Climate Change and the Global South, with Jan Umsonst

Understanding what is going on in our environment really requires understanding the whole global system. There are very few people who can grasp that complexity, which is I why I follow climate systems scientists. They help me weave it all together and make sense of the interconnections. 

However, as I am in the Global South, one of the limitations is the specifics for this region and seeing the disastrous impacts of climate escalations in Asia just in the last week, we must better understand what is coming next, so we can prepare and adapt. 

There are many reasons for the lack of specifics on the Global South, particularly the fact the narrative and media coverage is controlled and dominated by the English-speaking wealthy world, so grasping this whole story requires a lot of work. There are some areas that will remain extremely challenging, and for many countries/regions in the Global South, the challenge is a lack of data. Just that is a challenge we must overcome. 

To help me make more sense of what the Global South will face in the coming years, I asked Jan Umsonst if he’d join me to have a broad conversation about the region. He is the Earth System Nerd and an earth system consultant, regularly discussing the fact we are now leaving the age of natural variability and entering the age of forced variability, where we will start experiencing the synchronization of feedbacks.  

Sit back and enjoy a far-ranging conversation, which is honest, and empowering, with the clear message - we must act now. 

Thank you so much Jan! You can follow him on BlueSky @umsonst.bsky.social — Bluesky 

And here he is on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-umsonst-92ba859a/ 

#UncommonCourage #GlobalSouth #JanUmsonst

To get in touch with me, all of my contact details are here https://linktr.ee/andreatedwards

My book Uncommon Courage, an invitation, is here https://mybook.to/UncommonCourage

My book 18 Steps to an All-Star LinkedIn Profile, is here https://mybook.to/18stepstoanallstar

Transcript

0:05

Uncommon Courage. Welcome to Uncommon Courage, the podcast. My name is Andrea Edwards and one of the things I try and do with this podcast is create the space for the big conversations we need to be having. There are no 20 second sound bites that are going to do this story justice. I focus on the polycrisis, so it's all aspects of the polycrisis and how it all comes together and interacts and that's geopolitics, societal collapse, war, and of course all the way through to climate change. One of the communities, and it's a small community that I follow climate systems scientists and the reason I follow them is because they get the whole story and they bring it all together. But specifically what I wanted to do today is focus on impacts in the global South. So that's what we're going to do. And I am delighted to welcome Jan Umsons, who's from Germany. He speaks really fast, so if you need to slow it down, do it. I love the fact that he speaks fast because of course I do too. But he positions himself as an Earth system nerd on social media, which I like. Jan studies the changes in the Earth system and he's all trying to about understanding what's coming next. He is also an Earth systems consultant and he discusses the, the fact that we are now leaving the age of natural variability and entering the age of forced variability where we're going to start experiencing the synchronization of feedbacks and I think we're going to talk about that a lot today, so. Well, welcome Jan. I got through it and I hope I said you found me name right. So I, I, I first heard you speaking with Paul Beckwith on a podcast and he's someone I've been following for a long time as well. So I just really, really enjoyed listening to you and just thank you so much for saying yes to doing this with me. I appreciate it, I hope I do it justice. But do you want to just give people a little bit more background around about you? I was, I started to track Earth system changes from the year 2007. When I heard oceans acidifying I thought wow, oceans are big and if something that big is acidifying, maybe it's important. So I start to really read myself into it and the more I read, the more I was fascinated by Earth, how it interacts the biosphere with the physical processes and what kind of system it is. It's really amazing system actually our planet and, and with time I then I did not knew that Earth is so Complex. So with time I discovered this topic and that topic, that mechanism and that system and it got more and more and more. And so with time I achieved like kind of overview on what is happening on the planet. And now we enter a phase, the nonlinear phase of, of global change. We enter now global change because it's not only global heating, we have to call it, but also biological changes, changes in ecosystems and changes in species, in the oceans or the continents, forests. So it's much more than warmings of the pollution of the biosphere is also coming now. Very important. But now all is interacting like the Polychrist, how you name it is now interacting and it's more often than not interacting in a reinforcing way. And that's the problem. We, we shouldn't trigger every crisis at once. And that's insane. Yeah, yeah. And the, and, and, and the, the flow on, of those implications into society and we're just seeing it, you know, really happening around the world. It's funny, I, I, I, when I first like you, I've been doing it, but not just climate, also all of these other issues and I'm like, wow, we're going to lose the global economy. And that's going to create this and it's going to create that and it's good. Yeah. So, and then you've got plastics and you've got the novel entities and you know, the night, the, the nine planetary boundaries, it's, it's, it's big. And we also live in a world where no one's got any attention anymore. So it's like nobody wants to understand it. You know, it's like, oh, come on. Yeah, it's interesting times, for sure. Yeah. I mean, we go against the static of our house we are living in. And if you go against the static at thumb, at one point the roof will come down. And the same is with Earth. We go against the fundamental principles that keep our Earth system running to provide the living conditions we need to strive and prosper. And if we destroy these living conditions, you can't have a functional economy, for example. Doesn't work. No way. Exactly. Yeah. So I just want to give everyone some context and then I'm going to hand it over to you. But one of the sort of the bigger issues, so I'm based in Asia, I'm in Singapore, you're in Germany, is it's very difficult to get the real perspective of what's going to happen in the global south. And there's, you know, there's loads of coverage in the global North. We're seeing Australia. You know, we've, we've got a pretty good grasp of that. English speaking nations, right? Predominantly. But like just, just in this last week, this catastrophic event is happening in Asia. And people say to me, but nobody really cares what's happening in Asia. And I'm like, yeah, but you're to care when your coffee prices increase again and your tea prices increase and rice right there. All of these floods across one of the biggest grocery rice growing regions of the world is going to have an impact globally. And we've got amazing climate scientists right across this region. There's no question about it. But some of them can't speak because they live in a country where they can't speak freely. Some it's just cultural. People in this part of the world tend to be very, very humble. And the other thing is, of course there's multiple languages spoken right across the glob Global South. So you know, we've, we've seen some really crazy stuff. So what I want to try to do today, and you know, we might need to schedule another call but let's, let's see how far we can go. But how does this whole story come together specifically when it comes to the Global South? And I thought, you know, we're seeing things that have, have not happened before just in the last week from a. For in, in. In the weather systems, merging of things. The cyclone forming in a place that's never formed. But let's start with the big stuff, the tipping point. So you know, when I talk tipping points, it's obviously the Amazon dieback, the Antarctic ice sheets, monsoon disruption due to the AMOC and the smok, the coral collapse, which maybe we can talk about separately. Why did glacial melt like we've got the Himalayas, we've got in Latin America, we've got the glaciers there. Enzo disruption, which is part of the story of happenings now. So what do you want to start with? Do you want to start with the Amazon or. I mean the point is first, like the general system, nature, nature we're living in. Earth is not a linear system. This means changes in the Earth system. System that don't happen. Linear but most often abruptly and nonlinear. So Earth is a nonlinear system. It's very important to understand actually it's a high, it can be a highly nonlinear system. There the problem starts. The second problem is the nature of Earth. Earth is a water planet. Water planets are different than from rock planets. If you heat a rock planet, you cannot heat up the system too much. But if you have Waste oceans, you have like a battery, the oceans, they store waste amounts of energy because of rising greenhouse gas levels. So the oceans, if you have an ocean, they accumulate waste amounts of energy. If oceans get warmer, they produce steam. And steam is like the currency that drives the economy of earth running, that drives it. And if you get warmer oceans, you get more steam and the atmosphere gets more energy. And if the other the atmosphere gets more energy, this means air movements start to speed up. In some areas they speed up, in other areas they slow down. So the variability starts to increase in the system. And if you warm a water planet fast, you can expect highly non linear reactions, especially if you go down in time and space. This means in the given region, in a given month, in a given week, you can see astonishing freak events, wide off charts. So with the speed of warming you get a higher number of this freak events that I that are far distance away from the historical means. So what we see now is that we get ever often extremes that are astonishing in time, in space, in intensity or scale or frequency. So what we see the last years is like just the beginning. And that's the problem we face. It's not any more easy to predict how the system will behave, how extremes will increase in all their different aspects. Like you have draw, you have heat waves, you have storms, floodings, you have large wildfires and stuff like this. So the question is now how fast will global warming evolve and what will be the effects in the subsystems of the earth system? And as it seems global warming will happen now faster and effects on circulation systems and weather systems or stuff like this are much more extreme than we thought they would be. So we enter now highly dangerous terror. Yeah, so I mean we still keep hearing the it's going to happen by 2050, it's going to happen by 2100, but it's already happening now. Yeah, and when you say the non linear because I think that's, that's terminology that I understand and is used a lot. But I think for average people, they don't really get what that means. So do you mind just explaining that? I mean non linear you have like a clear line, goes deeply, go slowly, it rises. If you have non linear you have bing, bing, you know those sudden abrupt changes, they happen more frequently, they get more stronger. And these ping behavior or sometimes ping ping. No, whatever system you watch