On this page, you will find videos, summaries and transcripts of the third chapter of Designing the Revolution by Roger Hallam.

Videos #

Summary #

Part 1 #

Climate activist Roger Hallam discusses the seriousness of the climate crisis and how it's often downplayed by establishment scientists, who tend to give conservative estimates to avoid panic. This approach, though considered responsible, can be misleading and prevent timely action needed to prevent disasters. Hallam uses real-life examples to show how even a small chance of a catastrophic event should be taken seriously. He points out that past predictions about climate change have consistently been underestimated, with disastrous effects becoming reality sooner than anticipated. He believes that understanding these patterns can help us better prepare for future climate-related issues.

1. Understanding the Wider Context: #

Roger Hallam explores some essential dynamics of the climate chaos that's inherently superstructural and universal. The situation refers to underlying forces that could potentially destroy the societal 'plates and cups' on the table – a metaphor for how society will break down if climate chaos pulls the metaphorical tablecloth beneath.

2. The Relationship Between the Average & Extreme: #

Hallam discusses how scientific predictions or climate estimates are often underpinned by the spectrum of extremes. Drawing from his personal farming experience, he illustrates how extreme cold can decimate a crop, which is akin to how extreme shifts in environment due to climate change can result in mass death events.

3. The Concern Of Estimated Effects: #

Ideally, true effects of carbon emissions should be considered based on the next 10-20 years as those effects are already locked in. These include carbon lag, global dimming, and the Arctic effect, which increases warming due to a massive expanse of water. Hallam asserts that an estimated 2 degrees centigrade of warming is already locked into the system.

4. The Conservative Approach Of Scientists: #

According to Hallam, scientific institutions often downplay the level of risk coming from climate change. He attributes this to multiple factors including biases, cultural pressures, and political interference, among others. This misleading representation impacts society's understanding of the impending crisis, leading to inaction and a lack of urgency.

5. The Importance Of Considering Extreme Scenarios: #

In his analogy of the medieval village and wolves, Hallam stresses on the importance of focusing on extreme possibilities when assessing risks. By doing so, appropriate measures can be taken to prevent catastrophic damages. Similarly, instead of focusing on certainty, addressing less likely but more dangerous possibilities is seen to be crucial in tackling the climate crisis effectively.

6. Analogies to Understand the Severity: #

Hallam gives examples of a cracked bridge and a faulty plane engine to illustrate the importance of reacting to even a small risk when the potential outcome is catastrophic. Despite a 5% chance of the bridge collapsing or plane crashing, it is standard practice to treat these as extreme risks due to the potential loss of life. This illustrates Hallam's point that even if there’s a small chance of a climate catastrophe, it should be addressed proactively due to the high stakes involved.

7. Structural Bias in Establishment Scientist Communication: #

Hallam suggests that there is a structural bias in how scientists and official world bodies communicate the future impacts of climate change. They tend to understate the potential severity of the situation. This conservative estimation leads to a delay in acknowledging the true impact of disasters, which could leave the world unprepared for worst-case scenarios.

8. Proposal for Research: #

Hallam suggests that if social scientists examine past scientific predictions, it would validate his point of a more conservative leaning. His analysis includes data points where scientific estimates around global warming targets were grossly inaccurate. This suggests the need for scientists to be more alert to possible extremes and take into account structural bias.

9. The Consequences of Climate Change are Unfolding Faster than Predicted: #

Hallam suggests that the predictions made a decade ago have already been surpassed. For instance, the melting of the Arctic ice, which was predicted to occur by 2100, is now likely to happen by 2030.

10. Predicting the Future: #

Next decade, according to Hallam, will see the scientific community accept that 2 degrees C of warming is already locked in, similarly to admitting that 1.5 degrees was in fact locked in 10 years ago. This shows that there is a pattern of acknowledging the true severity of climate change a decade after the fact.

11. Impending Tipping Points: #

Hallam suggests that ice sheets in Greenland and parts of Antarctica are past their tipping points. These will have catastrophic impacts with significant sea level rises and are arguably already happening or likely to happen. He reiterates his point that factual communication of risks should account for worst-case scenarios and biases to avoid wrongful complacency.

Hallam concludes by promising to discuss additional related topics in future talks, emphasizing that understanding these 'rules' is crucial in navigating the impending climate crisis.

Part 2 #

Roger Hallam explains the urgency of the climate crisis and its expected severe impacts on the world's economy. He gives examples of environmental damage, including Germany's Rhine River issue, Florida's future climate disaster, the trouble of insulating UK homes, and increased methane and nuclear radiation. Hallam predicts critical points, known as "hard stops," signaling worsening climate change conditions around the 2030s, causing issues like a water crisis in the US, severe fires in Australia, economic decline in Russia, and potential mass starvation in India. He discusses the probability of species extinction, including humans, due to factors like methane from permafrost, increased nuclear radiation, and changing wind patterns. Finally, Hallam underlines the moral, legal, and spiritual aspects of this potential extinction and urges listeners to understand the causes for preparation and response.

Part 1: Overview #

Roger Hallam discusses the impending urgency of the climate crisis scenario, highlighting alarming facts, and issues often overlooked. He explains the concept of compounding and its effects on the world's economy, describing how they will be even more severe due to climate change.

Part 2: Significant examples of environmental damage #

Hallam provides multiple examples to illustrate his points, starting with the environmental crisis faced by Germany's Rhine River and its impact on the country's economy. He then speaks about the looming disaster of Florida due to climate change and the impossibility of insulating 29 million homes in the UK within a ten-year timeframe. Finally, he speaks about an increase in methane emissions and nuclear radiation as another imminent concern.

Part 3: Anticipating critical points and Hard Stops #

Hallam introduces the concept of "hard stops," or critical points, which refer to certain stats that signal when things will start to fall apart due to climate change. He asserts that the 2030s will be a critical tipping point in terms of a collapse event. He discusses various situations, including the looming water crisis in Southwest United States, the impact of extreme fires on average in Australia, a 30% decline in gross national product in Russia due to subsidence, and the possibility of mass starvation in India due to a decrease in wheat production.

Part 4: Probability of Extinction #

The talk then shifts to the possibility of extinction because of climate change, explaining that it is not a maybe, but a when. Methane escaping from melting permafrost, an increase in radiation due to nuclear power stations, and the slowing down of wind patterns are significant causes. The consequences of these phenomena could lead to the extinction of species, including human beings.

Part 5: Moral, Legal and Spiritual Implications #

In his concluding remarks, Hallam acknowledges the vast moral, legal, and spiritual implications of the possibility of extinction due to climate change. He implies that understanding the causes and effects can justify any form of disruption for the cause and prepares listeners for a response or strategic planning for the impending climate crisis.

