﻿This is the most important video you are ever going to watch,
and it’s why I’m here on screen talking to you today.
Because humanity has “lost the fight against climate change”.
These were the words of renowned environmentalist David Suzuki,
and they sent shockwaves around the world in July 2025 when he spoke them.
And, I’m afraid, it gets worse;
Carl Sagan, an American scientist, said
“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”
So, yes, he said we will go extinct - the only question is when, and not if.
I find it hard to believe that humans will still populate the planet by 2100.
And if you think that’s bad, wait until you hear this one.
Michael Dowd said:
“I think half or more of the human population - that’s 3 to 5 billion people -
will likely starve within 16 months of the first multi-bread-basket failure,
most likely this decade."
Truthfully, I would rather tell you differently.
I’d love to talk about some sort of climate silver
bullet that can bring us back from the edge of the cliff.
But I don’t think that exists.
And I actually - I didn’t really want to make this video if I’m honest with you,
but I felt like I had to say something in response to all those words.
You know I have a channel called “Astrum Earth”,
it would be remiss not to talk about what’s actually happening here on Earth.
And this one’s a little bit different, as I’m sure you may have noticed.
This feels like way too an important conversation not to have eye-to-eye.
So that’s what we’re going to do in this video, you and I having a conversation.
I want this video to be your all encompassing guide to climate change
and we’re going to look at where we’re really at.
And fair warning - this ain’t going to be pretty.
You’re going to get angry, I mean -
geez, I’m angry, I’m outraged, whatever the right word is, I feel it too,
and I’m right here with you in this strange journey we’re about to embark upon.
I feel like I should say now, please don’t hate me during this,
be angry at why it’s been allowed to happen;
feel free - shout in the comments, rage at policy makers,
be p*ssed off, please! We all are!
This video is based not on my opinions or anyone here at Astrum Earth’s,
but in true Astrum Earth style, this is based on science.
Alright, let’s get into it.
I’m James Stewart and you’re watching Astrum Earth.
In this video, I’m going to show you every single chance humanity had to stop climate collapse,
and how we blew every single one.
We’ll explore the latest climate data to see whether David Suzuki’s claims are backed up,
and we’ll confront the ultimate question:
Have we truly lost the fight against climate change?
So first things first, you may be wondering how we got here.
So let’s start by looking at all the times the world has come together
to successfully unite on fighting climate change and save humanity.
Thanks for watching this video, we’ll see you in the next one!
Yeah it makes for short reading, that, doesn’t it?
Actually, it makes for no reading at all.
So instead, let’s look at all the times we could have saved the world.
Yeah - I’ve set up a handy counter in the corner of the screen here so you can keep track!
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there weren’t any conferences
or meetings of world leaders to talk about climate change at all.
Then, as science caught up,
the UN sort of decided it would be a good idea to have some policies or agreements
that sought to regulate our changing world.
Enter the IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It was set up in 1988 to provide scientific assessments on climate change for policymakers;
and I bet all those policymakers were thrilled.
They set up some other fancy sounding groups too like the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is a bit of a mouthful,
or ‘UNFCCC’, which is the treaty that provides the framework for international climate action.
They also started hosting COPs, or Conference of the Parties,
which are the annual meetings you may have seen that hit the news every year,
in which countries that are parties to the treaty gather to make decisions,
or at least they’re supposed to.
And by the end of this video, you’ll see why every one of those meetings failed -
and why actually the most dangerous decade to be alive is the one we’re living in right now.
It wouldn’t be until 1992 that one of those UN acronyms came to fruition and at the UNFCCC
parties agreed to stabilise “greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at
a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the
climate system”. Chance number 1 to save the world went about as well as you might expect.
In subsequent years, the planet did actually cool down, but not due to government action,
but because of a huge volcanic eruption! With little human progress made,
just 5 years later another meeting was held; the Kyoto protocol which although adopted in 1997,
due to a complex ratification process didn’t enter into force until 2005, who needs urgency anyway?!
