 Okay, so, to those who have not seen who will attend, come along, you always upset me sometimes when they come, you know, get fast crowds of people. I just think these talks are so important and I wish more people would come. I've always thought, you've got something to please somebody. Ydw. Felly, mae'n fwy o'r unig oedd AMG yw profeser yn ymgyrchafol yn ysgologi'r cyfnod o'r hwn, a'r ysgologio'r ysgologio'r ysgologio. Dyma'r sefydlu o'r byw ymgyrchafol. Dyma'r byw, yn yr ysgologio. Rwy'n meddwl, dyma'r byw. Dwy Rhywodraeth i'w gyfnod i'n gwirionedd yma, Cymru yn ymgyrch ymryd, y bydd y debyg yn y Llyfr yno, ymgwrdd cyfnodd yn y Llyfr. A'r rhaglenu Gyrfaenno Cymru sy'n gyd-dyn nhw ar y cyfnodd y bydd yn y rhaglenu Gyrfaenno Cymru. Cymru yn ymryd yn y cyfnodd y bydd. Ac blwyddyn i wych chi'n ddigon darkyl ymarferol, ond mae'r hyn mae'n mynd yn cael eu ffordd o hyd yw'r rhaglenu. a yw'r llwysgol yw ddweud yw ddweud yw'r 1.5 o ddegwys, 2 o ddegwys, a ddweud y parysau ar gyfer ar gyfer. Mae'r ddweud o'r ffordd, ac yn ddweud yw ddweud yw'r ysgrifennu o'r ysgrifennu. Yn ymgyrch yn y twbl yw, a'r ddweud yw'r ysgrifennu, rwy'n gwneud ymwysgol. Dyna? Y desiu chi chi, Sam, and here we're hot doing in two, 45 min, and then we have it up here afterwards. Thanks for the invitation and thanks to you for being here. Fair is correct. This is an important issue and is going to become increasingly important, Mae'r ddweud y gallwn gwahoddiad, a os yw'r cyfnodd y gallwn, mae gweithio'n gweithio ac'n gweithio'n gwahanol. Yn ymgyrch yn y cyfnoddiad, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio i ddweud yw'r cyfnodd, yr amser yn llunigol ac yn ddweud o gyfnodd. Mae rhanen oed yn ymdegol yn Cymru. Cynnyddio chi fod yn ymdegol i'r ffordd o'r prifysgol? Rwy'n credu i'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r prifysgol i'r rhanen o'r ffordd o'r rhanen o'r ffordd o'r rhanen o'r ffordd o'r rhanen o'r rhanen o'r prifysgol yn cyddoi. This presentation is based on an article with the title of the seminar here that came out in the Journal of Human Rights and Environment 8.1. If anybody wants to look at this in greater detail. I apologise in advance to people who may know quite a lot about geoengineering, but I can't assume that everybody does, so if you'll bear with me as I go through just outlining what the issues are. So, to summarise, in a sense, is fair was talking about, you know, the aim in article two of the Paris Agreement to keep average global temperature from increasing by no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and preferably the exhortation to prevent temperature from rising by more than 1.5 degrees, which is what small island developing states threatened with inundation from rising sea levels actually need to survive. It's an existential question, so during the Paris negotiations, for example, they had a campaign 1.5 to survive. And so, the temperature is, would we trust anybody to have their finger on the global thermostat? Should anybody? Because as I go through this, the questions that will arise is whether we should permit geoengineering. And if so, is it possible to regulate it? How relevant is the law? How useful is the law in relation to an issue like geoengineering? So, start with the volcanoes. In 1991, as you see, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted, and global average, global temperature was reduced by half a degree Celsius for a time. Now, since the industrial revolution, temperatures have increased by about 1.1 degrees Celsius, so we're already very, very close to the 1.5 degree target in article two, and halfway towards breaching the 2 degree Celsius target. And the volcanoes are relevant, because what scientists are attempting to do with one strand of geoengineering is to mimic what volcanoes do. And you can see there that David Keith is the well-known Harvard scientist who is presiding over this project. You'll see this was March 2017, a $20 million project to send aerosol injections up into the stratosphere in the biggest chem trails experiment to date. Now, what we know from previous volcanic eruptions is that in addition to decreasing temperature by putting this kind of duvet effect, preventing the heat from reaching the surface of the planet, they also have decreased rainfall precipitation in many parts of the world. And this is relevant because if the geoengineering takes place and reduces the precipitation, if for example it disrupts the monsoon in South Asia, you're talking about one and a half billion people's food and water security being threatened. So it's potentially very, very serious indeed. And the solar radiation management, which I'll come to in a moment, works by spraying sulphates into the atmosphere. And we also know that sulphur dioxide depletes the ozone layer. So there's another potential problem that arises. Now the two main types of geoengineering, the one first one carbon dioxide removal is relatively benign and I'll go through the pros and cons of both of these two main types. The problematic one is solar radiation management. Now with carbon dioxide removal or carbon sequestration, you probably know it, you probably heard of carbon capture and storage, which is, as you see a technique for the long term storage of carbon dioxide. So we might find the disused oil wells in the North Sea to be a good place to store the carbon dioxide or in some kind of climate or poetic justice. The coal mines, the pits that have been closed, the coal being the dirtiest of the three fossil fuels, they might be good places to store carbon dioxide in future. Now this takes place, carbon sequestration takes place in plants in the soil as a natural process. And of course, the most important carbon sinks are the tropical forests, which we absolutely have to protect for human survival because of the absorption of carbon dioxide. There is also carbon sequestration underground in the geology, in the earth's geology. It happens deep in the ocean and this is where the research in carbon capture and storage is going as a solid material. Now the idea, for example, is to capture the carbon dioxide as it's emitted in industrial processes, turn it into a solid and bury it. So with terrestrial carbon sequestration, the carbon dioxide is absorbed naturally through photosynthesis and stored as carbon in biomass and soil. Now, in relation to forests, tropical deforestation is responsible for 20% of annual global carbon dioxide emissions. And an area the size of Wales is disappearing from the Amazon every year. Under Lula and then Dilma Hosef's governments in Brazil, there was some progress being made that's now going into quite a big reverse. There are massive problems with the annual burning off of crops and cutting down forests in Indonesia, in Asia. And it's imperative that we try to preserve them. There is the red plus framework for reducing forest degradation and deforestation that perhaps we could chat about after I've finished speaking and whether that is likely to succeed because it basically involves commodifying forests. We're sadly at the point where the solution to climate change seems to be to turn nature into a range of commodities because in a neoliberal world we don't seem to have conversations that don't involve price. Or not many. With