Full transcript #

Part 1 #

Download subtitles with timestamps (SRT)

Hi, this is Roger Hallam, and you're listening to Designing the Revolution. This is talk three, part one, The Wider Context. Okay, so in the last session, I was laying down a sort of standard heading for extinction, what to do about it, sort of talk that's been done thousands of times around the world. I was doing my version of it, and I attempted to lay out the killer facts. And the conclusions were, the summary was that what we're dealing with here is superstructural. The whole of society is the plates and cups on the table. And the climate chaos is the superstructural force which will destroy all that in so much as if you pull the tablecloth off the table, everything falls to the floor. That's the nature of what we're talking about. And we also made the conclusions that are pretty obvious, but that this is universal. There's no part of the planet, no country which isn't going to be affected by that superstructural possibility. And this event will happen forever, like it will continue forever, 100,000 years at least. And lastly, we summarised that what we're dealing with here, whether we like it or not, is mass death, death on a scale which has never been experienced in human history. And it is what it is. So what I'm going to do in this talk is, as I say, look at the wider context.

First of all, I want to look at some of the dynamics or understandings of how this whole thing works. And then I'm going to look at the connection between these physical processes and society, social processes and how they interconnect, particularly in terms of how this information is communicated and interpreted in a social context, in the context of, you know, scientists making statements and news about the climate and reports and such like. Okay, so the first dynamic I want to look at is the relationship between the average and the extreme. Now, just to say initially, just to remind ourselves, when scientists come up with predictions, they are by definition estimates. And an estimate by definition, couldn't be quite so bad, which of course, a lot of climate deniers say, but they also, if they're going to be logical, say, well, it could be a lot worse. So there's this ambiguity around the estimates. But the point here is that if you make an estimate, there's also an extreme possibility. So most estimates are what you might call normal distribution curves, in the sense it's like a bell curve, it sort of goes up and then it goes down, you have these two long tails. And when you're looking at the consequences, what you need to look at is not the centre of the curve, the centre of the bell curve, what you need to look at is the worst extremity, because the worst extremity has massive negative effects. So to illustrate this, I'm just going to give an example from my farming experience. So as I said on the first session, I was a farmer for 25 years, used to grow a lot of different vegetables commercially. And for about two or three decades, I'd grow around 30,000 leeks a year in Wales. And on just about every year, I'd lose five, maybe 10% of the crop, you know, some of the plants weren't very good, they'd get a little bit diseased, there'd be a bit of a frost, there'd be, you know, these outliers. So it'd bubble up and down. And then one year, it was minus 15, it was like the coldest year for another 100,000 years, I can't remember, about 15 years ago. And I think it was about minus 15 for two weeks. The upshot of it is, is the frost, the cold went right into the core of the leeks. And once the core of the leek freezes, then the whole plant dies. So if it's a little bit cold, you know, if it's minus 10, you might lose like half the leek, all these different layers, it's like an onion, half of the outer layers disappear, go sludge. But in the spring, the leek comes back and you know, you might not have a great crop or you've got a crop. But obviously, and it's obvious, at a certain point, you know, by definition, you will come to freezing the core of the leek and the core of the leek dies. Now, death is quite sort of interesting in a sense that what the definition of death means is, it doesn't come back, it doesn't continue forever. So in the spring of that year, all these leeks turn to sludge, I mean, the entire leek and the entire crop. So that year, my production wasn't, you know, 90-95% of the number of leeks I planted, it was zero, I mean, literally zero, I didn't crop a single leek, because of this extreme sort of point of where death happens. So a similar thing happens with human beings, of course, you know, you can go out in a chilly night and you get really, really cold, you get frostbite, you come back, but you live. But at a certain point, it's so cold that your whole body gets hypothermia, and you die and you never come back. So what we're trying to say here is that at a certain point in a set of living entities, if they're extremely dry, extremely wet, extremely cold, extremely hot, then there's a point at which there's an exponential takeoff in the consequences. So an example of this might be fires. So in California, I think, you know, I haven't got the exact stats, but I think four or five years ago, 1% of California burnt down, because it was really hot. And then everyone thought that was terrible, you know, that's the most it's ever burnt down ever. And then two years later, I think 2% of California had forest fires. And the point here is that as it gets hotter, let's say it goes to 40 degrees, goes to 45 degrees, it's not going to go linear, it's not going to go to 3%. It's going to go up to 10, 20, 70%, right? So this isn't, it's not, it's not difficult to understand this in the sense that if you have a lit fire, you know, it can go out, it can go out and then, and then if you attach enough heat and the whole thing burns. So I had a little example of this in Australia about three years ago, wasn't it, when 20% of the forest in the whole of Australia burnt down. So we can make a reasonable prediction that by 2030, when it's three, four degrees hotter at an extreme, then we could be looking at 20%, 30%, even 60% of California's forest burning down. So a little example of this is when it was 49 degrees in Canada in the village where it was 49 degrees, which is off the charts biggest anomaly in temperatures ever recorded on the globe. Three days later, the village burned down because everything set fire or combusted. So a third little element of this is this sort of horrific prediction of the future of the human nation. Because what it said is one degrees above pre-industrial temperatures, you've got 1%, 1% of the Earth's surface is over 30 degrees, effectively uninhabitable like the Sahara. So if you have a linear mindset, you might say, well, you know, two degrees, if you double the temperature increase, two degrees, then the amount of uninhabitable Earth should increase proportionately, right? It should be about 2%, maybe 3%, you know, for bad luck. But as it happens at two degrees centigrade, it's, I think they said 30%, but let's say for the sake of argument, 20, 30% of the Earth's surface will be effectively uninhabitable. So do you get that, right? So suddenly you've hit this S-curve, you know, it's a little bit of an increase, a little bit of increase, and then the increase, every unit of increase causes this massive takeoff as you go up the vertical, this almost vertical line of the S-curve. And then of course, at some point, you know, it levels off again. This is enormously important, I can't say how important it is, but it's important that we understand how this works. In other words, the dynamics underneath the facts. So this connects very closely to the phenomenon of tipping points, which I talked about briefly in the last session. So just to reiterate again, what a tipping point is, is a point at which the whole thing takes off of its own accord, and you can't bring it back. Now one of the reasons you have a problem with tipping points is they don't really exist in any objective sense in the social sphere in society. So for instance, you know, if there's a big spate of murders in Leicester, you know, a hundred people are murdered, it's a terrible thing, and society and the social services, the police and what have you, go into Leicester, and they come up with a program to bring it back to normal levels of murder, you know, one or two a year. So for instance, they might, you know, put more money into it, they might arrest more criminal people, there will be a public information campaign, blah, blah, blah, and then they bring it back. So 99% of human experience, particularly for our generation, is that's the way the world works. Something gets bad, and then you do something about it, and it comes back, and then, you know, everything's okay again. That's not how physics works. How physics works, and this is absolutely objective, you know, the basic principle of physics is there's a tipping point in a physical system, and because it's a physical system, there's no reflexivity in it, you know, the ice doesn't have a conscience, it's not open to negotiation, and you totally lose the situation. It goes off of its own accord, like the murders go up to 1,000 and 10,000, if it happened on a social level. Okay, so the obvious example of this, which is irrefutable, is if you warm the Arctic up, which is what's happening obviously with carbon emissions, then the ice melts, that's pretty obvious, and that releases, makes more of the sea visible to the sun, and the sea is darker than the ice, you can't really dispute that, so obviously the sea is going to warm up, and that's going to create a temperature increase, and then more ice is going to disappear, which is going to create an even bigger temperature increase, and it's exponential, it gets hotter and hotter. So the stats are 70% of the volume of the ice in the Arctic that disappeared over the last 30 years, so you don't need to be a genius to work out what the peer-reviewed paper is saying, which is it'll be gone in the summer in around a decade or so. And similarly, as I mentioned with the Amazon, it's a self-perpetuating ecosystem, the reason the trees are there is because it rains, the reason it rains is because the trees are there, they evaporate the water, there's nothing particular about Brazil that makes there need to be an Amazon rainforest, it's because it exists, because it exists. So at a tipping point, which apparently is around 20-25%, the area will not sustain that system and the whole thing dies back, whether you like it or not. Okay, so the third element, and again, this is massively under-publicised, but again, I understand it is a no-brainer, is when you pour carbon into the atmosphere, it doesn't effectively, the following day, create a temperature increase. The analogy here is, I'll come to an example, I'll come to an example, there's a guy, there's a real man-type guy, he's got a lump in his body, he doesn't think it is anything, so he doesn't go to the doctor, and when he goes to the doctor, it's too late, and he dies, so he should have gone, he should have gone early. And this is what you hear on the adverts all the time, you know, go to your doctor, get checked up, if you find cancer early, you'll survive. So the same thing applies to the human race, in the sense that, you know, we have this lump in the body, we have extreme weather, it's pretty bad, but it's not that bad, but the fact of the matter is, it's not like that. The increase in how terrible the weather is going to get is already locked in, it's going to get a lot worse. So when we look at the effects of the carbon, putting carbon into the atmosphere, we don't need to look at what it is now, because we've got to look at what it is in the next 10-20 years, because that's already locked in. So this isn't just some fake theory, there are peer-reviewed papers on it, you can look them up, so there's three elements, I mean there's several other elements, but there's three elements that have this delayed