Stephen Eades – What is a sensible approach to solving climate change? – Sep 2025

This question has occupied my mind for awhile, as I am sure it has yours, but it became particularly loud and intrusive recently as I read two items. One is about new research that suggests the influence of the Atlantic’s Gulf Stream is changing more rapidly than previously thought, and the other is what Sir Jonathon Porritt says in his new book Love, Anger and Betrayal about how Just Stop Oil activists feel, emotionally, about it all.

If the Gulf Stream, known by scientists as the ‘Atlantic meridional overturning current’ (AMOC) ceases to work in the way it currently does, then all of Europe is in for a very profound shock. Presently this Atlantic current, AMOC, has a huge influence on weather systems around the planet. Not only does it bring warm water northwards from the equator and the tropics, making our climate wetter and warmer than it would otherwise be due to our position geographically in the northern hemisphere, but it also influences rainfall and weather in central Africa and the monsoons on the Indian subcontinent.

Therefore, should rising temperatures caused by global warming cause AMOC and the Gulf Stream to falter or even stop working in the way it has done over the centuries since the last Ice Age (20,000 years ago), then the changes, according to the new research, will be ‘catastrophic’. What that means is that Western Europe will not get warmer as is currently happening but, instead, we will be faced by ‘extreme winters and summer droughts’, with temperatures falling by between 5° to 15°C.

That’s scary. This is exactly what Just Stop Oil activists fear: all life as we know it stops, and we become extinct. How do they feel about this impending catastrophe? Jonathon Porritt summarises their thinking as finding it impossible to not be frightened by what the future holds as greenhouse emissions rise relentlessly every year and climate disasters multiply everywhere; and yet, they believe that the catastrophe can still be avoided, or at least reduced, if we all change what we are doing. And that is what their activism is about – persuading us to change and, through challenging us, they face their fear and that gives them reason to hope.

They are brave people. They are confronting their fear, trying to turn it into something positive because all around them they see people who are just turning-off, or trying to swallow arguments about the science that are blatantly untrue. Yet, although their response may be brave and challenging, is it adequate?

Adequate means not just trying to slow down or, even better, halt global warming and climate change. It means, reversing it. In other words, bringing the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere back to where they were before all this began, see the graph illustrating this. This process is known as drawdowndraw down The process by which tides and wave motion remove (draw down) material from a beach and pull it out to sea. A sandy beach experiencing draw down is thus denuded of its sand. The process can be natural (i.e. winter storms) or can be artificially caused (e.g. aggregate dredging, whereby the dredging of sand and gravel offshore causes sand to be drawn down from the beach in order to replace the material which has been dredged).. It is all about extracting greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and then locking them away in the sea and soil.

The levels of CO2 that are in the atmosphere now are going to be there for another 200 years or more before natural chemical processes remove them. In other words, the CO2 in the atmosphere now is locked into our future lives, and that means that climate change and global warming has become permanent. The only way to break out of this ‘lock’ is to start drawdown – to set in motion policies and actions that will remove the CO2 from the atmosphere. Then, instead of CO2 levels being at 425 parts per million, they start to reduce to 400 ppm, then 350 and so on until we get back to normal at around 250 parts per million.

One way to do this is to restore the forests of the world and to engage in widespread re-wilding. This can be done not just on land. It can also be done in our seas by restoring large areas of seaweed and sea grass in the coastal waters around the world, see here and here. Another way is to lock up carbon once again in our soils, by converting agriculture away from the chemical methods based on fossil fuels (chemical pesticides and artificial fertilisers) to organic methods that use natural ways of generating soil fertility, see here and here. If you are intrigued by the possibilities, see Healthy Soils Australia and its short video and also the science of carbon storage in soil explained, very simply, by Walter Jehne.

The way to beat global warming is to think positively, and to create change that works in the opposite direction from what is happening at present. This way, we do not just protest because of our fear of what is coming, but we devise solutions and actually build a different world.

That is a world that does not cause us despair, but is one that we love and care for, and reflects our intelligence rather than our stupidity. It is a future world that everyone can celebrate and, if we do follow this course and its solutions, the natural world will thank us too.