Natural Disaster Expert: Elites Have NO PLAN for Climate Collapse

0:00of things carry on that the rate they are now, rate of heating, that we'll be seeing large numbers of deaths later this century. Three degrees C by 2050 is perfectly possible. So then you're looking at five or six degrees by the end of this century. And that's when it's going to be very, very hard for human civilization to carry on. Well, a number of analyses have suggested societal and economic breakdown anytime in the 2040s. There's a great line for Manus Tamingway. One of the best lines in English-speaking literature over the last 100 years, I think, where he talks about going bankrupt. It happens gradually, and then all at once. Over the course of the last few months, looking at the weather in this country, how dry it's been, how hot it's been. That's kind of how I feel about climate change. I'm sure for many of you out there, you've had the same feeling as well. Politicians and journalists often think in terms of minutes, hours, days, weeks. When really they need to be thinking in terms of years, decades.

1:02Certainly for a problem as big and as long term as climate change. In fact, today's guest thinks in the longest possible terms, he's passionate about geology. Now, bear in mind, our planet is about 4.6 billion years old. It's had many fluctuations in terms of climate. On the one hand, that provides sucker for climate change to buyers. They're not going to be able to do that. They say it's always got warmer. It's always got colder. The planet changes. On the other hand, the past can give us clues about what will change when we have higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, how much warmer will it get? How high will sea levels rise? Today's guest has thought about all of this stuff. For decades, he's a vulcanologist. He is highly credentialed in that world, but also climate change too. Increasingly, over the late 1990s and early 2000s, that's where he focused his attention, what he calls climate systems breakdown.

2:03He published this book a few years ago, Hot House Earth and Habitatants Guide. I really recommend it. 160 pages, really worth your time. And more recently, the fate of the world, a history and a future of the climate crisis. Of course, you can see Bill McGuire. Here are his credentials. They really stack up. Bill is a professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, a co-director of the New Weather Institute and a patron of scientists for global responsibility. He was a member of SAGE, the Science Advisory Group, in emergencies. Now, when somebody with that kind of CV tells you that you should be even more alarmed about climate change than you already are, you should probably pay attention. We know this is a problem. We know it's a crisis, but I think we also know, over the last few months, that things are probably developing even more quickly than the most frightened, alarming voices feared.

3:04Bill McGuire, thanks for coming on DownStray. Thanks very much, Helen. Great to be here. I am so looking forward to this episode, and I often say that at the start of these conversations and so often true. But I think with you, this is going to be a fabulous conversation because you're an authority on so many things. So we're going to talk about climate change, but also by training, you're a volcanologist. I am, yes. I started my life on volcanoes, active volcanoes, for my life, obviously, my career. And I went from there into looking at how climate and the Solid Earth interact, and then from there into more of climate science. So it's a sort of journey that lasted about 20 years or so. So when did you studies become a volcanologist? Well, as a kid, I was always keen on geology and fossils and rocks and this sort of thing. So thinking about what to do next, on the one hand, because it was in the late 1960s, I wanted to be an astronaut, obviously, as people did then. But my maths wasn't good enough,

4:05so I decided to do geology instead. So I went to university, did a first degree in geology. I was still mad on space, so I wanted to do a PhD involving planetary geology up and to look at marsh and images or the moon and look at those in terms of interpreting them in terms of geological processes, if you like. But again, nothing much came up. And then I was often an opportunity to work on mountaineer in Sicily, which I took and had an absolutely fantastic time. I mean, eating past, drinking red wine, and looking at rocks. So what more could you want in the sun? And when was this? You sort of turned towards volcanology? Well, that would have been... Nightwing with that 1977 to 1980. I did my PhD. And then after that, I went into lecturing and I was teaching in geology generally and also specializing in volcanology. Volcanoes, volcanic hazards, particularly. We're going to talk about volcanoes and super volcanoes in a minute. But I think this is just, as a chronology worth working out because it's a microcosm of a broader story.

5:06So this passion for geology and volcanic disturbances, when does that then become a broader interest than things like climate science, climate warming? Well, probably in the late 1990s, I think, when climate breakdown was becoming much more obvious and people getting really concerned about it, because I have to admit in the 1980s, it's not something I thought about a great deal. But as it became more in your face, if you like, then it was something that I turned to thinking, well, how to maybe volcanoes and a change in climate interact, how to earthquakes and climate interact. And it was about the late 90s, early 2000s that I got into that. And it was a time when the European Commission were giving quite big research grants to look at some of these areas. So we had one, for example, in the late 90s, to look at the relationship between Mediterranean sea level and change due to climate variations and volcanic activity.

6:06And there was a nice link there. So it began around about then, and it's progressed over the next 20 years or so. On volcanoes, some people might know you from various documentaries you did around this time, the late 1990s. Tell me about them. Yeah, there were two in particular. There was, in 1999, there was Supervolcano, which is really the first time people became familiar with that term. And it focused largely on Yellowstone in the United States. And what the potential for that to erupt in the future was. And then the following year, we made Megasyn Army wave of destruction, which was about a North Atlantic Megasyn Army. And that's based upon research at the time, which we undertook on the Canary Islands of La Palma, where you have a huge chunk of rock, maybe up to 500 cubic kilometers, which dropped a little bit in 1949 during the eruption. And it's now just moving very slowly. But at some point, that whole lot will go into the North Atlantic and trigger a major tsunami up to a kilometer high to start with.

7:08A kilometer high star, mate. Yes, because originally it would produce a huge bowl of water, and that would gradually die down to just a few hundred meters high. So when is this going to happen? Yeah, we don't know. I mean, hundreds of years, thousands of years even. Hundreds of years, though. And that's quite soon, isn't it? Yeah, well, you know, it could be next year. We have no idea. It's moving, it's creeping slowly. The last time we monitored it, which is in the early 2000s, it was still creeping very slowly. But then these things catastrophically fail. I mean, giant volcanic landslides are found at volcanoes all over the world, Ocean Island volcanoes. Hawaii is surrounded by these huge landslide deposits. And that generated waves, which hit California, for example, in the historic times. So they're common, but on average, around the planet, they happen maybe every 10,000 years or so. But that is common, you know, geologically speaking. I mean, there's that hamming way quite right about going bankrupt gradually than all at once. Yes, well, that's like a volcanic landslide. It's like lots of landslides, actually. They creep and then there's that fine trigger that sets them off.

8:12So in terms of the palma and the volcano, which is called the Cumbria Vieca, it could be any time, but that any time could be thousands of years in the future, or it could be a few years' time. There was a bigger option there a couple of years ago, and we were slightly worried, but nothing much happened. What's the volcanic disturbance slash catastrophe that we're most underpricing right now? What's the thing that you think my goodness? This could happen and it could really harm kill a lot of people, and we don't even talk about it. Well, I mean, people are always on about Yellowstone, that gets so much attention, but it's not showing any particular signs of erupting. There's a lot of magma down there, but it's not all joined up, you know, it all has to be joined up to come out and one go, at the moment it's in patches here and there. But there are a couple of other big volcanoes in South America, which are swelling, and we should have had huge eruptions in the past. One of them is Uttaruncu in Bolivia. Another one is Laguna Del Mowlin, Chile. So those are two volcanoes I always tell people to keep an eye on.

9:15I mean, they're not imminently going to do anything, but the magma's there, it's quite shallow. The volcanoes are swelling, and it's something I tell people they need to keep an eye on. And the other ones in Europe, in Naples, not the sousvios, but Campifla Grey, which is a volcanic cauldera, huge crater, that sometimes produces colossal eruptions, sometimes produces very small ones. And over the last 50, 60 years, it's been swelling and subsiding, swelling and subsiding. And in recent years, it's just been swelling and swelling and swelling. Now you're getting earthquake activity. There was a magnitude 4.71 there recently, I think. It's called Campifla Grey, the Fla Greyen Fields. And that could have an eruption almost at any time. And that's right in the middle of effectively in Naples, you know, so it's not a good place. Are our sort of political class and governing elites, and he talked a moment ago about funding rights towards the start of the millennium about this sort of stuff from the European Union, European Commission and whatnot.