effect. So the first one is what's called the carbon lag, it's pretty obvious to put carbon into the atmosphere, the carbon that we are having the effect of now was put into the atmosphere for the sake of argument about 10 years ago, so the effect of the carbon for the last 10 years is yet to come through, and the effect of that, there's actually numbers on it, it's around half a degree centigrade increase is locked in because of carbon. There's some discussion about it, some people think it's only 0.2, 0.3, some people think it could be a whole 1 degrees, but it stands to reason that it's not immediate. The second thing is global dimming, so this is a little bit complicated, but the pollution which is put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels like coal and what have you, possibly polluting aerosols or tiny particles into the atmosphere, it's not difficult to understand that that blocks the sun's rays, so it reduces the effect of global warming. So as we get rid of coal and stop having carbon emissions emitting paradoxically, that temporarily will heat up the Earth because all this pollution quite rapidly, in a matter of a year or two, will fall to the Earth and you'll get extra sun's rays. So again, there's papers on it and the stats are that once this happens, we need to add between 0.5 and 1 degrees centigrade of global warming. And the last one is the Arctic, they put the Arctic saying once the Arctic is melted in the summer, it's going to add 0.4 degrees centigrade to global warming because you're going to have this massive expanse of water and that's going to attract more heat through the dark water as I explained a few minutes ago. So this is a massive bombshell, assuming you can get your head around understanding it, or at least accepting it, because on the face of it, we've got maybe 2 degrees centigrade of warming already locked into the system, which takes us over without even taking into account that humans aren't obviously going to suddenly stop putting carbon into the atmosphere tomorrow, so you've got obviously the added effect of that. So the second thing I want to talk about in this session is the conservatism of scientists, the conservatism of science communication, documents that come out of scientific institutions or the UN and what have you. This is, how can I put it, beyond description, important because what comes out of these institutions and from these people creates what you might call the cultural baseline, it's what they talk about on all the news and what the NGOs talk about and therefore what 80-90% of the world talks about when they're thinking about the degree of risk and horror that's coming down the road. So if this is wrong, then it basically has a massive structural effect on our ability to understand what's going on, and it is wrong. From a social science point of view on this, this shouldn't be at all unexpected. Human beings are not God, they have biases, they have cultures, they have agendas, they have egos, they experience hate and fear, they're political animals and such like. If we were just talking about maths or some completely innocuous scientific process then the bias would be next to zero because there's nothing to be biased about. But when you're talking about something that is massively political in terms of challenging the corporate class and when you're talking about something that's enormously existentially challenging, i.e. the class society, it's a total no-brainer from a social research point of view that people are going to alter how they communicate. So let's go through some of the dynamics here. As you'll remember, there was an article in the Compensation magazine, as I mentioned in the first talk, where three scientists said that they didn't know of any scientists at the post-conference of 2015 who thought that we would be able to stay under 1.5 degrees. Now interestingly enough, I had a private interview with one of the authors of this and he said they don't want to rock the boat. That was his explanation. He said the reason the scientists wouldn't come straight with the global public is because they don't want to rock the boat. And he then explained it in more structural terms. He said, you know, just about all climate scientists in the world, the establishment ones anyway, are white, middle class, from the global north, tenured professors at the world's most elite universities. In other words, they're a tiny sliver, a minute sliver, of the world's population in terms of culture, social status and what have you. So it should come as no surprise that they have particular ways of operating. They are heard, as you might say. No one wants to rock the boat because no one else is rocking the boat. You don't want to be shamed by your colleagues. You don't want to be ostracised. The last thing you want to do is lose your job. You know, you just want a quiet life. This is entirely human. It's not the greatest thing about human beings, but it's a widespread phenomenon. And this is sort of similar to something else that happens in society, which I will call the shy Tory effect. I think that's actually what it's called, or shy Tories. So this is a phenomenon in the UK, but I think it probably exists in America as well. So if you're a researcher and you ask someone on a questionnaire or over an interview, say, are you likely, you know, are you going to vote for the Tory party in the next election? Let's say, you know, 35% of people will say yes. But the actual number who are going to vote for the Conservative Party is, for the Why is that? Because 5% of the people actually lied to you because they don't want it to be known that they vote for the Tories because they like to think of themselves as, you know, not selfish individuals or whatever. And secretly they are. And when they get into the polling booth, they're going to vote for the Tories because no one's going to know. So this is a systematic thing. There's nothing critical about it. It's, you know, one of the male social scientific practice that you need to take that into account. So when it comes out, 35% of the polling company or whatever, you know, to simplify somewhat, will say, right, so we expect, we predict, an accurate prediction is to say 40% of the population will vote for the Tories. And I think something similar just happened in the elections in America, where they thought not many Republicans would vote for Trump. And obviously, like secretly, you know, a lot of people, a significant number of people will say they're not going to vote for Trump, but they will because they secretly like the guy. But they're not going to publicly admit it. So, you know, I'm not moralising about it. I'm not trying to criticise it. I'm just saying this is just a phenomenon. And if you want to know accurately what's going to happen in the future, you need to take account of it. So let's call this the shy scientist effect. Okay. So, yeah, there's a whole bunch of micro dynamics there. As I said, people want to keep their jobs, not being shamed, not wanting to admit by news, being addicted to some sort of hope hypothesis that if they lie, people will, you know, maintain their hope and such like. A second one is a lot more familiar, which is political interference. So most people know this, particularly most progressive people, that institutions are affected by power relations and those with power in society will influence the communication of information if it's politically sensitive. So it should come as no surprise that, you know, the corporate lobby will try and influence what scientists say. And more specifically, the IPCC, the sort of official global body on information about the climate crisis. Their reports have to go through Saudi Arabia and Russia and various other autocratic sort of oil regimes. So it stands to reason that obviously they'll get watered down. Okay. So, so far, so good, as you might say. But the real problem here is a lot more complicated. But it's massively insidious in the sense that it's, I think, the core problem. It's a little bit complicated. So I'm going to give an example, an analogy, first of all. But it relates to this issue of certainty. So yeah, you know, if you're going to make a prediction, you want to be certain, right? Well, maybe, maybe not. And maybe it's more important to be accurate. Being certain and being accurate are two different things, as I'll explain. So here's an analogy, right? You know, to make it a little bit of narrative colour. Let's say there's a medieval village. It's quite isolated from the rest of the country. It's fairly self-sufficient. It lives mainly off sheep. There's 100 sheep in four or five fields. And it's surrounded by woodland, deep forest where wolves live. And there's three or four shepherds out one day, and they see three wolves come out of the woods. And that's clear, right? So they're absolutely certain they can see the three wolves because they can see them. So it's empirical, as you might say. It's certain. However, they also know, through doing what you might call social scientific research, is that over the last 20 years, when three wolves come out of the forest, there's going to be an average of 40 to 60 wolves come out of the forest in not too distant future, over the future hours, because they work in packs. So the real reality of wolves is not that they are in packs of three. That's very unlikely. They're usually in packs of 40 to 60, let's say. So if you did a normal distribution curve on the pack of wolves, you might say, well, there's a 10% chance there's going to be about five wolves. These things do happen. But the 80% scenario is going to be 40 to 60, let's say. But there's also a 10% chance it's a very big pack, right? There's 100 wolves. So what should they do about it? When they run up the hill, they're going to tell the rest of the village, they've got three options. They go, no, we can only see five wolves, three wolves, whatever it is. So it's no big deal. It's something to be a bit worried about. Or they're going to say, we're absolutely certain there's going to be three to five wolves. Or they're going to say, look, we all know that if it's five wolves, it's almost certainly going to be around 40 to 60 wolves. So it's a major situation. In other words, the most likely scenario is not the most certain scenario. The most certain scenario is there's going to be 40 to 60. But even more importantly, as we'll discuss in a minute, is there's a 10% chance there's going to be 100 wolves because it's a big pack. Now, as it happens, if there's three to five wolves, you don't really need to do anything. They might kill a sheep or two. If there's 40 to 60 wolves, yeah, it's a major, major problem. They might lose 50% of those 100 sheep. They're going to lose, say, 50 sheep, maybe 70. But there's going to be a few left. So yeah, this is the critical point. There's 100 wolves. What 100 wolves mean is that the whole of the sheep disappear. Now, if you're in farming, it's a bit like the leek example. You're basically not only losing all your sheep, you're losing all your sheep forever because, for the sake of argument, you're not going to have enough money. You're not going to have enough money to buy any more. In other words, it's existential. It's the end. It's catastrophic. It's the end of the village forever. Now, you don't need to be, again, you don't need to be a genius to work out what the most important data in there is. The most important data certainly isn't the three wolves, you see. And it isn't even that 50 wolves are going to come down the road after the forest and the sheep. The most critical data is this is a not insignificant possibility. There's going to be 100 wolves, and that's going to destroy the village forever. What does that mean? Obviously, it means it's a total emergency. The whole of the village needs to mobilize themselves. They all go out, and they kill the wolves as they come out of the forest, and they save the sheep and the economic existence, the very existence of the village.

