We had the launch of our pamphlet, Tomorrow’s Climate: Beyond Peak Carbon at the Institution of Civil Engineers last night. It went well, good speakers (Lord Smith and our very own David Vigar) and good attendance.

Our friend David Wasdell was also there. Over recent months I have learned how important it is to listen to what he has to say. He said that Runaway Climate Change is likely to be the next new buzzword in climate conversations coming soon. If he is right we are in real trouble.

Runaway climate change means that we move an inherently complex system (the global climate) into a state where the feedback loops from many interdependent sub-systems all start to move and the direction and scale of that movement becomes self generating and altogether unpredictable. All of this happens irrespective of our attempts to exert some control by reducing GHGs or even removing CO2 from the atmosphere. David’s work suggests that we are getting close to the tipping points were Runaway becomes inevitable.

The implications are severe for the conditions we need to survive and thrive as a species. Floods, droughts, death, disease, food shortages, mass migrations, political instability, rise of extremism, war, are all in prospect as our global community struggles to cope with unprecedented shocks and extreme uncertainty.

It seems to me we need to look at this scenario carefully and not run away from it because the consequences of David being right are too awful to contemplate. As we say in our report, quoting Keynes, it is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. We contrast our usual approach to risk (in business, in insuring our homes) which is rooted in the possibility of things going wrong  and insuring against those risks with our approach to climate change risk which demands certainty before action. There is something paradoxically crazy about that. The greater the scale and scope of the danger we need to take a more cautious approach, not a less cautious one. The greater the scale and scope of the danger the more we need to confront it not run away from it.

If David is even roughly right then we have a total and utter global emergency on our hands right now, something that needs to be on everyone’s mind, in everyone’s actions and in every system for planning and mobilising that we have. And yet we hear nothing of this in the news. Yesterday ‘men on the moon’ was deemed more prominent than the launch of the Governments Low-Carbon Industrial Strategy and MORI continue to tell us that climate change is only a real concern to less that 10% of us.

All of this will change I am sure.

I just hope we have some time left when we have no choice but to run towards the problem in the face of the global challenge of runaway climate change.