In this episode of "Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap," hosts Peter Reynolds and Geoff Sheffrin discuss the worst-case scenarios for humanity. They explore the various ways in which we could meet our end, from natural disasters to human-made catastrophes, including the climate crisis. While the episode may seem all doom and gloom, the hosts emphasize the importance of understanding the severity of the situation so that we can take action before it's too late.
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In this episode of "Mother Nature Doesn't Give a Crap," hosts Peter Reynolds and Geoff Sheffrin discuss the worst-case scenarios for humanity. They explore the various ways in which we could meet our end, from natural disasters to human-made catastrophes, including the climate crisis. While the episode may seem all doom and gloom, the hosts emphasize the importance of understanding the severity of the situation so that we can take action before it's too late.
Subscribe on your favourite podcast app and don’t miss an episode!
Also available on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkTMDHlF8N8lVIWzyPl4yhw?sub_confirmation=1
Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100087081536326
Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mothernature_podcast/
Peter Reynolds 00:18
Hi, I'm Peter Reynolds and welcome to Mother Nature doesn't give a crap with Geoff Sheffrin. We are all going to die. Maybe not today, but soon, geologically speaking. And what about humanity? will we survive into the next millennium? Or will we go out dinosaur style with a giant asteroid? Or have aI take over the planet? Or maybe just good old fashioned nucular annihilation? Or does Mother Nature finally get fed up with us and give the big middle finger in terms of catastrophic floods, droughts and superstorms. On today's episode, we're going to be looking at the worst case scenarios for humanity. And what can be done to help turn the tide before it's too late. And joining me as always, is professional engineer, environmental activist and self proclaimed fifth Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Jeff Schefren. Jeff, welcome back to the podcast.
Geoff Sheffrin 01:20
Peter, thank you, as always, your creative introductions, just set the tone. I love it. So we're up for our doom and gloom meeting today.
Peter Reynolds 01:29
Absolutely, Geoff. And I guess that's really the first question is, why did you feel we needed to have a doom and gloom episode?
Geoff Sheffrin 01:37
Well, the issue is that we've been talking for the last six episodes about the climate crisis. And we've gone through a shopping list of things that we need to do. And I think that is pretty self evident. And in the next episode, we're going to be covering more of these things. But I thought it was time to reflect on where are we as a species in the context of the climate crisis? So I'm referring to this as my doom and gloom episode, because I feel this is very much where we are. And I don't think we really appreciate the problems that we're in.
Peter Reynolds 02:13
So maybe we can then talk about that, you know, the sort of they're the two primary causes that can lead to our extinction.
Geoff Sheffrin 02:22
Okay, let me put my thoughts into perspective, people by now, particularly those that have seen all the podcasts that they'll know that I'm an engineer, I'm a rational thinker. I look at my facts and figures about the climate crisis, in detail to make sure that I've got them from reliable sources. And even reliable sources have a bit of variability, but that's what I'm doing. So on the basis of that, you know, this is an episode where I've dug into a much bigger, broader picture, which I have not researched. But I've done enough research on it to be able to talk about it now. I'm not a clairvoyant. I'm not a futurist. Right, unknown, let me correct that. I'm not a fortune teller. But I think I'm something of a future is by virtue of my background and my training, and how I look at things in the world. After all, one of my businesses, I do strategic work for clients. So am I a futurist? Maybe, maybe not, doesn't matter. The point is, we are dealing with a doom and gloom thing. So I really wanted to start off with the very big picture of where we are, in my opinion.
Peter Reynolds 03:30
So where are we then Geoff?
Geoff Sheffrin 03:34
Well, let's put this planet our planet earth into perspective. The universe was created 13.7 13 point 8 billion years ago, ever before he was a nighttime, the sun, our sun in our solar system is about 4.6 billion years old. Our Earth, our little planet, is about four and a half billion years old. So this chunk of space debris that we reside on, is four and a half billion years old and has been forming itself and continues to form itself. It hasn't finished. It'll finish forming itself when it disintegrates as a planet. So what am I looking at? I'm looking at our planet, which, in the context of the universe might be about the size of a grain of sand on a large beach. There are billions of grains of sand, and ours is about as irrelevant as the rest of them. Yet, this is our home. We're the species that have developed here. But our development here is we didn't create it. It was fortuitous. It just happened. Should I dig into that a little more?
