On this page, you can find the second chapter of Designing the Revolution by Roger Hallam. Watch the video, read our summary of check out the full written transcript at the bottom of the page.

Summary #

In this episode of "Designing the Revolution," host Roger Hallam discusses the pressing issue of global warming. He explains how increased carbon in the atmosphere is already leading us towards 1.5 degrees of global warming. He warns that if we reach 2 degrees, it could result in mass displacement and social collapse. He emphasizes the need to listen to leading experts, review objective data and trust peer-reviewed research. Hallam argues that climate change is not just an environmental issue, but a problem that affects every aspect of society globally. He concludes by comparing the fight against climate change to World War II’s Enigma project, urging listeners to think and act intelligently to combat this global crisis.

1. Talk Introduction #

Roger Hallam begins his talk Designing the Revolution by shedding light on his goal to discuss greenhouse gases and climate change. He aims to provide a concise and thorough summary of his talks and interviews on the subject.

2. The Topic of Climate Change #

Roger Hallam carefully avoids the overused phrase climate change. Instead, he uses terms like "putting carbon into the atmosphere." He believes using the phrase climate change subconsciously minimizes the severity of the situation due to how it's been framed by corporate PR departments.

3. Understanding the Truth and Killer Facts #

Hallam emphasizes the importance of unbiased information when seeking the truth. He explains that this includes hearing from leading experts, reviewing objective data, and reading peer-reviewed papers. He introduces the concept of "killer facts" that are consequential on a large scale and puts other facts in perspective.

4. Projection of Global Warming #

Hallam proceeds to provide a detailed outlook on what could happen at 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees of global warming. He includes research results that predict the displacement of millions of people and social collapse as the temperature rises.

5. Recognizing Superstructural Facts #

In his conclusion, Hallam emphasizes the superstructural nature of the climate crisis. He states that once the climate is gone, humanity loses its ability to sustain society and all progressive advancements in human rights and various societal achievements. He also mentions that it affects all areas and aspects of life universally and continuously.

6. The Enigma Project #

Hallam likens the fight against climate change to the Enigma Project of World War II. By comparing the task of breaking German communication codes to addressing climate change, he highlights the need for actionable intelligence to bring about victory. He concludes with the promise to delve into more details in later talks.

Full transcript #

This transcript was automatically generated using AI.

Download subtitles with timestamps (SRT)

