This ClimateGenn episode with Professor Mark Maslin from University College London in the UK, was recorded on the 2nd June following the World Meteorological Organisations report finding that the safe boundaries for climate warming are being crossed far earlier than scientists first thought.
Mark moves beyond discussing the rate of warming to looking at who is to blame, asking why are we not taking the appropriate action?
Prof. Mark Maslin
“There are eight richest billionaires [who] own the same amount of wealth as the poorest four billion people… That should make everybody angry, pick up their pitchforks and demand change.”
Full transcript:
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
Mark, it’s great to see you. Thank you very much for taking the time. I want to start, someone
who listened to the podcast has sent me some various quotes around the Washington Post
article responding to the World Meteorological Organisation recent report.
And it starts with seven years ago, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the
IPCC, predicted that the wouldn’t warm 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level until
2040. Then two years ago, the IPCC predicted the world would pass that threshold between
2030 and 2035. And now, the new data from the World Meteorological Organisation, the WMO,
released last Wednesday, indicates that the earth will cross this point in just two years.
We often hear the scientists talk about accelerating feedbacks and thresholds and how the rate
of heating is speeding up. Is this what we’re seeing right now? Are we being overtaken by the
heating within the climate system?
[Prof. Mark Maslin]
So Nick, I think there are two problems here. The first one is nomenclature. What do we mean
by the 1.5 limit?
So this was set by politicians in Paris 10 years ago. And they said, look, we’re going to stop
global warming getting to two degrees with an aspirational target of 1.5. Brilliant. But they
didn’t define what the 1.5 meant. So what we have now is lots of people talking about the 1.5
limit without necessarily talking about the same thing. So last year, 2024, was the warmest year
on record. Now, different agencies are putting temperatures together.
The highest one is Copernicus, the EU, who said that we hit 1.6. Now, if you look at, say, NASA
and NOAA, it’s closer to 1.5. Now, that means for one year, that year was warmer globally by 1.5
degrees than the pre-industrial. Now, does that mean we’ve passed the limit? Because we know
that, of course, the temperature each year goes up and down, even though the long-term
average is always upwards.
This is where every so often, every decade or so, climate sceptics or deniers suddenly turn
around and go, oh, look, it’s cooling. No, it’s just a slightly less warm year than the year before.
So this variability kicks in.
And the last two years have been much warmer than expected. So what the World
Meteorological Organisation has done is looked at predictions to say, what is going to happen
in the next five years or so? Are we actually going to cross this threshold permanently?
And that’s the key. Have we gone beyond it and never coming back? Whereas last year was just
one year.This year is predicted to be cooler than last year. So it’s about having a trend and passing that
1.5 earlier than we’re expecting. Last year, that warmth surprised climatologists.
The reason being is, we weren’t surprised that 2023 was warm. There was El Nino there. There
was lots going on.
That’s fine. But it should have been cooling slightly in 2024 because we switched to a La Nina.
That didn’t happen.
Now, what we think is one of the reasons is that we have cleaned up a lot of our industry,
particularly shipping. And so therefore, a lot of the reflected material, all that dust and dirt in
the atmosphere that was reflecting a little bit of sunlight was actually artificially keeping the
planet slightly cooler than it should be. And we’re seeing, because we’re cleaning this up, the
real temperature being shown.
We’re also deeply concerned that one of the aspects of climate change that we know about but
haven’t necessarily really taken into account is the heat in the oceans. So the oceans cover 70%
of the world’s surface. And if you look at the heat capacity of the top one kilometre, that’s a
huge amount of water, it’s just absorbing more and more heat.
And so what we’re seeing is this just becoming a radiator that’s giving out this heat that’s
adding to this climate change and this high temperatures that we’re seeing. So hopefully that
unpicks a little bit of why the World Meteorological Organisation’s predictions seem to be
slightly different to what the IPCC was saying, say, 10 years ago.
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
Okay. And can you, you talked about the oceans, they’re absorbing the heat. Can you take some
of this language, as you said, you things that we find more tangible, so impacts?
