Hello, everyone, and welcome to 100 Climate Conversations. I’d like to acknowledge that we’re meeting on the Traditional Lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and future. Today is number 99 of 100 conversations happening here every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians who are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We’re recording live here today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum. Before it was home to the museum it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899 it supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system right up until the 1960s. So, it’s fitting that in this Powerhouse Museum we shift our focus forward to the solutions to climate. My name is Marian Wilkinson and I’ve written and broadcast many stories about climate change. My latest book, The Carbon Club, describes the fraught political battles over our climate policy. Chris Turney is Pro Vice-Chancellor of Research at the University of Technology Sydney and a professor of Earth Systems Science. As an academic, he partners with governments, business, NGOs and communities to explore the solutions to environmental challenges. He’s a scientific advisor to the New Zealand based clean tech company CarbonScape, and he’s also spent many years researching and writing about Antarctica, making several trips to the frozen continent to study the stability of the ice sheets and their future impact on sea level rise. Last year he was appointed to the board of the New South Wales government’s Environment Protection Authority. So, please join me in welcoming Chris Turney to the Powerhouse. Chris, your climate research has taken you from the polar ice caps to the tropics. And I wondered, as a kid, was there a part of you that just wanted to be out in the field discovering things rather than stuck in the classroom?

Yeah, I think so Marian, I was completely indulged as a child. My dad was a forester by training so we travelled all across the UK, living in really remote places. It was very much sustainable living, growing our own food a lot of the time and living in those places where you could just go off and explore. Even as a child, my parents bought me a weather station. I mean, who does that, honestly? So, I was completely nerdy about the environment, but at the same time just allowed to explore over moorlands and forests. It was just an incredible childhood, but it just captured the imagination for me and allowed me to get a sense of how the world worked and fall in love with nature.

You were moving between the UK and the Antipodes – New Zealand, Wollongong, Canberra – but you finally settled in Sydney at UNSW, the University of New South Wales for a while. What led you to finally pick Sydney?

I love this part of the world Marian. We fell in love with it. I think the first time when I came over, one of my first post-docs was at the Australian National University in Canberra and our daughter was less than one year old and we drove up to the tropics to work up there. It was a four-day drive. It just blew my mind that you could travel for four days and not fall off the edge. There’s no way you could do that in the UK. So, the Australian Research Council have this amazing thing called the Laureate Fellowship Scheme. I was so, so lucky [to be awarded the fellowship] and I wanted to look at an element of a climate system called tipping points. The Laureate scheme allowed you to basically set up a research team to actually look at the tipping points of these elements of the climate system. I mean, they [also] work in economic, social theory, a whole load of different ideas, but Malcolm Gladwell had a book by the title. The idea or the principle is that basically you can only push a system so far, and then it goes into a completely different state. No matter how much you try to step back, if you’ve gone over a cliff, there’s no way back. And so, it moves into this other condition. [For] the climate system, that’s huge, right? Because one of the challenges we’ve got when we try and understand how the planet will respond to carbon pollution is that it’s based on the understanding of what we’re seeing now, particularly from the satellite era – so from the late 70s. Otherwise, from the observations that people have made, you know, going out morning, noon and night, taking weather records, which maybe get you back 100–150 years, but that’s nothing compared to where we’re going. We’re going off the map with the amount of carbon pollution, what a planet system can do. When you go further back in time, you could start seeing these massive tipping points. You have a collapse of ice sheets, ocean circulation changes just stopping, which we’ve not seen in the last 150 years or so. It’s only by taking that longer perspective, you realise how sensitive the climate system is to forcing and changes. And so, I wanted to get a better handle on that and [I had] the amazing team at the University of New South Wales, gorgeous part of a world. I had the resources and the team that I could actually just run with it without dealing with a lot of the other administration and other things academics just love. As a result, I had an amazing time at the university.

We often talk about the tipping points idea in climate, and it’s highly controversial, as you know, within the scientific community. But I’m wondering, in all your years of looking at the tipping points, do you think we are closer to seeing them now than even, say, ten years ago?