10:18Is it like Independence Day? You know, is there a plan from Brussels and Paris and Rome that if that volcano goes off? There's a response. It's coordinated. People know what they have to do. Well, do you think that'd be a good idea of it? Absolutely not. There are no plans whatsoever. I mean, in, after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, Tony Blair set up a natural hazardous working group, David King, that ran it and I was on it. And we produced a report about major geophysical events that could affect lots of countries. And we made recommendations. We said, you know, there should be people should be keeping an eye on certain things. They should be monitoring. There should be plans in place about what to do. And nothing much happened for a while. And then I can't remember how this happened. But somebody said, oh, the UN would be very interested in taking this forward. So it disappeared into the United Nations machinery in 2006 or something and it was never seen again.

11:21So that would have been a great idea to have a global geophysical hazardous database for the really big ones. So that at least people in the countries that would be affected, the governments and people knew what risks they were and what the chances of those things happening. But nothing happened. Of course, this stuff is highly improbable. But equally, if you're unlucky, it's existential for men as people. A lot of cases, it's not highly improbable. It's almost certain. I mean, the faults that ruptured to generate the Indian Ocean of Sonarmy, that was absolutely known about it was known. It was due to go an American geophysicist who worked there spent his own money warning people in villages, warning the government, warning everybody. Nobody listened. And then it went just as predicted. And there are lots of places around the planet where we know the average return period of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions and where we know that they're due or overdue. But that doesn't mean anybody's going to pay any attention.

12:22So when I say I'm probable, for instance, the idea of a huge volcanic eruption in Naples, I think it's pretty not priced in to happen the next 10 to 20 years, just because the margin of how these phenomenon work more broadly. What you're saying is that's actually not right. That actually people are saying certain things should already have happened, actually, statistically speaking. Well, in the case of certain faults, in the case of certain volcanoes, you know that they tend to erupt or tend to rupture over your 50 years or so. If it's 60 years since the last one, you know something is normally about to happen. Give or take a year or two. You can't be certain, but quite often you do get this quite nice time table that you can stick to. So you can warn people. We have warned people in the past about places where these catastrophic events are due, but people will not listen. You know, they've got other priorities, politicians, especially, really aren't interested. And when you've got to look at, you know,

13:22what's been happening or not happening in response to the fire wave across the UK in recent months. So it's normal. Let's talk about climate change. You've traveled to us in London today, from where? From the peak district, which is sort of in the middle of England, about as far as you can get from the coast. That isn't the only reason I moved there. And you moved there when? 2007. So it'd been there about 20 years. And what made you move? Well, 2003, we had the first really serious heat wave in the southeast, and London was a nightmare. You couldn't sleep. We lived in Hampton at the time. The Hampton Court. It was too hot to sleep downstairs. It reached 38 degrees. The National Record was broken. And we just thought, God, we can't cope with another. Heat wave like that down here. So we, a few years later, we moved up out of the city further north and uphill. Those are the three things people might want to think about in coming years. So we live in a village of 500 people,

14:23a thousand feet up in a peak district. It's massively cooler. We've got a house that was built in 1676. So it's 350 years old this year. The walls are 2,000 meters thick stone. And that keeps out the heat, even at the height of the heat waves we've been having this summer. We don't have any trouble sleeping at all. You know, I was speaking to an electrician last week. And this to me was a really fascinating conversation because he had just had egg conditioning installed in his house. Yeah. This is an electrician in Port Smith, guy in his early 30s. And he said, well, the weather's not changing, is it? This is it now. And I find it interesting that he would say that, but then you've got politicians like Nigel Farage, a solar brotherman who won't say that. This is their target audience. There's clearly a disconnect, I think probably generationally as well as part of it, between the reality and then the political rhetoric. That chap would probably say to you, Bill, say you were in London in the heat wave, why don't you just get aircon?

15:23Why go all that way to a building from the 17th century or all that way up in the peak district, far from everyone? So what was the rationale in terms of you said those three things that people should think about that drove you to live in that particular place? Well, there were other issues as well, obviously. I mean, the heat was something that immediately drove us out. But we had a small child and the possibilities sent you into a little really school with 40 kids in, for example, is just tremendous. The attention you get there is, opposed to being in some 1,000 kids school is huge. It's fantastic countryside. It's, we've got about an acre, so we can grow a lot of our own fruit and veg there, which is going to become increasingly important. And also, although it sounds as if it's in the middle of nowhere, you can get everywhere in the UK quite easily from Derby, which is our nearest big city, because Derby's a big rail center. And it has railings all over the UK.

16:24So once you get there, you can get anywhere. It's just getting to Derby, that's easy. I mean, Derby's slap bang in the middle of England, right? It is slap bang in the middle of England. In fact, if all the ice melts, the sea will just come up to Derby, right in the centre of England. Wow. Are you a survivalist? I'm not a survivalist, but I'm... I'm certainly preparing. I mean, we're increasing the number of water butts we're having water harvesting, because that's going to be obviously a huge issue in summers to come. Saving seed, storing, we're not doing it yet, but we will be storing things like flour and sugar and cooking oil in relatively large quantities in the cellar, because it's common sense. I think most people can look around this year and look at what the harvest is doing in the UK and in Europe, and they will rightly say, well, that makes sense. I mean, this year, just to be clear, and this was announced a few days ago,

17:25wasn't it this year, 2026, is the worst year on record in terms of a harvest for arable crops? Yeah. And the other three worst harvest since 2020. So, this is a dramatic... I mean, I knew this was going to be happening, obviously, and so I did any climate scientists, but the speed is just staggering. And, you know, once we get to a stage where you got food rationing, then everything changes, everything's up with grabs. And I don't know how quickly that can happen now. You... That's a crazy thing to hear. It is. That's a crazy thing to hear, because I've read your two books here, and we'll talk about them. You're talking about having moved in 2007 to somewhere that's high. You've got your own land. It's cooler. I presume you're talking about Darby, you know, potentially being at sea level, so maybe not in the very near term, but it's also safe from rising sea levels. And you're talking about rationing. That's not just me and that's not all farmers, you know, have worn about shortages of foods later this year.

18:26So, you know, this is common knowledge now, I think. But how plausible is rationing of something like flour in Britain? So, you think that could happen before the end of the 2020s? Well, in the... I mean, over the last five years, because of bad serial harvest, Britain lost the years worth of bread supply, a year of bread supply out of four years. Now, that's, you know, you don't need much more than that, and you will have to ration it. So, it's not, you know, it's not a surprise. It's just happening so staggeringly quickly, and much sooner than I expected. So, you're surprised by the speed of it? Oh, God, yes. Yeah. Has there some a surprised you? I think the surprising thing was how early the heat wave started. Now, to see 35 degrees in May, that was really the most astonishing thing. The sort of temperatures we've had in July and August are not unprecedented. And we still haven't broken the 40 degrees C record that was set in 2022.

19:26But it's the fact that it started so early, and it's just gone on and on and on. And we're not finished yet, you know, we may still get other heat waves towards the end of August and in September. It's worth saying, actually, so what's been so special about this year? We've had, I think, 38 days where we've hit 30 or more. So far, we've had four consecutive months where we've gone beyond 30 degrees. So in May, June, July, August, possibly September, people are talking about a heat wave in September, although, you know, that's in the future, we don't want to speculate too much. What's already happened is bad enough. And then we've seen, I think unprecedented drought. So for instance, we were in Whizzly in, sorry, at the end of last week, my colleague and I, and it didn't rain there for two months. And the previous record, I believe, was 37 days in 1976. Some people talk about 1976 as this outlier, which it was, for UK weather.

20:27And it's almost... That's why they remember it because of the white stuff. I like a sore thumb. Yeah. But now it's actually double almost what the outlier was. I want to read just an excerpt from this book, Hot House Earth and an Appetite's Guide. Brilliant book and actually very short, well, like 150, 164 pages. By the second half of the century, 40 degrees C, some temperatures and southern and central parts of the UK could well be driving people out of their appallingly insulated homes and towards cooler parts of the country. Now, you wrote that in 2022. I mean, that might happen in the next couple of years, right? Oh, yes. In fact, the extraordinary thing is, the week that book came out was the week that the temperature in the UK hit 40 degrees for the first time. Now, if you want good PR for a book, a book launch, what more could you want? So, literally, that came out the week it was 40.2, I think it was, which is still the record. But it's possible, even within the current climate, to see temperatures of 43 or more in the UK. So, who knows, next year, I mean, it could be a bad one.