And just for an example, we saw this glacier collapse in Switzerland last week. Today, we’ve
seen these horrendous, the sort of full horizon fires in Canada. At where we are now, that’s
what we’re seeing.
And over the last two years, we’ve seen absolute catalogue of disasters. How does that all fit
into this story in terms of where we’re heading?
[Prof. Mark Maslin]
So key thing is that what climate scientists have been saying for the last 30 years is, as you get
warmer, things get worse. And we know this. We also had a report in 2018 by the IPCC called
the 1.5 degree global warming report. And that clearly said, the reason why the 1.5 degree limit
is there is because between 1.5 and 2 degrees, a lot of things start to actually be impacted and
a lot of things start to go wrong. So with this incredible heat that we’ve had last year, that
seems to be the new trend in climate change and global warming, what’s going to happen iswe’re going to have more and more of these extreme events. So we saw the wildfires in
California.
They’re now in Canada. We’ve seen extreme floods all around the world. What we’re doing is
making extreme weather events a lot more common.
And the problem is that we are, one, not dealing with the emissions. We’re not actually
reducing the emissions yet. So we’re not holding climate change where we need it to be.
And the second thing is, countries are not spending money to adapt to these changes. We
predict impacts all around the world. We can tell country by country what’s going to happen,
what are likely to happen, whether they’re going to be floods, heat waves, droughts, stronger
storms.
But they’re not able to adapt quick enough to those events. So the problem is that this is a self-
fulfilling prophecy. I mean, and this is something that frustrates a lot of scientists, is we have
been telling the world about this for 30 years.
You go back to the first IPCC report in 1990, and you read the very conservative language. If
you read between the lines, it says by the 2030s, you will be at least 1.5, and these are all the
impacts that are going to happen. So it’s not like we didn’t know this was going to happen.
It’s just now people are seeing it in their own backyard. And at this point, they go, oh, those
politicians and the climate deniers, they’re just lying to us. And I think that’s where we’ve got,
it’s like, how now we’ve got people to actually understand this is real.
How do we then do all those positive things to actually ameliorate and try to actually mitigate
against the worst effects of climate change?
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
Okay. And that’s really where we are at, because you say we’ve been saying this climate science
has been warning, not just what’s going to happen, but also what we need to do to change it.
I’ve seen you at various COPs and so on and so forth.
And just, I think it was last week, the presidents of the last two COPs joined in with the
president of COP30, the forthcoming COP in Brazil, to say we need urgent action on climate
change. And yet all three of those nations are fully committed to expanding fossil fuel
production. And how do you, I mean, this is blatant hypocrisy, how do you respond to that as a
researcher, as someone who has been saying this over and over again, and it’s just more
business as usual at a time when a WMO report also comes out?
[Prof. Mark Maslin]
So I think there’s a balancing act. The first thing is that a lot of people dismiss the international
negotiations. So they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.It’s too slow. But if you go back to, say, Paris and that 2015 agreement, by setting out 1.5 as an
aspirational target and 2 degrees as the hard target, what it changed was the licks around the
world. Net zero becomes the actual main driving force.
You hear companies, schools, universities, sports facilities, all talking about how do we get to
net zero. That’s from a top down. And again, the interesting thing is that that tore apart the
politics.
It said, okay, we’re not doing this by country, some countries reducing by less than others.
Actually, all of us, every single country, wherever you started from, has to get to the same net
zero point as quickly as possible in this century. So that unpicked a lot of that politics.
The problem then is there is this huge inertia in moving away from fossil fuels. Now, the
reasons are multifold. One, there’s a lot of countries and a lot of companies making huge
amounts of profit from fossil fuels.
That’s the first thing. Second thing is, economics is slowly eroding that because we know that
renewables are much cheaper, much more secure and easier to maintain than fossil fuel
infrastructure. I’ll give you the classic example.
