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The big. And so he is a consultant intensivist in London and he's Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at UCL, but he also directs the Center for Human Health and Performance. He's co-chair two of the Lancet Countdown Commissions on Human health and climate change. And he now co-chair the 47 country Lancet Countdown on health and climate change. He's written and elected extensively on the subject. Um And he's briefed policymakers both nationally and internationally. Um and he also leads a UCL Masters module on climate change and health. Um In 2022 he was awarded an OB E for his work on climate change and health. And in 2023 he co-founded, he founded the nonprofit Zero Action on Climate change. And it is my absolute pleasure to welcome him today to talk to us. Um Thank you. Thank you very much, Becca. Uh Let me see if I can uh share that should be. All right, let's see if this works. Have you got that? Ok. Has that come up for you? Um Not just yet, not still see you and hear, but no slides yet. No slides. Ok. Let's try again. Sure. Let's see if that will do the trick. There we go. Good, a good topic. Great. Well, thank you for having me. I, I've got, I told around 30 minutes to try to counter through the threat of climate change as, uh, as it now stands. Er, you're not gonna like what I have to tell you, er, because it's going to be dramatically worse. I imagine that any of you could possibly have conceived but this is a call to action really. Um I've referred to this talk as when the can stop singing because it's about warnings. We've missed the problem. Of course is that carbon dioxide is drawn down from the atmosphere by plants which in photosynthesis using photons from the sun, use water and carbon dioxide to produce glucose. The glucose is synthesized into more complex molecules like cellulose and that works up the tree into other plants and into other animals which when they will die are meant to rot and rerelease that carbon dioxide. But over a period of around 550 million years, there were plants, animals which were crushed and didn't rot and stored away half a billion years worth of CO2 and locked it away as a very dangerous gene. Uh fly, releasing some of that is as oil where marine phyto and zooplankton algae bacteria were squid under sea salts for around 550 million years and under pressure and heat low down were converted into Waxy Carro and then into oil and the other greenhouse gas methane, which was rebranded, of course by the fossil fuel companies as natural gas, which it sounds nice. Similarly, coal over a period of, of more like 60 million years was formed when giant ferns and horsetails Clubmoss and so forth in swamps, fell to the bottom of those swamps and they also were crushed and formed coal and again, methane. So we now have three fossil fuels, the oil coal and quote natural gas, which is methane. This is methane, a simple enough molecule which is very poisonous and very dangerous and lethal and also explodes. And this was a problem down coal mines back in the day because as people were mining away this fossil carbon dioxide, they were also releasing the fossil carbon dioxide in the form of methane and it with explosions or with breathing it in, it killed miners. And this chap decided to come up with an answer. This is your average polymath doctor who was a son of a Scottish evangelist. He was also religious himself. He was a philosopher, a physiologist and a self self experimenter. He experimented on himself and on his son and got his son to be his lab technician as you'll hear. And he was interested in trying to detect these dangerous gasses, methane, but also the carbon monoxide with it. And what he found was that small animals such as canaries and mice were 20 times more sensitive to those poisonous gasses. And he decided that canaries would be a better choice than mice because rather than waiting for the animal just to die, canaries would stop singing first. And he decided that since mice don't singer, a canary would be a good choice. In fact, just for your Christmas trivia for next year, there aren't mice that sing. This is the arson singing mouse from South America, but he didn't have access to those. So he decided that you would carry a canary down the mine like this. And if it stopped singing, it would warn you that there was trouble coming. And if you ignored that warning, then you died. The trouble is that methane isn't just our minds anymore. It's all around us and we can't see it or smell it, but it is there. I'm releasing huge amounts. We release, declared around 32 million metric tons of methane a year from coal seams. It's probably vastly more than that with the food and rubbish waste that we throw away every year, which is compressed in rubbish tips that there's no oxygen there. So it can't break down aerobically, it breaks down anaerobically release another 50 million metric tons from landfill alone every year as we drill into oil seams, we release methane um that some of it is burned off as you can see here, but a lot of it is not another 67 million tons a year of methane comes from oil wells. And on top of that, cows are ruminants. They like us, can't break down cellulose. So they have three stomachs and the rumen is full of bacteria that break down cellulose to release methane. Every single cow releases around 251 L of methane every single day. And we now graze cattle on a land surface area greater than the entire continent of Africa. And every day we graze more, releasing colossal quantities of methane, another 75 million tons a year. And we also flood land for paddy fields and the wa the soil. There also can't aspire aerobically which means it releases another 100 million tons a year, all of that. So a methane rather is released into a very small atmosphere. If you were to wrap the entire atmosphere of the globe up at standard temperature and pressure, it would be the volume of that small pink sphere. We are surrounded by an incredibly thin skin and atmosphere. And if you put a lot of gas into a very thin skin, the concentration there will rise as it has here. Looking at atmospheric concentrations of methane, screaming upwards from all the sources I've described until it reached a balance with draw down on the planet over around the 10 years between 2010, er sorry 4010. Now this is a get out of jail free cards that will come to shortly if we were to reduce methane emissions, they fall very quickly. The concentrations because the atmospheric half life of methane is only 10.5 years. So if we were able to fix that problem, er, concentrations would fall very quickly. But that me thing may still kill us even if we can't see it because it is a greenhouse gas. Now being warned about these greenhouse gasses, the canaries stopped singing a long time ago. We were first warned by this woman, ya's Mutant Foot in 1856 100 and 68 years ago when she warned us that gasses such as methane, carbon dioxide and water vapor let short wave radiation through that sunlight and trapped long wave radiation in the form of heat. She said, if we keep burning fossil fuels, we'll raise the atmospheric constipation of these gasses and that will kill us. The canaries stopped singing. We warned but we did nothing 100 and 68 years ago and she was right. If you look at the energy gain from methane alone, we're trapping the energy equivalent of around 1.5, pushing a bomb's worth of energy every single second. And that looks like this in real time and that's going on all the time, day and night. But remember it's not just the me thing. Remember there's also carbon dioxide released when we burn the gas and the coal and the oil. We have the data. Now for last year. And this is what humanity burned last year. And every year we burn more and more and more that is not going down. And that's dangerous because unlike methane, with its relatively short half life, 1/5 of the Co2 released today will still be boiling our planet in 33,000 years from now. And 7% will be boiling our planet 100,000 years from now. So if you add a large quantity of a toxic agent into a small circulation, the concentration in that circulation will go up just as if we add large quantities of poison into our planetary circulation, the concentration will also rise and we are adding vast quantities if we turn those gasses into the heating equivalent of carbon dioxide, so change methane into carbon dioxide as it were these?