In Our Time - Climate Change

Episode Date: January 6, 2000

Melvyn Bragg discusses climate change. In 1999 the weather gave the planet’s occupants a terrible beating: 16,000 people lost their lives as a result of storms. Some 15 million people were left homeless and 10,000 died when the world’s worst cyclone swept across eastern India. Hurricane Floyd wreaked 4.3 billion pounds worth of damage in the United States, Typhoon Bart hit Japan and Typhoon York hit Hong Kong and Macau. Western Europe is unused to hurricane force winds, but since Christmas 80 people have died in France as a result of storms. And in Venezuela floods and mud slides are continuing to cause devastation on a massive scale.The climate has become political but is the science, supposedly underpinning apocalyptic and apposite millennial claims of doom, really water-tight? It might seem that the effects of global warming are already upon us, but are they - and if so how can we really hope to stop them? With Sir John Houghton, Co-Chair of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change - the United Nations’ global warming science committee; George Monbiot, environmentalist, journalist and Visiting Professor, Department of Philosophy, Bristol University.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello and happy New Year to a new time. Last year, the weather gave our planet a terrible beating. At least 16,000 people lost their lives as a result of storms. 15 million were left homeless and about 10,000 died

when the world's worst cyclone swept across eastern India. Hurricane Floyd hit the United States, Typhoon Bart hit Japan, Typhoon York hit Hong Kong and Macau, even Western Europe was hurricane a few weeks ago. The climate it can be made to seem is on the rampage. So are the effects of global warming that we've heard about already upon us?

And if so, how can we really hope to stop them? With me to discuss what could we call the new climate of fear at the beginning of a new century is Sir John Horton, co-chair of the United Nations Global Warming Science Committee, the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change, and the environmentalist, George Mombio, guardian journalist and visiting professor at the Department of Philosophy at Bristol University.

George Mombio, can you give us an overview of what you see happening with the climate in this next hundred years or so? This could be the most serious problem which civilization, which life on earth faces over the next century. We're seeing two potential sets of effects. The first would be progressive and largely predictable change with, for instance, the drier parts of the world becoming drier still, some of the wetter parts of the world becoming wetter still,

with potentially devastating consequences for the agriculture of those regions and for the settled parts of those regions. We could see many more of the sorts of events you've just been talking about. The second level of effects is the unpredictable, the big back, which could come about through what's called non-linear change, and these could be potentially as far-reaching as a disruption of the Gulf Stream, which keeps Western Europe warm. And we could end up paradoxically with a significantly colder climate in Western Europe,

if some of the effects which have been predicted do cut in, then we've got at the moment. Now, this is very much a received view, and you've been one of the people who have made us to receive, by banging on very effectively in the Guardian and in other places. I'm going to challenge this in a minute or two, but I just want to emphasize to the listeners how apocalyptic your views are.

By quoting from you a few months ago, you said, perhaps the gravest calamity our species has ever encountered impact dwarfs that of any war, any plague, any famine we've confronted so far. It makes genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering. I mean, we're in the book of revelations here, aren't we, George? Well, the Red Cross, for example, has now pointed out

that more people are being displaced by climate change than by the entire combined impact of conflict. Environmental refugees. Yes, that's right. We're talking about tens of millions of people now being displaced. This figure's likely to rise by the middle of the century to some hundreds of millions of people. In terms of sheer human numbers, yes, it dwarfs all of those factors.

Well, I'm going to come back to ask you how you can be so sure when we can't be all that sure, so when it's going to rain in Cumberland next week. But never mind about that. For the moment, that's a little bit trivial, but I think we should introduce a little bit of that at the moment. Sir John Horton, do you go along with this? Well, I go along with it to a great extent, yes,

because the science is very firm. We know that we're burning fossil fuels, that's an accelerated rate. We're putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is now 30% greater than it was before the Industrial Revolution. It's higher than it's been for millions of years on our planet. it's likely to rise to double the pre-industrial concentration and even beyond that during next century.

