Source: BBC Radio 5 Live: Shelagh Fogarty
URL: N/A
Date: 27/09/2013
Event: Peter Stott: "there is this very clear linear relationship" between CO2 emissions and temp rise
Credit: BBC Radio 5 Live, also many thanks to Lapogus for transcribing most of this
People:
Shelagh Fogarty: Good afternoon to you, this is Shelagh Fogarty on 5 Live, and the main story this lunchtime is about climate change. We're going to talk a lot about it on the programme today - 85058 is the number to text with your thoughts or any questions that you have - 0500 909 693 if you want to put those questions directly to a scientist we have with us later in the programme, after 1. So, what's in this report that's come out today? It says that the scientists of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are more convinced than ever that global warming is man-made, and is what they call the greatest challenge of our time. It also warns that by the end of this century, sea levels could rise by up to 80 cm, that's 2½ feet. Michel Jarraud is the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organisation.
Michel Jarraud: It is extremely likely that changes in our climate system, for the past half a century, are due to human influence. And it should serve as yet another wake-up call, that our activities today will have a profound impact on society, not only for us but for many generations to come.
Shelagh Fogarty: Thomas Stocker is the Co-Chair of the IPCC Working Group I, as it's called.
Thomas Stocker: Climate change challenges the two primary resources of humans and ecosystems - land and water. In short, it threatens our planet, our only home.
Shelagh Fogarty: Well, the Energy Secretary, Ed Davey, who's in China at the moment, says it's time for sceptics on climate change to put their doubts aside.
Ed Davey: The doubters will have to put their doubts aside and realise that climate change is happening, that it's being caused by human beings and that we have to act quickly. And let's remember, there are 259 scientists, leading scientists, from 39 countries, who've worked for several years assessing the evidence. They've had over 50,000 comments on their work. This piece of evidence that we're seeing from Stockholm is probably the most robust, rigorous, most peer-reviewed piece of science in human history. I think it's put the question of whether climate change is happening beyond doubt. We've got to stop debating this issue as if we're some members of the Flat Earth Society and get on and act.
Shelagh Fogarty: Well, we'll talk to a prominent sceptic on climate change in a few moments. First, though, our environment correspondent Matt McGrath is here and Dr. Emily Shuckborough is Head of Open Oceans at the British Antarctic Survey. Matt, first of all, give me a sense, if you would, of where this report fits into the IPPC's history, because it's been an interesting existence, hasn't it, not without its issues and not without its attackers…
Matt McGrath: … Indeed, not without its controversies, Shelagh, it's a rather bitter day here in Stockholm, the wind blowing in off the water, but I think there is a sense of, I suppose, quite warm delight amongst many of the scientists here, who see this as, I suppose, reclaiming the some of the ground they may have lost in some ways because of some of the controversies that followed the last report, chief among them was the error, the blooper if you like, that the Himalayas might all melt by 2035, but there were other issues too that followed in the years to come. And I think that one of the clear things that comes out of today’s report is the focus on the science, the absolute - you know, that Thomas Stocker said that we are not here just to make headlines, we are here to assess the science, and a very serious, sober approach to it. And with me is one of the serious and sober scientists, Peter Stott, from the Met Office, who's one of the coordinating authors on the issue of Detection and Attribution and this is very important, Peter, because… this is saying who dunnit… who is responsible for climate change. So tell us who is it?
Peter Stott: Well exactly, it is looking at what has caused, uh, the unequivocal warming we have seen, and now we have got this new evidence, which shows very clearly that the dominant cause of the warming is human influence through basically what we have done to the climate system, we have warmed it up, emitted greenhouse gases, so human influence on the climate system is clear, and we've had this this extraordinary thorough analysis of that evidence this week, and this is a really strong and robust conclusion about the dominant role of human influence on the climate system.
Matt McGrath: Well, I imagine you are in good voice for someone who has have been up for days, and through the night here… um, lots of people talk about the pause, and the fact that the climate temperatures, surface temperatures over the last 15 years have not risen as fast as they were rising before that, and people have pointed at that and say that there are some holes in your theory, what's your take on that, after being here?
Peter Stott: We have always expected to have variability around the longer term trend, and that is exactly what we have seen. In fact we have done a very thorough assessment in this report about the last 15 years, and shown about the important role of the ocean, and also our understanding of what's called climate forcing, so these are drivers of the climate system, and we have put all this together, and in fact it's evidence from the last 15 years… the, the warming ocean, the retreating snow and ice, the changing rainfall patterns, the continuing sea-level rise, and this evidence is so strong, of the dominant role of human influence on the climate system.
