In this climategenn episode I speak with climate policy analyst and Research Director at the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, David Spratt.
He has recently published a report titled: Warming has reached 1.5°C. What does that mean for climate advocacy? https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/climateadvocacy2025
David offers his perspective on climate policy through the Australian lens as the Earth heats to 1.5. degrees with no end in sight for the damage that it is causing to human life, nature and infrastructure.
Interview with David Spratt full transcript:
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
David, it’s great to see you again. Thank you very much for taking the time. There’s a technical discussion at the moment of whether we’ve officially reached the 1.5 degrees C global mean temperature. A key feature of this discussion is acceleration. And I just wanted to ask you, what does acceleration look like from a sort of Australian perspective?
[David Spratt – Climate Code Red]
The global figures are that the rate of warming has accelerated 50% from 30 years ago of 0.2 per decade to 0.3. So things are quickening up. In Australia, what made me really think about 1.5 is that we have these floods, which are enormous and break all records. And you know, we had a town where 500 houses are basically lost.
It’s a town that my parents come from, so I know a little bit. And they say, oh, this was a 1 in 500 year event. And then a year or two years later, it happens again.
And they say, it’s another 1 in 105 year event. And I mean, what that points to is that the understanding of the risks is too conservative. Either they’re using out of date flood maps, or they’re using an understanding of the risk, which is not up with reality.
And we had a flood expert recently from Queensland come and say, the maps are out of date. And that’s why floods, and I mean, it’s the same in Europe, you get heat waves, and they go, oh, this is 1 in 100 years. And then it happens again.
So this points to a systemic problem with the underestimation of the risks. And I think a failure to anticipate two things. The first is that warming is happening faster than expected.
And the second is that the extremes at that level of warming are greater than the models represent. And we’ve had a lot of people, Michael Mann and many others, say that the models can’t represent everything. This idea of Rosby waves, which is really new in the Arctic, are really helping to jam the heat that you’re experiencing now.
So this is a problem that, in essence, our risk management is living in a past paradigm. This is not the only example. In 2010, we had some fires, which were called Black Saturday, an incredible heat wave.
Several hundred people died in the fires. I think another 300 died from heat during that period. And it was said that the intensity of those fires was such that was not expected until the end of the century.
So this is the, I guess, Jason Box calling to face faster than forecast. These are just more expressions of this phenomenon.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
And when you’re talking about how these are presented through the media to the population, and then you talk about how that is interpreted by policymakers, can you give a nutshell of how are Australian policymakers responding to these challenges?
[David Spratt – Climate Code Red]
In a word, they’re not. I mean, we have had a climate risk assessment, the first in Australia, that’s been undertaken. It was started almost three years ago.
And two years ago, we have a Senate and the Senate have estimates where you can get senior people from the departments to come and answer questions. And they asked the people in charge of the risk assessment was, what was their assessment of warming for 2050? What was the scenario they were using?
And they said, oh, 1.5 to 2 degrees by 2050. And the senators who from the Greens Party said, well, that’s just out of date. And so as I understand it, the people doing the risk assessment then went away and said, we will do a risk assessment with various temperatures, but we won’t put a timeline on it.
So if you don’t have a timeline on when it’s going to get too hot, then you can’t plan any policy because you’ve just abnegated responsibility. So this is the problem. It’s being expressed again now because we’ve got 1.5 degrees now. I mean, that’s clear. We’ve got a new paper from Stefan Ramsdorf and Foster looking at five data sets and statistically analysing it. One of the data sets said we’ve hit 1.5 in 2024. The other four say 2026. Jim Hansen says we’re there now. I mean, yes, we’re there at 1.5. And policymakers are still basing their work on the old IPCC 2018 report, which said on average, we won’t beat to 1.5 to 2040. The IPCC says 2040, the risk analysis, the mitigation, the emergency management policy is based on 1.5 2040. And we’re now. So I mean, my quick take is that 15 years has just been taken out of the mitigation timetable.
We have just lost 15 years. 1.5 is here 15 years faster than policymakers thought it would be.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
Let’s come back to this very point. But I want to just quickly touch on root causes. And we know that it’s global emissions.