The changes we’re seeing now Marian, are just truly horrifying. I really wrestle with this. I think I’m convinced pretty much everyone you’ve interviewed probably goes through the same thing. Sometimes I wake up optimistic, other times I just cry. The changes we’re seeing, particularly at the moment, are extraordinary. When I was studying climate change when I started at the University of East Anglia, it was happening but even that was controversial. Have we actually detected that signal? James Hansen called it in [19]88, but it was still slightly like, not quite sure, the whole community. Progressively everything seems to have got faster and faster. We’re recording this now in October 2023 and they just dropped the results a few days ago, a few hours ago, saying that October again is the warmest October on record – ever. And that’s the fifth successive month warmer than ever. [It’s] effectively looking quite likely that we’re going to hit an average of 1.5 degrees for this year, 2023. Oh, my gosh. You know, previously it was 1.2. We’ve suddenly just jumped massively. That apparent acceleration in temperature and warming is really, really, really worrying. And when you then look at things like the climate agreement of Paris, which says that we need to restrict global average temperatures to 2 degrees, which doesn’t sound much but it’s a huge amount because that’s an average temperature, and ideally 1.5. And that means several years of 1.5. You know, a few years ago it was, ‘maybe some time in the next 10, 20 years we might hit that’. And then last year and early this year, it was like, ‘we might hit this in the next 5 years’ and now we’re talking about, ‘we could hit it this year’. That 1.5 isn’t a number that’s just been plucked out of the air. It’s a limit on where some of those tipping points might happen. At 1.5 [degrees] is where we might start seeing things tip. And just last month, a paper came out in Nature looking at the West Antarctic ice sheet as one example. That’s just one example where it looks like the equivalent of 4 metres of global sea level rise, trapped as water in the ice, is almost certainly gone. When it will go, we don’t know. But that’s effectively gone beyond the threshold where we can hold that ice back. It’s going to go at some point now. That’s extraordinary. So, yes, I think we’re very close to the point at which, sadly, now some of these things are locked in. I think that’s the sobering thing, which we often forget about. It’s not this lovely response where we just stop emitting carbon and we pull straight back. Ninety per cent of the heat that gets trapped in the atmosphere (that is caused by humans), gets trapped in the atmosphere, but then goes into the ocean. And there’s four Hiroshima bombs of energy being trapped each second as a result of these carbon emissions. So, you’ve got this huge amount of energy that’s building up in the planet, which is still playing out. Wow, what do we do about that? That’s an extraordinary challenge for us.

I want to take you back to some of your earlier work, because one of the things I think that comes through in your scientific talks and your papers is this understanding of dating and why this is so important when we look at climate research. And one of your early books was Bones, Rocks and Stars that explored the science of time, the science of dating. Why was that so important to you and when did you really hook into this idea about the science of time?

This is one of those aspects when you’ve got gorgeous observations scientists have taken, you’ve got everything beautifully written out in notebooks and everything is timed beautifully. Nature does the same. It has these wonderful weather stations. You’ve got trees, you’ve got ice collecting on the ice sheets. It’s annual snowfall. You’ve got these beautiful layers forming in lakes. These are nature’s weather stations and they’re very responsive to weather. We’ve known since Leonardo da Vinci that a tree growing under perfect weather conditions puts on a nice, fat, juicy ring. And then if it’s a really bad year, there’s a very thin sliver or no ring at all. We’ve all done that, we’ve walked along, we’ve seen a fallen tree, and we try to count the number of rings. So, it’s a beautiful record. Trees are a lovely example because you can get absolute dating year by year and that can go back thousands and thousands of years. Other things, like when you drill an ice core that’s 3 kilometres above sea level and it’s -40 degrees and you’re going down through the ice, going down kilometres or so, and ice gets more and more compressed, and the layers are less and less clear. And depending on whether the ice is drifting, of course, whether the snow is drifting, whether you’ve actually got year by year is just not so certain. So, when you start looking at how the climate system responds, you’ve got to be aware of those uncertainties. Because when we’re talking about what’s driving a climate system, how quickly do ice sheets respond or the coral reefs respond to forces? You’ve got to know, is it bang on the same time? Is it a five or ten year lag? That’s huge for us because that’s what we need [when] dealing with these major issues. Moving forward, if things are going to respond really quickly, it’s not in the instrumental record, it’s back in the past. So, I found that those examples where you can look in the past and actually explain to people how it was done … it just gave you insight. I used to teach a course and it was a really dry course. I hope the person who originally taught it is not listening to this, but it’s called quaternary geochronology. It was dull as dishwater and as a young lecturer, I inherited this course with all these notes and lots of equations, much of which I didn’t really understand. I had to teach it the students. They were bored. I was bored. Everyone was bored. What are we doing here? After about week 3 or 4, I noticed that when you were teaching these courses and you were giving these lectures, everyone woke up, including myself, when you actually got to the example. And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ I thought, ‘I’ll flip it. I’ll start with a question and then I’ll come back to how do we answer it?’ So in there, there was dating ice cores, there was the Turin Shroud (you know, a famous forgery), dating volcanic eruptions [such as] Santorini. You just have these wonderful stories, the end of the dinosaurs and other things – King Arthur is a bit of a favourite of mine as well. I started with Monty Python and the Holy Grail for those of us old enough to remember and then just used those as examples. But flipping it – I realised again the importance of stories because it’s by telling a story that you share knowledge and engage. I wasn’t expecting them to become world leading quaternary geochronologists, that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was to explore the beauty of the science and get people to think critically. But they knew that there were these issues, and they could actually interrogate these ideas when people talked about these things. That was all my purpose. But if you got away with one element of that and they linked it to a story, job done, and it really informed me with how I actually communicate science – that actually, stories are the way to do it.

