Science Vs - Have We Crossed the Climate Tipping Point?

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Headlines are screaming that the world is about to reach a climate tipping point, which feels like a point of no return where the climate is screwed and there's nothing we can do. But it turns out, that's wrong. These visions of a climate apocalypse don't align with the science. So what exactly is going on with our climate? What even is a tipping point? And are we really about to lose control of the climate? Comedian Michael Hing joins us for a journey with climate scientists Dr. Ed Doddridge, Dr. Seaver Wang, and Dr. Sarah Das, as well as Dr. Felicity McCormack, who's at the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative Securing Antarctica's Environmental Future at Monash University. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsClimateTippingPoint  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Fire in the hole (06:14) What is a tipping point?  (11:04) Is Planet Earth "tipping"?  (17:00) How do we know when the ice sheets tip? (25:04) When will the ice sheets tip? (27:34) Have we lost control of the climate?  (31:58) Why tipping points are the distracted boyfriend meme (35:30) The good news! Send us your questions about How to Solve the Climate Crisis!!  Insta: @science_vs Tiktok: @wendyzukerman Send a voicemail or video to [e-mail] Or! If you're in the U.S., you can call 774-481-1238  This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Meryl Horn Rose Rimler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Music written by Bobby Lord, Sparse Movement, Bumi Hidaka and So Wylie. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to, including Professor Andrew Dessler, Professor Christina Hulbe, Dr David Armstrong McKay, Professor Tim Lenton, Aditya Lolla, Dr Elizabeth Maroon, Dr Jan Nitzbon, Professor Johannes Quaas, Dr Jonathan Leung, Dr Kirsten Schell, Dr Madi Rosevear, Michelle Dvorak, Dr Robin Lamboll, Dr Zeke Hausfather, Dr Sam Krevor, Flowra Zhang and others. And extra thanks to the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, did we just cross the tipping point? When it comes to climate change, how screwed are we? And to add a little comedy to this drama, I've invited my mate, Australian comic Michael Hing to the show. Hi, Michael. Hello, Wendy. When you say to bring some comedy to this, is this a hilarious topic? Because I do feel like a lot of people listening to this will just broadly be bummed out. Yes. I mean, there are a lot of reasons to be bummed out. Let's just

quickly go through a couple of them. For one, it has been weirdly, some might say freakishly hot recently. We've just been seeing like month after month of record-breaking heat. And I know even for people like mildly following climate stuff, you'll be used to hearing record-breaking heat. But it's just seriously, if you look at the graphs of this year and last year, the temperature of the globe, like the average global temperature,

just jumped. Yeah, I have seen some news stories about that. Yeah, and temperatures were actually supposed to have dropped, but August numbers just came in and it's still really hot. Yeah, there's no... A decade ago, you would occasionally get these like hopeful climate stories where I'd be like, oh my goodness, they've invented these new plastic balls

they can put on the top of water or something and that'll save us. Or like, hey, have you heard about all these seaweed pills we can give cows and that'll save us? And like those stories have really dried up in the last decade, haven't they? All the stuff we were like, let's really pin our hopes to this. I know. Where are they now? And if you'll bear with me for just one quick doomsday story.

Of course. So Dr. Ed Donneridge at the University of Tasmania in Australia studies Australia's sea ice, which is this layer of frozen ocean that surrounds Antarctica. OK. And he told me that for ages the sea ice would melt in summer and then refreeze in winter in this very predictable pattern. It was like a heartbeat.

Well, every year, boom, boom, boom. And that heartbeat had been looking like a little less healthy, but then last year... Everyone was just kind of gobsmacked. As a community, we were just standing there flabbergasted. What... what happened? What just happened? The ice just didn't grow back. It just didn't grow back. Yeah.