Hi, this is Roger Hallam, and you're listening to Designing the Revolution. This is talk number two, The Situation. Okay, so in this talk I'm going to be looking in a broad and sort of basic way at this whole activity of putting carbon into the atmosphere, greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And then after we've looked at this in some detail, we'll be going over to why this means revolutionary episodes will become inevitable over the next decade or two, and how we're going to try and design those episodes so they have pro-social outcomes. That's the general direction of travel at this stage anyway. Okay, so what I'm going to do is give you an outline of the talk about this science, as it were, that I usually do when I talk to the channel public. So as some of you may know, I've done hundreds of talks and interviews and what have you. And what I'm going to do is give you a summary of what I do in that talk. Now, obviously, there's lots of different ways of doing it. But in my view, this is probably in the ballpark of the best summary you can get. And that's based upon hundreds of pages of notes and stats that have been sent by some of the world's top scientists and people that help me accumulate all the different things that are going on. Okay, so this is probably going to take 20 to 30 minutes, something like that. All right, so before we start, I just want to make a few sort of introductory comments about it. First of all, you may have just noticed that I didn't say climate change. I said putting carbon into the atmosphere. And the title of this talk is The Situation. Now, there's a number of reasons for doing that. The first reason, of course, is because climate change, I'm afraid, those two words, is made up by corporate PR departments 20, 30 years ago. And it's easy to work out why they did that, because climate sounds like some technical, natural phenomenon. And change, of course, sounds quite neutral. There's change happening. There's always change happening. It's no big deal. So my proposition is, is every time anyone in the climate movement, if you want to call it that, uses the word climate change or even climate crisis, they're basically doing the corporate agenda for us, because they frame it in a certain way that dampens down any understanding of seriousness of what's going on. And we know from psychology that as soon as you sort of frame something as a thing out there, then you've already, it's very difficult to change your opinion of it. And what happens in your brain is, is a little bit of your brain goes, oh, the guy's talking about climate change. And your brain gets out a little box called climate change. And in it is a whole load of assumptions and biases and denial sort of mechanisms. So what I want you to do, and obviously it's quite typical, is pretend that you have never heard about any of this. And you're looking at it for the first time, and you're just going to take it in. You're not going to jump to conclusions. You're not going to say, oh, I'm sorting out that box, or that's not right, or that is right. Just try and hear it for what it is. Or at least be aware of it. Be consciously incompetent, as you might say, because obviously it's very difficult to. And when I do YouTube videos, often if you read the comments, really the majority of the comments fall into two boxes. People are either going, look, the climate crisis, you know, the climate thing doesn't exist. It's rubbish. It's all made up. They're climate deniers. Or they're saying, it's too late. You know, nothing can be done. Civilisation's going to collapse. Everyone's going to die. It's useless. Now, obviously both those reactions are really two sides of the same coin, which is they both enable a person to not actually engage with what is actually being said. And they both enable someone not to take responsibility morally or emotionally for what's going on. So that's what I want to ask you not to do. Stop the judgement. Stop the jumping to conclusions. And to the extent you can, just take it in. Okay, this is the situation. And we're going to use this analogy of going to a doctor and being told you've got cancer. It's a similar sort of thing as you're sitting there and the doctor's saying, look, I'm just going to tell you the situation. It's your responsibility to listen to it and make your decisions based upon what I'm going to tell you. All right. So when I do these talks, one of the first things I say is I ask the audience what they think, how they think you can find out the truth. It sounds like quite a deep philosophical question, but I mean it in a fairly pragmatic way. So continuing with this analogy of going to the doctor, you want to know whether you've got cancer. In other words, you want to know whether it's true that you've got cancer or not. So how do you, what criteria are you looking for? So what I suggest is there's three criteria. First of all, there's three ways, three sorts of knowledge that you want to be told. First of all, you want to be told what the world's leading experts or at least the experts in the field think. You don't want to know what the doctors make down the pot think or his wife thinks or whatever. You want to know what a leading expert thinks about the situation. Secondly, you want to know the data. In other words, you want to look at the x-ray, you want to see that x-ray of your lung, you know, is it filling with liquid, is it diseased, to the extent it is, you want to be able to see it. In other words, you want to look at objective data. That sounds pretty obvious. And lastly, you know, if it's clever about it, you want to know about the peer-reviewed papers. So peer-reviewed papers are when scientists come up with some data and some propositions and they write