the geological sequestration, you get the storing of carbon dioxide underground in rock formations over a long period of time. And the carbon dioxide is held in small pore spaces that have held oil and natural gas for millions of years. Now, here this was sort of like a laugh I nearly cried bit. Some of the ideas that have been put forward for the geo engineering technologies. So you'll see, for example, climate-ready crops, artificial trees. And I really, really do not understand why when trees are so efficient at absorbing carbon dioxide, we would want to invent artificial trees. Biochar, burning and then burying agricultural carbon waste underground. There's things like enhanced weathering because the carbon dioxide gets absorbed in the rocks geologically and you can enhance that process. But there are things there you see like white painting. So presumably we're going to have to paint every roof in the world white to reflect as much sunshine as possible, which is obviously much more sensible than reducing the use of fossil fuels. Space mirrors, firing trillions of tiny aluminium mirrors into space to deflect sunlight. Do you think when the people sat down in a room and came up with this idea, what were they actually smoking? Because what would be the carbon footprint of sending millions of mirrors into space? Cloud seeding. Again, if we could spray seawater into clouds to precipitate rain, fine. But two of the areas of climate science that are least understood to date, relatively less understood, are ocean warming and cloud formation. So there's uncertainty as there is intrinsic uncertainty in all climate science. But those are two areas, certainly cloud formation is a potential problem. So here are some of the other, as I said, brave, brilliant, bizarre, benign or just bonkers. Rapp Greenland. These are serious. I'm not making this stuff up. These are serious things. Greenland is the largest island in the world. So wrapping it in a blanket sounds wildly impractical, but that is exactly what Dr. Jason Box, a glaciologist from Ohio State University, proposes to do. He believes that if the world covers the country's glaciers with blankets, this will be enough to reflect the sun's rays and prevent the ice caps from melting. About two years ago, NASA and Bill Gates teamed up to hatch plans for a seawater spraying machine that could prevent climate change by creating clouds that reflect sunlight away from Earth. The machines could suck up 10 tons of water per second and then spray it over 3000 feet into the air, increasing the density of clouds. Although the plan would help to mitigate climate change, it would take a large amount of energy to power each individual ship. A study showed that it would take at least 1,900 ships at a cost of over $7 billion to stop the Earth's temperature from rising. The list wouldn't be complete as the one I've referred to before, giving the Earth a solar shield. This is the idea of someone called Roger Angel, and according to his plan, there would be the construct of a massive 100,000 square mile solar shield made from trillions of lenses. This would help to deflect the sun's rays by 2% and keep the Earth cooler. The catch is that since it takes years or days to plan a shuttle mission, this project is practically impossible, and it would cost the estimate when people sort of ran the figures $350 trillion. 12 times global economic output annual, and of course its carbon footprint would be insane. So in relation to carbon dioxide removal, the pros are, and this is an important one, it's relatively safe. The risks of capturing and storing carbon dioxide appear to be relatively low, and it is relatively cheaper than solar radiation management techniques which I'll come to in a moment. The cons are that it's unproven, underdeveloped, and it will take many, many years to deploy at scale. First of all it would have to be proved to be effective, and then rolled out across the world. And from my research into this, we don't have the time that it would take. We're running out of time to meet the two degrees, I don't think there's any chance of not reaching the 1.5 degree Celsius goal in the Paris Agreement. We're running out of time with two degrees, and I can't see that carbon capture and storage at this current state of development would work in sufficient time. So here are some of the basic ideas involved in carbon capture and storage. With the conventional one, the fossil fuel goes into the factory and comes out as carbon dioxide. With carbon capture and storage, a majority of the carbon dioxide is stored, and so you get a reduction in emissions. With biomass energy you get a closed cycle where the biomass goes into the industrial process, comes out as carbon dioxide which is then reabsorbed by the trees. And then the final one where you do have, this one would give you zero emissions with becks, with biomass energy with carbon capture and storage. You would have negative emissions, so it would actually be reducing the amount of emissions. And again, so that would be very virtuous if it can be done. So at the risk of some kind of repetition, the idea of artificial trees, also the idea of fertilising the ocean. And this has happened, it's illegal as far as I'm aware, but a Canadian called Russ George, I think trying to do something of this kind in about 2010 or somewhere around there until he was stopped by the Canadian government. There are other ideas to try and get more algae to bloom in the ocean because algae will suck up carbon dioxide. And of course the idea of chimney filters that I've mentioned before. So that's, as I say, relatively safe and relatively cheap, are the virtues of carbon dioxide removal. The problem area is solar radiation management. So albedo modification is cloud modification, as I say, using the pinot tube effect of mimicking volcanoes. And you can see from the diagram there that you have the injection of aerosols into the upper atmosphere to increase the scattering of sunlight causing less sunlight to reach the surface. And secondly, increasing the reflectivity of low clouds to cool the planet. So is it feasible, can it be done? The problems at the outset are that, well depending on which scheme is being proposed, it may or may not be less costly than carbon dioxide removal. It is definitely more risky and I'll go through some of the risks. The big issue here, well there are two issues from a legal and a political and a democratic perspective. The first is research, the second is deployment. And decisions have to be made, well the research is going ahead. Should we, could we, would we want to ban research into solar radiation management techniques that are thought to be risky? Could we possibly do it? I was just having a conversation earlier on about for example yesterday the news that two macaques have been cloned in China. And so we know that because the scientists doing the work are revealing what they're doing. But we can't be sure about what research is being done in which institutions, in which countries. So even if we wanted to ban research, would it be possible using the law? Isn't it better to try and get as much transparency as possible so at least we know who's trying to do what? So the research is one thing we can come back and