And you’ve written about this, the current sort of snapshot of global emissions isn’t. You just said we’ve lost 15 years on mitigation time, but we’ve also wasted more time in trying to tackle emissions. What’s the current outlook?
[David Spratt – Climate Code Red]
The evidence is that emissions are still going up. They have not yet peaked. And people are saying next year, next year, and maybe it will be, but they’ve been saying that for 10 years.
I remember in 2010, when that was the critical decade, and we’re another critical decade, we’re halfway through. So what’s happening is that renewable energy is adding to the fossil fuel energy supply rather than replacing it. Or in other words, the increasing demand for electricity from India, from China, from AI, from crypto, from cloud services, the increasing demand for energy is greater than the rate at which renewables are going out.
So emissions are still going up. We have new information, new research coming out saying what’s called the Earth’s energy imbalance, which is the difference between incoming and outgoing heat. And it really talks about how much more heat is in the system.
Earth’s energy imbalance has doubled in the last 20 years, faster than the models. So that suggests that there’s a lot more heat to come, more than the modelling and the policy makers expect. So from those point of views, and the question of aerosols, that the fact that we’re losing cooling, which has really been the driver of this rapid heat, would suggest that this accelerated rate of warming, which is now about 0.3 per decade, will go on for the next two or three decades.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
You just stressed, I mean, if you take all those factors together, and where they put us on the sort of risk slider, and you talked about last decade was a critical decade, this decade is a critical decade. And I’m paraphrasing something I read in your work about Stan, how close do you want to stand to the cliff in terms of what is acceptable risk? I mean, what seems to be our collective response to this idea of acceptable risk at the moment?
[David Spratt – Climate Code Red]
This is the problem from two points of view. First of all, from a risk management point of view, if a risk is really severe, I mean, we can call it existential, but even if it’s the chance of a bridge falling down or a plane crashing, you want to know what the plausible worst case scenario is. What’s the worst thing that could happen that could crash the plane or whatever, crash the climate?
But policy makers and the science that feeds them, particularly the IPCC reports, doesn’t look at the worst case scenarios, it looks at the middle range. So that’s the first problem, that we’re not looking at the damaging possibilities, which is why these 1 in 500 year floods turn out to be 1 in 3. So I think that’s the problem.
The second problem is when we’re making policy, what’s driving us? What’s the normative goal? So we used to have this thing about avoiding dangerous anthropogenic influence in the climate system, on which the UNFCCC started, and that was said to be two degrees, by an economist, not by scientists or people affected, by an economist.
And then people said, no, it’s probably 1.5. And in fact, Sir David King, who worked with the small island states in Paris, where that was brought up, after that Paris meeting, gave an interview, and he said, I was wrong. I realised that 1.5 was too high. And that’s now clear, because we’ve had a number of papers this year saying at 1.5, systems will have tipped. You’ve done interviews on AMOC, you’ve done interviews on the Amazon, which is tipping right now. I mean, Jason Box says, effectively, Greenland has passed its tipping point. Eric Rigg knows that about West Antarctica in 2014, wherever you go, I mean, coral reefs and the Des Moines, I mean, 1.5 is not what I would call a safe or reasonable target. So the question I’ve been asking is, why do policymakers and even NGOs keep on talking about 1.5 when it’s at the edge of the precipice? It’s like, how close can we go without burning all the ecosystems? Rather than the question of what would we need to do to actually preserve them?
So I think we’re tipping very close in the black hole to that point where you disappear, the horizon event.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
Well, I think you just answered my last two questions. Okay, that’s good, because we can we can accelerate. And yeah, and you mentioned COP21, we did, we talked then a lot and a lot of people, I remember even Caroline Lucas, the Green MP at the time, when I interviewed her, she said, you know, there’s a huge disconnect between what the science is telling us, and policymaking.
How do we address this? Because policy goal setting is like a fantasy area. And scientific realities are arriving so fast and impacting us so fast.
We’re in a really awkward position.
[David Spratt – Climate Code Red]
The fossil fuel industry is a cop, and we know what he’s going to do. And governments are into the art of a compromise and a deal. And we know what that ends up with.
