#16: Life at 3° C with Dr. Bill Mcguire, Dr. Camille Paramsean, Dr. Edmon Totin, and Dr. Peter Howard

Apr 2, 2023

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You are living on a planet that is 1.1°C hotter than 100 years ago. By 2100, your future family members could be living in a 3°C world. This means mass deaths from extreme heat. Failing agriculture and food scarcity. Lack of drinkable water. Mass climate migration. Cities underwater. Civil unrest, and other dangers that you may not have even thought about. It’s not IF these things will happen, it’s how soon and how bad it will get.

Buckle up.

In this episode, we look at the path we are currently on and attempt to illustrate what daily life could be like as the earth warms to 3°C. We explore where we might adapt and where adaptation could be impossible.

With our four guests, we look at just how dependent we are on natural systems and talk about what will happen as these systems break down. We explore the changes that are already happening in food production and what we will have to do as temperatures rise and weather patterns shift, and speak to how the climate crisis is going to change myriad other aspects of our lives on Earth.

Our guests are some of the top scientists and economists who have studied these issues for decades, written sections of IPCC reports, and books, and compiled meta-studies of existing literature. Each one echoes the same message - Life at 3°C is very, very bad: but that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. While there is still time to prevent further danger, the window is closing.

In this episode, our guests include:

Dr. Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, author of several books including Hothouse Earth.
Dr. Camielle Paramsean, Professor at CNRS (SETE - Experimental and Theoretical Ecology)
Dr. Edmond Totin, Research Scientist at ICRISAT
Dr. Peter Howard, Economic Fellow at Institute for Policy Integrity

Resources:

Hothouse Earth (Bill McGuire)
Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson)
The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert)
Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5C (IPCC)
Extreme Heat Will Change Us (New York Times)
UN Emissions Gap Report 2022 covers how policies currently in place point to a 2.8°C temperature rise by the end of the century.
Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (National Weather Service)
IPCC 6th Assessment Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability - Authors Camille Parmesan (Chapter 2: Terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and their services), Edmond Totin (Chapter 9: Africa)

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