354: Water, Wildlife, and Climate’s Hidden Trade-Offs
In this episode, we take on some of the knottiest questions in climate including water stress, biodiversity loss, geoengineering, public understanding and the language of urgency itself.
About this episode
The climate crisis is not one problem. It is a crisis of water, food, energy, language, justice and power, all colliding at once. So how do we respond when climate solutions create new trade-offs of their own? And are we even using the right words to describe what is happening?
In this episode, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson take on some of the knottiest questions in climate. From water stress and biodiversity loss to geoengineering, public understanding and the language of urgency itself. What gets overlooked? What gets simplified? And how do we navigate increasing complexity in the middle of a worsening crisis?
We don’t have all the answers. But as our choices grow harder, these are some of the questions that demand our attention.
Learn More:
💧 Dive into Why Water Matters from the UNFCCC
🦅 Explore how solar and wind energy producers can mitigate impacts on biodiversity
🎧 Listen back to last year’s episode unpacking some of climate’s most common acronyms
☁️ … or return to our most recent episode on geoengineering with Politico’s Karl Mathiesen
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe
Join the conversation:
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Or get in touch with us via this form.
Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Edited by: Miles Martignoni
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford
This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.
Full Transcript
Transcript generated by AI. While we aim for accuracy, errors may still occur. Please refer to the episode’s audio for the definitive version
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Hello, and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac.
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Christiana Figueres: I'm Christiana Figueres.
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Paul Dickinson: And I'm Paul Dickinson.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: And we are still together, and we're still answering your many questions. Today, we're going to be looking at impacts, trade-offs, and how we talk about climate. Thanks for joining us. Okay, friends, so another round at these brilliant questions is that they're going to be our third episode of Listener Questions. And honestly, they've been fantastic. So thank you to everybody who wrote in. And I guess we should just kick off. So I believe the first one is a question we have from Samia, and we have a recording. So let's go to that.
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Samia Anwar Rafa (listener, WaterAid Bangladesh): I'm Samia Anwar Rafa, working for WaterAid in Bangladesh. I'm here in Bilim, attending COP30, and I want to ask the podcast if water is kept at the heart of the climate conversations, because in Bangladesh, back home, water is how we see the impacts of the changing climate. This is how the changing climate enters our homes. And I want to know from you if water has been given the importance that it needs to be in the decision-making.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: A fantastic question. There's lots to say there. Paul, should we start with you?
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Paul Dickinson: Well, I certainly don't know as much about the problems of water in Bangladesh as you do. I mean, there are obviously two... I'm just going to talk a little bit about categories here. People most closely associate problems with water in Bangladesh's rising sea levels, where there's catastrophic problems for literally millions of people from rising sea levels. I remember seeing an extraordinary piece of work that was about the necessity for families to tie babies up at night because if a baby were to move off a platform with water underneath, they might be lost. This kind of tragedy is a lived experience for millions of people in Bangladesh. Now, there are additional issues with water, which is essentially drought, not having sufficient water. There's a big difference between seawater and fresh water. You can't drink seawater. So, step back from these categories to the basic issue. We had to come up with a framing for this some years ago. You probably heard me say this before at CDP. We said, if climate change is the shark, water is the teeth. So essentially, it's water that actually gets you so often in a climate change context. I guess the reasons behind this are incredibly obvious, but I'm just going to mention them. One is the melting of ice, which sits basically, not floating ice, but ice that sits on land. When it melts, it raises sea level. And of course, the world is getting hotter, and the oceans are particularly getting very much hotter. And there's something called thermal expansion. Now, sea level rise is somewhere between 3 millimeters a year or something, more or less. It kind of depends for various reasons in different regions. But the critical issue is that sea level rise is correlated to increased storm surge. So inundation of land that might have been 10 meters or 100 meters, with a centimeter or two of sea level rise, could be many hundreds of meters, and far more severe storm impacts. So essentially, I suppose... And then the final thing to say is, in terms of flooding events, which are also super serious, greater energy in the earth system causes greater carrying of precipitation of water in the atmosphere. So you get these more intense rainfall events. So in all of these different areas, I think it's a great question. And I suppose the question I would put back to you two, based on this question, is if we assume water is not well enough comprehended, although we talk about it in terms of small island states, but more broadly, how can we better include the impact of water in our kind of engagement with the climate challenge?
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, just to build on that, thank you for going through all of that, Paul. The one piece that I would add is the absence of water in terms of droughts.
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Paul Dickinson: Oh, yes.