Peter Reynolds 04:56
Well, when you said you were going to put it in context, I didn't realize that context of the known universe, Geoff. So I'm very happy to have you go on.
Geoff Sheffrin 05:06
Alright, let me go on with the next piece. When you go through the four and a half billion years, let me go back to the last 800,000 years, 800,000 years, I've been reading some research from something called the Greenland ice project. It's one of about six projects, which over the last 40 or 50 years have been tackled on Greenland. And these projects have gone down to colliders and pulled up the ice core crust from two kilometers deep. And the neat thing about the ice core crust is at every layer, every centimeter on the way down, it locks in what was going on in the on the planet at that time. So a two kilometer chord down, which is what they've done, gets me to 800,000 years of history. When you look at the history, and I now get back to the ice ages, the planet has evolved through volcanoes and ice age. And you mentioned at the outset, you know, the the dinosaur annihilation from a, from an asteroid, etc. But, you know, why have human beings if we've been around 4.6 billion years, why am human beings evolved the way we are today? Much earlier. But when you look at the ice ages, the last serious ice age we had was about, it stopped about 130,000 years ago. Right? Then we were into the next Ice Age and a few 10s of 1000s years ago, we climbed out of that ice age. And we got to where we are today in terms of temperature profiles. What's interesting about Ice Age temperature profiles in the depth of an ice age, the average planet temperature is about minus eight degrees Celsius. Versus right now the average planet temperature is about zero degrees Celsius. And people will look at that and say eight degrees Celsius. When it's minus 20, in Toronto, I put a Parker when we go out. That's not the point. The point is that when you have a minus eight degrees Celsius around the whole planet, the Arctic ice cap goes all the way down to France and Spain, covers Canada goes into the northern us, covers China down into parts of India. The polar ice cap isn't just a bit that we know now. It's down past the Tropic of Capricorn. From the south end, it covers Australia, etc. It goes up to the Tropic of Cancer. So you have this thin band around the equator, which had minus eight gave sustainability because the question would be if Neanderthal man was around a million years ago, how come he didn't extinct himself in the Ice Age? Well, he didn't expand because he didn't have the resources because the world was very limited in what he could give him. He was from Asia, out to probably the west side of France, Europe effectively. That was his span, lots of little colonies, but it never gelled as a species. And for whatever reason, it became extinct. I haven't studied that. That's not my purpose. What is special about today, where we are, is that in the last six, seven or 8000 years, if you look at these, these ice, borings, these drillings, from the Denmark or Greenland project, what we've had is about six or 8000 years of the current average temperature profile. That's never happened before the ice ages. The ice ages when they peaked at this temperature only lasted 1000 years or two. This is the first time we've had an extended period. So what's happened as a species, we've been able to roll up our sleeves and get on with it. And that's what we've done. And we've done quite a remarkable job. Until 150 years ago, we became so remarkable that we invented the steam engine stuck on a set of wheels. And Robert Louis Stevenson really had some cold. Let's fire this thing up, make the pod run. Ever since then, we're going to have in a handbasket.
Peter Reynolds 09:06
Well, that's something funny enough, I read the same article that you did. And it's fascinating this idea of studying the past and studying the distant past, to create and understand solutions for moving forward. And one of the rights one of the stats that jumped out at me was for 800,000 years, the co2 levels have been between 170 and 220 parts per million. But in recent memory, we're now over 400 parts per million. And considering in just such a short period of time, it's nearly doubled. This this is not the trajectory they want to be on.
Geoff Sheffrin 09:49
No, and that's this is why one of the reasons I wanted to approach this particular episode this way because when I go back there was 800,000 years looking at the same graph you're looking at, if you're exactly Right, we've been between 150, and maybe as much as 250 parts per million of co2. It's the natural background for the planet. But what you've seen, and what I've seen is, it's the last 150 years, where we've just added the hockey stick. Right. So we've gone from the peak of 250, we're now pushing 450 and netzero fine budget, if you can lock it in at 450. But we're not going to be quite that clever unless we really get off our asses and do something. But we're not going to be locking it in at 450. Here to go further. So the last 150 years is what's caused where we are. And whether we like want to deny it or not, we are the instigators of it.
Peter Reynolds 10:45
Maybe we could move on to another, another potential NASTRAN natural disaster.
