John Gibbons

speaker

873 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Sep

John Gibbons’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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The Last Word with Matt Cooper · How Will El Niño Impact Ireland This Autumn? · 3 Sep 2026 podcast

Normally a one and a half degree temperature shift would probably take anywhere between a thousand and ten thousand years.

We human actions have compressed that into a couple of decades.

I I'm I'm glad that that that question has been asked because I I'll explain briefly what it means.

One and a half degrees, first of all, means that you're approaching certain critical tipping points.

So for example, we know that the West Antarctic ice shelf is fundamentally unstable.

And and scientists through the IPCC have calculated that anywhere above one point five degrees, West Antarctica comes into play.

Now West Antarctica has locked up seven

seven meters of sea ice.

Now, we do not want that seven meters of sorry, seven meters of ice that is capable of of changing global sea uh sea sea sea levels.

Um that is land based ice in Antarctica that is at risk of ending up in the sea.

So just be very very clear about the difference between sea ice and land ice.

So West Antarctica at at one point five degrees comes into play.

In other words, we could wake up someday to the news bulletin to say that gigantic glaciers like the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is on the move and we're seeing rapid sea level rise and evacuation of cities.

This is not science fiction, Matt.

This is what's possible once you move above 1.5.

There are other critical thresholds.

At above 1.5, the likelihood of the Amazon rainforest completely drying out and switching to Savannah.

Is is somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees, that's going to happen.

You also have the destabilization of the Greenland ice pack above 1.5, and also you have what's called a blue ocean event risk in the in the Arctic, which means that the the Arctic Ocean is sea ice.

So it doesn't directly affect sea level.

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