 On Monday the IPCC released its latest report into the catastrophic consequences of climate change and the urgent action we need to take to stop it. This would have been an obvious opportunity for mainstream channels to invite on climate scientists to talk about their findings to talk about what we should be demanding our governments do. Instead the Jeremy Vine show on channel five invited on Mike Parry is a former journalist at the sun and the express more recently a host at the Murdoch owned talk radio we can look now at this non experts response to the report. This report was by hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists by the way we'll also see a response from my colleague Ash Sarkar. It's all very well us doing our bit but we're responsible for one percent of the world's emissions OK but Russia, China, India are all actually stepping up their emissions by using more fossil fuels. China have just discovered in in a in a Mongolia which is why that's a horrible to the to the Mongol people billions of tons more of coal and they're going to use it they're opening a new coal fired power station about once a month somewhere in China. Now I know you can say well OK but we're still going to do our bit but are we putting enough pressure and will be at the COP 26 on other nations massive nations using all these fossil fuels to do their bit because if we're doing our bit but it's so tiny. Compared to the rest it's pointless so they're pointing us because we're so small. I'm sorry but that is a load of fraff one of the things that Britain can do is introduce legislation tomorrow which was to stop British banks from financing fossil fuel projects. So while so while you're at notes so while you're right we have been decreasing our emissions but there are still plans for new oil and gas fields in the UK. This is the controversy around cambo just off the coast of Scotland. You've also got these plans for a new coal mine in the northeast suicidal of the government is absolutely and it also doesn't wait. I let you have a go. I let you have a go right. It's also doesn't make economic sense. All right you're going to have to shut these things down if we want to manage global temperature changes to have in a reasonable level. What the report says today is that we are at code red for humanity. It's going to be one point five degree increase in temperature by 2030. We're at one point two now and we're already seeing fires across Greece and Turkey fires in Italy, flooding in Germany. Yeah, yeah, but so think about what it's going to cost if we don't take action. But these are all models. This is not fact yet. What you're doing is predictions. No, this is fact because what we can see now and one of the things the models haven't taken into account. If you read the work of Simon Lewis at UCL of really really important climate scientists. Is that what none of these models have taken into account is that the impact of extreme weather events is happening much sooner than the models seem to be. Well, listen, Ash, will you be aware of a chap called Michael Schellenberger, who was described on Time Magazine here over the environment? He's just written a new book called Apocalypse Never. Have you read it? No, have you? Have you read it? No, have you recommended a book you haven't read? No, I've read the review of the book because this is the same thing. That's fine. That's fine. Yeah, thank you. And what he says is what he says is that actually it's all massively exaggerated. This guy was a campaigner for change and now he says it's not happening. The other thing is, look, I'm sure there are lots of people who make a really good living denying the scale of the climate. A lot of people make a really good living for money and for attention. No, right thing. Yesterday, the facts are incontrovertible. We are seeing the effects of global heating now. And there are people like you who quite frankly do a disservice to the people of this country by lying to them. I'm not lying to anybody. No, no. Have you read the book is such a good line. I have so much respect for Rache every time she goes on mainstream media. That's so disarming. Have you read the book? He hasn't read the book. Worth noting for our show about the IPCC report, we've got a leading climate scientist. The Jeremy Vines show decided to get a former journalist at the Sun and current host on talk radio. Someone who didn't know their stuff. He was making there a classic argument against action in the West. An argument for climate in action, essentially, saying that whatever we do in Britain, it's completely irrelevant because it's other countries who have all the responsibility for climate change. Why should we change what we're doing when we're only one percent of emissions? Let's look at who is actually responsible for climate change. Because when you look at historical emissions and obviously we benefit from the fact that we emitted so much carbon over the last century because that's why we're so rich, why we're so wealthy. The climate doesn't care, particularly when the carbon was emitted. It stays that around for centuries. It is Europe and the United States, Europe and North America who have the most historic responsibility. The EU 28. So when this was made in 2019 by our world in data, the EU 28 included the UK now has a population of half a billion. It's historical responsibility for climate change is 22 percent of total emissions. China, who