This is the Decarbonisation Dialogue, a podcast from Salix. Welcome to Delivering on Climate Change, our collective challenge, Decarbonisation Dialogue. I am Hannah Walker, and I believe that the best way to communicate a message is by being passionate about what you are talking about. Through that passion, I believe you take people with you and create action using your influence
to make change and make a difference. My guest today is Professor Peter Cox, who is Director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter. The Global Systems Institute aims to be thought leading in understanding global changes, solving global challenges and helping create a future world through transformative
research, education, impact and engagement. As well as his role with the Global Systems Institute, Professor Peter Cox is Professor of Climate Systems Dynamics and Mathematics at the University of Exeter. He has previously worked at the Met Office Hadley Centre and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. He is an international leader in understanding of interactions between the land biosphere and
climate change. Professor Cox is also lead author on the fourth, fifth and sixth assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a member of the UK government's DEFRA Scientific Advisory Council. He has been named as a highly cited author by Thomson Reuters for every year. from 2014 onwards. From 2006, he's been driving the development of world -leading climate research at the University of Exeter. So it's fantastic to have Professor Peter Cox with me today. Thank
you, Peter, for joining us. No problem, Senna. Thank you. So we're going to go straight to our first question because I'm intrigued. I'd love to know a little bit more about your career. You're a highly successful author and an expert in climate change and science and have led global research with big impact. How did you get to where you are today and why climate? Mostly where you get to is luck, I think. I actually started
out as a physicist. I was working on, well, I got very interested in physics when I stopped being so interested in cricket. although I never stopped being so interested in cricket, but got very interested in physics. And then I did a degree in physics and I did a PhD in plasma physics. I was working on nuclear fusion research in the day. Believe it or not, Hannah, we thought we were going to run out of fossil fuels when I
was doing my PhD in the mid 80s. I was doing it not because I thought climate change was a problem, but because I thought we were going to run out of fossil fuels and run out of energy. And so by the time I got to the end of my PhD,
which was late 80s. the climate change agenda had emerged and i thought this is fantastic from a i was one of these scientists who was not good in the lab so i became a theorist almost by default really because i used to break stuff in the lab so when i went to um uh when i finished my phd the climate change issue came up and it was a modeling problem was a mathematical modeling problem i thought it's very exciting so i went to the metaverse hadley center at that stage
with basically no knowledge of I was a physicist with very little knowledge of trees and plants and ecosystems. And as they did in those days at the Met Office, they said, well, you think you're a bright guy. Go and do something you've not been qualified to do, weirdly. So I got put on modelling vegetation and the carbon cycle. And that's where I started my career and had a great team there. And it's gone from there, really. So a lot of kind of, I suppose everyone's
career is a bit like this. There's a lot of sort of random turns in a way. And you end up hopefully in a nice place. So to talking about climate, we're not talking about something new here. So but we are looking at massive challenges as we face climate change, not least of the very threat to humanity. Why can't we all agree on what is happening to our planet? Because the way I see it, you know, we switch on the news every day. Climate is in the news. The need for action has
never been more urgent. What changes we're looking at? I mean, what is happening to our planet? Yeah, well, so the headline figure is always that the planet is warming and has warmed quite significantly. By about, well, the last year, 2024, was the hottest year on record globally. 2023 was the previous record. Previous eight records are all the previous eight years before it. Not in order, but the last 10 years on record are the warmest. So we know the climate changing.