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Christiana Figueres: Which is, you know, the other disturbance of the hydrological cycle.
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Paul Dickinson: I have to say, people say an eight-year drought in Iran has sort of fermented demonstrations, perhaps for a long time coming, but we've seen the same. Syria, the conflict was possibly caused by drought, but sorry to interrupt.
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Christiana Figueres: No, and the question, because water or the absence of water or too much water or warmer water is so often the way that climate is experienced. I often get the question, why is water not mentioned in the climate convention or in the Paris Agreement? And it is a very good question. The somewhat procedural, sorry about that, answer to that is because both the convention and the Paris Agreement tend to focus on the cause of climate change. So, in this case, the rising concentrations of all greenhouse gases, but particularly CO2 of which the disturbance in the hydrological cycles of the planet is one of the main effects. But neither the convention or the Paris Agreement tend to go into the effects, but rather stay with the causes of the problem.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Except in adaptation, right?
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Christiana Figueres: What do you mean by that?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, I mean, obviously, there are adaptation elements to the UNFCCC mitigation adaptation. Adaptation will presumably respond to water.
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Paul Dickinson: Building a seawall, for example, to stop flooding.
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, but that's not what I'm saying.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: OK.
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Christiana Figueres: What I'm just saying is that the word water doesn't tend to appear.
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Paul Dickinson: Yeah.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: OK. But will it not be referenced underneath the adaptation elements of the UNFCCC?
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Christiana Figueres: Well, maybe. But honestly, almost like a footnote, not really with the importance. That's my point.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: OK.
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Christiana Figueres: Because the Convention and the Paris Agreement and the CRETA Protocol and all of these tend to focus. It's the same answer to why are fossil fuels not named.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Right.
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Christiana Figueres: Why are fossil fuels not named is because these legal texts tend to stay with the original cause. And the original cause is the the emissions of greenhouse gases. Anyway, what in addition to what you have said, Paul, I wanted to add, have we thought about the fact that water is actually the golden thread that crosses through all the three environmental conventions? So water is definitely at the heart of climate change. Water is definitely at the heart of the biodiversity crisis that we have. And it's definitely at the heart of the desertification processes that we're seeing. So it is very ironic that despite the fact that water is the golden thread through all three, that it doesn't have from, I guess, from a negotiation perspective, why don't we have a negotiating process that focuses on water? And those that would like to bring all these three conventions to some way of coherence have focused and said water brings them all together.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, it's such a good question. And I think one of the things I take from it is we should delve into it more this coming year. It makes me remember last year at the Clinton Global Initiative, I moderated a panel with Matt Damon and Gary White, who run water.org, and they actually said they'd come on the podcast and educate us a bit more. So we should go back to that and bring them on to help. Answers to me is a very good question.
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Paul Dickinson: Just one last thought on water, if I may. With regard to refugees in Bangladesh, but not being able to survive in that country, India's built more than 3000 kilometers of fence to stop migration.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, that's a very good point. And actually, I was going to go to that. I have a very good friend who argues cases in front of the Supreme Court in the United States. And he has specialized particularly in water disputes between states. What happens when water is supposed to flow from one state into the other?
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Christiana Figueres: Rivers.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Rivers, exactly. And like the Rio Grande, not reaching the ocean. And there are so many ancient pieces of law that cover how much flow is supposed to go from one legal jurisdiction into another. And these things are just ramping up at the Supreme Court in the US. And it's also happening internationally. Because what happens if Bangladesh's rivers are as abundant as they once were? Because it's being removed by Indian agriculture. There are huge areas of complexity.
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Christiana Figueres: In the Middle East, huge issues about water.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So actually, those territorial disputes, I think, are going to become more and more prevalent. And the other issue, I would just point to all the great ones that you've all brought up, is I had an amazing statistic, which is that AI is using more water than the entire bottled water industry now. So I appreciate that's a very different angle on it, but water is going to become more and more of a scarce resource in specific areas because of that.
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Christiana Figueres: Say more about that, because...
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, because it's required for cooling the data centers. So there's an enormous water demand in these data centers. For cooling, it's not here. Yeah. So anyway, a great question, and we should definitely come back to it more this year. Thank you for that. Right. And so I think the next question is from Antoinette.