he tries to single out a population of 1.4 billion. Historically, they've created only 12.7 percent of emissions, half the amount of Europe. India, he also tried to single out India, remember, a population of 1.3 billion people. Historically, they have emitted only 3 percent of global emissions. Then you have someone like him saying, oh, he's got nothing to do with Britain. The problem is India. The problem is China. How can you possibly be asking developing countries to play a role in combating climate change, which we need them to do, by the way, because even though we shouldn't have emitted all that carbon, we do now need all countries to reduce their carbon levels at whatever phase of development. That's why we should be pumping money into governments in these countries so that they can have green growth instead of dirty growth. But they are not going to take kindly to people in the West saying, climate change, it's your fault, because they know it's not true. He is kind of right about new coal. China is building 60 new coal power plants. That is very, very bad and pressure should be put on them to stop doing that. Apparently, they have quite a powerful coal lobby in the country. It is not as simple as he was suggesting, though, because as well as developing new coal, which is unforgivable, China also has more than a third of the world's installed wind and solar capacity. That doesn't just matter for China. It matters for the whole world because developing these technologies actually made them affordable enough for everyone else to use. It's because of China that solar and wind power is now very, very competitive. The last thing we'll point out is the book he cites, but which he had never read. It's by Michael Schellenberger. He isn't a climate scientist. He is a former PR executive. I, like Mike Perry, have not read the book. So I can't give you an honest rundown of what it said. I did look for some reviews. So in the Yale climate review, Peter Glick, who is an actual climate scientist, unlike myself or Mike Perry, he described it as filled with bad science and bad arguments, which is deeply and fatally flawed. Of course, we shouldn't get distracted by reviews and counter reviews of some book by a contrarian. We have already a document which shows us what is the current consensus among climate scientists. It's the IPCC report. It's the kind of thing that the likes of Mike Perry are trying to distract from. And that shows that there is an overwhelming consensus among the world scientists that human-caused climate change is happening. Its effects are incredibly extreme. Whatever a right-wing talk show host who read a review about a book by a PR executive might like to say. By lying to them. I'm not lying to anybody. No, no, I'm not lying. What I'm saying is I'm trying to weight the evidence on one side or the other. And there is a 90 to 95% consensus on scientists that the effects of global heating are real, that there is irreparable damage being done to the earth now. And it is poor families across the world The issue here is whether in Britain we should make sacrifices that the Chinese won't make. So what I said is that one is that we can apply more pressure to Chinese governments, India, to Russia and to Brazil. They won't take the slightest bit of notice of it. Hang on one second. One of the things we can do is we can stop British banks from funding overseas fossil fuel projects. Introduce the legislation tomorrow. The second thing we can do is wean ourselves off the reliance of exports which come from these big polluters. Because while we have decreased our own carbon emissions, we've in fact just kind of negatively offset them by buying so much from other countries. So we need to become a lot more self-sufficient as a nation. So let's buy less on Amazon from China. And then the third thing we can do is use the state as a means to support a just transition. So right now borrowing is very, very cheap for the government. And you don't have to pay it back like a household debt. You can stretch out over a long period of time. So it doesn't make a huge impact on day-to-day finances. So one of the things you can do is, because you're right, heat pumps are expensive, what you can do as a borough to fund this country. You mentioned about poor families a few minutes ago. What poor family in Burnley is going to want to spend £10,000 on a heat pump, which is a completely unnecessary addition to their house? What poor family in Doncaster wants to deal with yearly floods? Because that's what's happening. Of course they don't, but that's called weather. And there's too much reliance put on climate change being responsible for every bit of weather in the world. What I think was most ridiculous there is that he keeps saying, I'm not a denier. I'm not a denier. I'm not a climate denier. And at the same time, he says, you can't keep connecting extreme weather events to climate change, right? No, I'm not a climate scientist. I'm not here to tell you why increased extreme weather events are related to climate change. I'm instead, which is what I think is the sensible thing to do in this situation, going to go to the IPCC report released today signed off by over 200 of the world's leading climate scientists and all of the world's governments. This is not a radical document. This is representing the consensus among scientists and policymakers. They