at, like sea Su5 temperatures for example, global ocean surface temperatures that jumped by 0.3 degrees the last six months in 2023, 0.3 degrees doesn't sound much but the mean warming rates of the ocean surface had been about 0.1 degree in 10 years. So you had suddenly a jump of 0.3 degrees and six months in 23, that kept up 24. So it was a massive, massive jump in sea surface temperatures. And we did not saw it coming. Now declined again. But these jumps, they get likely bigger. And this is the main problem that global warming accelerating means, not the line gets more steeper. That's not the point actually. But the global warming does not happen linear or gradually. It happens, as it seems like now to be the case, wire jumps. And we had a jump in 1998-1999. We had a strong elinium, this time, a highly warm equatorial Pacific. And this warming jump went declined afterwards with a lot of la lineas till 2012. So in the past we had warming jumps, they declined again. And then it took a time till another jump came. And now we have the situation. We had in 2014-2016, a massive temperature jump. But afterwards, the temperatures did not decline significantly afterwards. So we get now temperature jumps that come to stay. So we had 2014, 2016 one, also driven by nonlinear. The next one came 2023, 2024, also driven by El Nino. And this jump was even a little bit larger than 2014-16. And the astonishing thing is in 2003, 23, 2024, we breached suddenly, not only 1.5 degrees, but 2024 reached 1.62 degrees, like the mean of all its temperature data sets. So we jumped right from 1.2, 1.3, we jumped right to 1.6. Now we declined a little bit to 1.5 again. But now is the big question, when will the next temperature jump happen? And that's the nonlinearity we are most concerned with. Because these temperature jumps, they produce a disproportional increase in extremes. Likely. It's not sure because you don't have like 100 years of global warming data. It's just we learn while it is happening in a way. Yeah. So what we can expect is the temperature jump of 2023, 2024, that another one will happen. Likely it will become larger or as large as the last one. Why can we expect that? We understand now these temperature jumps in the system, they are driven by the oceans. This means living on a water planet, means global heating leads to oceans accumulating energy. And from time to time, they start to give like a burp. They release energy to the atmosphere and that are El Lineus. But now we have the case that the last El Nino Also it was a different El Nino, a different spiciness or different flavor it had. This means the convective areas during the last El Ninus were not located in the central to eastern Pacific, where most of the heat was pulled from the oceans into the atmosphere. But it was the western Pacific and the Caribbean. This were the main connective areas. And so we had like a new kind of El Nino which released also massive amounts of energy, but via other ocean areas, not the central and eastern Pacific, which also released energy, but mostly was these two centers. And that's the problem that these jumps driven by heat release by the oceans into the atmosphere, they are likely to increase. So when comes the next jump? Maybe 2030, 2032, 2035, but maybe more earlier than the last one. Like the frequency is shortening. And why is it so I'm just. Going to ask that, that, that last jump, the scientists still don't fully understand why it happened, right? Or do you think the answers are coming in? Yeah, they are now came in actually there exists a statistical approach, statistical climate science and model scientists, but there exists also like the mechanistic approach, like, like what happened actually in the physical system that triggered this temperature jumps. And now the studies are mostly complete or they, they draw a complete picture of what happened in 2023, 2024. And it all indicates that these warming jumps are also kind of feedback driven. And if you look at the reasons of what happened in 2324 before, in 2020-2023, Red La Nina conditions and ocean heat uptake rates, they skyrocket. The last years, we have now a six fold ocean heat uptake rates annually than in the 80s to the 50s, 1950 to 1986 fold increased now. And in the years 2019 to 2023 we had very high rates of ocean heat uptake. And then in 23 this heat was in part transferred to the upper ocean and released to the atmosphere, while at the same time we had a very large cloud feedback over warmer oceans, which mean less clouds over warmer oceans. The oceans take up more heat, they warm faster. And this was the temperature jump from the oceans. So you had heat accumulation, it was released to the atmosphere and also less clouds, increasing feeding back on heat accumulation. And this is now the problem that the ocean heat uptake rates, they are very, very high now. And at the same time we had 2024 very high rates in CO2 levels increase, which are which were one third above old maximums. So this shows us that the next temperature jump comes slightly more early than later. So 2014, 2016, you had seven years to 2023 to 2024. And if you would apply another seven years till the next one happens, would make 2031 two years on top. You have maybe 2033 or when the warming is realized. So we would approach 2° by that date or maybe preach it. So this is the craziness, all these discussions over 1.5 degree goals or 2 to points that we do not reach 2 degrees or if we will reach 2 degrees, no, we will reach 2 degrees of warming that's set. We have way too high rates of ocean accumulate heat accumulation, greenhouse gases increases that any reductions won't change it, that the next jump will come and then we will see another rapid intensification of extremes. And that's the big problem because you say, you told me about South East Asia and Asia, the extremes you had 2024, also 2025. Now tell me like heat waves are very problematic now, huh? Oh yeah. So I'll, I'll just put us both back on. So in 23 and 24, so we were still living in Thailand, in Phuket and it was, we, we moved into deadly wet bulb temperatures and we, we have no idea how many people have died across Asia and Africa and Latin America from these deaths, from these heat deaths. We just have none. And I was actually looking at some statistics and I was calculating with AI because I'm not a maths person. And you know, in Africa it could be three to 400,000 people dying a year, but they'll say it's between one and 200. You know, this is the difference in extremes that we're talking about. But what scared me living in Thailand is the electricity is above, is still up above the ground. Right. And have you been to Asia? I was sometimes. I was in India, was in Thailand also. Yeah. Right. So you've seen, you know, the electrical cables there, all these mesh of wires. Right. So it didn't get hot enough for the grid to collapse. I know in roads there was a grid collapse when it hit about 48°and that system is under the ground, whereas in Asia it's all above the ground. So I'm extremely concerned about the, the grid ability to hold, hold its structure during these heat extremes in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, I mean they're just getting absolutely decimated by the heat. So you know. Yeah, so I'm, I'm very, very worried about heat and where we're going because you know the, a huge majority of people in this part of the world live, live with a piece of tin over there, over their top. You know, they're not, they're not in a house. But even people in homes with air conditioning, if the grid goes down, you, you're not going to make it either. Right. So I'm, I'm curious about that escalation, like where I know that there's already significant numbers of people dying, but, you know, like 2 degrees, I mean, you know, we're on the way and I, I, I just dark laugh when I hear the, we got to try and keep it under 1.5. It's like. Yeah, right, okay. But, yeah, but like, you know, so when you're talking about this escalation, you know, by the end of this decade, hitting 2 degrees, which is game over for things like the coral reefs, even though they've already declared coral reefs have passed their tipping point, which I've thought for a long time, we've lost the reefs. We just don't know it yet. Because they can't just keep coming back from these bleaching events. Right. So, yeah, so from the, that time frame, because this region is, you know, I'm 70 kilometers north of the equator where I am, it's actually cooler here. The, the, the wet bulb. The wet bulb is. Yeah. But you know, when you go north of, of the equator or you go south of the equator, the temperatures are much, much higher. But your humid heat waves. Oh, that's the problem. That's very high sometimes. Yeah, yeah. But the infra, Singapore's infrastructure is very much designed for heat. It was built for that. You know, that's how they got investment into the country. So they're very serious about protecting their citizens from heat. It's a, it's a government that's been taking climate change seriously for a very long time. Actually. It's, it's, technically, Singapore is quite a functional government. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Feeling more and more governments become really dysfunctional. Absolutely. Yeah. Singapore is, it's somehow an exceptional. They also give good money to the politicians. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To come to the money. Exactly. No, it's, I, I have deep respect for this country and the way it's run. Yeah. Europeans and Americans wouldn't put up with it. But, but I think it, it works, it works culturally and the government takes care of the people. The majority of the people in Singapore are taken care of. And you saw it during the pandemic. I was in Thailand where people were basically left by themselves. Here, everyone was taken care of. They had incomes to stay at home. You know, it was impressive watching what was happening here. And, and people trust the government and they trust the scientists, you know, so it's, it's pretty, it's a, you know, it's a good model for the future that we've got coming. I think it's a good model. I mean, what we need and what's one of the central points, because we can cope with the extremes, but the money has to flow to the people or to project projects that protect the people. Well, in the end of the day you always need the people. And so governments have really to take it serious to protect their societies from heat, flooding and extremes. And most often than not, it's more of us away, the eva, evasion. We have to erase, evade, evade the heat coming at us. This means like cooling center, stuff like this. Cooling centers in slums, for example, cooling centers in cities, shelter, you need to build shelters, cooling shelters. In India, they need everywhere cooling shelters. Because in the short and the mean, in the middle time or midterm, heat extremes will intensify fast. And we are now already near the red or sometimes inside the red area already. And these massive heat waves, they. Because what we observe is the most extremes, the most massive heat wave, that's the category that increases the fastest. So that's the problem that you get these massive heat wave peaks that start to persist for a longer time bring the people over the edge with the heat they can cope with. A nighttime temperature that don't, do not go down. If you don't have air conditioning, you are trapped in a heat hell day and night. And there's only so much we can cope with. And, but we have, like I saw one example, I mean you have to, to help the people to cope with the heat. That's one of the main points. So countries have to start to redirect funds to save the populations. But I don't see that that's really problematic