ASM164 How Screwed Are We?

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how screwed are we a special look at the most recent report on climate change from the ipcc [Music] well hey everyone it's science mike uh back from the liturgist gathering in london my voice is just getting strong enough to do podcasts again although you might still hear a little bit of a rasp because wow did we have a party together in london lots of fun seeing all of you over there even more fun uh drinking too much tequila and dancing the night away at a club in central london that was a lot of fun um so if you're don't know what i'm talking about you might be new to this program so this this is a podcast called ask science mike i'm the host my real name is mike mccarg i'm an author and a podcaster who talks about science and religion and spirituality and life in general how those things get integrated together and uh this is a podcast where i answer people's questions every week and this week we're gonna have kind of another special episode uh because some really big news has come out but before we get into that and before some of you start hitting skip in your podcast players uh i have a ton of stuff coming up in october and november and so there's a chance to turn this thing where i just talk in a microphone and you listen into a dialogue where i get to communicate with you and i'd love for that to happen so there's several opportunities in october and november to turn our parasocial relationship into a proper social relationship so one of the first one of those is something called the cosmic campfire now you might have heard me talk about this before as an event we are planning and that's still coming although it'll be next year uh but just in just a few days on october 22nd i think we're doing an online pop-up book club about a book called how i found god in everyone and everywhere and that features contributors like deepak chopra richard rohr rupert sheldrake lots of folks who are you know prominent thinkers and scientists and theologians and it's a book about panentheism and mysticism and i just thought it would be really useful and interesting to people who listen to this program so i'm going to participate in that here's what it'll look like a weekly email with insights from each chapter which each one is a memoir in the book there'll be an online private facebook group for discussion and there will be a weekly video q a with one of the contributors to the book and i will host some of those i'll be asking the questions uh to some of the contributors to this book and the best thing about that well there's two great things one it's online so everyone can participate if you've complained i never come near you for events i will be in your living room or wherever in your house that you choose to watch for this event and two it's pay what you can there's no set cost so if your budget's tight then just send very little money that's all so really excited about this one you can learn more by going to cosmic campfire dot party and sign up for our online book club that me trip follower from homebrewed christianity and mike morrell who co-wrote that book on the trinity with richard rohr so you definitely want to sign up for that okay also twice two times in november we're having the liturgist gathering just like we had in london uh we'll be in minneapolis on november 16th and 17th and we will be in nashville december 30th no november 30th and december 1st december 30th would be a terrible idea so it is november 30th and december 1st for the liturgist gathering these are tons of fun my favorite thing about them is how quickly it seems like people forget that we're in the room and just start hanging out with each other you can learn more and grab tickets at the liturgistgathering.com and then i do have some other events um october 17th which will is the week this podcast comes out i'm doing an ask science mic live in placentia california by the way thanks to the event organizers for sending me a pronunciation guide for placentia so i'd love to see you there and then i'll be at evolving faith october 26th and 27th and then november 3rd and 4th i'm doing a contemplative spirituality and christianity conference in greeley colorado at the first congregational united church of christ so you can go to mikemcart.com events to learn more about all of those i know that's a lot but there's like a ton of times in the next two months we can get together and then as we move into december uh i still have a bunch of events in the first part of next year so i'll start telling you about those as well and that's the good part of today's show now the less less fun conversation and this is definitely definitely less fun i've really been struggling uh trying to figure out how to communicate this with all of you uh this is this is big news so this is definitely an episode you want to listen to pay attention to uh study on afterwards because we're talking about the future of human civilization and life on earth and i don't think i'm uh raising the stakes too high there if anything i'm not raising them high enough the intergovernmental panel on climate change the ipcc for short released a new report last week a report that included over 91 or maybe exactly 91 contributing scientists about climate change and it is very worrisome now the ipcc is a group that has made consistently good projections on climate change uh these are some of the best climate scientists in the world they are thorough they are conservative with their projections uh they are not prone to panic so i just want to be clear that this is not a fringe group