This research also, fascinatingly, really dovetailed into your other research on tipping points and with your fascination with Antarctica. So, you took your first research trip to Antarctica was around 2010?

Yes, that’s right. Yes.

And that obviously set you up for looking at tipping points, but also drew on your work about this idea of the science of time. But I’m wondering, why Antarctica? Why were you so fascinated with Antarctica?

Look I won’t lie to you, I think originally the stories were ripping yarns. One of my great heroes is still Sir Ernest Shackleton. For those people who don’t know, he was amazing, he led multiple expeditions down, never lost a man. Was involved in the most extraordinary tales of heroism. If people are not familiar with when they were trapped in the Weddell Sea in the Endurance – the ship actually sank, I mean, it was 18 months. You couldn’t make the movie up, it sounds so fake. So, I grew up with these ripping yarns. And then when the opportunity came to go down there, we went with a private company called Antarctic Logistics Expeditions. Antarctica for me, I mean, I was born in 1973, and there was a pioneering paper that was published in 1976 in Nature by a guy called John Mercer. He said then, in 1976, [if there’s] a doubling of carbon dioxide, watch out for West Antarctic ice sheet. The reason for that was the fact that the Antarctic’s got this weird sort of thing of east and west. Basically, it’s just where the Greenwich Mean Time comes down from the Antarctic, and you’ve got the big ear, which is East Antarctic, you’ve got the West Antarctic, which is the other bit, and then you’ve got the peninsula of a finger that points up to South America. [Mercer] pointed out that – even back in the 70s, he could tell, which is amazing, really, and it’s all been confirmed since – that most of that ice sheet is sitting on the seabed. Unlike the East Antarctic, there’s elements of that which actually are still below the seabed and they’re a lot thicker, but most of West Antarctica is actually sitting on the seabed. It’s held back in place by some of these things called ice shelves, which are basically like buttresses of ice holding it in place. But effectively, if you warm the oceans and it gets under the ice sheet, the whole thing slips into the ocean. That’s it ultimately, and you lose that ice sheet. He pointed out that in the past, so when periods were naturally warmer, the ice fell in the oceans. And he warned that, you know, as you start losing ice shelves down the peninsula, the finger of Antarctica, watch out for West Antarctic. That’s all happening now. He worked that out in 1976. So, we knew from the last time the world was warm about 120–130 thousand years ago, which sounds an insane amount of time for most people, but that was the last period the world was naturally warmer. The polar regions, we know were about two degrees warmer than today, and sea levels were 6, [even] 9 metres higher than they are. The implication is it must have been Antarctica, and the West Antarctic must have gone, but no one could prove that. So, we wanted to go down to this test that idea, had the West Antarctic ice sheet actually largely disappeared when it was naturally warmer?

You went back then ten years later in 2020 and did a research paper out of that. And you’ve been down more recently, I think a year ago. What’s your current thinking about the stability of the West Antarctic ice sheet and the implications for sea level rise now?

