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thank you [Music] [Music] if we think about where we're heading let's be clear we are over 30 years 32 years now since the first major
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scientific report on climate change that came out in 1990. and so I think when we judge where we are heading we have to say well what have we done since 1990 well we've watched emissions go up year after year
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after year they're now over 60 percent higher per year than they were in 1990. so there's lots that you will hear lots of rhetoric lots of good words lots of lots of optimism about the future but
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given we've known about this subject and apparently been working on it for 30 years the trend line tells us that we are heading towards three to four degrees Centigrade of warming across this Century an absolute climate
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catastrophe and it's catastrophe for all species including our own and so that's the direction of travel now that direction of travel does not have to continue but the current trend
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line tells us that all we are doing so far is giving rhetoric and optimism and greenwash and not driving the levels of change that are necessary to stay within
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the 1.5 to 2 degrees framing of the Paris agreement when we think about three or four degrees Centigrade let's be clear this is we have no historical precedent in in human history for these sorts of
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temperature changes and they're occurring overnight and they don't just occur across this century firstly and we know that things like sea level rise will keep going for hundreds of years after that and that we
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are locking in absolutely locking in really high levels of sea level rise maybe seven eight or more meters so we may only across this Century see one or two meters which will be devastating for many of our coastal cities and of course
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most of the population of the world live near the coast so that would be devastating for our existing communities but we're locking in this Devastation for centuries to come but we're also changing very significantly how we will
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produce our food whether we produce enough food where will that food be produced and that's because we're changing the complete weather patterns of our of our of our society of our of our Earth we're changing rainfall patterns we're changing insect
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pollination of our crops so all of this plays out one one's disaster after another so any single one of them we might think or we can we can resolve we can deal with that but when you bring all of these together occurring almost
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overnight you're talking about the collapse of our modern society you're talking about the collapse of most of our sort of emblematic ecosystems so this is this is not a future that we shouldn't anyway be we should be
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heading towards and we should be doing everything we can to avoid it the sad State of Affairs is though that we're doing nothing to avoid it there is plenty of talk but no action and what we
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have to bear in mind is the climate only responds to action it was the physics responds to how much carbon dioxide now the greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere so we can talk about efficiency we can talk about green
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growth and all of this stuff it's meaningless what really matters is keeping the emissions out of the atmosphere got Royal Highness is excellencies
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ladies and gentlemen the six years since the Paris climate agreement have been the six hottest years on record
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our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing Humanity to the brink we Face a stark choice either we stop it or it stops US
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and it's time to say enough of brutalizing biodiversity enough of killing ourselves with carbon enough of treating nature like a toilet
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enough of burning and Drilling and Mining our way deeper we are digging our own Graves our planet is changing before our eyes from the ocean depths to mountain tops
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from melting glaciers to Relentless extreme weather events sea level rise is doubled rate it was 30 years ago oceans are hotter than ever and getting
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warmer faster parts of the Amazon rainforest now emits more carbon than they absorb recent climate action announcements
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might give the impression that we are on track to turn things around this is an illusion what we've seen in the last few years is that countries have made these various
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promises about what they're going to do about climate change and a really optimistic reading of that often held often given by people like the UN and other some other climate academics they
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say oh we're heading towards 2.7 degrees of warming well first let's be clear 2.7 degrees of warming at a global average level is itself a disaster I mean these these temperatures are not spread evenly
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around the planet so that is a that is like moving to a different planet it's not the one that we live on today but in addition to that holding to 2.7 relies on huge amount of optimism by the
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analysts and by the UN it's not embedded in the commitments the governments are making you look at those commitments and you extend them out beyond the time frame that they're normally talking about which is only say to 2030 and then we're much more likely to be heading
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towards three or four degrees Centigrade of warming this 2.7 is optimistic but because because it is relying on future Generations our children and our grandchildren to develop technologies that will remove carbon dioxide from the
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atmosphere not small quantities of carbon dioxide hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide to be removed from the atmosphere and stored safely somewhere underground that we're relying on these on these future generations to
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develop the technologies that we don't have today we have a few pilot schemes and a few ideas and a few professors Minds there is nothing out there of any scale that we're talking about so we are having to imagine a future there's new
