WHO HE IS 

• The world’s most renowned climate scientist. Who heads the world’s leading environmental think tank, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. 

• Pioneer of the 9 planetary boundaries framework – a wake up call. 

• A sentinel raising species-scale concerns. And rallying to save the earth – and us.

WHAT ARE PLANETARY BOUNDARIES 

• Think of them as Earth’s “vital organs”. Or natural guardrails. That keep our earth safe, healthy, stable. For human prosperity. Survival. 

• There are 9 of them. Land, freshwater, air. Climate, oceans, biodiversity. Chemicals. Ozone. 

• We’ve already violated 7 of them. Just look outside: record-smashing temperatures. Anywhere between a dozen to 150 species going extinct – every day. Football-field worth of forest land decimated – every 6 seconds.

• Cue tipping points on the horizon – dramatic and irreversible changes, usually for the worse. Like melting ice sheets – that will lock in meters of sea level rise. A coral ecosystem collapse – which will endanger fishing, coastlines, medical breakthroughs. And 25% of marine life. 

• The damage isn’t sometime down the line. Just in 2025: the world’s costliest wildfire to date, which burned through 23,000 acres – the size of 40 Central Parks. Devastating floods across Southeast Asia – with almost 900,000 people displaced in just Indonesia. And extreme weather events almost every single day in the first 9 months in India – from severe lightning and thunderstorms to relentless monsoons and cloudbursts. These events claimed over 4,000 lives, destroyed almost 100,000 houses, killed almost 60,000 animals, and ravaged cropland 1.5x the size of Sri Lanka.  

MORE TROUBLING FACTS 

• Forget 1.5C: We’re on track to reach 3C warming – in just 75 years. That’s the duration of an average lifetime. 

• The last time CO2 levels were this high? Sea levels were 20 meters higher. And humans didn’t exist. 

• Land absorbs 31% of our global carbon footprint. But now, rainforests – once giant carbon sponges – have flipped to become carbon leaks instead. 

ONE BIG BLIND SPOT

• Our industrial food pipeline: from agriculture and livestock to supply chains and diets. End to end, the global food system is responsible for a staggering one-third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.  

• Here are a couple of tidbits for context. Every forkful carries a carbon footprint. Take a pound of beef, which produces 100 pounds of GHGs. (In comparison, a pound of coal releases 4 pounds of CO2.) Cows, too, are climate offenders. Every year, 1 cow burps 100 kgs of methane – a gas 28x more potent than CO2. 

ONE SUDDEN STUMBLING BLOCK 

• The science is clear: warming is accelerating. Impacts are arriving faster – and with greater volatility. And delays in addressing climate change are locking in irreversible damage. 

• But is it? Not as per US president Donald Trump, who’s called climate change “the greatest con job” – and is taking a hatchet to US environmental regulations and global climate leadership. Or billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, whose new memo suddenly scales back on the urgency of climate change. Or deniers who reference previous climate change cycles. The fact that “CO2 is a trace gas” – i.e., it only makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere. Or the fact that predictions of mass mortality haven’t yet materialized. 

AT SYNAPSE

Johan Rockstrom will cut through the clutter and tell you why climate change is not up for debate – but is a flashing red emergency. How the planet is going from friend to foe. Just where humanity is headed. And the new science of living within limits: Food. Fuel. Capital. Psyche. 

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