How much ice is missing? At the maximum, we were missing about 2.7 million square kilometres of sea ice. So that's the size of Western Australia or Alaska and Texas combined. Whoa. Like huge, huge areas of ice. And that's terrifying. What do you feel when you see this as a human i just want to sit in a corner and cry yeah it's bad it's really bad i think also in terms of a

metaphor calling something calling something the heartbeat of the planet and then it's stopping is like pretty powerful. Yeah, yeah. And I think now with all this crazy heat and these, you know, really bad things happening across the planet, there's all of this talk that we're sort of on the brink of a tipping point. And that is actually what today's episode is all about. There's just these headlines saying, you know, we're so close to the tipping point. And that is actually what today's episode is all about. There's just these headlines saying, you know, we're so close to the tipping point. A UN official this year said we've got two years to save the planet. And so, Michael, when you read or you hear stuff like, you know, we're on the brink of a tipping point, what do you think it means? I would guess it means that, like, we're at a point in the history of the planet

where we will not be able, as a species, to reverse the effects of what we've done. And it'll create, like, a... I don't know, like like almost a whirlpool effect. It'll get faster and faster and the deterioration of the environment will be beyond our control. And even if we stopped all carbon emissions tomorrow, it's like the catastrophe has already, it's already underway

and cannot be stopped, like a runaway train. It's like the catastrophe has already, it's already underway. Yeah. And cannot be stopped. Like a runaway train. And when you like watch docos or news reports about tipping points, what you described is exactly what I feel. So this is like an example. We're near the tipping point.

Things are getting bad. They're worse than we thought. If tipping points are crossed, that could spiral beyond human control. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. And so today on the show, is the Earth truly on the brink of a tipping point? And are things getting so bad that the climate is about to spiral out of our control? Okay. We are going to go on a grand adventure on this search.

We are going to sink a boat. We're going to travel to the ends of the earth. We're going to drill a massive hole in Greenland until we find out. And actually, you know what? I will, not just for good radio craft, but also for my own personal sanity, I will remain committed to the idea

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a tipping point. And so far, things have been, frankly, Wendy, I'm not putting this all on you, but it's been pretty grim so far. All right. Time for some fun. So the term tipping point gets bandied about a lot. Every time something bad happens in terms of the climate, it's like, we're near the tipping point. We're near the tipping point.

I kind of might have led you there in our intro. But this kind of like grinds the gears of a lot of scientists because when scientists talk about tipping points, they're actually talking about this incredibly cool and very particular thing. And I talked about them with Felicity McCormack at Monash University in Australia. I mean, personally, I find the science of tipping points just so fascinating, like devastating and fascinating. It's just, wow, like this is how the earth works. So to find out how the earth works and what a tipping point really is, Felicity was like, let's start with an analogy. So backstory, 2020, lockdowns, I'm Zooming reading books to my niece.

And one of the books was Who Sank the Boat by Pamela Allen. So as Felicity's reading this book, she realises it's an excellent depiction of a tipping point. So in this book, picture it, you've got a bunch of animals. So there's a cow and a donkey and a sheep and a pig and a tiny little mouse. Can I ask which is your favourite of the characters in Who Sank the Boat?

The cow's quite delightful. But the sheep? The sheep is knitting. The sheep is knitting. So you've got all these animals, the cow, the donkey, the pig, the sheep with his little knitting needles, and they all decide to jump into a small rowboat. One by one, they jump in.

First the cow, then the donkey. And as each animal jumps in, the level of the boat drops a little lower, drops and drops and drops until finally the tiny little mouse jumps in and the boat sinks. So the mouse sank the boat. Right. Now, in the book, the animals just kind of collapse into the water. They're all very good swimmers.

All the animals survive. No one was hurt filming this book. Yeah, you'd hope so. What a horrifying children's book it would be if it was about animals piling into a boat and then all of them drowned. Who drowned? The animals. But to put this all into the context of climate change,

you can imagine that the weight of the animals is the heat from all the greenhouse gas emissions that we're putting into the air. And as it gets hotter and hotter, the animals are piling on. The boat can somehow hold on, like it hasn't sunk yet, but it is dropping a little bit further and a little bit further, but not sinking. But then all of a sudden, mouse jumps in, tiniest bit of heat, and bam, the boat sinks.

And so that is the tipping point. Okay. So you can think of it like a temperature threshold, and once we pass it, what happens next leads to an irreversible and self-perpetuating change. So that means that even if no other animals jump into the boat, you get, like, no more warming. The boat is still underwater.

