21: IPCC: Code red for humanity

A landmark UN scientific report has detailed how human activity is changing the climate in unprecedented and irreversible ways. It warns of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts and flooding, and is widely reported to be "a code red for humanity". In this bonus episode, the Local Zero team, Becky, Matt and Fraser, share their thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears in response to the report.

Episode transcript

Matt: Hello and welcome to a bonus episode of Local Zero. 

[Music flourish] 

We’ll still be releasing our full episode at its usual time but as many of you know, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC for short) has just released a new report that addresses the most up-to-date understanding of the climate system and climate change. So almost all of the news outlets have had something to say about the Sixth Assessment Report and so we felt the need to chime in also and consider what this means for local climate action. 

[Music flourish] 

I’m glad to say I’m joined by my esteemed colleagues, Rebecca Ford and Fraser Stewart. Welcome, guys. 

Fraser: Hello, hello. 

Rebecca: Hey, Matt. 

Matt: How are we doing? 

Rebecca: Yeah, good. My brain is literally exploding... well, not literally [laughter]. 

Matt: No, that’s good. We don’t want that. 

Rebecca: It’s not literally exploding [laughter]. It feels like it’s literally exploding when I consider everything that is in this report and what it actually means and I think I’m on a bit of a roller-coaster ride of emotions. 

Matt: I think that’s fair to say. Fraser, similarly up and down? 

Fraser: More up but not necessarily positively. I feel furious. I just feel furious with determination underpinning it but just furious. We knew this was coming. We knew what the content of this was going to be but seeing it reflected back and knowing the endorsement that it has from so many of the people ultimately responsible for what’s happening is just... oh, it’s enraging. 

Matt: Okay, raw fury? 

Fraser: Raw fury. 

Matt: Channelling raw fury. So we should say, for our listeners who don’t know, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has basically drawn together the evidence base across a wide range of topics related to climate change but this particular report spells out the state of the climate emergency; where we are in terms of climate change, how many degrees warming and crucially, what the future looks like and it doesn’t look great. Picking apart the report, there are some extremely interesting points to be made. I think, for me, what came out more obviously than anything else is that even if we act today and get our act together, we’re still looking at about a 1.50C change in average temperature versus pre-anthropogenic climate change. So 1.50C doesn’t sound much. 

Rebecca: It doesn’t and I know a lot of people will often think, ‘It’s a bit chilly up here. We could do with warmer temperatures,’ but that’s not what it’s about, is it? What that actually means is what we’re going to see more of are these extreme heat events which, aside from being incredibly uncomfortable, have caused huge amounts of devastation across swathes of the world like the raging wildfires. That’s been absolutely mindblowing how much of that we’ve seen this summer. We’re going to see more heavy rains and more flooding and none of this is good news. 

Matt: No, and there were some really interesting frequency stats that came out about how likely extreme weather events were. They did a really useful summary where they said if extreme heat that happens once every ten years under pre-human warming era, that, under 1.50C would happen four times every decade. 

Rebecca: Do you know what, Matt? I think we need you. I think we actually probably need to do a two-hour episode for you to distil all the findings because [laughter] I read the same charts as you did and I... 

Matt: Look on the net [laughter] but the thing that made my jaw hit the floor was where if you got up to 40C warming... so we’re already at 1.10C but if you got up to 40C warming, that extreme heat event which would happen once a decade would happen, on average, every year. There’s similarly scary stuff around rainfall and flooding. It doesn’t look good. It really is end-of-the-world stuff with sea-level rise as well. If we don’t check stuff at 2 metres by the end of this century, again, it doesn’t sound like much if you’re living on a hill but if you’re in the Maldives or Bangladesh, this is serious stuff. 

Rebecca: This is your community. This is your home. This is your livelihood. 

Matt: So, Fraser, you were all over the press; media, TV and radio. You name the format and you were on it. What was the key message that you were trying to get out there around this? Obviously, there’s a lot of science and it’s saying it’s scary and we know the link between human action and climate change is severe and it’s real, so what next? What do we do now? 