I mean, as I said, many years ago, trying to negotiate with the laws of physics and chemistry is a dumb thing to do, because they’ll just walk all over you. What worries me is that those people from NGOs, from the climate activism, climate concern point of view, I mean, for example, in Paris, when 1.5 was put up there, we’d already had Bill McKibben’s 350.org movement. And Jim Hansen had said, and that was what Bill McKibben based his work on, Jim Hansen said, what’s safe is under 350, under one degree.
And in fact, we know now it’s probably close to the 0.5. So, I mean, my question is, why did advocates and NGOs go along to Paris and say, 1.5, fabulous, just what we need, that’s a great step forward, rather than saying, 1.5 won’t save ecosystems. So, I mean, I think it’s the climate movement, the climate advocates, who have, with a lack of understanding of the science or in this urge to be inside the tent and be a play arm, are agreeing to compromises which negate the scientific realities.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
I did speak to the late Dr. Sadiq Mulhaq about this. And he was part of a group of vulnerable nations who were arguing very strongly for 1.5, because the Paris Agreement was going to put in two degrees. And he said, they knew it was extremely difficult for them to try to hold to that.
But because two degrees was a death sentence, it had to give them something to fight for. But 1.5 is a death sentence too. Yeah, I know.
But every time we move the target higher, we relax in that space, expecting to overshoot it. It’s kind of a crazy situation. And now you fast forward to today, where all climate action is being reneged on, and you’ve written about this as well.
And this is by policymakers and industry, and the financial sector, etc, etc. And it’s being displaced by a whole, instead of era of climate, we’re talking about an era of violence. And through all of that, do you see a pathway back to a sane and safer destination?
We’re talking about biodiversity ecosystems, we’re talking about future generations, you know, for all of that.
[David Spratt – Climate Code Red]
Emissions are going up. The fossil fuel industry is on the attack. Policymakers are on the retreat.
That’s what you’ve just said. That’s clear. So what’s the discussion from here on in?
I think our side needs absolute clarity. I mean, for example, you see a lot of advocacy about 1.5, keeping 1.5 alive. Yes, we’re at 1.5 now. And they say, yes, 1.5 plus overshoot and come back to 2100. I’m not sure that those people understand that that overshoot might be one degree at their rate. I mean, in another three decades, we could go up another degree and then come back down.
I mean, if in that overshoot, you kill off a whole lot of ecosystems, cooling down won’t bring the ecosystems back. So I don’t think there’s a clear understanding that overshoot has its problem. The other thing, and this is a sort of a more scientific argument, is that I think a lot of people on all sides assume that 1.5 is an end point. Yes, we get the 1.5, everything will be OK. And Jim Hansen and paleoclimatologists have made this point for a long time. There are points of stability in the system and there are points of instability.
We know over the last million years, the climate has seesawed between glacials, three or four degrees warmer, 180 parts per million, and into glacials, the Holocene, what we’ve experienced. But there’s not a point of stability in between. Jim Hansen has made the point over and over again that one and a half to two degrees is not a point of system stability.
And the reason for that is obvious and it’s before our eyes right now. And that is that so many carbon cycles are now out of sync, whether it’s forests, whether it’s permafrost, whether it’s boreal forests, whether it’s retreating ice sheets, changing the reflectivity of the planet. 1.5 to two is not a point of system stability. You’re either going to end up at three or you’re going to have to cool back to zero. I mean, I say 1.5 is a signpost on a dusty road. It’s not a place.
And I don’t think policy makers or advocates have thought about that. And that, of course, then takes you to the quest of climate interventions. And you’ve recently been at a conference talking about that a lot.
I mean, I think that I won’t say the good news, but I think it’s interesting that a lot of people are now talking about the need for climate interventions and cooling until fast mitigation and drawdown can get the system back in order that we need to try and pull the heat down for a short term. I think the cooling agenda is really opening up and people who were previously openly opposed to what they call geoengineering are now realising that it may be the least worst option. So I think that’s where the debate has moved on.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
If we just take what you said about, you know, we’re potentially going to keep going to a degree, a whole degree of overshoot. And there’s a lot of dialogue. I know that there’s a Tipping Points conference going on and we just had the Arctic Repair Conference that I attended and the people talking about the AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the ocean currents that transport heat around and keep the world as we know it climatically.