Its main purpose was to commit 37 industrialised nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by
an average of 5% below 1990 levels by 2008-2012, with, by the way,
no mention of temperature limitations. You can probably see where this is going.
Fear not, because there was another agreement in 2010, of course there was - the Cancun
Agreement. Maybe this could be the one! Now, this was really the first time temperature
levels were mentioned and an agreement was formalised to limit the increase in global
“average temperature to below 2 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels”.
However, during this time, research continued to show, unsurprisingly,
that for some countries and vulnerable ecosystems, the risk of grave damage
rapidly increases at less than 2 degree Celsius of warming. So yeah, another miss.
Now, here’s the good stuff, because in 2015, nearly the entire world
(195 nations) came together at the United Nations-held international climate meeting
(or COP21) to sign the Paris Agreement. And that December date in 2015 should
have been remembered as the day the human race came together and saved the world.
Now, up to this point, you could argue the world didn’t really understand the scale of the problem.
But after this next meeting in Paris, that excuse disappears completely.
The Paris agreement aims to limit global warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius by
the end of the century, and "pursue efforts" to keep warming within the ‘safer’ limit of
1.5 degrees Celsius. And I don’t think I need to tell you what happened here, do I? Once again,
owing to self-interest, economic inequalities and some would say down right greed,
spoiler alert - current end of century predictions place us at 3.5 to four degrees of warming.
Hilariously, I’m also recording this hot on the heels of the most
recent COP. COP30 in Brazil took place recently and once again,
they failed to cut fossil fuels - great work everyone, great trip, love that!
Now, in any conversation about climate change, you’ll notice the figure "1.5 degrees Celsius"
is rarely far from the discussion, but what does this actually mean? Because it doesn’t sound like
a huge number, does it? So what’s all the fuss about? 1.5 degrees Celsius above what? Well,
the answer is a wholly unsatisfactory, “average”.
We usually define it as the average global temperature over the “pre-industrial period”,
or, the time before the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases due to human emissions began
to significantly influence global temperatures. For instance, the September 2023 global surface
temperature was 1.44 degrees above “average” - specifically, the average September of the
twentieth century. But it’s not always that simple, we don’t make it easy for ourselves,
the definition of which years make up this “pre-industrial period’” varies.
Most historians would define the dates of the Industrial Revolution as between the mid-1700s
and the mid-1800s, but scientific definitions of pre-industrial typically cover some range of
decades between 1850 and 1900. Now that’s not because scientists are terrible at history,
but because that’s the earliest time period with widespread,
consistent surface temperature records to go off.
Without getting too bogged down in the technicalities, the crucial take away really
here is that industrial versus pre-industrial is actually about the human impact on our climate
and how scientists can distinguish that from natural variability going back thousands of
years. Which brings us back to the big question: who decided 1.5 was going to be the magic number?
The Paris agreement was the only time everyone agreed to an actual
number for the global warming limit - that’s it, we sort of have no other
benchmark but that 1.5 degrees. As a direct result of the Paris agreement,
the IPCC put together a special report in 2018 in which they warned global warming is likely
to reach 1.5 degrees between 2030 and 2052, if it continues to increase at the current rate.
OK, good news. It’s still 2018 at this point, there’s still time to act!
So, did we listen to that warning? What do you reckon! Well, in its Sixth Assessment
Report (the AR6), released in parts from 2021 through to 2023, the IPCC said if we wanted to
limit warming to 1.5 degree Celsius, then global CO2 emissions would need to peak by
2025 at the latest and then fall by 43% in time for 2030 (that’s all relative to 2019 levels),
and methane emissions would then need to drop by a-third in the same timeframe.
Now, here’s the good bit, because I’m here, this is the future, it is early 2026 as I record this,
they’ve had so many chances to sort this out, oh they wouldn’t let us down would they? Surely not!
Now up until this point, everything so far has been nothing short of a brief history lesson
really, but what comes next is the part that decides whether this century is survivable.
