Source: BBC Radio 4: Costing the Earth
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03brkds
Date: 01/10/2013
Event: Costing the Earth: IPCC's 5th Assessment Report
Credit: BBC Radio 4, also many thanks to Geoff Chambers for transcribing the first half
People:
Frank Saunders: Right, good morning everybody. The remains of the vortex which brought the pretty lively weather down to the South West...
Tom Heap: When it comes to the weather, these words are as close as you get to tablets of stone handed down from the summit of forecasting excellence. This is the Met Office. And every day, at nine o'clock, the Chief Forecaster - today it’s Frank Saunders - marshals computer models, radar pictures, and data, originating from land, sea, air, and even space, to craft words of wisdom for forty or so fellow forecasters.
Frank Saunders: ... and then again, Southampton and down towards Plymouth, later on Saturday and overnight...
Tom Heap: They in turn convert that raw material into the adjectives, symbols and numbers so vital to our daily lives. "Do I need a coat? Should I put the washing on? Or can I afford to break out the flowery shirt?" But the Met Office aren't just here to say how the weather will affect us. They also examine how we are affecting the weather, and some of the key numbers are crunched here.
Frank Saunders: ...towards the UK, and a number of short wave upper troughs to complicate things further, so I think right at the outset I should say uncertainty in detail is perhaps the key point for the next couple of days...
Tom Heap: I've come down to the basement of the Met Office now, and the place is much more dominated by screens and buttons rather than people. Security codes and heavy doors... And in this room are banks and banks of supercomputers. It's an area about three or four times the size of a tennis court, infested by wardrobe-sized brushed metal black boxes with "IBM" and "Power 775 Supercomputer" written on them. This is the hub, where the diagnosis of our climate, both present and future, goes on, and it does feel a little bit like a scene from The Matrix.
But all this cutting-edge hardware crunching complex data is really looking at one key question: How are we changing the climate? And that's why we’re here. On Friday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published their latest forecast for our atmosphere. The headline is that scientists are now 95% sure that human activity is warming the air and sea around us. Growing emissions of carbon dioxide are the culprit, and without sharp reductions, global temperatures will rise two degrees above today's average, a threshold beyond which lurks danger. So Costing the Earth has assembled a top group of scientists and thinkers to pick over the report and how the public and politicians should react to it.
We've stepped away from that hum of technology, and first of all I'm joined by the woman in charge here, Professor Julia Slingo, Chief Scientist at the Met Office, Sir Mark Walport, the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor and Mike Hulme, not another chief, but Professor of Climate and Culture at Kings College London, and author of the book Why We Disagree about Climate Change. Julia, if I can come to you first of all - what was the most remarkable thing for you about last week's report from the IPCC?
Julia Slingo: I think it was the increasing confidence that we have that the planet has continued to gain heat, and that increasingly we see evidence of that, not just in surface temperature, but in many many aspects of the earth's system, and that we are, again, increasingly confident that at least since 1950, a fairly significant part of that is due to our activities. Yes, we're saying the same things with more confidence about the planet as a whole, but actually we're beginning to talk about what it means for you and me, and in particular, the increasing number of extreme events, and the increasing evidence actually that human contributions have played a role in that.
Tom Heap: Sir Mark Walport, as someone who's relatively new to this environment - I mean, you came from more a medical science background - what did you make of last week?
Mark Walport: Well, I think the most important thing in a way is that it wasn't that remarkable. What it showed was that the previous reports have been correct in substance, and I think it's a question of singing the tune with even greater clarity, actually.
Tom Heap: Mike Hulme, we do have a problem though, don't we, because the public are being pretty reluctant to sing along with that old tune. Is this going to help in any way, what we heard?