That’s potentially slowing down and stopping, which would transform global climate. And yet when they analyse the impacts of climate intervention, so if you did stratospheric aerosol injection, for example, so you pump stuff up to try and cool down, you really got to start five years ago because of the whole processes involved. I couldn’t repeat the science to you.
But as you go further down this road and closer to it tipping, if it actually tips, the recent research seems to indicate if you try to cool then you could actually cause a massive advance of ice sheets down to southern England. There’s loads of stuff around that.
[David Spratt – Climate Code Red]
I mean, I think there are two issues there. First of all, coming back to this question of overshoots and getting in too late. I mean, there’s this thing which I won’t try and explain in detail called hysteresis, which basically says the path from A to B is not the same path from B back to A.
That is, for example, if you melt an ice sheet or slow down an AMOC, that can happen really quickly in 100, 200 years, very quickly in historical terms. But the path back is really slow. I remember talking to Antarctic scientists saying we think that the tipping point for the really vulnerable Antarctic glaciers was around 0.5 to 0.8 of a degree, looking back. But they said you might have to get back to 0 to refreeze it. So this idea of overshoot and being able to just, you know, open the blind and everything will be all right again, this is a problem. Overshoot because of hysteresis and other things makes it a very complicated question.
And the second issue you referred to is something that I think Mike McCracken, I don’t know whether he talked about in your recent interview with him, he said there’s this view that climate interventions, sulphate, you know, cooling the planet is something that would do when everything else has failed. You know, when we’ve got to two and a half or three degrees. But he said at two and a half or three degrees, it probably won’t work because the problem is too big.
He said you need to start testing this early. He says at one, one and a half degrees, it might work. At two and a half or three, it won’t.
And that’s the issue. And I think that’s parallel to the AMOC story that you were telling, that waiting for things to get bad and thinking some magic bullet will reverse it is not going to happen.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
That brings us to this sort of coming back to this idea of the message, because at the moment, there’s a polarisation in this whole discussion around climate interventions. And there are a lot of emerging voices at that conference. I did speak to someone from the Sámi Council.
I spoke to someone who from Tuvalu and both for the lady from Tuvalu from the climate climate representative was deeply upset about the consequences of sea level rise and inundation and basically the destruction of their identity, culture and actual land. And when I asked, would you consider intervention that were being proposed at the conference? She said she was an emphatic yes.
And then the Sámi Council very famously opposed the Scopex experiment and have responded since then by setting up a council looking at individual proposals and trying to educate themselves about all of the proposals that could potentially help their communities because they are so badly impacted. And it seems like we have people who are on the front lines of climate change, really being more open to these discussions than a lot of scientists who might be much more involved in the arguments as opposed to the sort of out there. What do you think about this polarisation and how it could be diffused a bit?
[David Spratt – Climate Code Red]
Well, I mean, I think that’s very encouraging. I mean, I think this 1.5 degree is actually happening 15 years earlier than anybody felt, which has increased the pressure on everybody, policy makers, activists. It’s sort of mugged people.
This is, I mean, this is shock. I mean, this is real shock and awe, something we didn’t expect for 2040s now. I mean, and so people are prepared to rethink, to have another look at things.
And the problem with the debate about climate interventions, it’s been, I mean, there’s been several aspects. The first is, particularly with some scientists, but I mean, scientists have often been very bad political operators. So excuse that, you know, good scientists, not necessarily good philosophers.
There’s been this view that we shouldn’t interfere with nature, what we call the conservation paradigm. But the fact is we have interfered with nature so badly now that the world’s major ecosystems are on the point of collapse. So you shouldn’t interfere with solar sulphates or climate interventions interfering with nature.
Not interfering with nature won’t save nature. So I think the conservation paradox argument is now completely out of date. The second thing is that people say, we’ve got this situation.
If you do sulphates, it could be some bad outcomes. But that’s the wrong comparison. The comparison is not now versus doing sulphates.