Like, once it's inundated... It goes down and down and down until it hits the bottom. Until it hits the bottom and it's sunk. Can I ask you a question? Yes. If all the animals fall out and they swim away, you know, the boat itself, that'll sort of pop back up, right? The thing is that the carbon dioxide that we've currently been putting

into the atmosphere, it's going to stay up there for generations and generations. And so it's still going to be hot. Methane, which is another greenhouse gas that we are currently putting into the atmosphere, that will stay in the atmosphere for about a decade before it goes away. So that is good. But most of the heat that we are putting into this planet, it's not going to go anywhere for a really long time.

Okay. One scientist told me that, you know, we've often got this view with climate change that someone's going to come and, like, magic our way out of this and make it all better. But the idea with tipping points is that, like, that boat is sinking. Once you've crossed the threshold, there's really no coming back. So here's how Ed put it. He's the guy that studies sea ice. There is no way to go back from that decision. That's what a tipping point means. It's an

irreversible change. You change something in the climate system so fundamentally that we can't get it back. So Michael, in this analogy, do you want to have a guess? What's the boat? Ooh. I would say the boat is meant to be the climate. Planet Earth. Yeah, like the environment we live in. That's sort of what I had thought too.

And Dr Siva Wang, who's at the Breakthrough Institute in California, he says a lot of people seem to think that the climate of planet Earth is the boat. And it comes up in the question that I and every climate scientist I know get all the time, which is, are we screwed? Have we crossed the point of no return yet? So I think that's how everyone imagines climate change to be, where it's a cliff and, you know, beyond a certain temperature threshold, then all hell breaks loose.

So, for example, you sometimes see these headlines that the temperature threshold, the tipping point of Earth, is like 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Have you heard, like, about this number 1.5 C? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, 1.5 degrees above, like, before the loom was motorized or whatever. I don't know. So the number came from the Paris Agreement,

which is where all these countries came together and said, we've got a goal to limit the global average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which they say is 1850 to 1900. It's a bit after the power loom was invented. But anyway. So this number, 1.5 degrees Celsius, it's been great to have a goal like this, a clear target to talk about.

But now it's been reinterpreted as the tipping point of planet Earth. Yep. Some irreversible threshold for the whole climate. Now, actually, according to some measurements, for 13 months in the past 14 months, we have actually been over 1.5 degrees Celsius. Like, we are, like, August, we are living in a 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

You know, like, that is such a bummer on Brat Summer, you know? We're all having a great, great summer, Wendy. Okay, okay. But the thing is that this idea that the climate of planet Earth will fall off a cliff once we pass 1.5 C, that is not right. So here's Sabah. People think that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a tipping point for the Earth. And people, for example, have this mistaken idea that, you know, we're down to like maybe like six or seven or eight years left to save the climate. But that is absolutely wrong.

Okay. And the even better news is that planet Earth is actually not the boat that's sinking. Yeah, so the planet doesn't have a, you know, a tipping point yeah so this like neat and tidy and devastating story that that we think that like the world will hit this specific temperature this doomsday clock moment where bam the planet slides into irreversible climate chaos like that is not right so what's the boat what's the boat the boat is stuff on planet earth big stuff. So like the Antarctic ice sheet or the Greenland ice sheet. So Antarctica actually has two different ice sheets, east and the west, and each of them are like their own boats.

So we think that they tip at different temperatures. Right. Other tipping points are like warm water coral reefs. They've got their own tipping point. The AMOC, which is like this huge current system, plays a very important role in weather patterns. That's another thing that can tip. So there's like all these different tipping points on planet Earth.

So, wait, what you're telling me is that each individual system, you know, getting into a death spiral loop, will not necessarily end life as we know it on planet Earth. Yes. But all I envision now is this flotilla of sinking boats. Yep. And that any one of them could go wrong because of our mistakes we're making. But so now the question becomes, when are they going to sink, right? Right. Like, when are they going to start to tip?

And I want to zoom in on the ice sheets. And these are these, like, huge chunks of ice and basically crossing their tipping points would ultimately mean that they slide into a state where they melt and melt and melt until possibly they've completely melted. And then if the Antarctic ice sheets melt and Greenland ice sheets, and they all melt.

