Downstream: Elites Have No Plan for Climate Change w/ Bill McGuire

**Aaron Bastani** (0:07)
There's a great line from Ernest Hemingway, one of the best lines in English-speaking literature of the last 100 years, I think, where he talks about going bankrupt. It happens gradually and then all at once.
Over the course of the last few months, looking at the weather in this country, how dry it's been, how hot it's been, that's kind of how I feel about climate change. I'm sure for many of you out there, you've had the same feeling as well. Politicians and journalists often think in terms of minutes, hours, days, weeks, when really they need to be thinking in terms of years, decades, certainly for a problem as big and as long term as climate change. In fact, today's guest thinks in the longest possible terms, he's passionate about geology. Now bear in mind, our planet is about 4.6 billion years old. It's had many fluctuations in terms of climate. On the one hand, that provides sucker for climate change deniers. They say it's always got warmer, it's always got colder, the planet changes. On the other hand, the past can give us clues about what will change when we have higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. How much warmer will it get? How high will sea levels rise? Today's guest has thought about all of this stuff for decades. He's a volcanologist. He is highly credentialed in that world, but also climate change too. Increasingly, over the late 1990s and early 2000s, that's where he focused his attention, what he calls climate systems breakdown. He published this book a few years ago, Hot House Earth, An Inhabitant's Guide. I really recommend it. 160 pages, really worth your time. And more recently, The Fate of the World, A History and a Future of the Climate Crisis. Of course, you can see Bill McGuire.
Here are his credentials. They really stack up. Bill is a professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, a co-director of the New Weather Institute and a patron of scientists for global responsibility. He was a member of SAGE, the science advisory group in emergencies. Now, when somebody with that kind of CV tells you that you should be even more alarmed about climate change than you already are, you should probably pay attention.
We know this is a problem. We know it's a crisis. But I think we also know over the last few months that things are probably developing even more quickly than the most frightened, alarming voices feared.
Bill McGuire, thanks for coming on downstream.

**Bill McGuire** (2:41)
Thanks very much, Aaron. Great to be here.

**Aaron Bastani** (2:43)
I am so looking forward to this episode. And I often say that at the start of these conversations, and it's often true, but I think with you, this is going to be a fabulous conversation because you're an authority on so many things.
So we're going to talk about climate change, but also by training, you're a volcanologist.

**Bill McGuire** (3:02)
I am, yes. I started my life on volcanoes, active volcanoes. Well, not my life, obviously, my career.
And I went from there into looking at how climate and the solid earth interact, and then from there into more of climate science. So it's a sort of journey that lasted about 20 years or so.

**Aaron Bastani** (3:20)
So when did you study to become a volcanologist?

**Bill McGuire** (3:23)
Well, as a kid, I was always keen on geology and fossils and rocks and this sort of thing. So thinking about what to do next, on the one hand, because it was in the late 1960s, I wanted to be an astronaut, obviously, as people did then. But my maths wasn't good enough, so I decided to do geology instead. So I went to university, did a first degree in geology.
I was still mad on space, so I wanted to do a PhD involving planetary geology. I wanted to look at Martian images of the moon and look at those in terms of interpreting them in terms of geological processes, if you like. But again, nothing much came up, and then I was offered an opportunity to work on Mount Etna in Sicily, which I took and had an absolutely fantastic time. I mean, eating pasta, drinking red wine, and looking at rocks. So what more could you want in the sun?

**Aaron Bastani** (4:12)
And when was this, your sort of turn towards volcanology?

**Bill McGuire** (4:15)
That would have been in 1977 to 1980 I did my PhD, and then after that, I went into lecturing and I was teaching in geology generally, and also specializing in volcanology, volcanoes, volcanic hazards particularly.

**Aaron Bastani** (4:31)
We're going to talk about volcanoes and super volcanoes in a minute. But I think this is just as a chronology worth working out because it's a microcosm of a broader story. So this passion for geology and volcanic disturbances, when does that then become a broader interest in things like climate science, climate warming?