So you can see here, this is the core, you know, head fuck, dare I say it, of the scientific community's communication, which is they're only really interested in certainty, and there's good reasons why certainty might want to be communicated, and you can talk to science and epistemological scholars on this as the phrase goes, and they'll tell you, yeah, certainty is important because science wants to be certain before you go around, you know, saying something exists. And that's fair enough. But when you're dealing with real world risk, particularly when you're dealing with critical risk, in other words, you know, the end of the system, i.e. death, and arguably endless death, then obviously you want to be looking at critical risk.

So I'll just give two little examples of here, which, you know, are no-brainers. If an engineer goes to a bridge, and there's a crack in the bridge, you might say, well, look, you know, there's a 5% chance that that's going to, you know, lead to the bridge collapsing. There's a 50% chance that there's going to be a lot of cracks, and it might rumble a bit. But all I can see at the moment is a crack. Well, obviously, that person will end up in prison if they don't actually raise the alarm, because a 5% chance over the coming year of that bridge collapsing is catastrophic, and it's going to lead to a massive loss of life. So even though it's just a little crack, then you're legally and morally obliged to call the alarm. So a famous scientist, I forget his name, sort of said a similar point in one of the talks, one of the best talks on the crisis. He said, you know, can you imagine you go to the airport, and you're going to put your two kids on a plane, as you can see, their grandparents, and the attendant says, oh, I just need to let you know there's a 5% chance of the plane crashing because you've had a few problems with the engine. And he says, well, you know, we're not totally certain it's 5%. It could be 1%. I mean, admittedly, it could be 10%. But it's not very high. So, you know, don't worry about it. You're not going to go, oh, yeah, that's okay. So anyone jumps in 20, you know. No, you're going to say, look, this is absolutely outrageous. You're off your head. You're mad out of your head. You should be arrested. The executive of the company should be in prison. It's a catastrophic risk. There's no way in a million years you're going to risk your kids, unless you're some weird psychopath, on a 1 in 20 chance. Okay. And as it happens, I actually looked up on the internet. I think the chances of a plane crashing is 1 in 11 million. So why is that? Because it would lead to a catastrophic loss of life. And dare I say it, airlines discovered a good 30, 40 years ago that even a slight risk of a plane crashing would stop people from getting on board for obvious reasons. Okay, so this is like major, major stuff. Okay. So in summary, what we need to think about here, and again, I want to emphasize that this is not some big political conspiracy sort of point, right? This is standard analytical social science practice. There's a structural bias in the communication by establishment scientists, by official world bodies, on what they say is going to happen in the future. And just for the record, you know, listening to this, you can look up a bunch of other dynamics. This is by no means the only ones, but they're the most significant ones. So, you know, I'm not very long at King's College as a social scientist, but if I was there, or if I was in the social science department, and if there's social scientists listening to this, they might want to do this. And what the most important research at the moment would involve is getting a statistically significant number of science predictions from establishment scientists, you know, 100, 200, and then working out the degree to which they're conservative and doing a quantitative sort of average. So my sort of back of the envelope sort of analysis is as follows, which may be right, might be a bit wrong, but it's probably in the ballpark. So two data points. First of all, 10, 15 years ago, the scientific consensus was we'd be hitting 1.5 degrees centigrade by 2050. That was the official communication. Of course, privately, no doubt, they thought that was rubbish. But the official communication was that the ice would melt in the Arctic around 2000, 2100. Okay, and now it's 2030. And obviously, 1.5 is coming along in the next two to three years, definitely by 2030. So those are two massive data points of killer facts that have been completely, you know, massively wrong through the certainty bias of the scientific community, the free wolves coming out of the forest syndrome. Okay, so these are my predictions. So first of all, what we know from the article in the conversation is, is eight years ago, around a decade ago, most scientists around the world already knew that 1.5 was locked in. Okay, so it's only been officially recognised the UN a few weeks ago, as I've said, I've said two degrees, sorry, 1.5 degrees is no longer credible, which is, you know, official science speak for a dead duck. We're definitely going 1.5. So we know that there's a 10 year lag there. So what we can probably predict with some accuracy, is the real situation is that two degrees centigrade is no longer credible. And a scientist will come along in 2032 and admit that two degrees is no longer credible. So you see how that works. If you want to be smart, what you need to do is factor in this structural bias, which is massively significant. Okay, so the last example here is, is the situation with the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctica. So I talked to a guy called Jason Box, I think that's what he's called. So he's arguably the world's leading science expert, been to Greenland dozens of times and what have you. So I had a chat with him and I think he said publicly that the Greenland ice sheet is now past the point of no return, the tipping point is definitely going to melt. No surprises, it's hot, the ice melts, I think meters of sea level rise are now locked in because of the degree of heat that there is in the Arctic. Now, I think he would probably say that he was pretty sure this would happen like 10 years ago. So again, you have this like, you know, for the sake of argument, 10 years back. So the official scientific certainty fetish, as it were, on Antarctica is it's in the balance, particularly the West, West Antarctica, that's I think something like seven meters sea level rise as well. The idea is, as you may know, that there's these massive glaciers and they're sort of blocked in at the moment, but once the front of them sort of slides into the sea, obviously the whole thing slides into the sea and arguably could happen really, really quickly and what have you. But from a sort of smart analysis point of view, taking into account this inbuilt bias, we can say when they say it's not certain yet that the West Antarctica ice sheet is going to melt, what we interpret that as is the most likely probability is that it is going to melt. It's not certain, right, but the best prediction is it's now going to melt for the reasons we've just discussed. So that gives you a sort of, hopefully a deeper understanding of what we're looking at. You've got these raw killer facts, but this gives you like the rules of the game, as you might say. Okay, so there's a bunch of other things to talk about as well, which I'll do in part two, and I'll speak to you then. Thanks.

