Modern Wisdom - #403 - Richard Betts - Why Is Climate Science So Disputed?

Episode Date: November 27, 2021

Richard Betts MBE is Head of the Climate Impacts strategic area at the MET Office, the lead author on several reports from the IPCC and a Professor at the University of Exeter. There are few areas of science as contested as the climate. I wanted to speak to someone who has been researching this area for more than 3 decades to discover out why there is so much disagreement over fundamental questions like whether the earth's warming is actually caused by humans? Can we stop it? How accurate are climate models? Should we switch to renewables? What does Richard think of Extinction Rebellion? How much are China to blame? And much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Extra Stuff: Follow Richard on Twitter - https://twitter.com/richardabetts  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Richard Betts. He's the head of the Climate Impact Strategic Area at the Met Office, the lead author on several reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a professor at the University of Exeter. There are few areas of science as contested as the climate. I wanted to speak to someone who has been researching this area for more than three decades to discover why there is so much disagreement over fundamental questions, like whether the earth's warming is actually caused by humans. Can we stop it? How accurate are the climate models? Should we switch to renewables? What does Richard think of extinction rebellion? How much are China to blame? And much more.

how much China to blame, and much more. But now it's time to learn about the state of climate science with Richard Betts. I wanted to try and have a conversation with you to work out how there is so much disagreement about climate science. People are prepared to accept it. Eating too much makes you fat, well not everyone, but most people that are saying do. Smoking causes cancer, but climate science seems to probably be one of the most contested areas that I've seen. So for the people that aren't familiar with you in your background, what are your credentials and what do you do? So I'm a climate scientist at the Met Office, which is the UK's National Weather Service

and Climate Service, and I'm also a professional university of Exeter. So I train as a physicist. I have a Master's in Meteorology and a PhD in Meteorology, and I've worked in the Met Office as Climate Research Department, the Hadley Centre for nearly 30 years. So I've been working on the climate modelling and then bringing in observations and these days applying it to risk assessments, to understand what we might have to do in response to climate change. And the intergovernmental panel on climate change, what is the role of that? What's the duty of that? climate change? What is the role of that? What's the duty of that? Yes, I'm a lead author on one of the, well, several of the reports by the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. The role of that is to produce authoritative assessments of the science of climate change in many different aspects. So the physical science, understanding the changes that are occurring, what we're expecting for the future, but also the implications for human impacts by diversity, impacts on someone, and the personal challenge, even more challenging, and all that, the different options for reducing climate change in terms of mitigation. The IPCC is somewhat unique and it also links very closely to governments. It's not a government document but it is designed to inform government policy. So part of the process at the end is to very closely with

the representatives of the world's governments to make sure that they are brought in to the science of it. And that's where it gets particularly interesting at the end of the process. But it is a scientific document ultimately. Talk to me about this tension that I brought up earlier on then. Why is it the case that there can be so much contested about something that to me sounds like a science. So I think what is more contested is actually what the responses are and what the sciences take into imply rather than the science itself. I mean with any science that there's there's always somewhat different views. You can interpret things in somewhat different ways, especially when it's a big and complicated subject. But there's very few people, if any, that contests the basic fundamental

science of climate change in terms of greenhouse gases exist. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, greenhouse gases keep the earth warm, and it would have have been as other gases like methane, water vapor, they're also greenhouse gases. Hardly anybody dispute that where controversy comes in, some of it is in terms of what we are expecting for the future, in terms of how severe the future impacts will be if we keep building up more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide. There's a wide range of possible outcomes of that. So people tend to focus on either the worst case or the best case scenarios. But even beyond that, there's the deepest controversies

about what this really means, how urgent it is to reduce emissions, should we just live with the changes that we're putting to place, how so they will those be. So when you get further down that chain, the real controversy has come in, I think. How accurate are the climate models now?

Because even I know that the weather guys get it wrong some time, and if they can't predict what mucus or Austin, Texas is going to see tomorrow, whether it's going to rain or not, I imagine that all of the complexities rolled forward over 10 years globally must be kind of difficult. Yes, working in the Met Office, obviously, the main role of the Met Office to do the weather forecast day to day and week by week and so on. Yes, you can't always predict a few days ahead exactly what's going to happen.

