Meet the expert: What is climate change anyway?! Here’s Dr Jim Salinger.

I am so excited to speak with the guest for this episode! I have wanted to have a proper discussion with him ever since I first met him.

Dr Jim Salinger is a noted international climate scientist and amongst his many achievements he is known for being the involved in the first detection of global warming (climate change) in 1976.

Since then he has been a vocal communicator and educator around climate change and if there is anything about it you don’t understand, he is the expert to get all the answers from. So naturally that’s what we’ll be doing in this podcast.

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Transcript:

Brianne (intro): Kia ora kaitiaki and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host, Brianne West, an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excited about our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to making the world a better place without the judgment and making it fun. And of course, we will be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we share our planet with. So if you are looking to navigate through everything green or not so green, you have come to the right place.

Brianne: Kia ora kaitiaki, welcome back. I'm very excited about today's episode. I've been wanting to talk to this person for a long time since I met him in an award show and learned about his work. He's the kind of person who inspires hope in an arena where sometimes it feels like there isn't much. I'm going to let him tell you what he does. Please welcome Dr. Jim Salinger to the pod. I am delighted that you are here. I actually first met you at the KiwiBank New Zealander of the Year Awards where you won. So what did you win for? Who are you? Tell us a little bit about your background and how did you get into what it is that you do?

Jim: Well, I was rather surprised to get the award because it was very humbling and I wasn't expecting it. But it was for all the work I've done in climate change. Now I've done this, I started working on climate warming and climate change in 1975. So the award was given for the research I've done over the years. I've been involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Brianne: The IPCC, right?

Jim: Yes, IPCC, which is where we assess all the facts. We don't lick our fingers and say, ah, that's climate change. What we're doing is we're looking at all the measurements and evidence. Science is on facts, not imagination. So we've done this over the years and the IPCC, the years I was on it, we got the Nobel Peace Prize for our contributions to global warming. I've also done a lot of work with climate and agriculture in New Zealand and I was given a rather prestigious medal for that from the New Zealand Institute of Agriculture and Horticultural Science. And I'm a companion of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Anyway, you're probably more interested in the journey.

Brianne: All of it. All of it's fascinating.

Jim: Okay. Well, the journey actually started when I was 12 years old. Oh, wow. Yes. hosted the IPCC in Auckland, we had some of the climate greats in our house. We all seemed to start the same way. We all started with climate stations when we were about 12, and what we'd do is we'd add thermometers and measure the temperatures and took the rainfall and other readings. In a sense it was a hobby, but it was a very good one because it doesn't lead you into any problems like if you're interested in the share market, well that can cause problems. But the weather's fascinating and just by tracking it day by day, I was in Dunedin at the time and if you've ever lived in Dunedin, it's quite tangible, one minute...

Brianne: Very cold.

Jim: And warm. You can get a little wet. My aunt used to describe Dunedin as a lot of autumn and a lot of spring days, the occasional day of summer and the odd day of winter.

Brianne: Yeah, that's nicely summed up. I remember our house grew mould.

Jim: Yes, that's right. But Dunedin, would you believe, is warmer than Christchurch in winter.

Brianne: Huh, I'll shut up then.

Jim: Yes, only in winter. Right, okay. And there's a reason for that, but I won't talk about that one. Then really the epiphany happened in 1975 when they're still doing weather readings then, and I used to organise people around Dunedin to take local weather readings for me, just because New Zealand's a fascinating place. And cities like Dunedin have lots of microclimates where North East Valley is very cold, Maori Hill is a lot warmer and that sort of thing goes on. Anyway, moving on from there, there was this feature in the OT, Otago Daily Times, the next Ice Age Comet by Reid Bryson. It was a Northern Hemisphere author. And I thought, well, this is funny. That doesn't feel like that's happening to us. So then with Jill Gunn, we looked at what temperatures were occurring right throughout the New Zealand area. And our records, I'll talk about them in a minute, but we could get back to late 1880s and we showed that this stage, this was 1975, that since about 1950 we'd been warming up. So we wrote this up, submitted it to Nature and Nature, which is a very important magazine, published it.