21:33Because of the El Nino, which we'll know to talk about later. We can talk about El Nino now. So, you think we could go above 40 next year or the year after. How does this work, then, El Nino? How does it interact with breaking the present record for the UK, which I believe was Q or Heathrow in 2022, which was about the last two years? Colleagues B was, I think, it was in Yorkshire, a link. Tell me about El Nino. Well, El Nino is the second biggest climate signal other than the seasons. So, you know, that's how big it is. That's how much impact it has on the global climate. And it involves the heating up of the Eastern Tropical Pacific. So, you see, because that heats up so much, it affects the air patterns above it, and they have knock on impacts right across the planet. And it brings extreme weather to places as far off field as Peru and Australia and Europe as well. And North America, it affects everything and everyone pretty much. Now, El Nino is a classified on the base of how much hotter

22:37the Eastern Pacific gets. And the record is something like 2.7 degrees C, I think. Something like that, in 1877. That was the biggest El Nino on record. Well, estimates now are for something getting on for four degrees. That's just staggering, unprecedented. And nobody's really sure what the impact of that will be on the global climate and global weather systems. No one's really sure, but obviously you're a highly learned man on the stuff and you've seen a ton of data. So, what's your informed suspicions? Well, the changes to the weather you get from El Nino are obviously superimposed on all sorts of other influences for the weather. So, you can't say everywhere on the planet is going to get hotter. But El Nino, because it brings up so much heat into the atmosphere, it does result in the global average temperature to planet heating up. So, you know, we're pretty much getting on for 1.5 degrees C

23:40above pre-industrial now. Next year could be above 1.7 C, because of the impact of El Nino. That wouldn't necessarily be permanent, you could come down again. But, you know, when you've got that much more heat, spread out across the planet, a lot of places will be much, much hotter. It's possible the UK might get away with it, but the chances of it being another dreadfully hot summer are pretty highly, I would say. So, there's a few things I want to say to you, responding to that. People talk about 1.5 to stay alive, 1.5 degrees, but as I understand it, the IPCC says you need 1.5 for 11 years, and then we're at 1.5. Well, it's a mad system of measuring it really, because it's the average over 20-year period. So, it would mean that if we got past 1.5 this year, it wouldn't be officially confirmed till 10 years time. Now, that's just bonkers, to be honest. We need to know when we've passed 1.5. Otherwise, fossil fuel companies and others will say,

24:42oh, it's fine, we've got plenty of time, we're not beyond 1.5 yet, so we can just keep going. Now, it's just another excuse for business as usual. There are ways of determining whether you're at 1.5 by looking at the current level of global warming and saying, well, we look back over the last few years, we've got an average of 1.5, this is where we're at. And we need something, we need to be able to say, this year, we're at 1.5, now we're at 1.5, too, whatever, because it's the current systems mad. So, we're at 1.5. Well, effectively, we're at 1.5, yeah. And we were, you know, 1.5 has been dead in the water for years. And one of the worst things, I think, we see every year is a cop, you know, the cop conferences, climate cops, every November, early December saying, we must do our hard, our best and our hardest to keep the global average, 20 below 1.5 degrees. They're still saying it last year for God's sake. I mean, we're pumping out 40 billion tons of CO2 a year still,

25:45and we're at sort of 1.48 or something like that, you know. It's dead in the water. It's been dead for ages. Why carry on with this nonsense? Well, we had Kevin Anderson on a few weeks ago, and, you know, in terms of their methodology, it is plausible if, I think, I think Britain, basically, would have to reduce CO2 emissions by something like 12% every year. You know, we'd have to decarbonize completely by maybe the late 2030s, and, you know, more, more, what would be more difficult, of course, is that the global south, while still developing, and while population is growing, would have to do something similar. He said 8%, which is just, and that's by their own methodology, which you're acknowledging is kind of stupid of being clung to agree, as somebody who knows a lot less, but is, you know, relatively aware of these things. So 1.5 is dead, and it's being used almost as a delaying tactic by vested interests. Yeah. And you're saying 1.7 is quite plausible, they'll need you next year. Well, in 2024, the global average temperature was over 1.6. Yeah, because of the last tail of the need, you know.

26:46So over 1.6 next year, 1.7, pretty much certain, I think, it could be higher than that, who knows, we've, you know, this is so unusual. We don't know what's going to happen, really. And you were saying about how different places warm up in different ways, and again, this is something in Hot House Earth. Places with water warm up at different rates to land masses. The Arctic is warming up much more quickly than, you know, the southeast parts of the United States. And then in the book, you talk about something which I'd completely forgotten about, which was British Columbia, getting to the high forties. Oh, yes. I mean, a few years back, you had 49 degrees, so you had towns obliterated by wildfires, something which was staggered by at the time. But now you're seeing 40 degrees in the UK, and British towns hit by wildfires. So that's just an example of how quickly things are progressing, I think. For people who want to wear in British Columbia, it's a warm part for Canada, but it's still Canada.

27:49Yeah, it's a maritime province, so it's normally got a fairly amenable climate. You know, it's fairly damp in winter, and it's mild in summer, hotter when you go further inland, but, you know, one degree below 50 degrees centigrade is not what you would expect there. But they do also have skiing results, you know, like Whistler and so on. They do, yes. Well, you know, it's damp in winter, but if you're high enough up, but dampness translates into snow, so. And it has got big mountains, yeah, the Rockies goes up there, but, you know, all the same, bordering on 50 degrees in Canada is, you know, bonkers, really. You don't like the time global warming? No, I don't know. Many people I know don't use global warming, warming, you know, when it's something a bit warmer, sounds cosy, you know, quite nice, but heating is something quite different, and the rate at which things are changing, heating is a much more appropriate term. So I use global heating as do other media sources and the garden will use that, for example.

28:49And I use climate breakdown because climate change can be either way, you know, it can be for the better or for the worse, but breakdown is what we're seeing, a stable climate, which we've had relatively speaking over the last few thousand years, is now falling apart and becoming extremely unpredictable. I want to talk about some sort of deep history now, some deep geology. We're going to get back to climate change, but I think this is really important in terms of understanding the bigger picture in terms of how much climate systems are constantly changing, which, you know, is quite hard to appreciate because we have fallible human brains and cognitive biases and recency biases. We also have those as societies, so if something's looked like a certain way for 200 years, we think that's just how it's always going to be. And I think that the sort of deep history in the geological history that you offer particularly and have already big up this book, in this book helps contextualize a lot of that. So what was thea? Oh, that's a great story. Thea was a body, a terrestrial body, a lump of rock, roughly mass-sized. It's been suggested that collided with the Earth in its very early history.

29:55And it was that impact that not a great chunk out of the planet, which broke up and circulated around in orbit and then clumped together the form of the moon. And the impact also tilted the planet, but it looks for it as well. So, you know, that's the reason we've got seasons. The moon gives us tides. If that hadn't happened, we may not have any tides. We may not have any seasons. The world would be completely different. We might not even be here. Life would have evolved differently. So, you know, that one accident, if you like, has got us where we are today. And when was that? Oh, it was first 100 million years of the Earth's history. I mean, yes, 4.6 billion years old, so very, very early on. I mean, the whole solar system would be in full of debris. And the planets were forming by bits of debris coming together and colliding and sticking, the process and there's accretion. So, the Earth had accreted up lots of other bits, and it was pretty much formed. And then this last huge bit hammered into it. That's incredible.