The comparison is doing sulphates or what the world will look like in 20 years without sulphates. And if we get to two or two and a half degrees, I mean, we, I mean, the famous Hothouse Earth paper with Will Stefan and so on said, the tipping point for the Hothouse Earth runaway extended warming beyond human capacity to reign in is between one and a half to two. We’re moving to that zone now.
So the efficacy of climate intervention should be compared with the Hothouse possibility, not with the current circumstances. And the third thing is, and which I think your interviewer probably referred to is, we are now in a least worst choice outcome. I mean, yes, in the perfect world, there wouldn’t be climate change and nature would be happy and we’d be all happy.
But we are at the point of systemic collapse, both of human systems and of nature. And the question is, what is the least worst outcome? And I personally think that trying to bring some cooling into the system to stop the AMOC slowing so that you can’t grow food in northwestern Europe and the UK is probably a thing that needs to be really thought about.
So I think the fact that policy makers have been mugged by this new 1.5 reality opens up a whole lot of possibilities in the climate intervention space. And I think the opposition will drift away in a sense. I mean, I’m told that there’s a lot of scientists who publicly sit on their hands, who privately are saying this is necessary.
I know a few years ago, there was a person who did a thesis in Melbourne and interviewed 15 people about their attitudes to interventions, and they included some leaders of some NGOs, some climate organisations, whose public position was opposition and who privately said it was necessary. So I think if we can draw this out, I think that’s really important.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
I know in the past, you’ve done quite a lot of work on the idea of defence. How does this kind of climate area fit into the defence narrative? And yet, on the more broader stage right now, countries are actually spending way above what they were spending before on defence budgets, but on conflict to fight each other.
How have you reflected on this?
[David Spratt – Climate Code Red]
We could do a whole programme on the idea of security, because as soon as you say national security, people think, you know, marching to war and uniforms and tanks and so on. If you talk about human security, the right of people to live, to have food and water, and so on, they’re both securities, but they’re different understandings of security. And I think this is the choice that has to be made.
I mean, we in Australia have signed a new defence agreement with the United States for nuclear submarines. That means that if the United States goes to war with China, we will be involved. And I do work with some former military people who tell me in every war game of a China-US war, in every war game that’s been held, the Chinese have won and the US have lost.
So this is madness. This is madness. And, you know, some of the security leaders here are saying climate, not China, is the biggest threat.
This is human security, not old-fashioned national security. So I think there is a debate about security. I mean, security, safety.
I mean, you know, I remember there was Lincoln, whoever said the first duty of a government is to protect the people. I mean, that’s what we’re talking about. So I think security can have a different turn.
That might seem idealistic, but I think there has to be some really forthright discussions. And we have here in Australia, former prime ministers saying, no, not more money for this stuff. Let’s deal with the real issues.
So, I mean, that’s got to be had out as well. But the trend is not good in terms of the securitisation of climate. And we’ve seen in the UK, I think, climate adaptation money being switched into defence.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
This seems insane when we know that we’re committed to certain levels of sea level rise and the amount of GDP that it will consume to move those cities that will build the defence infrastructure. And we’re wasting it all on bullets.
[David Spratt – Climate Code Red]
As you know, a long time ago, we did some work and we talked about the need for emergency action or immobilisation. I mean, and the analogy in a way was the war economy. In Second World War, most of the allies spent 30, 35% of their economy on the war.
The COVID response was another thing. We dropped a lot of things we were doing, and governments did special things to deal with the problem. Climate is a far greater problem than any of those.
And I think it’s a bit like the least worst outcome argument. The notion that we can go along in some business as usual mode and deal with this is absurd. This is all hands on deck.
I mean, really, with the 1.5 smugging, this is now all hands on deck. And I think climate advocates should say that. Say, let’s not pretend this is normal.
We can go to a conference and we’ll put on a tax and the market will solve this. None of that’s true. Any more than 1.5 is stable. I think we need a bit of nitty gritty realism about the threat.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
That’s a very, very good place to conclude. And it would be good to come back and talk some more about this idea of defence because it actually crosses over with adaptation and where the money should go and what we’re actually doing. And it is about envisioning a future because a lot of people are disconnecting thoughts from the future and living in a sort of tormented present.
And I think that’s very unhealthy.
[David Spratt – Climate Code Red]
So thank you.