Geoff Sheffrin 10:52
So what do we got available? Something pretty benign, that's happening right now. And you and I have looked at the data is the sub replacement fertility piece that's going to annihilate us. The good news about that is it may peak out population because the planet won't be able to sustain 20 billion people we're at a billion now. Right. But it's important to recognize this BS because it'll come up in one of the other natural disasters want to talk about. So sub replacement is not going to wipe us out. But it's happening right now.
Peter Reynolds 11:23
And one way that we can definitely control the population of the earth is an asteroid impact. Can we talked a little bit about that, Geoff? Yeah,
Geoff Sheffrin 11:33
the point is, we won't control it, what we can do with a bit of luck is because of our space technology, we can probably avoid the risk. So I think an asteroid wiping us out, the way it did for the dinosaurs, is highly unlikely, because we've already proven that we can now charge a reasonable sized asteroid asteroid coming toward an asteroid off its path. And we've already demonstrated that we can do that. And we have enough capability to detect something like that coming towards us that we have time to make that you would then fix in place, probability of that very small.
Peter Reynolds 12:07
I really find that the the, you know, it's very much science fiction, becoming science fact. And this idea of the Dart project, I think you were talking about with NASA, you know, the idea that we can detect these asteroids detect these Near Earth Objects, in fact, I think that NASA is, is putting a special telescope into orbit specifically to look for Near Earth Objects. That's correct. And the idea that when we see one that could be an issue nudging it off course, it's really, you know, we talk about the doom and gloom episode, I was just doing a little bit of research because we we often we think about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, like 65 million years ago. But what about more recent asteroid impacts, and I was looking at, they call it the, the Gousto event that happened in Siberia in 1908. This is an asteroid that was only about 60 meters wide. And it flattened a 2000 square kilometer area of forest in Siberia. And when I just sort of looked at a map, suddenly, you see that as being an area from Toronto to Halifax, from Barry to Florida. I mean, we're talking about a massive area. So it would not take, I think, you know, something the size of what destroyed the dinosaurs to devastate us, and screw. And so it's really, it's really good to know that there are people looking into this. Because
Geoff Sheffrin 13:44
my speculation is we know enough about how to predict that and obviate its problem very early on in the cycle, which is why I say the probability of that is very small. Go back a century, the risk is much higher, today, much lower.
Peter Reynolds 14:01
So let's talk about another potential natural disaster. And that's electromagnetic storms, geomagnetic storms, solar disruptions, things like that.
Geoff Sheffrin 14:13
Well, they are happening all the time. The sun is perpetually going through. The sun is a giant, vast fusion reactor. Mind, it is a self sustaining piece. It's been around for 4.6 billion years. With a bit of luck. It'll go on for another few billion, eventually to burnout. But at the moment, it's not a stable entity. You'd look at it and say, Oh, look, the sun's nice and bright. It's up here. It's yellow in the sky, but it isn't. You know, it's bouncing around. It has solar flares. And some of them are serious enough that we get disruptions from solar flares are happening all the time. You know, we get many, many, many of them every every year every month, virtually every week. There are solar flares, but they're small enough to be inconsequential, but some of them are had been big enough that they disrupted, you know, power transmissions and that sort of thing and communications for short periods of time. So not out of the question. But I think, again, like the asteroid, it's a very, very small probability that it'll affect us. But we can't predict it an asteroid, we can predict this we couldn't predict,
Peter Reynolds 15:19
is see, I would maybe disagree slightly with you there, Geoff. And the fact that I think it has the potential to impact us more and more. And that is at you know, I was thinking of, of examples like, like, what does a solar disruption, you know, geomagnetic storm, what it what does it do? You know, it's disrupting electrical fields. It's impacting things like GPS. Right now, maybe that messes you up on your trip to the cottage, you know, that you can't, you know, you can't track your trip there. But what about when we have all automated cars, and autonomous cars all using GPS all on the highways? Something like this happens? Yeah, it does not. It does not make for a go down.
Geoff Sheffrin 16:07
Let's get down to the CD and go play dodgem cars. Yeah, exactly,
Peter Reynolds 16:11
exactly. And
Geoff Sheffrin 16:12
it's a disaster happening.