talk about. The second is deployment. Now the problem with solar radiation management is that if it's done at a scale that is necessary to find out whether it will work and it has unintended consequences, it creates risks, would we be able to recall it? And if we couldn't, what should we do? Should we ban deployment? Could we ban deployment? So a lot of the research is being done through modelling because of the problems inherent in deploying at scale. Now some of the consequences of injecting sulfates into the stratosphere is that we might have permanent clouds. I said to my students, would you like your children to grow up? The sky might turn orange. The sky wouldn't be blue. We'd have next generations growing up without knowing blue skies. So when I talk about price of everything and the value of nothing, what price do we put or what value should we put on blue skies? Or saving polar bears? Or any of the kinds of, you know, on forests for their intrinsic value rather than their economic value? We'd have to have, according to some of the research, as I said, a permanent flotilla of ships up to 2000, or a fleet of balloons permanently above the earth that were spraying the sulfates. The big problem is potentially if we start we might not be able to stop. So let's assume that one or more of these technologies works. If we start spraying sulfates into the atmosphere and it does work and it reduces the temperature, we would have to keep doing it forever. Because if we stop doing it, the temperature would just spiral completely out of control. And again, we're not sure in terms of climate science already whether we're at or past tipping points, negative feedback loops. Because again, we've never been here before. We've never had human beings conducted an experiment like climate change on the planet. So we'd have no way of measuring what we're doing now against something before because we've never been here before. So if suddenly it stopped being done, the temperature might go up like 4, 5, 6 degrees Celsius, so we would have to be permanent. And as I said, some of the potential side effects would be affecting precipitation such as the South Asian monsoon. We're already seeing massive, massive forest fires. So in California, in the Napa Valley, in one country in California, huge, huge forest fires on a regular basis. There is a group of Portuguese youths who are crowdfunding climate litigation against the Portuguese government for failing to put into place policies that are preventing the annual savage forest fires in Portugal. So this is already happening. These are manifestations of what's already happening. It could get worse. If the precipitation is undermined, it could intensify the droughts. I don't know if you know what's happening in Cape Town. Cape Town is running out of water. That area of South Africa is experiencing the biggest drought since records began. By April 12, there are going to be standpipes. It's not going to stop. There's a drought been going on for two years now. There's desertification that's creep. Desertification is taking place in sub-Saharan Africa as the Saharan creep southwards. It's taking place in the southwest of the United States. Arizona and New Mexico, parts of California, are turning into desert in Australia. The danger is we can see what's happening already with about 1.1 degrees Celsius increase in temperature. These are some of the potential risks of solar radiation management that could intensify these risks. You can see here some of the pros and cons. With carbon dioxide removal, it actually addresses the cause. The cause of the climate change is primarily carbon dioxide. There are several other greenhouse gases. We're trying to deal with carbon dioxide, whereas with the solar radiation management, it doesn't address the problem. It's trying to mitigate the problem without necessarily reducing the emission of carbon dioxide. In fact, one of the big risks of geoengineering is that people look at it and say, well, we've got to get out of jail card. We can carry on merely using fossil fuels as much as we want. We can go and as far as the Russians and others around the Arctic are concerned, there is this virtuous circle where climate change leads to the melting of the Arctic ice, which makes it possible to get the oil and gas that's under the Arctic and burn it, intensifying the problem. People are advocating, certainly the fossil fuel companies, geoengineering, to enable them to continue profiting from the extraction of fossil fuels. Things are changing because now New York has threatened to a case against fossil fuel companies. There is a case being brought in California. A couple of municipalities in California are bringing a case against energy companies for rising sea levels on the California coast. The climate litigation is now taking off in quite a big way. James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first alerted the US government in 1987 to the true scale of what was going on, has now called for a massive wave of climate litigation because he thinks with a great deal of justification set to say that the Paris agreement, his term is bullshit. He just thinks it's not good enough teeth. It may be legally binding but it's not enforceable as we can see with the Trump administration threatening to pull out. With the climate litigation it seems to me there are two main forms. One is against states such as the Portuguese government for the forest fires etc. The other now increasingly there are attempts due to the energy companies what happened with the tobacco companies. Again it took a long long time to deal with the tobacco companies. In many cases they've just shifted now to the global south where the rules on smoking etc are not as strong as they are elsewhere and we're running out of time there again. To go back here so the carbon dioxide proposals there are no great new global risks whereas with SRM there certainly are. The carbon dioxide removal are expensive or currently expensive or expensive comparable to the cost of emissions reduction whereas the SRM techniques are said to be relatively inexpensive. Carbon dioxide removal may produce only modest effects within decades whereas solar radiation management can produce quite substantial effects if the technology is worth within a much shorter time. So far as law and politics are concerned carbon dioxide removal raises fewer and less difficult issues with global governance in stock contrast to solar radiation management. Carbon dioxide removal will be judged largely on cost where the solar radiation management needs to be addressed in terms of risk. So those are without going through all of them those are some of the comparisons that are salient. So what are the ethical issues involved here? Well there's the moral hazard as I said will climate engineering reduce incentives to mitigate. So people say we don't have to worry about keeping temperature from increasing by more than 2 degrees Celsius because we've got a technology and it's kind of there's a kind of technology fetishism operating here where the boys with toys and a lot of it is actually it's very male dominated. There's a kind of male geoclique pretty much in Europe and North America who are making these proposals. Many of them I