Climate Change Briefing Podcast Hosted By Nick Breeze - ClimateGenn

In this episode, Nick Breeze speaks with Dr. Claudia Wieners, climate scientist at the University of Utrecht, to explore one of the most urgent and controversial questions in climate science: could Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) be used to prevent the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)?Dr. Wieners explains how AMOC is driven to collapse by two key forces — ocean warming and freshwater influx from increased rainfall and Greenland melt — and why SAI could theoretically counter both. She breaks down the role of the subpolar gyre and deep convection zones in sustaining AMOC, and why the timing of any SAI deployment is absolutely critical: wait too long, and you don't just fail to save AMOC — you could trigger a dangerous "double cooling" effect around the North Atlantic.The conversation also tackles the complex trade-offs that make SAI so politically charged: its potential impact on the Amazon rainforest, the risk of it being used as a pretext to slow down emissions reductions, and why many EU policymakers refuse to engage with the topic at all — even though, as Dr. Wieners argues, that refusal itself carries serious risks.Dr. Wieners outlines what a credible research programme would look like: better climate modelling, small-scale stratospheric measurements, and international monitoring infrastructure — and she issues a sobering warning that every year of delay increases the chance we've already crossed a critical threshold for AMOC without knowing it.🔔 Subscribe for more in-depth conversations on climate tipping points, geoengineering, and the science shaping our future.

In this ClimateGenn Episode I speak with former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government and Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, Sir David King. The interview was initiated in response to David being quoted in the Financial Times. The article reported on how people in the East of England being forced to evacuate their homes due to erosion from inundation of sea water. A problem that is forecast to see thousands of homes abandoned in the coming years.We cover a lot of topics in this conversation but they all illustrate the gargantuan size of problem we face and how badly we humans are responding to challenges. For all the talk of Artificial Intelligence, the glaring truth is: if we focussed our collective real intelligence on solving these problems, the horrors accelerating around us might be greatly reduced and even manageable. If only.In the next episode I am speaking with former UK Green Party Leader, Baroness Natalie Bennet about the mainstream media narrative emerging claiming that the UK Green Party have replaced environmental policy in order to appeal to the so-called far-left. Is this a radical shift for political opportunism, or, is there consistency with the Green manifesto of the past and how does it all hang together?There are more episodes scheduled with leading world experts on critical issues from collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica, to how climate is changing all around us, in realtime— I want to say a big thank you to everyone who commented on the last interview with Dr Jennifer Francis, sharing thoughts and examples of how extreme impacts are impacting your regions and communities.

In this end of year episode I am looking back on the main climate highlights of 2025 with Research Director at the Breakthrough National Centre For Climate Restoration, David Spratt. Links:David Spratt's own 2025 Climate Round-up:https://www.climatecodered.org/2025/12/climate-hot-takes-on-2025.html?m=1National Emergency Briefing Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@nebriefing/videosProf. Stefan Rahmstorf at ATLAS25- Our heating system is heading for shutdown, #AMOC – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKBTZ324COADr James Hansen at ATLAS25 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2abyXGvELIRafe Pomerance Discussing Overshoot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX6FzVd4kC0&t=596sVisit https://genn.cc for more information about the ClimateGenn podcast.Here we discuss some of the key aspects of 2025’s narrative on climate, concentrating on the longer-term themes that will be central to our 2026 climate agenda.We mention several conferences where key talks are presented online – I am putting links to these in the notes and on the genn.cc website. I have also included a clip of Professor Kevin Anderson as quoted by David. I do recommend that listeners check out the official recordings of the National Emergency Briefing.

“The world is as delicate and as complicated as a spider’s web, and like a spider’s web, if you touch one thread, you send shudders running through all the other threads that make up the web. But we’re not just touching the web, we’re tearing great holes in it . . .” Gerald Durrell, 'Catch me A Colobus' 1972.Important Links For This episode:https://durrell.org – find out more about the Durrell Wildlife Conservation TrustOrder 'Myself & other Animals' – https://amzn.to/3KtSePjVisit the main page for this interview on https://genn.ccSign The national Emergency Briefing Letter To Prime Minister Kier Starmer – https://www.nebriefing.org/The quote is from his earlier book, Catch Me A Colobus, published in 1972. Although it stayed with me, I didn’t comprehend it’s true depth and meaning until many years later, by which time Gerry was long gone and his nightmare visions of what we are doing to this planet are more advanced. For a bit of disclosure, I am related to Gerry Durrell via my grandmother, Margo Durrell, as satirised in his books, including My Family & Other Animals. This new posthumous autobiography provides a vivid flashback to the animal obsessed boy, riddled with curiosity and affection for the natural world. However, in this new book, Myself & Other Animals, a serious Gerry also emerges– reflective, at moments melancholy and deeply enraged by the destruction we humans are inflicting on the Earth. Despite his writing these texts in the 1980’s and early 90’s, his commentary is as fresh and relevant today as it would have been then. That’s not to say there is nothing to do – if anything there is far more to do. In this conversation with Lee, we traverse many topics including Gerry’s inner world, his enormous empathy for all living beings, including people, and of course, the fabulous work today of the Durrell Trust, that has worked with over 100 critically endangered species in captive breeding programmes and has rewilding projects going on all over the world, including a young project underway in Scotland.