Matt McGrath: Some people have said that the heating, the heating from the pause, might have gone into the oceans, is there enough evidence to substantiate that at this point?
Peter Stott: Um, we have got very clear evidence that the ocean is warming, and that a huge amount of energy that is going into the ocean, and that that reflects this imbalance of the climate system that we have, and so we got, we have this beautiful illustration that I presented to the delegates here in Stockholm, that shows that, that continuing rise in energy in the climate system, expressed through not just the warming oceans, but then that melt of the Arctic Sea ice, we had record Arctic sea ice extent, it has changed global rainfall patterns, it's, it's, it's changed extremes as well, more extreme weather…
Matt McGrath: And it is a clear linear relationship, so that the more you pump into the atmosphere, the more the temperature goes up, its… in a very complex system, it is as simple as that?
Peter Stott: This is a very important new piece of science actually, that again, we explained in great detail to the delegates here, we all wanted to look at it very very thoroughly, and, despite all the complexities of the climate system, there is this very clear linear relationship between the overall emissions of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide and the global temperature rise, so the more we emit, the more the temperature increases.
Matt McGrath: And people talk about the dangerous 2 degree level - from what you have seen, from what we know now, are we going to blow right past that, and if so, when?
Peter Stott: Well there is still, there's still time, we showed we showed different scenarios, and the point about this is that what happens about the future depends very much on what we emit, and so there is still a chance to avoid 2 degrees if you like, but it very depends on the scenario of the next - of the coming years, the next few years actually.
Matt McGrath: And we have had conversations like this before, in 2007, 2008 and 2009, leading to political inaction, why will things be any different now?
Peter Stott: We have this new report, and this is the the most thorough report - if you look at the document released today in Stockholm, it goes right across the climate, it is the most thorough document, it has been the most thoroughly reviewed ever, and so this is really something the policy makers have owned in Stockholm, and now they have to take this document on and and, take it into account.
Matt McGrath: Okay, that remains for another day. Peter Stott from the Met Office, thank you very much for talking to us, and back to you in, in, in Salford.
Shelagh Fogarty: Thank you, that’s exactly where we are, thank you Matt, Matt McGrath, the BBC’s environment correspondent. Listening to that was Dr Emily Shuckburgh, the head of Open Oceans at the British Antarctic Survey, and I will talk to Andrew Montford in a moment as well, who is a writer, blogger and climate change sceptic. Dr. Shuckburgh, on that question that Matt was raising there with Peter Stott, about this pause, this "hiatus" as it is called in the report, since I think '98 there's been no evidence, or the Earth's temperature, sorry, hasn't gone above the global average, and sceptics have leapt on this, perhaps understandably, and said "‘now where’s your continuing endless climate change?", what's your thought on why that pause has happened?
Emily Shuckburgh: Well first of all it is important to understand what is being described here, so in fact the last three decades have seen increasing temperatures, decade by decade, and so when people talk about a pause, it is more of a plateau actually, we are still at record warm temperatures, and as was described by Peter, um just now, if we consider the Earth as a whole, then although the surface temperatures haven't warmed significantly over the last 15 years, we have seen many other changes in around the Earth, we have seen record Arctic sea ice decrease over this time period and we have also seen continued sea-level rise, so what's been happening is that we can tell from satellite data that the heat trapped by greenhouse gases has continued, but that heat has been re-distributed, around other parts of the Earth.
Shelagh Fogarty: Well, into the oceans? because that is far from proven, is it?
Emily Shuckburgh: Well, we do have um observations of the oceans, which show that the oceans have been warming…
Shelagh Fogarty: But we don’t know why, do we? We don’t know why.
Emily Shuckburgh: Well, we do know that the heat has been going from the atmosphere into the oceans. We don’t have a long record of the temperatures of the deep ocean, and so it is that, that uh, deep ocean that we would like better understand how much heat is going into that deep ocean.
Shelagh Fogarty: What about what that report says on sea levels, because its 2007 report was criticised for the claims it made on rising sea levels, and in this report, it says by the year 3000 [sic] I think it is, they expect sea levels, at the current rate, to be - what, 2½ feet, 80 cm higher than now. In your view, what would that result in? In the UK for instance?
Emily Shuckburgh: So that’s by the end of this century, um, the upper projection is just under a metre of sea level rise, that is the maximum that is anticipated by this report, and to put that into a UK context, if you think of the Thames Barrier, which was built some 30 years ago now, to protect London from flooding, at the time it was built, it was built to protect London from a 1 in a 1000 year storm, um and associated flood. If you had 50 cm of sea level rise then that would reduce down to only protecting London from a 1 in say, 250 year storm flood, and if it went up to a metre, which is considered unlikely but possible, then that would only protect London um, from an event that would occur one in every 10 years.