We are actually pretty good now within a few days. Perhaps you know, a week week ahead in some cases, but the atmosphere is very complex. So you're trying to predict individual weather, day to day and hour to hour. You can't do that more than a few days ahead. Beyond that, you're looking at trends. So you can look at general trends

and whether it's going to be a generally warmer or milder winter, for example, but then you're looking kind of more about the balance of likelihoods. When you go beyond that, you can't predict day by day, year by year because there's so much complexity, but one you can successfully look at is the longer term trends of warming and general patterns of rainfall change. And actually the early climate models that were produced in the 1960s and early 1970s, they made predictions which have now been shown to be accurate so it was predicted in the early 1970s

that by the year 2000 the world would warm by 0.6 of a degree Celsius. That turned out to be reasonably accurate. The truth was about half a degree so it was a slight overestimate but not too bad and the warming has continued since then. So we're now in a state where we are able to see that the early predictions of climate science are broadly coming true. We're now also seeing more extreme weather of some kinds, so more extreme heat waves in some areas, more extreme rainfall, more increased drought in other areas. That gets more difficult to tease out, particularly things, but we are seeing those to find a change now. So,

broadly speaking, we know that we were saying the right thing was 30 or 50 years ago, but we still can't really, yes, predict perfectly for many years in the future, because the system is so complex and chaotic. So then becomes a task of risk assessment rather than trying to make perfect predictions, you see. Is CO2 the sort of fundamental underpinning or one of the main pillars of what you guys are looking at with regards to climate change? CO2 is very important. It's not the most important greenhouse gas in terms of its effect on the climate at the moment because the most important gas is water vapor. We're not directly changing

water vapor in terms of human activity except for very small and out areas where we're irrigating. So we're considered about CO2 because that's the one that we're increasing the most in the atmosphere and it stays in the atmosphere for very long time. Decades to centuries if you if you increase the amount of CO2 that increase will be there for decades or centuries ahead because it doesn't break down chemically in the atmosphere. So that's why the focus is on is on CO2 but there's other gases that methane andthane and NW as well, also greenhouse gases that we are increasing. What's happening with water vapor? So water vapor also changes and that changes in response to climate change. So as the world warms, a warm atmosphere can hold more water,

so water vapor can be a feedback mechanism on climate change so it can actually increase the impact of CO2 and other green escatives you see. So it's like a catalyst, let's say that there is a warming on the earth that increases the water vapor which permits more of a warming. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes, yeah. Interesting. What about the increased greening from CO2? Because this is something that I've heard about, that the parts per million that you can get, if you have greenhouses where farmers and horticulturalists are growing particular things,

that they want their PPM to be through the ceiling and that we're nowhere near that amount, increased greening presumably would mean more plants, more plants would mean that they absorb more CO2, which would then bring the CO2 level down. So, talk to me about how all of that pieces together. Yep, so that's something that I've worked on myself and I've published on several times and that in fact some of my PhD was on that exact issue actually. So yes, when you put POSCO2 in the atmosphere, that enhances photosynthesis, the process through which plants grow.

So plants will take up some of the CO2 from the atmosphere, through photosynthesis, the process through which plants grow. So plants will take up some of the CO2 from the atmosphere, three photosynthesis. So that's a negative feedback. So actually, if that didn't happen, we would have warmed the earth even more because the CO2-wise would have been even greater than it has been. So we'd have probably doubled the amount of warming than we had seen. CO2 is also taking up in the ocean to some extent as well. So that is an extremely important process. And so it is a large part of the reason of why we're seeing greening off the earth, where you can see from satellite that some areas of the earth has denser vegetation cover, especially semi-arid regions where there's limited water, so higher CO2 means plants need less water so they can green up more.

There's other reasons for the green that we're seeing change in land use, also the warming of the climate itself, in the very cold regions, simply warmer temperatures when you get longer growing seasons. So there's many factors behind the green, but CO2 is one of them. The reason that's also important for the future is we don't know for sure whether that will continue to the same extent in the future. You know from laboratory studies that the impact of CO2 on photosynthesis, it kind of flattens off at high levels of CO2, but we also know that higher temperatures,

as well as living at longer growing season in cold regions that can have a detrimental effect in hot regions. So the key question is, will this beneficial effect of CO2 continue into the future? We need to do more large scale experiments in real ecosystems with high levels of CO2 to really be sure about that. So again, it's an open question. So when you're considering risk assessments, you need to account for a range of possibilities that has CO2 will affect

reading in the future. How have you been able to tease apart the industrial impact on CO2 in the atmosphere? So we know for sure that the CO2 rise is entirely man-made because the amount that we're putting in in the atmosphere and possible fuel burning is way more than the amount that we're seeing building up in the atmosphere about double, in fact. So simply by conservation and mass, we're putting 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year for the burning fossil fuels, another one or two billion from deforestation. The amount of buildup in the atmosphere is only equivalent to about five or so billion tons of carbon per year. So simply by the arithmetic there, we know that what the increases due to the industrial impacts has been offset by the natural impacts of uptake a CO2 by natural vegetation.

