I present the text of the "Climate Emergency Forum" this week, the video is published on YouTube, State of the Climate 2024 - Earth in Crisis.  Discussion centered around the publication in the BioScience journal, available online -  "The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth".  This was published on 08th October 2024, by an author list of Climate Scientists in prestigious institutional paid positions, who are not known to be given to alarmist predictions without strong evidence. A number of factors suggest the earth's climate system warming resistance is collapsing. Terrestrial carbon sinks are not working as well as before. Well known climate tipping point processes are getting bigger. And of course human civilization continues to pump out more greenhouse gases every year.

This paper reported on the growing impact of climate on our biosphere. Of that in a large survey of Climate Scientist's informed opinions about how hot this planet is likely to get from human generated global heating, the central tendency predicts a 2.5-3.0 °C of warming by 2100. Some 16% of survey respondents predict 3.5 °C or greater.  Right now, the linear rate of temperature anomaly rise, seems to have increased in the last decade.  A climate science publication with James Hansen name on it, put the current warming rate above 0.4 °C per decade.  My linear regression on the GISS temperature series also indicates this.  Take that 0.4°C , multiply by the 7 decades to 2094, to get 2.8, and add the current global rise so far, 1.6, and we get 4.4°C of warming  by 2100.

Collapse of modern Techno-Industrial Civilization, surely now underway, as long predicted, is likely to be starkly obvious by 2040 - 2050. Diesel fuel is the primary supply of the worlds transport and mining machinery energy fuel.  This peaked and will be run down by at least 50% by this time period. A larger part of that supply is needed to keep the oil industry extraction and delivery systems going. By 2040-2050 a very large part of  human component of overload of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere and oceans will  die down. I mean "die down" literally.  The rate of Gas and Coal extraction supply is also dependent on Diesel fuel.

Here Howard T Odum's famous quote is applicable -

What is the general answer? Eject economic expansionism, stop growth, use available energies for cultural conversion to steady state, seek out the condition now that will come anyway, but by our service be our biosphere’s handmaiden anew.   - copied from "Energy, Ecology & Economics 1973" - Eric Lee

A 1997 world scientists warning to humanity still goes unheeded.

The extent of future climate catastrophe is very likely under-predicted. We predict from what we know about now, and uncertainty, and further acceleration can kill. Already the casualty list of extreme weather, heats, fires and floods, is growing faster.

Here below is text of the presenters remarks, for those who can read faster than spend time listening. I lightly edited the YouTube transcript for punctuation, and paragraph separation, for reading clarity.

Introduction preview: Paul Beckwith speaking.

This is a very readable, brief paper. It's not written in scientific jargon. It's not holding back on what it's saying. I mean basically it's showing that these scientists, along with many many other scientists around the planet, are getting extremely concerned. About the rapidity of climate change, where it's heading, and the lack of any action by governments to even cut back on greenhouse gas emissions or reduce you know, reduce overall emissions.
 
Charles Gregoire: Climate Reality Leader, Co-producer of CEF

Well hello and welcome to the climate emergency Forum. I'm your host "Charles" and today we're diving into a crucial scientific paper that demands our immediate attention. Our title today is state of the climate 2024, "Earth in crisis" and this is about the paper - 2024 state of the climate report - Perilous times on planet Earth. This has just been published in BioScience and its findings are both alarming and urgent. Of course we'll put a link in the description for you to access it.

This report, is authored by a team of renowned climate scientists, including William Ripple and Christopher Wolf. It serves as a stark wakeup call. It's not just another academic paper, it's a desperate plea from the scientific Community to humanity. In essence this paper can be seen as a continuation and evolution of the scientists warning approach, applied specifically to the current state of the climate crisis.

It maintains the core elements of urgency, comprehensive analysis and call for Action that characterize the scientist warning papers we've covered, in previous videos. Yhe message is clear - we are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. The report highlights that despite decades of warnings were still moving in the wrong direction. Fossil fuel emissions have reached an all-time high and we've just experienced the three hottest days ever recorded in July of 2024.