Fraser: I think there are two parts to that, Matt. The messaging that I was trying to get out around that and something that I’m glad that people picked up on is that obviously, the IPCC tries to stay neutral and tries to deal with the physical stuff but it doesn’t necessarily extend into what the human impacts and the social impacts are which we know, as people who have been researching this stuff for a while now or adjacent to this for a while now, is you’re talking about mass refugeeism, you’re talking about death in lots and lots of places, you’re talking about huge health impacts and you’re talking about lower-income areas specifically bearing the brunt of all of this around the world and here as well. So when we talk about the inequalities and who is going to feel these impacts that the IPCC outline, that’s not a million miles from home. You’re talking about 140,000 households in Glasgow and millions more across the UK. We’re seeing it in Greece. We’re seeing it in Turkey. We’re seeing it everywhere just now, so it’s important to remember that, when we’re talking about these huge global implications, it shouldn’t have taken this long and it shouldn’t have needed to be on our doorstep for people’s ears to prick up as they have now but that’s something that’s going to affect us and it’s going to affect us even more, like you say Matt, very, very shortly. The other side of this, and it feeds back to what I said right at the very beginning, is something that I find so infuriating about it which is that we know it’s not a failure of technology. It’s not a failure of you rinsing your dishes before you put them in the dishwasher. It’s a failure, broadly speaking, of policy and of accountability that’s seen as careering towards this not just 1.50C, which the Paris Agreement set out before, but careering towards that ten years prior to when we said we could really afford to do it. So I think we have a big issue with accountability and this, for me, brings it back to the importance of the local and of the community. When we talk about local and community action, it’s not just about making those little changes to emissions, important as those are. We know from the episodes that we’ve done with The Bowling Green and with South Seeds, in particular, that these local climate spaces are great spaces for building political action and building solidarity for forming the coalitions that we ultimately need to hold leaders, whether that’s fossil fuel companies or local governments, to account, to demand better and make sure that they’re putting in the effort as well. It’s not just about acting locally; it’s about acting locally in service of this bigger need for collective action as well. 

Matt: Becky, accountability and action. 

Rebecca: Yeah, I agree with Fraser. I think that the timing of the report is really, really important so that these messages are absolutely amplified. We can’t forget that it’s a COP year. It’s happening in Glasgow but it’s happening in the UK and there’s a real opportunity for this report to feed into that. I think that’s critical. I think that there’s more to be said as well about what can happen at the local level. There was a great report that the Place-based Climate Action Network (PCAN) published earlier this year and they were looking at what’s happening across local authorities because local authorities in the UK are really taking strides forward with declaring climate emergencies and developing Climate Action Plans. One of the things that they found was that, actually, whilst we’re seeing 80% declaring climate emergencies, not all of them have updated their Climate Action Plans and where they have, they don’t tend to focus on adaptation measures as well as resilience. They don’t focus as much on just transitions and this kind of inclusivity. I think what we’re seeing is that these severe climate events, which are going to happen more frequently, have the potential to impact vulnerable communities more than affluent communities. They have the potential to really devastate lives and we need to be doing more not just to protect those that need it most but also to be, today, putting in measures that can help us to live with this future that is going to happen. We need to be mitigating it but we also need to be adapting our infrastructure and adapting our societies to be able to deal with what’s coming. 

Matt: It’s a really valuable point and one that probably isn’t made frequently enough is that warming is happening and these more extreme events are happening. You just have to turn on the news to see what’s happening recently in Greece and Turkey and what’s happened in Germany with floods. We have to accept that even if we get our act into gear, which is what Glasgow and COP26 will all be about and putting words into action, and we accomplish it, 1.50C is about as good as it gets. We know even at a 1.10C that this is frightening stuff and so adaptation is very much at the forefront I would say. 

Fraser: Yeah, every fraction of that counts. Like you say, Matt, 1.50C doesn’t sound like a lot but 1.10C or 1.50C... it all matters. That’s life and death for hundreds, thousands and millions of people. 