Yeah. So we went back to the actual site that Michael Palin flew into, which was a lovely thing, going back to my teenage years. It’s a place called Patriot Hills and it’s only 50 km from what we call the grounding line. That’s the point at which the ice disconnects from the seabed and rises up. So, it’s super close to the edge of the ice sheet. It’s in this weird spot that’s basically buttressed by all the ice sheets around it. Effectively no ice flows into it and it goes up and down the ice in that Horseshoe Valley depending on how much ice there is. We found that basically during this last period when the world was actually a wee bit warmer, up to 2 degrees, most of the ice disappeared. And so, we could show that under a sort of Paris agreement of a two-degree warmer world, the Western Antarctic ice sheet did indeed go. Probably very early on in the warming, we could actually show that it was very early. So, that was what we published and were able to confirm that idea that John Mercer had done back in 1976. We went back last November, in 2022. We were going down to look at whether we could do far more detail – to see if there were any early warning signals in the ice that would give us a heads up that this is going to happen again now. We were flying down, this is in late November last year. Now November is spring in the southern hemisphere, and it’s when the sun has just started rising above the horizon in that part of the world. So, there shouldn’t be much warmth or energy in the system. Most of what you’d expect as you fly down the peninsula, because we’re flying from South America down, is that most of the Southern Ocean should be covered in sea ice right up to the peninsula. What we saw was just horrendous. It was open water already, that early in the season. It was like a bad Hollywood movie because that shouldn’t be happening. That was so off the scale of what has ever been recorded before. It looked beautiful but it was an environmental disaster. Since then, the rest of the Antarctic continent, the sea ice surrounding the ice sheet has retreated and not really recovered nearly to the extent it should do normally. What you’re faced with is this idea that … oh my god, so you’ve suddenly changed from [Antarctica being] like an air conditioning unit of a planet where the heat is being reflected off the sea ice and keeping things cool to suddenly ramping up a warming because now you’ve changed the reflectivity of the surface. You’ve got open water, it’s dark, you’re absorbing that heat, the ocean’s warmer, the event potentially warming and melting more of the ice sheets. The whole thing’s like a bad news story, you know, as everything’s amplifying and speeding up. That was just horrendous.

Now, a lot of scientists have argued in the past, I think including scientists who’ve worked for the UN’s IPCC, that this problem in the West Antarctic could be offset by the East Antarctic still having a buildup of snow and ice. Is that still the case or is that idea now sort of really being questioned?

That was something, Marian, that for a while there was this hope that things might balance out. The latest work from NASA shows there has been some modest increases in snowfall in the East Antarctic but has been more than outshone by the amount of melting going on the West Antarctic. And of course, if it accelerates even farther West Antarctic is not going to be able to offset that. But the question is when? You’ve got 4 metres of global sea level rise trapped in the ice sheet and depending on … because of the gravity and the way that water moves around the planet, some places that could be even higher. So, the east coast of the US will probably be 5 metres. I mean, you’re looking at Bangkok, Manila, London, New Orleans. These places which are super vulnerable already, just really struggling with that. And how do you do that? Because half the world lives in cities and many of us are near the coasts. And so, we’ve got an enormous challenge with how we actually manage that.

Well, maybe this is the right place to move on to the fact that you’re moving from research about climate change and its impact to solutions. So, you’re now in a new role at the University of Technology, Sydney, and you’re focusing on practical solutions. But you actually started on that journey quite some years ago when you became an adviser and I think founder of a little New Zealand start-up called CarbonScape. Tell us about that.

That was a that was a bonkers experience as a teenager. So, back in the 80s, those of us who remember when microwaves turned up in their homes. Many of us didn’t understand how they worked. My dad still argues with me about who said what to whom. Anyway, the idea was that mum and dad were actually going out for dinner, which was one of the rare instances when they had some money. They left me at home and said, ‘Oh cook a potato’. I understood dad told me, ‘Put it in for 20 minutes’, which is an awfully long time in the microwave.

Not good in the microwave.

