Don't have nightmares - Climate Science 101

Welcome to the first episode of Real Zero! In this inaugural episode, co-hosts Dr. Daniel Grant and Professor Hugh Montgomery set the stage for the series by exploring the urgent realities of climate change. Dr. Grant, with a curious mind but limited knowledge on the topic, interviews Professor Montgomery — a leading climate expert, intensive care consultant, chair of the Lancet Commission on Climate, and founder of the non-profit Real Zero.

They break down the latest climate science and news, revealing the stark truths about what’s happening to our planet and what could lie ahead. But it’s not all doom and gloom. The conversation pivots to hope and action, highlighting 7 key steps each of us can take today — as individuals, businesses, and healthcare systems — to help drive the urgent change needed.

Tune in to find out how you can be part of the solution and help create a brighter, more sustainable future for the next generation.

Transcript

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Hello there and welcome to the Real Zero podcast. I am Dr. Daniel Grant. I know a little bit about climate change, but not loads. And I'm joined by Professor Hugh Montgomery, my co host. Hugh, hello. Hello, Dan. Good to see you again. You too. So Hugh, do you want to tell us a little bit about this podcast and, why we've put it together? Yeah, sure. So I'm, as you know, because you work with me, Dan, as a doctor, I'm professor of intensive care medicine at UCL, but I've been working in the climate change space around 25 years. We're hitting a crisis point, which we can talk about. And so this podcast is educating people about the nature of that problem. But empowering them about what they can do. So this is not meant to be a down and dreary one. It's informative, it should be very interesting. We've got some stellar guests actually. Some really high end people that are going to talk to us. But we're going to leave people with positive actions they can take to feel that they've really been able to make the difference. Yeah, totally agree. And in terms of guests that we've got to come, do you want to give us a bit of an overview about the kind of topics we'll be covering? Sure, because what we want to do, we want to be a part of. The basic science, which is where we start. We're going to be talking about what is climate change? Are we causing it? How bad is it? What's going to happen? What will the impact be? Got to cover that. We've got some experts in that. Then it's a question of, well, what do we do? So we've got things like banking. Sounds really dull, doesn't it? I mean, really, really dull, but it's not. We're all financing our own destruction. So is that true? But where is money? Why is that happening? What can we do simply and easily over a bottle of wine or a cup of coffee to make the big difference with our money? We've got some great economists to talk about that. We've got people in the food sector. You know, is it true that it really makes a difference not to eat meat or to eat less meat? And what sort of food would be better and why? Let's hear from some experts in the food system. And we've got, not only people in food systems, but chefs for instance. So we, power generation, same sort of thing. How does the power system work in Britain? You know, what difference can we make? Is there something we can all do that's pretty simple and easy? So, yeah, those sorts of people. Fabulous. So I guess what we're going to do is educate people along the way. There might be some scary things as people realise just how bad things might be, but at least we can show people what the potential answers are to come out of it. Well, I think that's right, Dan. I mean, you and I are practising clinicians. We're doctors. We look after people on wards. And we're used to telling people bad news. And sometimes the bad news is terminal bad news. It's we can't help you here and all we can do is support you and try to make your death more comfortable. Sometimes it's you're in terrible trouble. If you want to get out of it, this is what we're going to have to do together to get you out of it. And that's the bit we're going to be focusing on here. It's not a question of how do we make our demise a bit more comfortable? It's a question of how do we make our lives good and survivable for us and for our children going forwards. Well, I suppose the first thing to talk about is really you and your journey, because you've become one of the, well, the nation, maybe even the world, one of the world's leading experts in climate change for health. So what made you kind of move into this field, especially coming from intensive care? Accident. Like so much in the world, really. So I was doing a lot of molecular biology and genetics in the nineties. We have to remember that a lot of, published science wasn't, online in those days. It was paper copies. So when I was reading other people's important scientific discoveries in the big journals like Nature and Science, you'd have to turn to a page to read it. And these are like, I always describe these journals a bit like a highbrow cosmo. If you're looking for an article on, I don't know, molecular genetics, next to it would be something about fossil hominids or string theory or gravitational waves or, Something random that you'd look at and go, Oh, that looks a bit interesting. And there was stuff about climate change, and it looked very frightening to me. But at the same time, the newspapers were all saying, oh, there's no such thing as climate change, or the world's getting colder. And there was such a disparity between the two that I thought, well, I've got to really try to understand this, because one or other of them's right. So I spent a couple of years to really read and understand and learn the climate science and the physics, And I reached the conclusion that the papers I was seeing were correct, that we were in terrible trouble. And in fact, people had grossly underestimated the threat we'd got. So I started trying to work out what to do about it. That would have been about 24 years ago, around year 2000. And since then, I've done, I suppose like Edison said, you know, I haven't failed. I've just tried 10, 000 things that don't work. Fair enough. As you've been working within the medical field, I suppose you've kind of been moving across and you've been seeing the health impacts of climate change first hand. Yes we have, I mean of course on the personal basis in the western world, most people have been relatively protected so far. So, most people haven't suffered a death from a heat wave or whatever it might be. And of course I started as a practicing doctor, focusing very much on the health impacts of climate change, was saying, well, what are they going to do to the conventional metrics of health? So spread of bacterial disease, changes in viral disease patterns, change in vector borne disease, like malaria or dengue or Zika or whatever it might be, or pollution or heat stress. What I've realised though, as we've gone on, and I've been doing that, as