In Texas, you know, heart of the oil and gas country, you know, guess what? Over 50% of their
electricity is generated from wind energy. Why?
It’s cheaper. You know, hardcore economics cuts through all the politics, and therefore, that’s
starting to win. So again, we are shifting this transition away from 19th century technology,
burning stuff, to 21st century stuff, which is generation of electricity directly.
But it’s taking time. And there’s a brilliant book by Simon Sharpe called Five Times Faster. Now,
you don’t have to read the book.
It literally tells you what the problem is. We are doing lots of great things. But we have to do all
of that five times faster.
And again, I think that’s the transition. The transition is happening. It’s just will it be quick
enough to avoid the worst disasters that climate change can throw at us?
And the other thing is, why are we beholden to a particular group of individuals who are
making huge amounts of profit from polluting the earth, which we’re going to have to, as
taxpayers, clean up and repair the damage. And so therefore, I think there is this sort of like,
corporate issue that we haven’t actually addressed. We haven’t looked at the elephant in the
room and said, hang on.
These guys are making huge amounts of money. And they’re doing it with particular political
agenda, which is actually not in my interest. So for example, the UK had actually gone full
frontal renewables 10 years ago.The cost of living crisis that we all had to endure with huge increases in energy prices would not
have happened. The government wouldn’t have had to use taxpayers money to subsidise the
poorest parts of the communities to be able to afford their own energy. Again, it’s one of those
things.
It’s like, there’s a logic here that people are trying to avoid.
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
Okay. We’re moving slowly towards this sort of renewable future. And as you said, it’s all about
doing it in time.
And with the forecast or projections that I’ve seen say we’re pretty much on track for
somewhere between two and a half and three degrees at warming, which is kind of double
approximately where we are now. That doesn’t seem that encouraging, to be honest. I mean, is
life viable at that sort of temperature?
Do you think is our society viable at that sort of warming? How do you see that?
[Prof. Mark Maslin]
So the problem is, let’s just take 1.5. So 1.5 seems like a small amount. It’s like, oh, you know,
oh, you know, if the temperature in my room goes up by 1.5, I’m not worried. But the problem
is when it’s translated globally, 1.5 isn’t 1.5. What you get is three to four degrees in the Arctic
because there’s the polar amplification. You get weird things like in London in 2022, we had a
heat wave of 40 degrees. Now, as a climatologist, we were predicting 40 degrees in southeast
England in perhaps the 2040s. We got that in 2022.
And I’ll put it in context. It’s July, and the peak temperature in July is 24 degrees. This is why we
go on holiday abroad, OK?
But this was a 40 degrees heat wave. So that was 16 degrees warmer than it should have been.
So a one and a half degree global warming causes a 16 degree heat wave above what it should
be.
So that’s the problem. It’s translating that 1.5. So three degrees is an absolute nightmare when
it comes to all the impacts around the world. And the papers are there, OK?
In the IPCC, if you want to scare yourself, absolutely. You can read what a three to four degree
world looks like. I mean, luckily, we think the highest emission targets, which we’re talking
about five to six degrees, because of the change in global politics, because there are so many
countries that are pushing for renewables and trying to do this switch, we’ve probably avoided
the five to six degrees sort of like apocalypse.
But we’re still looking at three above three degrees. So we need to pull that down as much as
possible. And I’ve always been struck by something that Greta Thunberg said.So she was being interviewed by the BBC, and they’re being hardcore, OK? You know, as they
should be. And they said, OK, what happens if we miss the 1.5 target?
And she said, I’ll fight for 1.6 and 1.7 and 1.8. And I’ll just keep going. Because as she
understood from the science, which is correct, every tenth of a degree matters. And of course,
will increase the extreme events around the world.
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
OK. The UK agency ARIA is allocating tens of millions of pounds into research, into
geoengineering, climate intervention, to cool the Earth while society tries to bring down these
global emissions. How inevitable do you see this climate engineering route?