Part 2 #

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Hi, this is Roger Hallam, and you're listening to Designing the Revolution. This is Talk 3, Part 2, The Wider Context. Okay, so in the last session I was expanding on our understanding of the killer facts and the raw situation, as you might say. We talked about the extremities situation, tipping points, delayed effects, and then I went on to the broader, often ignored situation of the conservatism of the communication of this information via scientists, scientific establishments, the media, and what have you. So we talked about the issue particularly about certainty, and in this talk I'm sort of continuing on, really. I'm going to be talking about compounding, which is another thing which doesn't sound that important, but then the more you think about it, the more it's a bit of a bombshell sort of realisation about how this stuff works. So I'm going to talk about that. Then I'm going to take a little bit of a detour. I'm going to be talking about what I call hard stops, or at least critical points. So I'm going to go through some stats to give you a flavour of what's going to happen, when, and how bad it will be. And then finally, dare I say it, I'm going to talk about extinction, which is often left off in discussions about this situation. But it needs to be talked about for a number of obvious reasons, really. All right, so after that we're going to go on to the inevitable revolution and the social and political inevitabilities that come out of these realities that I'm going to talk about. All right, so let's get going on compounding. So I'm going to give – it's quite a difficult thing to explain, so I'm just going to explain it as I usually do, really, through a number of examples. So the first one is about the Rhine, or about Germany. So the Rhine is, I think, the biggest river in Germany, coming out on the North Sea. And you may know that this, I think it was this summer, it almost dried up. And I read a newspaper article and it said that this is a big problem because, ironically, there's these big tugs or whatever, or boats, and they take coal down. And they couldn't take coal down the river because it was so shallow. So they were only taking 25%, 50%, and then they had to take it by road. So obviously all the costs went up, and this had knock-on effects and what have you. Anyway, in this article, they said this is going to result in a 0.2% decline in the gross national product. It's going to take off, rather, a fifth of a percent of gross national product in Germany this year. So when you read this, of course, like when you read most stuff about the crisis in the media, you get this little snapshot, a particular little bit of the situation. And obviously the cognitive reaction to this is, oh, well, you know, it's really bad, but it's just another bad thing. Now, there's a number of problems with this. First of all, obviously, as we've discovered, as you might say, the situation is getting worse. So the Rhine is, for the sake of argument, going to become really shallow due to drought, arguably every year on average from 2030. Now, I'm not saying that's absolutely certain, but it's certainly a viable probability. And obviously, it's not going to be every year. Some years it's going to be fine, and other years it might completely dry up like the Rhine River did in France this year. So I'm going to suggest that each year in the 2030s, there's going to be a reduction in the gross national product, or a minus on the gross national product of 0.2%, a fifth of a percent. You might think, yeah, yeah, that's pretty reasonable probability. But this is the critical point, right? If the climate crisis, if you want to call it that, is happening to the extent that the river is in trouble every year, then inevitably, I don't mean that's too strong a word, lots of other things are going to be happening as well. So for instance, there's likely to be a climate-related war or a war that's created by secondary effects. So let's say something similar to Ukraine is happening each year on average again during the 2030s, and that adds another 0.2% reduction in gross national product. Now, as we also talked about, it's close to inevitable that it's going to be a major refugee crisis due to the secondary effects of extreme weather. And let's say that produces another 0.2% decline, then there's likely to be disease, maybe another COVID knocking off another 0.2%. Then there's forest dieback that's beginning to be a massive problem in Germany. It could be fires, could be disease. So let's say that that creates a minus 0.2%, and then there's floods. Those are major floods in Germany this year. So again, on average, some years won't be floods, but the years there's going to be massive floods, that takes off 0.2%. So I've just chosen five things there, and you add them all together, and that's minus 1% of gross national product. So if you times that by 10 because it's every year in the 2030s, then that's minus 10%, minus 10%. So gross national product, we're saying there's a viable and arguably inevitable probability that in the 2030s, Germany, due to this compounding effect, these interconnected effects of weather chaos, due to putting carbon into the atmosphere. Okay, so you might say, yeah, that's really, really bad. But obviously, Germany doesn't exist in some bubble. It's part of this massively interconnected global economy, and similar effects will be happening to every other country in the world, because as we've established, it's universal. It's not like South America's going to be let off or something, or nothing's going to be happening in the United States. Obviously, some countries, due to random factors, will be affected more than others. But for the sake of argument, this is going to be happening on average to every country in the world. So if every country is experiencing a minus 10% reduction in gross national product, then it goes without saying that this will have a compounding effect. In other words, there's going to be, for instance, loss of export markets, more expensive imports, economic nationalism, protectionism, and such like. So we can say that the compounding effect, that will be maybe another minus 10% in gross national product. So that's minus 20%. Now, the point here isn't that it's going to be minus 20%. That's not what I'm trying to say. I mean, it could be minus 40. It could be minus 5. The point I'm trying to make is that if we're going to do an accurate analysis, i.e., what's most likely to happen as opposed to what's certain, and we discussed that, right? What's most likely to happen is there's going to be 10% to 20% reduction in gross national product. What we're certain of is maybe there's going to be a few little tricky things around the edges. And of course, the worst case, reasonable worst case scenario is massively worse than this. So let's take another rather embarrassing example of not very clear thinking. So let's look at Florida. So as you probably know, Miami, a big city. If you know your sort of climate science situation, you know that it's going to be flooded absolutely inevitably. And so the idea is, let's say, that they're going to build a wall around it. Now, just for the record, apparently this is impossible because it's limestone, so all the water goes underneath. But let's forget about that little empirical problem and assume you can build a wall. So let's say the wall is going to be $2 billion. I've got no idea whether that's about right, but again, the numbers aren't that important. So they do a report. Miami Council say, right, we're going to build a wall, and we're going to need to build a wall, say, in 10 years' time. And we need to know how much it's going to cost. So what people do is they'll go out and they'll work out labor costs, material costs, overhead costs, blah, blah, blah. And they come up with $2 billion. Now, why is that, like, almost certainly total nonsense? Because if and when, or rather when, we get to the point in, say, the 2030s where Miami has to be evacuated, otherwise they are going to, otherwise, you know, unless they build a wall, then, again, like the Rhine River, 101 other things are going to be happening at the same time. So you'll probably start to see a pattern here in these examples. So, for instance, we know at 2 degrees centigrade, there'll be 1,000 million refugees. So let's say, for the sake of argument, there's going to be 100 million refugees coming out of Central