I say, for the Those things are very important, but the big thing that risks your life and mine, and I'm 62, and that's of our children if we have any, is actually the societal collapse that comes from the economic impacts and the mass migration and the war, and the food supplies. So that's actually now what I've come to realise is the, imminent cause of our demise Yeah, and it's a pretty serious things could happen down the line I suppose we're going to get into that over the course of this podcast let's start right at the beginning and in layman's terms, you know, what is climate change? Okay, so it's a really good question So climate is different from weather which some politicians in the world don't seem to understand They tweet out saying oh, it's snowing outside. It's cold. You know, there's no such thing as You Global heating. So the climate is the global weather system, I suppose you might say. It relates to, the environment of weather around the world. Weather is what affects you locally. It's whether it's raining or sunny today. And the climate that we have is largely dependent on the temperature of the air and of the oceans. And that temperature has changed. over the millions of years, or billions of years since the planet formed. Because lots of factors change the amount of heat that comes in, and the amount of heat that we lose. And you'll understand that to maintain a constant temperature of any object, the amount of heat it receives has to be the same as the amount of energy that it radiates away. And that sort of amount that comes in and goes out has changed over time. It changes, over 100, 000 year cycles with things called Milankovitch cycles. Because, essentially, the Earth's orbit changes from being spherical to being more elliptical. Of course, when it's elliptical on that part of the journey, it'll be slightly closer to the Sun. So it will get more solar radiation. The angle of the Earth's tilt changes, so a bit like putting your hands near a fire. If you bring them closer, or you angle them to the right angle, you'll get more heat as well. And the tilt of the Earth changes. The tilt also precesses, so imagine a spinning top spinning on its axis. As it comes to get slower, it starts doing that, doesn't it? And so you get precession of the angle. Over shorter term frames, between 10 and 17 years, you get sunspots, which basically affect the amount of radiation coming out. All of those sorts of things summate to mean that we move, usually over around 100, 000 year cycles, between periods of Ice ages to periods of warmer temperatures. So it is true that climate change is a natural phenomenon. There have been some interspersed events, though, where you get sudden changes related to things called greenhouse gases. Now, greenhouse gas is just a gas that lets shortwave radiation through. That's like sunlight. And it traps longwave radiation. And that's heat. And they're good. If we didn't have greenhouse gases The world would be around 33 Celsius colder than it is now. Right. So life as we know it would not exist. Because the planet would basically be frozen. So we like greenhouse gases because we wouldn't be here without them. But if you put a lot more in, you trap a lot more heat. And that has happened serially in the last billions of years. Often because you get sudden melting of methane from frozen methane stores. And methane is a greenhouse gas. Or you get sudden release of carbon dioxide, for instance, from volcanic activity. And those sudden events can be catastrophic. And, in fact, the big five mass extinction the planet's had outside the one where the meteor struck Yeah. have been due to climate change. Well, I suppose the meteor striking was a climate change event, too. Yeah. This time, though, we are driving that mass extinction event. Right. Because it isn't a volcano that's causing the problem or a meteorite that struck us, it's us burning fossil fuels, which we could talk about what they are if you're interested. But we're putting those greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and they're letting lots of light in and they're trapping more heat. Trapping a lot of energy. They're trapping somewhere between five and eight Hiroshima bombs worth of energy a second in our atmosphere now. Wow. That's the problem. And if you add energy to an atmosphere, you get weather. So, how have we as people in the last hundred years or so, what have we been doing to exacerbate this problem, really? Well, until, if you go back to, let's say, 1800, the energy we got was largely derived from burning things that had already drawn down greenhouse gases. So, a tree grows, it draws down carbon dioxide. You burned the tree in your hearth at home, or in a kiln or whatever else you were doing with it, and the CO2 went back in the atmosphere. So the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was pretty rock steady for a really long period of time, you know, geological time scales. Around 250 parts per million. In the early 1800s or so, with the Industrial Revolution, we started burning coal. We discovered that coal could be burned, that there was lots of it, and that we wanted it to drive steam engines and factories and plant machinery. Uh, and we started burning it. And that coal essentially is fossil salad. Coal is really vegetable matter, plant matter. Plants that have drawn down carbon dioxide over many tens of millions of years, a period called the Carboniferous Period, Drawn down that carbon dioxide, and the trees, instead of falling to the ground and rotting, had got trapped in swamps, didn't rot, and locked away that carbon. So tens of millions of years of carbon dioxide had been drawn down. The same applies to natural gas and oil, which are other small plant and animal life, that got squidged, and that carbon dioxide got locked away. But we started burning coal. But that wasn't enough. We then made the internal combustion engine, and there was oil, so we started burning oil. And that wasn't enough, so we started burning natural gas. And we've been chucking vast quantities of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas into our atmosphere ever since. How much? Well, if you include land use and other greenhouse gases, because we make fluorocarbons, methane is a greenhouse gas that comes from gas, natural gas essentially is methane, cows belch it. It's the equivalent around 50, more than 50 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year being released into the atmosphere. So that's 50, 000 million tons. Each ton is 1, 000 kilograms. And a kilogram of carbon dioxide is around 520 liters. And it hangs around the atmosphere for a really long time. A fifth of the greenhouse gases we're emitting today, because there's a light on me, there's a camera, um, all of that's CO2. A fifth of that will still be cooking our planet in 33, 000 years time. And 7 percent will be cooking our planet in 100, 000 years time. Yeah. It's quantifiable, because you can put a number on it. But it's quite hard to understand what it is. I mean, what does it compare to? I mean, it's almost