On the twenty-second of July 2004, an amendment
to the UKs electrical safety regulations, known as Part P, was laid before Parliament to
be ratified. It prescribed safe zones on walls where electrical CABLES could be installed and
it specifically dictated that cables must ALWAYS run in those safe zones and must ALWAYS run
perfectly vertical or perfectly horizontal, so that everyone knew they were after they’d
been hidden behind dry wall or plaster render. One week after that parliamentary sitting, on the
thirty-first of July two thousand and four, the daughter of one of those very parliamentarians,
whose name I won’t mention to protect her privacy, was electrocuted, and killed in her own home. It
turned out that, back in nineteen-ninety-nine, she and her husband had had a new kitchen fitted
and, unbeknown to them, an electrical cable connecting an extractor fan had been bodged in at
a five-degree angle instead of dead vertical. Two years later, the husband installed a wall mounted
metal dish drainer below that extractor in a zone he assumed to be safe. But one of the screws just
breached the outer insulation of the badly fitted cable. As the drainer moved a bit over time,
that screw finally came into contact with the live conductor, making the drainer live. One day
soon after that his wife placed a metal utensil on the drainer while one of her bare feet also
happened to be touching the metal front of their dishwasher. That made an electrical circuit
that kill her instantly – at the exact same time that legislation was being passed to
prevent precisely that kind of tragedy. So, the question is, should the electrician who
installed that cable be held responsible for that person’s death? After all, even though he almost
certainly knew what he was doing was extremely dangerous, the new rules didn’t exist at the time
he installed the cable, and five years had passed, so was it really his problem?
The reason I share this story, if it hasn’t already clicked, is that it serves
as a gruesome but very apposite allegory for the way we humans are collectively bodging our
planets natural system boundaries right now, with potentially lethal consequences, possibly
even for us, but certainly for our descendants. And the reason I mention it NOW, is because a
group of the world’s leading climate scientists has just published this very blunt new analysis
outlining precisely what those system boundaries are, how badly we’re currently bodging them,
and what the consequences are likely to be for future generations, starting with our
kids and grandkids. So, the question is, should we be held responsible for the future
safety of our descendants, or is it their problem? Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think, This new work was led by a guy called Professor
Johan Rockström who, as I’m sure many of you know, is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate
Impact Research. At a recent gathering of some of the world’s most eminent scientists, called
the Frontiers Forum, Rockström delivered an excellent forty-minute lecture summarising its
contents. This video is based very closely on that presentation, so if you’d prefer to get
the details straight from the horse’s mouth, and frankly I wouldn’t blame you if you’ve got
the time, then you can click up there to jump straight to that video, or follow the link to it
that I’ve left in the description section below. If you’re still watching this though, then
here’s my attempt at a potted summary. First of all let’s talk about the shift from a
Holocene period to the so-called Anthropocene period that you’ve no doubt heard about in the
news recently. This chart from a research team led by Matthew Osman from the University of
Arizona, shows how temperatures changed over the last twenty-four thousand years. During
the eleven thousand or so years since the onset of this interglacial period, known as
the Holocene our planet’s average surface temperature was fourteen degrees Celsius
plus or minus zero-point-five degrees. Temperatures never strayed towards one degree
higher, let alone one point five or two degrees. Modern humans have been on the planet for about
two hundred thousand years. As a species, we’ve lived through two ice ages and two interglacial
periods. But it’s only when we left the last ice age that conditions enabled us to shift from a
few million hunter gathers to a more sedentary agricultural lifestyle with domesticated
animals and fixed geographical positions that brought about the growth of great civilisations,
culminating in the global sprawl we have today. The reason for that stability has been
a healthy biosphere. In other words, earth’s various planetary systems were always
able to compensate for any natural variability and sort of mop up things like carbon, either in
the oceans or in land sinks or in the atmosphere. Professor Rockström explains that the Holocene is
the model we want to aim for as a set of proven safe boundaries for human development. But that’s
not where we’re at now. We’re now in a new epoch, called the Anthropocene, where the dominant
driver of planetary conditions is not earths own calibration systems but human or anthropogenic
forcing. And this isn’t just about the climate crisis by the way. Rockström and his team take a
more holistic view that considers the impacts of things like future global pandemics, like the one
we all recently experienced, regional conflicts like the war in Ukraine that can disrupt food
and energy supplies, and an ecological crisis that Rockström says has already wiped out seventy
percent of the populations of vertebrate animals over the course of the last seventy years and
which has driven one million of the eight million known species on earth either to extinction or
to a point of very serious extinction RISK in the coming decades. The fundamental challenge of the
ecological crisis, says Rockström, is that we’re losing the ability for moisture recycling, for
carbon sequestration, and for food production, AND we’re putting ourselves at increasing risk
of what our scientists call zoonotic disease outbreaks, which is essentially what Covid was.