Too long in the microwave. And then turn it over and give it another 20. What could go wrong? So, a minute afterwards, the fire alarm was going off, came into the kitchen, smoke is billowing out of the microwave. I grabbed some tea towels and I get the plate and I throw it out the door, then I just remember it smashing. The potato, what was left of it, just broke into lots of little chunks of basically coal, glowing embers. It was just – I charcoaled it. It was just an awful experience. Mum and Dad were incredibly good about it, I think, because Dad was embarrassed actually. Anyway, enough of that. So, anyway, I had that experience and then years later, dad had been doing all this pioneering work in sustainability. Dad was driving all this, you know, net-zero companies, producing wine that was zero carbon. This was amazing, this was the late 90s, early noughties. It was incredible stuff. We were talking a lot more about this sort of space. We were chatting about these ideas where you could actually do something, where you could develop a technology where maybe you could fix carbon and you could do some good for the planet. We were chatting about ideas. Initally I thought, maybe we could just charcoal something. At first I was trying all these different ideas, it just wasn’t working. Then suddenly sparked this awful experience with the microwave. I said to dad, look, maybe that would work. So, I bought one and used it out in the backyard. We realised actually this was a really good way of fixing carbon and it basically led to the idea of CarbonScape. And so we set CarbonScape up originally as a way of fixing carbon. But it has gone on to this amazing thing because what we ealized was that actually you have to go where the market goes. The market went for a number of different things and basically, we’ve landed on creating graphite for lithium-ion batteries. For those people not familiar with it, graphite is either mined, so you have fossil graphite effectively, or it’s made from petroleum, which is what we call synthetic graphite – [with] really nasty carbon emissions as a result of that. For those people not familiar with lithium-ion batteries, [graphite] can make up a third to a half of the weight of a lithium-ion battery. So, graphite is actually a major part of lithium-ion batteries and most of which comes from China. So, the market shifted towards the demand for graphite and could you actually create something that’s more sustainable? So, the team there, just amazing people, brilliant engineers, scientists, and they’ve just taken it to a level up. As a result, you can actually make what we call bio-graphite from forestry waste, and you can make it locally. It’s actually a net zero – negative carbon actually – because you fix more carbon in the process by creating it and it’s locally produced. So, it was just an amazing experience. But one of the things that really taught me was that … I learned so much from that. We put a lot of time, effort, money into that. I worked with a lot of other people outside the university, and working with industry, and learning how those ideas work and how you translate science and ideas, and getting out there. [CarbonScape have] done their big multi-million dollar raise and they’re setting up production now in North America, in Europe, and it feels really good that we’re actually doing something positive that’s going to hopefully make a difference. But there’s lots of these ideas out there, lots and lots of them, and universities and people have got their own ‘nearly burning a house down’ experiences. You know, who knows? Hopefully someone’s listened to this and thinks, ‘Oh, that could be applied in a different way.’ If you’ve got those embarrassing moments, maybe there’s another way you can learn from it.

Well, in the position you’re now in at UTS, you can do some of this. What excites you now and what do you think you will be able to achieve in this new role where you are trying to build these bridges between the innovators, business, the university and the community?

I took this role because after 25 years in research, I still love research [but] I just saw this as the challenge of our generation – and some. So, working at a university which prides itself on linking to industry and government and communities is terrifically important if you’re going to make this happen. But I think it’s true of all universities, and I think the challenge is how do we create that environment where we can actually engage? You see that at multiple levels. So, we have research and development where we’ve got amazing stuff we’re actually looking to deploy, but it’s also the students coming through. You know, half the students who come to UTS want to run their own start-up or be involved in a start-up. We have a huge start-up community of undergraduates, increasingly PhDs. They’re going out there learning. Sometimes they do really, really well. We can upskill people who are my age and older who want to come and learn new skills, which we need to in this new net zero world where we need lots of skills. We just haven’t got the skill base at the moment, this workforce out there. But there’s also the research and development side of things where we want to get those ideas out there. What’s exciting me at the moment? There’s so many different aspects. But I think one thing at the moment is we’re seeing … we talk about cutting emissions but at the end of the day we’re still putting more carbon into the atmosphere. Carbon pollution is driving this mess that we’re in and we’re not going to be at net zero well, ideally by 2050. But at the moment that’s really looking like a massive challenge, and we’ve already got climate change happening. So, I think one excitement for me is, not only deploying all these amazing technologies to get us down fast, [but] how do we draw that carbon down? UTS is doing a lot of that sort of technology development. I’m part of what’s called the Climate Recovery Institute as well as an advisor on that. The idea is, actually all these billions of tonnes of carbon that’s in the atmosphere already, this pollution, we need to draw that down. That’s an entirely new market and the UN is saying even if we get to net zero, [there’s] 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide we need to trap each year just to get to net zero. Then we’ve got all the extra carbon that’s been accumulating all this time. So, we need to draw that down really fast and we’re not going to get that by even just one university. It’s a global effort. But one of the things that we’re doing at UTS is something called the Green Genie, which is just this gorgeous idea. Using microalgae, and for those people who are just like, ‘it’s green water’, microalgae can fix carbon 40 times more efficiently, effectively than trees. And so, the Green Genie, if you come to the University of Technology Sydney there’s this 20-foot container and inside that is a series of tubes filled with microalgae where they’re pumping carbon dioxide in, the microalgae are fixing that and growing. Then you can use that algae to either feed cattle, get their carbon emissions down, their methane emissions down – which is another carbon pollution source. You can make plastics, building materials, to fix the carbon and you can deploy that anywhere around the world. That’s amazing. That’s just amazing. And lots of universities and ideas are out there. So, I think universities, we’ve got this opportunity where we can really drive change. But the scale is enormous. I have a worry that the enormity of what we face hasn’t yet actually sunk in. I mean, it’s a war-like mobilisation of resources. We’re just starting to wake up. I think when we hit 1.5, if we are going to hit 1.5. We had the fires in 2019–2020 here in Australia, tragic northern hemisphere heatwaves and fires, and flooding. This year’s broken all records. It’s bonkers. And so, I think that’s focusing minds, the deployment of renewables is making a huge difference. But there’s these opportunities to create new markets, new skills, new jobs. It’s not a case of people doing without. It’s a case of us using the amazing technologies we have which we know we can use. And just getting there as quickly as possible.