We've actually had the science of this. Since the 19th century, actually, we've understood the concept of greenhouse gases and we know carbon dioxide is going up because of fossil fuels. So we know the climate changing. We know and we're getting more and more circumstantial evidence that at least increasing weather extremes. So if you warm up the climate, you tend to get more water in the atmosphere. That means when it does rain, it rains heavier. It also means when it's
not raining, it evaporates faster. So you get an intensification of the hydrological cycle, which means you get more floods and droughts, bizarrely, both of them. And so there's bigger and bigger impacts on people. And at the same time, the climate change is as clear as it could possibly be. We have the reemergence of scepticism, especially in the US, but with the US goes everyone else. So it is a very weird world we live in
at the moment. But it feels like if I'm in my optimistic mood, Hannah, I'd say I hope it's the death throes of climate denialism. because it seems such a weird thing to be doing that right now when it's so obviously wrong. But people can be misled by the fact the media is controlled by very few people, but by people who can buy bits of the media. So we're in a dangerous situation, but I'm hoping it's a short -term thing as we make that transition towards basically a net
zero world or something like it. Yeah, I certainly do want to touch on the idea that we've got to be positive, but also... we are facing serious times. And when you talk about that global warming, you talked about 2023 being a record, and then we moved to 2024 and that hit a new record. So what is that? We see it in the news, we see flooding, we see drought, we see these extremes, as you say. Tell me a little bit about that measurement.
I mean, is there an answer to net zero? Net zero, will reaching net zero, we have rather a lot of targets, we can also talk about that, but will reaching net zero solve the climate change issue? It will stop climate change to a very high accuracy. It's a really interesting thing that when I started my career in the early 90s, we always knew the climate problem was difficult. And I was working on vegetation, the climate system, there was all sorts of issues to do with.
whether climate change might kill forests like the amazon forest and i worked on that for a long time but something emerged in 2009 from a number of studies which is quite remarkable like a lifeline for humanity really for understanding the problem so it turns out despite all the complexity of the weather and all the complexity of the earth system if you plot the total emissions that have been produced from fossil fuels and deforestation since about 1850 against global
warming it's a lovely straight line And that means that there's that's where the concept of net zero comes from. If you stop emitting CO2, you pretty much stop global warming. When you stop global warming, you stop most of the impacts of climate change. So it's an approximation is a very good one. And it's an extraordinary simplification, really. I mean, if when it was first published and I unfortunately I wasn't on the papers, but I thought this is ridiculous. It's too simple.
Can't be like that. But it does turn out to play out like that. And we can see that in models as well. to a very good approximation, if we get to net zero, and it's easier said than done, but if we get to net zero, we will stop 90 % climate change, maybe a bit more than that. Okay. So in terms of simplification, because I'm not a scientist, but to keep global warming, where are we? No more than 1 .5. Is that the figure
at the moment? Well, that was the aspirational figure that came out of the Paris Agreement.
Two was always the upper limit. At the moment, um well so if you look at the individual year 2024 was hotter than 1 .5 compared to pre -industrial now the way you can say that that doesn't mean that paris the lower limit paris has been broken as you think about longer term averages when you think about the climate so in five year averages we're probably more like 1 .3 similar to 1 .3 and 1 .4 but it's very unlikely we're going to avoid 1 .5 degrees now you know even if you take
five year averages we're going to probably burst through it so 1 .5 And it was never intended to be an upper limit, but 1 .5, avoiding 1 .5 is not going to happen now. So we are far from where we need to be right now, today. For 1 .5, yeah, I mean, it really depends. The limit that was set at the Copenhagen COP, which was in 2009, which defined dangerous climate change, believe it or not, was two degrees of global warming. And that's the one that you were not supposed
to exceed, right, with Paris. At the moment, the current commitments from governments would take us way beyond two degrees. So the bigger issue for me, at least, is we're going to crash through 1 .5. The world will not end, but it will get harder. But we mustn't crash through two. And that needs a lot more work than we're currently doing collectively across the globe. And let's talk for a moment about the Global
Systems Institute. What role? What is the role of the Global Systems Institute and what next for the climate research? We are facing so many challenges in today's world, aren't we? Geopolitical strife, we're facing famine, we're facing war, we're still recovering from the pandemic. So what is the role in terms of the GSI going next? Yeah, so the GSI, I mean, it's a very... It's quite a difficult term to define. What we've done since I've been director is basically say
we're centred on the climate problem. It's a systems institute in the sense that we want to connect that to everything that might affect it or be affected by it. Because climate is so ubiquitous and so central to everything, it pretty much gives us a free reign to do anything. But it is centred on the climate problem. So there are issues obviously connected to human wellbeing and health. There are issues associated with technology and renewable energy and carbon capture.