Let’s start with emissions, where the news is erm… not good. In fact, it’s terrible. Because
atmospheric emissions of CO2 hit a record high in June 2025 at 427 ppm. For context, the last time
CO2 was that high was likely over 3 million years ago, when global temperatures were about 2.5 to 4
degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels, and sea levels were 25 meters higher than today, what!?
So yeah, what I’m telling you is that despite knowing this would happen for 40 odd years,
not only did emissions continue to rise, they’re now so high, they’re at the same level as before
the earliest known members of our own genus even existed?! Should quickly say the reason
it’s not actually 2.5 to 4 degree Celsius hotter today is down to a time lag between
cause and effect in our climate, in other words, we’ll experience the full effects
of today’s emissions in the years to come. So, sorry in advance, future grandchildren.
And if you thought that was bad?! It gets worse! Because the growth isn’t slowing:
in just one year from October 2024 to October 2025, CO2 jumped by about 2.2
parts-per-million (from ~422.35 to ~424.54) and there is no sign, according to NOAA,
that we’ve even hit the peak yet. At the beginning of 2020, scientists estimated
that humanity could only emit 500 billion more tonnes of carbon dioxide (only!) if we
were to have a 50% chance of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees. Which, by the start of 2025,
a new study said this so-called "carbon budget" had shrunk to just 130 billion tonnes.
Ouch, yeah if you’re still keeping score, emissions-wise, there’s not really anything
else to say other than based on those IPCC reports and those numbers, yeah,
as our friend David Suzuki said, we have lost the fight against climate change, and we’ve lost bad.
The next factor we have to look at is global temperature – the sort-of bottom-line outcome
of all those emissions. I don’t even want to tell you about this one, if I’m honest. So NOAA,
NASA, and other agencies track Earth’s surface temperature via thousands of weather stations,
ocean buoys, and satellites, and when they’re not being torn about by the US government,
they release their findings and who’d have thunk it, it’s more bad news, I did tell you, at the
start of this video, this was going to be a tough watch, didn’t I? Well done if you’ve got this far.
The data here shows an unequivocal warming trend, in fact the past decade (from 2015
to 2024) has been the hottest since records began in the 19th century.
For small islands and low-lying nations, the reality is hitting hard - they are already seeing
storms like 2025’s Hurricane Melissa, the largest hurricane ever to hit Jamaica. There, water
temperatures were 1.4 degrees warmer than average, dramatically and rapidly increasing the intensity
of the storm by nearly double. These conditions were made up to 700 times more likely due to
human-caused climate change, according to an analysis from science non-profit Climate Central.
A once-in-10-years heatwave in pre-industrial times is twice as frequent at 1.5 degrees warming
and would cause about 14% of Earth’s population to face severe and regular heatwaves. A new report
from ‘The Lancet’ suggests heat related deaths would surge, increasing by 23% from the number
seen in the 1990s, and they were absolutely right. Very sadly, heat related deaths now register at
well over half a million per year. Even in 2024, pollution from wildfire smoke alone was attributed
to 154,000 deaths. In short, even at 1.5 degrees, billions of people would be impacted; the ‘best
case’ scenario is arguably still, horrendous. And if that doesn’t p*ss you off enough, this might.
Even if you think about the most recent years: 2023 was the warmest year on record at the time,
1.18 degrees above the 20th-century average (and roughly 1.3 degrees above
the pre-industrial level). And no one said a thing! And even more ridiculous still,
is that it barely held that title for 12 months – 2024 came along
and shattered that record at 1.55 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
Ugh honestly, I need a break, I’m sure you must do as well because this - this is exhausting,
so if you’re looking for a tiny piece of positivity in amongst all of that,
I might have one. Because NOAA points out that although global surface temperatures in September,
October, and November 2023 exceeded 1.5 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial
period, there were other influences outside of human-induced changes.