that so much CO2 is going up there. It's almost impossible to imagine, isn't it? And also, the numbers are confusing. As I say, they're sort of a billion tons. I can't imagine what a billion tons look like. I can imagine what 520 liters look like because it's sort of 262 liter coke bottles. So you can sort of imagine that that's a kilogram and then a thousand times that is a ton. And then you can get some idea, but even the parts per million, we've gone up from around 250 parts per million pre industrial. We're now at 427 parts per million. Now, that's a really big increase in the concentration, but to people who are not familiar with this, parts per million, that's hardly anything. It can't possibly be a meaningful amount. These things are very hard to visualize. I think it's much more helpful to visualize the energy gain. Yeah. You know, we all can imagine what a nuclear bomb looks like. And adding five to eight a second to our atmosphere, that's a lot of energy gain. Yeah, and I suppose that what we can do is also look at the effects of it. So, you know, we've seen graphs in newspapers and all kinds of things the last decade or so, but what are the tangible effects that, you know, and what people who are listening to this would have experienced? Yeah, well that's a really good point Dan, because, again, it's been a bit of a bugbear of mine that people talking about graphs. The increase in global average surface temperature saying, Oh, well, we need to try and keep that below one and a half degrees. One and a half degrees is, as a number, is nothing, isn't it really? If you raise the temperature of your coffee cup by one and a half degrees, you wouldn't even notice it, I wouldn't have thought. So people think, well, what's not to like about one and a half degrees? And we all like a slightly warmer summer after all. That's not the issue. It's energy gain. It's gain of radiation. That's the problem we've got. 90 percent of that energy gain, the 5 to 8 Hiroshima bombs a second, is going into the oceans, where it's heated up the top 2km. And we can measure those temperatures. So ocean temperatures are now the highest they've been in recorded history, by us. We know the surface temperature in the Mediterranean at the moment, we've broken records again. We're recording this in the last two weeks. We know the surface top 2km of the ocean. Last year alone, Absorbed an enormous amount of energy, measured in hundreds of things called Zeta Joules. Again, what's a Zeta Joule? Well, it's the equivalent of taking a trillion Olympic swimming pools. From 0C, that's freezing point, to boiling point. That's what we've added to our oceans. The surface temperature of the land has risen by an average of now over 1. 5C. Actually, globally it's done more than 1. 5. We're approaching 1. 8C over land. Europe it's more than two, Antarctic it's more than three, so the average temperatures are going up, but on top of that we're getting as a result ice melt, so the extent of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice is retreating, the volumes of land based glaciers are disappearing. 10 percent of its glacial volume and this is happening all over the world. Yeah. The water's running into the sea. That, and the thermal expansion of the oceans is raising sea levels, now by around a centimetre every two years. But we're also, of course, getting extreme weather events, because if you don't have any energy in an atmosphere, you have no weather at all. But if you add energy in an atmosphere, you get more weather. You evaporate more water. That water is a greenhouse gas as well, oddly enough, up in the atmosphere. But it's got to come out again as rain. When it does, it releases all the latent heat of evaporation. That causes worse storms and worse flooding. You get changing weather patterns. You get more heat waves, more droughts, more cold spells in some areas as well. More tornadoes, more extreme weather events. So I suppose those are the things people would be seeing. I'm aware of more and more the instability in our weather this winter. we lost 11 percent of British agricultural value because the ground was flooded. That's because the jet stream is moving North and it's dumping water on us. Meanwhile, in Spain, the 16 percent of their volume. They were over 85 percent lower, than they are normally. Because it's not raining there. So we're seeing these, that's I guess what most of us are now seeing and experiencing along with forest fires. Mmm. I suppose that it seems like we're on the very cusp of something much nastier happening. So you see in the news, you know, there is a bit of a extreme weather event here and there are some forest fires. But, I don't think people really appreciate the, It's very close to tipping over into something which could completely damage the economy, could damage, like, geopolitical, the balance of the world. Like, how, how does that happen? Well, you're right. We're reaching an acceleration, which we've all been familiar with. If you just look at, I don't know, most people will go, I sort of remember the fires in Australia in the northern hemisphere winter, just pre COVID, remember all the koala bears getting burned. Yeah. But now we're used to the fact there's a massive flood here and, you know. 1300 people killed in the Hajj just recently. The flooding in Dubai twice with two years of rainfall in less than a day, twice. The fires in Canada last summer that added 6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions just from one fire. The heat waves and fires across the Mediterranean. People will be looking at that going, yeah, you're right, This really is accelerating. The reason it's accelerating is we've triggered a whole series of positive feedback loops. So the first is that ice and snow normally reflect heat and light back into space. That's the thing called the surface albedo effect. Yeah. As you melt the snow and ice, there's less snow and ice to reflect it back, and more dark ocean and land to absorb it. And that may well have doubled the rate of Earth's energy gain in recent decades alone. Hmm. The ice gets melt water on the top, and the melt water is water. It absorbs the heat, so that's a second effect. We're getting fires. The fires release carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas that heats things up and causes more fires. It releases black soot, which absorbs more heat when it lands on glaciers and causes more melt. It affects ozone layers. It affects heat gain in the upper atmosphere. It releases carbon dioxide. Carbon monoxide, that takes out a thing called a hydroxyl radical. Hydroxyl radicals would normally clear methane. So, the half life of methane is extended. We're releasing methane. It's being released from melting clathrates and hydrates in carbonate rocks, brought from frozen tundra, and from fermenting wetlands. We're deforesting. We're burning fires down. The Amazon, parts of it are now a net emitter of carbon dioxide as it dries out. As we lose the trees, they can't draw down as much carbon dioxide. It turns out trees have got bacteria living on