Brianne: It's a very big coup, Nature.

Jim: Yes, it was. Well, the reason it published it is because there was evidence that there was warming happening in parts of the Earth, and that was of great interest. And we surmised it was warming in the southern hemisphere because we didn't have the air pollution that was hiding the warming over Europe and North America, and it was at that stage. This was 1960s and at that stage people used to think that the trends in Europe and North America were the global trends, which they weren't. So that was when people were figuring out, well they'd figured it out how the earth had glacials and interglacials and if the globe had been left to its own devices, we would have been digging into the next ice age. But the Industrial Revolution came on and at that stage people started using fossil fuels. That's the oil and coal and all that since the 1850s. And this has started loading up the atmosphere with gases called greenhouse gases. Now the Earth is an interesting place in that we have in our atmosphere trace gases, that small amounts of gases of certain types, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane is the one we're probably very familiar with in New Zealand. These are greenhouse gases. Now what they do is…the Earth's atmosphere has a natural greenhouse effect. And how this works is the atmosphere is transparent to the shortwave heat radiation from the Sun that heats up the surface of the Earth. Then because the surface of the earth is at a temperature, a lower temperature, so about 15 degrees, it radiates heat energy, but it radiates at longer wavelengths and these minute amounts of greenhouse gases are opaque. In other words, they absorb the radiation coming from the Earth and in a sense slow down the heat loss to space. So it's like the Earth, if we didn't have greenhouse gases, our climate would be very much like the Moon, hell of a hot during the day and freezing cold at night. Now when you add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere it's simply like you're in your bed at night and you're throwing on some more blankets. What you're doing is you're slowing or trapping the heat in your bed so you're warmer, the air above your bed is probably a little bit cooler. So that's all it is, it's a natural greenhouse effect. So from there I went and did my postdoctoral studies at the University of East Anglia and this is 1980, I did my PhD at Victoria University of Wellington, where I basically was putting together the climate records for New Zealand. Luckily we have very good climate records. They go back to the 1870s and we had Sir James Hector who was basically, shall we say, the national scientist. It would have been wonderful in those days because you had pretty free reign of what to do.

Brianne: There was a golden age of science, wasn't there? I read a lot of history of science and it seemed that you could sort of do what you wanted, which did go badly in some instances.

Jim: The Dow Scotts did, but he was very rigorous and he introduced high-quality instruments, thermometers, put these in Stephenson screens. These are louvered screens so that the instruments are in the shade, there's no sunlight on them, and with high precision instruments you get very good readings. So it's because of him that New Zealand was off to a good start. In fact, it was off to a better start than most countries in the world because they didn't have one person defining the standards and we were way ahead of Britain then in that sense. Of course each Australian state did its own thing. This was in the 1870s. So that gives us a good early record and so my PhD was basically documenting the warming up to, shall we say, yeah, the mid-1975, a bit longer. So then, at the University of East Anglia, I was working at the Climatic Research Unit, where we were putting together properly records of global temperature. Before that work had happened, there wasn't really any good integration of all the temperature records globally. You had to sort out the records and you had to sort out the data and temperature to make sure they were accurate because climate stations get moved and you have to screen out the bad data. So since the 1980s the Climatic Research Unit has been doing that and others and you've now got a few organisations that compile the global temperatures. So these days it's pretty accurate. So I came back to New Zealand, joined the New Zealand Meteorological Service. Then we discovered in the early 1980s El Nino Southern Oscillation and I remember I was in the New Zealand Meteorological Service in those days and in 1982 we predicted there was a strong El Nino and we were able to predict what the seasonal climate would be for summer. And we got it spot on. So it was almost a perfect forecast of the three months of summer. That was this dramatic El Nino.

Brianne: And El Nino is the hotter, drier versus the La Nina, which is wetter and colder?