maybe even radical things like geoengineering. There's issues to do with equity because climate change says to hit the people at least responsible hardest. So it connects us. There's issues to do with the economy. How do you transform your economy to be a low -carbon economy without affecting people's well -being? So we are centred on the climate problem, but we're very interested in these connections, and we believe the connections are key because they imply what we might call
emergent properties. things about the total system that you can't get from the individual parts. And you might think of the Industrial Revolution and climate change as one of those things. You know, the tipping point was in the use of fossil fuels to fuel an economy and steam engines and so on. And then it led to these unexpected consequences. So anyway, cut to the chase. The GSI is interested in interactions. We're also very interested in emerging properties like things called tipping
points. You've probably heard about these. abrupt changes so in the climate system there are some we can see them in the historical record in the past the uh the atlantic meridional ocean circulation which keeps us warm has shut down and we're concerned it might in the future we're also concerned that um warming especially in a lot um because the greenhouse gases could lead to amazon's getting dry and dying back and there are a number of other things that we worry about so there are
these assisting tipping points we major on but what we've lately been realizing is that there are huge tipping points on non -linearities abrupt changes in the human realm and they're the ones some of those we need to stimulate to make a transition to more um sustainable ways of operating so what we're doing in the gsi amongst other things is to say we now understand these abrupt changes and we're scared of some of them want to avoid them there are other abrupt changes
that would get us onto a more sustainable path we might want to use they might be transitions that we can use and i think what we're seeing in the world you know coming back to the question we were discussing earlier with these weird political um socio -political flip -flops are also kind of non -linearities and tipping points that um that in principle can be frozen in one way or the other so when you get to an instability in the system and it could go two ways you get to
choose actually if you know about it you get to choose and so we are studying what we call positive tipping points, which are things where you might say, at this point, maybe an injection of something like a little bit of money or incentive could flip it to the other state. And that means that we'd be in a position where we could take a systems view, not just in order to avoid these horrible non -linearities, but use the non -linearities to make a change. And that's one of the things
we're doing at the GSI. Other things too, but that's one of the things. climate change should unite the world, shouldn't it? It's not just an issue we're facing here in the UK. And although we can move forward and we make, to a large extent, we're making great strides on the green energy front and looking at new technologies, but it's a global issue. If you were to look at... countries overseas like India? I mean, India has made huge strides in solar power and China, China also
looking at solar and wind. Where would you look to? Because we are, I mean, are we in the UK, are we leading, would you say, or are we trailing behind, especially when you look at countries like India and China and their work with solar and wind? Yeah, I mean, I think we've, our record on carbon emissions production is actually pretty good in the UK. And other European countries hold us up as a good example of how you can do
things like the Climate Change Committee. And actually, we've been lucky in the sense that successive governments have not denied climate change. You might argue we've gone slower than we could, but there's generally been good progress. So on the big picture, maybe because we're fortunate and we've not got an economy that's growing really
fast, we're doing well. Where the emissions are growing, it's either because there's not been action on getting to more sustainable ways of doing things, moving to renewable energy, for example. All the economies are growing quickly, and that's true of India and China. So Chinese emissions have grown, but they are much faster to make a transition than we were or the US was or other developed economies were. And we hope
that's because we've all learned something. We now have technology that can be used and actually makes sense economically, quite apart from sustainability. So I think they are making progress, and especially in China, moving relatively quickly away from fossil fuels. were very, very fossil intensive not long ago and still are quite fossil intensive and have a huge demand for energy. So they will be key players in this. And as far as the U .S. is concerned, the U .S. is no longer the biggest
emitter in the world. So we'd love them on board. But in a sense, the economies that really need to be changed are the ones that are going through the transition, the one that we did and the U .S. did and most developed European countries did on fossil fuels needs to be not done that way. And we've got the technology, so that doesn't have to be the case, actually. Yes. So do you think when we're talking about these climate issues, we're on the cusp of great technology.
