In this ClimateGenn episode I am discussing the forecast 2026 El Niño event with Dr Jennifer Francis from the Woodwell Climate Research Centre in the US. I don’t mind admitting my heart sank a little when I heard the news of the forthcoming el Niño. 

Visit: Genn.cc for more information about this podcast

The intensity of climate induced extremes that life on earth has been experiencing in recent years, coupled with the negligence and, in many cases, gross degenerate policymaking, has set us up to be woefully unprepared for the climate extremes we can expect later this year. Jennifer gives us the detail on this but always remember that this is a crisis that we are continuing to worsen by not cutting greenhouse gas emissions at the fastest rate possible. 

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.

In this ClimateGenn episode I am speaking with cofounder of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) and author of Paradise Lost, Paul Hoggett. Paul’s book was published in 2023 and is more relevant today than it was a couple of years ago, given the ongoing tragedies and violence we are all being subjected to and forced to respond to. 

"There's that kind of coldness, that cold indifference in the face of inhumanity and suffering is something I think has been a very powerful element in the way in which, for example, oil companies and oil company professionals and executives have functioned."

Paul Hoggett - Author of 'Paradise Lost' 2023

For more information visit: https://genn.cc/a-blank-and-pitiless-stare-confronting-the-inhuman/

Paul refers to the work of the poet WB Yeats, in particular, one poem, ‘The Second Coming’ written in 1919 in the aftermath of the first world war. Given its resonance in the context of our lives today, I have pasted below for those who have not read it:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Source Wikipedia

I definitely recommend Paul’s book, Pandora’s Box too if you want to explore the issues that we discuss in this episode. I have found it fascinating.

W.B. Yeats – The Second Coming

“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.

Activist Clare Farrell’s current framing of the climate crisis– on confronting political paralysis and urging radical collaboration between grassroots movements for a just, democratic response to rising global threats.Hansen In Helsinki (including Clare farrell's interview): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2abyXGvELI

Main website with transcript: https://genn.cc/clare-farrell-interview/This episode, with Extinction rebellion cofounder, Clare Farrell, was recorded in late October at the ATLAS25 conference in Helsinki, following Dr James Hansen’s keynote and their subsequent discussion. A link to that recording is in the notes.Hansen placed great emphasis on the role of aerosols in masking extra heating from global warming and how recent spikes in the earth’s temperature are linked to a reduction in aerosols over the oceans. He also stressed the need for more research on solar geoengineering citing evidence for how historic volcanic eruptions, not only cooled the planet by reflecting the suns energy back to space but also stimulated carbon sinks creating a greater uptake of carbon dioxide.Here Clare reflects Hansen’s findings as well as on a range of issues emphasising the need for humility in facing the enormity and complexity of the climate crisis. She also stressed the dangers of arrogance or over simplistic binary thinking.

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 journalist-and-author, Andy Neather, about his new book: Rooted In Change – The Stories Behind Sustainable Wine, co authored with Master of Wine, Jane Masters. The authors set out to document the challenges facing all aspects of wine production from the vineyard to the glass.

Order 'Rooted In Change'

Wine makes up an estimated 0.3% of agriculture globally and yet despite this tiny proportion, it is a beverage that humans have been making for thousands of years– serving sometimes with food, or as a ceremonial drink, or, in times more extreme, as a source of calories for French soldiers in the 1st World War trenches. 

Today vineyard around the world– from France to Australia or Chile to China– are at risk from worsening impacts of climate change – in that sense, this 0.3% of agriculture is as vulnerable as much of the other 99.7% of agriculture that underpins our global food supply. As Professor Paul Behrens said in the previous episode, 30-40% of inflation on food in the UK is due to climate change.

A decade ago in Champagne, a wine producer told me harvest dates shifted forward in the late 1980s due to warming. Polar researchers I'd interviewed earlier noted Arctic sea ice decline accelerated in the same decade. Both independent observations confirmed the same reality: our world is heating up.

This new book, Rooted In Change, gives us a glimpse of the global response of the wine industry to save it self while acting responsibly as stewards of both land and atmosphere.

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.

In this ClimateGenn episode I speak with Dr René van Westen about his recently published papers with colleagues that identify a physics based method for forecasting the very consequential AMOC Tipping Point. 

LINK TO RESEARCH PAPER: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025JC022651

If or when the AMOC – full name, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – collapses, it will lead to North western Europe plunging into freezing conditions with an estimated 20% less rainfall, and widespread societal disruption, especially to food production and energy needs.

In René’s own words: “There is this signal that this may be a potential scenario, which we can’t ignore because the impacts are quite, quite drastic. And therefore it is very worthwhile to know what we can expect as a society. And I hope in the end that I’m wrong also in the predictions, because we don’t want to deal with these kinds of changes because that’s in the end will be very difficult to adapt to.”

In the next episode I am speaking with Professor Paul Behrens, who is the British Academy Global Professor at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. Paul specialises in exploring the intersections of climate, energy, and food systems, suggesting one proven action that we can all take that could change our course from famine, to one of better health and more abundant and affordable food supply. 

Paul Behrens is also the keynote speaker at next weeks Sustainability In Drinks conference in London where I will also be chairing the high-level panel at the end of the session. If you are in London and work in any aspect of the Drinks Business then do consider coming along. Tickets are available from the SID website.

"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 Moore

In 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.