Jim: Depends where you are. If you're in New Zealand, El Nino for the south and west of New Zealand is cooler and wetter. In other areas like the Gisborne and Hawke's Bay it'll be a bit warmer and dry. In Australia, it usually represents drought, though the El Ninos have their own character. Like this one we've just had in eastern Australia, it in Eastern Australia wasn't that droughty at all. La Nina is when there's a switch in the Pacific and so El Nino in New Zealand you get more south westerlies over the country. In Australia you get big anti-cyclones so they don't get the storms coming in to NSW and Victoria so that’s when they get the drought. La Nina is different. What happens is the northeast of these come in and with it they bring rain to the north and east of the North Island of New Zealand and it's really dry in the south and west of the South Island. a good time to go and look at the southern lakes and the scenery there. Australian La Nina brings wet weather into Queensland and New South Wales and it's a bit cooler as well. So the reason why the El Nino Southern oscillation is very important is after global warming it is the influence that causes the main variability in New Zealand climate. We were also looking in the early 80s at the climatic effects of a nuclear war.

Brianne: Ha, cheerful.

Jim: That's it, yes. Well, what they do is they block out a lot of sunlight in the northern hemisphere, so the northern hemisphere goes into nuclear winter. So what parts of the war haven't finished off people, the nuclear winter will cause mass starvation. The southern hemisphere, because we're mainly oceanic, we're a bit saved because we wouldn't get the same effects.

Brianne: Oh good, so we're in the right place.

Jim: Yeah, you could say, though of course we don't want a nuclear war. And then in 1990 we had the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption, and volcanic eruptions cause blips in climate, what they do is the volcanic material gets into the stratosphere and that reflects a bit of this heat from the Sun coming to the earth and we have about 9 to 15 months of cooler weather and temperature decreases by half a degree. So we've got El Nino, Southern Oscillation. We don't want a nuclear winter but we have the spirit episodic volcanic eruptions. There are other influences but they're not as dramatic. But the main thing that's been occurring has been the rise and rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide at the end of the, well over the Ice Age interglacial cycles ranged between 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million. So in other words it's hugely increased. And the other greenhouse gas which has increased dramatically is methane which is now around 2,000 parts per billion. It used to be at 800 parts per billion. It's dramatically increased. And with that temperatures have increased. If you look at the last 12 months it's actually been 1.5 degrees above the 1850 to 1900 average. So we see the warming is very clear these days and you'll see coming over the news how June globally was the warmest month ever. New Zealand 2022 was the warmest year. We had the El Nino last year into the bit of this year, makes it a bit cooler, but we've had our warmest years ever. Our temperatures over the land have been about 1.7 degrees centigrade above the earlier average. I like to look at New Zealand land and sea because we have a very large exclusive economic zone. If you put that in, I call it as the land area, we're up by 1.3 degrees. Our area is about 4.2 million square kilometres, of which 180,000 square kilometres is land. So when you look at the greater area, there's been a lot of warming in Perth Patch. This is an area of 4 million square kilometres.

Brianne: That is surprisingly large. So you hear about the figure 1.5, you know, we want to hold it to 1.5 degrees warming and a lot of people are saying that ship has sailed, that it's no longer a viable option and at that point it's what, 70 to 90% of coral reefs, which I personally find one of the saddest outcomes of that, are gone. But we're more likely to hit something significantly higher and the next milestone is 2 degrees. Now, the thing I come across in comments or in conversations with people about this is how can such a small amount make so much difference? And this is, I think, a lot of the reason people don't understand and therefore deny that climate change is happening is because even though going from 280 to 420 parts per million is a big jump, it's still tiny in the makeup of the atmosphere, right? I can understand that even a tiny amount over the natural order of things makes a difference, but how do you explain these seemingly small changes to people who don't want to hear it?