because we can do something, but it will affect us in any way. Now, for example, a long heat wave for one month or two weeks or one month. People who have to seek shelter, often they are not able to work or to tend for their fields because it's too hot. So you have to support these people of the livelihoods, stuff like that, income, stuff like this, and also education. You have to keep the education running. If children always have to stop with school because of heat, because of flooding, then you get populations which are not educated enough. So we need to protect the people, we need to protect education. So we stay in the game in a way. Because if we want to mitigate global warming, that's what we will have to do. We will have to not only reduce our emissions but decrease the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. If we want to do that, we will need all of us more best educated as much as we can do it because we will have a lot of work to reverse the cause Earth is heading to. So the first rule has to be in climate warming, protect the people. We need the people. We need the hats, we need their abilities, we need our abilities. So but, but how is in Singapore you have the feeling lots of things are done. Oh yeah, yeah, they're test, I mean just covered walkways. I'll put this both up. So covered walkways for people to get to public transport. They're testing the white reflective paint on surfaces to reduce the urban heat island effect, you know, but it's going to get, it's going to get uncomfortably hot, you know, so it used to average four days a year of wet bulb temperatures. Now it's 188 days a year. That was measured in 20, 24. And you know, just this week the, yeah, the Asian, the Asian risks report came out. So 90 of people living in across Asia will be exposed to extreme heat. You know, Cambodia, Phnom Penh, it was like 100 and something, 150 something days above 35 degrees and wet bulb temperatures have been downgraded to 31. But they're saying 40, 35 and then there's like 50 something days above 41 degrees. So when you're in the tropics where it's really hot and you've got the moisture in the air and, and you know, I look at the wet bulb temperature every day and you know, some days it'll be, it'll be 41, 42 degrees. The real feel. Even though the actual temperament temperature might be 31, 32. And my son's out playing rugby on a, on a, on a fake, you know, Astroturf. And because the other thing that's happening of course is a lot of workers from Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, they go to the Middle east to work and within a couple of years they're sent home because they've got kidney failure, because they're out in these extreme heat. So kidney dialysis units will be a massive need. You've got women working the fields who are aborting their fetuses because it's so hot their bodies can't hold the babies anymore. So, but, but the other thing of course is, you know, with this extreme heat is it's it's destroying the crops. So we're gonna, if we save the people, there's going to be nothing left to eat. So you know, you know, in the, in the Europe you're seeing, you know, the, the rising authoritarianism and people thinking these strong men are going to come and save everyone. Which is the absolute. Exactly. It's the absolute opposite of what we need. Yeah, you know, we need, we need strong leadership, but wisdom and empathy and, but we also need politicians that really explain this is where we are, this is where we're going and this is what we need to do to come together as a community to solve it. But also accept the. There is going to be people are going to die. These heat extremes. We're not going to be able to. You know, the Thai prime minister at the moment is struggling to respond to the floods and he's gonna, he's up for election next year because they sacked the last prime minister. Right. But you know, no country in this region is ready for what's coming, what's happening. You know, all of the responses are failed responses because, because that they're just not ready for it. You know, Indonesia's just lost 300 people to this cyclone. No, the truth is the whole adaptation scheme, the whole discussion, the whole concept of adaptation is not gonna work. We cannot adapt to a water planet that is fully escalating because we warmed it way too fast. And we do not, do not even have the concrete to do it the sand we need. Because actually you speak about rebuilding most of the infrastructure structure to be able to adapt to climate conditions not in 230, 250, but 270, 280 to 100. So, and, and we are now heading likely for runaway global warming if things go, if we are not lucky, let's say like this, we are not lucky. We're eating heading for runaway global warming. If you look at the systems, you don't see it in the EPCC reports or single studies you use in starts now emerge at signals in the system that we could have a trigger runaway global warming. So if we trigger something like that while our ability as humanity diminished to do anything about it because our economic system collapse, our social systems, political systems, then we will be helpless in the face of an escalating self driven warming of earth and our civilization won't survive it. Our economy and no chance, no way. Just take resources. The whole mining sector goes to open pit mines because you can dig deeper. It's cheaper to draw out minerals out of open pit mines. But with this massive rain event, these pit mines can really take out or can be taken out of business for weeks or months if a really strong amount hits them. Because these terraces you have where all these people drive downward, you know, you get mountain slides and stuff like this in these mines. And I don't know how long it takes to repair these streets inside these deep pit mines and bring out the water. So just from this point, the whole logistic, the resource sector, the electricity sector, the grid sector, for example, they all are not built to cope with the dreams we are triggering now. It's not extreme for trillion in 20, 30, 50 years. But what is happening since let's say 2022, 19, 2018, it really started to accelerate. The last two years really have another intensification. So maybe just the next temperature jump, may it happen in 221, 231, 235 or maybe 240, but I don't think so. I think more early, but if this one happens afterwards, we are far in the red. Also in terms of non durable heat waves and they're really problematic. I mean you had in your post some numbers because it's really this massive heat waves, they will affect billions of people. And it's really the case what we can see now, that large parts of the planet will become non livable because of the heat wave. Just this point and it's just insane. But in the end of the game, global warming will lead to a state where there exists no regions on earth where you have living conditions, where you can strive. It's really a global issue. We cannot escape from global warming or its effects. This means we have only one solution. We have a species solve it. We really have to reverse the warming, otherwise we will break down. The physics of a water planet will win against us. And this is what you see now all across the tropics. For example, with this extreme flooding you have now and this intensification of extremes, it's a self amplification process. So just if we just focus on extremes and the intensification of extremes, the last year it happened way faster and much more stronger than we predicted it. And the reason is that the system, like how weather systems function, how currents function, or how air movements function, or jet streams function, all these processes in the oceans or atmosphere, they are driven by small scale processes. And these processes we could not implement in the climate models or earth system models because too much computational power. So they leave out all these small scale processes. But these are the processes via which the System change and amplify suddenly. And just to explain what I mean on a concrete example, what we observe now is that you get in one region a massive flooding event. If you have rain, you have water vapor that condensates to raindrops. This condensation processes releases the energy that was needed to evaporate the water back to the air. When it condensates the water, although you get hot, hot upper air streams that come down over a high pressure area where the air sinks again. And if this hot upper air sinks down, it compresses again and gets hotter than the moment it when it started to rise at most, although it starts to rise at warm moist air and comes down another place as very hot dry air, intensifying a heat wave. So what we observe now that large areas of flooding are coupling stronger with neighboring areas of massive heat waves. So this is the steam machine aspect. So you get intensifying flooding events. This means you get intensifying heat events. And that's one of the problems we face. And both cells are like circulation cells. Away from the quarter, they start to rotate and a low pressure system rotating in one direction and the high pressure system rotating in another direction and they can couple stronger. This means why one provides hot upper air for the other one to warm really up. The other one provides the lower air that accumulates moisture to rise in the low pressure system again. So high and low pressure system in a warmer climate start to mutual amplify much stronger than it was the case in a cooler climate. So processes of amplification are speeding up. And this is then the moment where you can get these off charts events suddenly. And what you observe now in Asia, these sudden jumps in hot days in a given region, these are these outcomes, this non linear behavior, this means further sudden intensifications being be it in intensity of heat waves, be of scale of heat waves, or persist persistent of heat wave. You can expect that you will get that you get also in the future further jumps of intensifications. And if we expect that the system is intensifying and jump wise character, and we are already near the red, this means we are very fast. We can find ourselves deep in the red in a given region, in a given season, in a given year. So you don't know when things go really off charts when it will hit you. But the chances are rising with further warming massively. What you see now all across Asia with this flooding heat waves since several years, it really goes nuts. I observe a little bit India observe a little bit also China and stuff like this, like the flooding in China is insane. How much moisture the system pumps into China for example in the given region season. And so we really have to take global warming seriously because all what you observe or observe in your neighboring countries expected to become fast worse. And we have to be solidarity with each other, we have to take care of each other or we have to strengthen our communities. And actually we will need a different economic system. The system will break down. That's it's now the current economic system is already a gooner in a way. Just one example of the exist of faculty of actuaries in England. It's they analyze risks for the whole financial market but the background risks, not specific risks of violent balances and stuff like this. Or. And the point is they expect in a 3 degree warmer world by 254 billion deaths or more than 4 billion deaths. Economic decline by more than 50% EDP. But the 3 degrees till 250 it's their worst case scenario. But it looks like we were. We are. It's even worse. It will be worse than a worst case scenario. So these numbers, you know, 50 or more than 50 breakdown of GBT but GPT across a domestic product or that 4 billion peoples are dying or