30:55It is, isn't it? So, this is 4.5 billion years ago, basically. Yeah, exactly like that, yeah. When was the Hadian era? That was from the very moment the Earth can be regarded as a single planet for the next, getting on for a billion years or so. When it was very, very hot, very, very unpleasant. And still being bombarded by stuff, you know, hanging out in space now and again. So, you wouldn't have wanted to be around and life... Well, I was going to say, you know, life would find it very, very difficult, but extraordinary life... It looks as if tiny, microscopic life started within a few hundred million years of the Earth being formed, which is astonishing, really. It didn't do anything for a couple of billion years after that, but, you know, it got going very quickly. And what did it rely on? Oxygen had this work. Well, it needed water, that's the critical thing. And even though the Earth was very hot, there was still oceans, because water could still take liquid form. If the pressures are very high,

31:56and the atmosphere at pressure was very, very high there. So, water wasn't boiling off. You still had liquid oceans. And you need water for these early life forms to grow. But they were, you know, literally single-cell things. But the fact that they could form that soon, you know, on a mass-free, in-hospital planet is amazing. There's five billion years of geological history. We're not going to go through all of it, but this is the most interesting stuff. What's the Cambrian explosion? I think people hear about this a lot often. You hear Jeff Bezos will say, we're having a Cambrian explosion in terms of revenue models for digital commerce. What is the actual Cambrian explosion? Well, if you take the whole of Earth history, 4.6 billion years ago, up to about 540 million years ago, not a huge amount happened. But then there was an explosion of life in the oceans, or an explosion in what we can see, because they preserved as fossils. So there was life before that,

32:58and probably quite complex life as well. But it looked as if by the Cambrian it was developing harder parts that could be preserved as fossils. So, you know, life would have been a burdening maybe 100, 200 million years before that. But it's 540 million years ago when the Cambrian stars that we see all these different amazing forms preserved in sediments. You send the book as well, you know, basically for a billion years nothing happened. Yeah, there's something called a boring billion. But nothing happening means nothing enormous happening. I suppose things were happening all the time, but there was nothing like the emergence of life or snowball Earth or something, which is another great time in the Earth's history. I'm loving this. And this is actually very pertinent now to the climate change conversation. What is the PETM, the petem? That's the paleocene ear seen thermal maximum, as it's called 56 million years ago.

33:58The Earth was already hot, and in fact the Earth's been hot for much of its history. But it got even hotter very, very rapidly then. There was an increase in temperature of 5 to 8 degrees centigrade in a few thousand years. And that is that rate of change is quite often compared to what's happening today, except what's happening today is happening 10 times faster. So, you know, this is a critical point of this whole comparison between history and where we're going. And that is that the rate of heat now has never ever happened at all in the history of our world. And the PETM is caused by an ejection of huge amounts of carbon in the atmosphere. Yeah. It's something called a hyperthermal when hot can get even hotter. And in almost every case that is resulted that comes from a major lava eruption and we're talking sort of millions of,

35:00square kilometers of land covered. And this goes on for thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, even millions of years in some cases. And over that time it is pumping out calm dioxide all the time. She's heating up the atmosphere. In the case of the PETM, you had very rapid, geologically speaking, heating over a few thousand years or so. So it's CO2 coming from lathers. And there's a sort of double whammy as well because that CO2 heats the planet a bit more. And that increased temperature causes these deposits you get in marine sediments called gas hydrates to break down. Gas hydrates are a little bit like water ice, but they contain methane, natural gas. And when they break down, that methane is released. Through the sea into the atmosphere and that heats things up even more. So you got this sort of double whammy. Now this sounds very reminiscent of the, of the feedbacks and the taking point that we talk about with climate change. Yeah, it is a feedback. So the lava eruption produced a CO2,

36:01heats the planet, that extra heat causes gas hydrates to break down. That has more methane, that heats things up even more. So positive feedback effects, that reinforce heating. And of course, marklinus wrote a really fabulous book about this stuff. I'm not all of it's necessarily correct in terms of predictions because there's huge margins of error. Six degrees. But the big ones are methane stored in cyber and palmafrost and of course methane hydrate, which you're describing. Gas hydrates, methane hydrates. In the oceans. And then there are other aspects like the Amazon, if that disappears, it becomes, you know, it's creating carbon, rather than being a carbon sink, etc. So you're drawing a parallel between where we are now, basically the last what 170 years, and man make climate change, human made climate change, you're drawing a parallel between now and the pattern. And you're saying that the pattern was driven by volcanoes. We see warming of six to eight degrees, because that happens over a really long period of time.

37:02And a climate skeptic would say, well, we can carry on doing this for thousands of years, then that's okay. What would you say to them? Well, that's, you know, we're heated the planet 10 times faster than at the pet area now. So, you know, we haven't got that time, we haven't got any time. And the reason we don't know how hot things are going to get, how quickly is that even though we can model to some degree, and so on, the model is very useful, there's no precedent for what's happening now. Ever? I think in the book, correct me from wrong, because we're drawing on lots of numbers. So I might be getting this, making us, you know, but out by a factor of God knows what. But you say that the amount of CO2 being ejected in the atmosphere now is about 40 times what it was during the pattern. That's the rate of it. The rate of it being ejected is much faster, significantly faster, yeah. That's incredible, isn't it? I know this happened over a very long period of time, but the idea that the biggest ejection of carbon in the atmosphere, in the Earth's history,

38:03as far as we know, and we're out doing it by 40 times now. Well, the pattern, what did, you know, that did involve a huge ejection of carbon dioxide, but that was nothing compared to the Permian Triassic boundary, the Great Dying, two hundred and fifty million years ago. That was, you know, colossally more, and that wiped out 95% of all life. You know, that was bad. I mean, the pattern was bad. The Great Dying was, as you would expect for something called the Great Dying. So, carbon triassic, that's the beginning of the dinosaurs, right? The Triassic. Permode triassic was, I mean, whenever you get these big, mass extinction, something else always comes along and benefits from them, and it was the dinosaurs after that, yeah, Triassic and then into the Jurassic and Creditius. Nine-year-old me is loving it. You talk as well about, and again, this is, you know, I'm religious, I believe in God. We'll talk about this a little bit later on, but reading the fate of the world and the geological history,

39:04it's just magnificent, isn't it? No, it's stunning, yes, astounding, really. It would be great to have a quick trip through geological history, you know, visiting, stopping off, visiting the best events, I think, all the most interesting events, and seeing being there, being, I think, in the fate of the world, I describe what it might be like, standing on the coast of Mexico when the asteroid hit 65 million years ago. Maybe that's not some of you might want to be, but you would still have been astonishing, you know, 10-kilometer object hitting our world at some colossal speed. Being in the straits of Gibraltar when the Mediterranean basin fills with water, yes, so it would have taken a few years, but yeah, when the waterfall just starts, yeah, I know, so many spectacular events you could revisit. So we've got the pattern. What's the 8.2KA event? Oh, that's, well, 8.2KA is K for 1000,

40:05so it's 8.2Ka's event. So really quite recent, 8,200 years ago, and it involves the entrance into the North Atlantic of a large body of cold water, melt water, probably, from the ice was still melting, as we came out of the last ice age. And that looks as if it might have had an impact on tsunami activity in the North Atlantic, because we have around about this time Scandinavia, which was covered in something like 3 kilometers of ice. We had that as the ice was removed bouncing back up again, because the ice, the weight of the ice, caused this, caused the whole of Scandinavia to be forced down by hundreds of meters. When the ice went, the whole lot came up again. And the crust underneath it had had earthquake had active faults in it, which were accumulating strain over 1000,000 years,

41:06but they couldn't release it, because of the weight. When that was removed, you started to get massive earthquakes, magnitude 8 earthquakes in Scandinavia, in Lapland. You expect to find farther Christmas there, you don't expect earthquakes that you'd normally get in the Pacific, in the ring of fire. And one of these earthquakes triggered a huge submarine landslide of the coast of Norway around 8,200 years ago. That triggered a tsunami that came down into the North Sea across Scotland, across the Shetland Isles. And if it happened today, it would be utterly devastating. And that's a fantastic example of how climate and geology interact. So as people probably can already grasp, we're trying to create some kind of chronology here. The greatest hits from the fear through to the Canberra and the explosion through to a little bit over 8,000 years ago. Next is the Roman warm period. What's that?