this represents the very best consensus of what we have in climate science and this new report is quite worrisome very very frightening what they are finding climate scientists is that we are seeing increased impacts at less temperature change for things like drought and therefore wildfires heavy rain events coastal flooding and heat waves so basically those things have gotten more severe more quickly at a certain amount of warming so far and they are expected to get even more severe even more quickly for every degree of warming that happens on the planet and it's possible although there's less evidence for this that hurricanes and tornadoes are already seeing increased impacts from climate change and we'll see faster worse impacts than previously forecast that's a big deal you know my hometown tallahassee florida just was on the edge of one of the most powerful hurricanes to make landfall on the u.s and on the edge and and most of my friends still don't have power a lot of the streets are blocked and tallahassee came through that storm really well mexico beach where i used to go as a kid was destroyed apalachicola which is one of my favorite places to go in florida it's a beautiful little town uh had such severe storm surge that it could be months or years before that community has recovered um so we're already seeing right now the impacts of climate change and in fact we've already had one degree celsius of warming since the industrial revolution began around 1900 and we know that that is from man-made carbon emissions we know that it's already happened and we already see climate impacts from that warming it seems like every year is a record heat year it seems like every storm is a record storm it seems like every wildfire out here on the west coast is a record wildfire and that will continue as the planet warms record-breaking bad weather events become normal and not exceptional and you can imagine what that means for economic impact and the very sustainability of human cities of course not all parts of the earth are impacted equally the southern hemisphere will have more miserable days and weather events than the northern hemisphere for example and sadly almost perfectly consistently the more impoverished people are it seems the more that their region is being impacted by climate change so there's an incredible incredibly bad correlation here between impacts and wealth so we've already experienced climate change and so this new report from the ipcc says that one and a half degrees is the target necessary to avoid widespread socioeconomic damage or pain i hesitate to say calamity although that that may not be too big a term one and a half in other words we've already heated one degree and they're saying we should limit heating to one and a half degrees there's only a half degrees celsius left and that's because we're seeing worse impacts already than anticipated and we expect that trend to continue or even accelerate more and here's the problem to limit overall heating to one and a half degrees which is what the paris accords are trying to do by the way we have to cut cot emissions much more and much more quickly than we thought so where the paris accords are leading us even though on paper they're trying to stay below two degrees ideally at one and a half is three degrees or three and a half degrees celsius of warming of course no action uh by you know 2100 or 2150 has us maybe as much as five degrees of heating and we'll talk about why that's a big deal in a few moments but if we want to hit one and a half degrees we have to cut co2 emissions 45 by 20 30 20 30. that's not some distant point in the future 2030 is in my lifetime easily unless i have an accident or a heart attack or something 20 30 and we need to cut co2 emissions 100 percent by 2050. 100 in order to do that in 2050 we would need 70 to 85 percent of our energy coming from renewable energy sources we'd have to levy a heavy tax on carbon emissions and we would need technology that scrubs carbon from the air in other words the remaining non-renewable energy sector would need to have technology that removes carbon from the air if that's even technically possible in other words can we build technology that scales to do that i don't know and nobody knows yes we've seen some carbon scrubbers but they take energy so if you scrub carbon from the air but produce more carbon in the process of doing so it's like putting a refrigerator in your kitchen with the door open and trying to cool it uh thanks to thermodynamics more heat comes out of a refrigerator than cool air so if you open a fridge it acts like a space heater somewhat counter-intuitively are you hearing this a hundred percent of co2 emissions need to be cut by 2050 to limit heating to one and a half degrees which is no paradise by the way one and a half degrees celsius so we're not talking about future generations anymore we're talking about hitting one and a half degrees celsius around 20 40 at our current pace of carbon emissions 2040 my word 22 years from now i'll be younger than my parents in 22 years scary scary stuff so we're not talking about future generations we are talking about us we are talking about the effects we are going to see in our lifetimes on this planet and on our civilization and on our cultures don't panic everybody i've been panicking don't panic it doesn't help it's really important to note that the changes that the world sees from warming are not linear more warming causes more severe impacts for degrees here's what that means a degree and a half celsius of global climate warming is manageable but difficult no picnic still gonna