more than 4 billion people. It's all. It's our decisions. If this is happening, it's not a given that it will happen. Because if we let it happen, if we do not react, it will happen. But if we react and really as a humanity and start to reduce not only greenhouse gas emissions, we have to reduce greenhouse gas levels as it seems because we have not too much, then we really have a chance. But if we think oh we can anyway do nothing, we have no chance to do anything then expect to that things get fast worse and expect that it will happen in your life that the society around you breaks down and it doesn't matter where on the planet you are. Because we live in a globalized economy. All the economies are interdependent and no economy can function on its own. So it will affect everybody. And also this increase in extremes, it seems very extreme in the tropics now. But also if you look in the subtropics or the further north mid latitudes, you realize that the increase in extremes is also. It's bringing countries also now on the brink far away from the equator, like for example Italy. They are in the middle of a fast warming Mediterranean Sea and they have no flooding after flooding after supercell. Look at the American Midwest or central to eastern part of America. They have no fraud for summer, they have one flooding, 1,000 a year flooding event, flash flooding, flash flooding, tornadoes, heat waves. It's really crazy, the weather, North America, for example. So this weather craziness, it's really getting fast. It's really intensifying fast. So we have to accept that we won't win the fight against global warming. We won't be able to adapt and we will have to react at one point. Currently, nothing happens. I mean, Cop 30 was a big failure. Most countries so don't realize how urgent it is. But from an Earth system perspective, we would have to start now to bring down our greenhouse gas emissions as fast as we can do it because it's not clear if we get a cascading feedback reaction of Earth. The science is really fast mounting and really seems like the system can change fast in a cascading feedback reaction. And the stakes get ever higher while on the other side what we're doing is actually decreasing and it's, it's not functioning. So I really hope that more and more people will understand that the only way we come out of it is like as a community, if we work together as a species, because no country on its own will be able to solve it if you further escalate it. So, yeah, so I want, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna ask you about sulfates because this is obviously a big discussion point in the, just in the scientific community, especially James Hansen and his team, right. So one of the reasons that I've seen that the Pacific Ocean warmed up so much is because China was reducing its pollution, which reduced the amount of sulfates in its environment, which had a heating impact on the Pacific Ocean. So one of my understandings is, so when you said we've got to reduce, not just reduce fossil fuel use, but we've got to reduce what's already up there, you know, because every year that we use, we release by comparison, a tiny amount compared to what's already up in our environment. Right? So, you know, we've got all these people talking about DAC machines and all that sort of stuff, but it's, it's the regeneration of, of our environment. You know, like 75 of arable land is used for farming. You know, these are industries that are publicly listed companies that are going to grow. And we've only got 25 more arable land. So we're just going to keep chopping down the forest. You know, the, the mega fishing trawlers. You know, we've got to get life back into the ocean in abundance. You know, if we don't do. Because that's another way to sequester carbon, right? So to me, it's like, if we're going to do it, we've got to really, really change our food system to. And so we can regenerate a lot of the farmland. We've got to stop the mega industrial fishing trolling. You know, we've got, we've got to do these really, really big things. And I don't, I just don't even hear those conversations happening. Scale. I always think it's, there's a, there's a scope, we have a scale problem and there are scale solutions and it's not buying an ev. That's not the answer. I mean, when you were talking about the mines earlier being flooded, I mean, the vast majority of minds are in really hot parts of the Earth, so they could be out of action for months because it'll be too hot for the people to work in them, you know, and even, even if they say, oh, well, we like, we can have robots, well, robots won't be able to work at certain temperatures either, you know, so, so, you know, that's, that's not a solution. What, what that sulfate conversation. Because my understanding is if we, if we radically reduce our fossil fuel use without also radically reducing the amount of CO2 that's already in the atmosphere, then we're going to see a heat escalation. Do you have any thoughts on that? The problem is we have warming in the pipeline. So we are now at 1.5 degrees physically, 1.6. Release 24, 25, a little bit cooler than 24. So 1.5. We are now at something like that. Sox, it's aerosols produced by burning of fossil fuels, for example, and they have a cloud seeding effect. So they brighten clouds, they increase their lifetime. They also increase cloud cover because clouds consist of aerosols out of which water condensates. So cloud seeds and SOX emissions were seeding clouds in a way on a global level. We had about 120 million tons of SOX emissions in the 70s or something where we peaked. Then we reduced SOX emissions till the mid-90s. Then SOx emissions started to increase again because of India and China. They increased emissions massively. 2012 China or 2010, 2012, China started to reduce its SOX emissions by, for example, China, India, they were still increasing. So these increases and decreases of global SOX emissions slowed down warming or accelerated warming depends on the phase you are in our development. So X emissions decrease, you speed up warming because you reduce cloud brightness, cloud cover and More sunlight hits the surface. So clouds cool the oceans. SOX support cloud formation so they help to cool the climate. And the thing is our total cooling effect of SOX is highly discussed. What is the actually cooling effect? And it's EPC gives numbers around 0 degrees to 0.8 degrees. It's likely the higher end. So we have currently a cooling of about 0.6 degrees, 0.8, something like that in the pipeline because of Sox. Part of it had be had been realized by SOX emission reductions over the fishing lines shipping lines in 2020 and IT but it had been only about 8 to 10 million tons of SOX. We are currently at about 60 million tons of SOX emissions after the EMO regulation. So the EMO regulations, International Maritime Organization, these reductions of shipping fuel sulfates, they happen in 220 and we're about 10 million tons. Though the discussion is now the acceleration of global warming the last years how much of it was caused by SOX reduction over the shipping lines. And the problem is if the warming we have now is feedback driven, then we are in much more worse territory than if the recent warming acceleration had been driven largely in part of SOX reductions. Because in one case it's our doing, we reduce sox warming accelerated. In the other case, oh, the system's internal feedbacks led to an acceleration of global warming further amplified by SOX reductions. Well that's a big question out there. And the problem is it's, it's for the system though if you say it's sox you get from the system more gratitude because the system, the political preferences, they don't want to have people panicking over global warming though their prefer results they're not alamistic. But if it's not SOX or only in part, but mostly a feedback driven acceleration, then we are in highly dangerous waters now. And it looks like that it's more a feedback driven effect. Also Hansen says in one post it's two thirds is cloud feedbacks, one third is sox because we have reduced cloud cover, reduced albedo of earth though the earth takes more sunlight in than it reflects to space since several decades. And this darkening of earth is in part caused by SOX reduction, but also by feedbacks that lead to a reduction in clouds. So we have two things that works that reduce cloud cover and speed up surface warming like the Northern Pacific. That's reductions of SOX and feedbacks. Yeah, and likely it's more feedback driven. Why can we say the warming 2324 is more feedback driven than SOX driven? The largest sudden termination effect we had 2020. And if you reduce SOX emissions, they are washed out of the atmosphere in the matter of a week or two. They don't stay long in the atmosphere. So as for X reduction, they produce a long term warming effect because of the leather, a fewer cloud baseline. You have leather clouds, leather brightness. Well, this is then the warming over time we produce of SX. But we had in 2023, 2022, we had the cloud feedback going maximum really high to October 2023. And though we had with ocean surface temperatures going sky high, we had the cloud feedback going sky high in 23. And likely it had been a warmer ocean surface reducing cloud cover. And that's one of the main problems we face with global warming. If ocean surface warming reduces cloud cover, which leads to a faster ocean surface warming, we could be in big trouble depending on how strong this feedback is. And in regard to the North Pacific marine heat wave, which is very important for Southeast Asia and South Asia, the North Pacific marine heat wave, it started to intensify in the 2 tens and it became really extreme. In 2014-2016 you had to block off the west coast of US massive marine wave you had then you had 218 to 19 other massive heat waves in the west and eastern part of the North Pacific. But then from 2020, 2021, 2022, 2, 3, 4, you had a development of a summer marine heat wave that was on track to cover most of the North Pacific of the extra tropical North Pacific. It's a waste huge area this marine. In 2025, this marine heat wave covered nearly the entire North Pacific. The extra tropical North Pacific. It was a massive, massive, massive monster marine heat wave. And this heat wave happens under high pressure and high pressure. You have low cloud cover. So SOX is not too effective here because you need clouds or cloud cloudy conditions that SX can improve cloud conditions. But if you have high pressure, you don't have too much clouds anyway. And these high pressure driven marine heat wave also by heat transport into the North Pacific and circulatory changes supporting high pressure over the North Pacific, it's likely self reinforcing what we observe there. And the North Pacific marine heat wave helps to stabilize the subtropical North Pacific high pressure system. And this high pressure system gets very large, moves more to the west to Japan and it rotates clockwise. And this clockwise rotation brings the trade winds over the maritime continents, intensifies them all. The air coming over the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, towards Vietnam, China and all these countries, India. So these winds, these trade winds over the western Pacific are likely intensifying. And the surface Temperature in the western Pacific is also intensifying also in the Indo Pacific. And stronger winds over hotter surface oceans can produce much more moisture. And this is what you observe then in the tropics, this massive rain events. Because one point the oceans in Southeast Asia and Asia Asia they produce more moisture. Although because of the tropical of the heat waves in the North Pacific. And the high pressure system pulling, pumping more air towards Asia and warm over warmer oceans. So you get more moisture on one hand. And the moisture transport into a given area where we have this massive flooding, then it also intensifies from time to time because you get for example, stronger storms. A stronger storm has a very large rotation and it can really move large streams of air into a given region. So you get stronger surface winds over the western Pacific, you get much higher in a seasonal character, higher sea surface temperatures producing much more moisture. You get more storms, stronger low pressure system which can move even more moist air into a given region. And then you get this massive, massive sudden flooding events. So you can expect these things to intensify also nonlinear. And I see all the time, you know, I start at one point and then because, because, you know, and in the end. But I just want to outline that what you expect observe in Southeast Asia and South Asia, all this flooding and heat waves, they are the result of. Of global to regional amplification processes that lead to this sudden extreme events. And if you have a lot of factors, a lot of different factors that can contribute to an extreme event, which can all behave in a way non linear, if they all align perfectly well to intensify regional extreme movement. And it can become suddenly off charts much more stronger than you had any extreme event in the past. For example, Vietnam. Vietnam had no rain events. 