Is It Too Late For The Climate?

0:04 Well, hello again. I'm Dr. Peter Carter, director of the Climate Emergency Institute, doing another video. And for climate people, environmentalists, really the big story right now, very recent, was David Suzuki. So, David Suzuki was interviewed. In the interview, he stated, "It is too late. we have lost the fight against climate change. So that certainly stimulated me to think and re-ress research very deeply for many years. I mean many years people have asked me is it too late you know and I've said uh well you know I have no crystal ball things looking very bad but it's not too late for you to get

0:51 actively involved in the climate emergency. I don't know whether that had any effect on people but that was always my response. So this is what he said. The um um the article um the editor of the article included um in the introduction that that David Suzuki was still um working hard solidly on the climate change issue that he hadn't let up. Well my conclusion is he's right. He is right. It is too late and we have lost the fight against climate change. Although I would say we have lost the fight against the uh fossil fuel industry, the big banking corporations and their climate denial campaign which

1:38 has been going on constantly since 1989. So that's the fight that I see that we have lost. Um to me, uh Suzuki is telling what I've called for some years the terrible truth. He's telling the truth and he's telling the truth that others have not and still do not. So maybe that's why it came as a big surprise perhaps to many that he would say this. Um I I I should point out that I also researched Dave's life and absolutely amazing, absolutely incredible. Um, I've always thought and said that if humanity united, focused on the uh climate change

2:26 emergency, the global planetary climate change emergency, and united on nature, we might do it. It might not be too late. But we most certainly are not doing that. and we certainly have no plans whatsoever to do that. in which case really there's no response to the climate emergency on a government global basis individually and with NOS's it's very different um so to Suzuki's uh David Suzuki's points so he says that uh he says that primarily he's made this decision that we've lost the fight because of the

3:12 science of planetary boundaries Now um that really is um a brilliant project and approach which um David Suzuki responded um David Suzuki referred to Johan Roxcom who's led the team that has been doing these planetary boundaries and redoing it every couple of years and the first one was in 2009. So why that's really important why Davis Suzuki is so right is that yes they have climate change in there they have climate change in there in a actually important way that I don't not usually see but they have all the other um global environmental destructions

3:59 degradations and pollutions they have them all and so no wonder David Suzuki likes that because that has always been his point and that has always been his sort of complaint that we don't do that we don't look at the whole earth. We've now, as David said, crossed seven of the nine planetary boundaries. Um it's seven because ocean acidification has just been included in the planetary boundaries. And what I was really pleased to see on planetary boundaries that I seldom see is that in addition to atmospheric CO2 concentration, they had radiative heat forcing. And that's the total amount of heat that we've added

4:44 built up in the climate system. And that boundary is huge. That boundary is as high as any of the other boundaries go. So they've really got that right. And um that is I'm afraid a big reason why David Suzuki is right. Atmospheric CO2 concentration. Yeah, he mentions it's record high. Atmospheric CO2 concentration is accelerating. It's been accelerating ever since the first monitoring in 1959. And it's actually accelerating faster today than it ever has before. Move on. So, we're stuck with today's atmospheric CO2. We're stuck with today's radiative forcing. And that means we're stuck with

5:32 a very very much higher uh global surface heating and climate disruption. So, of course, then there's a CO2 emissions. I mean, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere alone is the key. You don't need to know anything else because it's twothirds of the global heating and all of the ocean acidification. EO2 emissions were again record high last year. It increased last year 1%. 1% is huge. The amount of billion tons that we're putting in the atmosphere every year, you add 1.1% um it's it's a lot. and the um greenhouse gas emissions are

6:19 exactly the same. So the total greenhouse gas emissions are the same and the total greenhouse gases obviously is much higher than CO2 alone. So um by that alone um we're losing or have lost the fight. David also mentioned uh Trump and what he said was um when Trump was elected he said that was a dagger in my heart because that was a win for um modern corporate capitalism and for neo liberalism. And um David Suzuki all of his career has been teaching that what is wrong,

7:07 the single original root cause of why all this is happening to our planet is the economics is our economics. But the latest thing that I discovered and I only discovered it today. We know that coal is back in the United States. Trump made made that very very clear. And um of course there are a huge number of abandoned coal mines in the states because the coal has been switched to natural gas. That's why um the United States is the world's leader in natural gas production and also the leader in oil production. So Trump, his first or second executive order when he came into