We're looking at other countries and seeing how they're progressing. But a lot of people like you and me, we're going about our daily lives. What do you think is the trigger to make us change our lifestyle? Government, business, big business has got to work together. But you talked about the cynicism earlier, you know, cynicism in climate change. How do you get everybody else involved in this conversation? Yeah, I mean, I think... Without it becoming this huge catastrophe. Yeah,
that's one of the problems. Doomism also turns people off, except some people who get extremely depressed by it and frozen into inaction. We have to keep in mind that things can be done. It isn't rocket science in the sense we sort of know what needs to be done, right? We've got all the tools we need to a large extent to do this stuff. We know that the transition to electrifying our economy is one way to do it, but we've also
got economic barriers to that. So things that are unsustainable are often cheaper than things that are sustainable even now. You know, electricity is much more expensive than natural gas if you want to heat your home, which is kind of ridiculous. We've got a situation where flying, which does a lot more damage to the environment, is much more extensive than train travel. This is absurd,
right? And in our university, we're now even trying to get a levy on flights from our own staff so we can subsidise their train travel. But it is bizarre that organisations have to do it on their own and it's not being done anyway. It just feels like there is a will, but not enough to fiddle with the economy. Never enough to fiddle with the economy. So I do think there's two things. One is an education thing, so you have to keep.
the issue on the agenda without it becoming doom -laden and very much associated with a better way of living, really. So we want better air quality, even if people couldn't care less about climate change. They do care about the air they breathe. They do care about the water they drink. And these things are all connected with how we fuel our economies. So I think there's that. The other thing is there is a positive tipping point in social networks, right? Why do we all
recycle now when we didn't 20 years ago? It's because all our neighbours are doing it and we can see them doing it. And you feel guilty when you don't. So there is a social tipping point that can work in our favour. But there's also vested interest associated with historical commitments to fossil fuels and other ways of doing things that will fight against that. But in the end, I think the number of people that are connected, directly connected to each other, that think
of ways of doing things in a different way. We'll win. It's just whether we could do it fast enough to get it done quickly. Right. I mean, it feels like the tipping points are in our favour in that sense. Social networks are tipping points, but communication between them is still controlled by a few rich people. Right. Quite often. And that makes it more difficult. And it's that understanding, isn't it? Because when people understand, it's not just knowing about it, but it's actually.
having it explained in a simple way without being patronising. It's that sharing. Because the more people understand, I suppose, the more people can prepare for any risks and challenges around it as well. Yeah, I think we've done quite well in the UK in getting the issue across. I think there's another gap between that and affecting people's lifestyles. So things like dietary changes
is one of the things individuals can do. It's quite hard to get across because there is a counter view that, you know, roast dinners are really, I mean, I still think roast dinners are lovely things, even though I try not to eat women and meat, I still think of them as lovely things. When I fly back into the UK, I want to see green fields, even though they're far from natural and they're not maximum carbon storage. I quite like seeing cows, even though I know they're
bad for the environment. So there's very much an association with what you're used to, what makes you comfortable because it's like you're
used. but some of those things need to change and that's going to take a while and it is a bit like um replacing those sort of um nostalgic views of the past with even more attractive views of the future that might even be more natural you know we'll have we'll have woodlands rather than grasslands kind of thing yes but it's quite hard to get across even for someone like me even i think fly back in uk i think it wasn't lovely to see the green and pleasant lands they're basically
all farmland right yes grazing land um And doing quite a lot of damage to the environment. So it's quite a difficult thing to think up all that. You're right. It's changing the way we think and changing the norms, I suppose, because it's clearly when we look at we obviously want everybody to move forward and we need to address this issue because truly the cost of floods and droughts is costing the economy billions anyway.
