Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: N/A
Date: 25/03/2013
Event: Beddington on climate change: "what we're going to experience is greater and greater variability"
Attribution: BBC Radio 4
People:
John Humphrys: It's a big job being the government's Chief Scientific Officer - you've got to be an expert on everything, from global warming to homoeopathy, and it helps to be a prophet as well. Sir John Boddington has been doing the - Beddington's been doing the job for five years and he's about to step down, and he's with me. Good morning.
Sir John Beddington: Good morning.
John Humphrys: You've got the beard of a prophet - I don't know whether you consider yourself as a prophet?
Sir John Beddington: No, I think the beard is just one of the things I've had for 45 years, and shows a degree of conservatism, not wanting to change it when I went into the civil service. I think it's important to look to the future, and I think some of the things that I've been trying to bring to governments' attention, and more widely, are some of the things that really are serious, and I think are not talked about enough. And I think there's three things that we really need to appreciate about the relatively near future that is going to be inevitable. The first one is population - the world's going to have another billion people in the next 12 years.
John Humphrys: And whether we can feed them...
Sir John Beddington: Whether we can feed them, whether we can provide enough water, whether we can provide enough energy, and where they live. So that's the first thing. The second thing that's inevitable is that largely they will move - that increase in population will be in cities. And that presents both opportunities and real challenges. And the third one is climate change, in which, basically, the delays in the climate system mean that what is the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now will determine climate - and therefore weather - for the next 25 years. So what it actually means for now -
John Humphrys: Even if we don't do anything else -
Sir John Beddington: If we do nothing else whatsoever. And so the climate, and the weather that we're actually experiencing now, comes from greenhouse gases that were in the upper atmosphere 25 years ago.
John Humphrys: To which a lot of people shivering out there, caught up in snowdrifts this morning will be saying "Bring it on - let's have some more global warming!"
Sir John Beddington: Well, I think -
John Humphrys: I know it's a frivolous approach, but nonetheless that's the reality, isn't it? I mean, people will look at the temperature and say "We've had a rotten few years, been cold as sin, and you know..."
Sir John Beddington: That's the whole point, because it's not global warming as such. That's a sort of shorthand way of doing it - it's climate change. And I think this sort of - one of the analyses that is becoming more and more clear, is that as we are looking at climate change, what we're going to experience is greater and greater variability. Now it's very difficult to attribute a particular weather event to climate, but you're getting a build-up of an enormous amount of variation. For example, 2010 was the wettest year in the total hundred year or so history in the USA - 2012 is the driest. You just have to look at 2012 in the UK - first five months, a drought. The next seven months - the rainiest time we've had for a hundred years or so.
John Humphrys: Do you know what will happen, though, there will be sceptics, won't there, who will say "Hang on a minute, he's not changing his mind now, is he, because we're not getting the global warming that we were told we were going to get, and now they're looking at other reasons to justify those" -
Sir John Beddington: Well, I'm sure sceptics will say those sorts of things. But, for example, the last decade was the warmest there's ever been, that was warmer than the previous one, which was the second -
John Humphrys: The last eight years has been cold, relatively speaking.
Sir John Beddington: No, they haven't. No, the last eight years, worldwide -
John Humphrys: I've got a chart, in front of one of these -
Sir John Beddington: It's slowed down, but the last ten years - if you look at the global average for that decade - was higher than the previous one, higher than any one previously. But I think the key here, is this is a sort of simplistic way of thinking about it. That's a nice indicator, but there's other things going on. For example, one of the results of the climate analyses is saying we do expect more variability, and we are seeing more variability. We also expect geography to be important. The Arctic is likely to be warming more than other parts of the planet. That we're seeing unequivocally. So I think that the issue, in a sense, needs to be taken out of a very simple, simplistic thing.
John Humphrys: But is it simple, is it simplistic to say the answer is: burn less carbon, put less carbon into the atmosphere?
Sir John Beddington: No, that's not simplistic, that's absolutely right. Slight caveat - you can think about, actually, mechanisms for sequestering carbon dioxide. You know, carbon capture and storage is the way -
John Humphrys: Stick it under the North Sea, or something -
Sir John Beddington: Stick it under the North Sea or in aquifers, or something. And I think those things are really worth doing. But I can't emphasise more, John, that it's the time delays. The international community has met and failed to reach agreement. Now they may reach agreement and they may start to reduce greenhouse gases in the next five years or maybe a little longer. But they're still climbing. And when that increase is reversed, we will be left with the weather and the climate for the next 25 years, from whenever that happens.
John Humphrys: Sir John Beddington, thank you very much.