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Antoinette (listener): Hello. My name is Antoinette and I listen to your podcast every week. It helps me to stay positive when the situation looks so bleak out there for the environment. My question would be, I think it was Paul who mentioned industrialization during your podcasts from the COP30 with regards to wind energy. And I wonder whether you could devote some time to the balance between renewable energy, maybe wind energy in particular, and the biodiversity crisis. Because I feel that private companies sometimes are able to build wind energy where biodiversity is rare and at threat. And how far can we go? Should we go? I feel passionate about the biodiversity loss we're facing. I also think we need renewable energy, but there has to be a balance. Thank you very much for your podcasts. And please keep going. Keep helping me through this difficult time. Thank you.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Great. Such a great, interesting question about trade-offs.
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Christiana Figueres: Well, Antoinette, thank you so much for being an avid listener. Love your comments. Thank you so much. First off the bat, absolutely, wind can harm biodiversity. You're absolutely right. The one way that that can happen is what you name already, which is habitat disruption, because roads are built, foundations are built, transmission lines for wind turbines or wind farms that can fragment sensitive ecosystems. That is one way in which biodiversity can be affected. There are a couple of other ways we know about bird and bat collisions where turbines have been poorly sited. Also, we should consider offshore wind and what the construction of the bases of the turbines, how that construction noise can disturb marine animals. All of these are definitely negative impacts on biodiversity. Now, what is changing is the planning, sighting and operating of wind turbines is actually changing in many ways, technically to have larger, more efficient, more effective wind turbines, but also changing in order to be much more sensitive to negative impacts on biodiversity. And in fact, standard best practice that is already being implemented by the industry takes this account. So there are now radar and AI systems that pause turbines when birds approach. There are seasonal curtailment protecting migration and breeding periods. There is now much stricter standards about where the roads and access points can be built and cannot be built. I'm not saying it's a perfect situation, but it is being improved. Very, very interesting to me is the fact that offshore wind turbines are now being found, being built in a way that they're acting as artificial coral reefs. And so in that sense, those wind turbines are actually increasing local biodiversity. So it's so it's not a black and white picture. But overall over all of this, I think the consideration that has to be made is what are we comparing the wind turbines to? If the wind turbines are actually displacing fossil fuels, then one can say fossil fuels cause climate chaos, ocean acidification, air pollution, mass extinction. So it has a global existential impact. Wind power in the worst cases, and we're moving away from the worst cases, are having localized manageable risks that are being improved and are improvable. So I think we have to accept the fact that if we need energy and we need more and more energy, we are going to have some impact. But can we actually move away from global catastrophic impact to local impact and as little local impact as possible?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So I think this is such a great question, and I think it also gives us an opportunity to speak to the politicization of this issue specifically. So we often hear at Trump and Farage and others who are trying to discount the validity of wind energy and try to find arguments to prevent its spread, which ultimately probably at its cause has a desire to perpetuate fossil fuel infrastructure using this example of destroying birds and, you know, they're destroying. And of course, this is a problem, and we need to address it in the ways you've set out. But in the US, for example, it is true that wind turbines cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of birds. But cats cause the death of billions of birds, like orders of magnitude.
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Christiana Figueres: Oh, no, don't tell Paul that because he loves cats. Paul, you didn't hear that.
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Paul Dickinson: I love cats, and I love birds. But I kind of think, you know, cats are awfully good at catching and killing birds.
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Christiana Figueres: It's kind of what they do. Exactly.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Now you just heard the data point.
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Paul Dickinson: I sort of kind of forgive them in a way, even though I shouldn't really forgive them. I kind of do.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Do you forgive wind turbines as well?
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Paul Dickinson: Yeah. I mean, but I've never kind of had a wind turbine curl up on my lap and purr.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I mean, it's obviously an issue we should think about. And as somebody, I have a lot of house Martins that nest around my house. And it honestly is just one of the most heartbreaking things when the migratory birds don't come back for whatever reason. And you realize this connection to this incredible species that travel halfway across the planet. And anything that prevents them and kills them, we should absolutely do everything we can to stop that from happening. And at the same time, that argument is being used in an outsized way to drive a political point that is not consistent with the level of damage. We can solve the problems. We shouldn't give in to the politicization of it. The next question is from Baroka.
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Listener (unnamed): I listened to the episode, the latest episode about geoengineering, and what I want to see addressed more is that aerosols, they will affect renewable energy because they will block the sun. So you can't create that much solar energy. So that will kind of be a lock-in problem, because it will be harder to reduce emissions if you reduce the energy generation from solar energy. And I would love to hear more from climate scientists, like IPCC scientists. For example, one of the highest positions that a woman has in the IPCC, the IPCC vice chair Diana is a woman. Coming from a small Eastern European country, I would love to hear sometimes her views. And she's also very optimistic.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Great. I mean, what an important question from Baroka. And I would 100% agree that we should get, not only talk more about this, but get some of the top scientists, including from the IPCC, to come and talk to us.