Factors like El Niño and random weather events can briefly push up monthly or even yearly
global temperatures above 1.5 degrees. But to bring us back to reality, human-caused warming
was by far the main reason for those high temperatures and 2025, now we have the data,
was the third hottest on record, beaten only by - yeah, you guessed it - 2023 and 2024.
Now, these aren't sort of secret stats I’ve conjured up and hidden in a vault down here,
these are readily available to you, to everyone - and of course, that includes governments. And
well, should I say this, we might cut this bit out, anyway, in the 12 months leading up to 2025,
governments awarded 492 new oil and gas exploration licenses globally,
and right on cue Donald Trump to start 2026, very generously helped Venezuela
(the country with the world largest known crude oil reserves) influence how that oil is sold. So
2026 has picked up where 2025 left off, it’s off to a flyer, but it’s not all about data
and scary numbers because all of this alarming information affects something we can’t see too.
As the independent climate change research organisation Berkeley Earth put it, the Paris
target of staying below 1.5 degree Celsius at this point “is unobtainable”. Even UN chief
António Guterres speaking ahead of COP30 in Brazil acknowledged it is now “inevitable” that humanity
will overshoot the target. ‘Let’s recognise our failure’ he told the Guardian newspaper.
Looking at those temperatures on their own, without context,
can be a little meaningless, but these temperature records aren’t just numbers;
they translate into tangible extremes. NOAA’s data also calculates an uptick in extreme events
that aligns with climate change predictions. For example, in the United States in 2023,
they suffered a record number of billion-dollar weather disasters (things like wildfires,
hurricanes, severe storms), which NOAA tallied at 28 separate major events. Globally,
we’ve seen unprecedented wildfire seasons (as in Canada and Australia), deadly heatwaves (I
think back to 2022 in South Asia or 2023 even in the Mediterranean), intense flooding (like
we’ve seen in Pakistan). These kinds of extremes regularly make the headlines now;
they’ve become normal - climate change has moved from a future threat to a present-day emergency.
Indeed, if we judge by atmospheric metrics alone, humanity hasn’t even slightly begun to win,
in fact you could argue we’re still digging the hole deeper.
For David Suzuki, the man whose words prompted this video,
data around temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions are just
the start because there’s something else going wrong too, very wrong.
I know that was a lot, so thanks for sticking with me,
and if you are in desperate need for some good news, you’re not alone, I promise you.
Not because we want a comforting story,
but because we need evidence that doing something still matters.
Because it does.
Enter Planet Wild!
They are a community-based nature protection organisation helping our planet -
I think of them like crowdfunding but for nature.
Each month, their community funds a mission to restore nature around the world
and they document it with a YouTube video,
so you can see the impact of your contribution.
It's actually that transparency that encouraged me to become a member in the first place.
They’ve done such a good job at helping our planet,
all you need to do is check out their page to see what they’re all about;
from turning farmland into an ancient swamp to a wild plan restoring a forest
without planting a single tree - that’s particularly impressive.
Honestly, I adore what these guys do,
which is why the first 100 people to sign up using my code
ASTRUM2 will get their first month paid for by me!
Yeah, I mean it. Just scan this QR code, or click the link in the video description!
You'll immediately have an impact and see the result in less than 30 days.
If you want to see them in action,
check out their mission to restore a forest with the link in the description below.
As we head back to the video.
Apparently I’m a glutton for punishment, because here we go again - strap in folks,
it gets better - and by better, I mean worse.
In the mid-2000s, a group of Earth system scientists led by Johan Rockström
identified nine Planetary Boundaries – essentially Earth’s critical life-support systems, each with
a threshold we shouldn’t cross if we want to maintain a stable planet. This is something
Suzuki directly referenced in that interview, and the boundaries include climate change,
biodiversity, land-system change (that’s when the transformation of landscapes, from things like
deforestation and urbanisation), freshwater use, biogeochemical flows (which includes
the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles), ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion,
atmospheric aerosol loading, and novel entities (things like chemical pollution).