42:08Well, if we look at the climate of Europe over the last few thousand years, there are times when it's been quite warm and times when it's been relatively cold. So the Roman warm period was saw mild conditions across Europe. It's followed by much cooler conditions. And then we got into the medieval warm period when temperatures were a bit higher. Then the little ice age, which is characterised by sort of decencing Christmases, you know, frostfares on the Thames and this sort of thing. And these different changes in temperature are in some ways related to very small variations in solar output. And in fact, climate deniers will say, look, we were warmer in the past and we were colder than we were warmer. That's all to do with the sun. It's nothing to do with calmly oxide because there wasn't any additional CO2 around then. But as usual with deniers, they don't know the whole story. These were regional events,

43:08so they didn't affect the whole planet. So they weren't global warming or global cooling. It just happened that Europe was affected. Other parts of the world were affected at different times. Or weren't affected at all. And although the sun was a contributor and it's, you know, it's, it's, activity does vary very slightly. It wasn't the main instigator of these things. So it's just, it wasn't the main instigator. It wasn't the main instigator. It was just a contributor. And they were not global events. So you can't say it was warm in Roman time. It wasn't actually warm to be honest. It's warm in the other than any other of these warm periods. But in any case, it was a regional event. So, you know, once again deniers are, I get the wrong end of the state. This is what Pears Corbin says, right? Pears Corbin says all sorts of things. I think this is Pears Corbin's account for, you know, why it's feeling warmer is because the sun is, you know. Yeah, well, I know, I've known Pears for a long time. And he had a weather forecasting company. I don't know if he still has. And he used to have contracts with insurance companies

44:11who were obviously interested in the weather, who used to rely on him. And everything was based upon the sun and the sun's activity. I don't know anymore than that because obviously, he didn't tell anybody his secret. But it's just not true. I mean, we can look at variations in solar activity over, you know, many, many years. And you do get cycles. You get a sunspot cycle 11 year with 11 year periods. But you can, you know, there's no increase in solar activity or decrease in solar activity. They can explain the sort of global temperatures that we're experiencing. Now, there's no doubt whatsoever that it's purely an increasing greenhouse gases. Do you know the dates for the Roman War period? I think it was then these Pears don't have fixed dates because various people think they started in different times. But you know, you're talking maybe 100 years BC, sort of 300, 400 years AD, something like that.

45:11Which is basically the upper share of the Western Roman Empire. Yes, which is why, yeah, which is why it gets the name. You say that 536 was the worst year in history to be alive. Yeah, you don't see on the side. And that you're citing a paper that says that. Yeah, yes. I mean, that was during a time when Europe at least got much, much colder. Sun may have had something to do with it. It looks as if it may, mainly it was a number of massive volcanic eruptions. It's superimposed upon one another. Because when you have explosive eruptions, rather than lava eruptions, you pump a load of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. And sulfur dioxide is excellent at reflecting solar radiation back into space. So it lowers temperatures. And you get very rapid cooling. I mean, we, you know, yellowstone, for example, when that's interrupted in the past, it's thought to have brought down temperatures, global temperatures by three or four degrees, which is getting on for halfway to ice age conditions. So a number of these smaller eruptions,

46:12but enough to pump a lot of acid into the atmosphere, seem to have really made a miserable climate around that time. For lots of people. For Europe. I don't know what it was like in the rest of the world, but Europe, which is pretty much all we know about around it. That sort of thing. I think the path you took about the pathiens as well. So bits of West Asia as well. Yeah, probably struggling. But it's not a good place, not a good time to be around. I would say that was today as well. Yeah, wait till 2027, I'd say. Yeah. Yeah, it's creeping up, isn't it? It's the silver medal right now at 2026. So when people say that grapes were growing in Britain 2,000 years ago, that's not untrue. This is something that climate deniers say quite frequently, right? The weather of Westchangers, look, they were growing. This crop was here at this particular point. Okay, they've come back. They're English wines now, but they were here before. You're not disputing that. No, no, and I think there's pretty much probably always been wine growing in Britain, probably only in the South, Southeast, and rarely.

47:12Now, obviously, it's massively expanded. But that doesn't tell you anything. It tells you to the climate in Europe, as was slightly warmer. Not warmer than it is now, but slightly warmer than it had been previously. But it's not global heating. So when was the last time the planet was as warm as it is today? I think we're pretty much the thing is, over the last 50 million years, 55 million years ago, the temperature of the planet just gone down, down, down, down, and down. So we hit ice age conditions 2,5 million years ago. And now we're rewinding that, all the, you know, starting to rewind it back. And we pretty much got back as far as the last interglacial period, called the Imian, about 120,000 years ago. Temperatures were one to one and a half degrees above pre-industrial. And that's where we are now. So we've rewound our climate 120,000 years. And we're going to keep going back up that temperature-increasing trend.

48:16So if we get to sort of, this is a strange question, I know. So you're saying that one and a half, which we know we're out, we had this conversation earlier, if we get to two, three, how far back do you start looking then? Well, by the time you get just two, three degrees, you're back to the Pleiocene, which is about three million years ago. Then you had, the worrying thing is that the Pleiocene is two and a half, four degrees above pre-industrial. But the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 330, the 400 past per million. Now it's a 430 past per million. So that's the best we can hope for, I think, is a return to Pleiocene conditions. Three degrees C-Hotter, C-Levels, eventually 15 to 25 meters higher. That's probably our best case. And if you want to stop there, we better, emissions need to peak by 2040. Act now so that Britain can look like Indonesia. And of course there's a delay, and this is key, there's a delay between concentrations of CO2

49:23and the atmosphere and the kinds of things you're talking about. Yeah. So there isn't much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We talk about parts per million. Yeah. Before the Industrial Revolution, we're looking at something like 27280. Yeah. And now it's 430. Yeah. So 50 percent increase. Yeah. So when was the last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere? And that's not the same as how hot it is, because we just said there's a delay between CO2 and heating. So when was the last time there was this much CO2 floating around? Probably about 15 million years ago. So, you know, back to the Pleiocene. If we don't stop, if we keep rewinding the clock and don't stop the Pleiocene, we'll end up in the Pleiocene, middle Pleiocene, climate optimum. So 15 to 17 million years ago, you had 600 to 800 parts per million of CO2 and the temperature was 7 to 8 degrees C hotter. Now nobody's certain why that was. That's too high for those levels of carbon dioxide.

50:26And the possible reason is that you start to get serious breakup of cloud cover as the temperature increases as CO2 constricts increase. And that lets in a lot more sun's heat. And we're seeing that now. We're seeing cloud cover start to break up in the tropics quite significantly over the last couple of decades. So, you know, that's very, very worrying indeed. And lots of people say that, you know, humans would struggle to live on a planet at six degrees warm than today. Yes, they would. Why? Well, six degrees is an average temperature. You're talking much of the land masses being much, much hotter than that, or the increase being much greater than that. So you're talking, you know, common temperatures of 40, 50, getting up to 60 degrees maybe in places. You most crops won't grow effectively over about 30 degrees.

51:26So you're, you know, you're getting into the realms of much planet being uninhabitable. And probably a lot lower temperatures than that. I think at four degrees, you're going to be struggling to grow anything worthwhile. Certainly the feed of population of the size we have at the moment in most parts of the world. I think this is worth sort of probing because I'm not actually interested necessarily in, okay, well, we could sustain a planetary population of one billion if everyone moves to the Arctic and the Antarctic and, you know, at what point does the earth become literally uninhabitable for human beings, maybe in terms of air composition, right? You know, because obviously we're a lion ox, a journey, etc. But what point would there be too much methane in the atmosphere for us to breathe or anything with lungs to struggle, for instance? What are we looking then? Well, it won't be the composition of the atmosphere, it'll be the heat. I mean, the sun is heating up more, it is growing in terms of the outputs out, but, you know,

52:27every million year by million year, if you like. And by the time we get to say another 250 million years in the future, it'll be too hot for most life forms on the planet. So, you know, most of the conditions for life to exist on the planet is already over. We've done 80% of it. Then another couple hundred million years left, and then there'll be nothing to speak of left. I mean, the sun will keep getting hotter and hotter and hotter after that. But after 800 million years, we'll be back to unicellular life. I think you say in 600 million years time, there'll be no plants because photoscence is not working. Yeah, and then after that, a couple hundred million years after that, there'll be a girl, really. I saw it's not far on in geological terms. It's not far. I remember reading a great tweet, and the person said, I'm a socialist because I care about the heat death of the planet, you know. We need socialised productions so that one day our descendants can go down to what? There's Chinese sci-fi about this, by the way, about moving

53:30the Earth to another star and all kinds of crazy things. I like Chinese sci-fi. There's some great stuff being written over there. Yeah, Xi Jinping does a story about they move the planet to another star because I still have a guy. I think I've read that, I actually can't remember the name. Yeah, fantastic. But I suppose most people watching all said, well, that's terrible for anything that's around a couple hundred million years time. But let's say that the planet is five degrees warmer in 200 years, right? plausible-ish, quite plausible. You suspect humans won't be around to reproduce at the kind of rate we'd expect for a successful species, basically. Well, my personal view and the view of others is if things carry on, that the rate they are now, rate of heating, that we'll be seeing large numbers of deaths later this century. Maybe not that much later this century. I mean, let's look at the rate of heating. We're talking about the current rate, which is generally used now, which is 0.35