Mike Hulme: Well it is a déjà vu, I mean six years ago I can remember very similar conversations going on after the fourth assessment report, that we were then very likely [sic] that humans are the major influence, we're now extremely likely. Well, I think moving from "very likely" to "extremely likely" is hardly going to change the game, in relation to the geopolitics of climate change. The other thing I would say is that the more important aspects of how future climate risks will unfold, of course, is still deeply uncertain, you know, the range of the climate sensitivity is still 1.5 to 4.5 - that's gone up in fact in the last six years - so there's a wide range of possible future risks, which again, does not make decision-making any easier to undertake, so in some respects I think this is a little bit of a distraction from the real difficulties that confront us.
Mark Walport: May I come in and slightly sort of disagree with you, because now sitting inside government, I think it's absolutely crucial that we keep reminding - not only policy makers, but all of us - and the communication is actually extremely important, so it’s quite true that it doesn't make the policy decisions, but you can only make the policy decisions if you're absolutely clear on the evidence that drives them.
Tom Heap: A lot of people use the analogy of "This is a wake-up call". I heard that from three or four, you know, senior people, including, I think, Ban-Ki Moon. Another way of putting that is that, you know, we've been crying Wolf and the wolf hasn't arrived, and isn't that a problem in terms of getting this scientific message through?
Mark Walport: Ah, yes, but I think this is a wolf that is actually barking very loudly, although, I’m not sure that wolves - howling, I should say - and is starting to bite, and Julia can say more about the extreme events that are happening, but all the evidence is that this is more than howling, I think.
Tom Heap: And in terms of that, Julia, I mean, one of the areas where we are seeing the most dramatic effects are in the Arctic currently, and I gather, you know, looking forward, some of those forcing events could be in the Arctic regions as well. Is that where you think we should be looking for some of the big future problems?
Julia Slingo: Well, of course, yes, the Arctic is changing rapidly, despite the media attention on the slight increase in summer sea ice this year, which incidentally we know for sure is associated with changes in weather patterns. It's not gone unnoticed by a lot of us that we had a very good summer this year, and the Arctic was a bit colder, all tied up with the natural vagaries of the weather, but that actually obscures what’s really going on. The Arctic is changing rapidly, and, yes, it is going to be a part of the world where we'll see some big changes quite quickly.
Tom Heap: Do you think there has been a pause in the increase in temperature?
Julia Slingo: There has undoubtedly been a pause in the increase in global surface temperature. The fact is that surface temperature is only just one measure of a changing planet.
Tom Heap: One of the figures that was new to me, I didn't know, was that, I think it said 93% of the extra energy that's gone into our atmosphere has actually been taken up by the oceans. I mean, in some ways that's like a survival vest for us, but in other ways you sort of think it's storing problems for the future.
Julia Slingo: Well, that's absolutely right of course, because, quite simply, water has a much larger thermal capacity than the atmosphere and the land surface, and the ocean of course is also a fluid, so unlike the land surface, where you can warm the surface, and then the heat sort of stays there really, to a large extent, in the ocean of course, the ocean is continually moving, and it's moving that heat around in very complex patterns of what I call ocean weather.
Mark Walport: Let's just look at the so-called pause. If you look at each of the last three decades, each of them has been successfully [sic] warmer, so the 1980s was warmer than anything that had come before, then the 1990s and then from 2000 to 2010, and again, if you look at the IPCC, they said that that thirty year period from 1983 to 2012 was very likely the warmest 30 year period of the last 1400 years.
Mike Hulme: Well absolutely, but one can't also deny the fact that over the last ten or fifteen years, the ocean/atmosphere system has not performed in the way in which the models are simulating, and actually many of the commentaries from the 1990s would have anticipated. So there are questions here to be answered by science, and I think the IPCC role [?] hasn't been able to draw upon the most recent scientific publications.
Julia Slingo: That's actually not true. When you look at model simulations, they simulate periods of slowdown, pauses in warming which we can tie very clearly to changes in the Pacific Ocean circulation. The fact that we didn't predict this particular pause at this particular time is another scientific issue, but it's not the fault of the models.
Tom Heap: Julia Slingo, if we continue the way we are now without any appreciable decrease in emissions of global warming gases, where will we get to by 2100?