It's costing us across the world, isn't it? So there isn't that much longer that people can start to say, particularly world leaders can start to say this doesn't matter anymore because it's going to become too costly to bear, isn't it? The cost of climate change. It's really interesting, actually, that one of the first organisations, and you might think, well, this is not surprising, but the first organisation to collect good data on the impacts of changing extremes for the insurance
industry, actually. responsible for insuring our homes and and and dealing with issues when we have accidents and they are more and more concerned by this so they've got really good data they can collect also on claims and also uninsured losses and they're kind of frightening so um the evidence the evidence for extremes extreme damages predominantly comes from the insurance industry because they have to keep good data to work out what the premium should
be and so on and so forth so when big businesses like that get involved there's two things one is It's serious economically or else they wouldn't be doing it. And secondly, they have some leverage on things because they are an enormous part of an economy or economies worldwide. So that's a plus. And some of the organisations, insurance organisations, reinsurance organisations, have been very active in wanting an action on climate change. It's not just about driving up premiums.
They want their businesses not to break because the losses get too large. So to me, that's when you know it's not purely environmental scientists like me. ringing the alarm bell too loud. These are the people ringing it loudest, the people that have an interest in, you know, insurance, and actually whether insurance is even feasible after a while. Okay, so you, though, as a scientist, what's the next trigger for climate change? We've talked about the 1 .5 figure, we've got a 2050
target. We've got countries across the world looking at air and solar and all of the other types of, whether it's geothermal, all the other nuclear. For example, we've started to think again, haven't we, about the way we use nuclear in this country. So what is the next trigger, though, for climate change? What should we be looking out for next? You did mention the fact that, well, the world's not going to end tomorrow. It's not going to end. There's not a sudden answer,
is there? There's no sudden result for this. But what is the next trigger? What should we be looking at in terms of climate change? So I think we've got to keep our eyes on the rising impacts in climate change and try and understand how the extremes are being affected by climate. That's happening anyway. But one of the things that are emerging at the moment is when we look like we're going to miss targets that are associated
with dangerous climate change or... With the agreement what dangerous means, like 1 .5 and 2, people are now thinking, and we're working on this as well, whether there are emergency measures you need to be working on. So the thing about CO2 is ultimately you've got to get greenhouse gases down if you want to stabilise the climate. But what if we can't do it fast enough and we crash through some of these targets? Would you
do something else? Now, there is a really radical thing, I don't know if you've heard about this, that's called geoengineering, which is this idea that you either suck CO2 out there, which is also slow, but could be done. Or you just make the planet brighter deliberately. And this is sort of what happens after volcanoes, some volcanoes, mostly volcanoes like Pinatubo that went off in 91, cooled the global climate down by about half a degree, probably. So some ideas that have
been around a long time are re -emerging. And I don't think, from a physics point of view, I'm a physicist, as you remember, it makes a lot of sense. From a sort of socio -political point of view, it's really dangerous because it's one person with a finger on a button possibly to cool the planet down a bit. But in principle, you could do this, right? You could as an emergency call down the planet. And for a while, this research has been underground. It's been a taboo to talk
about it. But if you really wanted to call the climate down quickly, it's the only way we know how to do it. And I think this research now needs to be out in the open, partly because we might need an emergency measure and partly because people need to know what's being researched as well. So I think the thing that's going to emerge now is this idea of solar radiation management as an emergency measure. Well, the other stuff
is kind of there. So we haven't done the work we need to do on extracting CO2 from the air, which is possible in principle, but expensive and requires a lot of energy. But I do think there'll be more and more about whether we have
emergency measures in case we need them. It's a bit like saying, some people say we don't want that because it will mean we'll just... we will never cut our fossil fuel emissions so you can't have that situation you have to do that but if you wanted to chop the top off it might be the only way you can do it and lots of my scientist colleagues disagree with me on this they don't even think i should talk about it but i think we should talk about it because i think we are
getting to the stage where we are in a kind of climate emergency we don't know how bad it's going to get and we might need some measure like that that doesn't say that that doesn't um Go against the idea that the ultimate thing has to be to get to net zero. That's when you know you stabilise the system. You don't have to have any sticky tapes. But I think there is a case for thinking more and more about geoengineering and doing it openly. OK, so geoengineering and
it's all about those CO2 emissions. When I think and when a lot of people think about our climate, we do tend to think about. beautiful places in the world and how our landscapes are changing, how our wildlife is changing. And you, indeed, we think might think about the Amazon. Now you've done, you did a huge amount of research into the Amazon forest dieback. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? What did that involve? Yeah, so what we did, this was in the days when
I was in the Met Office. So I left my PhD, I went to the Met Office. I remember they said to me, well, you're a physicist, now do biology.