54:35of a degree centigrade. That's one degree every 28 years. So you're looking at two degrees arriving in the late 2030s or 2040. But the satellite data suggests that the planet's heating up much more rapidly, maybe a half a degree a decade. And there was a report last year by the German physical and meteorological societies saying three degrees C by 2050 is perfectly possible. So then you're looking at five or six degrees by the end of this century. And that's when it's going to be very, very hard for human civilization to carry on. Well, a number of analyses have suggested societal and economic breakdown any time in the 2040s for business as usual. And I would agree with that because the impact of extreme weather will just become all pervasive. And this impact on economies, impact on food security

55:35will rapidly, very, very rapidly really start to hammer home in terms of deaths, I think, particularly in majority world countries, but not only there. Let's stick with that for a moment. Explain for me quickly the difference between wet and dry bulb temperatures. Because this is the thing that we're really talking about when we say tens, hundreds of millions, billions of people potentially not living through all of this. So what are these things? What's the difference between wet and dry bulb temperatures and when does it get dangerous for humans? Well, when we have a normal thermometer, we're measuring the temperature of the air. So, you know, 30 degrees, 35 is extremely hot and unpleasant. But using what's called a wet bulb thermometer, the temperature you see is a measure of heat and humidity. And when you reach 35 degrees on a wet bulb thermometer, it means the air is saturated with water. And if it's saturated with water, you cannot sweat. I mean, we lose heat by sweating. If you can't sweat, you can't lose heat. And so the temperature,

56:38the internal temperature of your body just increases and increases and increases until your organs start to fail. And you've got about six hours to live. So, you know, these conditions do occur and they're becoming more common, particularly in the Gulf region, in parts of central America, in South Asia, etc. And in China. But they're going to become more and more common. And at the moment, the saving graces, you don't get wet bulb temperatures of 35 degrees see for very long because you tend to get massive thunderstorms that break the temperature, if you like, and temperature falls. But in the future, you may see those conditions prevailing for much longer. And there's one particular area, which is a North China plane, where you have some like 400 million people working. It's a bread basket of China. A lot of irrigation, so very humid. That in the future, in decades to come, we'll see these conditions more and more commonly

57:39occurring. And most people there have no air conditioning. If you don't have air conditioning, these conditions prevail for a day, then you won't survive. So, six hours. It's when people die, or when they're subject to 35 degrees of wet bulb temperatures. And it doesn't matter if you're in the shade, or if you've got lots of water, or whatever, you just the heat will just keep building. You cannot lose heat. I mean, this is the start of a miniature of the future by Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction book. And that is actually probably one of the more readable novels he's written. And he talks about a mass death event, I think, in India, in South Asia. Something like that happening. How plausible is that in the next 20 years? Well, a few years ago, I would have said, who are looking at the middle of the century before we start seeing that possibility. But things are just progressing so quickly now that within this 20 years, it wouldn't be a surprise to me. So, when I was young, I suppose these kinds of conditions existed,

58:41I mean, currently from wrong. It's some are like Nevada, death valley, etc., etc. But you're saying that to dry there. To dry. Okay, so historically, where were these kinds of conditions? The Gulf region, just the Gulf region. South Asia, India, Basso Central America, these sorts of areas where you can have humidity, high humidity, and high temperatures. Nevada, it gets incredibly hot, death valley, but it's very, very dry heat. It's not going to be nice, but it's not going to kill you. And as you said a moment ago, these conditions existed for very small parts of the world, but invariably they were broken up by storms, and so that six-hour time frame wasn't really a thing. That's going to change. Yeah, and we're now seeing the conditions occurring much more commonly as well. So, you'll probably start seeing the impacts of Australia, maybe, even passing North America. Not Europe as far as we know, but again, things are changing so quickly. You know, it wouldn't surprise me in southern Europe at some point.

59:42And politicians aren't preparing for this? No. Not in the least, if they even know about them. Have we had a sort of glimpse of something like this happening? You know, has there been somewhere where there's a large concentration of people and they say, well, actually, we hit wet bulb of 35 for 90 minutes or something? Have we had a glimpse of the future so far or not yet? There will have been situations like that, but I don't think there's been a significant die-off, if you like, to other people who would recognise it. I mean, if you have it in the Gulf region, nobody'd notice whether there will be a condition tower blocks or whatever. It's true. You know, it's really something. I'm half a Iranian, and in late June, early July, I'll be on the weather app. And I say, I wonder what it's like in Banda Rabas in southern Iran or even Baghdad, and it's often 48, 49, 50 in Baghdad, which is a capital city. Yeah. And you use things. A couple more degrees, and this is not a habitable place, right? Even with aircon. Exactly.

1:00:43I mean, we're getting, you know, so many past the world now, cities, major cities. We're getting to that threshold we're using. How can people survive? How can they live in terms of normal lives? I mean, you can't sleep, can you? You wouldn't be able to sleep night after night after night. How can you function? So it's not just temperatures and humidity is a kill you. It's temperatures that are too high to be able to do your normal job or whatever you do. You wouldn't be able to do anything above them, sort of lie down. Let's talk about sea levels, because that's something they've got a lot of attention, right? Especially when I was a kid, all that I remember about the sort of the the planetary crisis was in the 80s, um, ozone layer. That was a big one. Banned CFCs, Captain Planet Cartoon. I remember that. Litter, anti litter. But also acid rain was a big one in the 80s, right? I'm showing my age here. But sea levels too. And actually people like Farage or Richard Tyse say, well look, sea levels are barely risen.

1:01:44You know, what's the problem? You know, you were talking a few moments ago about sea levels being. You know, 15, 20 meters higher, etc. when we had concentrations of CO2 and the atmosphere like we do now. But that's not being reflected in sea levels. Why not? And how quickly can things change with rising sea levels? Well, it takes a while, obviously, for changes in CO2 concentrations, the atmosphere to translate into melting ice, which, and, or expansion of, of sea water. And that's what drives sea level rise. But we're now seeing it really start to accelerate. I mean, up until 20 years ago, or so sea level was rising at a millimeter and a half, something like that a year. Now it's getting on for half a centimeter a year, with a doubling rate, which could be 20 years. So it doesn't, you know, you go from a half a centimeter a year to a centimeter to two to four to eight. Doesn't take long, then, if you'd see these enormous rises, that we saw the end of the last ice age, where you had several meters and a hundred years.

1:02:49And so the IPCC estimate, or the maximum estimate, is about 1.8 meters, maybe by, the 1.2 meters by the end of the century. But you can easily get the two meters. I wouldn't be a tall surprise to see two meters by the end of the century. And what would that mean? Because two meters doesn't sound like very much, right? No, it doesn't, but if you know a guy who's two meters at all, you know? Yeah, but if you look, for example, at East Anglia, I mean, something like two or three meters of sea level rise and the sea would be coming into Cambridge, because the land is incredibly low and incredibly flat. So, you know, it can change the shape of countries, very, very, with a very small sea level rise, meet, I mean, a few meters, rather than tens of meters. There's a great start, I think it's in Hot House Earth, which is that if we burn all the fossil fuels in existence, and of course, this is very hard to model, but if we did, we'd warm the planet by 16 degrees. Yeah. And of course, there are some people out there who want us to burn all the fossil fuels in existence,

1:03:50that's what they want us to do. 16 degrees sounds quite a lot though. Well, we put two and a half trillion tons of counter-automatic into the atmosphere. If we burn all known reserves, that's another three and a half trillion on top of that. That's a lot of CO2, and 16 degrees isn't a surprise at all. And much of the planet, most of the planet, all of the planet, would not be habitable for humans. I mean, that's a pretty interesting one, right? Because somebody like Richard Tyson, Roger Farage, or Kemi, you know, they actually, Kemi, Badenock, for instance, acknowledges that the planet is warming. She does, but she's just not, you know, she thinks Netsero is a bad idea. But I suppose if you're saying, well, look, if we carry on with what you want to do, which that's what you want to do, here's what the costs are, then this is where we end up. And they don't seem to have a response. Well, you know, there are lots of questions like this. I mean, you think, you know, you're an oil company executive. You've got young children. Why do you keep pushing for more oil and gas?