Staying within these boundaries keeps us in what science calls a “safe operating space”
for humanity, which, obviously, would be very nice. Crossing them risks triggering large-scale,
potentially abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. Think of them like pressure limits on a
life support machine – push beyond the red line, and the system can fail in unpredictable ways.
So how are we doing with these? Honestly at this point, I’m almost scared to tell you.
From research published in 2023, six of the nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed;
those are Climate Change, Biosphere Integrity,
Land System Change, Freshwater Use, Biogeochemical Flows, and Novel Entities.
Yes, six - two thirds done, gone, finito, goodbye! And just when it seemed things
couldn’t get any worse, they did. Quite literally as I was recording this live,
we crossed a seventh; ocean acidification, gone!
Since the start of the industrial era, the ocean’s surface pH has fallen by around 0.1
units, that’s a 30-40% increase in acidity, pushing marine ecosystems beyond safe limits
and degrading the oceans’ ability to act as Earth’s stabiliser. What this means in real
terms is that warm-water coral reefs - vital to nearly a billion people and a quarter of marine
species - have already passed their threshold of stability. Mass coral die-off is underway and,
unless global warming is reversed, large reef systems as we know them will disappear.
Only two of Earth’s boundaries remain in the safe green area: the stratospheric ozone
layer and atmospheric aerosol loading. Some of you of a certain age, like me, may remember
hearing about the ozone layer at school, but these days, we never really hear much more about it. And
this is kind of a good news story, and it’s all down to a global phase-out of CFCs which worked
spectacularly well, so well in fact the ozone layer is slowly recovering – a rare success
story in amongst all this chaos. Everything else – climate, biodiversity, deforestation, freshwater
use, pollution, ocean chemistry, and nutrient overload – well that’s lit up in warning colors.
In Suzuki’s words: “If we pass one boundary, we should be shitting our pants, we’ve passed seven!”
You know what really gets me after all that we’ve just digested from this video? There was a 2019
report from the Climate Accountability Institute and they found that just 20 state-owned and
private companies are responsible for one-third of all global emissions since 1965. All of them are
big fossil fuel companies, in many cases still, to this day, turning record profits. Collectively,
national governments spent $956 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2023, yeah,
subsidies! Why do these oil companies need subsidies with their profit margins?! Have
they suddenly rebranded as charities that we weren’t aware of, yet despite all of that,
somehow, we - we’re made to feel like it’s our fault. Make that make sense!
OK, granted passing multiple boundaries doesn’t guarantee immediate catastrophe,
but it heightens the likelihood of severe disruptions to the planet’s equilibrium.
We might not notice the cliff until we’re falling off it, in other words.
So another battle lost, and another win in the column of David Suzuki’s
statement for a game he does not want to be the victor in. So is that it? Did we lose?
Despite all of what we’ve just talked about,
the IPCC still doesn’t frame this as ‘game over’ - I don’t know, frankly,
if they're just naive or if they’re too scared to say it. Instead, they say limiting to
1.5 degrees with a small overshoot, or to well below 2 degrees, is still worth fighting for.
After Paris set 1.5 degrees as a goal, researchers scrambled to figure out how,
and if, it could be done. The emerging consensus was that meeting 1.5 degree Celsius likely
requires a temporary overshoot. In other words, we have to go over the 1.5 before
we bring it back down again, which surely is an admission of defeat from that agreement,
but there we go. The basic concept is that we’d have to use negative emissions (things like carbon
removal) to draw CO2 down and cool the planet back below 1.5 degrees by the end of the century.
This was a concept floated by renowned climate scientist Professor Piers Forster
at the University of Leeds. Forster’s article points to modelling scenarios where this happens.
He even provided a chart showing how a five-year “ratchet” mechanism of
increasingly ambitious pledges could flatten, or even slightly
reduce emissions in the 2020s and then drive them down in the second half of the century.