referred to the Harvard experiment earlier on many of them have got patents on the technology so they're hoping to get very rich by saving the world. Is solar radiation management a slippery slope? Is the research and insurance policy to come back to the question of whether we should allow it or not. Given where we are and given the intensifying climate harms that we see all around us on a daily basis now it's not as though it used to be said climate change was a kind of invisible problem. It's not invisible. If you can't see climate change it's because you're not looking. It's not watching the news or reading newspapers or whatever it is. So would it be a dereliction of duty or violation of moral obligations not to undertake the research? Shouldn't we have an insurance policy in our back pocket? But that then creates the problem that Einstein foresaw with nuclear weapons. If you make them someone will use them. And we see again it's a toss up that you were saying the doomsday clock has now been shifted to two minutes to midnight for two reasons. The threat of nuclear war with Kim Jong Un and that bastard in the White House and climate change. So if the research has taken place was the fact that it's taken place kind of force our collective had. Every time I do this I put the hour in inverted commas because a good friend and a greer is actually the editor of the Journal of Human Rights in the Environment. He insists all the time that when we're talking about the we who is the we who is responsible for climate change. And again historically it's been Western white men who historically since the industrial revolution have been responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions. The people in the global south have been responsible for very few. So who is the we when people talk about the Anthropocene so that we have become a teleurigated. We are now capable. We have changed the geology of the planet through things like plastics, concrete, radio nuclides, traces of that in the geology and of course the effects of climate change. But who is the we who is responsible for having done that. And of course who should decide. So could we be confident that someone like Trump wouldn't authorise an experiment because America first is the withdrawal of multilateralism, the destruction for all its many problems of the liberal international order. You can foresee a situation saying hey the southwest of the United States is turning into a desert. We need to do something. Mexico wouldn't have a say. Nobody potentially anybody else might have a say. And so to going back to that question of whose hand if anybody should be on the global thermostat. To what extent will human rights be undermined or climate engineering further undermined human rights because we are talking about a very wide range of human rights that are already threatened. Lightlyhoods, food security, water security, the right to life itself. I mean people are dying in the Caribbean and elsewhere from climate change. Climate change is violating human rights. So my perspective on this is to say should we risk finding out. And the other side of it is can we risk not finding out. Now I'm still sort of hoping against hope that we can do this through mitigation. But I think the pressures are going to increase quite substantially to commit geoengineering. Now there was a project that took place in this country in May 2012 called the SPICE project. The experiment would have injected 150 litres of water into the atmosphere from a weather balloon via a one kilometre pipe tethered to a ship as part of the stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering in SPICE. Now this would have been small. Relatively low risk. It's certainly nowhere near, that's the point I made before, nowhere near the scale where it would be an unacceptable level of risk. The two scientists involved in the project had not been initially forthcoming about the fact that they had submitted patents for the technology similar to that which they wanted to use in the SPICE project. And when the news came out in the media there was a public outcry and they withdrew it. And what's interesting about that is that there was this kind of immediate and quite substantial public reaction saying no, we don't like this. It's like debates about genetically modified crops, etc. Those kind of things about all the things that we're going to have such fun with when we get this massive trade deal with the United States and the chlorinated chicken and beef hormones and all the stuff that the European Union, terrible place of the European Union, has resisted in environmental risk and health terms. But it was, as I say, if the SPICE project was anything to go by there was a great deal of unhappiness. Whether that will continue as the impacts of climate change unfold further we will have to wait and see. This is American businessman, Russ George, dumped 100 tonnes of iron sulfate into the Pacific as part of a scheme off the west coast of Canada. And this is where the law comes in. This violates the Convention on Biodiversity and the London Convention on the Dumping of Wastes at Sea which placed moratoria on profit seeking ocean fertilisation activities. So these are quite specific in relation to the oceans. They don't govern the atmosphere. There is no international law on experimenting with the atmosphere in this way. Now the international environmental law principles that do exist such as the no harm principle, one of the main problems with international environmental law is that it's very soft law. So one would think that a principle like the no harm principle that should prevent harming the environment of other countries would apply whether the precautionary principle. You would think that this is the most perfect area for the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle basically says that if there is a risk that a certain activity will cause harm that the onus is on the person or group of people who want to engage in that activity to show that it is safe. So again you would think perfect. Could we use it? Well I don't know. Just to go back to the precautionary principle if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or the environment. In the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. Now Nmod is the environmental modification convention, formally the convention on the prohibition of military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques. It's a treaty that prohibits military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long lasting or severe effects. But of course the proponents of geoengineering are going to argue that this is not hostile or for military use. So in terms of governance, assuming as I do that we require governance of geoengineering, what's the best level to do it? Where should it be done? Should it be done at a national level? Should individual countries take steps to regulate these techniques? And part of the problem with trying to regulate them is I started out by saying there are two kinds. But within you saw, within solar radiation management, there are a whole range of technologies. Would a piece of legislation be able to encompass all those technologies or would you have to regulate all of them separately? Should it be