So Rupert let's start really at the highest level One of the things that struck me in one of your recent talks was you were talking about how we have all these clocks and we have the nuclear clock and we have clocks around climate and people say it's 5 to midnight et cetera And in one of your talks you said no it's actually 5 past midnight And I'd like you to talk a bit about that And maybe the sub question is how bad is it going to get and how fast I know you spend a lot of time talking to some of the best scientists who as you said are conservative often as scientists are in terms of not making headlines So from your perspective talk about that 5 past midnight and where we're at right now Yeah so the reason we think that it's so important to be clear that this kind of 5 to midnight one minute to midnight stuff is really passe is that until we actually admit how much trouble we're in we're never going to actually face up to that trouble and do enough about it We can't If we keep pretending oh it's kind of bad but you know we can still fix this then we're never actually going to face right into the jaws of the horror that we're in Because the truth is we're not going to fix this We can ameliorate it We can and must ameliorate it We can stop it from becoming completely apocalyptic But this is not the kind of thing you get to fix Or to put it another way quite a long time ago we might have been able to fix the climate problem But now it's too late for that We are in a predicament We are deep deep in trouble And the way we express that in the Climate Majority Project is by saying metaphorically speaking it's 5 past midnight We are in the age of consequences We are deep into the danger zone into terra incognita and that's gonna carry on getting worse for a long time to come even if folks like us manage to step up brilliantly and do a lot about it And I'm just gonna repeat I am absolutely not saying it's too late to do anything I'm absolutely not saying we are F-U-C-K-E-D'd What I am saying is we are in very very severe trouble and we need to admit that trouble You cannot get anywhere with something which is as I say worse than a problem if you don't actually face where you are if you don't face the hole that you're in And by the way this also goes for talking about the cause of the trouble So imagine for example 2 countries at war and in one of those countries people are saying oh look at these terrible impacts from this war