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Paul Dickinson: So if you could actually have Corinne Le Carre, who's a brilliant scientist and chair of the Climate Change Committee in France. And we recorded her. It was one of our first recordings. And then we lost the recording. So she said she'd come back on. So we'll try to talk about it.
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Christiana Figueres: Let's not lose the recording.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: It's a very generous we. I think that was me. But thank you, Paul.
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Paul Dickinson: Yeah.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Right. OK. So a few different things here. One is spraying aerosols into the upper atmosphere, which is a topic we broke into a tiny bit at the end of last year, is such an important consideration that so many people are looking at now. I personally find that I am terrified by that prospect and that it's not really responsible to just discount it without looking at it at this point, given how late we are and given how many risks we are. So that makes it a great topic for further debate and discussion and research. And we will be providing that this year. In terms of the specific question here, which is around the proportion of dimming that solar radiation would have into the planet and what effect that would have on solar energy, my understanding is that the aerosols would dim solar radiation, reaching the surface of the planet by 1 to 2 percent. And that would obviously have a significant impact, not only on solar power, but also photosynthesis, for example. And we don't really know quite what that would mean for photosynthesis. But my understanding on solar energy is that local factors like dust on the panels and other things can have a much bigger impact on that. So whether that in itself will be a significant impact, I would suggest it may not be. But we've had many other questions on geoengineering, including from Steve, who wrote to us and said, presumably dimming the sun won't stop ocean acidification at a terrifying rate. And I want to just dig into that for a minute as well, because I think that's also really important. And he is absolutely right, of course. It would have no impact on ocean acidification and may even, in a sort of unintentional way, make it worse, because it may remove some of the urgency and the desire and the necessity to reduce emissions, which then could accelerate ocean acidification. It doesn't have to turn out that way, but you can see why you'd be frightened of that. The pH of the oceans has shifted from 8.2 to 8.1 since pre-industrialized levels. Now, that's a logarithmic scale, so it's much more significant than that number sounds. It's actually a 30% increase in the acidity of the oceans. And that has devastating effects in various different ways. Of course, acidification slows coral growth. So when you get to the point where warmer oceans are killing the corals, and the acidification prevents the regrowth, then it massively increases the damage that we are causing to our coral reefs. And the other thing I would point to...
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Christiana Figueres: Which are the basis of the food pyramid in the ocean. That's why it's so important.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: 100%.
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Christiana Figueres: That's the basis of the food pyramid.
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Paul Dickinson: Well, that's worse.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: There's another issue that's connected to that. So there's something called aragonite saturation levels, which affect the ability of plankton to form their shells. And as we get closer and closer to these saturation levels, then you can prevent the shells being formed around plankton, particularly at the South Pole. And those plankton, as you say, Christiana, are the basis of the food chain.
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Paul Dickinson: But also 40% of the pump down of the atmospheric CO2.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Absolutely. So those shells then form, the creatures die, they fall to the bottom of the ocean, and that's 40% of the pump down of CO2 from the atmosphere. So, I mean, again, we're just pointing at depths and depths of complexity here. But what happens…
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Paul Dickinson: You feel like a doctor, sort of saying. And there's another thing with a patient as well.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, what you don't want to get to is at a point where, exactly, where you get to a point in illness, and this, of course, tragically happens to people, where you end up with trade-offs. It's like, well, there are so many challenges happening that you could have one solution, but it creates other problems.
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Christiana Figueres: But that's where we are.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: But that's where we are.
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Paul Dickinson: And keeping points in medical conditions. You know, this problem with the patient is exacerbating that problem with the patient, and they're both getting exponentially faster worse.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah. So, for all of those reasons, spraying aerosols into the upper atmosphere is a terrifying prospect. And it's also slightly terrifying not to spray aerosols into the upper atmosphere because of all the other impacts we're seeing. So, this merits a lot more thought and reflection and science as well. But I don't know if either of you two want to add to this important topic.
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Christiana Figueres: Well, as you say, there are so many comments about this from Tom, not you, Tom, from another Tom, and from Grattan also. And he says, logic will say, geoengineering will give us more time, more time for what?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: That's exactly the question.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER — please verify: He's really nailed that.