done at regional level for example through the EU or international? Should there be a dedicated treaty or should this be done under the UN framework convention on climate change? I mentioned the ARWIS convention which is a convention on procedural justice in environmental issues in which countries are required to provide adequate consultation and participation for the public on environmental issues. Perhaps the most well-known attempt to address this are the so-called Oxford principles, there are five of them. They looked at governance, they looked at regulation and came up with these five. First of all it should be regulated as a public good, it's something that affects the public. It's not a private thing, it's a public. There must be public participation in decision making, there must be disclosure of research and open publication of results because that's what we rely on with biotechnology with all kinds of science. We rely on the scientific community to do this. There must be independent assessment of the impacts and finally there should be governance before deployment. Now, when this came up in the House of Commons there was a parliamentary subcommittee I think who decided that Britain should not outlaw research on geoengineering because the UK can't know what other countries are doing and it might put the country at a disadvantage. There's the danger, despite what they will say that this is not hostile, there is a danger of weaponising the climate and because the potential risks can't be contained within borders we're talking about threats to other countries. We're already seeing the massive securitisation of climate change. It's now coming way up the agenda. All the spooks, the CIAs and the GCHQs and all the risk assessments, climate change now is a massive security. It's been treated as a security risk. If deployment takes place that can't be recalled and has unintended effects it could lead to massive migration that's making what's happening in the Mediterranean now. All the predictions of climate change, we're talking about predictions ranging from like 50 million to 200 million people and that's going to lead to conflict. Already climate change was an issue at the start of the Syrian war. It was an issue in Darfur and potentially this will get worse. We can engineer the climate or we think we can. We can certainly do it in terms of carbon capture and storage. But as I say should we and who are the we. So we are having people looking to technology to help us out of the mess that technology has gotten us into. Now there's potentially a lot of hubris involved here and by people who are promoting with basically a fast impact with geoengineering. And finally wouldn't it be more sensible to use that and not to post the technology per se. We have technologies, this brings us back to policies here about onshore wind, about the subsidies of North Sea oil but not of solar and renewable energies in this country. There is an intergenerational aspect here about what kind of planet we leave to future generations. If as I say we start and we can't turn the technologies off they're going to have to live with it. So we know what to do, that's reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We know it can be done. We know that we can decarbonise the global economy by the middle of the century with the technologies we have now. The cost of renewables is already far lower than coal for example around the world. So why isn't it happening? Perhaps the question here is if the law is limited, if regulating is difficult, does it come down to a matter of politics? Is this about political will and what will it take to change the politics? What has to happen for countries to do what's necessary? The Paris Agreement is a step in the right direction but George Monbiot said a very good line about the Paris Agreement. Compared to what it could have been it's a miracle. Compared to what it should have been it's a catastrophe. So is the response to the catastrophe geoengineering? That's what I said at the outset. I'm really trying to sort of stimulate debate in addition to Fayette at least one other person I know read the article from which this comes because I've been invited to talk about this at the Edinburgh Science Festival in April, which is good because it needs to get sort of out of the academy and into public discourse because we have to have a participatory democratic discussion about what we should do. So, thanks for listening through the trip through the year. Any questions? You haven't been listening. So I would encourage you to please ask Sam some questions. I know I have some so I will be polite and wait. It sort of strikes me that the only way around this is to get public opinion on site and I think the whole social fabric has changed. People with one technology, they have a much shorter attention span and they're much less interested in the scientific background and all the detail. More in the stat shops, the headlines. I think what we saw recently with David Attenborough's on plastics, that short, very graphic image had such a huge public reaction. It's almost as though you need David Attenborough to make a documentary on the atmosphere. I think that the value of that is that we need climate change, we need to approach climate change from every single possible way. We need stories, we need art, music, literature, academic stuff and the law is insufficient. The Attenborough example is that person trusted to that extent with that image has a potentially massive effect. I don't know where and how we could tell the same story about solar radiation management, particularly given the fact that carbon capture and storage is regarded as positive. So you have a good form of climate engineering and a bad form and will the two get conflated in the public mind and to what end? We have the other issue which is becoming salient now. I'm reading in newspapers the division between the less educated classes and the more educated classes doesn't appear to be coming any less noticeable and with the prime example of President Trump. There's no reason to believe that this phenomenon won't exist post Trump and we've had Mr Goh for whatever reason to our experts. There are a number of people who for whatever reason don't feel that they want to take part in it or led by the educated people and I'm not sure how this could be solved. Well maybe when Brexit kicks in there will be the revenge of the experts when the true scale of the disaster. I have this nightmare that the damn thing works. The same thing about America at the moment and stuff like that. If the American economy just keeps growing through the next three years there's a really good chance you'll get re-elected and it's kind of a nightmare. We always have the law of unintended consequences and actually there's a causality that doesn't go in a straight line. The fact that there are more jobs in the US isn't necessarily down to Trump in a sense that the groundwork was laid before with things that had happened before and then we also have the cyclical things that would happen anyway. I think as regards climate change I think that there is a role for us who understand the science in terms of actually pushing more the things that we can do from a baseline. I think