Peter Reynolds 16:14
And by that point, that people, you know, my son or my son's children, they're not going to know how to drive a car, they're not going to know what to do. And so I think that, you know, it may be sometime in the future. But hopefully, these companies that are building these cars are factoring these things in so that we can redesign the systems before it happens. My fingers are going I'm sorry, my fingers are crossed, Geoff, the
Geoff Sheffrin 16:40
that's probably a good idea. Just make sure they don't set up with arthritis as you go, because you'll be crossing them for a long time. Either way, let me move to another one, which I think is a much more realistic scenario. If you go back in history, and you look at volcanoes, our planet is not a stable entity. Earthquakes are, we know where earthquakes are going to happen. Because we know where the fault lines up and they protect the plates match up or don't match up. Volcanoes. We know where they are. And there's just like there is on earthquakes on the Richter scale. It's a geographic, it's an exponential scale. There's the same thing for volcanoes. The last really serious one, we had Western Bara in Indonesia, in 1815. The population of the globe at that time was relatively small, it was immediately after the Napoleonic Wars. But this thing erupted with a force seven on a on this scale of zero to eight. It discharged, let me just check a number because I think it is charged 100 cubic kilometers of debris 100 cubic kilometers of debris that is debris 100 kilometers wide, 100 kilometers high and 100 kilometers deep, which spread across the world. We had a year and a half of volcanic winter. The sun did not shine. Crops did not grow. The climate stopped. Starvation was a problem. This is immediately after Napoleonic Wars. Right. It's a risk. The last big one like that, I think was about 537 BC. But these things are not out of the question. We have that structure in our planet. And we have several volcanoes. Hawaii is an area, the Indonesia inherited is another and there in other parts of the world under the Pacific. These things can happen. And we with 8 billion on the planet. If this were to happen to us, I'm not sure we'd survive well, for a year and a half. If the planet was blocked out, and we couldn't grow things.
Peter Reynolds 19:01
No, absolutely. And I was thinking doing doing a little bit of research on this that we know the other difference, of course, as you just mentioned, is population density. And we talk about, for example, Pompeii. So when when Vesuvius exploded, Pompeii had a population of 10,000 people and about 2000 people died. Well, now what is right next to Vesuvius, but Naples with a population of 3 million. So something like that happens, there's going to be a it's going to be much more catastrophic. And it is there. Yeah, I was just gonna say that, that. Luckily, though, again, we have people on this, this is what's great is, you know, you know, whether you're an engineer or a scientist, you know, there are people that are looking into these things, and we have a scientific study being done right now in Hawaii, that looked at the last eruption. And they're, and they're basically able now to build predictive models based on what's happening inside the volcano, to figure out when it's going to blow. And so this idea of, you know, having being able to evacuate, you're not going to stop something like have it happened in Indonesia, if that happens, it happens. But in terms of smaller eruptions, you know, that are going to impact loss of life directly around the volcano, we at least have plans in place.
Geoff Sheffrin 20:32
Absolutely. And if you look at something like the volcano around Pompeii, at that time, it that was a very small eruption. It really, I think it was only rated as a three or maybe a four on this scale. So it's a very small and in that context, highly localized, you know, tomorrow was effectively became a global event.
Peter Reynolds 20:55
Did you know I didn't know this? You know, we talked in the 80s. We talked about Mount St. Helens, and that, of course, getting all the press. But in 1985, in Colombia, there was a volcano that exploded, they call it the American tragedy, and 23,000 people died. From that. And this is, this is also the thing that that sort of bothers me is that, you know, something happens in North America. Oh, my God, we hear all about it. You know, 57 people died in Mount St. Helen 23,000 people died. I wonder how many of our listeners knew in 1985, there was a volcanic eruption. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, when I had never heard of that, the one that happened in Indonesia. So again, this is all about educating people, letting them know that these things do exist. They are you know, and we need to study history, if we're going to have a path forward.
Geoff Sheffrin 21:54
We need to study history and study the current science to stay on top of it. So we're at least informed, we won't change how these things unfold. Excuse me, right? So, you know, we're we are we are the victims of whatever Mother Nature deals with us here. We're we live on a volatile planet. And that's just the nature of the beast.
Peter Reynolds 22:16
So we've talked about natural disasters. And you taught me a word today. Jeff,
Geoff Sheffrin 22:25
and thrombogenic. Is that what you said I should say? Is Man, man, yes,
Peter Reynolds 22:31
yes. You see, we learn everything, even even our hosts. We all learn stuff on this podcast. So yes, anthropogenic man made disasters? And yes, just from the first half of this podcast, Geoff, you think to yourself, well, Christ, we've got so many things to worry about with the natural world, why would we create our own problems?