[Prof. Mark Maslin]
So one, you have to unpick what geoengineering is, OK? Because people throw this term
around. So geoengineering is anything that affects the climate of the planet at scale.
So we’re already doing that by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So massive
reforestation of the planet counts as geoengineering. But also putting mirrors in space to try
and reflect sunlight.
So is putting particles in the atmosphere. And so is fertilising the ocean. A lot of these ideas are
thought experiments that are now starting to be experimented on.
My viewpoint is actually the cheapest way of dealing with this problem is to stop the issue,
which is emissions. So I work with a lot of medics. So the best thing is prevent somebody
getting cancer first.
OK. Prevention. Why not just prevent it?
Instead, geoengineering is a little bit like a person who has unfortunately got cancer and you’re
then treating with radiation. OK. You’re putting poison on top of the poison to kill the other
poison off.
And that’s what geoengineering is. It’s covering up an issue that we have created by creating
another issue. However, as a scientist, I think we should always be doing this research.
The reason being is because you never know what you’re going to find out. And that’s the
beauty of science, because we call it blue skies, which is you may be experimenting something
on stuff like geoengineering, which you discover something really important about the climate
system that helps somewhere else. So it’s, again, important that we do this research,
particularly as I’m sure when we do the research in detail, what it’s really going to do is go,
don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this because of all these issues.
And I think that’s really important because unless politicians have the evidence in front of themthat says this is so dangerous, don’t do it. Again, I will go back to the 1980s. And what was really
interesting is the first early climate models were used to show the impact of nuclear war.
And what they showed was there would be a nuclear winter, and forget about the number of
people killed by the impacts, the winter would cause mass starvation of billions of people. That
meant, that science was given to the leaders, Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev came together,
knowing that science, echoing in their ears, and actually started to reduce their nuclear
arsenals. So therefore, sometimes doing this research can lead to very different outcomes that
you’re expecting.
So even though I think geoengineering, particularly some of the stuff that ARIA is funding, is
ridiculous, dangerous, and in some case, slightly mad, I also have to have my other hat on. So
as a scientist, we should investigate this, because you never know what we’re going to find.
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
Okay. A previous guest on the podcast was saying, in a more pro-geoengineering context, was
saying, well, you know, if you take a stratospheric aerosol injection, putting particles in the
stratosphere, we have an idea from the volcanic records of what that might lead to. But if you
take two and a half to three degrees, we have no real experience of that as a society, and it
could be much worse than we anticipate.
And if the evidence that ARIA’s funding produces, you know, positive sort of forecasts for
geoengineering, that it could be effective without causing more harm than not doing it, for
example, would you support that? Or would you still be, you know, have the same sort of, we
shouldn’t do this?
[Prof. Mark Maslin]
I think that we need to do less to the planet. We need to think about our impact, which is huge.
I mean, the human fingerprint is on every part of the environment.
Okay. What we need to do is work out how 10 billion people, that’s the peak by 2050, can live on
a planet sustainably. And that doesn’t mean sort of like burning stuff, making huge amounts of
profit, still having sort of like billions of people in abject poverty, and then going, oh, but that’s
okay.
We’re just going to inject a load of like shit into the atmosphere, and hope that’s going to
counter that. Okay. That is illogical thinking.
When we know we have 21st century technology that can clean our energy, and is so much
more efficient. So for me, the frustrating thing is, say the UK can go completely electric. Okay.
Now separate out concrete and aviation, because those are very difficult. So let’s keep those to
one side. So everything else, we electrify.Okay. And we generate enough renewable energy for all of that. We save 40% energy straight
away, because burning stuff, deeply inefficient.
Using electricity directly, really efficient. 19th century technology, 21st century technology. You
know, it’s a little bit like me saying, okay, do you know what?
Let’s not use modern medicine. Let’s just go back to the 19th century, and let’s treat you sort of
like that. It’s like, this is the energy system.
Why are we living in a sort of like a time zone, which is like 100, 150 years away. So I think that’s
the mentality we have to have. And I don’t think if we can clean up our sort of like mess, we can
do that.
