Stopping Cruel Climate Change—interview w/David Spratt—Radio Ecoshock 2018-10-17
Channel: Stop Fossil Fuels
Date: 2018-12-31

What if we really have wrecked the planet, with massive casualties coming in the next generation? The awful facts and witnesses are all lined up by our next guest.

David Spratt is best known as the author of the book and blog “Climate Code Red“. He is with the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Australia. Spratt and co-author Ian Dunlop have issued a devastating critique of climate science—“What Lies Beneath: The inside story of political failure and scientific reticence on climate change’s existential risks.

Show by Radio Ecoshock, reposted under CC License. Episode details at https://www.ecoshock.org/2018/10/stopping-cruel-climate-change.html

Stop Fossil Fuels researches and disseminates effective strategies and tactics to halt fossil fuel combustion as fast as possible. Learn more at https://stopfossilfuels.org

SHOW EXCERPT
 In this report, David and Ian explain why the “Probability Obsession” doesn’t work for climate change. Everyone likes to run models dozens or hundreds of times, to accept the mean average, the results most in agreement, as what will happen in reality. But, as Schellnhuber says, we cannot “redo the Industrial Revolution and the greenhouse-gas emissions it triggered a thousands times or so, always starting with the Earth system in it’s 1750 pre-industrial state.”

PERMAFROST

A lot of Canada is frozen. It’s like an ice-box full of old food. If that starts to thaw, there is going to be a stink, as gases like methane and carbon dioxide are released. Thankfully, David and Ian have a whole section in their “What Lies Below” report on Permafrost.

We recently had the French scientist Thomas Glasser on the show. He is the lead author of “Path-dependent reductions in CO2 emission budgets caused by permafrost carbon release”  just published in Nature Geoscience. Dr. Glasser says the great thaw of permafrost has already begun, and he can’t see any way it can be stopped.

THE CREDIBILITY GAP OF THE LATEST IPCC REPORT

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just released their report on the impacts of warming the world 1.5 degrees C (about 2.7 degrees F) over pre-industrial temperatures. The Panel acknowledges we have already warmed by about 1.1 degrees C  so there isn’t much room left.

David has a blog post titled “IPCC’s political fix on 1.5°C will undermine its credibility”. In our interview, he explains why. 

If you want to get steam coming out of my ears, start telling me about all the gigatons of carbon we can keep on burning in the coming decades, as a so-called “carbon-budget.” That “budget” is delusional.

David Spratt in his Climate Code Red blog on this says: “So for a 1.5°C goal, humans need to draw back down every ton of emissions from now on, and more. In other words, what goes up must come down.” But that’s unthinkable. Who can imagine a world where every bit of carbon going up is brought back down?

A CHAIN OF PLANNED IGNORANCE

Start with the scientists, who depend on grants from governments and institutions which tend to be conservative. The results depend on climate models which do not include key factors. These are peer-reviewed to withstand the grave objections and doubts. Those papers are collected, and the IPPC seeks a middle ground, thus losing possible true results.

The IPCC reports have to be vetted by politicians, and in any case need to be accepted by oil-producing states like the United States and Saudi Arabia. That is communicated (if at all) via mainstream media owned by corporations depending on corporate advertising, including from fossil fuel dependent industries.

At the end, the public is dependent on fossil fuel and consumption, and has an inbred human tendency to hope for the best, and life for today. The chain of ignorance is complete, even as calamity obviously arrives.

COMING BACK DOWN FROM “OVERSHOOT”

The IPCC admits we won’t be able to stay at 1.5 degrees C warming. So they include in their “carbon budget” (and plans) an “overshoot” as high as 2 degrees. They they say we will somehow bring carbon levels back DOWN!

“The IPCC Summary for Policymakers Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees C” specifically talks about developing options as the world warms more and faster than expected (by them):

“Allowing the global temperature to temporarily exceed or ‘overshoot’ 1.5°C would mean a greater reliance on techniques that remove CO2 from the air to return global temperature to below 1.5°C by 2100. The effectiveness of such techniques are unproven at large scale and some may carry significant risks for sustainable development, the report notes.”

Let get this straight. The official plan, agreed by over 190 governments, is to load up the atmosphere with enough carbon to blow up our climate, and then count on our kids to fix it. We don’t know how, but it’s up to them!