Geoff Sheffrin 22:54
Well, that's exactly my point. There's a billion of us scurrying around on this planet, right? About 7 billion of whom are just trying to get on with their lives. And about a billion I might put in the category of business leaders, entrepreneurs, professional engineers, scientists, academics, thinkers, you know, they're the ones that might be able to pull things together and make things happen and moving things forward. But the point is, you know, we are in a situation where we have now created our own means of self destruction in several ways. And I think about the intellectual capability that we have. And I wonder why we have the short sighted my optic stupidity, to do what we do. You know, if I look at it, we can annihilate it with for 70 years now we've had nuclear capability, we can ignite as as a species, right. And we're too busy, like kids in the schoolyard threatening each other with, you know, throwing an acorn at each other. When you know, that acorn could be a nuclear bomb, which can kill can wipe out 90% of the world's population. That why did we do that to ourselves, because that's what we can do. Book of biological annihilation. That, to me is a very real risk. We've gotten so many if you look up the there are some very very virulent, deadly bacterial viral diseases that are active on the planet now. Right. And I, you know, there's several I could name but they don't. Let me let me name one that's perhaps understood well, like Ebola, or something like our recent pandemic with COVID. If I combine Ebola as death capability, with COVID transmission capability, I can wipe out 3 billion people. Right? We're creating an environment that is getting warmer, and it's getting more conducive to these viruses breeding mutations, because we're moving out of the stratosphere, that very narrow band of temperature, which allows for these things to migrate and change. That's part of what we've done to climate change. So we have risks there, which I don't think we're, there's a lot of people paying attention to it. Right. But I don't think we're doing it well enough. There's a risk there, in my opinion.
Peter Reynolds 25:19
No, absolutely. And it goes to what we talked previously about, you know, the expanding populations and us moving into areas that are dangerous, whether it's next to volcanoes, whether it's moving into floodplains, or in the case of these diseases, that you're talking about, more interaction with wildlife and humans that didn't necessarily exist before, as we sort of pushed out into her into the world. Interestingly, though, when you mentioned before, that we were going to talk about biological annihilation, I funny enough, I thought we were going to talk more about biodiversity. And the idea of how there's like, you know, a million species currently on the brink of extinction, and how we're losing species every day. And it's, you know, this idea of habitat loss and deforestation, the whole chain can collapse and that whole food chain, and we're doing Yeah, yeah, because that's a real path,
Geoff Sheffrin 26:27
we don't appreciate that. We don't appreciate it, this whole chain is linked. We survive, because the parts of the chain below us, feed us whether it's plants or animals, it's part of our food and sustenance, it also creates the environment that should be healthy enough for us to breathe and live in. Right. But we are creating change, which is destroying those things, and therefore creates an imbalance much further down the chain, which then ripples up and eventually will come back and bite us.
Peter Reynolds 26:58
Yeah, I was looking at an example of the acidification of oceans, which is directly correlates to more co2 in the atmosphere, makes the changes the pH levels of oceans makes them more acidic, ends up killing coral reefs, which are breeding grounds for fish. For tourism. There was one stat that said there are 500 million people on the earth that get their food and their livelihood, essentially, directly from the health of coral reefs, you know, whether that's fishing or tourism. And, again, these are things that are that are manmade, that we can control. And I don't think people look that far down the line.
Geoff Sheffrin 27:47
I agree with you they don't. That's one of the reasons why I wanted this episode to put some of these things into context. There are some things in the planet, we can't control. We've talked about those. But all of these ones we're talking about now, we could have controlled, right and now need control. And we now need to find a way of capping it and reversing it. We're not there.
Peter Reynolds 28:10
Okay, so what about something recently, everyone's talking about in that AI chat GPT. The proliferation of artificial intelligence, the where does that fall in the?
Geoff Sheffrin 28:24
Well, I think when you and I started this first podcast, it would leave him going on the agenda. But that shows how remarkably quickly it has developed. Right, our first podcast was about the time when chat GPT was was launched. Right? And, and you're the pundits, the experts who created this are saying, we're in a risk situation. And if it's anything like the internet, the internet was intended to be good. And it is, it is good for so many and so much of everything we do, but the bad actors have figured out how to take advantage of it. You give them something like AI and chat DBT the bad actors will accelerate and no matter how much talking we do about capping containing a six month moratorium, sort of what we knew but rules and regulations in place. If we get it, in my opinion that genies out of the bottle. I think it's one of the high risks that we're facing without it. To me, it's it's becoming a higher risk auditor.