How do you know that that wasn't just a trend that was occurring and that's now being continued? Well, we can look back in time from getting data from ice cores. If you drill down into ice layers on the layers, ice that have been built over thousands of years and examining the bubbles of air trapped in the ice, as the snow fell and trapped here within it and then turn to ice, you've got a record of the atmosphere going back thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years so you can analyze that and see what the seeking concentration was and before we started burning fossil fuels in the industrial revolution, the CO2 levels were hovering around about 280 parts per million for many, many thousands of years

and they did go up and down in the more distant past. You can infer it from fossil records. It did change naturally in the past in response to very large scale changes in global ecosystems, but in a much slower rate than what we've seen in recent decades. The rate of C2 increases just way more than anything's been seen in the previous Pagodial climate record. I heard something about the Malankovic cycle, which is this sort of climate wobbling up and down in temperature, we're going up and down and this is part of a small uptrend before we then go further down. How much legitimate seed you see in that? Yeah, so that, again, that's that, that's perfectly good piece of climate science that colleagues have worked on for many decades or more.

So, the ITAGs are generally these milankovic cycles of change in the Earth's orbit and the tilt of the Earth. So, that's an external forcing on the climate system. We call it. So change in the earth's energy balance, all the patterns of how the energy from the sun is reaching the earth, occur due to these changes in the earth's orbit and the tilt of the earth. That can lend these kind of feedback processes like with the carbon cycle, which mean that as vegetation changes over the world, it can pick up more CO2 for some periods or release more CO2 as you come or release more CO2 as you come back out of the cycle. And this is all part of our understanding of how a feedback

process in the climate system. So the reason that this is important is because then let's us see when we're looking at how we're warming the worth with earth and other for things like human cause increase in CO2, how feedbacks may then amplify or dampen that in the future. So all links together as our understanding of the climate system. What's the current projections that you guys have got with regards to temperature and CO2? Let's say that we don't make too many changes and kind of things were to continue as they are at the moment,

what happens to temperature and CO2 concentrations? So if we carried on as we are, we would see global warming of anywhere between two and possibly up to four degrees Celsius by the end of this century. It's very hard to be precise because we don't know the strength of all the feedback. So the best guess is probably somewhere below three degrees warming by the end of the century.. So the best guess is probably somewhere below three degrees or maybe by the end of the century. If we carry on, as we are, I was currently implemented policies on energy and land use.

Just to interject there, Richard. When you say on average, when a climate scientist says on average an increase in this, how's that figure worked out? Is that an aggregate across all areas around the globe? Because presumably, certain areas will increase by more, certain areas will increase by less. How do you come to that figure? Yeah, exactly. So this is all done with climate models, which are essentially the same models that we use for the weather forecast.

So these are models based on mathematical equations, which represent our understanding of the physics of the climate forecast. So these are models based on mathematical equations, which represent our understanding of the physics of the climate system. So we understand the workings of the atmosphere pretty well. So we're able to make these calculations, which can explain past changes in climate and make projections of the future. As I said earlier, you can't make perfect predictions. There's a certain amount of uncertainty, but if you compare the models with what they've done in the past and compare with what we've observed in the past, in terms of past warming, you can actually narrow the uncertain to some extent. So these projections I've just talked about are based on an assumption of carrying on emitting as we currently are as you pose the question,

but also how that plays out in terms of the response of the climate system linked to what we understand from past changes. Yeah, so we've got this water vapor as one of the examples. You have feedback mechanisms, so you have a first order effect, which is an increase of CO2, then you have a second order effect, which is an increase of water vapor, then a third order effect, which is CO2 in response to the water vapor and so on and so on. Yes, I mean, that the computers that you've got running these models must be pretty big and pretty sophisticated because you can already begin to see how when you put that across an entire globe, just how many degrees of separation you are away from what you're trying to do in what a 80 years time to try and arrive at these sort of figures?