7:52 office was to declare an energy emergency. My god, how absurd. Um, of course, he got away with it. So, um, Trump did say that, uh, he was going to, um, invest, put money into the coal industry to bring it back. Well, I discovered today looking at the um Department of the Interior that they're giving $725 million to the coal industry for this year for 2025. So, very very seriously, uh Trump and his administration are bringing coal back. So, not only is the United States going to continue to actually produce

8:38 even more oil and produce even more natural gas, but it's now going to be producing coal again. Absolutely fatal to the planet. Absolutely fatal. The other thing about Trump is that I think we all know that as soon as he came into power, as soon as he took the oval office that uh he was up to boosting um oil and gas, the fossil fuel industry up to the maximum. We all know that. Well, quite recently, he started his process of killing clean energy in the United States. And um uh it's absolutely horrible and terrible what he's doing. Um because the United States has actually been very

9:25 good and has been developing clean energy very well despite the fact that it's biggest producer of fossil fuels. Uh now that is um looks like that's going to be stopped. And yeah, what I'm talking about is only the United States, but of course the United States is the world's biggest economy. So, whoever is in power as president, that's going to have ramifications around the world. That means killing clean energy means Trump has killed any chance of a future worth living. Any chance at all. So, on uh David so right to say a dagger in my heart, what is a dagger in the heart of all of us? Um because that alone makes David Suzuki right. what

10:14 Trump and his administration, the United States is doing alone makes it way, way too late and means we've lost the fight. And um to me, as I say, it's the fight against the fossil fuel industry. And there's no question who's winning that fight. Um it's a uh it's an unprecedented evil is what I call it. um the fossil fuel industry and the corporate banks um fighting against the reality of climate change and fighting against any movement on climate change mitigation and that brings me to the other thing that David Suzuki

11:00 mentioned which is the United Nations COP so-called cops that's the called a conference of the parties it's an annual conference It's under the 1992 United Nations Climate Change Convention. And Dave is pretty mild on this one. He said, "And we we haven't capped emissions." Well, it's it's actually a lot worse than that because ever since we've been having these COPs for the past 30 years, of course, emissions have been increasing, increasing. And not only that, the cumulative CO2 emissions which builds up in the atmosphere that has been increasing at a hugely accelerating rate. So the um the fact about the cops which I've tried to communicate is that they were and are set up to fail. The

11:48 cops have failed and they failed failed because they were set up in an absolutely extraordinary way. They were set up by a voting system unique to the United Nations or probably anywhere else in which they interpreted consensus coming to consensus about making a decision as unonymity. In effect, this gives a veto to even just a couple of the big oil producing countries which just want to produce more and more and more oil. All of this is insane. You know, the more I look at this, the more I think we're living in the in the asylum. We're living in a global asylum, a crazy, insane asylum. Then David Suzuki makes

12:34 his big point that uh we are entrenched in a perverse economic, legal, and political system. So these systems that we live under that are being created, so-called developed um they control everything. they control everything more and more and more. So this is a big point that he stressed in the interview and as I say he's been saying this all his professional life. He said well maybe all that we can do is to continue with incremental changes and we haven't even been successful on incremental changes. So so then he says but you know we we really don't need that. What we need is a revolution. And that's right,

13:22 too. And he posits, is it possible to have a peaceful global res revolution? Well, hopefully it can be. So, I'm now going to the science in some detail which supports David Suzuki's conclusion. A very very important uh really groundbreaking report was released in this year earlier this year in January. It's called planetary solvency and interestingly it says finding our balance with nature. So that fits in with David Suzuki for sure. The different thing about this is that it used risk assessment experts and they're

14:08 called acturies. So what happened here was the um in the UK the society of acties got together with a climate change department and the university of exa and they produced this absolutely excellent uh report which really really nailed everything. I'm going to give you a few quotes from that. Here's one widely used but deeply flawed assessments of the in economic impact of climate change show a negligible impact on GDP. Um they're referring at least there to the IPCC cuz the IPC has always stated that mitigation of climate change

14:54 is a cost and obviously it's a massive massive profit benefit and they say that that's rendering policy makers blind to the immense risk of current policy trajectories that the whole world is in. And uh so the uh uh report says our dominant economic model doesn't recognize a dependence on the earth system. A dependence total dependence on the earth system viewing climate and nature risks as what they call externalities. So the uh economists call these externalities which means they ignore them. They're out there. we don't have

15:41 to uh we don't have to assess or do anything about them at all. So fundamentally we have an economics of evil because not only does our economics not take in m nature our economics our economics is based on the progressively increasingly ruthless exploitation of nature. So it is an evil within our civilization and societies and so we've come to this and so we come to it's too late on climate change and quoting again from this uh excellent risk report uh climate change risk assessment uses methodologies that understate the economic impact as well