them that draw down methane. We're losing those as well. We're putting water vapour 19km into the atmosphere, where it acts as a greenhouse gas. And on top of that, as we get rid of greenhouse gas emissions, which we have to do, we get rid of some of the other pollutants, which strangely are helping protect us a bit. We get sulphate particles from shipping fuel. Nitrogen oxides, or reactive nitrogen species, that keep us a bit cooler. So as we're moving ahead, we're now accelerating into positive feedback loops, a feeding frenzy of things that are causing rapid accelerations in Earth's energy gain. Okay, and when you say rapid acceleration, what kind of timescale are we dealing with here? Well, if you look, I mean, I encourage anyone listening to this to look at some news headlines. You'll see in the last year, Pretty much every climate scientist has used phrases like bonkers, unexpected, uncharted territory. Because the temperatures were expected to change with this El Niño La Niña effect, which is a weather system in the Pacific. But it went way beyond what I was expecting. Surface and ocean temperatures went mental last year. We're seeing really big inflection points. We're seeing really big instability. We're seeing really big instability. In, for instance, Arctic temperatures, where we're seeing a sudden rise now of 40 Celsius above normal. Yeah. At the poles. These are really, really big changes. Did you say 40 degrees out of the poles? The temperature in the summer, average, in this Arctic circle, in the summer, was plus 32 and a half Celsius. That's absolutely crazy. Yeah. And this causes rapid acceleration and it will cause other major changes to weather systems. So as you dump cold water and it affects ocean currents They transport huge amounts of heat around the globe. It keeps what means that britain is the gold stream Yeah keeps us not having icebergs, which if you head at the same latitude west You have in newfoundland If the atlantic meridional overturn circulation collapses, and we know it's at a point now close to critical transition That will produce catastrophic changes to weather systems in the northern hemisphere. We know that the, jet stream, which is a high altitude river of wet air, right up there, at the junction of cold arctic air and warmer southern air, is moving north, because the arctic is warming three to four times quicker than the south is. And as it moves north, it's desiccating southern Italy, France, Spain, Portugal. And it's dumping all the rain on us. We're going to see a thing called the Danz Gardoschka effect, which is a sudden acceleration in polar warming. Remember the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide was more than 420 parts per million. We're now 427. Sea levels were 53 meters higher than they are now. Start thinking where all the coastal cities are, and where the money actually is. And you mentioned the impacts on money, which I guess we should probably talk about. What is the economic impact of this for the average person over the next 10 years or so? Yeah, it's really important because. When I share this thing with a colleague, the Lancet Countdown, which is about health impacts of climate change, and when we started, I was very much focused on bacterial disease and heatwave and heat stress and so forth. But actually our health and that's what's given us the quality of life and the general health that we all have is economically driven. It's what's provided us with good and healthy food. It's what's allowed us to grow our muscles in a way that we couldn't before. It's what's given us vaccination programs and health care programs. We're all really dependent on economies and food supplies and so forth. And these are the big ticket items, because when they collapse, then we collapse. Extreme weather events are a big problem. So what we're seeing already are steady changes in average temperature. And those steady rises in temperature, which we're seeing around the world, we're seeing these very high temperatures now in Europe every summer. Across, the Gulf States, in bits of Africa now, Mediterranean, that's going to make those areas uninhabitable. And we know that within the next few decades, as a minimum, 18 percent of the world's surface area that's currently inhabited by humans, will be uninhabitable, because it will have average temperatures above those of the Sahara. Right. So, you can't live there, because it's too hot, and there's no food and there's no water. And that's why we're seeing, for instance, the desiccation. of Spain and Portugal now. Very high temperatures, and jet streams moving. So firstly, it'll be too hot in some places to live, and there will be no water, and there will be no food, and those people will move. Another half a billion people will need to move. So that's, by the way, around three billion people will die, or actually more likely, migrate. Add to that another half billion that will have to be moving because of sea level rise, because people tend to live on coasts and a lot of them are very close to the, to the, sea level. So you're now looking at between three and four billion people dead and migrating in a matter of only a few decades. Now that's half the world's population. And look at what happens when you get a few thousand refugees or migrants moving in. It creates instability and civil unrest. Imagine billions moving, but into areas which themselves don't have enough food or functioning economies. Yeah. Let's think as well then about the effects on food supply. Because as temperatures rise, areas will be unable to grow crops. If you've ever tried to grow something in a garden when you were a kid or whatever, you also realise that you could be having a great growing season. But if you have one heat wave, one dry spell, one wet period, one bad frost, one bit of snow, it wipes your crop out. So weather instability will affect it. Energy production for fertilizer or for farming or for factories. Is also impacted because nuclear power stations need cold water. And as the water heats up, you have to switch them off. And we've seen that happening in the heat waves a couple of years ago in China and France. Hydroelectric power stations start failing. All of these things have economic impacts. Now, how much? It's scary, right? In recent years, we've lost around 4. 3 trillion to climate change. From the world economy. Yeah, we're told by Lloyd's of London. So this isn't tree huggers. This is Serious economists that the next four or five years would likely to lose another five trillion of the world economy We're losing four and a half thousand dollars a second out of the world economy due to climate change extreme weather events already That's going to ramp up. So we had a paper this year from economists saying that we're now committed to To a loss around 19% as a minimum of global domestic product, and it could be as high as a third, 38 trillion a year off the world economy. That will make the 2008 financial crash or the Covid financial crash look like a walk in the park. Mm-Hmm. Lloyd's of, well, the Institute of Actuaries and Insurers actually last year warned that there's now a one in 300 chance. Of a single extreme weather event Taking 17. 