And that means that the rate of climate change that we're talking about is again much faster than the Earth has experienced for perhaps at least 10,000 years and maybe longer. And it's this rate of change which will make it very hard for us to adapt to it, which is a big problem. You know, trees like a certain sort of climate. and if during the lifetime of the tree the climate changes a lot, then the tree will die back. Humans find it hard to adjust,

and of course if the sea level rises by even a small amount, perhaps half a metre, then large populations will be displaced, and there will be substantial the numbers of refugees. And I go along with the sort of numbers of perhaps an estimate of 150 million by the middle of next century. That's half the population of the 90th century. This century, indeed, this century, yes, I was realising me in a new century now.

and those numbers are quite believable in terms of what we know about the science. Right. Now, you two have devoted your lives to this subject, and I haven't. But nevertheless, I've looked out, try to find some evidence which contradicts this block view, which seems you've got your evidence, but there's other points of view. Because I'm worried about the evidence that you can know so much about what's going to happen in 100 years' time, and I'm worried about the lack of robustness in saying, well, you know, the Earth, things have come and gone over the last few years, a few hundred years,

thousand years. Your statistics only go back 100 years or so, so what are you measuring it again? So that, as a historian, worries me. Came across this article by Dennis Avery, who's no mean champ, and he said it sounds like a lot what you're talking about, but between 900 AD and 1300 AD, just a few years ago, the Earth warmed by 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, very close to your predictions of this 21st century,

and things got better. It was on the most favorable periods in human history, population expanded, food production expanded, there was a surplus of workers and energy so the cathedrals and castles were built, colossal buildings were required, population actually boomed, technology flourished, rail earnings in China reached the highest point,

Indian subcontinent prospered, the deserts retreated and so on and so forth. So in those years, he says, and he says a lot more as well, that he has evidence with warming over those years, things got massively better for masses of people. So in a sense, why is he completely wrong? Well, he's overstating the positioners regarding the Middle Ages because the amount of warming then was certainly not 5 to 7 degrees.

It was less than that. We're talking about a global average at the moment of 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, which is perhaps 5, 6 degrees Fahrenheit. But there's dispute over the next 100 years, how much they? Because Matt Ridley, again, who's no slouch, says that, that the IPCC cut its estimate of global warming by a huge 33% recently, three years ago, particularly the three degree rise for 2,100, plus or minus 1.5 degrees. Now it says 2 degrees plus or minus 1.

I'm trying to get at this sort of evidence. You know, but matter of Italy just depends on the assumptions you make regarding the amount of emissions and all sorts of things and this change by less than 30% as far as our predictions are concerned. And the predictions are essentially the same in terms of the scientific basis on which they're based in terms of our scientific understanding. Those predictions have not significantly changed for about 15 years now. So they are quite strongly based, in fact.

So you are sure of two things. First of all, that you can predict over the next years the degrees of global warming to 1 or 2 degrees, and A, and B, that these will necessarily have devastating effects rather than, as in the Middle Ages, beneficial effects. You're convinced of those two things. Then we can move on.

If you're both convinced, who am I to do? Let's say what we're sure about. I mean, some parts of the world will, in fact, of course, under a warmer world, be better off if you live in there in North Siberia. If you're a farmer in a marginal tundra region, then you will have a longer growing period, you will be able to grow different crops and so on.

Northern Europe will become, probably, agriculture in Northern Europe may well benefit from global warming, for instance, in certain parts of Canada. forests will tend to die back for the first hundred years or so because the climate is changing but then... The climate changes massively in tropical forests anyway.

Then they would possibly improve. But that's a question of adaptation which can be achieved over a long enough period. So some parts of the world will be better off but some parts of the world will be hit very badly and it's the parts which will be hit very badly which we're mostly concerned about and that is parts that will be flooded

because of the sea level rise. Bangladesh will be very badly hit, for instance. Southern China will be very badly hit. But this is no new thing. Parts of the world have been susceptible to flood for centuries and what people have built dikes against them and we have now more warnings. There is such a terrible thing.

Bangladesh, it's impossible. It's completely impossible. I mean, a lot of Bangladesh will be followed. We're talking about a sea level rise, which is very much more than we've had for thousands of years. And you're certain about that? We're as certain as we can be about that. Yes, I mean, one in one, that sort of number.

I mean, it's a good, good certainty. George Monbeau, you've been aching to come here. One of the key iron is here is that the parts of the world which are most likely to be hit are the parts of the world which are already most vulnerable

to particularly famine. They are sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Sub-Saharan Africa, because it's likely to get warmer and drier in the areas which are already warm and dry, which will make life very difficult for the farmers there,

which will have a massive impact on food production. And the Indian subcontinent, partly because of monsoonal flooding coming from the sea, but also because many of the centres of civilisation and the centres of agricultural production are the valleys of the great rivers,

the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Indus, which are fed from the Himalayas and fed on the whole from the melting of snow and glaciers. Now, in those mountains at the moment, the glaciers are retreating very rapidly. And what we're likely to see is that for the first half of this century, there'll be an increase in flooding in those areas

with potentially devastating consequences for the people living in them. In the second half, we'll see a decrease in the amount of water flowing through those rivers, again with potentially devastating consequences for agricultural production. And this is the central irony. These two areas, not only are the most vulnerable to climate change,

they're also the places in which, per head of population, people produce least carbon dioxide. In other words, we in the developed world are creating this problem, they in the developing world, are picking up the bill. But you, well, I'm still worried about the evidence for this. The evidence that you could, what evidence can you tell us, Chris Horton, that in the next century, because all this is to do with man-made pollution, isn't it?