1.7 meter was one maximum at the local station. Another one was 1.5 meters. Some days later, the last, last record, highest record was 1.9 meters or something. So suddenly get 1.7 and the other one was 1.5. But just regional extremes at one station. But around these stations I guess not much less. So you suddenly get a nearly double of what you ever experienced before. Yeah, and that's the problem. And this is all these large scale sickle with circulation changes driven by surface oceans heating up and a stronger coupling with the atmosphere and interacting with regional conditions, amplifying regional conditions. And this, these amplification chains they get in a warmer climate, larger, more systems can contribute to a regional extreme event. And the single components, they can peak stronger. So suddenly you get a massive marine heat wave in the North Pacific even more extreme in 2027 you get a massive high pressure system over the North Pacific rotating very strongly. You get strongly intensified trade winds over Indonesia and the maritime continent. You get at the same time much higher ocean surface temperatures around the Philippines, around Indonesia, stuff off the coast of Vietnam, intensifying the moisture production even more. And then you get a very perfect constellation of low pressure systems channeling or storms in this case channeling all this extreme moisture into one area. And then it goes bam. And that's another thing what we learned. Flash flooding is intensifying the fastest. Well the extreme cohort of rainfall, this is the intensifying the fastest. Where you low levels, they are de. Low levels of rate of decreasing and all comes down at once. This is like the, the general trend, but you have also another trend. So you get local flash flooding massively intensifying. But you also get large scale flooding events affecting multiply multiple river basins. They are also increasing. So you get small scale events massively intensifying like what the fuck happened? My village or my neighborhood is, is a river system. And you get large scale persistent flooding events that also are on the rise. And you never know in which season you got hit by what. That was one that was going to be my question. So we are in the season of typhoons. We're coming to the end. Philippines has had its 21st that Vietnam flooding. The area was hit three times in three weeks, so it was probably even more than double. And then Typhoon Koto was coming through this week and it turned at the last minute. But it then merged with this cyclone that formed in the Mala Straits that came across. And then I, I haven't had a chance to look. It was supposed to dump on Thailand again which of course has just gone through this 1 in 300 year flooding event. But I'm not sure which part of Thailand was going to be hit. So, so, but the, but you know, so there's seasonal times, you know, so for the farmers, right? So I, I, I've got a friend in the Philippines up in the mountains who, she's a farmer and I sent her a message, you know, in the last time it was before the super typhoon, it was a typhoon before that. I said to her if you, if you've got anything that you can harvest, get it in now because a big storm's coming and they got it in and an hour later the rain stopped. And if they hadn't done it, they would have lost their crop, which is of course really important. Right. So the reliability I suppose of Time when, when things happen, that's also changing, right? Gone. I mean what you see, for example remote is gone. But I mean in the northern hemisphere you still have colder temperatures in winter. Yeah, you have. Yeah. But the main point is that the seasonal character of, of of our climate, regional climate is changing and getting more erratic. For example, the Indian monsoon season is not any more erratic a monsoon season because it can happen anytime. That's a little bit what is happening for example in India also like the monsoon rain in China is changing. It can happen earlier, persist longer. Also thing and what you said about these typhoons merging, the point is in the past we thought that global warming is intensifying extremes. That was wrong. Global warming is intensifying extreme events. Yes. But what we missed is that these extreme events they trigger and reinforce other extreme events. And that's the problem. So this means global warming intensifies extreme events, be it heat wave, flooding storms, dry moist conditions, whatever pressure gradients. And these extreme events can then enable other events to become even more extreme. Because any extreme event in our atmosphere ocean is driven by circulation systems. This means an extreme event is triggered by circulation systems, but it triggers a reaction in the circulation systems. So the stronger the extremes get, the stronger the impact on neighboring circulation systems that affect distant circulation systems. And this is amplification chain is highly non linear especially if you look at the given region in the month or a week or a season, subseasonal scale, let's say in some seasons just things go off charts what happened in this month or in this week or in this event. And so you don't know anymore how strong an event can get because it's highly likely that one time in a thousand year events after the warming jump, 2003, 24 we did not observe till now. And this means in our given climate state now much more worse and intense extremes are possible than what we had the last two years. This highly exceptional class of advance. So this is another problem. So in Asia for example with your typhoons, the problem is you have one typhoon that produces an atmospheric river or a region with high moisture in there and if another typhoon comes and merged with this moisture, moisture it's intensified or if what case you case you have now two typhoons merging to one off. The cause of Vietnam is it? Oh, it was. Well the, the Koto was on its way to Vietnam to the same sort of central part of Vietnam that it had those three flooding events. And then it's changed direction in this cyclone that formed in the Straits of Malacca and it's never been recorded in history for a cyclone to form there. It went across Malaysia and formed with Koto and then it changed direction. So it was, it was scheduled to hit Thailand with more flooding. So it's a tropic, it's been downgraded to a tropical storm. So it's not that, it's just a big wet event. Yeah. So in a way the whole ocean weather, ocean atmosphere system around Southeast Asia and Asia gets more active as it seems. And if the whole coupled ocean atmosphere system gets more active, you get sometimes these frequents. And now a new study came actually out. It has just opened before the season, just our talk here. And the study found an oscillatory regime of the tropical circulation. And it's highly interesting. What happens is this oscillatory regime has a period of 30 to 60 days. It's periodically oscillating. And what happens is you get warmer sea surfaces in the Indo Pacific warm pool, this means Indian Ocean, Western Pacific. You get higher sea surface temperatures. This then starts to a higher heat release to the atmosphere. The tropical atmosphere is warming in this time. This intensifies atmospheric circulations. Surface winds over the ocean strengthen, they cool down the ocean again via moisture production. And you get this higher active atmosphere with more moisture, more energy, warmer. Then you get all this flooding extremes and then it calms down again. Yeah. So these oscillatory processes, they seem to intensify in a warmer climate. This means kinetic energy in the atmosphere. It has to build up in a region, it affects other regions and then it dissipates again, you know, builds up, creates a lot of motions, oceans get cooler again, get a lot of extreme events to get. Then it calms down again and these build up faces. That's the problem. That is oscillatory regimes between highly or much more warmer oceans and an intensifying atmospheric circulations, these bruise the most massive events. And these oscillations, they will likely also intensify non linear in a warmer climate. For example, you had now one extreme event was caused by the land India conditions and the negative Indian Ocean depot. This means you have a very strong sea surface gradients between the east and West Pacific tropical Pacific. And you have very large ocean surface temperature gradients in the Indian Ocean. And both affect circulation cells which can intensify and can produce massive extreme events in a given region because moisture is pumped into it in the form of a cyclone, for example. And this gradient intensification on this oscillatory regimes that can intensify for time produce massive Extreme events, these will further escalate. In a warmer climate, we get stronger gradients between regions in pressure and in temperature, in density, saltiness, whatever the gradients increase in a warmer climate, they produce movement of fluids and movement of fluids in a water planet over warmer oceans produce massive, massive evaporation events which lead to massive flooding in one area and heat waves in other areas. Because all the flooding of Asia all is heat production for the upper oceans. Upper atmosphere produce the hot upper air that comes down in the extra tropics and the subtropics making all these heat waves. It's all connected. Yeah, yeah, it's. And sometimes you have, in the tropics we have a flooding event fooling a neighboring heat event. Just you have, for example, northern India, you have western India, massive flooding, while north east India, massive heat event. And both couple, both systems. So what about the Enzo, like the reliability of it? Because we've, I've just, we're going into it, we're still in a La Nina or it's back to a strong La Nina. So like, you know, this El Nino La Nina that, that is, it just will keep going back and forth, but in it be extreme in both or what's going to happen with that system? That's, that's a big question out there. What we can expect this is that El Ninos and likely La Ninas will both get more extreme because that is what we observe in all the systems. These oscillations become more extremes. So likely also La Ninas will become more extreme. This means the temperature gradient shifts