Yes, I mean, so these models are vast. There are two million lines of Fortran code. We still use Fortran, which a lot of computer scientists find amusing, because it's a very old computer language, but it is actually, it actually a very well-used language in climate science, because one of the important things is many people work on these models over years and decades. So it's got to be a particular computer language which helps with collaborations, it's got to be very clear and structured. So there's dozens, maybe even hundreds of people who have worked on the Metopist model over the years. So it's two million lines of thought-try, which represent the mathematical equations,

which represent the physics of the climate system. These calculations are only for tens of thousands of points across the Earth's surface, and many, many layers in the atmosphere. So yeah, huge models which take weeks to actually do the calculations, in fact. That's crazy. I had heard something to do with where temperatures are detected, temperature changes. How do you ensure that there isn't a discrimination with regards to where temperature changes are measured? Let's say that you take them from particular areas and not from others or areas are more represented. I'm going to guess that this is something

you guys have to account for as well. Yes, exactly. So, colleagues of mine in the toughest and in other institutions across the world, I've done a lot of work on this because there's thousands, tens of thousands of data points and whether information taken across the world,

every hour, probably even in every minute, these days actually, and bringing that together is done routinely for monitoring weather and helping to with the weather forecasts. And it's now done very systematically across the world and there's quite high standards for that. If you want to look at climate change in the past, if you go back a few decades, the quality is very good. We've got satellite data as well, which also helps give a big picture. But if you go back, you know, 80s and 70s, you've got satellite data. If you go back before that, the network of weather stations across the world, it is less systematic. We've got, whether it's taken from aircraft and ships and weather balloons as well. But would you go back to the start of the early 20th century? You've got much more sparse data and then beyond that, you're much more limited. And sometimes,

in many cases, you have to be very careful about whether this data is reliable, especially whether stations have perhaps even shifted, like a particular town has moved its weather station for one side of town to the other. You've got local effects like an urban area which generates your own temperature, impact and so on. You might have had a forest cut down or wind, that kind of thing. So you have to account for these by cross checking weather stations in certain areas. There's a lot of quality control goes into that now. And so it's not trivial matter.

You can't just look at the rotation data because you will get a very misleading picture. You have to do this kind of cross checking to make sure you're going to clear an accurate picture of change over time. What happens if we get to the end of the century and we're less than three degrees, but more than two degrees warmer? So I would say we will probably have initiated some severe lung-term sea level rise impacts at the very least because it seems that

well, mountain glaciers are already melting because we've worn the world already. So we're already locking ourselves into putting more meltwater into the oceans and therefore more sea level rise. We're more sea level rise, we see sea level rise happening already. We may well have initiated some further long-term impacts of melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. If we keep warming below three degrees, perhaps we won't kick off the worst of these, but I think exceeding two degrees does risk some major impacts like that.

And also we would have changed when the patterns in many parts of the world, some of the hotter parts of the world, which are already kind of almost on the edge of what humans can live with day to day, what we'll be going past the areas, past times of extreme heat stress for humans and so on, so places like the Indian subcontinent parts of Africa, a two degree world areas at past times of extreme heat stress for humans as well as the places

around the Indian subcontinent parts of Africa, a two degree world would probably expose about a billion people to extreme heat stress for more than 10 days a year we've calculated. So the hotter parts of the world would be seeing severe impacts and then we'd be seeing impacts on biodiversity, the colder regions of the world where a lot of the ecosystems and species of animals and plants are adapted to cold temperatures. They won't be seeing the cold temperatures they're used to, so we'd be seeing massive impacts on biodiversity and human life there as well, actually,

in terms of ways of life, which cultures which are adapted to cold temperatures, you see. What about if we get closer towards four degrees? Is there a step change that occurs there or is it just more of the same horror? It's very hard to say that whether there's any kind of particular step change, you often hear about critical thresholds or something. Oh, yeah, like runaway cyclical natures of stuff. Yeah, so you can't put your finger on any particular level of global war that would definitely kick off any kind of chain reaction. But the more war when we put into the system, the more we risk these large scale changes,

like irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet, for example, which would take centuries to millennia to completely melt away, but you can reach a point of never return with the Greenland ice sheet where as it melts, the surface of the ice sheet comes down to the warmer temperature in the lower atmosphere and that sort of feeds on itself. Just explain that to me. So the Greenland ice sheet is very thick, it's mild thick, so as the surface of that melts under higher temperatures, the surface comes down lower into the atmosphere and the lower part of the atmosphere is warmer than the higher