In this Climate.Genn Episode I am speaking with Baroness Natalie Bennett about her book ‘Change Everything’. Natalie makes a fascinating case as to why the centre of politics can no longer deal with the critical challenges we collectively face, from the economic to the social and environmental – we are living in a moment of both energising and frightening changes!In Change Everything Natalie details her Green Philosophy to rethink, repair and rebuild society.

In this climategenn episode I am speaking with Professor Paul Behrens, British Academy Global Professor, at the Oxford Martin School, at the University of Oxford, UK. “If we continue on the way we’re going, we just have less and less resiliency in the system, less and less ability to roll with the punches of climate change.”Paul is the keynote speaker at the Sustainability In Drinks conference being held in London on the 21st October, where he will highlighting the incredibly fragile state of food production and supply. This fragility is being exacerbated by climate change.https://sustainabilityindrinks.com/“Some research suggests that food prices will increase between one and three percentage points, so an extra one to three percent per year by 2035, based on climate impacts. Now, the thing you've got to remember on the modelling on this is it's very hard, extremely hard, to model all the different impacts on the food system. In general, when I look at a model or an outcome of the model, I typically think that it's probably going to be a little bit worse than what you read.”Here we discuss the changes urgently required to help us navigate a more resilient pathway to the future. Aside from the Sustainability In Drinks conference on the 21st October, Paul is also part of a broader presentation being given at Westminster Hall in London on 27th November. This National Emergency Briefing on climate change will be given to MP’s, as well as other government officials and business leaders. Please check the link below:https://www.nebriefing.org/In the next episode I speak with author Andy Neather about his newly published book ROOTED IN CHANGE – The Stories Behind Sustainable Wine, coauthored with Jane Masters, Master of Wine. Available to order from the Academie du Vin Library.Thank you to all listeners commenters and members. There are many more episodes being recorded so please do subscribe to stay up to date.

"The car seems like freedom, and it might have been the freedom of the 20th century, but it certainly isn’t the freedom of the 21st century." Dame Hentrietta MooreIn this ClimateGenn episode I am speaking with Professor Dame Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay about their new book Road Kill – Unveiling the true cost of our toxic relationship with cars.Despite the motorcars association with freedom, it is become responsible for the degeneration of our town and city centres, enormous fossil fuel consumption, lung damage from air pollution, and a whole host of undesirable impacts. This book Roadkill is not just about diagnosing our car blindness and true costs of maintaining our addiction to them, it is also about rethinking the future, including urban design and local thinking. Henrietta and Arthur give us insights into how they are tackling this uber-toxic issue. More information on Roadkill and how to order the book can be found here.

In this Climate.Genn episode I am speaking with Erin Sikorsky, Director at The Center for Climate and Security and also the Security Director at the The International Military Council on Climate and Security. We are discussing issues that Erin covers in her new book, Climate Change on the Battlefield. With so much focus on national defence spending, while fires and floods are tearing through nations around the world, this is a timely subject. Here, Erin guides us in untangling the contradictions of investing in modern warfare, while simultaneously struggling to keep citizens safe from the extreme impacts of fire and floods that are worsening in intensity and frequency. In Spain in recent days there has been 199 wild fires counted with more across the northern hemisphere, whilst floods across countries like Pakistan and China, and across S America and beyond, are taking lives and costing billions in infrastructure damage.Yet, countries are being coerced into spending hundreds of billions on defence that excludes protecting against the raging climate. How we proceed from here has consequences and Erin, with her book ‘Climate Change on the Battlefield’ offers many essential insights.Order: https://amzn.to/4fAcfi8