What sets this report apart is its comprehensive analysis of 35 planetary Vital Signs. These indicators paint a grim picture of our planet's Health. From record breaking sea surface temperatures to unprecedented ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland, the evidence is overwhelming. But this report isn't just about numbers and graphs, it's about the real world impacts. We're already seeing devastating wildfires, deadly heat waves, and catastrophic floods are becoming more frequent and intense. These aren't distant threats, they're happening now, affecting millions of people worldwide.

The authors don't mince words, they state that we're amid an abrupt climate upheaval a situation never before encountered in human history. We've pushed our planet into climatic conditions not ever seen before our species evolved. However, this report isn't just Doom and Gloom narrative, it's a call to action.

The scientists emphasize that every tenth of a degree of warming we can prevent is crucial. They outline necessary steps from rapidly phasing down fossil fuel use, to reforming our food production systems and adopting a more sustainable economic framework.

In the next few minutes we'll delve deeper into the report's key findings, examining some of the most critical planetary Vital Signs, and discuss what these mean for our future. We'll also explore the solutions proposed by the scientists and what each of us can do to make a difference. The climate emergency is here and "The Time for Action" is now.

Let's begin our exploration of this pivotal report, and what it means for our planet and our future. Peter, I'm anxious to hear what you've gleaned from this latest report.

Dr. Peter Carter - Expert IPCC Reviewer.

Thank you Charles and thank you for that excellent introduction. You you really captured the very special importance of this paper and in fact this project, and I'm going to run through the history of this project, and I'm sure people will get some surprises. So Bill Ripple. William Ripple - He's a distinguished professor of ecology at the University of Oregon, and I stress ecology, because this whole project, which is actually a major project, includes ecology, which is not included. You really don't find ecology in the otherwise solid IPCC assessments, so I just going to mention the recent one and Paul will describe the science of the recent one.

It's a state of the climate report. It's published by Oxford academic Journal. It mentions that we live in perilous times on planet Earth. We're on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster, and irreversible social collapse is what we're looking at. It requires immediate action. Those are things that you rarely find in the other scientific papers,  but this is different, because this is from an ecological perspective more than anything else.

So in 1992 there was a world scientist warning to humanity which I remember very. That times about 1700 World leading scientists got together including the majority of the Nobel laurates of the scientists, and they explained the situation at that time, and where they saw and explained, where we were headed, which was a very very bad place, if we continued doing business usual as they called it at that time.

The world scientists warning describes the number of Global Environmental degradations, and that was how we were looking at the world situation at that time. A large number of ongoing increasing Global Environmental degradations, but it's interesting, that the report was a short report, said what must we do, and it pointed out that there were five strongly inescapably linked areas that must be addressed simultaneously.

In other words this is the opposite approach to the standard science of reductionism. But here it is really, really important, and it's amazing to reread this. We must bring environmentally damaging activities under control, to restore and protect the Integrity of the Earth Systems we depend on. So that's exactly what we have to do now,  still and we haven't done. But what about this, we must for example, move a away from fossil fuels to a more benign inexhaustible energy sources, to cut greenhouse gas emissions,  and the pollution of our air and water, which comes from burning fossil fuels.

We must halt deforestation, we must halt the injury to, and the loss of agricultural land, and goes on to animal species and the oceans. So isn't that something, that the scientists got together way back then, and said look here's what the world has to do.

I also want to mention that in this warning they had War, which of course is I sort of try and remind myself and people of often because, we're not going to get anywhere all the time we're killing each other in these vast numbers. But they do have War, which is very unusual, and special. Success in this global endeavor, will require a great reduction in violence and War. A new attitude towards discharging our responsibility for caring for ourselves and the earth.

So that's the really quite amazing in a sense. World scientist warning to humanity. And humanity of course tragically didn't pick up on that, apparently. Although we did have in the same year the big Earth Summit and the 1992 convention on climate change. So the first paper that bill Ripple and some colleagues published was in 2017. In November they published what they called a second notice, of the world scientist warning to humanity. So that's what started what has become a major major Endeavor and scientific project.