16:28 as they often exclude many of the most severe risks that are expected and they do not realize or they do not recognize that these are a risk of ruin. So these are the experts on risk assessment and they say they are precisely wrong. So this um planetary solvency report by the acturies um uh they they estimate a risk at 2° C which we are definitely going to hit for sure um of over two billion lives. That's two billion lives and more on the line. And that actually fits with the uh

17:16 last IPCC assessment that said that there were over 2 that there were over 2.3 billion um lives in the world that were highly vulnerable to global climate change. A little bit more information on the latest data on atmospheric CO2. um which as I say you just take atmospheric CO2 you that's a whole assessment actually so atmospheric CO2 has been increasing at an accelerating rate ever since it was first monitored by the scripts institute at Monol um which by the way um the Trump administration is closing down um is breaking apart

18:02 now not only has it been steadily increasing at an accelerated rate but in 2010 10 and 2022 there was a more rapid increase on the rate of that acceleration. So yes, atmospheric CO2 totally proves that we are too late on climate change. We're not too late for doing everything we possibly can individually and collectively. But the science tells us as Suzuki says it's too late on climate change. Atmospheric CO2 has been increased. It's not just climate change. It's climate changed, right? We're doing it. Uh economics is doing it. It's been

18:49 increased 50%. So anyway, accelerating global climate has changed rapidly and it is rapidly increasing disasters all around the world. That is so obvious. And already catastrophic impacts. There now are impacts caused by climate change that are irreversible on land and in the oceans. The certainty of these disastrous and catastrophic effects. Um it's very different, very definite from atmospheric CO2 as I pointed out. us. The Global Carbon Project just last year did an assessment on methane and did an

19:36 assessment on nitrous oxide and guess what? They are aligning with the very worstc case scenario on CO2. Why is it so certain on CO2? Because although the IPCC has never put a number on the lifetime of atmospheric CO2, which is a pretty bad emission omission, um it's been put by the um carbon dioxide analysis center, for example, at around 200 years. So um it it is inevitable that adding CO2 to the

20:24 atmosphere is going to increase its concentration, increase global heating and increase global climate disruption. And we cannot remove CO2. There's a lot of talk now about wouldn't it be nice and we think we can remove CO2. It's called um it's called CDR carbon dioxide removal and there's a lot of research on it. Well um we have zero capacity for that today and there's no plans of foot to develop a capacity. I mean the fossil fuel industry of course is touting it. Um and as I say it's going to take decades to develop. So we and that means all the

21:11 world's children today all future generations are stuck with this amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is continually increasing at an accelerating rate. There's a lot of nice ideas and I agree that they should be looked into for removing CO2 but um we have to remove vast amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. Um, so another certainty that makes David Suzuki right is as has been recognized and I've just read out uh government's general inaction on mitigation. But it's far worse than that because governments are rushing to permit more bigger greater worse fossil

21:56 fuel extraction projects. And they are still subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. Not only that, they're subsidizing the fossil fuel industry in massive amounts and it's increasing. Um the IMF few years ago um find found it was $5 trillion a year if you include the externality. But that produces great harm and great costs to us um $5 trillion a year. So they repeated that two years ago. It's now $7 trillion a year. So that makes David Suzuki right. If our governments are subsidizing fossil the fossil fuel industry, the cause of all

22:43 this that we know we have to phase out, stop, close down. It's too late because we haven't changed them. And because revolution is a great idea, peaceful revolution, but that's not going to happen anytime soon, is it? On the um evil of the externalities, um you know, this is the theme of the big UK Stern Commission report of 2006. So nothing new about this. uh Stern explained over and over um this is the greatest most far-reaching market failure ever. That's climate change and it's due to us not costing and

23:31 considering the externalities. So we've known that a long time or our governments have known that a long time and they're doing the opposite. So um it's certain because we have accelerating global surface heating. Global warming is accelerating and um even more importantly ocean heating is accelerating. Now a very useful thing that the NOA that great American institution that Trump is going to break apart. The NOAV every year does what I find is the very best single um scientific assessment on climate change. It's very simple. They

24:17 do what they call the uh their greenhouse gas index. And in 2023, this is quoting from the NOA, we have turned up the heating influence on the planet from greenhouse gases by 51% since 1990. We've increased the heat in the system which we and everyone in all of life is going to experience um 51% since 1990. That's completely insane. Atmospheric uh greenhouse gas concentrations they also get every year. I find that very useful because that's so important, not just CO2. And um that's expressed in what's called