it out. They send it, it gets sent blind to other researchers and scientists who don't know who's written it. And if it's incoherent or it doesn't make sense, then it doesn't get published. So peer-reviewed papers, that's what that is. Now, no one's pretending, of course, that this, you know, enables you to have God-like knowledge, but we're talking about pragmatic design here. And if you want to know something in a limited amount of time, it's pretty obvious that those are the three things you want to know. Okay, so lastly, before I get into the actual situation itself, the other thing that I've spent the last few years doing is trying to communicate that what we need to look at here is the killer facts. So killer facts in terms of two definitions of that. So killer facts in the sense of, well, yeah, what is actually going to kill you? What's going to kill people, destroy civilization, all the rest of it. But also killer facts in the more general sense that once you've heard this fact, then it doesn't really matter what other facts are going to come along. It is the dominant or encompassing or system fact. So, for instance, again, using the analogy of going to the doctor. If the doctor gives you that x-ray and you can see clearly that your lung is half diseased and it used to be course diseased and in two or three months time it's going to be three courses diseased, by which time it's likely you're going to die. That's a killer fact. It's going to kill you. And also, it doesn't really matter what else is happening to your body. So, for instance, if the doctor says, but you know what? You did have a rash on your arm and it's clearing up. Well, that's true, but it's irrelevant, right? Because, you know, it's your lung. It doesn't matter what's happening around your arm. But it does happen to be a fact. So, what often happens, of course, is that people do what's called cherry-picking. You know, they want to say that your body is looking pretty good. So they say, look, look, you know, look, your arm, your rash is getting better. And it's true, but it's irrelevant or it's not important because the main show is your lungs and what have you. So often, cherry-picking means you just pick a little bit of data, you know, like the temperature in New York last week, you know, something silly like that. What you really want is to know the facts about the whole system. You want to know over a large amount of time and a large amount of space. So, for instance, you want to know what's happened over the last 10 years over the whole world. That's a killer fact. You don't want to know what it was in Manchester in 1967. Who cares? Okay, so that's like a bit of a preparation for how I hope you approach the main data expert opinions, which I'm going to go through. So in terms of killer facts, what I'm going to talk about is three killer fact areas, which is 1.5 degrees of global warming, 2 degrees of global warming, and how long we have. So how long we have is that sort of question, you know, you see in the movies. Someone's been told they're going to die, and that's the question everyone wants to know. How long have I got? All right, so let's start with 1.5 degrees. So I usually talk about three situations on this, but there's a fourth, so I'll add a fourth for this talk. So first of all, there was an article in the Conversation magazine last year, that's 2021, I think it was in February, which has been downloaded by 2 million people. It's a bombshell article, I think it's won some awards, commissioned by three of the world's leading scientists. They're all practicing academics. I think there's 80 years of experience between them. So these are main people in a prestigious, like, online magazine, only people who are fully-fledged academics can write for it. Okay, so it's a serious thing. And in this article, in the middle of the article, they say, words to the effect, that at the climate conference of 2015, the Paris conference of 2015, we did not know of a single scientist who thought it was possible to stay under 1.5 degrees of global warming. Okay, so there's a lot of, that gives you some important information, that privately, most of, or even effectively all the world's scientists, seven or eight years ago, were already of the belief we were going to go over 1.5. Now, the second sort of data point is Chatham House, which is a foreign affairs think tank in the UK, arguably the most prestigious one in the country, hardly full of radicals. They said last year that there is now a 1% chance of staying under 1.5. So a third data point is a bunch of social scientists, and pray peace they did this, did a smart thing. So if you have a social science background like myself, then it's like pretty basic that you don't ask people a question in public. You want to know what people think, you ask them in an anonymous survey, and this is what these guys did. They asked 200 leading world scientists, I think they were IPCC scientists, which is the leading body in the world looking at the climate crisis. And they said, what's the chances? Are we going to go over 1.5 degrees centigrade? And 94% of them said, yes, we are, in a private survey. So, again, I'm asking you to just look at this in as unbiased a way as you can, and I'm going to suggest that if I don't think you're right, we can go through lots of more data points, but we don't need to. So having said that, I will add one thing that the UN said a month or two ago, I think around COP, and they said staying under 1.5 degrees is no longer credible. Okay, so 1.5 is done. James Hansen, the leading climate scientist in America, just before I went to prison, he brought out a statement with his colleagues saying, we're probably going to go over 1.5 in 2024, because of the anemia effect, because