Weathered

There are a number of ways in which climate change could quite literally end the world.

The best example happened 252 million years ago when nearly everything on our planet died.

Now, obviously this wasn't human cause climate change, we weren't around yet, but it's fair to ask whether we now have the ability to trigger something comparably catastrophic.

The very worst mass extinction event in the history of the Earth was triggered by a temperature arrive of six to eight degrees Celsius that occurred over 10,000 years.

What we're doing today would be an order of magnitude quicker.

In the last episode, we laid out the very real reasons the world could warm far beyond the scenarios.

Most people, including many climate scientists, tend to focus on far enough to pose an existential risk to humanity.

But we never stop the story there because here at Weathered, we believe that understanding solutions is just as important as understanding what we're up against.

To do that, we're looking in some unexpected places, and it turns out you can pretty much boil down surviving climate change to five crucial abilities.

We're gonna look at them, but one of these, number four, turns out to be one of the secret ingredients that determines which civilizations survive climate shocks.

Because history shows that survival doesn't hinge on how advanced or powerful a society is, but on how it's organized.

Whenever I would be doing talks or presentations or policy advisory, it was very clear that a lot of people had a mental model of the climate change threat that they often described as like a car heading towards a cliff.

And we could just at the last minute change cause or else we'll go off the end of the cliff.

The thing is, there's no cliff.

The story that going over 1.5 or not reaching certain climate targets means that it's game over is just not true.

The binary win lose story was never true.

In 2015, the world came together at the Paris Agreement to commit to try to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But the last three years have already exceeded that threshold, and most of the climate community now agrees.

This goal is for all intents and purposes dead, but it's definitely not time to give up.

So Lori came up with a new analogy.

Our global situation is very similar to a situation where you had a bunch of sailors who thought they were gonna sail round a storm that they had previously spotted on the horizon.

When you end up in the storm, you expected to sail round and it didn't work out.

It's a massive shock.

You've gotta get your head around the new reality.

When you enter that storm, you just need a whole bunch of different capabilities to continue to do what you've been trying to do, which is change course.

So let's start with the first of those capabilities.

You've.

Gotta know what's going on around you so that you can better navigate in that much more chaotic situation.

Lori's talking about situational awareness on a ship.

This is your radar.

It allows you to anticipate what's coming next.

And when it comes to climate change, Lori says, our radar is low resolution.

An example of this, many financial institutions around the world now undertake risk assessments of what climate change could do to their investments.

The problem is that those risk assessments are telling those institutions that over the coming decades, what climate change will do is not that bad.

Lori said some risk assessments estimate that pension funds would only be impacted by 0.1% decrease in a warming scenario of four degrees Celsius, but the reality of a four degree warmer world isn't a slightly worse portfolio.

In a recent episode, we looked at what the global economy could look like in 2100 under a warming scenario comparable to four degrees, and we found that global economic output could be on the order of 40% lower than it would be otherwise, not the 1% less return, but a fundamentally poorer and unstable world, and it gets crazier.

At the same time, we're underestimating the risks.

Governments are cutting funding to critical systems that monitor our weather and climate.

That includes agencies like noaa, which operates satellites and weather stations that power early warning systems for storms, floods, and heat waves.

This is the same as when you enter a storm, one of the crew members sabotaging your radar.

But even if we get better at navigating our ship, we won't get out of the storm if our boat falls apart, which brings us to our next capability adaptation.

The idea that we should be focusing on adaptation was sometimes uncomfortable for a lot of people in climate politics because it felt kind of like giving up.

For a long time.

Now the focus of climate mitigation has been on decarbonization or lowering our carbon emissions, which is crucial to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

But unfortunately, the scale now of the damages that are already happening and the ones that we anticipate are now coming means that way more effort needs to be put into ensuring our societies are much hardier.

And that's why we spend so much time talking about adaptation on this show.

For examples of this, check out our episode on the LA Fires.

Like a ship in a storm, you need a hardy boat so that you are not having to spend all your time patching it up as it gets battered to pieces, then you have more time or resource to focus on.

Navigating.

And adaptation doesn't compete with mitigation.

It actually helps it.

In societies that are much more resilient, that are much hardier.

They are gonna be able to handle these worsening climate shocks and their domino effects better.

And that will mean that some of the destabilization and other chaotic things that could happen will be reduced, which could mean hopefully there's more of an opportunity, more space to be able to focus on decarbonization.

But none of this really matters if we're stuck in the storm for a long time, because the longer we're in the storm, the more damage our ship will take on.