They put together 15 and a half thousand scientific signaturees to this paper. Almost as much as the original one. From 184 countries. Now that's really important of course, because we have a global look at this. What I noticed that they did was that in this paper and in subsequent ones they updated the trends. What we call indicators now. And they include multiple indicators. And I want to point out that these are very re-readable papers.

In many ways they're they're better to go to than the IPCC assessments. So this paper said with the exception of stabilizing a stratospheric ozone layer, and it's not totally stabilized, Humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental challenges. And alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse.

So with the paper, or soon after the paper was published there was a lot of interest from a lot of scientists around the world. Ripple and his team set up Alliance of world scientists and they have 27,000 subscribing members. I think that that's probably an old number. I'm sure it's more now, from 180 countries. But what they did here was that they invited other scientific experts to write other aspects, focused aspects on the world warning from science. These are fully referenced papers. Many of are published, some of them are just on the site of the alliance of world scientist.

There's over 40 of these research papers, so you're beginning to see that this is a very very big scientific project, and it was called World scientist warning to humanity, a second notice.

I got lots more but that's okay.

Charles G:

Thank you Peter.  Thank you for that contextual perspective on uh the work of William Ripple and from 2017 and also the original warning in 1992.  It's really fascinating, and now I'd like to turn to Paul. Paul, what have you gleaned from this report?

Paul Beckwith: Climate System Scientist

Yes uh thank you the uh as Peter said uh Charles this is a very readable brief paper. It's not written in scientific jargon. It's not holding back on what it's saying. I mean basically it's showing that these scientists, along with many many other scientists around the planet, are getting extremely concerned, about the rapidity of climate change, where it's heading, and the lack of any action by governments to even cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, or reduce, you know reduce overall emissions. So the paper is yeah, it's a lot easier to read than any of the IPCC documents, and Peter's given a good history and sort of background of it.

You know, the Rio Earth Summit, many people think of that as being sort of a turning point, hopefully for the world. And it turns out, that you know emissions have still increased at an accelerating rate since then. You know the COP process, the climate conference on Parties, by the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change and the UNFCC, framework convention on climate change. You know they started the first cop, I guess was in 1995 in Bon at the UN headquarters. You know just three years after after the Rio or Summit. And you know we know all of these things have failed to reduce emissions. Which are you know maybe they're not increasing as fast as they would have without these things, but they're still increasing at ever accelerating rates.

And I'll just put the some of the things in this paper in context. Because you know this paper was just released just last week and since then there's been some very significant papers that support you know, the idea of a planet in Peril. So the British zoological society and the WWF, not the wrestling but the World Wildlife Fund people did a report, joint report on what they call the planet living index.  

And we've had a 73% drop in Wildlife between 1970 and 2020. We're basically losing wildlife on our planet. It was even higher in in Latin America. In the Caribbean it was 95%. The drops in fresh water are huge. Terrestrial sort of in the middle and Marine is the lowest. but Marine you know, ocean is even 56% drop.

There's also a paper that talks about the carbon sink failing on land. Terrestrial carbon sink failing in 2023, and if this trend continues, because of warming the surface, you can get less carbon, you can destroy the ability of the surface to absorb carbon. In this case, our emissions will end up,  more of them will be in the atmosphere. Temperatures, so greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will spike, and temperatures will spike if these sinks continue to be failing.

We're seeing lots of increases in the price of everyday goods and things inflation's rampant. Central Bankers aim for 2% inflation. About half of that appears to be from climate change, even more than that for food inflation. We're getting massive disasters around the planet. Most recently the hurricane Helen - $200 billion plus, and hurricane Milton - 50 to 100 billion estimate,on that. Combine those two storms and that's uh you know that's almost a half of the US military budget, just to put it in context. And these things will cause inflation.

