“…there’s a very real possibility that the latter part of the lives of most of you in this room will be grim or non-existent.”[1] Universities do not deny the seriousness of anthropogenic dangerous climate change directly, but they are often complicit through its near-absence across much of the curriculum. This is partly born of a fear of ‘politicizing’ the problem. Yet unless we are willing to address the profoundly political and ethical questions raised by dangerous anthropogenic climate change, we have no hope of avoiding worst-case scenarios or of adapting transformatively to already locked-in harms.

A white desert of snow-covered peaks, startlingly blue skies, face-tingling ice crystals in the crisp cold air,– when I first flew into Svalbard on a reporting mission in the spring of 2007, the beauty of the high northern landscape fulfilled all my expectations of the cold, remote region of my imagination.
I had been covering climate change since the 1990s, when it was anything but a mainstream topic, either of conversation or media interest. Now the International Polar Year had brought me to the place most people would at that time still have assumed one of the last to be bothered by “global warming”.

In this latest interview from ScientistsWarning.TV, Professor McGuire and Dr. Green talk about the need for scientists to speak up about the climate and ecological crisis, about geoengineering – what it is and why we should care – and his new novel, ‘Skyseed’, a terrifying yet realistic tale of geoengineering gone wrong.

“For years, Guy Dauncey has tirelessly warned of the urgency of tackling the climate crisis and provided practical ways to achieve reductions in our emissions. While the crisis has only worsened, the window of opportunity to shift direction has shortened. Here is a blueprint for concrete action. Read it and act!” – David Suzuki

We know that we are in the midst of a climate and ecological emergency. A key question is what can we do about this? Which actions will have the greatest positive impact? Scientists have been working to develop modeling tools to help us to predict this and to inform policy decisions. One promising tool is En-ROADS (Energy rapid overview and decision support).

The footprint of human activity is now felt in every region and ecosystem on earth from the bottom of the oceans to the tallest peaks and even high up into the atmosphere. Because of this, many scientists now think we have departed from the Holocene, which refers to the previous 13,000 years or so and entered into a new, much less stable, geological epoch termed the Anthropocene where humans are very much in the driving seat of the earth’s systems.