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Paul Dickinson: The tragic opera that causes us all to burst into tears in the front row. More time for what?
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Christiana Figueres: More time for what? Exactly. Yeah. The adverb is very important in that question. But my sense is that this is such a huge topic that we should actually, Tom is already volunteering to take the lead on doing a whole deep dive, are you, Tom?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: There's lots of space for all of us.
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Christiana Figueres: Can you commit to that publicly now?
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: If you're looking to me to solve this problem, it may be beyond me. No, no, no.
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Christiana Figueres: Not solve, but take the lead on constructing a deep dive for us onto engineering.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: I mean, to me, this is one of the most interesting things for us to educate and help our listeners understand this year. So I'm really excited about that.
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Christiana Figueres: All right.
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Paul Dickinson: Paul, we're talking to risk professionals about building out content in this area. It's not going to go away.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Great. OK, so let's move on. I think the next question, wonderfully, given that we're in Bath, comes from Anne Elliott, which I'm assuming is not the Anne Elliott from Persuasion by Jane Austen. But let's listen to her question.
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Listener (unnamed): Hello, Outrage and Optimism. I really think if we're looking at words and terminology, I think the term climate change is way too narrow in this era of incredible urgency. And I think we should always, when we talk about climate change, say, climate change, loss of nature, loss of biodiversity, because one feeds the other. And to help encourage this sense of urgency and then action. And if we're going into, you know, deep adaptation mode, the rewilding, the restoration of land is so important at every level by all of us, where we can do it. And the other side is developing more compassion and supporting communities and working at the grassroots, while also somehow feeding the top, which is government and acts way too slowly.
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Christiana Figueres: Well, and what a good question. You've actually asked something that we should just ping over to Al Gore because this is one of his pet topics, which is, how come we're calling this just Global Warming? Warming sort of has a positive sense to it. So he was one of the ones who said, no, no, we have to move toward climate change. Then he said, no, that's not drastic enough. Let's call it climate weirding. Climate crisis. Climate crisis. And to your point about the urgency, I think though, one or two years ago, many people moved over to climate emergency. And I think that is much closer to where we are. What we call things is really important. I so agree with you that we should call things by their true name and not paint a picture that is not commensurate with what we are facing. It is one of the most difficult things to do. How do we communicate about this? And not just the words that we use, but the arguments that we put on the table. So climate communication, I must say, is at front and center one of the challenges or perhaps the biggest challenge that all of us face because not only how do we explain what is happening, but also how do we motivate people, institutions, governments, subnational and national to take the bull by its horns and actually take the action that is so urgently necessary. Very difficult to communicate.
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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah.
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Paul Dickinson: I just think that if you think it's an era of incredible urgency, let's call it the era of incredibly urgency. I think that's a great name. One of the things that I was just thinking, if you look at...
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Christiana Figueres: We do have decisive decade. Does that more or less move in that direction or not?
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Paul Dickinson: Probably too many names, you know, for all of us.
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Christiana Figueres: More or less true.
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Paul Dickinson: Win the War is a famous one that I quite like. If you look 100 years ahead, it's an emergency now. And I was just thinking about this just now and I really see it really, really clearly. I just want to draw our attention particularly to smoking and alcohol. Now let's just consider drinking a bottle of whiskey or something like that. That's incredibly dangerous. People drink a whole bottle of whiskey, they die. The alcohol kills them on the spot. They fall under a car. Something terrible happens. No child or say somebody in their 20s is at the slightest risk from smoking 20 cigarettes. They will not die for years if they smoke 20 cigarettes. Every day for a few years, no problem. But we go to massive, massive efforts to stop children smoking cigarettes because we factor in the future now.
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Christiana Figueres: The long term consequences.
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Paul Dickinson: So unlike this bottle of whiskey, despite the fact someone could smoke cigarettes from 20 to 25 with almost zero chance of dying from that activity, we go to enormous lengths to stop them. And so I think it's bringing time and emergency into the equation.
00:26:14.060 --> 00:26:21.000
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, I agree and I find challenges with it because you're so right, the smoking analogy should work. We should be able to use that anticipation of future risk and apply it to the way that people change their lives and we run change societies now. And if we're honest, we have been at best partially successful with that journey, right? And the idea that climate change is psychologically distant, that it doesn't really affect how you feel and what you're going to do today, that the impacts are collective rather than personal. If I smoke 20 cigarettes a day for 20 years, I will die. But if I drive my car and go flying on holiday, then the impacts on me aren't going to be any greater than on everybody else. So I do think there is an interesting debate going on now with a lot of research around the kinds of language that we can use to get people more engaged. And one of the things that I have heard is that actually that connection of immediacy, you know, it's about affordability, it's about lung health today. It's about other things that affect my life in terms of, you know, my wallet or my personal health or my kids' lungs that do seem to motivate people more because we have this real challenge to engage and take meaningful action on collective problems when there's not this shared sense of urgency. So it's a really good question. Language is part of it. Making it more immediate to people is part of it. There's a lot in there.