of various changes in the Earth's temperature, which naturally were in combination with carbon in the atmosphere. Okay, so let's look at 2 degrees. So there's a whole bunch of papers come out, peer-reviewed papers, which over the last few years have given a lot more specific information, like hard information on the basis of years of research on where we're going and what the implications of that are. So I'm just going to look at one paper, which is called The Future of the Human Niche. You can look it up on the internet if you like. It's only about 12 pages, fairly straightforward to read. So the first thing to say about this paper is that they say, when the global temperature increases 2 degrees centigrade, because that's the average around the whole world, including 60-70% of the Earth's surface is covered with cool water, the temperature over that obviously is going to be a lot higher. And according to their calculations, that's up to 7 degrees of increase in temperature, 7 degrees. So places like Cairo and Bangladesh and Paris or wherever, when it's 2 degrees, it's potentially going to be around 7 degrees. Okay, so let's look at 2 degrees of global warming. Now over the last few years, particularly since we set up Extinction Reboot, there's been a lot more peer-reviewed papers come out, which give quite specific numbers on the impact of putting carbon into the atmosphere, particularly with regards to heat. So I'm going to refer here to a peer-reviewed paper, which is quite well known, called The Future of the Human Niche. You can look it up on the internet. It's only about 12 pages long. It's pretty readable. Now what it says in this paper, after years of research, and I've spoken to the authors of it as it happens, and they confirm in this article, in this peer-reviewed paper, that at 2 degrees centigrade of global warming, it's actually around 7 degrees centigrade of global warming on land where people live. And there's no big mystery around this, because 60-70% of the Earth's surface is water. Water is cooler than on land, so obviously it's going to be warmer on land. But it's obviously a bombshell to find out it's actually 7 degrees rather than 2. Now it's not necessarily like that everywhere, but that's broadly the situation. Okay, and then they talk about what the implications are of it being in the region of 7 degrees higher than pre-industrial times. Now that's an average, of course, 7 degrees. So it means on a hot day it could be 15-20 degrees higher than average temperatures. And this has a very dramatic impact on the inhabitability of large areas of the planet. So as it turns out that today's temperature is around 1% of the world. It is on a temperature of around 30 degrees centigrade. That's the Sahara Desert, what have you. But once it goes up to 2 degrees centigrade, then it hits this tipping point that we'll talk about more in the next session, where all these areas in the world which are on the edge of inhabitability, they all become uninhabitable. And this is in a region of 20-30% of the Earth's surface. So at 2 degrees centigrade, they predict that 1,000 million people will be living in uninhabitable areas and therefore will have to move. At 3 degrees centigrade of global average temperatures, that increases to 2 billion people. That's about a quarter of the Earth's population. 1,000 million is what, about one in seven people, something like that. Now this isn't the only stat here. There's a number of other very official sort of statistics coming out. So for instance, the IPCC report, which is, as I said, the main body in the world that produces reports on the climate. Earlier this year, they produced a report that said up to 700 million people in Africa, just in Africa, will be displaced by 2030. By 2030. So that's half the population of Africa displaced, i.e. refugees, by 2030. And 2 degrees, depending on who you ask, is coming down the road in 2035, 2040, maybe 2045. For the sake of argument, in 15 to 20 years, there will be 1,000 million people on the move. And again, we're going to talk about this a bit more in the next session, in the next talk, but remember this is an estimate. What an estimate means is, yeah, it could be less. It could only be 500 billion, 500 million, or of course it could be 1.5 billion, 1,500 million. So let's just delve into this a little bit more, because one of the big things to get your head around when thinking about the climate and temperatures and putting carbon into the atmosphere, is it's not just a physical, natural event. It doesn't affect just the physical world. It obviously affects human society, human beings. And once we start thinking about 1,000 million refugees, then we can start thinking about what else that must mean, almost inevitably. So for instance, during the Second World War, there were 50 million refugees at the end of World War II. So what we're saying is, in comparison to World War II, it's like 20. It's like 20 World War IIs happening within a decade in terms of refugees and social and political disruption. Or we can compare it to Ukraine. There was about 5 million refugees. That's 200 Ukraines happening in around a decade in terms of disruption. In Syria, there was around 5 million refugees, external refugees. And there were half a million deaths, 500,000 deaths so far. So that leads us into another area of analysis, which is these 1,000 million people, they don't just neatly and in a nice organized way leave the place that they've lived for 1,000 years or whatever. It obviously involves war, rape, slaughter, starvation. These things always come together. There's no question about that. And we might like to give another estimate that 100 million of these people, 10%, like in Syria, will die from starvation and slaughter. The broad implication here is we're going to have social collapse. On a mass scale, over an eighth to a quarter of the world's population within 20 years. So to give a flavor of what social collapse looks like, we can look at the Congo, which is the biggest example of social collapse of a society since World War II. So in the early 2000s, according to some estimates, there were 5 million people who died due to the collapse of the government and war lordism and what have you. And there were 2 million rapes. 