The worry is that this is the greenhouse effect. It's all to do with us emitting too much CO2, and that's all to say. Can you give us your evidence for why the accumulation of this is going to have such a devastating effect? Because people use extra CO2 as fertiliser, don't they, to bring crops on. Yes, indeed, if you want to grow big tomatoes. You put a bottle of CO2 in your greenhouse and it will give you bigger tomatoes and there is a CO2 fertilisation effect which will to some extent, a small extent, produce greater crops.

And all this is in the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have a big body, we try to use all the scientists in the world to know anything about it, whether they believe in devastation or not. This is, so we're talking of thousands of scientists worldwide who've been working on the science of the problem, on the impacts of the problem, and indeed on the economics of the problem. And all the evidence we have points very strongly to the fact that the damage, which will occur, will be very very very important.

much greater than the benefits. And, I mean, the world won't come to an air. Can you give us some fix on what the emissions of CO2 are going to do to the atmosphere over the next 50, 100 years, which are going to make these, bring about these devastating apocalyptic effects that George has been outlining? Well, the two biggest negative impacts are the rise of sea level by about half a metre, maybe

a metre, but it's the sort of range... But this will be caused by what? By us, by pollution? This is, no, this is caused by the fact that the earth is getting warmer, only by one or two degrees, but the ocean then, the ocean water expands because it's heated. It's the normal thermal expansion,

which makes the, it wants a bigger volume, so the sea level rises. And that sea level will continue to rise, actually, as the ocean gradually warms over perhaps a thousand years, all the way to the bottom. And it's going to rise by the order of. And our conservative estimate is half a meter a century.

Now, half a meter is going to create some problems for the UK, but we can buy our way out of those. You'll have to raise the Thames barrier and do things on the East Coast and so on. But in places like Bangladesh, southern China, Nile Delta of Egypt, all the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, many of them will disappear. You're talking of millions, hundreds of millions of people who will be very severely.

affected by it. So that's one effect. The other big effect, the other major negative impact is on the water supplies. Now, if you have a warmer world, you have more energy in the atmosphere, you have a bigger, more energetic overturning of the atmosphere as it goes on. You have water, air that goes higher, gets drier. So you get more floods and you get more droughts, more intense floods, more frequent floods. Now floods and droughts are the biggest disasters that the world knows by far in terms of economic damage, in terms of deaths, in terms of misery. Now, if you increase the frequency and the intensity of floods and droughts, and that is very bad news, particularly for many developing countries.

Again, in a place like the UK, we can buy our way out of it. We can move water from one place to another. We can find things to do. North America is the same. Europe, the same. But if you go to countries in the subtropics, which you're in... will be very badly hit by this, where large numbers of people live, then you're going to get very large numbers of people

who want to go and live somewhere else. And that's not possible in our modern world. George Monby, are you absolutely convinced, well, obviously you are, but can you give us your reasoning why all this is going to happen because of man-made pollution? It seems to me we've got a large planet. A lot of it is oceans. It doesn't grow up pollution come off that.

A lot of it has not got factories on, and manifest pollution doesn't come off that. it could say in this particular part of the world in which we live, Western Europe was far more pollution in the 18th and 19th century than there is today, stuff piling into the sky. You just have to look across London now. You couldn't look across London a hundred years ago. Like you can look across London now.