And so I was asked to set up a group to put vegetation dynamically into climate models um and i went they first thing they sent me to the us to meet some other experts and they all kind of laughed at me the idea was going to try and do this but because i wasn't really i was i was young and probably a bit wet behind the ears i thought we'll do this anyway and we did do it and so we did the first experiments in modeling experiments of simulations where we had vegetation moving
around the globe if it was able to And we had carbon being absorbed by vegetation and the ocean. And we ran this simulation in the early 2000s. We published a paper in Nature in 2000 where we basically said, in this particular model, these feedbacks that have been missing would accelerate climate change a lot. Like global, instead of being four degrees, being five and a half. And the reason it happened was because carbon started to be released from the land,
especially from soil. And really most... And worryingly, the Amazon rainforest died in that model. So it got hot and dry. The forest couldn't survive. When the forest starts to die, it stops recycling water. It gets hotter and drier still, and you've got a feedback loop. You lose the forest. Now, this turns out to be quite an extreme
response from that particular model. And for years, we did experiments and analysis to try and work out how feasible this was and convinced ourselves it's not all that likely in the real world. But the latest climate models are showing more and more of this, actually. So not just the metaverse model. In fact, almost everything but the metaverse model is now showing evidence that the Amazon forest could die back under climate change scenarios, which is a real worry. And
the Amazon is getting drier, too. And we think that's not just because of carbon dioxide. It's actually a rather unfortunate consequence of cleaning up the air. So the other thing that we did in the 60s and 70s and 50s was burn sulfurous coal. Now, my parents talk about the pea supers in London where you couldn't see a hand in front of your face. And that was because we were burning, putting a lot of sulfur dioxide out with CO2.
Sulfur dioxide, even though it's a horrible pollutant, has a weird effect of making clouds brighter. It forms sulfate particles and droplets can form around them. You get more drops in a cloud. It reflects more sunlight. And so for a long time, we accidentally counteracted global warming with
arguably even worse pollutant. And then we quite sensibly said, this is really bad for our... health for our respiratory health so we'll take the sulfur dioxide out and we've therefore got a kick the global warming that's happened just in 2020 we finally took sulfur out of shipping fuels and there's circumstantial evidence that's one of the reasons the oceans have been so hot since i've been getting hot because that sulfur dioxide was actually reflecting sunlight by virtue
of making clouds a bit brighter and keeping those areas a bit cooler than they would have been Anyway, long story short, we mainly emitted sulfur dioxide in the northern hemisphere because that's where all the industrial nations were. So as we reduced those sulfur dioxide, we got a warming that meant that what's called the intertropical convergence zone, the place where there's lots
of rain and cloud move northwards. And in the process, away from Amazonia, as it made sub -Saharan Africa a bit wetter, which is good, but it made Amazonia drier, especially southern Amazonia. And we think that's what's going on. This is part CO2, but a lot of it's due to doing something really sensible, which is to clean up the air. And we are getting a bit of that going on. We
can see that in the satellite record. The planet is warming now as much or a bit more because it's getting darker than it is because it's getting less good at emitting radio. Now, if we're turning the conversation, trying to be perhaps look at the more positive, one of the aspects of this climate change discussion, is that it does draw
people together. Just when I think about the kinds of people I'm speaking to, like yourself, our podcast guests, speaking to people from a range of careers, professions, backgrounds, from scientists to artists, a whole range of incredible people who are talking about this. And you work at Exeter, so you work with a lot of young students as well. So there are two questions here. So do you see hope in terms of your students, in terms of the students there for the future? And
do you see a way of this? Do you see a way of the climate crisis, climate emergency? Because it is a climate emergency. I know you said it was a kind of climate emergency, but it is a climate emergency. Do you see the way that people can work together on this agenda a positive? Absolutely. So, I mean, we're all in a bit in bubbles sometimes, aren't we? And the people