Last year was the fifth warmest year on record, despite there having been three years of
La Nina conditions in the South Pacific, which normally tend to cool our global atmosphere
a bit. It was also the most expensive year ever in terms of loss and damage, costing more
than three hundred billion dollars globally. We’re now moving into an El Nino phase, which
tends to cause additional global warming and you can click up there somewhere, to jump
over to my video looking at that phenomenon. Rockström suggests those El Nino conditions
could briefly bump us into temperatures that are one-point-five degrees Celsius higher than
eighteen fifty to nineteen hundred levels, as early as twenty- twenty-four. That may prove
to be a freak single year this time around, but it’ll certainly give us an idea of
the longer-term direction of travel. Nature has done its best to compensate for our
profligacy though. It continued to do a lot of mopping up, even as our species learnt how to
exponentially accelerate our consumption and emissions as a result of the discovery of fossil
fuels at the start of the industrial revolution. To get an idea of just how much we’ve
leveraged our own human and animal power, we can look at oil. A single barrel of crude oil
contains an amount of energy roughly equivalent to the amount of work that a single human
labourer, working 8 hours a day, every single day, would take almost eight years to achieve.
And in twenty-twenty-three the world will be producing one hundred million
barrels of oil every single day. Essentially the planet has absorbed fifty percent
of the impact of our activities over the last one hundred and seventy years or so. That’s
basically a massive, unaccounted for subsidy to the world economy, because if nature hadn’t
mopped up the extra carbon dioxide and heat, we would have had to deal with the consequences,
which of course would have cost a lot of money and severely curtailed global economic growth.
The slight wrinkle, as Rockström points out, is that all the models in the IPCC Sixth Assessment
report that we took a look at in this video, assume that this extremely helpful planetary
activity will carry on indefinitely. But all the research shows that cracks are now appearing
in those systems. So, we’ve got things like the Amazon rain forest shifting from a net carbon sink
to a net carbon emitter, which we looked at in this video, and a similar phenomenon is happening
in the forests of Northern Europe and Canada. Then there’s our oceans. They’ve absorbed
ninety five percent of the extra heat and more than thirty percent of the extra carbon
dioxide that we’ve produced since the industrial revolution. The upcoming El Nino might just give
us a taster of what it may be like if that energy is released back out of our oceans and into our
atmosphere over relatively short timescales. So, the future, according to Rockström and
his team, and by the way plenty of other analysts around the world as well, is not just
about building out millions of windmills and solar panels to decarbonise our world economy,
important though that is, it’s fundamentally really about staying within the earth system
boundaries, or ESBs outlined in this paper. And to that end, Rockström insists that
one-point-five degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is a limit that we really
can’t just go sailing past and say, oh well, never mind. It’s not an arbitrary number and
it’s certainly not some politically motivated compromise plucked out of thin air, as some
sceptics suggest. It’s a genuine planetary boundary beyond which we will begin to invoke
some of the tipping points that Rockström and his team mapped out way back in twenty-O-nine and
updated in twenty fifteen on this global chart. Now, it’s extremely important that people
like me don’t give the impression that phrases like ‘Greenland Ice Sheet Collapse’ mean
an immediate disintegration like a house of cards, causing seven metres of sea level rise by
next Tuesday. It could take hundreds of years for some of these consequences to play
out in their entirety. But just like a clumsy teenager overturning their chair, once the tipping
point is passed, there’s no going back until the consequences play out to their conclusion.