In this ClimateGenn episode I speak with researcher, Rene van Westen. We discuss his recent paper looking at how the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) responds in three different carbon emissions scenarios. This work builds on his – and colleagues – previous research that looked at establishing the conditions for the AMOC to collapse.René et al's findings shed new light on the risks we are facing from this vital ocean circulation in the Atlantic that connects to the global climate system. The research paper can be accessed here: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025GL114611

In this episode Nick Breeze speaks with Dr Soumitra Das from the Healthy Climate Initiative. Soumitra sheds light on the life threatening challenges that face citizens in India and surrounding countries today. A major threat to life is when heat and humidity combine – known as wet bulb temperatures. This is when the body is unable to cool itself, leading to fatal heatstrokes within a few hours. Today 2% of India’s population are exposed to wet bulb extremes. In a country nearing 1.5 billion people, 2% equates to ~around 30 million people. On the current trajectory this figure is set to rise by midcentury to 70%, or, in real terms, in excess of 1 billion citizens at risk of heatstroke.The fossil fuel industry is the main culprit of this ongoing rise in temperatures, doing everything they can to slow the inevitable transition to clean renewable energy. The impact on peoples lives, infrastructure, biodiversity on land and in the oceans, is incalculable, as carbon emissions continue to rise. All of this is set against the needlessly worsening relations between humans around the world. New episodes include interviews with Professor Mark Maslin at UCL about the state of what the recent World Meteorological Organisation Climate Report tells us and his views on whether we should be looking into methods to cool the earth while we continue to try and reduce emissions. Nick also catch's up with Dr René van Westen at Utrecht University about his and his colleagues new AMOC research paper. The research tells us more indications of Europe’s dramatic climate future as the global mean temperature rises over 2ºC. This is inline with our current emissions scenarios that scientists have told us we should avoid at all costs. Currently our emissions trajectory is taking us much much higher and raises hard questions about the future we want to try and exist in.

Zack is well known on social media for his engaging graphics that tell the climate change story. He also played a pivotal role at the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Association, or NOAA, in advancing climate modelling and forecasting through innovative AI and machine learning approaches. His forced departure, along with hundreds of other scientists due to DOGE-led federal cuts, has significantly undermined NOAA’s research capacity. The loss not only stalls progress in critical climate science but also poses real risks to public safety and the global understanding of climate change. “The data is actually in a pretty fragile ecosystem... in some cases in their free time, just kind of turning a crank to update the data.”“The data is actually in a pretty fragile ecosystem... in some cases in their free time, just kind of turning a crank to update the data.”“The data is actually in a pretty fragile ecosystem... in some cases in their free time, just kind of turning a crank to update the data.”

IN this ClinateGenn episode I am speaking with Dr Mike MacCracken, a pioneering climate scientist whose research on atmospheric physics and global climate change has significantly advanced our understanding of human impacts on the climate system. His leadership roles at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the US Global Change Research Program established him as a key figure in climate science. As chief scientist for the Office of the US Global Change Research Program, he played a crucial role in advising multiple US administrations on climate science and policy.In this episode we explore counter and cross-over views to opposition to solar geoengineering. With great respect to experts on all sides of this discussion– Mike offers some compelling reasons as to why we cannot just denounce proposals to cool the planet.This is at a time when the UK government is significantly funding research into solar geoengineering. With such a split in views on this topic, I hope you take the time to consider what Mike says, and also what Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert says in a previous episode, in order to inform your own perspective.In the next episode I’ll be speaking with Alexander McDonald, a former head of US National Oceanic and atmospheric Agency, NOAA, who is the leading proponent behind SuperGrid’s for supplying the world with clean abundant electrical energy– without which, all our dreams of the future will fail.Thanks to all subscribers. Please do like and share and feedback in the comments. I try to respond to as much as I can.

Sustainability is often framed and presented as a purely environmental subject. The truth is that the economics of any given sustainability effort are underpinned by economic viability. It is the market place that determines whether products are desired and thus bought. If the producers get it wrong, there is no business, meaning job losses and environmental objectives are abandoned. Here we dive into the economic challenges that face Alentejo’s wine industry but also are mirrored in many regions around the world.Download the FREE ebook: https://sustentabilidade.vinhosdoalentejo.pt/uploads/ebook/into-the-heat.pdfFrancisco Mateus was the President of the Wines of Alentejo wine commission at the time of this interview. He stepped down in 2025. His broader picture view helps us to place the economic pillar of sustainability into a broader context.