Yeah. What are we, is it Waterworld? Is it Kevin Costner Waterworld? So if we just lose, so Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are the ones that are on the table. For now. For now. For now. If we just lose Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, it's 13 metres of sea level rise. Good. That'll take out my house. Yeah. So 42 feet for our American audience. Say goodbye to chunks of, large chunks of New York, Miami, Shanghai, the Netherlands, a ton of Bangladesh. Not only that, there are then fears that the fresh water

that comes from all of that melt will then enter the oceans and muck up the currents. And if you read the news, it sounds like we are on the brink of crossing those tipping points. Oh, no. But is that true? Well, hopefully you'll tell me. After the break.

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Today on the show, we're looking at tipping points. Next stop, the ice sheets. So we're going to find out when will they tip. And I'm here with comedian Michael Hing. Hello. Hey, Michael. Can I ask, like, what is the actual process of an ice sheet uncontrollably melting? Like, what happens?

It's like it starts to melt. And then what is it about the water and the temperature that means it's all over? So it's different for different ice sheets. But let's just do the Greenland ice sheet. So with the Greenland ice sheet, picture this, like, big dome of ice. But ice can behave like a fluid. So here's Dr Felicity McCormack again. The ice sheet actually spreads under its own weight.

So like honey, right? As you warm it up, it kind of like spreads across a table. So if you imagine at the top of this ice dome, this honey ice dome, there's a couple of things going on. So the air at the top of this icy dome is colder than the air at the bottom. Sure. And because the higher you go, the colder it gets. Like if you climb a mountain.

Yep, classic. Classic. Outside an airplane, very cold. Very cold. That's right. The higher you get, the colder it gets. And so the idea is that as it melts from the top, it'll just shrink because it'll be like melting and melting and melting.

Yeah. So the worry is that as this ice sheet melts, it's getting shorter, further and further away from the cold air and into the warmer air. Yep. That's going to make it melt faster. But then not only that, what will happen is because now you're imagining the whole thing sort of moving, from the bottom it starts to stretch out and move out into the coastline.

Ah. And so then more portions of it will be like at sea level or whatever. Yes. Oh, no. The thing about sea level is, like like the sea, that's liquid water. That's liquid. That's liquid. That's right.

And so basically what scientists are trying to work out when they work out the tipping point of Greenland is like the temperature that tips that whole process into self-perpetuating cascade. Yeah, yeah. So will you come on an adventure with me as we explore how scientists get to this point? Yes. Okay, so one thing you can do is look at satellite data

and see how the ice has melted in response to climate change. Sometimes you see those on the internet. Yes. And it's never good. It's never good. It's like, hey, here's a picture of, like, you know, the world in 1963 or whatever, and did you know most of the world was ice caps?

And then they compare it to, like, they go, hey, and then last Tuesday we took this photo, and it's like, oh, it actually turns out Santa lives in a desert. It's the North Pole now. It's just sand. Obviously not that bad. It's not, oh, it actually turns out Santa lives in a desert. It's the North Pole now. It's just sand. Obviously not that bad. It's not that bad. But we've been losing eyes.

We've been losing eyes. Now from this, scientists could tell like, yep, ice is sensitive. This isn't good. But it can't tell us if we're on a tipping point. So to get to that, we have to go deep into our past. And, Michael, where we're going, we don't need roads. So Dr. Sarah Das at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution flies off to this vast cold mountain of ice.

We're heading to the Greenland ice sheet. You'll fly in to a place where no one's set foot ever before. And as you fly up over the edge, you're just going over the most dynamic and colorful and exciting features that ice is like nothing else on the planet, really. It's melting, it's breaking. It's like lava, but it's cold.

And then you fly up over these just bluest of blue lakes and these raging rivers and the whitest white snow. Yeah, it's extraordinary. Sarah is out here in this majestic landscape and what she's doing is drilling what are called ice cores, which I thought sounded very romantic. No, I don't know. I don't even know.

What do you mean? What do you mean? Well, Sarah, grace with you. It's not all romance. When you're out there working night and day with your small team, sleeping in tents on the snow and melting snow for water and eating dehyde, you're not always so enamoured with the ice cores. You're just trying to get the work done

and you not get too much frostbite and not get the drill stuck. What has happened in your love life, Wendy? I've been drilling ice cores, going back in time. Look, Sarah set me straight. And so what she's doing is basically, they've painted a picture of this industrial work that she's doing, is she's pulling out these, like, giant cylinders of ice. You can sort of imagine coring, like, a giant cold apple.