8 trillion out of the world economy. It's a fifth of the world economy In one go. Yeah, and that's just one extreme weather event in one country There's much higher risk than that. And of course these risks get bigger and bigger as time goes by So if we start looking at this sort of hit um Imagine that we do lose a fifth of the global economy in a week And food supplies start disappearing. What then happens? Well, what we see happen is that people speculate on food prices. So when we had the heat wave in 2010, globally, grain production in Kazakhstan plummeted. Russia became a net importer of grain. Wheat prices went up from 150 a metric ton to 350 a metric ton in a matter of a few months. We then end up being unable to afford food. You can see how these things ripple around the world. So it's an economic impact and it's the social impact of mass migration. When you've got economic collapse and mass migration, you get war. And let's remember again, this is not sort of extreme left wing views of some variety. Both Jack Straw and William Hague as a Labour and a Conservative foreign secretary used the same phrase, warning that climate change was going to drive mass migration. Quoting directly on a biblical scale. So these are the sorts of impacts that are coming down the pipe soon. And you might say, well, one in 300 chance. That's a one in 299 chance it for 299 out of 300 chance. It won't happen. Yeah, but someone wins the lottery. And the one in 300 chances is pretty good odds. I'd buy a lottery ticket on one in 300. Yeah, and these risks are getting worse every year and they don't go away. just when you stop emitting greenhouse gases. They continue to get worse for reasons we've discussed. Yeah, I suppose you're gonna say that, you know, it is 1 in 300 that something biblical and catastrophic happens. But it's a lot less than that, that something not quite biblical happens. And if you add a lot of those less than biblical things up, you probably get something quite biblical. But equally, if you start looking at the fact tables, so things that are interlinked, So if you get an extreme weather event in one area that does that, the knock on effects to global trade, and you're unlikely to be getting just an extreme weather event in just that one country. You might remember the summer, I think it was the summer before last, we had that incredibly hot summer everywhere. There was a ring of fire around the world. Everywhere was incinerating. Winter temperatures in South America were higher than normal summer temperatures. Everywhere is a blaze because the jet stream split in two and trapped hot air around the world. So there are real dangers that when you get an extreme weather in one country, it's not just there, it's everywhere at once, everything everywhere all at once. And these risks are going to get worse. They sort of start turning into certainties over a period of time unless we act. So it's again, it's another reason. For acting now because there is this idea that it's only poor people in poor countries that are going to be affected by climate change Wealthy people and wealthy nations. We're going to be okay Well, let me tell you we're not because actually Poor people who were able to live subsistence lives can sometimes move and they know how to live on very little But I don't know about you if suddenly there was no money in your bank account You didn't have a job. There was no health service and you couldn't buy food You I'm not sure I'd cope very well with that. I'm not sure I'd know what to do. No, you can see how it does, yeah, the ramifications are pretty bad. And even in this podcast, you know, we are compartmentalizing things a little bit, but it's really important to know that everything is quite connected. And when we talk about things from, for example, even the health point of view, you talk about the parasites and the bugs that survive in hotter climates, but they don't survive up in the north. Because, it's colder. However, when it gets hotter, we have a whole new burden of disease that's coming our way. And that impacts the economy of the health system, and so on and so on and so on. Yeah, and you're right, there are also some big, extinction events we've been destroying our world's ecosystems. So since 1970, when I was 8 years old. We've lost around 72 percent of the number of vertebrates, that's animals with backbones, on the planet. 7 out of 10 aren't there anymore. We're now grazing cattle on a land surface area bigger than the entire continent of Africa. The most prevalent bird on the planet, by miles, is farmed poultry. Yeah, growing so many and we killed everything else off. So we're 72 percent down on those. We've got eight species an hour Becoming extinct already. We're living through the biggest and fastest mass extinction the planet has ever seen and we are causing it But that's not being caused by climate change you start adding climate change is what's known as a force multiplier to that and Things collapse fast. There was a paper in the journal science a couple of years ago warning you That unless we change quickly, we would have triggered a mass extinction event, quoting directly, to rival those of Earth's past. Yeah. And the Permian killed 96 percent of life in the oceans. Remember, we as humans balance at the top of a very narrow pyramid. Of an ecosystem beneath us. And we're chopping away at its base. So there are these binary state changes, like southern economic collapses, but equally. Irreversible collapse of entire ecosystems that we can't risk happening. Yeah, I mean I suppose we will talk about the impacts down the line. I suppose a big question for me is that you have seen all this in the newspapers over the last few years. There has been this growing Discussion about everything I suppose the question is why aren't people doing anything about it? Really? I mean people are doing little things about it But you don't see massive, dramatic changes. Why is that? I think it's a very good question. I think there are many reasons for it. And we can divide, I suppose, us up into politicians, business people, and the hoi polloi like me and you. You know, the Joe public. I think the first thing is that some politicians and business people, don't have the intellectual capacity to understand the problem. And that's not to be rude. Because we all have different skill sets, thank God, in the world. If you have no scientific training, and you studied English, or Greek, or politics, philosophy, and economics, and you didn't do sciences, you wouldn't understand the nature of the science, and the way this thing would work. Nor would you have the bandwidth to do it. I've been blessed by being an employee as a professor at a university, where I'm paid to think and spend time looking at stuff. Most people, honestly, don't have the bandwidth. And unless you're a bit of a geek for this, and you read the scientific reports and follow it, if you even had the intellectual