America, some of them may be going, you know, heading south, some of them may be heading north. So there's going to be massive, massive amounts of chaos and financial overhead dealing with these immigrants. That's going to have knock-on effects of security, law and order, ability to create effective transportation. Then, obviously, it's not like Miami exists in some little sealed world. Everywhere else along the American coast is going to be suffering, and having to build walls, and the knock-on effects of flooding, and, you know, then we've got hurricanes, and, you know, extreme heat events, and all the rest of it, which is going to create enormous fiscal cost to the federal government. It's going to, in other words, start to run out of money. And then lastly, of course, everyone else is going to want to build walls as well. So there's going to be massive demand for materials, and materials are going to be in short supply. So obviously they're going to cost a lot more money. You're going to have to ship them in. There's going to be transportation security problems and such like. So the idea of doing an assessment of the cost of the materials at today's prices with today's, like, migrant situation, security situation, fiscal situation is ridiculously naive. So for the sake of argument, we might say, well, it's not going to be $2 billion, it's going to be $10 billion. And then, of course, that's naive as well, because it's very likely that if it goes over $5 billion, it simply isn't going to be paid for, or even more likely, arguably, it's going to get half done, and then it won't get completed, because everyone would have to start moving out of Florida because of the knock-on effects of the collapsing oil trade and such like. Okay, so last small example, and you've probably got the idea, is insulation. So I helped initiate the Insulate Britain campaign in the UK. I came up with this idea that insulation would be great because it's the biggest no-brainer thing in the UK that you should be doing to reduce carbon emissions. No one was talking about it. And to be honest with you, I didn't really know much, it's not really my subject. I do mobilization and what have you, that's my specialism. But through the process of doing this campaign, I was talking to a bunch of experts in insulation. And just as a little rule of thumb, it's always good to actually speak to professionals on the front line, the guys that do the essential work rather than people who have got particular interests in making things sound reasonable. So the guy that I found most interesting was this 50, 60-year-old guy who spent his 40 years in the building trade. He was an advisor to the citizens of North England, Leeds and Sheffield. He was a proper regular guy, had a moustache, beer belly. He was the real thing. And he came on the call, and he was brutally honest because these guys can really ask, because there are PR departments behind them. And he said, look, the situation is, if you want to insulate, I think it's 29 million homes in the UK, it's just going to be really difficult, he said, worst-case effect. And then he said, first of all, it's going to cost 600 billion pounds. That's a massive amount of money. I think it was on the news the other day, the government's spending a billion pounds insulating new houses. This is an enormous infrastructural project. Secondly, he said, builders don't want to do it. People in the building industry do not want to do this because they've always been let down by the government. There's no trust with the government. They don't want to take people on and all sorts of risk factors. Secondly, of course, there aren't enough builders anyway because this is a massive job, so you're going to have to take 500,000, a million people out of other forms of work to get this job done, because it's got to be done in the next 10 years to reduce carbon emissions and all that business. Then he said, well, there's no people to train them. The training colleges aren't there. All that infrastructure doesn't exist. Then, of course, like previous two examples, they were saying there aren't the materials. Materials to insulate 29 million houses, they just aren't around. You're going to have to import them. As with the Florida example, that means everyone else is going to want these materials, and they're going to cost much more money. Then you've got all sorts of transportation problems and such like. The idea that it's going to cost 600 billion, of course, is pretty naive because it assumes all these things, just go down and get these materials off the shelf. There's no contextual analysis of it. The next thing I'm going to go on to after we're done compounding is what I personally call hard stops or critical points. What I mean by that is there's a number of stats which are really critical, which give you the ability to understand when things are going to start cracking up. I've spent a bit of time talking about how this works. Then you have to put the numbers in. I'm going to put some numbers in here to give an idea that the 2030s are going to be the critical tipping point in terms of a collapse event. The reason we can be fairly certain about that is because we have some really certain numbers. I'm going to give a little selection here. I think if I had my 200 pages of notes from various scientists, I could probably come up with 20 or 30 of them. The general rule of thumb, just as a little aside, is that if you read articles in The Guardian or in science magazines, there's usually a killer stat, usually in the middle of the article, usually they give some general concerns. Then they'll give you the actual stat. Then they go on to what they think policymakers should do about it. It's that stat that's important. You can collect them and you put them all together a bit like a detective. It can work out how they're going to compound together. Then you can make a pretty clear prediction of when things are going to happen. One of the problems, as small people know, is predictions arguably are really problematic. But that's not necessarily the case. For instance, trying to predict a stock market crash, for instance, is actually quite difficult. However, just before it happens, it happens to be not that difficult at all. You may remember you've seen the big short. People are saying, oh, there's going to be a crash, there's going to be a crash in 2008. This guy is going, well, maybe, maybe not. Then it goes down to Florida. I think it's Florida. There's people who are really poor there. They've got mortgages on five houses or whatever, and they're about to get sick. Everyone knows they're not going to be able to pay their mortgage payments in about a month. There's a bit where this guy goes, this is definitely going to happen. In other words, he's got out of the office, and the generalities are there, and he's actually found out this is definitely 100% going to happen. He can put a number on it in the next month or two, and then he speeds back to New York to make lots of money from it. This is like getting out and talking to sex workers in Florida, I think it was, this next 10 minutes. Here we go. Let's get out and check out Lake Mead. Lake Mead is, I think, the biggest dam in Southwest United States. It's losing water. Last year, it lost 40 inches, or this year. The upshot of it is it's got 41 inches left, presumably less now. In other words, at some point in the next 12 months, give or take a bit of variability, it's going to run out of water. That's going to have a cascading effect on the whole water supply of the Southwest United States. Tens of millions of people, a massive amount of industry. Obviously, it's just a matter of time before they run out of water as well. Obviously, they might be able to mitigate to a certain extent. The fundamental hard stop here is there's no water. Again, as a little aside, this is not a mini issue. If there's no water, there's no water. It's not there anymore. A bit like when there's no food, there's no food. It doesn't matter how much money you've got. Again, you could truck this stuff in or do desalination plants, but all these things take time, enormous amount of money, and such like. We can say with some predictability in the next two years, let's say five years for the sake of conservatism, the economy of the Southwest United States is going to crash because of lack of water, i.e. having no water. Similarly, if we look at Australia, so there's a peer-reviewed paper. Notice this is not someone's prediction. A peer-reviewed paper after the forest fires two years ago, the paper said, we can expect such fires, which burnt down 20% of the forest in Australia, affected the health of 80% of the population, went on for weeks and weeks. We can expect such fires to be happening each year on average within 20 years, 2040. 