During the process, global temperature might overshoot 1.5 degrees by a few tenths of a
degree for several decades (maybe hitting 1.7 or 1.8 degrees mid-century), but then slowly
decline to 1.5 degrees by 2100. Now for this to work, every single tool must be used in parallel:
renewables, efficiency, electrification of transport, reforestation, carbon capture,
behaviour change, methane reduction, you name it, we have to do it. And that also
includes things that were once unthinkable at scale, things like direct air capture of CO2 or
burying carbon with biochar – because to pull the planet back from an overshoot, we likely
have to go to net negative (where we remove more carbon than we emit) later this century.
And perhaps we stand a chance. The IPCC has documented rapid advances in clean energy:
since 2010, the cost of solar power, wind power, and lithium batteries,
for example, has plummeted by as much as 85%, making a renewable energy transition
more attainable than ever. Many nations have strengthened policies,
and by 2022 over 170 countries included adaptation and mitigation in their plans.
The IPCC chair Hoesung Lee stated, “We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming”.
But the big question still remains, doesn’t it - just
because we’ve got the tools, will we use them? Because what I find particularly worrying about
all of this is where this blame for not meeting these targets is being placed. Because it’s not
on the biggest offenders, is it? It’s not on the big companies and industry - it’s on us,
it’s on individuals. The focus of many policies calls on regular people,
like me and you, to drive less, recycle more, minimise water use, eat less meat etc etc.
Even the term “carbon footprint” was marketed by BP, who are a petrol company, to shift the
rhetoric and put the onus on individuals to save energy instead of fossil fuel companies.
Given that only 27% of electricity is used domestically, this is a huge win for fossil
fuel company lobbyists. While I’m worrying about turning my heater down by one degree,
BP, in Q3 of 2025, reported a $2.2 billion profit.
But, there is still a reason to lower your carbon footprint. Not because turning your lights off or
cycling to work make a big difference in itself, but because the real impact
comes from the collective action of others doing the same, just by watching this video,
for example. It’s not about the carbon you save, but the cultural and political change you build.
Now this is hugely important. When millions of people start changing their habits,
it does two things. First of all, it builds personal awareness and a "climate-conscious"
culture, but secondly it creates social and political pressure. It signals to
politicians and corporations that voters and consumers demand "drastic change elsewhere".
If we keep that pressure on, then hopefully, it’s only a matter of time before we see a shift in
global policies and those most responsible for climate change are forced to stop
So, have we lost the battle against climate change?
If “winning” meant no damage, no overshoot and staying under 1.5 degree Celsius – then yeah,
David Suzuki was right, the battle is well and truly lost. Even the greatest scientific minds
seem to suggest the most likely way back is going over the target set. Suzuki’s despairing view that
“it is too late” also resonates when we count the missed opportunities over the last 30 years
and still, to this day, see emissions rising. We will endure a period of climate suffering,
that might have been averted with earlier action and that is just a fact,
and the stark reality is there is a 50% chance, according to researchers at Stanford,
that global warming will breach 2 degrees Celsius even if humanity meets our current
goals of rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by the 2050s.
With our current rate of warming, at around 0.27 degrees per decade; which is faster than
anything in the geological record by the way, 3.6 billion people will be left highly vulnerable.
Yes, a lot of change is already baked into the climate and ecological ecosystem, and yes a lot of
bad things are going to happen. But remember this also; the Earth is incredibly resilient, and guess
what, so are we, so are humans. You know I find myself watching the film ‘Don’t look up’ every
now and then and if you’ve seen that, or you’ve heard of it, take a moment as we come to the end
of the video to think about who you are in that film, and more importantly, who do you want to be?
Thank you for watching this video, and if you’ve got to this far in the video,
please let me know your thoughts.
You’re probably going to need some time to digest everything we’ve just talked about,
and that’s absolutely fair enough.
That’s what the comments are there for - we read them all!
Even the ones that think I am AI!
I’m here, I’m in real life, and on that point, obviously this video was a bit different.
I wanted to have this conversation with you like this.
If you like this kind of format, let us know. If you prefer just the voice, also fine.
Thank you so much for watching and we’ll see you in the next one!