And again, there are other technologies. We don’t need to reflect stuff from sunlight. What we
can do, if we really need to, is we can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
We can basically industrialise, fixing the climate. Okay. Whether that’s direct air capture, which
unfortunately is very expensive, or just plant a load of trees, you know, reforest the planet.
We’ve cut down three trillion trees, which is about half the trees on the planet. So that would be
a good start. You know, rewild, re-nature the whole of the planet, et cetera, for humans.
So again, I go back to that medical thing, which is, if you have a problem, prevent it in the first
place. Don’t get ill, because otherwise you’re just going to have some nasty interventions. And
that’s what geoengineering is.
It’s just covering up an issue that we can’t be bothered to face and deal with.
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
It wasn’t a prevention point back in 1990, when the countries of the world did get together at
the BOS summit. And they actually said, if we don’t take this action, you know, our human
existence in the 21st century could be terminal. And we’ve kind of let it get to this as a
collective, you know, wealthy nations especially, we’ve let it get to this point.
[Prof. Mark Maslin]
I don’t think we’ve let it. I think that we is very misleading. I think it has been incredible
lobbying by oil companies, oil nations, fossil fuel producers.
And there has been a delay, delay, delay. It’s like the tobacco industry, except on steroids. You
know, it’s like, we are not giving anything.
There was a brilliant play that’s just ended in London called Kyoto about the Kyoto cop. And it is
brilliant, because it just shows that the oil and gas companies were right there, right at the
beginning of the negotiations, undermining, undermining, playing countries off against eachother, lobbying, spending money, making sure that nothing happened. And this is what we
have.
And it’s a real, I think it’s really disappointing that humanity is basically being undermined, and
our future being sold out for a non-consequential thing, which is money. You can’t take it with
you.
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
But you’ve got this limited time, and the time really is just ticking extraordinarily close to us
now. And you have the lobbyists that you spoke of, and, you know, the last few cops have all
been completely maligned, really, by fossil fuel interests. And if we take that, we take the
government, the government, the British government seems to be trying to move in the right
direction, but it’s going against the tide.
And then you see, you take all of that, and you see them funding geoengineering, and as citizen
X, Y, or Z, or whoever, you look at this, and you say, right, well, these scientists are telling me
that we can sort this out by stratospheric aerosol injection. But these scientists are saying, if we
do that, we’re going to make the situation much, much worse. And the policymakers are saying,
well, this evidence is a little bit inconclusive.
It’s either here or there. How do we move past this impasse, because this is literally pretty
much what’s going to happen, it seems like.
[Prof. Mark Maslin]
Yeah. Because I think the clearest science is that if you don’t emit greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere, the atmosphere doesn’t warm up. That is the best science.
So therefore, none of this sort of like problems occur with just going, okay, let’s just stop
emitting greenhouse gases. And I think sometimes we are pessimistic because of where we
are, but the economy is changing in the world towards renewable energy. We have countries
like China taking climate change very seriously and they don’t have to worry about being
lobbied and basically being paid off by the fossil fuel companies.
If they decide to do something, they will do it. We have the UK that has bounced back and
decided to be a climate change leading nation. I mean, the big energy push now is that by
2030, 95% of our electricity will be from renewable energy sources.
That’s just in five years. Now, again, they may not make it, but if they make 88%, that will be
incredible. So it is, again, I’m not gonna hold them to that 95.
If they make it up to 90, I’m gonna be sort of like shouting from the rooftops to show that it’s
possible. And again, I think that’s what we need. We need to think much more positively about
how do we improve society for everyone, not just those companies and those lobbyists andthose politicians that are making a huge amount of money, particularly as they’re not the
generation that are gonna have to deal with the consequences, okay?
We have certain politicians who probably won’t be around in 20 years’ time to look at the
consequences of their delaying action.
