My latest with @w_knorr & Robert Watson published today by @ConversationUK "The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C” Why did we write this? Let me explain with a 🧵theconversation.com/the-overshoot-… In 2021 Sir Robert Watson (previous chair of IPCC & IPBES), Wolfgang Knorr (climate scientist) and I wrote an article “The concept of net zero is a dangerous trap”. Three years later we’ve revisited net zero & efforts to avoid dangerous climate change. 2/ theconversation.com/climate-scient…

1⃣Writing a report about climate change impacts. I cannot stress how important it is to understand that dangerous climate change is already here. 2023 has been gobsmackingly bannanas & it's likely to get worse. climate.nasa.gov/news/3282/nasa… 2⃣Multiple temperature records in 2023 have been shattered with temperature anomalies in September being the greatest year-on-year increase ever recorded. It is now almost inevitable that 2023 will be the warmest year for at least 125,000 years. climate.copernicus.eu/climate-bullet…

It is sometimes said that working with fossil fuel companies will help them decarbonise. Is that working? Take @Shell for example. Here are some relevant announcements & reporting over past 6 months. 1 - 25th October 2023 "Shell boss set to cut jobs from low-carbon division: Wael Sawan ready to axe 200 roles from division as part of plan to grow profits”
theguardian.com/business/2023/…

As someone who has spent over a decade writing/talking about climate change, I’ve often felt like I have been waiting for the penny to drop: for society to recognise the catastrophe that we are heading towards. 1/6 Would the brutal heat afflicting much of southern Europe finally be the moment when we would look up and realise things are going seriously wrong with the weather? 2/6 independent.co.uk/news/world/eur…

1⃣Since their invention in the 1950s, 8.3billion tons of plastics have been produced. 80% of it has ended up in landfill or the environment. Recyling was thought to be a solution to the plastic problem. But it may be making it worse. A 🧵 inews.co.uk/opinion/recycl… 2⃣A recent study on a UK plastics recyling facility discovered that it was releasing billions of microplastic particles in each cubic meter of waste water & this is one of the better run facilities having installed microparticle filters. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

1⃣This week I was told that my talk about net zero at @TEDTalks is being circulated by some within the COP27 negotiations as evidence that scientists say that 1.5 is now impossible and so the Paris Agreement should be watered down. jamesgdyke.info/acknowledging-… 2⃣It’s no surprise that I am being used as a useful idiot for fossil fuel interest who continue to impede effective action on the climate crisis. I would like to think that I’m not solely responsible for the collapse of the climate negotiations...

1⃣I am a perhaps strangely optimistic person given my day job. But over the past few months there has been this building sense of dread & despair. Not so much about env' change, but societies' unravelling as a consequence to such change. Sorry to lay that on you🧵 2⃣It seems more & more people are protesting, getting arrested, prosecuted, convicted, going to prison. I get the objectives in movements such as @JustStop_Oil @ExtinctionR. And the inevitably that the UK & other governments respond with more draconion laws.

In June this year I gave a talk at TED about net zero. It’s from 25min in this recording of the session. I don’t know if @Ted will produce a standalone video for my talk. Yes, I would like them to do that, no I don’t know how such decisions get made. ted.com/talks/ted_coun… Now the session videos have been released I may write up some thoughts. In the meantime the transcript with slides is available here: jamesgdyke.info/we-must-end-ou…

1⃣We are not going to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C. Anyone who says otherwise is misinformed, or in denial, or dishonest. Does that mean we are doomed in the future? Ask that question to someone suffering the brutal heat in India. eu.usatoday.com/story/news/wor… 2⃣Accepting the failure of the Paris Agreement means stopping asking for "more political will". We cannot continue to have faith in the political & economic systems that are unable to deliver the scale of change required. unfccc.int/process-and-me…

1⃣If anyone wants my "take" on the latest IPCC report then here goes (will be writing something about this later, but to be honest, this thread will probably allow me to say what I want to say more effectively). 2⃣1.5°C is over. We now have to imagine the most fabulous scenarios to truly honour the Paris Agreement. That includes increasingly including large-scale removal of CO2 from the atmosphere to drag down temps after "overshooting".