And scientists like Sarah are drilling deep into the ice because the deeper you go, the older the ice is. Yeah, I've heard about this. And you can look at the different, I guess, layers of ice. And then you go back and back. And it's like, oh my goodness, did you know like 250 years ago, it was just pure water or whatever. So it's not like 200 years. So scientists can go back like hundreds of thousands of years. Oh, wow. There's ice cores that go back a million years, right? So I call it like this magic time machine. It's not magic, right?

I mean, science isn't magic, but there is something magical about what we've learned. And so Sarah calls it a magic, not magic, science time machine because in the Earth's lifetime, there were times when it was like way hotter than it is today and the ice sheets had completely melted. There were other times it was much cooler. And so scientists can analyse these ice cores like tree rings

to see, like, what was going on with the ice sheets when the Earth was at different temperatures. And Sarah could see when it came to Greenland that nearly 10,000 years ago, when the climate was only, like, a little bit warmer than it is now, that parts of the Greenland ice sheet had significantly shrunk. So does that mean, so when someone like Sarah looks at this, they probably think that's where we're headed?

Yeah, it's a clue. It's a clue. And then, so there's other clues. This is a really cool clue I want to tell you about. So scientists, they'll drill down through the ice and then keep going until you get to the dirt below. And that in Greenland, that dirt is at least 400,000 years old. And what they can see in that dirt, this was reported just this year, is they found like a poppy seed and an insect eye from an insect that presumably would have been flying around

400,000 years ago when there was no ice sheet. Do you want to see a 400,000-year-old insect eye? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Here we go. Ooh. It's like kind of like a classic hexagonal kind of print

that you would see in a fly's eye if you zoomed in, but a chunk of it is missing, which I guess after 400,000 years, you'd expect some deterioration. I mean, it's pretty well preserved, right? Yeah. And they actually say in the paper that it's possibly a fly. Hey, I know my insect eyes.

But an insect eye can only get you so far. So just quickly to understand what tipping points are, scientists also use climate models, which you've probably heard of, but what they are, are these like computer simulations, very detailed computer simulations of how we think these ginormous hunks of ice melt. And basically researchers will take them and then make the temperature go up and up and up and up. And then they look to see, like, basically when the boat starts to sink. Uh-huh.

And so you put it all together. Thank you for coming on this long garden path journey with me. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Come on. Okay, you put it all together.

You got the ice cores. You got the satellite data. You got the computer models. What do we know? When will the ice sheets tip? So a recent study that got a lot of attention looked through a ton of studies and it estimated, now you know, Michael,

these scientists are trying their darndest here. They are trying their darndest. They have tried so hard to understand that temperature that's going to make the whole thing tip. And remember, the stakes are ice sheets melt, to understand that temperature that's going to make the whole thing tip. And remember, the stakes are ice sheets melt, sea levels rise 13 metres. That's right. Okay.

That's right. Okay. That's right. Okay. But in this paper, they gave a range. So best case scenario, let's start with best case scenario. They said the tipping point of Greenland is the Greenland ice sheet is three degrees above pre-industrial levels. Okay. Which could be under current projections at the end of the century. Okay. 75 years away. I'll be dead by then. I mean, that's not, that's very selfish of me to say that, but... That was an honest reaction in the moment, and that's all we need.

The West Antarctic ice sheet, by the way, roughly the same. OK. OK, so that was best-case scenario. Best-case scenario, end of the century. OK, worst-case scenario, Greenland ice sheet has a tipping point of just under one degree above pre-industrial levels. Oh, so we've already tipped.

We're post-tip. Post-tip. West Antarctic ice sheet as well. Yeah, well, I mean, seems this has put like this. Now that I know that, a lot of the laughing and joking we did before will seem insensitive. The apocalypse is upon us. And like.

Well, I guess that leads. We can't. We're not going to end here. We're not going to end here. Because then the question is. That should be the end of the episode. I know. Just you and I in stunned silence feeling incredibly helpless.

Is that how you're feeling in this moment? I did not realise that there's a chance we would already pass the tipping point. Yeah. And if we have passed a point where any of us can do anything, I mean, you sort of retreat to nihilism, right? It's like, well, what's the point? Nothing matters. You know, should I even be paying $8 to offset the plane ticket that I, you know?

