Summary: The amount of carbon we can burn and still have a safe climate is zero. One Australian calls it Code Red, time for emergency action. Plus new science on why New York City will flood again and again. Guests David Spratt and Dr. Stefan Talke, plus special on gardening in extreme heat with Marjory Wildcraft. Radio Ecoshock 140611 1 hour in CD Quality or Lo-Fi. In this Radio Ecoshock show: we find out the amount of carbon we can burn and still have a safe climate is zero. One Australian calls it Code Red, time for emergency action. Then we'll zero in on one of the global cities that will flood time and time again. A new scientific report on why New York City is going under. We end with a quick lesson from a wise garden grower in Texas. How and what to plant in the coming times of heat and water stress as the climate warps far from normal. I'm Alex Smith. Get ready for Radio Ecoshock. Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB) NOTES FROM THE DAVID SPRATT INTERVIEW Our talk was pretty wide-ranging. You should listen to the interview if you have time. We began by looking at who originally set two degrees (Centigrade) as a safe level for the world to warm. We've already seen major melting at both poles, plus storms, droughts and weird weather in between, and that's just at 1 degree hotter over pre-industrial times. The two degree "safe" limit was from William Nordhaus, who wasn't a climate scientist at all. He was an economist when he made that limit in the 1970's. We've found out a lot since then! Find out more in my notes on a Guy McPherson speech. Search in that document for "Where did the 2 degrees "Safe" Limit Come From". David Spratt hit it dead on when he said the politicians think the 2 degree limit is coming from the climate scientists, while climate scientists think the 2 degree mark is just political! Neither is right. David Spratt explains why 2 degrees is far from safe, and anyway on our current path of fossil fuel burning we are heading to 4 degrees or more. By the way, each 1 degree of warming, David says, adds another 15 meters of sea level rise (almost 50 feet!!)over time. Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with David Spratt in CD quality or Lo-Fi. You can listen right now on Soundcloud here. Here is a short URL for this David Spratt interview, in case you want to Tweet about it. http://tinyurl.com/n76comk 4 DEGREES OF WARMING EQUALS PLANETARY DEPOPULATION If we do get to 4 degrees what happens? "If we get to 4 degrees of warming, we think, our best expert guess is that the carrying capacity of the planet will be under 1 billion people. So that's a very strong statement. Other people were - James Lovelock said that many years ago. And more recently at a presentation in England Kevin Anderson [Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research] said 'I think four degrees is incomaptible with the continuation of human civilization.' So I think there's a widespread view that it's simply - we could not go on as we are. And obviously at 4 degrees of sea level will in the end go up to 70 meters, that's going to drown most of human civilization. So it's a very dramatic scenario." On the road to the alleged safe level of 2 degrees, a whole series of reports, from the Stern Report in Britain to the Garnaut Report in Australia, to the IPCC - they all try to calculate "the carbon budget". That's the amount of carbon we can still burn before going over 2 degrees. They talk about gradual reductions of fossil fuels over decades because that pleases industry, politicians, and classical economists. That whole exercise is not just a farce, says David Spratt, it's an illusion so dangerous it could endanger most of humanity. Spratt explains the real numbers. Humans so far have put up about 550 billion tons of carbon. Then the real odds chime in. "If you want a 33% chance of staying below two degrees, then you can have 1500 in your budget. If you want a 50% chance