Julia Slingo: Well, we’re looking at temperature rises of four degrees, and potentially even more, and that's not including the increases that might come if we release large amounts of methane and carbon from melting permafrost. We're looking at an ongoing acidification of the ocean, which we know is already having significant impacts on marine ecosystems around the world. We're looking at an acceleration of sea level rise, potentially sea level rise up to as much as 80 centimetres, maybe even a metre in extreme scenarios, and we're looking at major shifts in rainfall patterns, something we haven't talked about. Drying of the Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, very clear signal now; increases in rainfall in other parts of the world which will have significant impacts on terrestrial ecosystems, on food production, and water security.
Tom Heap: Mike Hulme, what do you think about that long range weather forecast?
Mike Hulme: We know that the same meteorological extreme can cause radically different impacts on societies, depending on infrastructure, levels of wealth, education, and management and planning. A hurricane hitting America is not the same as a hurricane hitting Bangladesh, so we shouldn't immediately just translate changes in physical climate to an automatic implication of what it means to societies without studying actually what that means.
Tom Heap: And isn't that just the problem, because it's what it means to societies which will determine what societies are prepared to do to avoid it?
Mike Hulme: And that, first and foremost, is - you can call it a political problem - actually in the end it's an ethical problem, depending on how people value different things.
Tom Heap: Well we'll come back to some of the science and some of its relationship with society a little bit later on. But what about some of those impacts? We've just heard what could happen to the planet in maybe decades or hundreds of years, but are we feeling it? In the past few years there’s no question that we've experienced some extreme weather events, events that we've covered in previous editions of Costing the Earth.
Man's voice: ...we've been talking about it all week, and now it's arrived. A return to Arctic weather across the...
Woman's voice: ... motorists are being warned of treacherous conditions on the roads, and rail passengers...
Man's voice: ...take a look at this. On Saturday another band of snow starts to...
Man's voice: Nobody should imagine that when we have 15, 20 centimetres of snow falling in a few hours, we can avoid very major disruption...
Man's voice: We've had temperatures up to 110 degrees and, you know 106 to 110 day after day after day...
Woman's voice: I think it was around 18 days in a row of over 103 degrees.
Tom Heap: Reactions there to recent harsh British winters and last year's widespread drought across the USA's corn belt, the heatwave repeated in Russia. These extreme weather events are increasingly seen as portents of climate change, but is this scientifically valid or just a tempting short cut to scaring the public into taking a long-term threat seriously? And, if the scientists are right and this is the shape of things to come, how do we deal with it? Well, with me still is Julia Slingo from the Met Office and we've been joined by Tony Grayling, Head of Climate Change and Communities for the Environment Agency, and Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Tony Grayling, straight to you, these extreme weather events - are they a factor of climate change?
Tony Grayling: Well, the evidence suggests that we should expect extreme weather events to increase in future, but the Environment Agency's very much on the front line of dealing with those events, things like flooding and droughts. The UK Climate Projection suggests we should expect flood risk to increase from all sources. We also expect that water resources will become more scarce in summer periods. It means that we're going to have to adapt to a changing climate.
Tom Heap: So is it just a question of being able to say "we'll see more of these", rather than "that particular one was a result of climate change"?
Tony Grayling: I think that's right - it's always very difficult to pinpoint one event as being significant of climate change - for example, last year we saw both droughts and flooding to a large extent, across the country. That may well be a portent of things to come. It looks as though we are going to have to invest more in flood defences, over time, to keep pace with climate change. It looks also as though we're going to have to have a different way of managing our water resources.
Tom Heap: Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, what do you think about the link between those two things?
Bjorn Lomborg: Well, I think we need to be realistic and say we do know that we're going to see more heat waves, we're probably also going to see fewer cold waves, and we know that we're going to see more strong downpours, which support Tony's point in saying that we'll probably see more flooding. On the other hand, I think there's a general tendency to almost link any event that we see and say "Ah, this is an extra indicator of more extreme weather", whereas the reality is: a lot of these indicators we, first of all, can't link to global warming, and, secondly, some of them will get worse but some of them will get less bad. And we need to be honest about that - yes, we're going to see more heat waves, that's bad. We're also going to see fewer cold waves, which is actually good.