00:27:36.700 --> 00:27:38.260
Paul Dickinson: One last thought is just defence. You know, nations have been fighting nations for thousands of years and the public are not really expected to deal with that strange problem that may occur or may not occur. And so we all, in most countries, with the eminent exception of Costa Rica, some of our tax money each month goes into a budget for a national defence so that the nation is prepared for something that may never happen. So that's another collective protection and security system that we've built up that we haven't got for climate change yet. But I see no difference between the defence challenge and the climate challenge.
00:28:09.200 --> 00:28:16.800
Tom Rivett-Carnac: But that's, I don't want to get too hung up on here, but just one thought there is if an army appears on the horizon, then the solution to that is to go out and fight the army, right? The solution is intrinsically connected to the risk. If climate change appears on the horizon, then the solution is to elect better public servants, change your diet and, you know, do something else. It's not connected to the risk. And I think that's a big part of the problem. When it triggers our response, we have to do something different. And actually what it often triggers in people...
00:28:35.860 --> 00:28:36.780
Christiana Figueres: It's not a mirroring.
00:28:36.780 --> 00:28:37.420
Tom Rivett-Carnac: It's not a mirroring. What it often triggers in people is not, I better deal with my emissions and avoid this problem. It's, I better build a bigger wall to stop this impacting me. So I agree with you. Theoretically, there should be no difference. But when it actually shows up in people's lives, I think there's a massive difference.
00:28:52.420 --> 00:28:59.440
Paul Dickinson: And Sun Tzu in The Heart of War says that the battles are all won and lost before they occur in terms of the spirit of the people in the different nations. So actually that speaks to the collective challenge.
00:29:01.920 --> 00:29:04.420
Tom Rivett-Carnac: OK, should we move on? Great. Let's listen to this question from D'Andrea.
00:29:07.000 --> 00:29:18.520
Listener (unnamed): I'm getting hung up on the acronyms and having a hard time following the stories, period. Would you mind clarifying things a little bit more? Question mark. Thank you so much.
00:29:24.020 --> 00:29:27.440
Christiana Figueres: OK, D'Andrea, thank you very much for that question. Now, I will say, last year, if my memory does not completely betray me, we started the whole year's episodes with an episode on acronyms. Do either of you remember that?
00:29:37.960 --> 00:29:38.920
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Oh, yes. About a year ago.
00:29:40.140 --> 00:29:42.600
Christiana Figueres: I think it was the first episode. And I think the question that we set to ourselves is, what are the acronyms that we think are going to be pertinent to this year or coming up in the climate discussion this year? So we have quite a collection there. If you would like to go back and listen to those. But I also personally have a little internal war against acronyms. I do not like them. My personal favorite, least favorite, my personal least favorite right now is NCQG. I mean, somehow that doesn't quite roll off your tongue. And what it stands for also doesn't roll off your tongue. New Collective Quantified Goal. It's not exactly poetic. So what does it mean? That is my least favorite.
00:30:32.000 --> 00:30:34.140
Tom Rivett-Carnac: That's what I'm going to call my first child.
00:30:34.140 --> 00:30:35.900
Christiana Figueres: Yes. If you're Elon Musk.
00:30:36.920 --> 00:30:38.540
Paul Dickinson: If I'm Elon Musk.
00:30:42.500 --> 00:30:43.060
Christiana Figueres: There we go. We could send that one up to Elon Musk for your next child. NCQG, which is the terrible name that has been invented for the new financial target of support from the Global North to the Global South to meet the responses to climate change. In any event, I would like to say that we renew our commitment this year that we made last year to either not use acronyms or explain them and remind each other what they are. So is that a commitment of all three of us?
00:31:21.660 --> 00:31:25.320
Paul Dickinson: I swear on the things that I believe in, which change all the time, but I swear on them.