Jim: Right, well firstly, these are trace gases and they're what we call radiatively active trace gases. So like oxygen and nitrogen which the bulk of the atmosphere is made of doesn't cause any warming or cooling. In other words the solar radiation from the Sun and the infrared radiation from the Earth just goes through it. So if you removed all the trace gas as well, the situation would be a bit more like the moon, which has no atmosphere at all. I'm just being extreme, but it's effectively the same, in that the heat would come in and go out, and that would be it. Because of these trace gases that we have in the atmosphere, our planet is actually a lot warmer than it would otherwise be. So forgetting the greenhouse effect, there's a natural greenhouse effect. And we're lucky because it just, the atmosphere ocean system keeps us warmer as a planet than we should otherwise be, which has been ideal for all forms of life in one form or other. So in fact we've got this planet which is in the Goldilocks zone. I'll take two examples. Venus, which has a heavy atmosphere closer to the sun, lots of greenhouse effect. Well no one could live there because it's the mean temperature is several hundred degrees. If you go to Mars, where Mars does have an atmosphere but it has no trace gases in it, it gets a hell of a hot during the day and frigid at night. So these trace gases, because they absorb, shall we say, they're transparent to solar radiation but they trap the heat coming out from the earth, they're so critically important. You don't need a lot of them, as you see, they're small amounts, but also water vapours are greenhouse gas too, but that goes into the atmosphere and because of the other greenhouse gases it sort of enhances the greenhouse effect. So the tiny amounts are vitally important. If we didn't have them our climate would be much more like Mars where it'd be hell of a hot during the day, at the surface and freezing cold at night. So what it does is it delays the heat loss to space and gives us temperatures which are equable for life. So we've got the evidence where people like Charles Keeling started measuring carbon dioxide at the top of Moana Loa which is about 13,000 feet, about the height of Mount Cook. I've been up to the top and he started measuring carbon dioxide in 1957. But we've got records in the ice cores that will take us back in time. So that's how we know pretty well what it is, and people have got inventories from places like the Standard Oil Company which was the first company to produce oil and they've done the calculations of release of fossil fuels since the 1850s.

Brianne: Because they knew about it decades before the public, right?

Jim: Yes. Well, it was really once the science was known better, which was in the early 1900s. It's a pity that electric cars were around about 1900. It's a pity they weren't developed then. We mightn't have had today's issues, but so be it.

Brianne: Yeah, well, thankfully they're a thing now. Okay, so I don't want to get too depressing, but I do think it's really important. I read Uninhabitable Earth a few months ago and it was heavy. It's a book that talks about, you know, if we actually don't pull our socks up and actually do something meaningful, what we will be facing. You work a lot with government. Well, you certainly worked a lot with government throughout your entire career and the political appetite for actually addressing this in a meaningful way seems quite light in most countries. In your opinion, what do you think is going to happen over the next few decades? Do you think we are going to move quick enough to prevent 2 degrees warming? And if not, what does that look like?

Jim: Okay, well firstly, at the moment, if you take the pledges, the amount of warming would be 2.8 degrees centigrade. That's just, you take all the pledges around, so we're not very good.

Brianne: And of course the other point there is nobody's actually on track for those pledges either.

Jim: No, that's right, including New Zealand. Yes, so we're not on track. So I perceive we will possibly, probably have more than 2 degrees warming. Let's hope we can stop it so it doesn't reach 3 degrees warming. But at the moment we're not on track, we're not being good citizens and we're not being good, shall we say, guardians for the future. Unfortunately we're not doing that. But I think what's interesting is that survey done in, came out in December last year, showed that 86% of New Zealanders agree with global warming is happening and that humans are the responsible for it. There will always be a group in New Zealand with about 4% that deny it. I say on facts, not on someone's imaginations or what they think should happen. It's not based on disinformation. Science is based on observations and facts. If you look at the observations and facts, they go like this. You have greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These are clearly increasing. We can measure them all around the globe and now that carbon dioxide is at 420 parts per million used to be at 280 parts per million. Well you can't dispute that. We have very good temperature record from around the globe and they show that temperatures have increased probably in the order of 1 to 1.3 degrees centigrade at the point in time and these are made up of millions of observations from around the globe so you have those. In New Zealand I like to point people to our glaciers because it's very clear what's happening there. We're lucky in that we had some in the 1900s or the early 1900s we had surveyors who surveyed the glaciers and if you work out where the glaciers were around 1900 and the amount of ice they had in them these surveyors would map for example the surface of the Tasman and the Huka and Mulla glaciers around 1900. Have you been to the Tasman glacier?