And so it goes on and on. Are you convinced, and given the way that the earth changes anyway and there's things coming in from out, are you convinced that it's this man-made pollution, which you seem to be that this is the single cause, this is going to cause all this tremendous damage you're talking about. Well, there have been some increasingly sophisticated computer models produced, charting both the production of carbon dioxide

and the production of sulphate aerosols, which are another environmental pollutant, but which have a corrective effect. They actually reduce the amount of global warming because they create a sort of screen effectively in the atmosphere. And when you plot those, the increases in concentration of those gases, against world temperature over the course of this century,

you see that the two lines are very closely correlated indeed. The statistical probability that those would be correlated without there being a link between environmental pollution caused by humans and world temperatures is very, very low indeed. We're talking less than 2%. So the chances are very high indeed that the temperature changes we're already observing and the temperature changes which we're likely to observe

over the next 100 years are directly and immediately related to human-caused environmental pollution. The new thing to say, actually, an important thing to say, is that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide has a long lifetime in the atmosphere for the order of 100 years. So the carbon dioxide that I burn in my house

because I'm burning gas or in my motor car or whatever it may be, that carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere. It spreads around the whole atmosphere and pollutes the world. It's global pollution. Now, global pollution is a rather new thing. The only other example we know of that is the ozone layer being destroyed by chlorine compounds,

again, which humans put up. We didn't have global pollution 100 years ago. And this is very hard for us to get our heads around. I mean, we have to begin to recognize that when we turn on our kettle in Birmingham, we're helping to flood Bangladesh. This requires a step change, in human consciousness. We've got to start to see the world and our impact on the world,

our engagement with the world, in terms completely different from those that we've used before. And global pollution needs global solutions, of course. It means that all countries have to get together and say, well, some of us might actually be better off, but mostly we're going to be worse off. And because we're now a global village and the world is all one community in very many ways, then we have to find global solutions to it and we have to work our way through it. Well, if we had all this pollution as we did have in the knocking about in the 18th and 19th century

and you say the CO2 goes in the air and hangs around for 100 years, shouldn't we have seen more bad effects in the 20th century that we've seen? Because the amount of carbon dioxide we burnt in 100 years ago was very small compared to what we're burning today. We're talking of, in fact, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere didn't really start to go up until about 1950. When we've really started to burn worldwide, that is, coal, oil and gas in a big way.

We've also cut down forests, and wood in forests decay, and when wood decays, you've got carbon dioxide too. So that's helped to add to the total burden of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it's only a relatively recent thing of the last 20 or 30 years. Melvin, there's some key evidence from some ice cores taken in the Antarctic, going back 420,000 years. and what those show is that carbon dioxide of methane levels, methane is another greenhouse gas, those that are now higher than they've been at any time

in that last 420,000 years. They also show that the onset of the warming which brought the ice ages that we've had over the last 100,000 years, over the last half a million years, that the onset of the warming which brought those to an end was also attended by raised levels of carbon levels. outside of methane. So what you're really seeing is that every way you approach this, whichever angle you come in from, the evidence stacks up one set of evidence on top of the

other sets of evidence until it seems a compelling, conclusive picture. Man-made pollution is leading to global warming. There's also another modern thing which is important to realize, and that is that we're actually much more vulnerable as a world to climate variation. Climate variability has always been with us. There have always been storms, they've always been drought, it's always been floods to some extent, and people have had to live with those.

And, of course, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago, people could move. If they didn't like the climate, they could move somewhere else. In the Middle Ages, the Vikings, of course, moved from, or at the time, it looked later, actually, when it got colder in Scandinavia, that's right. They moved over to...

They moved for other reasons. They moved for loose. But they also moved because of the climate, actually. And so they could move and there was no problem, and they could take over and go and live somewhere else. And until very recently, people have been able to go and live other places if the climate is up there. I don't think that's true. I mean, when there was a sort of great freeze in this country, say 16, 17th,

when it was very, very cold, most people in this country couldn't just sort of put their knapsacks on and march somewhere else. They were stuck where they were. They didn't need to because there was enough food around. They could grow. It wasn't that bad. It wasn't a complete flood or a complete drought. We're talking, we don't know in this country, I think,

what the really devastating effects of enormous droughts and enormous floods in the way that Africa's experienced over the last round of years. And, of course, we're seeing people trying to move, which is why we've got this massive phenomenon now of environmental refugees. They're not finding it very easy, but they're doing their best because, in many cases, they are desperate. There is simply no way they can keep farming land, which has become unsuitable for farming,

principally because in many parts of the world it's now too dry. Now, I want to ask two questions. One is to do with, as you work so close to it, both of you, you and your scientific capacity, you and your journalistic capacity, what sort of schedule you see for these unrolling catastrophes and secondly what people are in a position to do something about it are doing about it. So first of all, here we are in the 21st century. You've talked about this century, well, we're in it, right.

You talked about in 50 years' time, which is a snap of the fingers. Some terrible things are going to happen. So what are we going to see in the next few years on your plan, if you're right and if your figures are right, what are we going to see? We're going to see a gradual risency level. We're going to see it in 20 years' time or 10 years' time. We will gradually see it 20, 30 years' time. We will really see it for real in a way.