one of the things that bothers me is not enough is being done to actually get people on side in terms of the things they can do here and now using solar power and so on. It's still sort of well up in the ether somewhere and I think that you always have to live with to some extent the negative things that are happening, the trunks of this world that are happening and actually recognise that that is a season and there is stuff that you have to get on and do. I personally see if anybody goes to a place on an annual thing like I do to the Caribbean a couple of times a year to the Caribbean you can see it's there and people have done stuff but even so it's not enough. Things like hurricanes are getting far more frequent and far more vicious and you can see where development is being turned back by a long, long way and so I think the time for people, people have got to, for me, we have got to work in spite of the trunks of this world and so on and drop pebbles in pools wherever we are. And I think I am because this is about the normal thing. I'm really quite interested in where the legal things can be used because what we're seeing is that you talk about the patents but it's not only the patents. There are people, for example, I've seen New Zealand last spring and one of the things that's very obvious there are people in the States who are deniers of climate change but at the same time they're buying up New Zealand because they think that they will be protected in New Zealand. They're buying up users of New Zealand and causing really real disruption to all sorts of aspects of New Zealand and so this is the sort of thing for me trying to use community activism and the law where we can as a disruptive force to do this. Obviously backed up by the science as we know it and there's the role. I wish we could get more people in here and particularly politicians. Well, you see the dilemma we have is that states are absolutely central to this and states are a problem. So I remember one of the conference of the parties, I can't remember exactly, I think it was Durban, I can't remember which number that was about two, three years before Paris and a young woman got up and she said to them, I'm 17 years old or something. You've been negotiating about this since before I was born. So if the Paris agreement had come 20 years ago we would have had maybe a better than even chance. Now the point I'm trying to make here is that states have been very very bad in dealing with the issue but they're indispensable because the actions of individual people are meaningful only in terms of state actions. So for example, we saw like the massive change as soon as the 5p charge came in for plastic bags and you know behavioural change and stuff like that but this is where the law, this is where the regulation and stuff like that so now actually stopping to sell plastic bags entirely in the supermarkets because I think Tesco now saying okay they're not going to stop plastic bags but they will provide reusable bags for 15p. But that requires some kind of domestic or international action and then the actions, if they're public transport options, if they're a cycle party, if they're all those kind of things that require governance and government at local, right up to international level, then individual actions. Can make a difference. And the other thing in response to what you were saying about, I think the only way we have a chance with this is through activism. The only possible way is from the bottom up because from the top down it hasn't worked. And thankfully I mean most young people now are much more switched on to this issue than previous generations. And hopefully I mean again you know in relation to what's happening in the United States in cities and the individual states their activities now going on that probably mean that the U.S. will meet the commitments Obama made in the Paris agreement by bypassing the Trump administration. And that's because it's happening on the ground so I think you're absolutely right. Activism is the key to all of this. When I raise the question about political will, that's how political will change hopefully. Do you see it facing the same issue? Do you see ever that as climate change litigation has or is geoengineering slightly easier to implement these rules such as the Noam rule? Well for states I mean the only place that states could litigate against each other would be in the international court of justice. Which requires the states to submit to the court's jurisdiction. And a state who's supporting or facilitating geoengineering is very unlikely to submit to the jurisdiction of the court. And the court is actually there are debates which I actually need to read a little bit more on about the pros and cons. I think it's the Marshall Islands have been calling for an advisory opinion from the international court of justice on climate change, akin to the nuclear weapons case etc. And there are some people who think that this may rebound, it may not be the most positive thing to do. It would require a general assembly resolution. And I think it's Palau and Marshall Islands. Do you know more about it? Do you know what the state of play is in relation to that? I mean my understanding is that what they're trying to do is push for a definitive figure rather than a judgment they want a definitive figure regarding temperature rise. And beyond that it's kind of just illegal. But we've got the definitive figure in a sense. The intergovernmental panel on climate change is the biggest scientific peer review exercise in history with 97% consensus. That's the frustrating thing. The science is absolutely clear. What's less clear is what the implications are of every small incremental increase in temperature because we've never been here before. But we know what we have to do. We know we can do it. I'm actually, we were talking earlier on about a friend and colleague, Moog Pendrabakshi. I'm co-authoring a book on climate justice at the moment. And all of these issues about rights, about future generations, about the fallout in the Caribbean and stuff like that and elsewhere. So who owes what to whom? Who is historically most responsible for causing the problems? And so what does the global north owe to the poor and vulnerable in the global south who are least responsible? But it's also, again we were talking about lifeboats for the rich. It's an issue even within developed countries. Katrina, Houston, Puerto Rico, and of course in a place like the United States. It's racialized because everything is racialized in the United States because the vulnerable tend to live in areas that are most vulnerable to the impacts of the storms, etc. I'm saying to pay it with your eyes, I strive to, every time I'm preparing, I teach two modules on climate change. Every time I sort of want to slit my throat when I'm starting to prepare. You cannot go into a class and have students come out of a class thinking there's no hope. But there actually is hope. There are things happening now in terms of divestment. So New York now divesting from fossil fuels, etc. That's massive. That's really, really big. So that's the good side, you know, what I was talking about, the cities and the states. And then I watch. Am I invested in