Yeah. Does any of it matter? I mean, probably don't pay that $8, right? What? Wait, do you mean because of tipping point or just in general? I mean, surely they're a scam, right? Well, I... Continue with your thought process.

That's for another episode. So is there anything that can happen in the next whatever? I don't know, 50 years, 2 years, 100 years. Is there anything we can do that could possibly help any of this? Yes, yes, yes, yes. The thing that I think tipping points bring out in people is this sense of, like, we have lost control. That boat is sinking, after all.

This is an irreversible, the state of that ice sheet has shifted and now it's going to melt and melt and melt. That knitting sheep, it's doomed. That's right. That's right. But when I asked, like, every scientist, I spoke to a lot of them, and I was like, so does this mean game over? And they were all like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

No. No, it's not game over. At no point do you stop fighting. Because even if we've crossed the tipping point of Greenland or the West Antarctic ice sheet, and we might not have, right? We might not have. A lot of scientists I spoke to thought maybe we still have time. Uh-huh.

But even if we have crossed them, what we do now, it could matter a lot. Hmm. So I talked about this with Sarah, and she said that there's this big misconception out there that once we cross a tipping point, climate collapse happens right away. I mean, you think about Hollywood movies and everything happens fast. Ice sheets melt, your house is underwater by Sunday. Like 20 years or so ago, right? You're probably familiar with this movie, The Day After Tomorrow. Right, yes, yes.

That was like a Hollywoodization of, you know, the shutdown of the AMOC, everything flash freezing over. I mean, it was crazy, right? And then again, we have the don't look up, where it's like the metaphor of climate change was an asteroid coming in. Very much so, yeah. And like tipping points really fit into that. Right, but it's not an asteroid.

So even if, worst case scenario, we have crossed the tipping points of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, it would take probably more than 1,000 years, maybe even 10,000 years for them to completely collapse. So you were not particularly worried about something that was 75 years away, right? No.

So what you're talking about there is completely liquid ice sheets. The 13 metres of sea level. Yeah, that's 13 metres of sea level rise. Yes. But the seas don't have to rise 13 metres for our lives to be profoundly changed by the climate, right? Right, yes. And as they melt, sea levels will rise.

But the fact that this is happening slowly is actually really important because it means that we have time to adapt. People can move to higher ground, which is actually something that's already happening in the US. They've moved like thousands of people to higher ground. Like away from the... Yeah, like away from flood-prone areas. Yeah.

And we can also build seawalls. Mm-hmm. So if we have, you know, hundreds, thousands of years, we can do something about it. Yeah. And not only that, we can actually get a handle on our emissions so we don't heat up the climate as fast as we have been. And if we do that, we might also slow down

how fast these ice sheets melt. I talked about this with Sarah. Because if we keep heating up the world, these ice sheets will melt faster, we think. Even once we've hit a tipping point. Absolutely. Absolutely. That we know. Even once we've hit a tipping point. Even if Greenland reaches some point where it's just going to melt away, you know, if that could take 10,000 years versus 5,000 years, that gives us a lot more time to adapt and prepare. You know, we can buy ourselves time.

So there's never a point at which we can be like, oops, all right, too late. No need to do anything. So I guess, so all of this stuff about, you know, we have two years left to save the planet, or at the start of the show, how you said that you thought maybe tipping points meant that if we stopped all carbon emissions,

it wouldn't matter, the catastrophe's already here. I mean, the truth is that it still does matter, our carbon emissions. There really isn't a planetary cutoff. And so here's Dr. Siva Wang. There is no tipping point beyond which Mother Earth wrestles control of the whole climate system away from human beings and proceeds to punish us for our sins.

From a scientific perspective, that's just not how it works. And so what I tell people is humans have their hand on the thermostat, and that's not going to change. And so with our hand on that dial, at least in control of how much hotter it's going to get, what it all really means is just forget this idea of runaway climate change. It's more like the more emissions that we put into the atmosphere, the worse this gets, and the less emissions, the better it gets.