across the tropical Pacific will intensify. That's one thing. And this means if you get, for example, during La Ninas, the system, the oceans accumulate more energy and this is released to the atmosphere again via El Ninos. This means if you get more La Ninas, you get faster rates of ocean heat uptake, which are released in part to the atmosphere via intensifying El Ninos. Because if you get molar ninjas, you have to get more intense El Ninos because the system has to get rid of the energy that is, this is what elinions do from a thermodynamic perspective. So molar ninjas, not good because they lead to more extreme El Ninos. What we will likely get is more El Ninos. And sometimes you'll get super an. And sometimes you get very strong lady. This is what we can expect. And most worrying is that the circulation cell over the tropical Pacific, you have a zonal cell over the equatorial region, but you have also meridian north south cell and these overturning cell in the the tropical over turning cell to the north and to the south is regional intensifying. So solar circulation, this walker circulation is also intensifying, especially on the event character. And the circulation cells they coupled stronger with neighboring cells. What you have, you have a stronger coupling between El Ninos and positive dipole events in the Indian Ocean. This means you have a lesser temperature gradient actually in the tropical Pacific. And I had sea surface temperature gradient in the Indian Ocean which coupled stronger in the circulation cells. And this then produces extremes or intensifies extremes around the planet. Because if you have one circulation cell intensifying, you have other ones as well. And this is what we can expect, that the different circulation systems in the different regions they couple stronger with other circulation cells and so you get likely stronger jumps intensification in extreme events worldwide driven by exceptional linears or exceptional El Ninos coupling with other tropical, extra tropical or high latitude circulation cells. So likely it seems like that the whole system is interconnected from poles to poles and that sometimes you get strong El Ninus or strong Lanas and the circulation cells in other parts of the planet also go into hyperdrive and you get sudden intensifications of extreme events. And so we can expect that these shifts in extreme events or some intensifications of extreme events driven by El Ninos and La Ninas will intensify in a warmer climate. So also another, another aspect that we can expect that is off charts event will happen more frequently and will become more off charts. And this is just, it's a sad story actually because we are already at the wall. But do not expect in Southeast Asia Asia that the extreme events will calm down again. They will likely and that's a big question, will they increase the next years without temperature jump or are or is the next trumpet temperature jump needed to intensify these extremes? Again, this is a big question. It's open. So yeah, right, so we've, we've obviously spent a bit of time on Asia and Southeast Asia, but obviously in the Global south we've got Latin America, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. So we've seen terrible, terrible droughts in parts of Africa in the last few years. Latin America, we've seen horrible heat extremes there as well. So when you look at those other parts of the Global south, knowing that we're going into a strong La Nina, what are you expecting to see? What, what, what's going to be the crazy stuff that's going on there? I mean, I mean one thing what we have to see is an intensifying tropical circulation affects mid latitude circulation and affects the circulation in the polar region. If the circulation around the polar region get disturbed, it feeds back towards the tropics or even into the another hemisphere. This means that extremes on our planet, they are interconnected on a global level. And we can expect now that this intensification of extremes will happen in most places on earth. There are nearly no exceptions. Germany actually is exception in a way. So if you take for example South America and the Amazon for example, we had 2023 over 2005, massive drought in the Amazon. We had 2010, a massive drought in the Amazon was exceptional droughts. Then we had droughts in the 2 tens, but not too, except not like 210 and 2, 5. But then we had in 2023, 2024, the most exceptional drought over the Amazon basin, the rainforest there. And it was really off charts much more, a lot, much larger areas, much drier, much other than any time during past droughts. And so you get suddenly a massive intensification of droughts over a couple most effective most of the Amazon for nearly two years it was driven by ocean ocean surface temperature pattern around South America. And the question is now when will the Amazon for example collapse? It's sufficient 1.5 and 2 degrees. It's now the estimates when this collapse, when this Amazon basine will slowly collapse. But if we look at 2023 and 2024 in this drought, we can expect that these events will further intensify. And that for example the Amazon rainforest is now on the brink already now at 1.5 degree. So likely, for example the Amassol will start to burn large scale, maybe on the road to 2 degrees as it seems likely we were mostly southern parts. But if the fire is going up more nerve in the north and the undisturbed Amazon Amazon rainforest. So for example the Amazon, if you get in burning Amazon, it's now a source. The whole Amazon is not any more CO2 sink, but it's a source. So if the Amazon collapses into a fire regime, it produces a high levels of greenhouse gases. That's one point. So it accelerates global warming. Then you get a drought state of the Amazon for example, heats up the tropical sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic. So you get a chain reaction get warmer tropical sea surface temperatures which then affects other areas. And you get the Amazon burns, for example, you get high loads of black carbon in the atmosphere. Yeah. Up to the stratosphere. We have now this new class of fires that produce so much Black carbon, which they pump so much so high into the atmosphere that it goes deeply inside the stratosphere. This was not happening with all small fires though. You, if the Amazon burns, you get high loads of black carbon in the stratosphere which are distributed around the planet. And black carbon, for example, heats the areas in the atmosphere where it concentrates. So you get also in the atmosphere a fully new effect. And likely black carbon in the atmosphere, it can reduce cloud cover, for example. So just in the case of the Amazon and South America, you get a crazy smoke levels for Brazil and neighboring countries, you get black carbon into the stratosphere, you get higher carbon levels or CO2 level in the atmosphere, you get massive fetal planto plumes by the smoke deposition on the ocean surface. So just on the example of the Amazon, it shows that one of these important systems is if it tips, it has a global chain reaction as a consequence. So this is what we can expect in, in, in South Asia, South America that we will see collapsing Amazon, more smoke accumulating across the tropics. And the smoke will also lead to higher rainfall levels, for example, more aerosols in the atmosphere and higher moisture level leads to the most extremes of rainfalls. But this you can expect. Indonesian rainfalls also had to smoke plumes. So you can expect the Indian rainforest will also a burn at a much larger scale in the coming decade, which will lead us to more smoke in South Asia and Southeast Asia and also distant region intensifying rain events. So basically we're stuffed. Yeah, not looking good actually. It's, it's all interconnected. And also what you can expect, the Arctic, the southern polar zone, it's now heating fast because warm and moist air is now entering ever more often. The Antarctic ice shields because the circulation around Antarctica gets increasingly disturbed. So you had more the solar round flow. Suddenly the flow makes a lot of curves and just it is. And it's disturbed in this solar flow around Antarctica and it wobbles more. And this is what we have now around Antarctica. The circulation cell around the Antarctica is more wobbling. It's not anymore so round, but it's more like. And this creates circulation, this circulation effects then tropical circulations, which also feeds back on extreme events in Southeast Asia. So there's another problem. You get extreme convection error convective areas in let's say in the Indian Ocean. They disturb the circulation around Antarctica, which then feeds back on the tropical circulation systems and causes abnormal circulation in the tropics. And so it feeds back on each other. And so the intensification actually it's affecting I mean it's South America, it's Australia, it's tropical Africa, South Africa, North Africa, it's Southeast Asia, it's South Asia, South West Asia so all these regions are now affected by the intensification of extreme but it also goes up to England goes North America we see it now Italy or the whole Mediterranean Neighboring countries are affected because the Mediterranean is heating up so fast so actually these intensifications you see now all around the planet and they're all interconnected but the most highest levels of rainfall you have in across the tropics because you have all this moisture there but also this moisture levels of the tropics they're expanding also Pol all these atmospheric rivers when it's tropical moisture moves far to the north also this is happening now more often so there's not a place not affected by global warming Extremes you cannot escape so difficult. Yeah I mean I was reading that the tropical system as, as it now exists is even going to be looking like moving down so down down sort of more into Australia I don't know if you've sort of come across that but one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was the AMOC because it's probably the, for some reason it's one of the things that everyone's discussing and in and for those who don't know it's the ant Atlantic Renownal Occidental current I'll bring me up so I can give you a break and ice Iceland obviously the government said it was a national you know emergency that they focus on it so everyone in Europe knows about it. My understanding is that process will be quite slow as far as the, the deep freeze that will make Europe unlivable and North America unlivable But this could be a stupid question but I, I don't necessarily have people to ask these questions of so I hope you don't mind a stupid question so but when that current goes and, and like I said it's, that's not a rapid thing it's not expected to be but I don't know you look at the pollution going straight up over the last 100 years I don't think we can rely on anything happening as it has happened in the past. They talk about you know Europe going or the north going into a deep freeze now if the north goes into a deep freeze are we going to then see there'll be enough so the Earth energy imbalance will change because there'll be more white stuff to reflect the Sunlight back. So would it cool the. Would it cool the earth down or what? Because what I'm trying to work out is I've heard that it would just get really, really hot in the south of the world, but. But no one's really answering that question. So if AMOC collapses, which will be a process, what not what does it mean in the north, what does it mean in the south? I think it's all open. We don't know. I mean one point is sure there exists studies that say CIS will agree increase the whole northern latitudes will cool down around Greenland. Possible. But in the past we had AMOC collapse