David Wallace-Wells
speaker
263 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 29 Jul
David Wallace-Wells’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But wealth itself is not a perfect buffer.
It often...
you know teaches us um delusion deluded lessons about how safe and protected we we are and in the case of los angeles i think it meant a lot of people didn't believe that any disaster of that scale was possible in their own lives and they sort of assumed um based on the you know the the the
social bubble in which they lived that they were perfectly protected.
And we may tell ourselves, living in little privileged bubbles, that we are safe.
And in any given year, most of us will be.
And most of our lives will be normal.
But privilege is not a perfect protection against these impacts.
So here we are in 2026 and the global average temperature is about 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average.
And it doesn't sound like very much on any given day that kind of effect is basically imperceptible to the average person, but it is a global average and it hides a lot of extremes.
It is also right about what we agreed we would try to limit warming to in the Paris Agreement in 2015.
We said we would definitely keep warming below 2 degrees, and we would do everything we could to keep warming close to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
And that came about because...
After a longer period in which climate scientists and climate policy people were talking about two degrees as a good target, there was emerging science and emerging political sense among the world's most vulnerable countries that two degrees wasn't enough, that 1.5 degrees was...
itself going to be quite difficult to manage, but anything north of that was going to be quite catastrophic.
And when we signed that agreement just 10 years ago, we were not yet north of one degree of warming.
And we are now, in the long-term average, somewhere about 1.3 or 1.4, and in a single year, at 1.5.
And we are heading quite rapidly, not just past
the goal that we set for ourselves as a more ambitious goal, 1.5 degrees, but towards that less ambitious goal, two degrees, which again, many of the world's most vulnerable countries rose up in protest about saying, this is not acceptable for us.
And now it seems, practically speaking, inevitable.
Showing 81–100 of 263 · page 5 of 14
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