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
That’s really a key point. I mean, as a researcher yourself, you interface with a lot of younger
researchers who really will have to be facing this for their whole careers and talking to other
colleagues in places like India or Bangladesh or wherever who are on the front lines of these
things. How do they internalise this?
How are they seeing it in terms of, what’s your general feeling from that sort of perspective?
[Prof. Mark Maslin]
Well, I feel really bad to vocalise what the youth think and feel. I’m always struck by how
brilliant it is to go to the climate meetings to see that youth delegation. They are incredibly
smart.
They’re incredibly eloquent and they know what needs to be done. And I think the one thing
that comes across is the frustration. The frustration with our generation and the older
generation for not fixing the problem and leaving them with this mess.
I think that is through and through. We know that climate anxiety is a real thing, being
recognised by the Royal College of Psychology and things like that across the world. It’s a thing.
And it’s important to recognise that people feel that they are powerless to do something. But
whenever you go out and you see the incredible grassroots movements across the world, you
see all the positive community action that’s been taking place. You see all those young people
and old people.
Hey, look, I’ve seen a 70 year old stick themselves to a bus, you know, sort of work with
superglue, you know. People really care. For me, I think what is problematic is we need to
change the way we think.
And I actually thought that COVID was gonna do that. Because what COVID showed was, did we
miss being able to have 20 pairs of shoes or tens of T-shirts or multiple yachts? No, actually
what we missed was being able to hug our relatives, talk to our friends, socialise and do what
we like.
Which is actually being that ultra social being. And I really thought that was a watershed
moment. And that was going to drive forward change.
But we then, the system reset itself. Oh, no, no, no, you need to have these, you need to haveall of this stuff. And I think that’s where we come back to making sure we need to reset how we
think about being humanity and what makes people happy.
And it’s not money. It is things like access to education. It is making sure that you have
aspirations in life.
It’s making sure that you have a job and security and things like that. These are things that
matter to people, not being a billionaire and having a yacht. And I think that’s something we
haven’t grappled with.
But that is the key question of the 21st century. How do we become a global species? And how
do we actually deal with the fact that we need to look after all the people, not just the very, very
rich?
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
Especially at a time when the very, very, very rich are pretty much sailing full steam ahead into
a sort of expanding fossil fuel extraction and just not really being too interested in the welfare
of countries and things like defence spending going up and so on and so forth. But, okay, well,
go on.
[Prof. Mark Maslin]
I mean, I was gonna say, for me, I don’t understand why people aren’t more angry. When we
look at the wealth, there are eight richest billionaires own the same amount of wealth as the
poorest four billion people. So eight people, and they’re men, eight men, own the same wealth
as the bottom half of the world’s population.
That should make everybody angry, pick up their pitchforks and demand change. But it doesn’t.
We seem to be accepting of that.
It’s like the frogs in the water. We’ve just been warmed up, warmed up, and everybody’s been
creaming off all the money and we haven’t noticed. And now we’ve got to this state and we go,
ah, that’s how it’s supposed to be.
It doesn’t have to be like that.
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
But is there a way as well that if you go back to Glasgow, the cop in Glasgow, there was a great
sense of civil society’s anger at that cop. You really got a sense of it in Glasgow. But then the
cops went to authoritarian regimes where to protest, you had to go to a designated area at a
designated time, and you could be de-badged for doing the wrong thing.
So is that not sort of emblematic of where we are today, where now we are much more
surveilled?[Prof. Mark Maslin]
So I think that is a much wider question than climate change, which is in an international
community where you have very different types of government, how do you actually negotiate?
How do you work as a collective when they’re not always thinking in the same way as us? And I
think that’s a much bigger question than I can deal with.
Hey, I’m in a climate change. I’m a climate change expert. I’m not gonna fix international
negotiations with you, Nick, because do you know what?
I have no idea.
[Nick Breeze – ClimateGenn]
Well, look, Mark, it’s been great to speak to you. Thank you very much. Absolute pleasure, Nick.
I’ll speak to you again at some point.
[Prof. Mark Maslin]
Take care, Nick.