why we're getting increased flooding. temperatures now, as we know, 40 degrees and above in summer. Windstorms will become more powerful, if not necessarily more frequent,

certainly more powerful winds. So everything is being sort of hyped up by global heating. So of course this has an influence on many things, but particularly on our ability to grow crops and grow food to eat. Yeah, well, I think one of the most terrifying threat multiplication factors of climate breakdown is the impact on food. There was a report published by Chatham House last year, which pointed out that by the middle of the century, the world would need about 50% more food for the growing population. But crop yields could be down by as much as 30%.

Now, that translates to a halving of the food availability for everyone on the planet. That would be, well, it would be catastrophic. You know, you're looking at global famine, war, civil strife, and just a general breakdown of society. That's only 28 years away. And this is what governments do not understand. And so just talking about the raw temperature already in some parts of, I believe, Pakistan, it's got incredibly hot this year, and the point where it's becoming almost unbearable to live in these places. Yeah, well, the really scary thing is what's called a humid heat wave,

which is a combination of humidity and temperature, which is read on what's called a wet bulb thermometer. When that gets above 35 degrees C, the human body can't sweat. and survival, you can only survive for six hours, your organs start to fail as you overheat. Now, those sorts of conditions are already being seen in the Gulf at the moment, but they will be widely felt in the second half of this century, particularly in places like Southeast Asia and China.

And there's something like 400 million people working in the China breadbasket in the North China plain, which could be threatened by these. So if you're caught out in the open, have no air conditioning, and you're in a humid heat wave with temperatures at high, you've got six hours to live. And it doesn't matter how fit you are, whether you're in the shade or not. So you can see millions of deaths, literally, in a day. So there's a realistic possibility that rising temperatures are rendering or will render

large parts of the planet impossible for human life to live in. Well, absolutely right. I mean, if we look at the bottom line, if all the fossil fuel reserves that are known about now are burnt, another 3.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide will be pumped out, which is more than all the carbon dioxide that's been pumped out so far since the Industrial Revolution. Our paper was published by James Hansen and others climate scientists in 2013, which showed if we burn all the fossil fuel reserves, the temperature rise, the global average temperature rise will be 16 degrees C. The planet at the moment is 15 on average.

That takes the average temperature of the Earth to over 30 C. that makes vast areas of it, most of it un inhabitable. So do we have a sort of time scale estimate for that? No, we don't. And you would think, surely we can't be stupid enough to allow that to happen. But it's there as the bottom line. If we don't stop fossil fuel corporations burning the reserves that they know about, they will do it.

You know, that's their job. But I trust that something will happen to stop that. Fingers crossed. So obviously these things are very good. complicated to predict, but a lot of people will say, well, yikes, we can't even predict the weather next week very accurately. How can we predict these climate models over decades? Well, you can't predict the weather next week because the weather is so unpredictable now, largely due to climate breakdown. But it's not only modelling, as I said earlier, we can model ahead in terms of what can

happen, but we can look back at the past when we've had very similar conditions and see what things were like then. And right up until now, every single prediction made pretty much about our climate has been underplayed. It's always worse than we think it's going to be. Now, it could be that, you know, ultimately things aren't as bad as we think they might be, but I have deep reservations about that. So a lot of, I mean, a certain, I wouldn't say a lot actually, but a certain subset of people will say science will come to the rescue in the end, you know, with geoengineering solutions or what have you. You know, what's your opinion on that sort of attitude? Well, you know, just hoping that something's going to turn up is frankly insane. And even the

schemes that we know about to roll them out on a global basis is gigantically expensive, incredibly complex. And it's just as easy to just cut down emissions for God's sake, you know, it's bad enough having to do this without a global geoengineering scheme, which are probably even hard. and due engineering tramples on all sorts of people's human rights and legal rights. Who has the right to mess with the climate and we've already messed with it? So it's a whole can of worms I don't think we should be opening. So having said that, what do you think, you know, these big organisations, these big energy companies and governments, what sort of key measures should they be taken, you know, or should they have taken already?

Well, the key thing is to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Now, at the moment, the fossil fuel companies get trillions of dollars in subsidies from the world's governments every year, which is a staggering amount of money. Those subsidies need to be stopped. Insurance companies need to be stopped from insuring any facilities, oil, gas, coal, whatever. Banks should be stopped being allowed to lend to these corporations. And if need be, there should be a hefty tax at the wellhead and the mine entrance as this stuff comes out of the ground to try and keep as much of it down there.

as possible. That's what needs to be done. And alongside that, I think, you need a massive change in terms of the amount of meat that we eat so that land can be freed up, reforested, and starting to absorb carbon in a natural way. A combination of those two things happening really quickly could have a huge impact. Going to a sort of more personal sort of immediate thing that our listeners could perhaps do, you know, is there anything that the individual can do to help help the situation? Well, I think everybody knows by now about what they should be doing in terms of driving as little as possible or getting an electric car if they can afford it,

eating less meat, not flying, switching to a renewable energy tariff, all this sort of thing. But I know lots of people have done that and they still don't feel they're doing enough. You don't have to glue yourself to a road because there are lots of other roles that are required in those organisations. Now, they've pushed climate breakdown and global heating right to the top of the agenda. they've done a fantastic job, whatever you think about them. And, you know, people who've done that, on my advice, say they feel a lot more positive, they feel they're doing something, and, you know, they're generally happier, even though they can see that the situation's grim. So it's sort of quite a lot there, and obviously the picture's a little bit bleak, but, I mean,

by way of closing, I mean, how optimistic are you that we can get through this, you know, as a human race? Well, it's difficult to be optimistic. I mean, you know, the one thing I would see, say is because we're going to smash through one and a half degrees, dangerous, all-pervasive climate breakdown is inevitable. We're going to see it. We're going to be part of a world which our grandparents would barely recognize. So we can't dodge that, but we need to fight for every point one degree C to stop that dangerous world becoming cataclysmic and uninhabitable. So, you know, there's still hope, there's still plenty to fight for, but the future will be Bleak. Thank you for listening to this episode of Vincent Genius. That was Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards, Bill McGuire.

If you want to know more about the science behind climate breakdown, check out his book, Hot House, Earth, an Inhabitance Guide. The current issue of BBC's Science Focus is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines, or visit sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. There's a moment when you start to wonder, what's the right next step?

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