Well, on that point, of course, the other side of that is stopping putting carbon pollution in the atmosphere. There has been a lot of criticism that Australia has not weaned itself off fossil fuels and – or not fast enough – and that it’s continuing to encourage fossil fuel development, particularly in the gas industry. But this is also happening in the US, in a lot of other countries as well. I know you’ve been really interested in this idea of climate litigation. The big case in America where the Children’s Trust is taking a case on behalf of American youth against the government there because of its failure, the government failure, to deal with climate change and growing emissions. Well, you, of course, have just recently been appointed to the New South Wales Board of the Environment Protection Authority. Do you think there is an avenue there where you can argue persuasively that climate change and climate pollution and its impact on the environment can be used further in the work that the EPA here does in prosecuting environmental cases?

The Environment Protection Authority here in New South Wales is amazing, they are an incredible group. I’m incredibly fortunate to be on the board. That’s a fascinating example in its own right. So, we’ve got the most forward looking … as a state, we have the most forward-looking policies now. We have a climate change action plan. Carbon dioxide levels are going down. But interestingly, the actual policy and driving that forward was actually as a result of a court action itself. So, the EPA, for those people not familiar, was set up in 1991. So, back when Brundtland Report, the Rio Summit. The thing that I’ve always loved about the EPA is written into our legislation – it’s not just to protect, it’s also to restore and actually enhance the environment. We want a beautiful state, and that’s what we’re legislating to do. So, we’ve got really wide-ranging powers. It’s a statutory authority, but it’s independent. But after the tragedy of the 2019–2020 fires here in Australia, the Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action took the EPA to court, and we were effectively instructed to come up with a policy to actually deliver on climate change. So, this has led to the Climate Change Action Plan. And effectively the idea is to get to net zero by 2050, halve the emissions by 2030, which is not that far away. A 70% reduction by 2035, that’s what we’re aiming for. This first phase has been released, there was public consultation. The important thing with these, Marian, is you can’t just say, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’ You’ve got to take the community with you on whatever you’re doing. You’ve got to engage at every level. We’ve got to take everyone with us. So, this is basically flagged to industry and the state – this is happening. In this first stage, it’s basically providing the support and the help to tell industry, support industry. All this informs how we’re going to get there. And then if required, we’ll then actually have to start issuing limits as well moving forward. But that’s the amazing plan that we’re doing and we’re ahead of everyone else in in Australia. So, it’s an absolute privilege to be on the board and actually help support that amazing endeavour.

You’re a science teacher, a science researcher and a science communicator about climate change. What do you tell your own children? How do you tell your own children to be resilient in the face of our future?

That’s such a difficult one. It really is. They’ve seen me go from the highs and lows, and that doesn’t help anyone. We talk a lot about what we can do as a family. You know, the kids, I’m incredibly proud of Cara and Robert. They are in their 20s now. So, they are full adults living their own lives. They’ve got a strong sense of sustainability and low impact in their lives, which is amazing. But we talk about resilience. They’re pretty strong people, to be honest, stronger than I am. They get that from their mum. So, that does help a lot. But it’s being there and being able to talk. It’s not something we talk about a lot, to be honest. I sometimes get banned from talking about it, for good reason. But at the same time, we’re very honest with one another about what we’re doing. Everyone has different conversations privately within their family about how they manage it. It’s really tough. It’s tough. And I don’t think there’s a manual for it, there’s no way you just – we’re all learning, and I think that’s the really important sense of this. There’s no right or wrong way for it.

Well, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you, Chris Turney. And I’d like to ask you all to please join me in thanking Chris with a round of applause.

Thank you.

to follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.