geoengineering? So we have New York doing that. The divestment campaign is the biggest and most successful divestment campaign since apartheid. And now Oremco are being floated probably on the London Stock Exchange and the biggest flotation in history. And I'm looking at it and thinking, you know, the Saudi oil company, trillions for a fossil fuel company. And the irony of it is, I suppose that Saudi Arabia is trying to diversify its economy away from oil. And again, you just look everywhere, that part of the world in terms of what's going to happen that already temperatures are almost unbearable. It's going to get to the point in the Gulf where human beings can't function because the body shuts down if you can't sweat, if you can't cool yourself down. So construction will be impossible. We've already got this ludicrous crooked world cup taking place in Qatar with all the migrant workers from South Asia dying because of the conditions they're working under and stuff like that. As the temperatures go up, I mean, you know, in India about 18 months ago, 50 degrees. And this is, you know, there's another, the other thing is just, we have to stop talking about natural disasters. They're not natural. They're anthropogenic. They're caused by human beings. So, you know, the hurricanes aren't natural. Well, yes, to an extent they are, but the intensity and the frequency is now anthropogenic. So, you know, we just have to keep on keeping on. I know it's not struck. We have to, we just, we have to, so far as I'm concerned, it's a kind of provision of labour so that from an academic and intellectual perspective, I can try to provide ideas that, for example, the global network on human rights and environment we've now teamed up with Greenpeace so to try and provide academic input into the climate litigation that they're undertaking. We've got a workshop on climate litigation at Warrick on the 14th of February in which we're actually looking at a very game in terms of positive things sort of happening where there's now, I think we've reached the threshold where there's got to be tons and tons of climate litigation. There's a law firm in London trying to bring, get a judicial review of the government's policy sharing with the Climate Change Act. There's all over South Africa, Pakistan, you name it and people are now resorting to the law. And there, again, there are real problems with the law because, well, two, one is standing. Who has the right to bring a case? South Asia is quite good because of public interest litigation where anybody can bring a case that doesn't have to have a direct relationship to the harms that are caused. The other is causation because in trying to make governments or energy companies responsible, since greenhouse gases don't obey borders, how do you prove that the emissions of the United States or the UK were responsible for the harms that are taking place in the Caribbean or somewhere else in the Pacific? So, again, I sort of come back to, we have to use every single lever we've got but to me, the political ultimately, you know, and with the litigation, we're going to have to pull every lever as many times until we sort of get, it comes up jackpot and if we get one big case against energy companies, that might open the floodgates. But we just have to keep on doing this again and again and again. So that's why I think there's a division of labour between the NGOs, the environmental NGOs, between students, lawyers, academics, everybody contributing to the extent that it's possible. So, and as I said from every perspective, the media, artists, musicians, everybody, the more stories we can tell because, you know, and the picture speaking of a thousand words coming back to David Attenborough and stuff like that, but also in terms of climate justice trying to get to a point where a lot of the things with charities to try and humanise the effects. So, in terms of the violation of human rights, et cetera, if we can show how this is affecting human beings, the trouble with the charities is charity fatigue. And, you know, if we start, if we can show how people are losing livelihoods because of climate change or people are dying, will it spur more action? And we just have to keep on keeping on because morally we can't not. We have to do everything we can to try and achieve justice for current and future generations. I've got my son, my daughter-in-law is actually originally from the Caribbean. I was seriously talking about whether they want to have children because of the thing about climate change. And that's like, yeah, so thinking about what kind of world their children would grow up in. And that's why I raised the issue about blue skies and orange and polar bears and stuff like that. Speaking as a grandmother, I think we should go ahead. I always say, you know, we're survivors in one form or another. If you think about the history of the Caribbean, you know, we have a lot of life left in this thing. And just one thing that is always worth remembering, that actually sometimes we can use existing laws for, you know, to get to what we want to get to. I'm not suggesting it's easy in any way, but I speak of someone who I remember using the control of substances hazardous to health legislation to deal with a tobacco issue. Pollution from tobacco in indoor environments. So it can be interesting when you use something that was actually meant about something else, but it actually turned out to be very useful in another. In terms of litigation and attribution of climate change, asbestos is one, you know, multiple businesses that someone individual worked for, you know, you can attribute reasonably, you know, a number of proportion of the causation too. And the science around attribution on climate change is getting really sophisticated. And that's obviously going to feed into the possibility of holding into account business of particulars. Well, this is, you know, in my research and teaching, sort of looking at the potential and the limits of the law. So here is a question in terms of regulation about how effective would law be here. Could we actually do it through law if we wanted to do it? Another one, just in relation to the Caribbean, is in terms of migration. So you're going to have millions of people displaced by climate change, by the impacts of climate change, and who most of them will be internally displaced. But, and when the migration happens, it's most likely to be to neighbouring states, but they're going to migrate with absolutely no protection under international law. And so you start to say, OK, could we envisage a dedicated treaty, a protocol to the 1951 refugee convention, and which I came to this country, purely political test, no climate. Lawyers are now looking at whether the well-founded fear of persecution, whether climate change could constitute a form of persecution. So, again, imagine, I've got the three eyes I talk about in terms of lawyers. We need to be innovative, imaginative and insurgent. We need to try every, one of the liberating things about this is that we're almost obliged to sort of go into, engage in thinking that might be recorded as bizarre bonkers of the world. So you just have to try and think about it. So in terms of migration, for example, in the current climate, you