atmosphere. So you could bring the surface of the green and high sheet into an area of warmer temperatures and that could mean the warming in the melting could feed on itself, you see. So that's what the irreversible change is. By being high, you're actually protected and refrigerated, and you have a frozen area which covers over an area that perhaps would be even now prone to melting, but it's kind of, it's almost protected over the top. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. So, and there's other potential, kind of tipping points in the climate system, which may exist, but we don't know exactly where. So one very famous one is the Amazon rainforest tipping point, where some early models of ours

projected a very severe warming and drying in the Amazon region. Most models don't project such a severe drying now, it has to be said. So that's actually something of a relief to some extent. However, most models do project something of a drying and warbing in that region. And that means that the other impact on the Amazon is from deforestation. So the real threat to the Amazon probably comes from a combination of deforestation and climate change. So it's kind of milder drawing of the Amazon. That means that any impacts of deforestation would be worse because deforestation in the Amazon means that the edges of the forest dry out and become more susceptible to fire. So it's more complex and simply a climate-driven

dive-act that the older models showed is more linked between deforestation and climate. Is the Amazon benefiting from increased greening from CO2? Is that helping it to grow back more quickly? Large parts of it at the moment, yes. Some parts of it know, some parts of it are now so warm and getting drier and are becoming impacted by deforestation and degradation that they're not benefiting. But large parts of it are. So a key question for us is, how long will that continue in the future? We've recently initiated,

well, I say we, colleagues of mine in Brazil are setting up a major experiment in the Amazon rainforest to look at exactly this. Will the rainforest remain resilient? And will it take more CO2 as CO2 levels are increased? So that's a big piece of science that needs to be done to help us narrow down the uncertainty in their models. Talk to me for a second. I want to try and get into the philosophical underpinning of what climate, not necessarily climate science, but what having a climate conscious

necessarily climate science, but what having a climate conscious world view is actually trying to achieve, whether or not it's trying to keep the planet the same, whether it's trying to make it as hospitable for humans as possible, whether it's trying to keep a hold of biodiversity, whether it's as my friend and past guest Charles Eisenstein said, just trying to retain the beauty of the planet as much as we can. What do you see as the goal of whatever you would refer to, climate conservation perhaps? What's the actual outcome that we're aiming for? So I mean, that probably comes down to something of a personal view. So I can only offer my personal view on this, others will have a different have different views. But for me, it's for the point of view of humans, it's about making sure that we

don't make our environment, you know, uncomfortable and ultimately impossible for ourselves in certain places. It's times to reason that we have evolved under a certain range of climates in the past. We've adapted our societies to certain local climates. We are actually fairly adapt to all humans living in a wide range of places across the world. So to some extent it can be about keeping the climate what we're used to in a particular location because we've built cities based on our own local climates. But in other cases, it's about making sure that we don't go beyond what is actually tolerable for people in a very, very hot parts of the world where there's not a limit to what we can cope with as humans or at least what we can kind of function within.

So that's part of it. It's about making sure that we don't make things inconvenient or impossible for ourselves. But also I think there's more of a, you can imagine there's a moral view on our responsibility to other species as well. Other species on the earth are adapted to certain local climates. We're changing that. So a lot of people, including myself, would regard it as an ethical tool to make life impossible for other species and ecosystems. And there is some beauty in the earth you can appreciate, you know, cold regions, glaciers, we love a cold, I love a cold bitters morning, for example. I do feel sad that the cold, I live a cold, it is morning, for example.

I do feel sad that the cold, whether we see it in the 1980s, happens much less frequently now, or it's inconvenient, but I did like a nice cold winter, you know. So these kind of changes, there's an emotional aspect to that, as well as cultural aspects as well as also human practical and survival aspects

and survival aspects for the species. So a whole range of things. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I definitely see as the stewards of the earth, I think that as the only ones aboard spaceship earth that aren't just cargo but were crew as well, we have some sort of moral obligation, I think, to act well as guardians of the other creatures and the diversity that we've kind of inherited. I wonder whether I wonder how much there is a price that needs to be paid. If you could almost see it as a balancing act between having an advanced civilization that is able to bring people out of poverty, that is able to raise living