Yeah. And I know you know this, but that is true. Like tipping points, whether we hit tipping points or whether we don't, climate change is here now. Here's Sarah on this. You don't need tipping points to scare me. You can take them off the table and the sea surface temperatures are warming off the charts, heat waves killing thousands of people. We have coral reefs dying. We have glaciers melting, nevermind tipping points. We have sea level rising, flooding all over the place, you know, rise of diseases. I mean, all sorts of effects. Fires. Fires, right? You name it. You

wake up any given day and open the newspaper no matter where you are in the world and you can see an example of a climate change impact. Yeah. And maybe just to cap us off here, given all of these terrible things that are happening to the planet right now because of climate change, I've actually kind of started to think about tipping points a bit like that distracted boyfriend meme. Oh, and the guy's looking over his shoulder. Yeah, and everyone's like looking at the tipping points

and being like, when are they going to come? And then like the girlfriend in the back is like, I'm climate change and I'm right here. Look at me now. I'm making your lives bad right now. When did Science Versus become a podcast that describes memes from eight years ago? It was a big one. Oh, no. Look, hey, everyone knows what you're talking about. To be clear, it was a very

effective communication tool. Well, good. Well, good. Thank you. And I know this has been a little bit depressing, this whole episode. I know. But I do want to say that there is some good news when it comes to how we are solving this, how we are getting off fossil fuels. I mean, because I had thought we were really just like twiddling our thumbs while Rome burns. But I think there is some little bit of hope. There is some exciting stuff happening with renewables. There is some good news. Here we go. But we're going to save it for a different episode.

Oh, that I'm not on? Great. Okay. Thanks, Wendy. Thank you. What we're going to do for our how to Stop the Climate Crisis episode is it's going to be a Q&A. So we're getting listener questions, which could include, your question number one, should you get the $8 carbon offset? So we've got a panel of experts to talk about renewables,

how we get to net zero, questions if you've got questions about can we actually solve this you know that's i'm actually gonna have to listen to that episode then because if you've listened to this one and you're thinking yourself oh my goodness it's all completely screwed and you're feeling like i am right now which is exhausted and a little bit betrayed by your friend wendy frankly then the really the only remedy to that is listening to the next episode where, I mean, frankly, Wendy, you've got some work to do. Yes. To regain my trust.

Yes. So if you have any questions, then you can go to our Instagram, science underscore VS. You can ask me on my TikTok at Wendy Zuckerman, or you can send us a video or voicemail to our wonderful senior producer, Meryl. Her email is merylh at spotify.com. If you're in the US, there's a number to call. We're going to put all of this in the show notes.

I'm really excited to know what your questions are. Well, thank you so much for having me, Wendy. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks for coming, Michael. See you again soon. This episode has 107 citations in it. So if you want to read more about tipping points, just go to our show notes and there's a link to our transcript. And while you're looking at the show notes, you can see all of the ways to contact us if you've got questions about renewables and solving this climate crisis. If you want to hear more from Michael, he has not one, but two podcasts. There's Free to a Good Home and his

long-running Dungeons and Dragons podcast, which is called Dragon Friends. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Meryl Horne, Rose Rimler, Akedi Foster-Keys and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Sam Baer. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka and So Wiley. Thanks to all of the researchers that I spoke to. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I spoke to so many climate scientists and this is just a handful of them. Professor Andrew Dessler, Professor Christina Hulbe,

Dr. David Armstrong-McKay, Professor Tim Lenton, Aditya Lola, Dr. Elizabeth Maroon, Dr. Jan Nitzben, Professor Johannes Quas, Dr. Jonathan Leung, Dr. Kirsten Schell,

Dr. Maddy Rosevar, Michelle Dvorak, Dr. Robin Lamball, Dr. Zeke Hausfather, Dr Maddy Rosevar, Michelle Dvorak, Dr Robin Lamball, Dr Zeke Housefather, Dr Sam Crever, Flower Zhang and others. An extra thanks to the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We are everywhere.

If you are listening on Spotify, then follow us and tap the bell icon and then you'll get notifications when new episodes arrive. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time. Hello, this is Michael. At one point, Wendy's editor thought that it sounded like I was genuinely mad at Wendy. So I guess this is just like a voice message from me after the fact, saying that I wasn't mad at Wendy.

We're friends and we've known each other for a very long time. And I was just joking around. So I wasn't mad at Wendy is what I'm telling you. I can almost hear my mom in the background. Good. Can I go now? Is that okay?