2 million women were raped. So you can go and do the maths. I know it's a gruesome thing, but we're here to try and work out what's going to happen. But what is going to happen is human suffering and injustice on a level never before experienced in human history. And in case you think that this is, you know, information which is not well known, I could quote Tom Tugginhart, who was a Tory MP in British Parliament, and he's on record as saying that he's spoken to people at the agricultural department of the UN, and they've said to him, if you think Syria's bad, wait until there's 500 million refugees coming from the Sahel, from Africa. So the summary of the situation is 1.5 is locked in, and if we head over 2 degrees, we're looking at the end of the global trading system, the end of the global economy, such as it is at the moment, and of course this enormous level of suffering and injustice. So the last question is, how long have we got? So I'm going to quote to you here, this now quite famous quote, used by Justin Poirot a lot in other A22 projects around the Western world. So the quote is from Sir David King, last year, early last year he said, we have to act quickly, what we do, I believe, in the next three to four years will determine the future of humanity. Okay, so Sir David King, he's one of those leading world experts, he was chief scientific advisor to the British government for a number of years, top British scientist, arguably the top scientist on climate in the UK. So he's saying that we now have two to three years in order to save humanity. Now saving humanity is a euphemism of course for billions of people starving to death, what else could he mean? The reason he's saying this is because the climate is not a linear situation, it's not like you put carbon into the atmosphere and things get worse and worse and worse in some straight line graph sort of way. There is a tipping point situation, a tipping point situation, the analogy here is a ball going downhill, so you kick a ball down the hill, at a certain point it starts speeding up, as the hill gets steeper and steeper and the ball speeds up. So at a certain point you're not going to catch it. So what Sir David King is referring to here is a bunch of different tipping points, but I'll just briefly mention two of them. So one of them is the Arctic, if the Arctic melts entirely in the summer, which peer-reviewed papers predict will be 2030, 2035, then the warm water and the dark water will absorb the sun's rays and it will melt more of the ice. And as more of the ice melts, then there's more dark water, which means there's more heat, which means the ice melts quicker. This is non-negotiable, it's 101 physics, it's really straightforward. And it means that at a certain point in the next 10 years, arguably we will lose the ability to stop the Arctic from melting because it will be off it on its way, regardless of what we do. Similarly with the Amazon, the Amazon, according to peer-reviewed papers, will be unable to maintain itself as a ongoing ecological system when 20 to 25% has been cut down around, according to peer-reviewed papers. And at the moment, the 17% of the Amazon has been cut down. So again, over the next 10, 15 years, we're going to lose the ability to save the Amazon, according to peer-reviewed papers. So you'll notice I've spoken here about world experts, James Hansen, the leading climate scientist arguably in the United States. Sir David King, he's a leading expert in the UK. So I'll finish off by talking about Johan Rostrom, who's the director of the Potsdam Institute in Germany, which is arguably the leading climate research institute in Europe. And he's on record as saying, if we pass two degrees, then we almost certainly, due to these feedbacks, these tipping points, we'll reach three degrees. And what he doesn't mention, of course, is if we reach three degrees, then we're certainly going to go to four, because it's the ball going down the hill. So in summary, 1.5 degrees is absolutely locked in, in any reasonable sort of pragmatic sort of sense. And if we go over two, we're done for. We'll have billions of deaths, according to the world's leading experts, the world's leading peer-reviewed papers. Now, obviously, there's a little bit of a caveat here, which is, Sir David King, and various other people are saying is, if we engage in earth repair activities or geoengineering or some combination of the two, in other words, we proactively try to remove carbon from the atmosphere, for instance, then there is a possibility, and it's only a possibility, of course, that we can actually prevent this slide towards mass death. Now, I'll give you a sort of flavor of how this goes, because I talked to a leading expert at Harvard University on this, and he said, yeah, what we need to do is cover three or four percent of the Earth's surface with mirrors, that's like the whole Sahara and India, which is a massive undertaking, obviously, but in so much as it happens, then it will halt the warming of the planet. It won't reverse it, but it will halt it. But the caveat, he said to me, and I swear to you that he said this to me in a private conversation, he said, and we have five years to do it, otherwise the human race is going to go extinct. And