Which brings us to capability number three.

We also need to move really fast.

Speed is about how quickly we can shift away from fossil fuels and build resilience systems in their place.

And right now, that largely comes down to clean energy.

Solar is the perfect example, not only because it's clean, but because it gets cheaper and faster the more we build it.

Solar has what's called a learning rate.

That means every time the global solar capacity doubles, the cost drops historically by about 20%.

So the more we deploy it, the faster it scales, the faster it scales, the cheaper it gets, and the cheaper it gets, the faster we can replace fossil fuels.

Luke Kemp studies the history of societal collapses and has found that there is one primary ingredient that determines which civilizations survive climate shocks.

If we look at, say for instance, the fall of the very earliest civilizations, as I call them, Goliaths, all these different societies fell rough at the same time, the onset of the little ice age.

If we look at the late bronze age, it also fell apart during the grasp of a mega drought.

Drought and climate change is a dry fingerprint across human history and across many cases of collapse.

But there have been many climate shocks that didn't collapse civilizations.

So what's the key factor that makes the difference?

It.

Wasn't a simple matter of climate change equals collapse.

Inequality is the most important factor that determines whether society is resilient or vulnerable to chromatic shocks.

Inequality tends to be corrosive to societies.

Societies which are more unequal also tend to have higher rates of both interpersonal and social political violence, higher rates of environmental degradation, higher rates of mental health illnesses.

Under.

Current policies, we're on track to reach about three degrees Celsius of warming.

By the end of the century, the impacts of three degrees would be severe, but it doesn't automatically mean the end of the world.

Three degrees of warming in a world which is marked by relative wealth, equality, trust, and public institutions.

Strong multilateralism in corporation and good adaptive technology, potentially humanity can navigate that.

A world of three degrees of warming in which you also have large levels of inequality, geopolitical strife and conflict technologies run a mark and a lack of trust in public institutions and a huge amount of misinformation, disinformation, that is a world which may actually result in catastrophe.

And today's world is extremely unequal.

Globally, the richest 10% control roughly three quarters of all wealth, while the bottom half of humanity owns just 2%.

And in some countries, the trend is moving in the wrong direction.

In the US levels of inequality have risen back towards what we saw about a century ago.

And if you zoom in on the ultra wealthy, the scale of this concentration gets even more stark.

The share of US wealth held by the top 0.1% has grown by nearly 60% since 1989, while the bottom half of households have seen its share shrink by more than a quarter.

And looking at the ultra ultra wealthy, today's US billionaires are estimated to be worth roughly $8 trillion about twice the combined net worth of the bottom 50% of Americans.

As you start to get more inequality, you also start to get a more top heavy society.

And as you have a large number of elites competing for status and resources, they're often taking more and more resources from the poor below them.

So if inequality fundamentally weakens civilization, how do we strengthen our societies to protect us against climate shocks and disasters?

We have multiple studies suggesting that societies which have stronger democracies tend to be better at navigating disasters.

They also recover more quickly afterwards.

Which ties back into Lori's fourth ability for surviving climate change.

How decisions in a society get made.

The decision making processes, who feels included, how decisions are made, are absolutely critical in what goes forward.

Because those are gonna have to be decisions about how communities remain safe in a world that at least for the foreseeable future, is gonna get much less safe.

We need stronger democracies with real accountability, social connection, and shared decision making.

Why is this?

Probably for a few different reasons.

One is democracies in general more accountable as citizens, and hence both during a disaster in the wake of it, they're more likely to allocate resources in an effective manner.

Secondly, democracy and inclusive politics is really about building social connections.

It involves voting, canvassing, people having democratic discussions.

And last but not least, democracies just tend to make better decisions because.

Those communities, if they're making decisions about their own resilience in this future, in this climate change future, and in a, in a future in which all sorts of other things are going on as well, then it could be the thing that, um, protects those communities against someone telling lies From the national level.

When we look for at history, many of the big societies and empires, they seem to be captured by oligarchy before they collapse.

And that seems to prevent them from taking the necessary steps and actions towards preventing or averting collapse.

And it doesn't take much to look at the day and realize that the same thing is happening.

So to recap, to weather the storm, we need situational awareness, adaptation, speed, and most importantly democracy.

And Lori had one final item on his list.

You know, and the last capability we need is, well, what we're doing here right now, it's about storytelling.

And this is why I have been doing this storytelling around a storm.

And it's also why we do this show because here at Weathered, we're trying to do all we can to make sure we make it through the storm.