likely also when the Greenland ice shield was vanishing totally or most of it. So maybe it can happen that Greenland and sea eyes recover and cool down a little bit. But this means you get higher gradients while the tropical and subtropical region heat up. You get up there very cold region or colder region though you get a temperature gradients increase in this area. This means speeding up circulation. This is what it means. So if you get stronger gradients inside fluent fluid, you speed up circulations. So you can bet you will get a speed up circulation and seasonal character and stuff like this. But what it means is if you have very cold Arctic down to England for example, and you have very hot tropics and subtropics, this interconnection zone where cold and dry air hits warm and moist area. And this will massively intensify in such a case. So actually it means weather cows means weather havoc. It means craziness, it means there's nowhere to go. Yeah, it's, it's. There exists like some studies, for example, AMOCs collapse is good for northern Europe or North America or parts of North America. Of course it counters global warming. Morning and now this is a means maybe colder winters, but hotter summers are possible. So you. It's just difficult to tell. But also this ammo collapse, it's far from certain when it will happen. It's not even certain if it slowed down. Measurements show did not slow down really. But some older ones do know a newer ones, they do not measure slowdown by model studies see a slowdown. But the AMOC collapse in the past it means it can collapse in the future. That's for certain. It can happen maybe even fast. Normally it should be more grade gradual or if you have a high freshwater input in the North Atlantic can happen more faster. But it's for certain something that will take likely decades will not happen next year, on five years, on 10 or 20 years will likely decline and suddenly, maybe faster, but a process of decades even not, maybe even only next century. So the AMOC is of no concern. That's my personal opinion. Because our concern is the next 10 to 20 years, how bad will it get? And will be wrecked as humanity. And for me, AMOC is a distraction. Yeah, because it's nice to talk all day long about amoc. Okay, there's effects, it can happen. But our problem right now is that the whole climate system is collapsing now. That's not happening in 10, 20 years. And that's our problem. And we do not know currently how fast warming can accelerate. Lots of feedbacks, they are not modeled by models because you have insufficient data or computational power or we don't know the system and systems enough yet to be able to quantify the warming effect. Though this means models are likely wrong in the prediction of the coming warming because they cannot simulate lots of feedbacks which can have a very strong warming effect. So this is our main problem. Our main problem is global warming spiraling out of control. And out of control means not out of our control, just out of control if we let it happen. But if humanity works together on a global level as one species, we can reverse this. Cause if we do not do it, I say every human being who is above around 60 and who will become 80 years old will be full into this. So the next 10 years, we will see a massive escalation driven by the next warming jump. And if the next warming jump happens, bringing us to as close to 2 degrees, things will go amok. The whole system will go amoc. That's, yeah, right. No, I like that. So I, I, it's funny, I expect to die of extreme heat. That's my expectation. My husband, my husband finds that a bit sort of hard to accept. But I'm like, I'm just looking at, you know, whether I'm in Asia or in Australia. That's kind of the path we're on. Right. So I want to just go one more topic and then I'll, I'll give you, I'll let you go. Because I know that this gets exhausting when you talk a lot, Right. But the clock, the coral reef. So you know, I come from Australia. The Great Barrier Reef is the, one of the most magnificent things I've ever seen in my life. Right. And so it was recently announced that that tipping point has passed. I've been saying for years, we've already lost the reefs. We just don't know it yet. The fact that it was officially announced as it's Gone. It's like the media coverage on that is just nowhere. And I'm like, I'm like this, this is probably the biggest story in the world right now that no one's talking about. So you know, I'm sort of sitting about it, sitting there and I was thinking about it and I've sent you my sort of, sort of analysis of what I think is going to happen, right? So 25 of life on the reef will go with, with, with the collapse of the corals, right? So that's, the creatures that live in the reef rely on the reef, the actual corals themselves and everything else that goes with it as well as the, the, the, the, the species that come in and have their babies in the reef, right? So that's stage one, that's 25 of, of life in the ocean. And within one to five years is my estimate that we'll start to see that really happen. But then there's stage two. And that's like I've said, you know, 30 to 40% loss of the rest of the species in the ocean because they rely on life in the reef. And then, and on it goes to stage five and basically we've lost 95 of life in the ocean, which is a dead ocean, which, you know, as you were saying, it's a water planet. So you know, that's 20, 30, 40, 50 years away. But the, the loss of the coral reefs, it is to me is like that's an end game, am I wrong? It's, it's, it's, we live on a water planet. The oceans control the living conditions on Earth, that's for sure. And it's the living systems inside the oceans which run to a major share the bio geoshemical cycles of the planet. This means movement of carbon, movement of nutrients, movement of life, aerosols for the atmosphere, for rain and stuff like that. So actually the oceans, they control the conditions in the atmosphere and the land masses. That's what they do. So if you destroy all the complex systems in the oceans, coral reef, kelp forests, seagrass meadows and all this important mangrove for us, all this important system, if you destroy all these complex ecosystems, opportunistic microbes take over. And what you see for example in collapse reef systems, maps of cyanobacteria are growing on the, on the, on the sea floor. So what you have, for example, if you stay with coral reef, coral reefs create a low nutrient environment, oligotrophic though you have few nutrients in the water. That's what coral reefs do because they don't like nutrients, they don't like euphorication. If you have a collapsing reef system, coral reef system, it's overgrown by macro algae algaes. Then the next step, you have a lot of new microbes, a single cell organisms taking over the system. You have a high biomass alga blooms and macro algae glowing on the seafloor, also producing lots of biomass. This means to follow oxygen levels, you get dead zones which lead to more nutrients being washed out of the sea floor. But this means where once a nice colorful coral reef system has been slime, toxic slime takes over. But you can bring it down to that because many of the microbes that are now spreading throughout the oceans and along the coastlines, they produce toxins and they produce high algae mass blooms because the, the, the, the food webs in the oceans get increasingly disturbed. In the past, for example, a reef system, you had these reef coral reefs in symbiosis with alga. They gave a lot of habitat for fish. They control each other though. They could have all prosper in coexistence. If these systems break down, you get systems dominated by microorganisms. And microorganism, they don't like it clear and nice and shiny. You can see white and far in the water. They like it slimy, murky, stinky. That's what micro microorganisms love. This is what we observe everywhere. So if you, if you collapse the complex systems in the oceans, you get systems controlled by microorganisms. They fool the microbial loop. This means microbes produce biomass which is used by other microbes to feed on this biomass. In the past you had a small copa, so plankton that were feeding on the algae blooms fish were eating. So plankton and other prey daddles were eating the other blackivorous fish. So these chains, they brought nutrients to higher levels of the trophic levels. But now we get the microbial loop strengthening. This means algae blooms feeding algal blooms which come now in, in many cases toxic neurotoxic. So we have now along all courses of the planet, the spread of toxic or neurotoxic highly toxic species, be it on the sea floor, be it in the water column, in the shelf seas. For mainly where we ultraficate the coastal systems. So we get now since 78s, we get no toxic species and the blooms spreading along all continental coasts of the oceans. And now a new study came out that a neurotoxic diatom species, Zia, which is spreading also along all the coast from pole to pole, is also spreading throughout the oceans. So the main problem is not actually a collapse of reef systems, but the main problem is we speak now about collapse of our oceans. And if the food webs of the oceans collapse into systems dominated by microorganisms feeding other microorganisms, not only more fish and so black ones, things can fast spiral out of control. There exists for example a scientific discussion during past mass extinctions. One of the question is either blooms near the coast, they increase massively. This we know that's given, but we do not know if that did increase massively in the open oceans. There exists discussions. I say yes, others say no. And that's the big problem. Can. Can the whole ocean collapse into a micro. A system governance perhaps full algae blooms also across the upper oceans. And I would say yes, but they have all the functions to do it. But we play a highly dangerous game here. Yeah. Because if you live on a water planet, first rule, the oceans are sacred. Yeah. If you destroy the oceans, you're Gouda. Yeah. That's. That's like. This is just, I mean just common sense, you know. Destroy the ocean on a water planet. You don't know. Yeah, yeah. And we're seeing that algae bloom impact off the coast of South Australia, you know, just for the last sort of six months. It's just devastating what's happening. Yeah, yeah. You know, the largest one was off the west code of USA 3000km of neurotoxic algae bloom for a month was 216 and was repeated now again last year. Was it. So if you get toxic agar blooms covering 3000 km of coast for months, what kind of warming you need actually. But it's all disregarded because if we want to solve just the algae bloom problem, we would have to solve global warming. How we use nutrition on the agriculture sector. We have to protect coastal systems. You have to stop pollution culture system. You have to stop fishing and all this bottom trolling fishing nets, you have to stop that. So you have though. And, and deep sea mining. What do you want top deep sea mining. I mean this is, this is, this is not stupid. This is far into the insanity area. We are not anymore stupid. We are just insane. Yeah, we are insane species. It's. It's just, it's just madness. And the problem is all or the whole world, the whole economic system is based on all these processes. And if you want to change our behavior, the whole economic system would have to collapse because just you have no worry about $250 trillion of debt. Or is it already $300 trillion of debt to pay this, all this interest rate, you need to destroy. You need to keep up all these markets running. You cannot just change our behavior without destroying the whole capitalistic economy. But we're going to destroy it