Tom Heap: In your view, Bjorn, how bad is climate change?
Bjorn Lomborg: Global warming is going to be a problem, it definitely is. But we also should recognise that most economic models actually indicate a moderate global warming - somewhere between 1 and 2 degrees' warming - will, overall, be a net positive for the world. Now, it's important to recognise that that hides an important distributional effect, because it's going to be beneficial for many rich countries, which, typically, lie in the mid temperate zones, whereas it's going to be bad already now for developing countries, where it's already pretty damn warm.
Tom Heap: A net positive, Julia? I saw a little grimace pass across your face then.
Julia Slingo: Yes, I think it was the use of "moderate" being 1 to 2 degrees. I think that, you know, if we look at what the 5th Assessment Report is saying depends where your starting point is, of course, with the temperature, but I think it's generally accepted now that to stay within a world that is less than 2 degrees warmer is going to be extremely challenging, and therefore we're probably looking at something that's a bit more than 2 degrees. And if you get up somewhere near 4 degrees, the implications, around the world, for food security, house [?] security, energy security, political security, are immense.
Bjorn Lomborg: I totally agree with you when we get to 3 and 4 degrees - yes, then it's going to be a net negative. But I was simply pointing out, we were talking about the immediate impacts, the impacts around these decades, and here we're still way within the 1 to 2 degrees, we're probably less than 1 degree still, and that definitely is a net positive around the world.
Julia Slingo: Can I just pick up on that final point? The whole business of the contribution of climate change to extreme events is a very challenging area of science, but I'll point to a very interesting published paper this summer by UK and US scientists, where they looked at a dozen of the extreme events in 2012 and, quite rightly, were only able to show that in half of them there was a contribution from climate change. So we're not over-egging the story. I think we have to be very clear and honest about this.
Tom Heap: Climate isn't the only thing that has different trends on a global and local level. So is politics. And, while we saw the IPCC pronouncing on climate change, our national political debate last week was full of arguments about energy, dominated really by a push on how to make it cheaper rather than greener.
Ed Miliband: If we win that election in 2015, the next Labour government will freeze gas and electricity prices until the start of 2017. [Audience applause.]
George Osborne: Any politician would love to tell you that they can wave a magic wand and freeze your energy bill. Everyone wants cheaper energy. That's why we're legislating to put everyone on the cheapest tariff.
Tom Heap: So do we have the ability and the will to stop climate change, or at least our contribution towards it? Well, back to our discussion guests now, and we have a full house - Julia Slingo, Tony Grayling, Government Chief Scientific Advisor Mark Walport, climate science expert and author Mike Hulme, Bjorn Lomborg in New York and Mark Lynas - author and radical thinker about matters environmental. Mark, as the new guest, what did you make of last week, and what do you make of what you've just heard?
Mark Lynas: Well, it's a strange sort of event, which comes around to what - this is the fifth time it's come round now - and it reminds me a bit if you - if you're worried about having a serious illness, and we've now gone, on the planetary scale, in terms of Earth' serious planetary fever, for a fifth opinion from the experts, and they've come out saying not only that this is a significant and increasingly severe problem, but they're increasingly confident about it. So the use of phrases like "virtually certain", you know, more than 95% confident about certain aspects of this problem - I think we can say: "Well, the debate is over, certainly on these areas of science, and now let's move forward a bit more clearly into the realm of what we do about it", because there has been this big debate in the media about the "global warming pause" and a lot of sceptic stuff has seen a bit of a resurgence. And I think we need to say: "Okay, the IPCC has pretty much demolished most of those sceptic theories".
