Overshoot: Navigating a world beyond 1.5°C

On 19 July 2022, Britain hit 40°C for the first time in recorded history. Houses burned to the ground. London ran out of fire engines for the first time since the Blitz. Trains ground to a halt. A major London hospital lost all its patient records. Former BBC journalist David Shukman reveals what actually went wrong that day - and why, four years on, we still aren't ready.

"Wouldn't it be nice if the banks and insurers stopped facilitating the activities that are probably going to have such severe impacts on their industries within the next 30 years?"Actuary Louise Pryor explains how economic models systematically underestimate climate risk, what a sudden repricing of that risk would mean for financial markets, and how the concept of home insurance cou...

Professor Michael Obersteiner is one of the scientists who popularised carbon capture - now he's warning that we'll need to run it for 300 years at a cost of up to 10% of global GDP - and the world hasn't even begun to negotiate how to do it. This is what net negative actually means, and why it changes everything about how we think about climate action.

We sit down with investigative climate journalist Amy Westervelt to dissect how the framework of "Net Zero" has been weaponised by the fossil fuel industry to justify continued extraction and emissions. We dive into the empirical and thermodynamic realities of carbon capture and storage (CCS), exploring why scaling this technology faces rigid physical and geological boundaries - such as subterrane...

Lieutenant General Richard Nugee spent 36 years in the British Army. Now he's warning that climate change isn't a future problem. It's a national security crisis happening right now. From resource wars to food insecurity, collapsing supply chains to mass migration, Nugee explains why the military understood the climate threat long before politicians did - and why we're running out of time to act....

We sit down with world-renowned oceanographer and climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf to discuss the reality of the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) tipping point. After 35 years of studying this system, Stefan warns that what was once considered a "low probability, high impact" risk has escalated to a staggering 50/50 chance - or worse - of collapsing within our lifetim...

Overshoot affects everything - where do we start? In this bonus episode, a panel of leading climate thinkers and doers discuss the implications of 1.5C overshoot for law, geopolitics, activism, and more. Host Laurie Laybourn is joined by Arlo Brady (Freuds), Olivia Lazard (Berggruen Institute), Harj Narulla (Doughty Street Chambers), and Clover Hogan (Force of Nature). The conversation was recorde...

How can we be resilient to what comes next? One of Spain’s worst disasters was driven by climate change. But it ended up boosting climate deniers. This episode explores how to avoid this, what it really means to prepare for a world above 1.5°C, and why governments are clinging to fantasy preparation plans. And we hear the stories of how we can stay focused on navigating the growing climate storm. ...

What do the people in charge think is going to happen? Sue Owen was enjoying her retirement until she asked her pension fund what it thought catastrophic climate change would do to the economy. Not very much, according to them. This episode follows the campaigners and experts uncovering how pension funds, governments, and the other people in charge are using misleading economics that wildly undere...

Who’s going to clean up the mess? Dangerous amounts of carbon have been dumped in the atmosphere - so someone has to clean up the mess. Enter the dream - or delusion - of sucking carbon out of the sky. We trace how a backup plan for tackling climate change became plan A, why fossil fuel companies love it, and the staggering scale of the carbon sucking that must now be done - and whether it can eve...

If the world didn’t win, then has it lost?  The world is overshooting 1.5°C, a level of global heating long seen as the marker of climate safety. But does that mean we’re doomed? In this opening episode, we hear the extraordinary story of how the 1.5°C goal was set, and how it shapes the ways we think about climate change. We learn why some people are now turning to fatalism and what it might real...

The world missed its goal for tackling climate change. What happens next?  In 2015, the world agreed to limit global heating to 1.5°C. Ten years later, temperatures are spiralling beyond this and climate chaos is wreaking havoc across the globe.  In a major four-part series, host Laurie Laybourn explores how the world ended up here and uncovers the huge misconceptions and the high-tech fantasies t...