standards, that is able to access degrees of health and wellness and flourishing and economic value and so on and so forth, whether, well, presumably, I'll put it to you. Is there a sacrifice that needs to be made in order for us to get that? Presumably by trying to restrict carbon emissions, what we're aiming to do is have our cake and eat it too. It's, we want to be able to live in a technologically advanced world,

but we also don't want these negative externalities that we have from the climate being wrecked. Yeah, and this is why this gets so controversial because people have different views about where this balance should lie. So yes, we want to have a good and happy and fulfilling and comfortable life for everybody on earth. And that requires, yeah, sort of, the living standards, which we have historically relied on fossil fuels and the use of the land to achieve. But now we're recognizing that the way we've done that in the past is ultimately not sustainable in the long term.

But at the same time, you can't rip that away immediately because we rely on it so much. So the phrase just transition gets used. So it's about how where people, individuals, societies, towns, and cities and even countries that rely on the old way of doing things, how they can transition to a more sustainable way of doing things without disadvantaged people. So for example, this whole community is relying coal mining. If we just shut down coal mining, as happened in the UK in the 80s, it has devastating effects on the local community. So you have to find ways to get through that and make sure that people have other sources of employment and you don't just rid the high-end out of a community and replace it with

nothing else. So it's not a trivial problem to deal with. I learned that cheap energy is one of the best ways to raise people in developing countries out of poverty and that fossil fuels are one of the best ways to get them that. Is there a tension between trying to reduce fossil fuel use and also still trying to get developing countries

up to an acceptable living standard. So there is a tension there and the other tension, of course, is the other effects of fossil fuel such as local air pollution and so on. So again, in the UK, we experienced in the 50s and 60s, incredible air pollution incidents. My dad, who is from the Black Country, would remember horrendous smogs, where it was just desperately unhealthy to be outside. A lot of people died of respiratory related problems and so on. So that was all to do with local air pollution. The UK is sort of, you know, by getting out of so much coal burning has reduced those problems,

those problems still exist in other parts of the world as well. So yes, there is this tension, as you said, but there's also the other effects of quality and so on. You need to take into account as well. Yeah. That's what we're talking about. I kind of combed benefits. It's actually the phrases gets used.

Coats are, there's other benefits of reducing fossil fuels beyond the climate impact, like improving their quality and so on. Yeah, but then there would also be kind of co-costs, which is the reduction of access to energy. It's one of the things that strikes me is that we're kind of fortunate that the planet is as small as it is. I know the earth's massive. I know that it's big, but we can fly around it in the space of 24 hours pretty much now if you're on the right plane. And

if the planet was even bigger, you would have so many different interest groups, so many different nation states. I mean, it's already hard to coordinate stuff at the moment with different actors and different agendas and so on. But let's say that Earth was able to sustain itself at the way that it was, but it was maybe twice as big, which would be an awful lot more land mass and awful lot more humans and awful lot more nation states, even wider varieties in terms of the climates and the countries and so on and so forth. Trying to get, trying to find a middle ground where you have trying to get trying to find a middle ground where you have every different nations interests aligned. You know, we've recently had COP26 in Glasgow.

And for all that countries can go there and say that we want to do this, each country has its own different agenda about where it is, what its desires are, for growth, for economic policy, for everything. So yeah, I think we're probably quite fortunate that we have, although it's massive, as small a sample size of planet to work with. Yeah, that's quite a major thing point which I'd never heard before. Yeah, so, yeah, I think things could be even less is what you're saying.

It could be even more complex. Yeah, you could need 50 million lines of code in order to be able to work out what's going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's an interesting one. But the complexity of the issue and the negotiations at COP and so on, it is a huge problem because governments have responsibilities to their own people and economies and so on. And yes, they want to, on the one hand,

keep protecting their populations from the worst impacts of climate change, but they don't want to just radically change everything, especially the developing world, which he's seen that we were being the developed world of benefiting all this stuff historically. They want some support from us, at least making this transition, is just transition I was talking about earlier. Well, yeah, because they're still playing catch up to try and get their living standards to where they see the West already benefiting from it, whether that be because we got their first or we have slightly preferable climates or whatever economic policies.