Tom Heap: Mark Walport, you're actually sitting in the heart of government, I gather, right now, and in BIS, and politically, last week, we heard the Leader of the Opposition saying we need to reduce the energy prices and we heard the Chancellor, George Osborne, suggesting that maybe we've gone too far in some of our green energy policies. I mean, is there any evidence that this message is getting through to the politicians?
Mark Walport: Well, the message has got through, in the sense that the UK has legislated, but I think it's - we've got to look at energy through three different lenses. So we've got to look at it through the lens of security of supply - we simply can't afford to have the lights go out - we've got to look at it through the economic lens - it's got to be something that is affordable - and then we've got to look at it through the sustainability lens. And if we ignore those lenses, then we're not likely to get the right answer. But this is an opportunity as well as a threat, because the challenge, of course, is to get new forms of energy that are competitively priced, and that's where there is both a technological challenge and an opportunity.
Tom Heap: And are you happy where this current administration has its policy, on these things?
Mark Walport: I think that, you know, we have to work together to make the very strong case, and ultimately it is for the politicians that we elect to make those decisions - it's not actually for the scientific community to make the decisions. That is what the political process is about.
Tom Heap: But it's up to you to -
Mark Walport: My job - my job is to write the advice very clearly.
Tom Heap: Yeah, and the advice couldn't get any clearer, after last week, could it. And I'm just wondering if - you haven't told me that you're happy with what they're suggesting.
Mark Walport: I've told you that my job is to provide the clearest advice that I possibly can, and they must make the policy.
Julia Slingo: To get political action, the politicians have to feel that the public is really wanting them to do something. And I think we haven't won that argument yet. And until we do, politicians will continue to think - look at their own national interests and being elected again.
Tom Heap: Mark Walport, is that what's preventing politicians listening to you, that they're not hearing more clamour from the public about the price of their energy, rather than its sustainability?
Mark Walport: Well, I mean the first thing to say is that I think the politicians are listening. I think they're listening very carefully indeed. The policy decisions are extremely hard. And I think that what's happened up to now is, to some extent, one way of ducking the policy decisions is to deny the science. Well, I don't think that's possible. The challenge now is to say: "Well, okay, we've got a series of policy decisions to make, and we have to decide between the balance of three things. We can mitigate - and what I mean by that is we can reduce gas emissions - we can reduce the consumption of energy, we can adapt - and I think we've heard about things like flood defences - or we can suffer.
And I think the challenge is this really is a global problem, that carbon dioxide doesn't, sort of, mind which country it comes up from. And I think if I may, that one of the new and one of the clear things that comes out of the latest thinking about this, is the concept of the trillion tonnes. In other words, we've emitted, as humans, about half a trillion tonnes of greenhouse gas, mainly carbon dioxide, in the form of carbon, since the Industrial Revolution, and if we're to stand any chance to stay within the 2 degrees, then we've got another half trillion to go. The challenge for policymakers is: how do we share that out? When we're emitting ten of those 500 gigatonnes or billion tonnes each year, and increasing by 3% year on year, at the moment.
Tom Heap: Mark Lynas, what do you think about this issue of engaging the public, who've shown, if anything, that they're becoming less engaged in the last five years?
Mark Lynas: Well, it is a struggle, because the narrative of climate change has always been framed as in: "You've got to give something up, you've got to stop flying, taking holidays, you've got to have a colder house", and things which people interpret as taking away from their levels of comfort and enjoyment of life. And, to a certain extent, that's maybe true if we're talking about reducing energy consumption overall - ultimately, we're even talking about reducing economic activity. And that's a big threat, I think, to the system that we all know and - I would say - love. but the prevailing system in our advanced, capitalist society. So, climate change - because it's about fossil energy, and pretty much all of our energy supplies come from fossil fuels to this day, is a huge threat to the way business as usual is conducted. And obviously, you know, as various speakers have said, just little things like unplugging your phone charger, things like that just don't stack up - we have to have very major structural change, which is going to take decades, and it is going to need new technologies, as well as the conventional answers of solar, wind, nuclear, and other low-carbon options.