cannot, I cannot foresee Europe, United States doing a dedicated treaty for the protection of climate displaced people. I can't see a protocol, another protocol to the 1951 refugee convention. I can't see a protocol to the framework convention, et cetera. So we end up here, we've got this legal loophole with this lacuna, where people are going to be moving without protection under the law. So now we're starting already, Kiribas, I think, has bought land in Fiji. We're getting all sorts of no problems that start to turn up about whether it's possible to have permanent governments in exile. So as already, as the small island states start disappearing and I'll come back because it's relevant to the Caribbean, could they have governments in exile in another country? Which country would that be? Would they have to buy land? Now, so part of the arguments are to say that people in the Pacific, the obvious places for them to go would be Australia and New Zealand. Because those are two developed countries who have historically emitted, especially Australia, quite a very bad record on greenhouse gas emissions and stuff like that. And because there are already diasporate communities there. So you think, OK, that's kind of logical, but you'd have to try and convince a country like Australia whose immigration policies are horrific. I mean, there are people self-harming and committing suicide in Nauru and Fiji and stuff like that. Would they agree to that? What do you do? So you're thinking diasporate communities, things in common. Where do the people from the Maldives go? A predominantly Muslim country? To Sri Lanka, which is Tamil and Sinalis. To Hindu fundamentalist India. To Bangladesh, which is a Muslim country, but is going to be one of the biggest, already one of the biggest sufferers from sea level rise. Now with the Caribbean, the obvious diaspora community is, and in terms of climate justice, I saw this figure that from something like 1800 to about 2010, two countries were responsible for half of all greenhouse gas emissions, or carbon dioxide. The US and the UK, two countries responsible for half. So when you talk about historical responsibility, ability to pay the benefits that have been accrued from the use of fossil fuels, the UK qualifies on all of those grounds, there is the links, as I say, that diaspora communities, the cultural links between people here and people in the Caribbean. Can you see any future British government? Because the small island states in the Caribbean are going to be threatened. Not all of the islands, not all of the time, but as the sea levels rise and people are forced to shift away from the coast, coming to conflict, etc. My fear is we end up dealing with all of this on an ad hoc case by case humanitarian basis, which is what we do with natural disasters. We put out the begging bowl to countries, the UN agencies do that all the time. We need to think ahead, we need to do this in a more rational way because we're talking about millions of people. And again, the law is just bad here. I mean, I think when you're listing the reasons why the UK and the US should take people, you say the ability to pay. Now, every jail on the street, if you said the UK has the ability to pay today, they would go, no, we don't. I can't even run a health service. I can't get rid of the overseas development. That's why we're living in the EU. In the mindset of your average soul, no way do we have the ability to pay it. I think this is where what has been interesting about your talk for me has been really the international relations dimension. So when you talk about who we is that could control this, you know, I would say more the geoengineering in terms of say the radiation management. You know, it is being funded. Imagine the research primarily funded by certain groups as well. We've got interest, vested interest. But it's a North South issue. And that has, that's racialized. A lot of people don't care about people. The population boom, that still goes into people's minds. And all of this kind of is within the ways in which people respond to the imagery as well. I mean, the gentleman's left now, but, you know, David Attenborough has gone on about climate change for many years. The plastics, it's tangible, it's visible, and the message is through a turtle. People don't respond to large numbers of people being displaced in conflict areas from different religious groups, cultures we don't understand and don't like. I mean, we didn't engage enough with that from a legal dimension. So we're trying to resolve these things in legal ways without recognising the political economy and the international relations dimensions as well. Well, I was about to your private course, and I was sitting there thinking that actually another legal thing here is, of course, the reparations movement, because a lot of the people in the Caribbean could say quite frankly, Well, hello there. You know, a lot of the industrial revolution and, in fact, when I go into the cities, I'm always recognising the marble halls as being where those come from and where still your doctors and so on. So people, that is also a dialogue that needs to happen, that people need to understand that there were times actually when there were problems in this country and people went to the rest of the world, and as a result, this country benefited. And so that's something that's very often not really spelled out, and I think there's more of that that needs to happen as well. But I think I'm probably much older than most people here, and I am actually probably a little bit more optimistic. I think one of the problems we have is people have short memories. They forget that actually, you know, there have been times, as I said before, when people needed help, and I can think of the wars and so on, when other people came and helped this Europe and England. And I think that people need to go back to that. I think that the youngsters coming up will find solutions. I've seen lots of changes that have happened. So I don't have to pick spectacles on, but I'm cautiously optimistic that we will find ways of having a dialogue and finding solutions to this one, and as you said, everybody, wherever you are, if you may drop this thing in your room. Well, I don't want to, and I think we should bring it to an end. A couple of comments. One, I don't want to criticise the saintly David Attenborough too much, but he was very poor on climate change for a long, long time. He had the opportunity, and only recently, and in quite a gentle way, he could have done this a long time ago. He could have advanced the debate quite a lot. The other thing is about the reparations. I think that it's an issue, I think very much in terms of climate justice, we need to talk about reparations. Being such a... Well, when Cameron went to Jamaica, what about 2014 or something, at the time there were calls in Jamaica for reparations for colonialism, and what he gave Jamaica was a prison. The British government offered in terms of aid to build a prison, and I thought, how absolutely symbolic that actually is, like absolutely the right thing. What we will give you as a form of reparations is a prison. And that was the end of Portia. She was following that. That was insulting. Thanks, folks.