We don't see it at the moment probably. We will see more disasters of the floods and droughts kind and so on. And gradually things will get more severe in terms of. in terms of climate disasters. Certainly as far as the developing world is concerned, and we will gradually see that occurring. What can we do about it? There's a great deal we can do about it, actually,

because we're terribly inefficient in our use of energy. We burn fossil fuels without really thinking about it. They're so cheap. We don't care about it. And we could become very much more efficient. We could reduce our use of these things, and we could become more efficient, and we could become, therefore, have economic gain.

In fact, for many of the things that we could do, There was a lot of win-win situations to be found out there. Solar energy, wind energy. And then there were other forms of energy like solar, like wind, and so on, which we're not investing in this country. Which we're not investing in the way we should be investing in it. We invested ten times as much in energy research 15 years ago than we do now, and yet we need far more new sources now.

So we're not doing many of the right things. We'd be talking about it. Are other countries investing in energy research? There's really very little going on. and this is a major tragedy. Part of the problem is this great institutional inertia that big business has made its investments, be those investments in oil rigs,

in car manufacturing plants, producing a certain kind of car engine, and it wants to stick to those investments and has fought very hard to ensure that significant change does not take place. And we've seen some very powerful, well-organized lobbies, twisting government's arms behind their backs and saying, you will not make substantial changes, will you?

And the governments have said, fine, we won't. we need to break that. We need to break through that barrier and see far, far more ambitious targets for carbon dioxide reduction than we have at the moment. We now have climate conventions and the most recent one is at Kyoto, a lot of publicity in 1997,

but the biggest, the engine of the world at the moment, USA will not ratify that. What does that say to both of you? It says effectively that we're going to stick with the carbon inequality which we've built up over the last 50, 100, What does that mean for listeners who might not have encountered carbon inequality?

That means that the rich countries using a great deal of fossil fuels are effectively causing enormous problems for the poor countries who are using very few fossil fuels, that we're not heading towards a situation whereby we say, right, there's a certain amount of carbon we can use, a sustainable use of carbon worldwide, let's divide that up so that eventually we head towards a situation whereby everyone in the world gets an equal allocation and is able to use an equal amount. Thanks to the intransigence of blocks like the United States,

and to a lesser extent, some European countries, we're finding it very hard to move towards that contraction of world carbon use and that convergence of the amount of carbon allocated per person, which is the only fair eventual solution. But this isn't lying on beds and nails, you seem, moving. In fact, the world will be a better place in other ways, too, if we cut our energy use by becoming much more efficient

if we cut our other pollutants too by burning less fossil fuels we could have nicer homes we could have more comfortable homes we could have better transport we could live in a much nicer world and in fact we could grow economically

much better actually if we took on these opportunities and some industries are seeing this as an opportunity rather than that's very good for job creation I mean, some estimates suggest that a 30% cut in carbon dioxide, thanks to a transfer to new technologies in Britain,

could create half a million jobs. But as we come to the end of this first program of the new What's It and What's It and What's it, I mean, having started as a skeptic, and End as Candide, if the immediate future looks so rosy without all this, why aren't we getting on doing it? Because there are lots of vested interests.

We're very conservative, politicians are too timid, and if we really grasped it and said, let's do it, let's do it well, and let's have a better world. We can get on with it and make a real success of it. George, do you see anybody taking the lead in this? I mean, with greatest respect to you, too,

any sort of substantial political body taking the lead in this? Well, there have been some positive moves, and the British government has been reasonably good. It's been better than most governments. I think what we've got to see, really, is a large citizens movement worldwide. It's beginning to happen. We've seen people become a lot more confident

in their attempts to challenge government, positions. We saw that at Seattle, for example, in November, the World Trade Organization talks. We need to put on governments the same sort of pressure that the industrial lobbies have been putting on them, but driving them the other way saying we've got to sort out this problem and sort it out now.

Finally, can I ask again to come back to my devil's advocate position at the top of the programme? About 30 years ago, a lot of scientists were tremendously worried about an imminent ice age. Where did that go? A few scientists who didn't know too much were worried about an imminent ice age. I mean, there will be an ice age eventually, given a few thousand years, we'll probably head for another ice age.

But that's way down stream. Down stream. All right. Well, thank you both very much. I hope listeners enjoyed that as much as I did. And next week in our time, be looking at the future once more as I discuss information technology and its long-term effects. Thanks very much for that.

And thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy, at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.