And because of the current state of the climate, you could see it as these bourgeois western bastards coming in and telling you that wagging their finger at you and saying, no, no, no, you need to be along with us. And he said, well, we're not in the same boat here. We have completely different living standards and economic structure than you do. So making developing countries sing to the same hymnsheet as a developed country is going to cause even more disparity. Yeah, and that's exactly at the heart of a lot of the negations that were at negotiations that were happening in the last couple of weeks in Glasgow at COP26.

And the other aspect of course is the fact that these countries, along with everyone else, are living with the effective climate change that are already happening. So they've already warmed the world by over-degree Celsius. We're already seeing some changes in extreme weather. We're already seeing an increase in sea levels in some cases. So the more vulnerable parts of the world, which happened to be often the countries which have contributed less to the issue, are now asking for support in dealing with that, putting in place adaptation measures. Because a strong argument comes from some quarters, oh we should just adapt our way out of climate

change or at least adapt our way through it. But you need to actually put things in place to do that adaptation. And again, it's the same countries that need support on getting away from fossil fuels and deforestation that need support in adaptation because they happen to be in the hotter parts of the world and perhaps low-lying, consciousness on. So again, this is another big issue that was addressed at COP26, but not fully was involved. What was your synopsis? What was your summary of that? I'm going to guess this is kind of like you've got the illustration of glass-dombury behind you. Cop26 must be a little bit like the Glastonbury

for climate scientists, but just maybe a little bit less fun. How did you feel that that went based on what you know and what you can tell us? Well, that's another very good analogy, actually. These climate conferences are huge. There's so many things going on at the heart of it, yet the pyramid stage, if you like, is in negotiations. That's what everyone, the rest of the world, sees where the countries are negotiating about what emissions they will cut and how

and will they support each other in adaptation. But then around that, the rest of the festival, the other stages of the festival, it's also this many different, even more delegates are having conversations amongst themselves linking to the negotiations, updating ourselves on each other's work on climate science, what this means for policy,

him from policymakers about what they need. So it's a big kind of meeting of minds around this negotiations. So there's a big kind of meeting of minds around this negotiations. So there's two different levels to it. The outcome of the negotiations, I would probably say it's not as good as we would have hoped, not as good as we needed to keep ourselves on track to meet the Paris Agreement targets of limiting warming well below two degrees. It didn't achieve that yet, but it was a good step along the way. A lot of positive things did happen. There were some good agreements on reducing deforestation,

actually specifically identifying coal as an issue that needs to be addressed. There was an aim to get countries to commit to getting out of coal completely. That wasn't achieved, but there was a commitment to reduce coal use. There were other things on adaptation, again, not going as far as was hoped, but more than was feared. So it's a halfway house really. Beyond that, the, I think, having this, the, the, the opportunity of a networking and sharing the information, sharing the science. That was reasonably positive. I think there's a good shared understanding building as well, which I think that will help inform the next copy in the years time where more needs to be done on the negotiations. Is it annual? It is, yes, it's one every year, except for last year when there

wasn't one because of the pandemic. So the ones from last year, Glasgow was supposed to happen last year, basically. Yeah. Has there ever been one which has attracted as much media attention as the one that we've just seen? Because you could have told me that this happened once every five years, and I would have believed you. Yeah, so this was particularly prominent, especially in the UK because we were the host nation,

but because also it's been five years since the last prominent one, which was in Paris, so the Paris Agreement, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, was at a previous COP, which was very prominent because that was the first time where there was an actual agreement between all countries to take action on climate change that had never been achieved before in previous cops. So that was very prominent. And also the ambition which had been talked about in previous cops before Paris was to limit warming to two degrees, global warming. The ambition became to try to limit them all to 1.5 degrees. That was another key thing in Paris. So the Paris one was as probably as prominent or almost as prominent as the glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass glass tells you what you want to hear but then decides to just crack on spunking loads of CO2 out. So the commitments can be monitored, there's processes in place to sort of check on how missions are actually progressing, that can be audited here, that deforestation can be

monitored by satellite. So the data is there. You can measure how much the sea to is building up in the atmosphere, you can see where emissions are coming from. But in terms of actual enforcement, like with any international agreements, it's actually fundamentally down to almost peer pressure between the countries, essentially. There's no international law as such. It's basically countries' general government's agreement.