anyway. One way or another. It gets destroyed, right? No chance. But yeah, it will anyway collapse. All this depth is unsustainable. And also, if you want to adapt, if you want to mitigate global warming, we cannot do it in depth like that. So actually we need a fundamental reorganization of humanity to solve the existential crisis we are now triggering. That's not a wish concert. This means we don't do it. That's it for our civilization. Yeah, yeah, I've got. We decide. Nature decides. That's. Maybe it's maybe in 10 years we are already fully in the red. Maybe in 20 years. But don't expect it to. That it takes much longer. Yeah, 20 years. I said, I said 10 years. Max temperature jump. But sure, it's not about right or wrong. It's just that it will happen. That's not sure. The only question is how fast will it happen. And those bunkers aren't going to be much use either, right? The billionaire bunkers aren't going to be much use in that future. Yeah, I mean. Yep. It's just. It really is. And I suppose one of the things, one of the reasons I wanted to get you to talk is people don't want to hear me talk about this stuff. They really don't. They really push back on it in, in social sort of conversations with people who don't think about this stuff. They really try and censor it. Oh, we're not talking about serious stuff. We're not. And, and I'm kind of sitting there and I'm like, guys, if we don't do what we need to do, we're really gonna be in a lot of trouble. And we're already in a lot of trouble. Right. And it's, it's a very difficult thing to sort of. Because I'm part of communities that think about this stuff, talk about this stuff, try and educate the world about this stuff. But you know, the majority of people, they just don't want to know. And I'm like, you're going to know one way or another, you're going to know. So it's better to know now when we've still got maybe a chance. You know, we've got to try. You know, we might not succeed, but I, but I'd like to try. I've got a couple of kids, you Know, I'd like them to be able to go and be heavy metal rock stars and pursue their dreams if that's what they want. Right, but. But we're not even trying. No, we're just not. No, it's just. I mean the problem is the elites, they do not realize it because you really have to occupy yourself with it. And one thing what the system tries to do is like they try to keep these politicians in the bubble. Yeah, everybody has his own bubble. For every social layer you have bubbles actually. Absolutely. All in their bubbles. So politicians, they do not realize what is happening in the field. Some maybe also the billionaires, I don't think they realize what's happening. Otherwise the Trump regime would not give a on emissions because they see it in the moment or parts of it as a geopolitical instrument. I don't know why the why the US government's government wants now with all its might to increase its emissions. Actually it's an attack of on humanity. What the US government is doing just now, I don't know. But it tells me that they do not understand what they trigger here. All also these billionaires like Teal and stuff, they have their mansions in New Zealand. They think they go with all collapses. They go to these mansions and then when all this collapse they come out again and take over the markets, produce food with bacteria tanks and stuff like that. Some fantasies like this they have, they really think they produce a collapse. Then they wait till the collapse is over and then they can rebuild after collapse, nothing. So actually the collapse of humanity has to be prevented because if we collapse we cannot do anything against it. So yeah, that's the main thing. If the current system keeps on doing what it does, it will collapse. No, no chance. This means all these trillions, all this will anyway will be gone. They will be gone. So best to transfer it over into a new system that can survive. This means we have to get rid of all the debt to create room maybe inside the same system. I don't give actually. But we need a lot of money, a lot of work power actually to reverse what we did. And there won't be be any chance for this world world we have now to survive. You just need to just. With the grids in Southeast Asia, you need to rebuild all the grids also in in the in countries. They are all not built for what is coming. So just that we build all the electric grids of the planet. We don't have the copper for example difficult. So we really have to be inventive. We have to Be smart, we have to be efficient. But this system prevents us to do anything because you don't want to have good grids, you want to have make money with grids. But if you have to invest money in grids, you don't make money out of grids. So, you know, the soul system is not made for what they trigger. And this I guess will be realized by ever, ever more people. It's like Trump is the best example. All the Republicans, they were sticking with Trump because I realized only if we stick with Trump, we have a future. Now that Trump is collapsing in his regime, now ever more Republicans are jumping off the ship because they realize if they stay with Trump, they go down, they have to leave the chip to stay on top. Those means in terms of climate warming, more and more people will realize the next 10 years that with this ship, they have no future at all. They need a new ship. So it will, it will create a massive movement and all society levels because all realize they have no future because also billionaires and rich people, they all have kids. Yeah. They ask them also know that personal level also has for them. So I think we will get a big movement, global movement, the next 10 years of humanity realizing if we go on, nobody wins, just nobody. No, no winners, only losers. So hopefully our species will work together and we'll. Until I, until I see, yeah, until I see that level of, you know, protest on the street, you know, you, you see climate protests and it's thousands of people, you know, and then you, I'm like, until everyone is on the street, people are not appreciating the situation that we're in. I mean, this is a time for a complete revolution and how we run our societies and every country is going to deal with it differently. Right. But, but war is not the answer because that's just going to exacerbate the situation. Right. With all the emissions that come from war and all the pollution, you know, Ukraine is devastated, Gaza is devastated. From an environmental perspective, you know, we can't, that's not the path. And that's where the leaders are taking as Peter Teal and all those sort of people that you were mentioning. Right. It's just we, we do not have the right people in power in Western nations. I do think that in some, some areas of the world, like I, I in Singapore, I think the leaders are very much operating in the interests of their community. But no country can start this by themselves. Right. And it's that, it's that collaboration that's necessary and we didn't Maybe that's one of the outcomes from COP30 this year's countries coming together, working together, a smaller group, I don't know, we went and see. But it's, it's time. But yeah, so. And then the other thing of course is there's still a lot of information we don't even know. You know, from a climate perspective. You know, there's parts of Antarctica that scientists have never been able to reach. You know, so there's, there's, you know, you were talking about the small things and the big things. You know, there's so much we don't know. There's so much we don't know. The temperatures that are happening, we don't know how many people are dying from extreme heat events. There's so much data that we don't actually have. So we actually don't even really understand how big the problem is either. So you know, I think that's where there isn't information is also information. Right. You must, as you, as you've been digging into the climate system, you know where the information isn't as well as where the information is. And I think that's a really important part of the conversation too. There's a lot we don't know. I have currently, it's a lot we, we really do not know how it will accelerate, how it will intensify. It's now open. But it looks like that we really underestimated to warm our water plant. What will be the effects. It's likely much more worse than we thought. But I really hope that our species will come together because of that. Otherwise I don't see really hope for our species because we don't change our course in any area. It's all over the red lines. Yeah. Pollution, the structure of ecosystems, biodiversity, laws introduce introduction of novel species inside, stuff like that. You have cloud, global warming, you have acidification, you have over harvesting of the oceans. I mean everything adjusted. Pollution every we toxify our whole planet now even then the effects of microplastic. I know, a planetary emergency already. No, because you just realized what microplastic does with us. It's, it's just unbelievable what we do. Yeah. Oh my God. Nuclear waste, melting, ready to melt out of the Arctic after it was dumped. You know, it's, it, yeah, it's just like. Anyway, Jan, I want to say thank you so much for joining me and for you for just, just being so honest. Maybe every six months we can catch up and you can tell me where we are and let everybody, let everybody else know. But I just really appreciate it. And you communicate in a fantastic way that I think most people can understand, because I think climate scientists. It's just so hard. It's so big. It's so complicated. Complicated. And it takes a lot of time. Right. To. To pull the pieces together. Right. But yeah, you do it well. And I like that starting point of the water planet and just sort of emphasize. Yeah. Because that's. I mean, I just needed 18 years to understand that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's really take time sometimes. Often it takes time for us to realize things or the true scope of things. Yeah. Okay. So I also really appreciate to talk to you, Andrea. Also nice. You took your time. And I think it's very important that the information comes out there. Yeah. That we are on course to disaster. That's only question. Yeah. Every single one of us got to do everything we can. That's. That's it. But. And I always say start with reducing your energy and material consumption by at least 70%. If you can do that, that means we stop flying. We. We stop holidaying abroad. We minimize our clothing purchases. We reduce our meat or donate meat at all. We get rid of our car and we use our legs or get on a bike or whatever it is, but just massively reduce. You can't do it overnight. It takes time. But once you start, it's. It's amazing. Once you start and say, well, I'm not going to do that anymore, then you'll see the next thing and the next thing and quickly and. And it's really liberating. It is. Because, you know, it frees you up. You. You stop being caught up in the consumption society where having stuff gives you status, because it. It just. It doesn't. And it's destroying the foundation of life. No. And it doesn't. Right. So holiday local to home and get out there and regenerate your. Your little part of the world. Do whatever you can. Speak with your friends, speak with people you meet. Also very important. And spread the message like what you do with your podcast. So important. So hopefully we reach a critical mass of people of humanity, understanding what is at stake. I'm going for 1 billion people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's my goal. I love it. I mean, actually, you have to think big. That's the point. Oh, it's the only way. Yeah. All right. Thanks. Yeah. Appreciate it. I have to thank you. Yeah. Bye. Bye.