capacity to understand it, which many people listening to this podcast do have, where do they get the information from? Well, there are stories in the Guardian and the Independent, but the readership for those is tiny. Most other newspapers don't carry their stories at all, and some of them carry stories to say there's no such thing. They're spreading disinformation. If you listen to Radio 4, you'll hear the occasional story about this. But if you listen to Radio 1, I'm guessing you probably don't. If you watch, only go to TikTok or Instagram, it'll be feeding algorithm material to you. And if you're not into climate change stuff, you won't see it. And the little bits it will feed you may be disinformation as well. So the first thing is ignorance that, again, that sounds rude. It's not meant to be rude. It's just to say, I mean, I'm ignorant about vast number of things in life. That's normal. So it's a lack of knowledge. The second is a lack of knowledge about the urgency, because it still isn't being discussed. People are still talking about future generations. I'm 62, and climate change, I think, is likely to kill me. I have an 18 year old son left, and if we don't get this fixed, it will definitely kill him, and the chances of him getting to his 30th birthday, I think, now are very small. Without action. So the urgency, I think, isn't being well communicated, but there's thirdly a feeling of disempowerment and that happens, let's suppose, let's think of Britain. You have politicians who say, well, if I talk about climate change, it's not a vote winner and people want to talk about the NHS and growing an economy and, you know, security and jobs. So that's where I've got a major on here. People aren't going to vote for me if I say we're all going to burn unless we do something. So the politicians aren't going to sell it. Businesses say, well, we can't do anything unless government change regulations for us to get a level playing field, because if we take action, costs go up, people won't buy our product, someone else will sell. The public go, well, the politicians aren't doing anything about it. The businesses aren't doing anything about it. What can I do? Then internationally, you get the same effect. So a government says, well, If we were to do something about it, there's no point in us, because, insert name of country here, India won't, China won't, America won't, we're too small, it doesn't matter what we do. Businesses go, well there's no point in us in Britain making that change, because a foreign competitor will do it, or people will just offshore. And people go, doesn't matter what I do, because someone in China's not going to do it, or my next door neighbour flies four times a week. Everyone is locked in to a reason for not acting, which again sounds rude but it's not. I understand the psychology of this, that it's easy to feel disempowered. It's taken me a long time to work out where to work. I've spent a lot of time talking with politicians, trying to change policy. It's not going to work. The politicians will fill up the permissive vacuum that we create for them. It's down to us as individuals, when we as individuals all do the right thing. Do you remember that thing that our parents used to say? It doesn't matter whether you think it'll work. You just do the thing that's the right thing. Yeah. We all do the right thing. We create market for the businesses and they can move. And we create space for the politicians and they can move. So in the end, it comes down to us. Okay. Well, I think that's a really nice place to take a brief pause, because when we come back, we'll be talking a little bit more about what we can do about it. Fantastic. Okay. Welcome back. So Hugh, let's talk about, we've already spoken about what's been happening, how things are getting worse, where climate change has come from, and we're getting an idea of the massive ramifications over a very short timescale within 10 years, pretty much. you know, really, really potentially bad things. and you know, awareness is key. And everyone listening to this, just learning a few messages and taking things forward is key and spreading the word. So yeah, let's, spin from being a bit like doom and gloom to the more of the positive side of things. So first of all, do you want to tell me a little bit about real zero? Yes. So, it's called real zero because there's this nonsense idea out there called net zero and net zero is a con. It's a way of allowing, companies, particularly in governments to not do anything. Yeah. Because the physics says That we should be at as close to zero emissions as we possibly can. And that things are so bad with this concentration of greenhouse gases that we need to draw them down. Remember I mentioned that a fifth of the CO2 we would emit today will still be there in 33, 000 years. Still trapping energy. So if we want to stop ourselves boiling ourselves away with these extremes of weather and so forth, we're going to have to draw down that carbon dioxide. Now what net zero says is, well I will reduce my greenhouse gas emissions as much as I can. But then I'm going to, do something else to allow for the remaining emissions I've got. And some of those are a complete con because, of course, some of them you would say, well, I'm going to draw down that carbon dioxide. That's the right thing to do. Say, okay, well, if I'm still putting out a ton, I've got to find a way of sucking that ton out. There isn't an industrial way of doing that at the moment. So last year, I think commercially around 1. 7 million tons got drawn down out of 50. 3 billion tons. Not much then. Less than a million, so pointless. Tree planting sounds a great idea, but it doesn't work. To draw down last year's greenhouse gas emissions, you'd need to plant around three and a half times as many trees this year as there are on the entire planet. And the problem is we're chopping trees down in rainforests at the moment, and they're also catching fire. So pretty much all of California's offsetting tree planting stopped burned down in the last two years. So at the moment, there isn't a sort of way of drawing it down. So what people then say is, oh, well, I'm, putting solar stoves into Africa, because then people will be using those in the future instead of using, I don't know, burning kerosene or burning something else. But that's not drawing down. That's just Helping prevent even more being added So the whole idea of net to zero is a con You can't get to a net zero at the moment. There's only real zero So we formed this outfit, which is a non profit charity funded called real zero to help people Because everyone listening to this podcast most people aren't psychopaths There are a few in the world, but most people are decent people And They don't want to be beaten up. Most people just want to go. Okay. There's a problem What is it that I can do that will help and that's what we're trying to do particularly through the health Economy. Yeah, and before we get into the things that people can do, There's probably a few things that you must hear quite a lot and