2060 is going to be a cool summer. It's going to have fires like that. Well, obviously, when we say average, that means some years it'll be 10% or the years it could be 40%. What we can say then is within 20 years, then Sydney is going to have to be evacuated, partially because of the health effects of months of smoke coming over the city, and obviously because of all the secondary effects on the economy, and psychological contagion of depression and despondency and what have you. Incidentally, I told a bunch of climate activists in Australia this, and they were all really shocked. Of course, this is because of the denial mechanisms. But the fact of the matter is, if it wasn't such an emotive objective, everyone would look at that data and say, yeah, well, obviously, Sydney is going to have to be evacuated. Similarly in California, leaving aside the Lake Mead situation, I think I've got completely clear on the stats here, but I think three, four years ago, 1% of California burned down. Everyone thought that was terrible, highest burn rate ever in California's history. And then two years later, 2%, 2% of California burned down. So again, you can probably put a few more data points in there, but this is an exponential situation, obviously. If it gets hotter, it doesn't just get hotter. The burn rate of forests doesn't move in a linear fashion. It gets hotter and hotter. Then the degree to which a forest burns goes up exponentially. So as you may know, it was 49 degrees in a town in British Columbia, and then surprise, surprise, three days later, the whole town burned down because all the wood burst into flames. So we can say with some broad degree of accuracy that in 10 years' time, 10% to 20%, maybe a lot more of California will be burning down on an average year. So again, we can say Los Angeles will be evacuated within 10 years with some degree of certainty. So let's go over to Russia. So again, as I said, the people to listen to when you want to get these stats are people on the front line, people that do insulation in North England, people in trade magazines in Russia. So Siberia Times I think this came from. I think this is right. 30% of the property's housing stock in the Arctic Circle are starting to subside. And then it has this remarkable statistic that by 2050, 30% of the gross national product in Russia will have to be spent on responding to the subsidence of presumably millions of buildings, not just in the Arctic Circle but all around Russia. And this is because the permafrost is melting because it's getting hotter. Again, if you look at this dispassionately, it's pretty obvious it's happening. It's pretty obvious it's going to increase exponentially. The point is, of course, is that if Russia is spending 30% of its gross national product on subsidence, it's also going to be spending an awful lot of its money on security issues because of social breakdown, mass migration from the Middle East, wars, all the rest of it. All these things are going to compound. So you can say that with some degree of accuracy that the viability of the Russian state will not exist after 2040, maybe before, of course, but certainly by 2050, that government is not going to exist in any modern sense. So speeding on along, we've got India, a number of predictions say India along with Pakistan and Bangladesh, the most vulnerable countries partially because of their massive population. In India, with the increases in temperatures, you're looking at a 30% reduction in wheat. They decide not to export any wheat this year, as you may know, because of very high temperatures. So we can say by 2030, there will be mass starvation in India due to this collapse in the ability to grow wheat and obviously the secondary and compounding effects of that. In China, I don't have the specific stats on it from what I remember, but I think at some point around the mid-century, people aren't going to be able to work outside due to the wet bulb effect. Well, if you can't work outside, then obviously you can't sustain agriculture. So that's going to lead to mass starvation and the viability of the Chinese state along with India and Russia is probably going to collapse at some point in the 2040s. David King, just to stay in Asia, says Vietnam will probably face 99%, I think he said, but let's say for the sake of argument, 90% of Vietnam being underwater with high tides and rising sea levels. So massive amounts of rice production will become unviable. I don't have a data on that, but it gives some clarity that in the context of compounding effects and secondary effects, the global economy and global society will collapse at some point in the 2030s and certainly in the 2040s. So just on this cheery note, as you might say, let's just have a look at probably the most important structural element here, which is the extra loops of hot and cold weather or dry and wet weather that cross the Northern Hemisphere. So as I think I've explained in the previous talks, but if I haven't, as the temperature increases in the Arctic, the temperature differential between the equator and the Arctic becomes less. So the energy pushing the wind patterns around the Northern Hemisphere slow down. So that means you get more drifting of cold weather further south and more drifting of hot weather further north. So you've got these big loops. And then second thing is that obviously, if the wind's not so forceful, then the weather patterns slow down. So instead of it just raining over the British Isles for four or five days, which is what it used to do when I was growing up, you get these big patches of four or five weeks or two or three months of rain or extreme heat or extreme cold weather. So, you know, your example is I think it was the warmest November on record or thereabouts last month in the UK. And then just beginning of December, we have like minus seven, I think it was last night. I'm sitting here in my cell with developing hyperthermia, I'm not exaggerating, through the windows not being able to shut until yesterday when this guy came in with the big pliers and closed my window for me. So, yeah, this is what you call critical points. OK, so just to get this over and done with, we're going to talk about extinction. So extinction is a bit of an interesting sort of emotional entity, as you might say. It's quite interesting. No one used to talk about extinction before Extinction Rebellion came along. One of the reasons we called it Extinction Rebellion was to break these two taboos that actually what we're talking about is extinction, i.e. the death of all the people who belong to the human race, all of the human race, and obviously the necessity for rebellion, which is what we'll come and talk about. Now, before Extinction Rebellion came along, of course, people didn't talk about rebellion and didn't talk about extinction. And they've largely stopped talking about extinction, again, in any meaningful sense. It's a bit of a blip. But let's talk about extinction. So just to be clear, what extinction means, once we have a more high resolution look at it, is when the death rate is over the birth rate. So in other words, a species or a community of human beings disappears when more people are dying than more people are born. That's pretty obvious, basically. So what we're looking at here, often people think extinction is a bit of a science fiction-y thing. You know, one day everyone exists, and the next day no one exists, and they say, well, that's ridiculous. But once you understand that the death rate being higher than the birth rate, then it's pretty easy, in fact, for extinction events to happen. So when I was a teenager, people used to talk about the nuclear winter, which terrified my generation when we were in our teens. And that was, here today, gone tomorrow, like the nuclear winter will effectively destroy every human being within a week or two. However, with climate, with putting carbon into the atmosphere to the extent that we are, we are looking inevitably at a slow extinction event, as far as we can see. So what does this look like? Okay, so I'm going to mention pre-situations that take us over into absolute