00:31:25.520 --> 00:31:26.120
Christiana Figueres: Okay. Okay. Good. So that is a collective commitment. But now here's my little confession. When I was leading the Climate Secretariat for a long time, I had to use my fingers in a very discreet way to make sure that I pronounced the three Cs. Because the acronym of the title when I walked into this position was, I was the ES of the UNFCCC. I mean, how on earth are you supposed to...
00:31:55.140 --> 00:31:55.980
Paul Dickinson: ES, let's start there.
00:31:56.000 --> 00:31:58.540
Christiana Figueres: Yeah, ES is the Executive Secretary. And that's what people call me, the ES. The ES, that's what we call the ES now. And then the convention is called the UNFCCC. Now I shied away from calling it the Triple C, which is what most people call it, because I just don't like the Triple C. But somehow the IPCC is so ingrained in my mind, and that only has two Cs, that I very often said, you know, the UNFCC, and then people would be, and what about the third C?
00:32:33.300 --> 00:32:36.900
Paul Dickinson: How much time is it really saving us to not say United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change?
00:32:36.900 --> 00:32:40.960
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, my favorite part of that is we actually had a conversation about why there's the word framework in there and nobody knew. So we're using the acronym.
00:32:43.000 --> 00:32:47.780
Paul Dickinson: There's a famous one, which is World Wide Web, which is faster to say than WWW. Sometimes the acronym is longer.
00:32:50.980 --> 00:32:52.920
Christiana Figueres: Anyway, what are your favorite acronyms?
00:32:52.920 --> 00:33:07.200
Paul Dickinson: Well, I think the ones that we use ourselves often are COP, the Conference of the Parties, where the parties to the UN Framework Convention meet, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific body that warns us, 1.5, that's kind of an acronym, well, it's numbers, which is...
00:33:07.200 --> 00:33:09.780
Christiana Figueres: IPCC, but you see, how many C's does that one have, Paul?
00:33:09.780 --> 00:33:10.340
Paul Dickinson: Two.
00:33:10.340 --> 00:33:11.040
Christiana Figueres: Okay.
00:33:11.040 --> 00:33:11.900
Paul Dickinson: Poor you.
00:33:11.900 --> 00:33:12.360
Christiana Figueres: Poor me.
00:33:12.880 --> 00:33:17.840
Paul Dickinson: Luckily, you managed to get the whole world to agree on some stuff, but you couldn't actually work out the difference between two and three. So, you know, it's kind of super achieving, under achieving. So 1.5 degrees, which is a target for temperature rise. Of course, it doesn't sound like very much, but it's related to the tipping points in the system. UNSG, the Secretary General of the United Nations, NDCs, Nationally Determined Contributions that countries submit, CO2e, CO2, the gas equivalent, because we can normalise everything to that. That's my list of the ones we use too much. Tom?
00:33:42.340 --> 00:33:52.540
Tom Rivett-Carnac: So I went a slightly different direction with this, and I bring you, humbly bring you, SSP3-70, bracket, CMI P6.
00:33:54.960 --> 00:33:55.700
Paul Dickinson: That's an emissions pathway.
00:33:55.700 --> 00:33:58.680
Christiana Figueres: Elements should immediately have at least three more children.
00:33:58.680 --> 00:33:59.660
Tom Rivett-Carnac: OK, so let me break it down for you. You're pretty close, Paul. SSP, Shared Socioeconomic Pathway, A Whole Imagined Future Scenario. Version 3, a regional rivalry version, which includes fragmentation, nationalism and low cooperation. Oh, I think that's us, actually. 7.0 is the radiative forcing in watts per square meter by 2100. And CMI P6 is coupled model into comparison project phase 6, the global climate model backbone. So what SSP3-70-CMI brackets P6 means is effectively a pathway towards global collapse. So we've developed this language to prevent us from having to go directly at these concepts. But now you know what it means.
00:34:42.640 --> 00:34:43.820
Christiana Figueres: Well, I feel so much better.
00:34:43.820 --> 00:34:44.560
Tom Rivett-Carnac: I'm sure you do, exactly.
00:34:44.560 --> 00:34:46.480
Christiana Figueres: That I know the path to collapse now.
00:34:46.480 --> 00:34:47.800
Tom Rivett-Carnac: But it might be that if we were able to...
00:34:47.820 --> 00:34:49.320
Listener (unnamed): Oh, you're Tom.
00:34:49.320 --> 00:34:51.460
Christiana Figueres: It makes me feel so much better.
