David Wasdell is possibly the foremost climate systems analyst on Earth: he tells it like it is, because he sees no reason to lie. When he talks, you listen, because failure to listen to his unique brand of unfiltered, unpoliticized, science-based analysis is failure to listen to the voice of reason.
He says we have to go into a period of negative radiative forcing (global heating energy) merely to end up with a stable, non-catastrophic climate system, “that’s the overall strategy. It is not, of course, the strategy being addressed by the IPCC…they are addressing a climate agenda that is way out of date from the reality of the system as we know it today.”
Wasdell is an angry man. He has stared into the abyss, time and time again, and realised that we are acting like spoilt children in a party where there is nothing but cake and chocolate laced with cyanide: spoilt children who will kill themselves in search of a toxic dream.
Ultimately we have to act now: he sees possibility, at present, in a humanity that still sits within a civilized envelope creating the necessary change – this is perhaps where we disagree, or perhaps where he offers the climatic path we have to take and allows us to decide how we get there, because he has no faith in anything that civilized humans have so far created and then destroyed. I have my solution, which fits with David’s analysis as a path to survival. If there is another way, we had better get on with it because civilization will only hang on as long as the man standing on the edge of Niagara Falls near the start of the presentation: after that, it has nowhere to go but downwards.