have mass migrations still have a lot of impacts we'll talk about in a second but five degrees of warming puts the survival of human civilization and most life on the earth in question five degrees is an armageddon number and here's what that looks like i'm gonna i'm just gonna give you some facts and figures from the world resources institute as derived from this ipcc report so let's talk about extreme heat and by extreme heat let's talk about the percentage of the global population exposed to severe heat at least once every five years so extreme heat or severe heat means like so hot uh you'll die right well that's what we mean by extreme meat if you're outside even if you're inactive you'll die in extreme heat so at one and a half degrees 14 of the world is exposed to severe heat at least once every five years that's a lot of people that's nowhere near uh where we've been historically at two degrees that's a half degree difference it's 37 percent or 2.6 times worse so that half degree of additional warming makes a heat impact in this metric that's 2.6 times worse let's talk about how often the arctic sea during the summer is completely free of ice at one and a half degrees that's at least once every 100 years at 2 degrees that's at least once every 10 years or 10 times worse from a half degree of additional warming let's talk about extinction at one and a half degrees four percent of vertebrate species will lose at least half of their range at two degrees eight percent or two times worse eight percent of plant species lose at least half their range at one and a half degrees 16 at two degrees two times worse insects those little wonderful creatures that power global ecosystems and power food chains six percent of them lose half their range at one and a half degree eighteen percent at 2 degrees and you can see now why the effects get compounded because as plants start to lose their range they stop mitigating carbon emissions right fewer plants means less co2 absorption means an accelerated rate of change at one and a half degrees seven percent of the earth's ecosystems shift to a new biome primarily meaning becoming deserts thirteen percent at two degrees or 1.86 times worse crop yields in the tropics are reduced by 3 percent at 1.5 degrees or 7 at 2 degrees let's talk about the oceans the oceans not only get warmer carbon makes them more acidic so at one and a half degrees we lose between 70 and 90 percent of the coral reefs on this planet which is a lot but at 2 degrees we lose 99 to 100 percent of coral organisms on this planet one and a half degrees 20 40. remember that one and a half degrees and 20 40. we're not talking about some distant hypothetical future fisheries a lot of people around the world rely on fish for their protein at one and a half degrees we lose one and a half million tons of fishery capacity and at two degrees we lose 3 million tons the effects of climate change are not linear not at all as we warm more the cycles and systems that produce climate change intensify that's already happening by the way one of the things that has caused us to heat more rapidly is that trees and plants all over the world hit their carbon carrying capacity and now they can't pull in more carbon than usual they've been trying to do us a solid those wonderful green living things and they have run out of capacity to do so and meanwhile we are cutting them down as fast as we can to make room for more livestock scary stuff scary stuff and i have been thinking about this for several days since the report came out and i was despondent uh you can talk to my wife jenny aka the honey badger i have been miserable to be around and miserable to talk to i have not known how to talk about this to the public i haven't known how to talk about this to my friends because this is legitimately terrifying if this is what we're talking about by 2040 what are we talking about by 2100 right now 2200 that seems like a long time away but i mean america's a couple hundred years old right is it possible that in another couple hundred years there's there's no global human civilization that we're were hunter-gatherers again or that we're barely hanging on in the midst of a a global mass extinction event it's plausible this is scary frightening things and i read both the summary report for policymakers and the full report from the ipcc i looked at both and i noticed some stark differences in what they offered policy makers versus what they offered other scientists in the full report the summary for policy makers didn't include a lot of the tipping points in other words heating releases additional heating factors that accelerate climate change or the impacts that that will have on human civilization primarily through one means which is mass migration people fleeing climate calamity in hundreds of thousands and then millions of people and then what that means for conflict i mean think about millions of people displaced and thirsty and what that would mean for global terrorism and global conflict is not a good picture it's not a good picture and the reason i get so dark is i look at the trajectory of the west right now and our movement towards populism and nativism at the exact moment when we need to take a more global view on what humanity is we seem to be pointing more and more inward and more and more insular because we are afraid and that's why i've been afraid to talk about this and why i've been trying to think about how to talk about this is when we talk about climate change it's such a massive problem learning about it can make us feel powerless and hopeless and afraid and that can keep us from acting so