As we take a tour around this global map you start to see that these consequences are not
just up in the Arctic either. And, not even just up here in the northern hemisphere. They stretch
right across the globe from East to West and from North to South. Four of them are likely to happen
if we go above 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, another two will likely occur if we hit 2 degrees
Celsius of additional warming, and another four, including the die back of the Amazon rain forest,
start between two and three-point-seven degrees, which is where our current global policies
are taking us to by the end of this century. And just to press home the point about risks to
global stability, Professor Rockström provides us with this global map created by a research
team at Exeter University here in the UK, showing what they refer to as the future of
the human climate niche. And this one is a particularly cheery little number. The country
colours represent economic stability with blues and greens denoting relatively stable economies.
Oranges and reds denote comparatively unstable economies, with the darkest red representing
the least stable. On top of that the team overlay a heat risk map. These solid black
sections are regions that already currently experience average annual temperatures greater
than twenty-nine degrees Celsius. At the moment, those conditions are confined to the Sahara
Desert. But these hashed areas show regions that will ALSO experience average annual temperatures
greater than twenty-nine degrees Celsius within fifty years if we continue on our current
trajectory. That’s an annual average that brings regular temperature spikes where human
outdoor survival is severely jeopardized. It includes Brazil, vast swathes of Northern
Africa, a good chunk of India and South East Asia. All told that’s about 3.5 billion people living in
regions where the vulnerable who can’t afford air conditioning will be forced to migrate elsewhere
( good luck with that one) or simply die in situ. The summary of all this slightly mind-boggling
information is the model that Rockström and his team refer to as the planetary boundary
framework, which would probably take at least another whole video to examine in detail,
but which serves as a pretty useful quick visual reference for where we’re at right now.
Four of the nine boundaries have already been passed. The red zones are where we’re now at high
risk, including biosphere integrity AND the use of phosphorus and nitrogen in agriculture.
Orange represents areas of increasing risk like global warming and land use, and blue
is where we’re safe, which is almost nowhere. Now, if you’re perhaps already in your
forties, or like me in your fifties or older, then the chances are you won’t be around in fifty
years-time. So, how bothered should you be about this information? Are you thinking ‘well, I
don’t live in one of those areas, and even if all the other near-term consequences of climate
change, like food shortages, economic breakdown, water scarcity, extreme weather events and all
of that stuff do start to impinge on my part of the world, with a bit of careful planning
and judicious stockpiling, I reckon I can probably get away with it until they finally put
me in my box’. Because if you are thinking that, then I would suggest you are no better than
the electrician I talked about right at the start of this video. I know you can’t solve all
these problems by yourself, any more than I can, but dealing with the four elements of the global
crisis that Rockström highlighted earlier, can only be achieved by fundamental changes in
human behaviour. Governments and corporations are not untouchable faceless entities. They are
organisations run by human beings. That means they can be influenced in the right direction by
other human beings. And those other human beings are very definitely people like you and me.
That’s my view anyway, for what it’s worth. There are of course, loads of different
opinions about how to address these issues, and no doubt one of those opinions is your
opinion. So, if you’re currently feeling a burning desire to express that opinion, why
not dive down to the comments section below and leave your thoughts there. And I’ll be very
interested to see what the consensus looks like. That’s it for this week though. Thanks, as always
to our fantastic Patreon supporters, who enable me to run this channel on a full-time basis without
having to include ads and sponsorship messages in any of my videos. And an extra special thank
you to the folks whose names are scrolling up the screen beside me here, all of whom celebrated
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As always, thanks very much for watching! Have a great week, and remember to just
have a think. See you next week.