1⃣Ask not what mitigation can do for you, but what you can do for mitigation. I fear we have approached the climate crises entirely back to front. Rather than ask how can we rapidly reduce fossil fuel use we've instead been trying to prop it up for as long as possible. Why?

https://twitter.com/Peters_Glen/status/1426072276861169666

2⃣Because pretty much all the analysis around decarbonisation that comes out of the IPCC is based on models that can only ever explore incremental change in which the global economy essentially continues. This rules out - by design - the sort of actions that could actually work.

It’s publication week for my new book Fire, Storm, and Flood: The Violence of Climate Change. On 5th Aug @ 6:30pm I’m doing a free online book talk in partnership with independent bookshop @Octoberbooks. A 🧵about some of the things I will talk about. 1⃣ eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-f… Things are not looking great right now. Records being shattered around the word gives us a glimpse of our future. We will soon look back at the crazy weather or 2021 as one of the final years of the stable Holocene epoch (all photos from book). 2⃣

1⃣"albeit still much too slowly" and that is why net zero is a trap. It assures us progress is being made - just not fast enough - when we know that winning slowly is no better than loosing as @billmckibben once said.

https://twitter.com/James_BG/status/1394913358600720385

2⃣One reason the @IEA report is important because it (finally) calls time on fossil fuel investments. But it's still full of climate unicorns. Vast deployment of technologies that either don't exist or haven't progressed beyond demonstrator.

1⃣This is very promising & is cause for optimism. But look, let's delve just a little bit deeper and you can see that these numbers mask a widening gap between actions and what we must do to avoid dangerous warming. A 🧵

https://twitter.com/tveitdal/status/1392016195730255872

2⃣The IEA has a history of underestimating wind and solar deployment rates. What's behind this latest revision is the big leap in China where wind & solar has taken off even without subsidies. Excellent news. But...

1⃣Thanks Simon. @James_BG makes a great deal of sense & I will reply below. But first I must point out one glaring error. He describes me as one "of Europe's leading environmental scientists". I am not!

https://twitter.com/DrSimEvans/status/1388140333217853441

2⃣That out the way... My immediate response is, James doesn't connect with the fact that net zero policies are simply too late. The rapid development of solutions are happening within a climate policy system that is decades out of date. inews.co.uk/opinion/climat…

1⃣Interesting article that cites @w_knorr, Bob Watson and my recent net zero trap article. It acknowleges that "the concept of net zero is complex and the science and best practices are developing fast". A 🧵 businessgreen.com/news/4030612/r… 2⃣I take the argument here to be that net zero policies should be seen as a "floor" for action not a "ceiling". It's a minimum that should over time only increase. Sound familiar? Nationally Determined Contributions of the UNFCCC? unfccc.int/news/climate-c…

1⃣ Debate continues about our net zero article. Great, because this is urgently needed. Here I want to address some specific claims that are vital to understanding the danger we are in. A 🧵

https://twitter.com/JamesGDyke/status/1385128115014455298

2⃣ “We are attacking the Paris Agreement”
No, we are trying to protect it. It’s the use of imaginary Carbon Dioxide Removal technologies that is shielding the lack of progress. Paris was a remarkable victory & we ust honour it.

1⃣ Climate policies built around netzero have become a dangerous trap. This is about the hardest article I have written. Not because it’s technical, but because of the emotions & worry of being misunderstood. 🧵 about why we must talk about netzero. theconversation.com/climate-scient… 2⃣ Before that a TLDR: Netzero offers promise of technological salvation that promotes a burn now pay later approach. This risks disaster while accelerating destruction of biodiversity today.

You can ignore much of this exchange, but this is important. The Conservative party candidate MP for Southampton Test & Conservative councillor in Southampton City @StevenGalton appears dangerously ill-informed. A thread about air pollution and COVID19 1/8

https://twitter.com/StevenGalton/status/1289540888784302082

So, what about the link between small particle air pollution - PM2.5 (particulate matter that is 2.5 microns across) & COVID19? There is a lot. The initial Italy COVID19 hotspot had high air pollution. sciencedirect.com/science/articl… 2/8

New research that shows hundreds of thousands of people would have died under UK Gov’s previous #COVID19 plan. A thread on why that should not be a surprise and why hundreds of thousands of people are still likely to die in the UK. 1/12
inews.co.uk/news/health/co… The UK (and many other) governments assume that COVID19 cannot be stopped. We have to ‘flatten the peak’ so health care services are not swamped. This means we are set on a course that will infect up to 80% of the UK population 2/12 vox.com/2020/3/15/2118…