This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter

If there’s one scientist in the world who has the big brain overview on the health of planet Earth, it has to be Professor Johan Rockström, the man behind the planetary boundaries framework - the idea that the health of the Earth can be assessed through nine categories, with vital signs, and possible tipping points, that we should aim to keep within.

Those boundaries are reminders that its health is not just about climate change and carbon emissions, but also biodiversity, ozone depletion, ocean acidification, phosphorous and nitrogen cycles, land change, freshwater use, “aerosol loading” and what is called “novel entities”, the plastics and other new substances that were not in existence before the arrival of humans.

This week, Rockström, head of the pioneering Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, visits Scotland where he will be presented with the Edinburgh medal by the Edinburgh Science Festival, and I took the opportunity to pick his brain about where the planet is at on those health signs.

A conversation with the professor is both awe-provoking and chilling, a deep plunge into the very pressing dangers of our human impact on earth, but also a journey into the marvels of the planet that supports us.

This newsletter interview should probably contain some kind of trigger warning given Rockstrom’s bleak frankness about where we are at, and our failures to pull back. It also contains a bit of Trump, and the shocking notion that we only have about five years of carbon budget still to burn.

But I urge you to read on, and take in what's been said by the man with his eye on the global life support monitor

For Rockström, the journey started back in 2006, following the publication, by the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme of a set of hockey stick graphs, which showed exponential rate changes in a whole range of environmental conditions and factors - not just carbon emissions.

“These iconic great acceleration curves,” he says, “showed that we are starting to hit the ceiling of the hardwired biophysical processes that regulates the functioning of the earth system. They were the evidence of the human pressures on planet Earth which had led, a few years earlier, Nobel Laureate, Paul Crutzen to propose that we may be in a completely new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.”

Not long after, in 2008, scientists, published research that for the first time mapped the climate tipping points in the Earth system. Also, in the same year, researchers working on ice core data published research which showed that in the context of previous cycles of ice age and interalacials, the most recent........

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