my friends i do not want to make you feel powerless or hopeless or afraid because i want you to act and i want you to act with me and i want you to act now we've got to act on climate change not just tweet about climate change we've got to make substantive differences in our own lives and you can make a difference as a consumer and you should you can use less energy you can do an energy audit on your home you can reduce your consumption of electricity you can use mass transit more i'm doing that by the way i live in los angeles which has got a real pain in the butt mass transit system and i when i go to and from the airport now i take mass transit which eats up an extra couple hours of my life each way but i'm determined to lower my personal carbon footprint so you can make a difference as a consumer and you should but you can't make enough of a difference as a consumer in fact if all of us consumers work together and only make changes in our own lives we will not hold warming to one and a half degrees we will blow right past it because when we look at where carbon is coming from we understand that governments and corporations have far more power to impact climate change than individuals do so as a consumer you can make a difference but you'll make a bigger difference as an advocate we the public have to hold corporations and governments accountable and demand immediate change immediate immediate change coal power plants have got to go globally and that's that's a really unfair thing for developing economies can you imagine we in the west here with our developed civilization and our much higher gdps we're shifting to renewable technologies when we've already benefited from the free and easy energy or not free but very inexpensive energy that comes from burning up carbon-based fuel sources now we're telling other countries they can't do the same in my opinion there's only one fair route and that's for the developed west who created most of the climate change problem to reach into these deep pockets of ours and offer to subsidize and assist the rest of the world in their migration to renewable energy why because we don't want to live on a hellscape of a planet because we want future generations on earth to survive we want human civilization and culture to survive right so you can and should make a difference and i'll have i'll have a link in the show notes this week on how to do that i'll have show links in the show notes on more resources to learn about climate change but the biggest thing we need to talk about is how to be advocates in driving policy change and i don't have the answers on today's program for that at all what i want to make you aware of this week is that climate change is worse than we thought and you need to know that but you don't need to fall into a state of fear and disempowerment over that you need to get fired up and you need to get ready to make a difference so here's my plan new thing on ask science mike for the foreseeable future maybe forever is i'm going to regularly do climate change episodes i'm going to invite climate scientists and climate advocates and policy makers on the program and we're going to have an ongoing conversation about how to prepare for climate change how to adapt to climate change and how to drive substantive policy changes that help limit the amount of warming that the planet goes through i've already had climate scientists offered to come on the program i'm going to take them up on that it's not going to be one it's not going to be two it's going to be as many as i can get and we'll open up the a science mic inbox to your climate change questions in fact immediately if you want to start sending in questions on climate change do so i will have experts on that can answer them not only scientists who explain how it's happening what we should do but also advocates who can tell us how to actually make a difference and drive change i'd love to have conversations with experts on how to talk to climate change deniers if you know anyone who's an expert on communicating with people who don't believe climate change is happening or don't believe that humanity is driving it i want to hear from you let me know i want to have those people on the program so we can figure out together how to talk to the people who don't believe this is happening but let's be clear surveys consistently show that a majority of americans want the government to take immediate action on climate change and surveys also show that the percentage that wants no action under any circumstances is very very small it's less than five percent when we talk about climate change for so long we've talked about what we're going to do for future generations if there's anything i take away from the most recent report from the ipcc is that we are no longer talking about future generations and we're no longer talking about the distant future we are talking about our lives and our children's lives i don't know how yet but i think that together we can figure out how to break out of the paralysis that we face societally on climate change and move into action that preserves and protects life on this planet because so often we talk about the economic impacts of renewable energy we talk about the economic impacts of carbon neutral living but the economic impacts of unchecked climate change will be disastrous potentially taking global gdp to zero and so even from the most free market conservative economic perspective the time to act is now if you can't do it for yourself you can't do it for your children then do it for the economy thanks for listening everyone and i'll talk to you next week