Brianne: Not in a long time. I imagine they look quite different.

Jim: Yes. If you look at them today, they're fascinating to look at, but there's been huge, what I call down wasting, in other words ice loss. And in those three glaciers there are these pro-glacial lakes these days. But the Tasman is interesting in that there was a hut on the side of it, which was built around the 1900s. Now that hut was on the edge of the glacier, Terminal Moraine. Now if you go to the position where that hut was, you look down 200 meters. That's where the remains of the glacier are today. From our calculations, since 1950, we've lost half our ice ice volume of our southern Alps glaciers. So therefore Kiwis they're the clearest indication of what's going on. Imagine that we've only got half the ice volume that we had in around 1950 and there's rapidly being a lot of ice loss. So that's what I like to point to, just good evidence of global warming in the New Zealand context, because you can't dispute what you see.

Brianne: You'd be surprised what people can dispute, my God. Well, you wouldn't be, actually, I'm sure.

Jim: And I think the Department of Conservation, if you go up the West Coast glaciers, they've marked where the glaciers used to be, and if you want to find them now, you have to go way up their valleys. There's been a huge amount of ice loss.

Brianne: I remember because I moved here from the Isle of Man when I was seven-ish, and I remember we did a tour of the West Coast and we went to Franz Josef, and I remember seeing my first ever glacier, and it was beautiful, but it was quite, from memory, and I could be remembering wrong because I was a kid, but I remember it being quite close to the road and you could see it from the road. Now, you can't. You have to go for a walk.

Jim: No, it's way up the valley.

Brianne: That's a huge change in my lifetime. 30 years, that's terrifying. Which does bring me to my next point. We talk about climate change as this future thing we're going to have to worry about, but it is happening now and it has been happening for years, but it's accelerating and getting more overt. Will it continue to pick up pace? Basically what I'm saying is, when will we hit 2 degrees or 2.8, depending on current trajectory?

Jim: Okay, well we're certainly at 1.5 around 2030 or 2030s.

Brianne: That's depressing.

Jim: If we don't abate, I would imagine 2050, 2060. illustration, when I was at the Climatic Research Unit, 1980, we could see what was happening to global temperatures then. We concluded that the evidence would be very clear around 2000, there was a lot of warming going on, and it was. And the other climate events that I foreshadowed, and this was about 30 years ago, was that around the 20s we'd start seeing lots of extremes. Well, I don't need to tell you.

Brianne: You were quite right.

Jim: Yes, I produced a book in 1989 called Greenhouse New Zealand. I foreshadowed that in Northland I'd be able to grow bananas and pineapple. What do they grow now?

Brianne: They do indeed.

Jim: Yes. If you look at those types of indicators, because plants are a good indicator. Well those sort of crops, subtropical crops, which are required to be frost free and a bit warmer, they're really good markers, good biological indicators of what's happening. Of course the glaciers is a good physical indicator. So we have plenty of evidence of what's happening and you had for example in recent hot summers in the fjords bleaching of temperate corals in there. So there's a lot of... and we've had strange things. Oh, if you talk to any fisher, they're now catching snapper off the west coast of the South Island and the Fiordlands. That's buggering up the fitting quota because they probably don't have a snapper quota.

Brianne: No! So, I have two more questions for you. So the penultimate question, what is the one message, overarching message you'd want people listening to this podcast to leave with?

Jim: Right, well the one message is that we can actually do it. We can abate greenhouse gas emissions and slow the warming down. So if we put our minds to it we can do it. There are actually lots of solutions out there. You only have to look at, for example, in the area of transport. There are all sorts of measures we can take. Most importantly is active transport and that's where you yourself are either on bikes or walking or what have you and you've got e-bikes in there as well. And active transport is actually very good for your health.

