Will we have a habitable earth after all?
This week on Cleaning Up, co-host Baroness Bryony Worthington speaks to journalist David Wallace-Wells, author of 2019 bestseller The Unihabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
This week on Cleaning Up, co-host Baroness Bryony Worthington speaks to journalist David Wallace-Wells, author of 2019 bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
In 2019, while I was jumping up and down on Twitter (as it was called in those good old days) declaring that #RCP85isBollox, journalist and author David Wallace-Wells was writing The Uninhabitable Earth, about all the appalling things scientists say will happen if we follow IPCC scenario RCP8.5.
It was a predictable bestseller (doom sells) and both fed off and fed the Zeitgeist of anger and despair which spawned Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement and Just Stop Oil.
Back then it may only have been energy modellers and a few climate scientists that realised how absurd RCP8.5 was. In 2021, I spoke to leading climate scientist and creator of the Planetary Boundaries framework, Professor Johan Rockström, and the current chair of the IPCC, Professor Jim Skea, on Cleaning Up and both of them were well aware.
Since then it has become mainstream knowledge that the world is not, in fact tracking anywhere near RCP8.5. The dam broke in January 2020 with a Nature comment by Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters entitled Emissions – the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading (which Peters has admitted was spurred by #RCP85isBollox). By 2022, the UNFCC’s annual Sythesis Report showed that even under the sum of Nationally Determined Contributions (which lag net zero climate pledges by a vast margin), the world is clearly tracking below RCP4.5.
Last year, this reality caught up with David Wallace-Wells. He wrote a long piece in the New York Times entitled Beyond CatastropheA New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View, in which he explained that it was no longer the case that the world was barrelling towards the most extreme climate catastrophe scenarios. But it contained a large does of self-justification - its opening line claims “You can never really see the future, only imagine it, then try to make sense of the new world when it arrives”, even though there were plenty of voices he could have listened to before declaring Earth on track to be uninhabitable. The dogged and precise Professor Roger Pielke, currently the second-most popular guest on Cleaning Up after Yanis Varoufakis, he dismisses as “a frequent Republican witness at congressional climate hearings”. Of me, he notes that I “spent a good deal of 2019 yelling on social media that “RCP8.5 is bollox” - but does not explain why my yelling did not give him pause for thought, when it alerted so many others to the enormous issue of dodgy climate scenarios.
So, now that David Wallace-Wells accepts that emissions are at or near peak, what does he think? Is he sorry about writing a scary book based on a scenario that lacks a shred of plausibility? Or does the chance of higher-than-expected Climate Sensitivity - which could be behind last year's extraordinary sequence of extreme weather events- make up for using the wrong scenario?
For what it’s worth, I think science proceeds when we DON'T muddle things up. But I strongly suggest you listen to or watch the episode - you'll find it informative and fascinating. David is a powerful and articulate communicator, whose instincts are in the right place and who has certainly thought about the issues more than most. And Baroness Bryony Worthington is the perfect interviewer.