write, it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land, widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. The scale of recent changes across the climate system as a whole and the present state of many aspects of the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years. Human induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heat waves, heavy precipitation, droughts and tropical cyclones. And in particular, their attribution to human influence has strengthened since the fifth assessment report. The fifth assessment report was the last report from the IPCC. You can make your decision. Do you believe Mike Parry, who's read a review of a book that he hasn't read by a PR executive? Or do you believe hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists? For instance, the stats are in controversy about the increase. It's cyclical. It's cyclical. Hang on, we don't yet know whether any individual moment in weather is climate change. Absolutely. But you've got a pattern building, which scientists say shows it's going up. We've had floods in these countries for years. In 1952, people wiped out in Cornwall a massive flood. It happens. It's cyclical. It's happening every year. OK, why did the Romans grow vineyards in Northumberland? Why did the Romans grow vineyards in Northumberland? I have to admit, I did Google that question before we went live. I didn't have quite enough time to get a satisfactory answer. The weather we are currently experiencing is not cyclical. The evidence for this is overwhelming. Let's go back to the IPCC report. They show here changes in global surface temperatures relative to 1850 to 1900. So they say with confidence that what we are witnessing now is unprecedented in more than 2000 years. So let's look at this graph on the left. You can see that the amount that the temperatures have risen since 1850 is just it's like nothing else you can see in the previous 2000 years. They also show on this that it's only been this hot for a sustained period of time once in the past 100,000 years. So that was around 6,500 years ago. We can look now at this chart on the right again from the IPCC. This here, they simulate what they think temperatures would be like if it were merely due to natural variations. So that's solar and volcanic changes. They say it would basically be no change at all, fluctuate slightly. But we're looking at 0.1 degree heating or 0.1 degree calling over the decades when you put into the simulation human interventions, human emissions, then you get what we are observing, which is over one degrees of warming. I think at the moment we have 1.9 degrees of warming from pre-industrial times. If you're just looking at two different people arguing, Ash did a brilliant job there, but they're basically seeing, oh, climate change, there's two sides to this argument. Who do I believe? Oh, yeah, vineyards in Britain during the Roman times. Maybe this is a complicated issue and it's too early for us to take any drastic action. How irresponsible do you think it is to put that kind of person on TV on a day like today? The British media is completely broken, right? Like the discussion that we should be having now is not whether this report by consensus that matches several other reports by consensus that, you know, as you've outlined that humans are responsible for global heating and that global heating, global warming is going to have these impacts going forward. The conversation that we should have been having is, okay, we know what we need to do as Ash outlined in that clip. How are we going to get there? What are the concrete steps? What are the concrete things that we can do in order to put pressure on our government and have concrete demands on what our government should be doing to get us there? Not debating about, you know, the reason that you couldn't find a straight answer to the vineyard question is because it's irrelevant and it doesn't matter. It's that that is, you know, and that lies on the responsibility of the of the Jeremy Vine show of the media of producers to present this to present the key question here to be not how do we take climate change seriously, but should we even bother to take climate change? Seriously, but I think also, you know, what we really saw come through in that clip was what we're going to hear a lot more of over the coming months with COP taking place in Glasgow this this year. We're going to hear a lot of bluster regarding Britain being a global leader of climate action where the government and and, you know, the media will be using a highly selective statistics to position itself as somehow doing even more than its fair share to in the fight against climate breakdown, but we cannot let that messaging succeed. And that is because it sets a precedent for, you know, as I said before, state led virtue signaling as a replacement for concrete action on climate change, but it also allows the government to get away with complicity and with its inaction. So and this is, you know, he said multiple times, you know, I'm not a climate denier because, you know, being a climate denier is kind of a dirty word. But what this is is climate deflection. It's deflecting from the core causes of climate breakdown using these precious. It's not every day that climate breakdown is discussed on mainstream media. It's using those precious moments when we can really access the public's understanding of the issues at stake and using that time to simply deflect on the core causes, not