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.
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a great week, and remember to just have a think. See you next week.