Source: Iain Dale
URL: http://www.iaindale.com/interviews
Date: 18/02/2013
Event: Attenborough on climate change: "we're already abandoning some areas of the country"
Attribution: Iain Dale, LBC
People:
[Excerpt.]
Iain Dale: Now I asked my Twitter followers last night what I should ask you, and as you can imagine, I had loads and loads of replies. One of the replies was from the Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, who wanted to ask you: "What one question would you ask our political leaders?"
Sir David Attenborough: Gosh. Um... Well, I must say this is going to be an unfashionable sort of response. I am grateful that the government of this country actually recognises the reality of global warm- climate change, which is facing the planet. It's awful that the most powerful country in the world, at the moment, doesn't recognise that, and the government is still arguing about it. So I'm very relieved that our government actually recognises and is doing something about it. Um... I don't know what else - the problems of climate change, of course, are huge. I mean - what are we going to do when the sea does rise? And we're already abandoning some areas of the country and saying "I'm sorry, we won't be able to save" - that's a very brave decision in itself, which I think is very bold of the people concerned.
Iain Dale: What do you say to climate change sceptics, who say "Well, actually this has happened over history, all the time." How do you explain the fact that it's different this time?
Sir David Attenborough: Oh, because if they wished to look at the evidence, and look at the charts, and look at the graphs of the changing contents of the atmosphere... We can plot how carbon dioxide has risen in the atmosphere over - going back over centuries, by analysing the gas that's trapped in bubbles in glaciers, and so on. So we know how the temperature - we know that a lot of these industrial gases have caused it. And sheer simple elementary physics will tell you that if that is the case, the temperature's bound to have risen. Well, it has risen, and more. And so of course there are variations and - small variations - but the range of the change now is beyond those variations, without any question. So that even if there were that, the fact of the matter that the increase of carbon in the atmosphere has increased in the way we know, will have un- ineluctably caused that rise in temperature.
Iain Dale: But of course there are lots of countries that - they may recognise the fact that there has been climate change but they're reluctant to do anything about it. China, India, emerging industrial countries - and if they won't do anything about it, what's the point of the British government doing anything?
Sir David Attenborough: Well, that's the road to disaster. I've actually just come back from China, and it isn't true to say that the Chinese haven't done anything about it. The Chinese have an enormous population - can you imagine, you know, they are... The population - 25 times the size of this country. It's 1.4 billion people. And one of the very brave things they do, and it's - a lot of people would find it intolerable, but they have brought down their population increase. And talking to people there - you know, this one child per family policy - talking to people, you can see that they realise that their land is overcrowded. They can't go on growing at the rate that they are growing - it will be catastrophic. And of course there are tragedies brought by the one family policy [sic] and many criticisms would say it's imposed with too great a severity. But nonetheless, they've done something about it.
Iain Dale: Can you see that happening here? I mean, we're approaching 70 million - we're quite a small island, aren't we?
Sir David Attenborough: Our rate of population growth is tiny, compared with what it is in Africa, and what it is in parts of Asia.