extinction, or maybe we can call it effective extinction. I think my understanding of effective extinction is that the number of people that exist is so low that it can't maintain itself. So this is like something from ecology, the study of ecology, that a species falls to such low numbers that although it still exists, it inevitably is going to die because it can't maintain itself. Okay, so let's look first of all at the nuclear situation. Now, I can bet I'm not 100% sure of this, because, you know, like a lot of these things, not many people talk about them. But from my understanding, from talking to a bunch of people, there's 200-plus nuclear power stations around the world. I think, all in all, at least most of them are on the coast. Obviously, there's going to be sea level rise, high tides. There's going to be breakdown of rural order. There's going to be, you know, lack of people able to run these things. They're highly dangerous. They need massively trained staff. They need massive amounts of money. But the critical extinction fact, as it were, is that if you decide to close them down, which you really or most certainly you're going to have to do as sea level rises, it takes 50 or so years to actually close these things down. So the other thing is, if you don't close them down properly and they overheat, then they churn out massive amounts of radiation. So the proposition, of course, is that this is not going to be some nice, neat, you know, social collapse situation. Social collapse, by definition, involves a massive amount of chaos, lack of money and all the rest of it. So it's highly probable that some of these nuclear power stations won't be closed down because there won't be the money, resources or know-how to keep them from overheating. And this explosion, like Chernobyl and such like, will churn out all this radiation. And as we all know, this kills human beings very rapidly, and it travels all around the world. That's scenario number one. Obviously, these scenarios can compound and interconnect with each other. Scenario number two is methane. So Sir David King, the former chief scientific advisor to the British government, said just two or three months ago that what we're looking at is methane coming out of the permafrost because it melts. And once that happens, as and when it happens, then temperatures will rise, quote, by four to eight degrees centigrade in 20 years, in two decades. So this is a done deal, as you might say. If the temperature rises by four to eight degrees centigrade, then I think at four or five, yeah, four degrees centigrade, you've lost the habitability of half of the Earth's surface. So the speed of it and the extent of it, if we're honest with ourselves, that's it. We're going to head to billions of deaths and almost certainly effective extinction within a decade or two. So the next question is, how likely is this eventuality of methane coming out of the permafrost? Well, the first thing to say about this is this is not a maybe situation. It's a when situation in so much as the temperatures are increasing, like basic physics, temperature gets hot. By definition, ice melts when it's hot. Ice melts in the permafrost. It releases gas. The only reason the gas isn't coming out is because it's blocked in by the ice. That's indisputable. If it was such a controversial thing, everyone would be saying when rather than if. So at the moment, we're at 1.2, 1.3. So to my mind, it seems pretty obvious this is going to happen at some point between two or three degrees centigrade. Remembering, of course, you have to times that by four or maybe even five to get the temperature in the Arctic. And there's an interesting paper out in case you don't know, which says that methane is actually going up exponentially. Its emission is going up exponentially. And the reason for this, at least on initial investigation in this paper, is not because of humans. It's because of the positive feedback loop between high temperatures and methane escaping from various places, soils, and permafrost around the world. In other words, we're on the cusp of this taking off regardless of what humans do because it gets hotter in the Arctic, which melts more ice, which has more dark water, which raises temperatures. And off it goes like a ball down the hill, as I've spoken about in the previous talk. A little aside, David King has got the bright idea that this could be stopped with various forms of geoengineering, of course. So it's not 100% certain, but it's there as a major candidate in causing human extinction. So the third one is what happens when the Arctic melts and the Antarctic melts as well, like has happened, I mean, four or five times, maybe more in the Earth's history. So we know, again, with some sort of 100%, 99% precision now, because lots of scholars have studied various sources of evidence, that when this happens, it becomes tropical weather in the Arctic with tropical trees and alligators and all the rest of it. And what this means is that there's no wind and that makes the currents in the ocean stop. And this basically creates stagnant seas and this emits, I think it's hydrogen sulfide, which happens to be poisonous to mammals. And this is why in the Great Dying or the previous mass extinction events, it wasn't because there wasn't any food necessarily, but it certainly was because of a change in the composition of the atmosphere. And incidentally, the oxygen levels, I think, declined by 25% to 12% if I remember rightly. So by definition, any surviving human beings will die. And no one's quite sure when this would happen, whether it's, you know, tens of years, hundreds of years or thousands of years. The point is, of course, that it's more or less a done deal once you get past this tipping point towards hot house Earth. And in my view, anyway, probably the most important statistic on putting carbon into the atmosphere is the speed at which it's being put in. So again, according to scholarly sources, the human race is putting carbon into the atmosphere 8 to 30 times faster than at any point in the Earth's history. Which is probably, as I say, the most important fact that you want to take in from these three or four talks. In other words, we're kicking that ball over the hill, down the cliff, 8 to 30 times faster than it's ever happened before. So all these things are speeding along 8 to 30 times faster than we thought they would. OK, so I'm not, you know, I could spend a lot more time on this, of course. I could spend a good 5 or 10 minutes talking about the oceans, the oceans potentially going to create human extinction. You've got the wild card of nuclear war, of course, and various other, you know, variables which are a little bit more difficult to sort of pin down probabilities. But with these, these look like they're done deals, unless there's some dramatic innovation, which, of course, there could be in terms of human organization and human innovation with science and technology. And I'll talk about that next, on the next session in more detail. So the last two things to say, I suppose, is just to acknowledge there are enormous, and maybe the word infinite is appropriate here, infinite and enormous legal, moral and spiritual implications of us heading towards extinction. And it's reasonable to say that the main scenario, not the inevitable scenario, but the main scenario is the human race will go extinct due to these end domino points. So, for instance, you know, if you're in court and you say, well, you know, I'm involved in civil resistance because there's a substantive and arguably inevitable probability of human extinction. Then from a sort of logical point of view, that justifies any form, any form of disruption, logically speaking, from a legal point of view. Okay, so what we've done then is, is moved in these sessions from this low resolution, vague, reformist, issue based, you know, framing of climate change through to a higher resolution. What exactly happens when this physical process of putting carbon into the atmosphere goes ahead at 8 to 30 times higher level than at any point in the Earth's history. And you can see here, assuming you're open enough to listen to it, we can start with some precision, understanding what's going to happen when. And that prepares us for the response. And that's what I'm going to talk about in the next session, in my introductory talks, and that will be the inevitability of revolution. More about that in the next session. Thanks very much.