You know the inflation, they're a big chunk of GDP. We have tipping points to be concerned about which are mentioned in the state of the climate report, and also there were separate reports on tipping points. A really good one came out by Lenton et. al. I think edited by Lenton in 2023 and the primary tipping points that we're concerned about are the AMOC, the Atlantic Meridial Overturning Circulation ocean currents, and also the Amazon rainforest.

You know as bad as climate change is, it's still happening faster and faster, but it's still following sort of linear trend. Trends somewhat you know, super linear, accelerating upwards, but it's not just showing break points. And these tipping points are essentially break points in the climate. So even without the Tipping points occurring, you know, these sustainable development goals, there 17 of them, we're supposed to meet certain objectives by 2030, and most of them are just not going to happen.

we're not on track to meet most of these sustainable development goals. The next week the conference on biodiversity starts up. They call it cop 16. We attended cop 15 in Montreal in 2022 and their goals were set to preserve, set aside 30% of the surface of the Earth for protected areas. That's oceans and land. Right now we're running at about 7% I think for land, and about 18% for oceans.

Countries are supposed to submit their goals to achieve 30% by 2030 and the vast numbers of countries have submitted nothing yet, and the conference starts next week. Then of course in about three four weeks, the COP 29 starts in Baku. And we know about the Paris COP, where goals of 1.5 Celsius and 2 Celsius were set. And we're already exceeding the 1.5. We had a whole year of 1.6. So so we're not, we're heading in the complete opposite direction, to where we need to be in in our climate system at the moment. And as this paper clearly points out.

Charles G:

Thank you so much Paul for all that information, and your comment about the inflation is quite timely. I guess people complain about the inflation, not necessarily linking it to the climate crisis, so that's a really good way to bring those two things together. So I thank you for that and I'll just bring up a few points here that to I glean from the paper.

The paper mentions Arctic Rivers turning orange, the paper mentions a new threat of Arctic Rivers turning orange due to toxic metals coinciding with permafrost thaw. The paper also mentions record-breaking emissions annual energy related emissions exceeding 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent for the first time on record. And of course you mentioned Paul also hurricane Helen's impact, and the paper cites hurricane Helen causing over 200 deaths, which we know that's an undercount.

And over that now and we covered that in our last video that that will end up being much much more than that, so with that I'd like to turn it back to Peter to continue filling Us in on the history of these papers.

Peter C:

Yeah thank you Charles and and I completely agree, what Paul said was really really important the economics, is a very, very big deal now, and environmentalists I can understand, they tend not to go there, but it's pretty critical right now.

So in 2019 Ripple and his team published a paper called World scientist warning of a climate emergency, and I'm just going to use use what they say to begin with, just a couple of words that explains why Ripple's ecological approach and team is able to do things that the IPCC does not do. And interestingly he had Johan rockstrom on his team at this time, and he's a pretty heavy heater with regards to his planetary boundaries and climate change.

So the quote is, scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn Humanity of any catastrophic threat and to tell it as it is. This is a language and description that you will not find in the IPCC, because they're under their intergovernmental panel on climate change. Their are under government constraints and they do not use terms that are called "value judgments".

So they don't say how dangerous it is, even they don't use that term, and they don't tell it as it is. So it is really, really great that Bill Ripple has brought, has built up a very big team now, of helping us, helping the world really understand where we're at, and also giving recommendations because the IPCC gives choices of things that we could do, but it doesn't make recommendations. These papers do.

Again they included updated trends, multiple, updated trends, large number of that time, so things had progressed so badly in the wrong direction, that in 2022 they published another one, with even more of the leading scientists of the world.  And so this is a second warning of a climate emergency. They said at that time we're at a code red on planet Earth. The same term that the was used in its state of the climate, published in March of this year.

They also included in this paper and subsequent papers, something which they put into an entire paper. Which was on feedback loops. So in the 2022 Planet emergency they explained the very many feedback loops the global warming will cause. So that brings me to 2023, last year, state of the climate report.