Brianne: Yes, the solution to so many things is the bike.

Jim: That's right, yes. So in the transport areas as active transport, there's lots of things you can do in your house. There are ways in which you can emit less greenhouse gases and what you consume as well. The other big area is food which can be quite sensitive.

Brianne: Yes. Well it's not even necessarily not because we all know about meat and dairy, but I've been reading the Project Drawdown and one of their recent updates is that actually the most impactful thing a household can do is lessen their food waste regardless of what it is you eat, which makes perfect sense, right?

Jim: Yes, because you think about, oh even food waste from the supermarkets, but luckily in this area we have people that collect the food waste from the supermarket or the excess and they repackage it and give it out for households that are finding they have a lot of poverty or don't have the income. So in this area there's quite a bit of that happening. But yes, waste is huge. It is encouraged by a certain sort of mantra on economics, which is it's the throw out or that. So you're absolutely right there. The other thing in food of course is transfer out of animal protein to vegetable protein and what you're doing there is you're cutting out, I did a lot of zoology and biology, you're cutting out what’s called a trophic level and the trophic levels sort of go from plants then to animals then you have carnivores at the top end. So the point is every part of that chain you lose energy.

Brianne: It's very inefficient.

Jim: Yes it's very inefficient. So So by not eating animal protein, you're actually getting a lot of more energy from plant products.

Brianne: Yes, it's incredibly inefficient to feed all of the soy meal, for example, in the States or Brazil or wherever, to cows rather than ourselves consuming the soy protein.

Jim: That's right.

Brianne: It's very hard to convince certain people of that.

Jim: Yes. Well, though a lot of the world doesn't eat a lot of animal protein anyway, so it's just I guess Western diets which haven't proved to be particularly healthy. And so it's actually the Mediterranean diet is the one people seem to like and that's full of plant-based foods and fresh vegetables and fruits and all that. So the food area is an interesting one where a lot of attention. And again, on the right, foods, diet is a lot more healthy.

Brianne: Yeah, you heard it here first, well you didn't hear it here first, but you heard it from an award-winning climate scientist, eat more vegetables. Actually, I have another question before I get my last question. My last question is my favourite. The other thing that comes up a lot from people who want to deny or pretend that this isn't happening is that scientists are paid to have these opinions. Now, I've never understood this because where would the motivation be? Who would be paying people to come up with this? You could say it would be EV manufacturers, but actually they've done quite well without that. So, what would you say to that offensive comment?

Jim: I'd just say it's a lot of poppycock. All the people I know who are climate sciences, we're motivated. You have to actually, to do science these days, it's quite difficult when you look at the fact that we only spent 1.4% of our GDP on science, which is very low. They want to get up to 2% but this current regime is not going to happen. And the OECD average is 2.8%. And a few places like Taiwan are at 5.5%. So it's actually quite difficult to do science. We're not millionaires or billionaires. We just get a salary like anybody else. So we're not in it to become excruciatingly wealthy I scientists do what they do and they'll put long hours and for example at the moment. I'm still doing science, but I'm basically funded by my pension and New Zealand superannuation.

Brianne: It's terrible you're in that position.

Jim: Oh yes. Well, no, that's sustainable. But what I'm saying is I do it because I want to and it's important. You need to have interest in life and it's a good thing to do.

Brianne: Yeah. Well, is there anything more interesting in the way everything works, which is effectively science, right? Yes, that's right. Why is the most important question? Actually, the most important question is the last question I'm going to ask you. I ask everybody this and I'm always fascinated by the answers. So if you were a supreme global overlord, what would be the very first thing you would do to make the world a better place? I think I know what you're probably going to say.