Peter Reynolds 29:30
Absolutely. And I think this idea of, of more and more of us living by and essentially, you know, being controlled by these algorithms that, you know, again, are often started with the best of intentions. And I was looking at a couple of studies that were showing that 55% For example of of human resource professionals in the US use AI in some form of another when it comes to the hiring process. And what they're discovering is, is that they have racial bias built into their programming, not because somebody went out of their way to do that, but because the data that they're using to educate and to learn is based on racially biased data from the past. And there was another example
Geoff Sheffrin 30:25
it reflects. Go ahead, I was gonna say it reflects who we are as a species. And that's why they have biases built it. We didn't deliver it, as you said, we didn't build them in there there because it's picking up all of his data, which contains those biases, because that data comes from humans previously.
Peter Reynolds 30:44
And the more and more we come to rely on it, it's one of these things where it spits out an answer, whether it's a medical diagnosis, whether it's a recommendation to hire someone, people don't have time to double check the sources or figure out how it got to that response. They just go with it. And, and I don't I don't see a matrix situation coming, Jeff, you know, we're not clear, we're also only controlled, but it definitely, you know, has the potential to really have an impact on on our lives, if we don't sort of step up. And, and hopefully, I know the genies out of the bottle, but maybe there's something that we can that can be done.
Geoff Sheffrin 31:25
Well, I'm hopeful that I mean, it's not an area that we're going to be digging into, I mean, our task is trying to figure our way through the climate crisis and try and push the positives that can be accomplished there. But this, to my mind is something which in the last very short time, has crept up and become just a bigger problem.
Peter Reynolds 31:44
So let's talk about nanobots. And this nanotechnology that's coming. So, you know, we're on the forefront, we're not quite there, but obviously, we can see the potential, but with the potential for good comes the potential for harm.
Geoff Sheffrin 32:04
Right. And I can't talk to that with any authority, because I'm not digging into it. But I don't have any difficulty imagining that with the amount of self replicating capability that these AI computers have, that I don't see how long how we can be very far away from self replicating capabilities. You know, and you couple that with the more innate intelligence building capability, we can create a subspecies which could grow into something which could be a threat to humanity, not out of the question.
Peter Reynolds 32:40
Well, to connect it to the environmental crisis, and solutions that we've actually talked about, you are starting to see people talk about, you know, things like, you know, building, nanotechnology, you know, building self replicating robots that can take the carbon out of the atmosphere, or who can clean the oceans. There's all of these, you know, possibilities, and they're very exciting. But of course, great, you know, once once you've built an organism that can go into the ocean, and, you know, take the, you know, you know, take the acid, you know, change the pH levels, you know, do that, how do you stop it. And so there's a lot of great intentions out there. But it, it can get a little, it can get a little scary, if it's not sort of tightly controlled.
Geoff Sheffrin 33:32
And I think you've just put your finger on the main point. We are so freakin clever as a species, we go and put this next solution in place. And then have we ever get surprised by the ripple effect or the knock on effect that this solution now has given us by way of a new problem? We seem to be quite good at that.
Peter Reynolds 33:52
Absolutely. Absolutely. The did you want to touch a little bit more on the on fertility and this idea, you know, when it comes to manmade?
Geoff Sheffrin 34:01
No, not not? Not really, I think today, I'm hoping this was the episode where those people that want to think about it would listen, those people that want to be in denialism will take a big fat black blanket and go into their couch and pull it over their heads and ignore what's going on. You know, I intended this to be a bit of a doom and gloom issue because we need to understand that there are things we can't control. But we need to get our hands on those things we can control. And we just don't do that. Well. And I think AI might just be the recent fastest developing example of how this is becoming a problem.
Peter Reynolds 34:48
Let's pull it back, you know, to the to the climate crisis to kind of you know, and where we started as a manmade you know, issue and, and and talk just A little bit about that in terms of, you know, in terms of, you know, our future as individuals as a species, you know, can you just talk a little bit about that? Well,
Geoff Sheffrin 35:12
you know, we, it's back to our opening salvo and one of the early episodes 2030, net zero, we have to get to 2030. Net Zero, because net zero just locks us in a hat. By that time, we could be a 450 500 parts per million co2, and methane, unrelated, we'll be at a cap, which is already going to cause significant global problems. And net zero at that time, as I've said many times, if we haven't got there soon, and then started to turn it around down to 00, we're going to just, you know, that is not the solution. Net Zero is not the solution. Net Zero 2050 2060 is a waste of bloody time, get off your ass and do something now. We've got to get to net zero by 2030. And have a mitigation plan in place to go down that slope, not to continue with?
