Please invest 23 minutes of your time

Thanks to my longstanding colleague, Professor Jim Longhurst, my attention was drawn to an interview at COP25 in Madrid with Dr Peter Carter (Director of the Climate Emergency Institute and an expert reviewer for the IPCC). I strongly encourage you to invest 23 minutes of your time to watch his interview in full. It would be hard for anything else you might watch not to pale into insignificance by comparison. He conveys integrity and great knowledge.

Health warning

But, depending upon how well informed you already are about climate change, be prepared to be shocked, to feel numb and become worried about the future. I now fully appreciate the condition Professor Jillian Anable suffers from. She calls it PTSD – Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder and refers to it as part of her transport and climate change presentation ‘Rearranging Elephants on the Titanic’.

The interview is so striking that I wanted to capture some transcribed sections of text from what Dr Carter had to say. These are set out later below (with highlighting added by myself, and any errors in the transcription my own).

Business as usual is our downfall

I am blessed with a wonderful family, fantastic colleagues and opportunities. How ironic then, that it is possible to feel a sense of helplessness and despair as the second decade of the millennium draws to a close. I am haunted by the now oft quoted mantra of “business as usual is not an option” yet it is hard to see much evidence of any serious departure from whatever business as usual is. Indeed, the optimist in me thought that departing from business as usual implicitly meant change for the better (or change to stop things getting any worse) and yet it seems departing from business as usual could also mean change for the (even, very much) worse.

Professional impotence

As professionals we are trapped within business as usual, just as we try to play a part in changing from it. It’s what I have previously referred to as professional impotence. I sense there are three states we can be in (and probably more):

(i)  deep anxiety that mobilises us to act

(ii)  overwhelming helplessness that prompts denial as a coping mechanism,; or

(iii) willful or unwitting ignorance of the realities suggested by the science.

My growing concern is not about (iii) among fellow professionals (at least in my circles) but instead a concern that as individual professionals we may struggle to move to, or stay in, (i) and are stranded in (ii).

So before turning in the remainder of this article to what Dr Carter had to say (please, please read the interview extracts and/or watch his full interview), I invite you to reflect on these matters and share your views and to raise your voices louder in support of the need to move away from business as usual as fast as we can.

Sobering insights from Dr Peter Carter

“Greta happened to mention in her short introduction that they had put together this panel of scientists – which is a public event – because, she said, the science wasn’t present in the main event in the negotiations as is usual. Now, I had been suspecting that, so last night I went to the Climate Secretariat and checked all the documents they have up to this day, and there’s not any science, there’s no mention of science, there’s no mention of the IPCC, there’s no mention of the IPCC 1.5° C report……this is very, very, very bad; we’ve seen this coming for a while. In the COP a couple of years ago there was a lot of media given to the terrible fact that four of the countries got together to block the tabling of the most important IPCC report ever – which was the 2018 report on 1.5° C which showed that 2.0° C – the old target since 1996 – is total catastrophe and 1.5° C is still disastrous but that is where we must aim….it is possible, but only if we reduce emissions by 7% each year from next year so that we can reduce global emissions by 50% by 2030…..If we wait any longer it becomes impossible to do it … As one of the scientists said this morning, ‘every year matters’. So COP25 is yet another circus, but the acts are absolutely terrible in this circus, its another delay.”

“The first true COPs were pretty hopeful. Ever since then, things have gone down, down, down, down, down…. The reason why they are set up to fail is very interesting. When the Convention was signed in 1992, ratified in 1993 … its set up to fail because in the Convention it said that major decisions will be made by consensus … what are we going to call consensus? Most of the countries said two-thirds majority… no, that didn’t happen, we still don’t have a definition of consensus under the Convention – its absolutely absurd. So what happens is, every single year they have what they call an ad-hoc decision and the decision is made by whoever is hosting… and it’s either unanimity, or virtual unanimity…As you can see, this is set up to fail because it just takes a couple of countries to be able to veto any major decision and that’s what we’ve seen now, we know for sure that United States, Russia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, at the very least, we know that they are blocking the science from the negotiations and it seems that in this COP they’ve been dropped completely.”

“Right now, all three greenhouse gas concentrations are accelerating – CO2 [the most important one], Methane…and now Nitrous Oxide….we are on a trend to total planetary catastrophe. We’re on a trend to biosphere collapse…we are increasing CO2 in the atmosphere at a rate that’s definitely – and the World Meteorological Organisation’s told us this – faster than anything that’s happened in the past 40 to 50 million years….rising fast.”

“We are seeing catastrophe after catastrophe after catastrophe….Chile in the Southern Hemisphere is in a mega-drought – there’s a mega-drought around Santiago where this conference was supposed to be held – and going down to Southern Chile, in other words those regions in Chile are never going to get out of drought at least for 50 or 60 years the experts say. What’s happening to this [all these catastrophes such as mega-droughts in sub-saharan Africa, Chile and probably Australia] to lessen them at least? Absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing’s going to come out of this COP with regards to doing anything or responding to that. That was decided, I heard, on the very first day….I’m also the author of a book called ‘Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival’. This is a terrible, terrible crime. It is unbelievable what these high emitting, fossil fuel producing countries are doing, you know, its really unbelievable. The countries that are blocking any progress on emissions, they are acting in the most evil way that anybody could imagine because we’re looking at the destruction of earth – oceans and land.”

Asked how to deal with this evil?: “First of all we have to call it what it is and few people are doing that. We certainly have to be calling it an unprecedented crime…. Nothing good is ever going to come out of these COPs, right – so that’s where the report of the climate emergency by the scientists’ authoring and published peer-reviewed scientists warning to humanity with the 11,000 signatures comes in because without the intervention, without the powerful statements by the world’s scientists, nothing’s going to happen. It doesn’t matter how much the young people say. They’re going to be completely ignored, their lives are going to be written off by the negotiating process by what we used to call world powers…we have to wake up. And a final word about waking up – there has been a massive eruption of methane in the Arctic – its gone practically unreported…. we’ve got to get these horrendous things publicised…. Methane – 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide… looking at the 2.2 million year ice core, the maximum methane concentration ever was 800 ppm, up in Barrow Alaska now it is 2050 ppm and staying there – its been up there for four months….. we have to pay attention to the Arctic, oh my god yes.”