25:03 CO2 equivalent. And last and 2023 that was 534 CO2 equivalents that is an increase of 75% since 1900 like CO2 the certainty of being too late is uh because of the accelerating global warming ocean heating and frankly everything else all of the indicators there is and NASA has an article in which NASA says there is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. There's nothing new about this. Yes, it's been argued. Yes, it's been denied and confused and lied

25:50 about by the fossil fuel denial campaign. In fact, going by the IPCC assessment, which of course I do in some detail, um 2023 and 2024, those huge, totally unexpected, totally unanticipated um increases in global warming, they were actually on the worst case scenario. They were on the very worst case scenario. Too late? Yes, that's certainly evidence. Um the other evidence from global warming comes from an excellent uh scientific project which basically has all the scientific centers and leading scientists under it. Now, um

26:37 that's by Pierce Foster um from Leeds University in England and they're now doing an update every year because the IPCC assessments only come out every 5 years and um as I say, they're got huge amounts of useful information, but you can't rely on everything that's in there or that is not in there. And and so um for the past two years that assessment of global climate change interuses has stated that global temperature increase is increasing at an unprecedented rate on our records. A record unprecedented rate. So

27:24 there is another big tragic sad reason um that I'm sure David Suzuki is aware of and that is the failure of response. I mean look at all this data that I've gone through. you know, um there's about 12 so-called climate indicators that I follow and now this team follows and um they're all record high every year. They're record high and they're all increasing as fast and some faster than ever. There's been no response to this. None. The governments, as I say, are doing an opposite response. they're subsidized in the fossil fuel industry, but there's

28:10 been no response from the scientific community either. They really have not said anything about this. Um, the reason they give, which I think is a poor excuse, is that they say science doesn't give value judgments. Well, they're wrong because their modeling inevitably involves value judgments. And that is from the IPCC years ago. So we have a failure of response and public is it a public response? Are people um still you know marching down the streets as they were 10 years ago or so? Um no. The uh protest is um sadly mainly a few um young people, the

28:57 teenagers in their early 20s and um they're now burnt out and they now have to give up because the governments crack down on climate change protest severely. They criminalize these protesters who are protesting in order to have some kind of a future. the governments are horrible, terrible. So as James Hansen and his colleagues in two papers and a lot of colleagues um has said um it is too late for 1.5° C. That means it's too late because one of the best IPCC reports was their special report in 2018 which was called the 1.5°

29:45 C report and it was very clear that 1.5° C was globally disastrous and that 2° C was unthinkable, globally catastrophic. We can't wait and watch the planet and monitor the planet as it goes down. The IPCC6 assessment said that global emissions had to be in decline by 2025 at the low latest. 2025 at the latest this year. It's too late, right? That the IPCC said 2025 for 1.5° C, also for two degrees C.

30:36 Uh final point on global warming. Global warming is accelerating. This was first stated by James Hansen of course some years ago. The scientists in general disputed it. But now it's very clear. The evidence is clear. Global warming is accelerating. It's accelerating long-term and short term. And you just have to look at the NASA GIS NOIA graphs of global temperature increase over the years. But over the past 12 months, the 12 month average is 1.55° C. The three-year 36 month average is 1.54°

31:24 C. Right? So, we are way over 1.5 degrees C. We are way too late for that. And we're going to hit 2° C. So, we're too late for that. And that's planetary catastrophe. And so, uh I admire um David Suzuki at his he's 89 years old now, by the way. I mean, I I I couldn't believe it. um uh he looks great and um he's as clear and lucid in his communications as ever, you know, I mean he's one of the world's great communicators on science of nature and also climate change which is foundation focuses on um yeah um the uh realization or the

32:12 idea that we're doomed has come along. The scientists have reacted very aggressively to that that we must not say anything like that. Um, however, um, you look at all this evidence, we have doomed the present generation, not my generation, right? We're okay with the cause of it, but we're okay. Um, all today's children are doomed to live in an increasingly hellish planet Earth. A planet Earth that human homo sapiens and the homminid prespecies to earth has never experienced never experienced anything close to this.

32:58 And the climate is changing faster than it has changed in tens of millions of years. So that's how much too late this is. And um uh so my final point is because the scientific data tells us it's too late means that every single one of us has to make sure it's not too late for us and it's not too late for our community. It's not too late for us to try and give it our very very best in order to uh frankly love our children

33:43 and love future generations and love this wonderful, wonderful planet that we live on. Not too late for that.