Peter Reynolds 36:04
Well, we see that Mother Nature has a lot of tools in its arsenal. If it's pissed off with this, Geoff, I think we've learned that if anything,
Geoff Sheffrin 36:12
yes, that's absolutely the case. And I'm still fearful that she will exercise some of those. And we will, we will live to regret it. And maybe we will die regretting it.
Peter Reynolds 36:26
Any final thoughts? Geoff, before we wrap up?
Geoff Sheffrin 36:31
Well, one of the things I've read past position out there is this episode, hopefully is designed to give a little more thought, or a little different perspective on thought. And my positioning here would be, we can't control the natural disaster side of it, we can mitigate and react and be informed. But with what we're doing, do, we really want to be in a position that our great grandchildren and their grandchildren and so on, gets destroyed, because we can't get our act together and shake things up to improve. That's the legacy we are creating. And we are not reversing it quickly enough. We're going to be creating this problem. And you know, people like to say, well, I don't want to leave this my grandchildren. Well, I think for the great great grandchildren in this, we may have left an extinct species. And they'll all be five year old orphans. Those that live anyway. So you know, I think I think we have a problem. And I think we are I don't think we address it adequately, globally. We've got the science, no 100 of the technology, we just don't get on and do it. We don't have the global leadership.
Peter Reynolds 37:46
Well, we definitely have the technology. I mean, if we can send, you know, a small little, you know, spacecraft, millions of kilometers to nudge an asteroid out of the way. We can definitely, we have the know how, and and the smarts to to solve the climate crisis. But it's not necessarily sexy. It's not something you know, that looks good on a campaign poster. And so finding that leadership is is really challenging, perhaps it is the toughest, you know, as you said, the money is out there, the know how is out there, it's the leadership.
Geoff Sheffrin 38:22
But the availability of easy money by not going that path is what's still driving us. If we haven't found a way of stopping burning coal, we're not going to get there.
Peter Reynolds 38:34
And I'm hoping that, that the podcast, if anything, raises that awareness. Because even in my own research, even in my own research, Geoff, for the for the podcast, looking at connecting the dots between say, the climate crisis, and and the economy and an economic crisis. And we were talking, for example, about, you know, rising temperatures, and people will say, rising temperatures, if the ice caps melt, you know, sea levels will rise that is very hard for people to imagine, to say, Am I really going to, you know, take my garbage out, because the ice caps might melt like that sounds very far in the future. Whereas if you look, for example, in the southern US, I'll give you an example. So in the southern US because of rising heat, and rising temperatures, they've actually lost in the southern states 20% of workable hours during daylight, because people can't work in those conditions. And that 20% directly affects the bottom line directly raises prices.
Geoff Sheffrin 39:44
It's another whole piece that we haven't touched on, but you're absolutely right.
Peter Reynolds 39:48
I think there's a whole episode on that. But there's a direct result that people can see of the rising temperatures and climate change. And I think hopefully this is what we're bringing to the table.
Geoff Sheffrin 40:00
Well, that's what this podcast series is about trying to encourage people to think outside the box and then get on board with what we need to do. Because what we're creating is self induced annihilation.
Peter Reynolds 40:16
And for those people sitting on the couch, Geoff, what do you always like to tell them?
Geoff Sheffrin 40:20
Well, there's movers and shakers in this world. The movers make things happen. The vast majority are the spectators. The spectators can sit on the couch. But my suggestion is go out there and be a mover contribute to making things happen. We can do this if we get our act together and get on with it. Peter, thank you.
Peter Reynolds 40:43
Well, Geoff, thank you very much for sharing your insights and giving me nightmares for the next few weeks. And to our audience, we want to thank you again for joining us. We love bringing you this information. And we absolutely appreciate your support, whether it's listening to us wherever we get your podcasts, or whether you're watching us on our YouTube channel. We absolutely love hearing from you. So please keep those comments coming. And for Geoff Sheffrin, I'm Peter Reynolds. You've been watching Mother Nature doesn't give a crap. And we'll see you next time. Hopefully