Summary: http://bit.ly/wulkTw "The future is impossible" says Dr. Kevin Anderson, former Director of UK's top climate research institute, the Tyndall Centre. Speech in London lays out our awful tilt toward an unlivable climate. Followed by discussion with Washington's Dr. William Calvin. Welcome. I'm Alex. Are you ready for the bad news about climate change? Really? I'm going to play you a speech too awful to run during the holidays. People with clinical depression and very young children may want to avoid this program. It's also going to be a challenge for our many North American listeners, because our speaker is Kevin Anderson. From his recent post as Director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK's top academic institute researching climate change, Anderson speaks quickly, says a lot, and holds nothing back. This lecture is part of the London School of Economics Department of International Development Friday Lecture Series. The title is "Beyond 'dangerous' climate change: emission scenarios for a new world" Anderson calls it "the brutal logic of climate change." This talk set up a blaze of urgency, and a stiff warning to people and governments: we are failing to address the greatest challenge ever faced by humanity. Something unimaginable is happening. Following this edited-for-radio speech, I'll chat again with Professor William Calvin from the University of Washington. He sees the bleakness, but offers a grain of hope. I'm going to throw you into the deep end with this one. I suggest you download the program from our web site at ecoshock.org, or find links in the blog at ecoshock.info. Things are not what they seem. This speech courtesy of the London School of Economics Lecture Series was recorded October 21st, 2011. The subtitle for this talk is "Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope". Dave Roberts of Grist wrote two articles about the implications of this talk, which he called "The Brutal Logic of Climate Change". Try this one, and this one. Find a .pdf of Kevin Anderson's pivotal paper on our near hopeless situation of unfolding climate change here. A recording of the original speech, running 1 hour 28 minutes with a Q and A is here. And you can find the slides for that here. To get a written summary, I can't do better than the Dave Roberts Grist articles linked above. Dave even throws in some helpful graphs. My own conclusions from this speech could be: 1. The 2 degree target (keeping below 2 degrees of global mean temperature rise to prevent dangerous climate change) is quite arbitrary, and likely too high. As Dr. James Hansen of NASA points out, we should be at 350 parts per million CO2 to keep the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets which moderate our climate. In previous history, levels higher than that triggered melting of the ice sheets, and eventually a much hotter greenhouse world. We are currently at 390 ppm and rising fast. 2. That 2 degree target is no guarantee of a "safe" climate, but just a 50% chance of staying within merely "dangerous" climate change, and "extremely dangerous climate change". 3. As we are almost 1 degree above pre-industrial times already, with at least 1 degree hidden by aerosol pollution (including sulfates from world coal plants) - it may already be too late to stay at 2 degrees. 4. The RATE of increase of our emissions is steadily going up, meaning the dangerous impacts of climate change keep getting closer and closer to us in time. Not 2050, but sooner. Yet government reports keep assuming 1 or 2% increase in emissions, when we are generally increasing at 3% over the past few years, and hit almost 6% in 2010. That is a 6 % increase over the increasingly high emissions during all the past years. 5. Kevin Anderson is particularly critical of all the government assessments which low-ball the emissions and the impacts. He says some climate scientists try to tell politicians, but those warnings are polished up as they rise through the ranks. Top ministers don't want to hear we may have to accept grave austerity