only of climate breakdown, but of most importantly, the uneven experiences of climate breakdown and shifting focus to, you know, selective and propagandistic statistics and narratives of the past, but also shifting, you know, shifting focus to false solutions, like, you know, whether it's individual recycling or, you know, shooting billionaires into space because, you know, we've given up on Earth altogether. And, you know, I think it's so important as well to myth bust on this idea that the UK is a global leader of climate and the fight against climate change, because let's be very clear. The UK is responsible for a considerable proportion of historical emissions, like when we talk about emissions, we're not just talking about what's happening today, what's being emitted now, that's not the only thing that's relevant. What's relevant is also what has been historically emitted and here the UK's contribution vastly outweighs the population and country size. And so there is a historical accountability here where Britain and in fact, you know, Europe more generally has a reparative obligation to the rest of the world that can't be compensated by merely, you know, this light touch greenwashing and saying, you know, oh, with the exception of a few coal mines, we're not going to commission any more fossil fuel projects. And, you know, but secondly, even if all fossil fuel projects within the UK ended today, which, you know, obviously we know that the UK hasn't even been able to commit to that, the UK would still be complicit in global emissions, because primarily London is strategically essential to the continuation of the fossil fuel industry as we've as we've sort of outlined, you know, that the government's neoliberal approach means that companies that are literally listed on the London stock exchange are able to use the fact that we have very lax regulation in this area to freely exploit fossil fuel reserves in Africa and Asia without any real regulation or any real oversight. And that is what I would argue, you know, a direct legacy of one of the most direct legacies of colonialism in the modern day. Our own government credit agency is has financially supported fossil fuel projects in countries like Oman in Ghana and Brazil, locking these countries into fossil fuel driven development models and then turning around and blaming them for omitting too much. So in what world could that be considered climate leadership? The question therefore becomes, and this is the discussion that should have been had on Jeremy Vine's show. What does climate leadership actually look like for the UK? Obviously, it goes without saying no more commissioning of any fossil fuel projects within the UK, but also dissolving the political and financial infrastructure that is located within the UK and enables extraction throughout the world. And we also need to funnel the UK's considerable financial and political capital into supporting a globally just transition that particularly protects workers in high carbon industries, which includes investing in models of development that don't center extraction, but also don't center growth at all costs. And it also obviously means removing the influence of fossil fuel industries in global climate negotiations and instead centering people and the communities and the priorities of those who are most impacted by climate breakdown. But there's also a reparations element here as well because of that historical role that has been played by Britain, which has always conveniently left out in these sort of media hits on climate change. And it's because of that historical obligation of European and North American states, we need to be providing the financing necessary financing necessary for countries of the global South who contributed the least to climate change and yet are facing its most brutal consequences to mitigate against the impacts of climate change. It does include transitions of wealth from the north to the south in order to provide for this mitigating infrastructure. But it also means things like abolishing intellectual property laws that prevent the technologies that we need in order to mitigate against climate breakdown. It prevents those technologies from being widely, you know, reproduced and widely available for all those countries that need it, opening our borders to people who are displaced by climate change. It means welcoming climate refugees and understanding that climate, that being a climate refugee is a very broad category. It doesn't always look like someone being directly displaced by an extreme weather event, but it includes things like economic disruption caused by climate climate change and climate breakdown. So that understanding of historical obligation and putting what we understand to be, you know, the UK's fair share in the context of that historical obligation, that is the benchmark for climate leadership in the global north, and particularly in the UK. It's not these mealy-mouthed, virtually signaling phrases that we're hearing from Alec Sharma, that we're hearing from Boris Johnson. It means actually putting your money and your political will where your mouth is, and that's what we will not see from that, from this government because of the systemic contradiction that exists between the political and financial systems that our government endorse and are embedded in and the actual action that is necessary in order to get us out of this problem.