that was two years ago. Okay, so the upshot of it is, is there's a limited amount of time. So I'm going to summarize some of these fundamental overall characteristics of the situation, the situation of putting carbon, greenhouse gases, into the atmosphere. And these are indisputable. This is physics. This is, you know, a meteorite coming towards the Earth. So the first thing is, the situation is, or I call superstructural. That means once we lose the climate, then we lose everything else. We lose our ability to sustain society. And if we lose the ability to sustain society, obviously we lose all the progressive advances in human rights, you know, workers' rights, women's rights, gay rights. All those things are most dependent upon maintaining the biosphere, maintaining the climate, stopping putting carbon into the atmosphere. So I want to, this is sometimes a little bit difficult to get your head around because the whole world assumes, you know, there's the environment out there and then there's all these social issues. No, the two things are intricately connected. So if you think of having a meal and someone puts a tablecloth on the table and you put on the plates and the cutlery and the glasses and what have you, and those plates and glasses represent different aspects of society and different progressive advances in gay rights, human rights, all the rest of it. Now, if you knock over one of the glasses, that's not structural. It's not going to affect the whole table. You know, it might affect one or two of the plates, but it's annoying. So that represents, for instance, you know, in a country, it turns into a dictatorship and they destroy human rights. It's a terrible thing to happen, but no one's pretending it's going to affect human rights all around the world. However, if someone comes along and pulls the whole tablecloth off the table, that's a non-mitigated disaster because by definition, everything rests on the tablecloth, i.e. the tablecloth is structural, super structural, and every single plate falls to the floor. In other words, you lose everything and that's what putting carbon into the atmosphere means. So that takes us on to the related second point, which is it's universal. There is not an area in space on the planet that is not going to be affected. It affects everything. It affects, you know, permafrost in the Arctic. It affects Amazon rainforest. There's no place in the world which is not affected. That's pretty obvious, but it's worth remembering because every other disaster that has happened in human history has just affected one part of the planet, right? There's always been little bits which have avoided it. For instance, in World War II, it didn't really affect South America. And it's going to involve mass death. This is not a small thing. It inevitably involves mass death, obviously, of animals. 70% of the animals in the world have already died over the last generation or two and there will be an exponential increase in mass death over the next 10 to 20 years. Lastly, of course, is yes, it affects all space, but it affects all time. In other words, it goes on like that. Now, at this point, I'd just like to acknowledge in a totally inadequate way, obviously, that I'm very sorry about the situation. The purpose of these talks is not to investigate the moral or emotional aspects of it. Not that this is an enormously important thing to do. It is. But there's only so much you can do and what I want to focus on is the design response. In other words, what we do, what you do when you get up in the morning, what you do with other people, how you prioritize your time, what you do during that time so that you become as smart as possible, as intelligent as possible in the collective enterprise to minimize the probability of this whole thing spiraling out of control. Now, you might listen to this like some people do and go, well, that's it. You know, the thing is done. Or you may go, no, no, no. You know, I don't believe you. This guy's making up. So as I said at the beginning of this talk, you know, those are the two non-thinking responses. And there are obviously emotional responses because what you're really saying is you don't want to have to emotionally acknowledge what's going on. So what this series of talks is doing is to say to you, look, it is what it is. And we need to... One of our responses has to be to think about our responsibilities in terms of what we do with our lives from this point onwards. And I want to use a little analogy here before I finish about World War II, which you may know about. You know, World War II was a massive endeavor. Millions of people gave their lives, you know, fighting the Nazis and what have you. And at the same time, there's a good argument to be said that the war was won by a very small number of people who broke the codes, the communication codes of the Germans, the Enigma Code, I think it's called. And there's a guy called Alan Turing. I've just got a book here, a massive book about it, which is very difficult to understand. But the upshot of it is, is that by applying intelligence to the key element, the secrecy of the codes, it was possible for the Allies to win. And if they hadn't done that, arguably, you know, Western shipping would have sunk and Britain would have been starved into surrender. So that's our project. It's an Enigma project to respond to putting carbon into the atmosphere. And over the next number of talks, we'll be investigating what we need to do. In terms of the next two talks then, I'm going to look at the wider context, how this information is interpreted and communicated in a social context. And that will give us a more rounded idea of what's going on before we move on to designing the revolution. Thank you very much.