00:34:51.460 --> 00:34:54.040
Tom Rivett-Carnac: But I mean, isn't that a dehumanizing thing that we call it that? And of course, we need to have language that enables us to talk about things with specificity. But we need to also bring... You know, it reminds me now a little bit of the financial services sector where the language is exclusionary. It stops you from participating because you need to know so many acronyms and so much specific language.
00:35:08.180 --> 00:35:12.020
Christiana Figueres: I would argue that the climate industry does the same thing. We do the same thing. Every time we have a COP, we have at least three to four new acronyms that are born at the COP. And that's the way you can tell whether somebody is really up to date or not.
00:35:23.340 --> 00:35:23.880
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Right. It's a purity test.
00:35:24.620 --> 00:35:25.220
Christiana Figueres: It's terrible.
00:35:25.220 --> 00:35:35.880
Paul Dickinson: And if you've ever edited a document, it's almost always the case of sitting up at two in the morning spending half an hour trying to find the meaning of an acronym that someone has written to save themselves about four seconds.
00:35:35.880 --> 00:35:36.960
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah. But I have to say, Paul, I'm very impressed you knew what that was.
00:35:39.420 --> 00:35:42.080
Paul Dickinson: Yeah, well, you know, I like to be a bit of a geek now.
00:35:42.080 --> 00:35:43.880
Christiana Figueres: That was totally dehumanizing. Thank you, Tom.
00:35:44.540 --> 00:35:46.540
Tom Rivett-Carnac: You're welcome.
00:35:46.540 --> 00:35:48.860
Christiana Figueres: Can we actually go to something much more humanized?
00:35:48.860 --> 00:35:50.100
Tom Rivett-Carnac: OK, yeah. And this is the personal story from Gita.
00:35:52.880 --> 00:35:58.500
Christiana Figueres: Yeah, this is the last comment that we will have in this episode.
00:35:58.500 --> 00:36:01.380
Paul Dickinson: Not quite, because I have a comment about the acronym episode. If people want to go to our whole episode on this subject, it's number 281.
00:36:04.840 --> 00:36:05.360
Christiana Figueres: Oh, good.
00:36:05.360 --> 00:36:05.520
Paul Dickinson: Right. Now let's hear from Gita.
00:36:06.720 --> 00:36:11.240
Gita (listener, Western Australia): Hi, Christiana, Tom and Paul. My name is Gita. I live in Western Australia, and I've been listening to your podcast for a few years now, and this is just a little story. It's not so much a question, but I just wanted to, first of all, thank you so much for your work. I've learned so much from the podcast, and I get so much out of it. I recently listened to the episode on the 10-year anniversary of the Paris Agreement. I think it's one of your highlights. And I also wanted to share our story. I met my husband in the Netherlands on the 1st of November 2015, when he was about to embark on a group pilgrimage to raise awareness for COP21. The pilgrimage was organized by Urgenda, and they had earlier that year won a very important climate case. I was only there to walk for the day, to walk the first 30 kilometers. But we fell in love, and I kept going back and forth between my working life and walking towards Paris. And on the 29th of November, we walked into Paris together. It was very romantic. Long story short, I moved to Perse, and we both became big fans of your work and your podcast. And that's just what I wanted to share.
00:37:31.860 --> 00:37:34.360
Christiana Figueres: Oh, Gita, that is such a beautiful story. I so remember these beautiful pilgrimages that descended on Paris from every corner of the world. One of the most beautiful preparations, I think, that all of us had for COP21. But what a story that the two of you fell in love throughout this pilgrimage. And I shall therefore now add you and your husband to one of my very favorite clubs, which is the COP Couples Club. I know so many couples that have actually met at the COP, fallen in love and are wonderful families now. So you are hereby inducted into the COP Couples Club. CCC, if you have to have an acronym to that.
00:38:20.040 --> 00:38:23.720
Paul Dickinson: Yeah, very important, the COP Couples Club, three C's. I would just say that, you know, my whole experience of working on climate change is a galaxy of friends and a very special kind of friendship. I would say that me and all these people are linked by deep bonds of purpose and belonging. It doesn't always work if I try and sell them something. Maybe the friendship is a bit thinner than I thought it was. But if I called and said we've all got to be somewhere tomorrow, because we had to be, I know they'll be there.
00:38:51.500 --> 00:38:52.600
Christiana Figueres: Thank you, everyone.
00:38:52.600 --> 00:38:53.660
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Thanks for all the questions. This was a great episode. And we will leave it here and be back as usual next week.
00:38:57.980 --> 00:38:58.460
Paul Dickinson: We look forward to it. See you then. Bye.