Shelagh Fogarty: And if someone listening to this in their house, who is is sitting listening to you, and looking at their 3 different types of recycling bins, and their environmentally friendly shopping bags from the supermarket, and they are putting a sweater on rather than turn on the heating because it is getting a bit chilly now it is nearly October, and thinking: this is so huge, surely, me and a few other people doing this, in one country isn't going to make the difference.
Emily Shuckburgh: Well you know, I can understand easily how one thinks of that, it is difficult to imagine how our individual actions could make a difference to such a huge problem, but at the same time, our individual actions have generated the problem in the first place, so it is the case that each of us, doing our bit, can make a difference, and one of the things that was mentioned in your report just now, is one of the key new messages from this new climate report, is that the temperature that we will anticipate in the future is absolutely dependent on the amount of emissions that we put into the atmosphere, so everybody who puts in an extra little bit of greenhouse gas emissions is contributing to that future temperature rise.
Shelagh Fogarty: However small…
Emily Shuckburgh: However small.
Shelagh Fogarty: Okay, thank you, Dr. Shuckburgh, Head of Open Oceans at the British Antarctic Survey. Well, listening to what she was saying is Andrew Montford, who's a writer, blogger and very much a climate change sceptic. Good afternoon to you.
Andrew Montford: Hello.
Shelagh Fogarty: From what we were hearing there from Dr. Emily Shuckborough, what are your thoughts? 'Cause you clearly disagree, don't you.
Andrew Montford: Yeah, I do. The problem with the report is that it - it has hidden a lot of the problems that - er, climate science has at the moment. A lot of the - a lot of these things have been tucked away in footnotes and things. One of the big issues, going into the Fifth Assessment Report, that sceptics were talking about, was the fact that we have this statement, on the one hand, that we can pin the blame for global warming directly onto mankind. But the models that they use to make that statement were the same ones that have failed to predict the pause in warming since the end of the last century.
Shelagh Fogarty: And when you - when you talk about models, just so people understand what we're talking about -
Andrew Montford: Computer models, computer simulations -
Shelagh Fogarty: Computer models for working out -
Andrew Montford: - computer simulations of the climate.
Shelagh Fogarty: And are you one of those climate change sceptics who believes that those models don't even accurately reflect the true sensitivity - or not - of our climate?
Andrew Montford: Well, this is precisely the point. There is a big divergence between the computer simulation estimates of long-term warming and the estimates based on observations. Now, in the drafts of the report, this was mentioned, in the text of the report. It's now been tucked away in a footnote in rather vague terms. But they do say there is a lack of agreement on the values across the different lines of evidence. Now, for a science that is very young, like climate science - and many aspects of the climate system are still not wholly understood - I think when your observations are telling you one thing and your computer simulations are telling you another, you should be believing what your observations are telling you. Now -
Shelagh Fogarty: When Ed Davey, the government minister on this - he was speaking from Beijing this morning - when he says "Look, this is not a conversation from some Flat Earth Society that we're talking about, here", he said, "this is 259 scientists" - I'm quoting him now - "259 scientists from 39 countries" have helped to produce this report coming out of Stockholm today. He called it "the most robust, rigorous, most peer-reviewed piece of science in history". Is everybody just wrong, mistaken, part of a conspiracy, just - you know, in some kind of joint hysteria on climate change - what is it?
Andrew Montford: No, I mean, I don't think it's a conspiracy. I mean, I've said this many times, I think there are - there's a big political demand for a strong message on climate change. I think if - I think if scientists were not under some of the pressures they are under, we would get - we would hear a lot more about what they don't know than rather dodgy claims about what they do know. I can come back to what Emily Shuckborough was saying earlier on, she was talking about the heat going into the deep ocean. And you quite rightly pointed out that this was moderately, er, tentative. Now - and Emily says "Yes, we don't know a lot about the heat in the deep ocean". But that is the issue. There is a whole lot of the heat, that is meant to have been trapped by greenhouse gases, that nobody can find anywhere in the climate system.
Shelagh Fogarty: Okay, well listen, thank you for talking to us - Andrew Montford, who's a writer, a blogger and is clearly a climate change sceptic. We're going to talk lots more about this, this lunchtime, and after 1 I'll be joined by Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, who is a former Vice-Chair of the Joint Scientific Committee for the World Climate Research Programme. He's now a Professor of Meteorology at Reading University -he's going to join me after 1, for a good few minutes. If you want to put a question directly to him - 0500 909 693 is the number to call, 85058 if you want to text.