Jim: We would just have to make sure of two things, that we appreciate the other citizens of the planet, not us, all the plants and animals and not try to exploit them. That's the first thing. And the second thing is that we’ve got to be far more equable on ourselves and I always liked the Plato principle which was that the most wealthy only got paid five times what the least got. We've got to have balance because there's only so much, shall we say, money that you need. Anything excessive. We have to have an eye for all the plants and animals because they're rapidly, we're losing them which is unfortunate because they all have roles in keeping the system balanced and going. So we say we were given a Garden of Eden, we want the Garden of Eden to continue.

Brianne: We are, as you pointed out earlier, we are the guardian of the Kaitiaki and we're doing an appallingly bad job. Yeah, I quite like those two options to come out, so if we can vote for Supreme Overlord, that'd be great. There's not many politicians doing a particularly good job at the moment.

Jim: Yeah, conflicted.

Brianne: A nice way of putting it. Is there anything else you'd want to say to people?

Jim: I really want people to get engaged in the issue rather than, oh yes, that's an interesting thing, we know about it, we've got 86% of the population that agree with it and accept that humans are the cause. Well, we need to get more engagement. And that's something that myself and colleagues can assist with.

Brianne: Excellent. Okay, so what do you recommend? So there's a lot of people out there who know about it and don't know where to start or they are frightened and that leads to apathy. So where do you recommend people go to get further information?

Jim: Well certainly he Ministry for the Environment should have a lot of material and actually some local bodies are doing a lot. In other words, my area which is the Queensland Lakes District Council, we have a climate and biodiversity reference group and there are a lot of policies coming out now to improve our response to the climate and obviously conserve the biodiversity. We're in a special area because there's a lot of alpine areas and so that they need to be preserved. And New Zealand has a good sense of preserving that.

Brianne: Well, I don't know about you, but I actually found that quite inspiring, quite hopeful, because he would know the damage that we are facing, right? The fact that we are certainly unlikely to save it at 1.5 degrees, but we are not really on track for two degrees either. And yet still, despite that terrifying notion, he has hope that we're going to get it together. And as he points out, we have all of the tools, we have all of the solutions to resolve this issue, to prevent further climate change. We just have to convince businesses and government and to a smaller degree, individuals, ourselves, to do the right thing. I had a quick chat to him off camera, off microphone, about how frustrated and sort of almost maybe depressed he was because they've been talking about this since the 70s and possibly companies have known about this for a lot longer and yet nothing had changed and he wasn't. And I find that really quite remarkable. So working for decades in this field and trying to encourage politicians and business leaders to make a change and not moving the needle that much and still he has that much resilience and grit to keep going. Really admirable. We need more people like Dr Jim.

Brianne: I hope you found this interesting. It sort of got him to explain a bit of climate science because I know there's a lot of confusion around it. I know when I ever post anything about climate change on any social media I get people that are like, but it's not happening because of this and oh how can this tiny amount of difference make all the difference and blah blah blah and hopefully some of the information in there has refuted it. But I look forward to talking about this on social over the next week or so because, watch the comments. I do tell people not to argue with deniers and I stand by that, so if you are talking about climate change on your social channels, and I do encourage you to, it's one of the most impactful things you can do.

Brianne: Don't argue with a climate change denier to change the denier's mind. I refute the claims they make in the comments and then I leave it there. And the reason I do that is because I want people who are reading the comments to realise actually the information they're spouting isn't true, because there are lots of people who don't have anywhere near the depth of knowledge on climate change that many of us do, and that's totally fine.

Brianne: So I want to educate them, and I just don't really care about the climate change denial. Because you're never going to change their mind, that is what it is. So I hope that was interesting, I thought he was fascinating, I could have talked to him for hours. See you next week, I have another ‘this or that’ episode for you. Kia ora, have a wonderful week.

Brianne (outro): And there you go! I hope you learned something and realised that being green isn't about everything in your pantry matching with those silly glass jars or living in a commune. If that's your jam, fabulous. But sustainability at its part is just using what you need. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't keep it to yourself and feel what you need. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't keep it to yourself and feel free to drop me a rating and hit the subscribe button. Kia ora and I'll see you next week.

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