you must have some decent answers for it So what happens when people say? Well, what what can I do? You know, i'm just one person out of seven billion. Am I really going to make an impact? Um, so the answer is, I understand it. The first thing to do is always do the right thing that you can't morally offset and say, well, if I do, if I don't do that, someone else do the wrong thing. We all know that. Actually, we've been through that. We learned that when we were five or six years old, that you don't do the wrong thing. You don't hurt yourself and you don't hurt other people. So there's a moral imperative for this. The second thing is that no one else, we're going to unlock this because governments, as I've explained, won't act because they feel they can't, businesses won't, people won't. Someone's got to unlock that and we can because if we change, governments will follow and so will businesses. Thirdly, each one of us has huge influence, all of us. You don't have to be a Hollywood star, you don't have to be Taylor Swift with however many bazillions of followers she's got. We're told by advertisers that most of us have at least seven people who either respect us enough or love us enough To pretty much do anything that we ask them to do And of course in life That's why people end up smoking cigarettes when they didn't plan twos because they want to hang out with the cool kids or We're all social animals so We can light the fire to make our changes and we can, each one of us, get seven other people to do the same things we've done. Now, do you remember our numbers, Dan, from COVID? Some of them, yeah. Okay. So, an R number, as you remember, was from a case, how many more people am I likely to infect? Yes. And COVID was around three to 3. 7 when it started. Yeah. Which meant that if I infect three people and those three people infect three, and that happens 10 times, around 90, 000 people are infected. Let's think of an R number of seven. Yeah. So for climate change, I can make a change and I can get seven other people, parents, if they were alive, sister, close friends at work, to do the same. I don't expect you to do the maths in your head, but how many people is it by the time if you do seven and then you've seven to seven and you do that ten times? That's quite a lot. Yeah, it's almost twice the number of people that are on the planet. So 13 billion. So we can, if we choose, light the fire that will make the difference. The third thing is that we have huge leverage. It isn't just about, if I reduce my meat consumption, or I change my bank account, from a bank that invests in fossil fuels to one that doesn't. Or I change my travel from trying to reduce flying to, you know, flying. It's not that just a reduction emissions that I'm responsible for. It's the change in the financial markets. Yeah. Because when I do that, the revenue changes and hedge funds and pension funds and investors looking to go. You know what? There's a little nudge in the market here. We need to invest a bit differently because if this all changes, we're going to be caught in trouble. Yeah. So the markets move. We've got really big leverage here. I know it feels that what we do as individuals doesn't matter, but you can feel really good about yourself by doing the right thing. A lot of things we're going to be talking about this podcast are actually boring and really easy and not that painful to do. Yeah. And together can have a huge impact. And that's why we're doing this, right? Because I'm very scared. But if I didn't think we could fix the problem, I wouldn't be bothering to talk to you today, Dan. Yeah, that's fair enough. And I suppose we can delve a little bit more into some of those things. What you said before, it reminds me, when I used to work in film, of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Where, no matter what, you would always be six jobs away from having worked with Kevin Bacon. And almost everyone in the film industry is related to him. So, I can kind of see how We all relate to each other in terms of this as well. Well, at least bacon comes from an animal that's not ruminant, I suppose, yeah, there you go. Um, so, uh, people can begin to make a difference. Now, we're obviously going to go into much more detail over the course of this podcast, and although you say it's boring, we're going to make it not boring, and we're definitely going to try. And, you know, some of the things are quite simple. It's almost like there are pillars of, support in this that people can look at. So, you know, you've mentioned Banking. And, you know, there's political things, there's power supplies and things like this. And what does it mean when we're talking about power, for example? Well, we'll have a podcast about that because it is actually quite interesting. Again, this isn't meant to be just all geeky stuff. And we've got someone from one of the major energy companies we'll be talking to you, Dan, another time. The power that you use in your home, which is usually electricity, Can come from burning fossil fuels. And a lot does. We've decommissioned a lot of coal fired power stations in Britain, which is good. Uh, anyone who seems to surround the world may well be getting their power from that. But we burn gas to make electricity as well. And there are oil fired power stations as well. That power can come from the sun, and the wind, and the waves, and what are known as renewables, so basically free stuff that isn't polluting. Thank goodness in Britain, we're blessed with a bunch of companies that only get that power supply from those renewables and it really doesn't cost any more money to get a power supplier that isn't. So I'm with a company called Good Energy. I don't own any shares in them and I, you know, I'm not profiting by saying they're great. It's all of their stuff comes mainly from wind turbines and from solar. The power I have in my home is, not polluting the planet. It takes literally maybe 10 minutes online to move. You just notice your bill changes. Yeah. That's all that happens. So it's dead easy. And immediately the options to use at home is Sorted there are some simple things as well at power at home that actually are quite helpful So gas prices, of course with ukraine war and stuff have become very expensive heating homes. Now. It's very expensive. Yeah If for every degree here's a good question for you for every degree you turn your radiator down or your thermostat Yeah, what's the saving in money and emissions? Do you think in percentages? Half percent one percent how many percent per degree how many percent? I think you'd probably save, if I was going to guess, about 20 percent on your money. Oh, well, you're very optimistic. It's around 7 11 percent per degree. Okay. So, if you're running your house at, let's say, 22 degrees, and you turn it down by 5, you've halved your bill. Halved your bill. 50 percent saving, and 50 percent saving in emissions. What do you do instead? Well, actually, use the savings to buy yourself a really nice jumper cut. Or a really nice fashionable flashy down jacket. Okay, you