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move carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because we are running too scared of the political repercussions of actually driving the missions out of the system today [Music]
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oh my God [Music] [Music] one of the things I think Civil Society has to be aware of is that there's been
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a deliberate misuse of the prospects of technology and I'm saying this as an engineer I used to design and build offshore oil platforms engineering can do a huge amount of things but it cannot perform miracles
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and yet a lot of models that we have what we have done in those is embed all sorts of sometimes real Technologies often pseudo Technologies and then we hide behind them they are a facade to
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avoid asking the difficult political and equity-based questions and you need to really guard against that when people are telling you oh we've got till 2050 to make these changes and even then when they say 2050
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and Net Zero Net Zero is a there's a real dangerous term in my view and if you hear the language of Net Zero I'd be very cautious about the optimism the person who's saying it um actually has
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unpick it reveal what's behind it and you'll realize what they mean is not zero emissions not Net Zero not zero emissions so I always call it Net Zero is Latin for Kick the Can down the road
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um and so you need to look at what are Technologies hiding and what they are often hiding is this deep inequality in in emissions you know who are the
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people presiding over most of the emissions and the way that they are avoiding asking those questions is to say we can do it with this technology or that technology um in 2030 and 2040 in 2050 and of
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course well beyond that because a lot of these net zero models are assuming Technologies in 2070 and 2019 and 2100 and these are the technologies that say that don't really exist today
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and so we're particularly many of well many of us who work in the climate change realm I think are hiding behind this because we've done very well out of the system thank you you know we we have nice places to live we have
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and the benefit of travel easy travel we can afford the the fuel we don't we're not in a cost of living crisis like many people are facing around the world today so for us Life Is Good Life Is Life is
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quite Rosy and we don't like to see ourselves as part of the problem and one of the ways around that is to delude ourselves and in doing that other people as well that actually technology is the savior technology is part of the
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picture it's a prerequisite but it needs to go hand in hand with fundamental profound social change by those of us who are responsible for the Lion's shared and the missions well I am obviously yeah
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and I have to be honest and say that you know my judgment my best guess is as someone who's worked on this for years is that we are going to fail we're going to go to three or four degree Centigrade of warming and we'll put up
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with all we won't put up with we'll have to live through or die from all of the repercussions that that will have that it is a terrible Prospect um and one that I think we have to try
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everything we can to avoid but the message of Hope if there's any thread of Hope in this is that it is a choice to fail we we have so far repeatedly I'm going
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to say we what I mean is effectively our leaders politically academically in the journalistic community you know across the board those people that frame this debate have chosen actively to fail for three
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decades and when they have breakfast with their own children they I hope they are thinking about what they have deliberately what we have deliberately imposed upon their future but as I say it's a choice and the great
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thing about a choice is we can choose a different way out of this now whether we can still hold a 1.5 it looks incredibly unlikely to me but incredibly unlikely doesn't mean to say that it's impossible
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it is only impossible impossible if we don't try and so the real trick here is to try to try really hard and what examples do we have of Rapid
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change because we don't have any examples of this history is littered with rapid change from time to time these things occur when particularly when we see there's a Collective Agreement that we're in a certain
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situation so with covid now obviously a deep tragedy but what we saw was a Global Response now there are lots of lots of the responses were were not particularly in the right direction and in an emergency
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that's often going to be the case nevertheless we did see a global response to covid we saw a global response to the banking crisis back in 2007-2008 in my view not in a healthy
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helpful sustainable way but nevertheless we saw a Global Response we have people like Roosevelt's fireside speeches going back to the 30s that really were Radical changes that were
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being proposed to the social norms of the time we've had we've been through the suffragette movement we've been through all of the changes in in race laws and so forth across our history we need to
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take those those examples and accelerate them and say yes we can drive chains very rapidly it is a choice to fail and it is a choice to succeed
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and if we sit back and wait for the great and good to deliver this change then we will we will fail it does come down to all of us to play our role as best that we can in doing
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this and thankfully we are saying early signs of this with some of the Civil Society movements who are really working very hard to try and change the agenda and the change of the dialogue and the mood music over over the last two or
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three years maybe the last five years now has come from that group to say it hasn't come from the professors or the academics it's come from civil society and to me that's really where the start the Nugget of
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Hope arises
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