1:04:51I mean, money talks. I can't think of any other reason. Profit counts for everything. I mean, why otherwise would fossil fuel companies see you, who condemn their kids and their grandkids to absolute hell? Do you not think there's other explanations as well, though? So there's a lot of wishful thinking, right? Because we've lived through such a fortunate time in the post-war period, especially in the global North. Incredibly lucky. As good as it gets quite possibly. So there's a, firstly, there's a recency bias. But also, I mean, that leads people that have lived in this extraordinary moment. The great acceleration where, you know, living standards and life expectancy and the consumption of just about everything was like this hockey stick, right? Well, I can look at that and that's the last 60 years. And I hear this gentleman talking about rising sea levels and billions dying. He sounds like an alarmist. I mean, in a way you could understand it, right? Only from someone that thinks we can carry on growing at an exponential rate.

1:05:54Yeah, tiny, tiny planet with finite resources. But that's our public ideology. That's my point, I suppose. So that fits with the profit motive, doesn't it? It fits with the oil executive saying, I don't care about the future. I want to make lots of money. I want more oil, more oil as much as possible. I mean, what other reason would you want to keep doing that for if you had young children? I mean, they're not stupid people. They must understand what's going on. It's, you know, I don't know. I have no answer for that, to be honest. Biggest belief, really. I suppose some of them think this wishful thinking, as we've said, some of them think that there'll be a technological solution, right? Because that, again, that's part of our ideology in the 21st century, isn't it? The technology will solve most problems. Yeah, but it's becoming apparent that we haven't got anything. We haven't got an answer to this. No. I think, I mean, even oil companies executives must realize nothing is going to just turn up.

1:07:01Mr McCorber, like to sort of solve everything for us. I mean, you know, let's talk obviously about all these various two engineering ideas, which at global scale are just not going to work. Things like, you know, sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to get our level of CO2 back down to reasonable proportions. I mean, even for a moderate scenario in terms of increasing emissions into the future, at some point, we'd have to start taking about at a rate of up to 60 billion tons a year, which is much more than we were all ebumping out. There's no infrastructure to do that, and we're not going to have it, because as things get as I think and as other things, as things get more difficult, and things start to fall apart, there isn't going to be the money to do any of this, and there's not going to be the infrastructure to support these sort of geoengineering schemes. The longer we go on, even if these things were feasible, the less likely they are ever to happen. You're a volcanologist, so you all think it's other things. Yeah, but by training.

1:08:02I say this because one of the big geoengineering solutions is to basically spray stuff in the atmosphere, and that will lead to global calling, which we know historically as you've already mentioned in the last hour and a bit, isn't the volcano's due, and we can verify that through empirical data and whatnot. I presume you think it's a bad idea. Yeah, well, I mean, one of the first things we know, because we've looked at volcanic eruptions in the past, is that when you have a big explosive eruption, a lot of SO2 in the atmosphere, you get a massive impact on weather patterns, so it can affect the monsoon, it can cause all sorts of changes, which leads to a lot of people dying to, you know, famine, etc. For this type of geoengineering to work, it's called solar radiation management. The idea is to maintain a level of about 20 million tons of SO2 in the atmosphere permanently, or well into the future. That would reduce the temperature by something up to one degree C,

1:09:03so it wouldn't cancel out all the cooling. You'd have to keep adding it to the atmosphere, so a huge project, and you would have to have effectively the earth, the population of the earth would have to agree with this country, you'd have to sign up to it. We haven't managed to get them to sign up to cutting emissions effectively, so this will be at least as difficult as getting everybody on board as that. Would they, though? You know, the US could just unilaterally do something like that. Not to the level you're saying for a global change, but there might be Peter Tiel might say, me and Ian Elnmance could part of it, and we're going to try, we're going to do a pilot. Yeah, well people do pilots, and we want to see if we'll reduce the planets, you know, global temperatures by 0.2 degrees, and we want to prove of concepts, and Silicon Valley is going to come to humanities, you can see this, right? So I've heard this problem before, and I sometimes wonder if the global collective action problem isn't, isn't what would stop it, you know, I can see like, I can basically see very wealthy people, because this could be big business, proving the concept, and then saying we want to buy

1:10:05in from national government, you know. Well, if you read my debut novel Skyseed, you'll, that's all about a, a secretive attempt to do exactly this by UK and US governments, it all goes sadly wrong. Skyseed? Yes. I've seen the novel mentioned, it's invention and here I think, is it? But I'm not read it. But it's, you know, it's, it's possible people will do is clandestinely, or try to do it, but it would be detected very quickly, I think, by people monitoring atmospheric compositions, and countries like India, where the monsoon might be affected, for example, would be, to say the least, extremely annoyed about it. But the thing is, people always say we need to do this to buy us time. What do they mean, buy us time for? I'll tell you what, we'd be buying time for, for fossil fuel companies to say, oh, well, we can carry on producing now, because the temperature has come down a bit, we've got a bit more time. And the CO2 would keep being pumped out and pumped out, and we'd be counteracting that with the SO2. But, you know, at some point,

1:11:08if we stopped doing that, you would have this huge increase in temperature over a couple of decades. It's called termination shock, which I'm sure you've heard about. So, I've used this analogy before, but it's like giving a poison patient an antidote while pumping them full of more poison. That's what we'd be doing. Now, if you said we will look at solar radiation management, when we brought emissions way, way down. So, we're hardly emitting anything. We're going to use this to cool things a little bit. Then, you know, that would make a bit more sense. Even then, I don't think you'd need to do that. If you brought emissions down, you'd wait for the climate to gradually cool, and you'd just have to get used to living on a hotter planet. But doing it now while still pumping out 40 billion tons of SO2, it's just, it is insane, literally. It's kind of an appendage to the Jévin's paradox, isn't it? And for people who want to wear, Jévin's, I think he was Stanley Jones, I think.

1:12:12British economist's 19th century, and he's observing coal production, he realizes the more efficient steam engines get you, think they're using less coal. But actually, the more efficient the engine, the more coal is consumed. And once you understand the Jévin's paradox, it's really scary. The more efficient we get at consuming stuff, the more of it we consume. So, the limits that need to be imposed can't come via the technology or more efficient technology. If jet engines become more efficient, we're just going to use jet travel more. And I suppose, yeah, it's feeding into this idea. Are there any geoengineering solutions? And I'm not going to be at painting roofs white. But the more white... That's a good idea. That's a good idea. We should be doing that. I mean, that's an easy win, isn't it? Paint roofs white in cities. They'll have a big impact on the urban heat effect. Plant lots of trees, paint roofs white. No, those are things that we should be doing because they're sensible. In fact, planting a lot of trees is regarded as a geoengineering technique, actually. But it's not one. It's normally,

1:13:13it's not what most people think about when they hear geoengineering. But those are good things to do. But the huge global scale things are the problem. And there's one that sounds quite interesting, especially to a geologist. And that is that basalt, which is a very common rock type, basalt lava, a civil canning rock, it's when it weathers, it takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. So, one scheme is to crush up basalt rock, spray it on fields. And it will actually fertilize the fields as well. It's got lots of nice, straight elements in it. But it will suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as well. But then you look at it on the global scale and you find that you'd need to cover half of the world's farmland with basalt dust for it to remove two billion tons of CO2 a year, which is, you know, we pump out 40 billion. But you'd have to cover half of the world's

1:14:13farmland. And you'd have to quarry all that as well. Can you imagine the colossally environmental disruptive disruption that would cause and the health issues and God knows what else? That sort of thing's never going to happen. The transport of this stuff around the world. It's like there were all of them. Good ideas may be in when you look at it on a small scale, but translating it to a global scale, they're all. But again, it's going to make somebody a lot of money. You know, I can see Jeff Bezos saying we're getting into the global basalt agricultural business. It's going to be critical and meeting our, you know, our climate commitments. It's going to, and people might laugh on the here that sort of thing, but that's kind of what we're doing with electric cars. That's kind of what we're doing with electric cars. Now electric cars are obviously better than cars that depend on fossil fuels. But the idea that you have a one for like, or one for one like for like replacement of combustion. I believe in electric cars instead of a billion internal combustion, and it doesn't help. Does it? All the raw materials that you use, etc.