So they're doing state of the climate reports now every year, and there they said something again which the IPCC couldn't say,  which is that planet Earth is under siege. Actually that's nothing new, there have been academics writing about that in those terms for actually many years, that the planet Earth is in Peril. In the 2000's this brings me to the 2024, which Paul is going to talk about, but when we got to 2000 there's major world climate experts on this particular one.

Clearly I think there's even more climate experts joining the Ripple project, on really explaining the terrible situation we're in, and what we have to do about it, and yes he does say in this paper that action has to be immediate. It's beyond urgent. Folks right we've been on urgent for many many years, so we're on immediate now.

So yeah that brings me up to the uh current paper.

Charles G:

Thank you so much Peter and I of course I couldn't agree more. We've been on urgent for many years and and yet we continue on, in our current path, and so Paul I'd like to turn it back to you, to add some more information to the all of this.

Paul B:

Yeah so, state of the climate 2024. Very readable paper on how our planets in peril. I love all the graphs showing you know, the trends. It's very easy to see what's happening you know, and even putting that in context, with the wildlife report of a 73% drop, and the lack of carbon sink terrestrial, you know in 2023 all these things are just pointing one direction. And that is that we are in a a very urgent dire situation.

But I mean how will we know if governments are taking this seriously? Because governments are saying that we're in a climate emergency, many of them have declared it. But their actions do the exact opposite. So to give you an example, you know one unnamed prime minister of some unnamed country said we're in a climate emergency, and then a few weeks later committed billions of dollars to buying a pipeline, and putting a new pipeline across the country. So this is like a farce, this is like ridiculous, so how will we know when we're in an emergency, when governments actually walk the talk and treat the is an emergency.

Well look at other emergencies look at World War I, World War II, Covid. How did governments respond? Okay, so a number of different things that they did is first of all, they opened the Taps on money. Right during the covid emergency, they sent the public billions of dollars, to so that they could you know get groceries and do things while staying at home. You know they responded very quickly with money, and so if they actually treat this as an emergency, they'll pump billions of dollars into Renewables and they'll completely cut off funding to fossil fuel companies.

They'll have all kinds of policies enacted, and they won't be voluntary. They'll be mandatory policies. You know we had food rationing in World War I,  World War II right,  we car manufacturers couldn't make cars in World War II in North America. They had to make jeeps and tanks to fight the emergency, so policy will be in your face and noticeable, and they'll treat it like an emergency.

They'll create all kinds of new government departments to monitor the policies and how they're working, and they'll have all kinds of metrics published on you know, what's happening. You know World War II, they let people know, well - keep doing what you're doing we're going to win this thing, right?

So they created all kinds of National inspiration and propaganda and this involved the media so they got the media on board right? You couldn't have the media say we need balance, and talking to climate deniers and all that garbage and nonsense going on.  And they use the media as a vehicle to get the public on board and explain exactly why we need to do this.

So we have uh mainstream media outlets around the world talking non-stop about 73% declines of wildlife, about losing the carbon sink, and about how it's a perilous time for us. And not talking about Haitians eating dogs you know, and all this nonsense sense and fake stuff that's going on. So we'll clearly know when they're treating this as an emergency, and they're nowhere close to it yet. And the fact that they call it a climate emergency and do nothing about it, they're taking huge hits to credibility.

So people you know, then they wonder why aren't people trusting governments, on either, you know the right political Spectrum or the left, and it's just craziness. So we'll we'll know and you know Greta thunberg wrote a great book "The Climate Book", interviewed a hundred different people one whole chapter is on the very things I'm talking about.

We will know when governments are acting as if it's a climate emergency, and they're nowhere close to that at the moment and they need to be.

Charles G:

Thank you so much Paul for sharing all these insights, especially the insight from Greta's book which you know should be something we all aspire to read and look at. So thank you for sharing that and thank you also Peter for sharing about the history of the scientists warning and its evolution over a period of time. So now I would like to also thank our audience for tuning in to us today and and taking in our our message and if you learned something from this video please consider liking the video. And if you haven't done so already, subscribing, and so we look forward to seeing you again on the next climate emergency forum.