Mark Walport: But let's take one technology that is working now, that is a difficult one, that is nuclear energy.
Bjorn Lomborg: Yeah, and I think, fundamentally, that you're not going to convince people to do this - clearly, most people are just not going to accept that.
Tom Heap: Just on nuclear energy, because I'm just intrigued - we have around this table a lot of people who are concerned about climate change. I just want a yes/no answer. Julia, would you go for more nuclear, in our mix?
Julia Slingo: I think that the evidence is that without that, we're going to find it very, very difficult to keep the lights on, in future.
Tom Heap: So that's a "yes" - Mark Lynas, I'm pretty sure I know your view, but tell me.
Mark Lynas: Yes, that's a "yes", too.
Tom Heap: Er, and Mike Hulme?
Mike Hulme: Yeah, I changed my mind on this about 12 years ago, definitely a "yes".
Tom Heap: And Bjorn Lomborg, clearly you think it's a good thing, as well, to go for nuclear?
Bjorn Lomborg: Unfortunately it's too expensive, compared to fossil fuels.
Tom Heap: Can I just end up with a question to you all, really: do you think this IPCC report will be seen as a turning point in our understanding of the climate and the damages being done, or will we just carry on as before, aware of the consequences but, kind of, ignoring them?
Mike Hulme: This report last week isn't going to be a game-changer, because, first and foremost, the issues that climate change raises in the world are political. And they're only going to be resolved by political processes, and we need to make sure that those political processes are as pragmatic and as realistic as possible. Science is not going to solve those conflicts of interest.
Tom Heap: Mark Lynas, what do you think?
Mark Lynas [laughs]: When I was young and very naive, and I think it was probably the 1st or the 2nd Assessment Report, I expected there to be less traffic on the roads the following morning, as people took this in, but of course [others laugh] such a thing never happens, and I don't think this will be a turning point either, and I have to look at myself, you know, I was on a plane last week, emitting about a tonne or so of carbon, and we're all, you know - until there are technological changes, I think, combined with the politics to drive these technological changes, which mean that we can all all adopt much lower-emissions lifestyles, at the same time as continuing to benefit from the advances that modern life has given us, I don't think we're going to get through this. The problem is, though, is there's so many established actors who are defending the vested interests - you know, you look at the new unconventional sources of shale gas, fracking, all of this kind of stuff, we're putting more energy in discovering more sources of fossil fuels now than we seem to be into developing low-carbon supplies.
Tom Heap: Sir Mark Walport, ending with you, are you going to build up this IPCC as something significant, or -
Mark Walport: No -
Tom Heap: - just another wave in an ocean?
Mark Walport: - it's not a turning point but it's a way point. And actually it's not about public education, with respect, I think it's actually about public engagement. What I think we must do is we must focus the public argument not on whether the science is right or not, but what we've got to discuss and argue about is the policy and the technological ways forward.
Tom Heap: Well, thank you all very much for joining us. That was Sir Mark Walport, Julia Slingo, Tony Grayling, Mike Hulme, Mark Lynas and Bjorn Lomborg. I'd like to finish with a chat I had with Dr. Emily Shuckborough from the British Antarctic Survey. She's an oceanographer who recently became a mother, cradling three-month-old Genevieve in her arms.
Emily Shuckborough: In 2100, she'll be 87, the age of my grandmother. And I would like to think that she will be living on a planet that is similar to the planet that we're living in at the present time. I've read opinion polls in the UK recently, suggesting that concern about climate change has decreased, over recent times. And, to me, that makes me feel that we've still got a big challenge to communicate to the public the reality of the threat posed by climate change and the risks that are associated with that to future society. In the UK we've seen, over recent years, floods affecting many, many people, and we now know that the risk of having floods of that nature has been significantly increased, as a result of the climate change we've had to date. So, in that sense, climate change is already here and now, and only going to increase in the future, and I think it's important that the public understands that, so that we can take the right decisions for society to respond.