1:15:16When what you need is a transformation in low carbon public transport. Yeah. I mean, I must admit, we are on our fourth electric car because we can't, it would either be an electric car or a horse. They're the alternatives to get anywhere from where we live. So an electric car, it's the least bad. But you know, whenever we can, we use public transport. So as I did today to come down here, but the buses are very few and far between in a village of 500 people, a thousand feet up in the big districts. So you need one. But I'm not stupid enough to think that there's a solution to anything really. So what do we need to do? So you're talking about the sort of evasive action that your, the evasive measures that you've taken personally to move where you have, what should we be doing? Do we need to stop eating meats? I'm not just about consumers. I'm talking about a sort of a global level. What are the big changes, apart from obviously decarbonising? What else? Well, I mean, the decarbonising is, it's virtually it. I mean, we, after that 41 billion tons

1:16:20a year that we say to, we have to the atmosphere, 38 billion is from burning fossil fuels. So you know, that, if we stop doing that, we'd have solved the problem. So decarbonisation is, it's a critical aspect of everything really. And it's a really key issue in the UK, the moment, because you know, we're at this point where the new Prime Minister Andy Berner will acknowledge climate breakdown and say all the right things and then say he's pragmatic about more oil and gas from the North Sea. And the, the excuse seems to be, and I can almost quote them, is that we'll be relying on oil and gas for, you know, for the near to medium-term future. Well, that's completely the wrong way of looking at it. What you need to do is say we cannot afford to burn this. We need to be on a war footing to transition ourselves incredibly rapidly off fossil fuels. And to do that, you'd need a mass programme of installing heat pumps in people's homes instead of gas boilers,

1:17:26which the plan was to get rid of gas boilers by 2030 or something, but that's now been, been got rid of or extended. So you'd know, you'd work to get these in everybody's homes. You'd work to push renewables much, much faster than you can now. So you don't need the oil and gas. You don't say, oh, we're going to have to have this oil and gas, which is, it's not an excuse, you know, that's not the way to do it. We need to be on a war footing to decarbonise now, you know, we need to, well, we needed to start 30 years ago, really. So it's fossil fuels. We could carry on eating meat. Well, eating meat isn't good for all sorts of reasons. I mean, health reasons, environment, whatever. And it does contribute a large proportion of, not a large proportion, but a significant proportion of emissions. But fossil burning fossil fuels is, is the critical area, I think. Yeah, often I think when people argue against eating meat, the more I learn about it, actually, the argument for enhanced biodiversity is a stronger one

1:18:29with regards to reducing animal agriculture, because obviously so much land is given over to particularly beef production, which could be, which could be rewilded. It's just a very inefficient way of allocating land and also allocating arable land, because you grow crops to feed animals rather than it crops yourself. One more question. Do we need to become a multi-planet species? I don't think we're going to be around long enough to do that, to be honest. I mean, there's an argument that the reason why we haven't come across any other life in universes, because if it does become civilised and technologically reached to stays where it wipes itself out, is that Fermi's paradox? Well, Fermi's paradox is, yes, I mean essentially, yeah. Do you think that? I can see that you can get to a stage where you can make things very difficult for yourself as a race. And we were, you know, the fact that we're, where we are now, and we can see how bad things are getting and how terrible things are getting, and we're doing

1:19:31nothing effectively about it. I mean, we've got intelligence, we've got no wisdom. That's the problem. And it may be a race is, if they exist or species and other planets, also reach that level of technological intelligence, if you like, without the wisdom to use technology properly. And everything goes bang. Because we think of ourselves as a, we are obviously a very intelligent species. We think of ourselves as a successful species, but, you know, Hano-Sapiens has been around for about 300,000 years. The dinosaurs were around for a couple of hundred million years, right? Yes. Yeah. So we're really, we're very stupid. If you're looking at a successful species in terms of their duration on the planet. Well, I think in the fate of the world, I have a section on Homo stultus, which is effectively stupid sapiens, which is a better description, because we're no effectively for, in the search for, because of greed and the search for short-term profit,

1:20:33an exploitation and environmental degradation, we're destroying our world, and potentially destroying ourselves. There's, there's, there's, what's the wisdom in that? You've got crocodiles and turtles. They're still around. We look at them as stupid and actually they're, they're probably a long, long time after us as well. Well, they might be, yes, or we'll, you know, we're also involved with at the moment is that I mean, there've been five great extinctions and people write about the sixth grade extinction, but it's not. This is the first great extermination. We are, you know, we are responsible for killing all these species. That didn't happen in the past. So, species that have existed for hundreds of millions of years may not get past the next hundred or so because of us. So it's a lizard with Colbert, right? The sixth grade extinction. And just one of the most depressing books I've ever read and it starts with, I can't remember how it starts, but you know, it starts with an encounter. We've only really thought about evolution for a couple hundred years. It's kind of amazing when you think about it.

1:21:36And then she talks about this very rare bird. It's the last kind of this bird and the way it's killed before it goes extinct as a species and you read us some up how stupid we are. Yeah. So, well, I think I talked in a fate of the world about a couple hundred years ago, a hundred million passenger pigeons in North America or something. And then about 50, 60 years later, none wiped out every single one. It's just absolutely terrible. What wiped them out? We did shoot in them, killing them. I mean, just, I think the figure was a hundred million something like that. The flocks that darken the skies, you think it's impossible to wipe out all those, but we managed it fairly quickly. Like the Bison in the US. Well, the Bison is the same thing. Exactly. We actually did shoot more recently. Yeah. By Ted Turner incidentally, I mean, he's died recently, but Ted Turner, of course, the man who founded CNN, was a big climate person.

1:22:37He went out, he was going out with Jane Fondre at one point. And I think he helped fund, he was the guy that basically helped commission the Captain Planet series cartoons in the 1990s. Quite an interesting interesting point, not all the billionaires are bad. I know I said finally on the space thing, because I think I find it interesting, you also know who's interested in existential risk. Right. And you're looking at this stuff through the long term. And people are like, Elon Musk, I think, do the same thing, right? Whether or not we overcome the climate crisis, if we, you know, stabilize planetary conditions, et cetera, if we want to be around for a really long time, we probably would have come up with planetary. That's why I asked it. But I suppose this is where I want to end up. Billionaires are looking at New Zealand as the kind of bolt hole where they'll be safe in a world of runaway climate change, political breakdown, the climate and crop yields, etc. As somebody who is as authoritative as almost anybody else on this stuff, is it going to work? Well, New Zealand is relatively speaking as an amenable climate. I was lucky enough to do

1:23:41sabbatical in Christchurch, in the South Island in 2005. It's certainly very quiet, if you want somebody to get away from things, and that's a place to be. But this whole idea of billionaires having a bolt hole, it just doesn't work. And I know they are concerned about this. Because if you, you know, if you've whizzed off somewhere, tied yourself away, you've got servants, security staff, assistants, hangers on whatever, one thing's fall apart. You have no hold over those people. They don't have to do what you tell them. They can just tell you bugger off through your hook. And they... Over through you? Well, yeah, they just, you know, they have no hold over people. And those circumstances, why would people do what they were told? No reason to. There's no money, there's no, whatever, they'll say, well, we'll do what we like, thanks. You can bugger off.

1:24:42The future warlord of a post-apocalyptic New Zealand will be, you know, a former Kitchin-Portafor. Yeah, could well be Mark Cuban or Jeff Bezos or something like that. But there's no reason why the billionaires should have, should have any, any hold over anybody else. And they worry about that. I've read things recently about them thinking of ways of, I mean, this might be a apocryphal of ways of controlling their staff, sort of some sort of thing around the neck that gives them an electric shock if they don't do as they're told. Seriously, these sorts of things. Because otherwise, they will just do what they want. We're thinking about Jeff or Elon. Elonaguay, this has been a fabulous conversation, really. One of the best we've had, on one of the most important topics. And I'm sort of thick scursus into, you know, five billion years of history. Port-house Earth and the inhabitants guide, I really recommend this. And of course, more recently, the faith of the world, a history and a future of the climate crisis, both very, very good. Bill, once more, thanks for joining us on the archivist.

1:25:45Very welcome. It's been fantastic.