can afford it big flashy down jacket is going to cost you. I know let's think of a number 150 quid. Yeah. Okay. You can easily afford that because you will have saved that and vastly more by what you've done. Yeah, and it does come back to what you were talking earlier, it's reframing things, and it's, the dissonance that people have, like, you know, one of the reasons why, the climate is so difficult for people to get their head around is because we live in this world where the media is so immediate and, bad news needs to happen straight away, whereas Yeah, and also, do you know what, I get it, we're all busy, you and I are still working in the NHS and Research and other things, 90, 100 hour a week. You get in an eight o'clock at night, nine o'clock at night. Do you really want to spend time sitting down and changing your energy supplier online? It's a Saturday for goodness sake. You want to play with the kids, get another part, whatever else it might be. Other things get in the way, but if 10 minutes, it's, or it's actually a friend of mine started doing. Talking about those seven people of influence, make it a social event and say, okay, Friday night, I'm going to get the seven or eight people that are mates of mine over that can do this. They can all bring a laptop. I'll get a couple of bottles of wine in and we'll all move our accounts and then we'll have a few glasses of wine and shoot the breeze over a takeaway or something. We can encourage our kids to say, you know, can you. Turn the knob down a bit. You know what kids are like? I mean, my kids when they were young would spend their entire life running around naked in sub zero temperatures they didn't seem to notice, do they? Yeah. I mean, I think, the kids is really interesting. You know, because on the one hand, they have, no concept of the electricity that they use or whatever. But on the other hand, I've done a variety of work in schools doing other things. And sometimes, you know, we ask the kids. What is the thing that's really worrying you, you know, or what is actually high up your agenda? And it's actually quite significant how many say climate. So I do think that, you know, the kids are following through and as they get older they may influence the adults. Well, I think you're right, but we need to empower them. So we did some schools work years ago and I remember giving a school assembly and there were some parents that back always a bit worried that the children were gonna be utterly terrified. And they, you know, I gave them the bold news, and this is also the four or 5-year-old CROs. They put their hand up question. I said, yeah. And I said, he said, are you saying we're all going to die? And you could see the parents getting anxious? I said, well, you obviously been listening. I'm gonna say, unless we get, unless we sort this out, the answer's yes. But the good news is that you can make the difference right now. And the kids say, cool, kids are up for action here. It only becomes something where people want to slash their wrists and get depressed. If you tell them bad news and there's no option. If I said to you, Dan, you've got colon cancer, mate, and it's going to kill you. You'll go, that's not very nice. If I say you've got colon cancer. But the good news is that if you're prepared to do this, that and the other, and we get your operation, your chemo, we can cure you of that. You go, great. I'll bring it on. I'll have the, I'll have that operation and you feel positive about, right, let's get on and do this thing. And we're in that situation now. It is, we've been told for years you can't tell people bad news about climate change because it puts them off. That's nonsense. People need to understand the nature of the threat and the immediacy and gravity and urgency of it. But then we also need to say, and as in consequence to that, don't just get paralysed by fear. Feel positive. Do these seven things. And then find seven other people to do them too, and if we can get that wave rippling around the world, the problem is solved. Yeah, fantastic, Hugh. I mean, I guess that's probably coming towards the end of what we need to talk about, because we're going to go into all those seven things over the course of this podcast. So, you know, we're going to be touching a bit more on the science. We'll be talking about, banking, we'll be talking about, the economic impact, the food that you should be eating, the power you should be using. We might even delve into politics and media and, the role that, celebrities and role models might have in this kind of thing as well. Yeah, and I should actually say, of course, this isn't an exclusive club, right? This is, Real Zero is a charity funded outfit. We're trying to do the right thing here. We haven't got money for lots of salaries, but thank you, Dan. I mean, you've come in and you're doing these podcasts for nothing. We're not paying you for them. We're not making money out of this. Other people want to get engaged and help and do things. We'll help them do these things too. You can join the gang. Feel positive about this. Yeah. And I suppose one of the most important things people can do if they're listening to this podcast. is get seven other people to listen to this podcast and then start spreading it around. As long as there's action, because words are cheap and easy, aren't they? We can soon shoot the breeze all day. The rubber has hit the road somewhere. So, I mean, you've heard a few hints today. You have Dan, I'm sure you've done all of them already, because I've been nagging you for a while. But, if you have just listened into those things, carve out that 10 or 15 minutes to move bank accounts, move power supply. We'll tell you how to do it in another podcast. Pour yourself a glass of wine, make yourself a nice cup of coffee, whatever it might be, and feel good about yourself. Fantastic. So please do subscribe to this podcast so you get, everything else that's coming out in season one. Hugh, any good websites to check out? Well, you can check out ours. So that's realzero. earth. Yeah. There are many others, which I think we'll give you as we go along. I don't want people to feel particularly swamped. One of my favorite ones, if you just want to see the climate data, NASA have good sites, NOAA, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, but Copernicus, you'll see the day to day data. So if you're just a bit of a geek who wants to know about energy gain and temperatures around the world, put in Copernicus, Climate and you'll find a website there if you are interested. That's not a bad of a place to start. Thanks Hugh. So there you have it. You know, we are, in a situation which is bad and getting worse, but we can do things about it and it can start with just you at home and 10 minutes of your time. Hugh, thank you so much for coming in. Are you're gonna be joining us for the rest of the season as well? I'm certainly looking forward to it. Now again, we've got some stellar guests from whom I'm looking forward to here. Lovely. Take care and we'll see you next time. Thanks Dan. Bye bye.