that I'm surrounded. who are equally concerned about the climate problem and interested in it, actually, scientifically, it's a real thrill to be involved with that. But the other thing is, in some ways, this is a bit of a test for humanity, this, right? Because, as you said, Anna, there's no way for us to solve this on our own. There could be one polluter in another part of the world and we'll never get to net
zero globally. So it requires a degree of... global cooperation than we haven't managed before. That means it's hard, but it also means that in order to solve it, we probably have to get something even better, which is global cooperation. So I sort of see that as a positive. It might be, as you sort of were hinting, the thing that
draws us together. It won't be all of us. There'll always be some dissenters, but there might be enough of us that are drawn together by this, that it not only helps us to resolve the climate problem, which is significant, but it could be even bigger problems like inequality and war and so on. These things will be affected by the fact we're connected. by a common interest and a common desire to stabilise the climate. So
that's in my very optimistic moments. I do have the opposite as well, which is, crikey, we're never going to do this. But it does feel to me like it's a hard problem because it involves people working together. And that means it's doubly worth doing. I was actually going to ask you whether you get terribly depressed doing your job monitoring this or whether you, but there's obviously, there's that hint of optimism there too, isn't there? Because there has to
be for you to do your work. I mean, I'm also a scientist, so this always sounds like a sort of evil scientist thing to say, but it's a really exciting thing to study the world as it's changing. I mean, you worry for your kids and you worry for your grandchildren, but in terms of studying a problem, there's nothing more interesting than this at the moment, I think, from a sort of science point of view, because you're constantly being stretched to understand what's going on. So it
is an unintended experiment. I wish we weren't doing it, but if we're going to be doing it, I want to understand it and try and help to solve it. And that last one, even if you deal with it, climate change is happening anyway. The best thing I can do is to try and understand it and help in some way. And it does keep me going. You kind of answered my last question, actually. I always like to kind of finish up with a very last question, which is really asking about what
next for you. You've got a highly successful career to date, but what are your ambitions next? I mean, the most exciting thing for me, the most rewarding thing is to develop new scientists. So I'm in my 60s now. I'll carry on being interested in this, but you start to see people coming through that can do things I could never do. They're going to be much more effective than I was. So developing people is a really key part of it.
And then there are problems you build up in your career that kind of get put on the back burner and they turn into a very tasty stew you'll have one day. Meat -free stew, I must say, it has to be. But, you know, a stew in the background that you'll have. And so there's always this thing when you get close to retirement is that all those pet projects you'll be able to do. The problem is I'm going to need young hands to help me get the data and massage it. But I
think that's doable. So one thing is about understanding this thing about the darkening planet, which is really exciting to me. Another thing is about understanding how you might detect a tipping point that you approach quickly. That's also a technical problem, but very interesting. And I think we're close to solving it. So, yeah, there's plenty of problems to keep it going. I really love that idea of that stew. And it is certainly not a time to sit back or sit on
your hands. This is a time to carry on and, as you say, draw in a lot of fresh other new perspectives as well. Well, thank you very much to Peter. Thank you very much for providing such a tremendous amount of insight today. There can be no doubt that climate change is the biggest challenge of our time. Today we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions to slow global warming. Today we must act for tomorrow, adjusting our lifestyles to current and future impacts of climate change.
Today we must use our collective wisdom to deliver on our climate commitments. Today we work for tomorrow's world. Thank you very much to Peter Cox, to Professor Peter Cox for joining me today. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. My pleasure. You've been listening to the Decarbonisation Dialogue, a podcast from Salix. For more information about our work and to find more content, please visit salixfinance .co .uk forward slash podcasts.