Matt: The question to you both would be if you were to read the IPCC report in isolation, you can imagine a lot of people would go full ostrich mode... head in the sand and thinking, ‘It’s happening. There’s very little I can do about it. I’m just little old me.’ How do we avoid that kind of mass apathy and decoupling from reality and get people to actually stand up and say, ‘I’m part of the fight. I’m going to do what needs to be done,’ and start to galvanise action? It must about visioning for the future. How do we do that? How do we bring people along? 

Rebecca: Well, I think Fraser made a really good point earlier around working with communities and getting engaged more and more. I think that often when we start to think about what can we do, we think, ‘Do I insulate my home? Do I change my car? Do I switch out my heating?’ But there’s a lot more we can do with our voices, our advocacy measures and our political positions. I think that coming together, getting out, getting more engaged and aware and building that community that is interested and embedded in this subject is absolutely key but I think that it also needs to happen at all levels of society. It can’t just be about individuals. I think that our local organisations have a huge role to play here and to play in partnership with community groups to get our communities ready for this. 

Matt: Fraser? 

Fraser: Yeah, I echo that completely, Becky. I think that’s absolutely spot on. It’s thinking more about ourselves not necessarily as consumers but as citizens and as part of a collective as well. I would also add that I appreciate that sentiment and I struggle with the despair of it all as well but I guess remembering that it will not fix itself is important. It’s going to take people standing up. It’s going to take people resisting the processes that lead to it and remembering also that there are people with names and jobs... real live people, who are behind this, who are either putting the blockers up to try and prevent the action that needs to happen or who are out there to be convinced, to talk to and to have those conversations with. So it’s about remembering that it won’t change itself and the only way that it will change is if we start to... whether that’s building locally, emailing, getting in touch with your elected representatives and lots of little social and political things that we need to do as well. 

Matt: But how do you light that fire? Do you attract people to a brighter, happier, fairer and greener future? That’s one way of doing it and I would argue that’s an important part of it. What I think we’ve started to see, particularly this summer with all the big events going on abroad and the climate catastrophes that we’ve seen happen, is that people are starting to get scared and I’m glad. I’m not glad this is happening but I’m glad people are starting to sit up and take note because I think that, in my view, is when people start to take real action. Now I’ll give you an example close to home. I was driving around the weekend past when there were heavy, heavy rain showers which we’ve been experiencing over the last few days and I got to the Clyde Tunnel. For those of you who aren’t in Glasgow, this passes underneath the Clyde that runs right through Glasgow. There was torrential rain and flooding and as I entered the tunnel, I thought, ‘This is the wrong call. That’s going to be flooded.’ You saw everybody slowing down and as I was getting in, I was genuinely petrified. I thought, ‘I’ve made the wrong decision.’ I thought then, ‘Actually, the reason I’m feeling this is because of climate change. I wouldn’t normally have this kind of anxiety.’ So I hope, in my view, that the IPCC report gives that foundation and that scientific evidence where people can sit up and look at these events on the news and draw a line between thinking, ‘Wow, that’s scary,’ and ‘That was climate change. That was us.’ 

Rebecca: I think the one thing that I really need to get my head around is that reading it in isolation is probably not a good idea because it does make you feel very negative and you start to focus on the problems and not the solutions. So for me, it’s about not just what it says but how we interpret that and how we take that information and what we do with that information in our individual lives, in our communities and through our policymakers but, of course, we could carry on and talk about this probably for hours... 

Matt: Yeah, we could. 

Rebecca: ... And we shouldn’t. 

Matt: Until the next report from the IPCC [laughter]. 

Rebecca: But we will be digging into this in a lot more detail in our next full episode and that’s going to be released on 26th August. We’re going to be chatting not just amongst ourselves but with Alice Bell who is the author of the book Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate Crisis. She’s also the co-director at the climate change charity Possible. I can’t think of anyone better to help walk us through this in more detail. 

[Music flourish]