Exactly, yes, yes. Like any of these things, it's about the community encouraging itself and policing itself really. There's another thing to consider. I wanted to start talking about China in a second, but we're at least not in open disputes with most of the countries on the planet. Can you imagine how much more difficult it would be if we were seeing some of the nation divides in terms of territories from the 1900s,

World War I, World War II, Cold War, lack of communication between different countries, and we had some climate challenges to overcome because there's no way that you're getting coordination. In fact, it's perhaps because of the tragedy of the commons, it's maybe even in the interests of particular countries that might be able to weather the storm of climate change better to be able to utilize that industrial machinery to just try and get themselves as far ahead because they're still in conflict with whoever else it might be. It's kind of fortunate that we're not a war at the moment. Yes, it is. I mean, although another aspect of this is the climate change being an extra stress on certain countries and so on. So again, this is one of the particularly

controversial issues about the role of climate change and international security and wars and so on. You can't really pin any specific wars on climate change as such, but you can start to see that it doesn't help when you get more extreme weather in a region which is already under tension, then an additional natural disaster, so it's quite franious and that kind of thing, it's not helping at all. So it's a further thing to bear in mind in the future. I saw a start saying that China contributes 30% of the entire world's CO2. Do you know how true that is? In terms of emissions, it's the largest emitter. So they do have a huge population and they have ramped up their energy production in the last 20 years as they've gone undergone a rapid development. So,

yes, China is the biggest emitter as a country. It's not the biggest emitter per person, because they have a very large population. The emissions per person are still smaller than the USA, for example. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, but in terms of the actual emissions there, they're the largest, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So I had a conversation the other day, which really opened my eyes to this. So I, I'm quite concerned about China. I think that sort of globally, it's a threat that we need to be taking far more seriously. And I started talking about this particular statistic that it's the largest single contributor of CO2 on the planet.

And one of the, the person that I was speaking to, Richard decided to say, well, yeah, that may be true. But you have to also think that one of the benefits that we've seen in someone like the UK is that we've outsourced a lot of our industrial production to China. So the fact that you can then point a China and say, look at all of the stuff that you're throwing out into the atmosphere is,

we can stand on a high horse and say, look at how green we are, it's facilitated by the fact that a lot of our production is now being outsourced there, that we're getting electronics, and machine parts, and so on and so forth from that country. Yeah, that's exactly right. So when you're looking at a country's claims on how well it's reduces certain emissions, so for the UK for example, monitors as our own emissions, we were the first country to put in place the climate change act, so legal obligation on the government to reduce emissions and the climate change committee, this independent advisory body will track the UK's progress against its commitments.

And you have to be very clear about whether the emissions reductions being quoted are the total emissions that the nation is responsible for, including what's called off-shoreing, what we're buying from other countries elsewhere in the world, which includes China but other places as well. Are you including that? How are you just not talking about domestic emissions, what we're missing locally? So you're absolutely right that you have to look at the bigger picture we're responsible ultimately for emissions

elsewhere in the world. What we can assume as well as what we create, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's some. I've found, I mean, understanding stuff like that, I find very interesting. I think that, you know, having that in the back of your mind when I can still be concerned about China, but having that is a little bit of a caveat was interesting. Does it annoy you that climate science sometimes gets forgotten or tarnished due to crazy

stunts and protests that grab attention? Yeah that's an interesting one. So I think that some things can be unhelpful if they're annoying a lot of the population when people are particularly like obstructing public transport or something. I personally think that is sending out the wrong message. I'm an advocate of public transport and cycling and that kind of thing. So when some people have used public transport to get their message across, I think that was a wrong target. A bit self-defeating.

Yeah, yeah. On the other hand, I can see how keeping the issue in the news is a useful thing as well. I mean, when people are perhaps, potentially endangered in other people, then I get, yeah, I'm not happy with that. So if you go as far as, yeah, some of these can be kind of productive. So you have to be quite careful about what you're doing.

I think it's a very difficult area. I would much rather say that the media, news media, for example, gave prominence to climate science in an unbiased way. One of the protests last year was particularly targeting certain sections of the media, wasn't it? And the reasons that the protestors gave the bats, that they still saw that this certain sections of the media, they were saying didn't give a true picture. I would want the media covered climate change in a good unbiased, fact-based way so that people then didn't have to feel they had to take this kind of radical action. Yeah, I read an article a while ago by Scott Alexander from Slate Star Codex,

it's called the Toxoplasma of Rage, it's very interesting. And he talks about the fact that activists or anybody that's trying to push forward a narrative or an agenda, they have a balancing act to make that the more outlandish and gregarious stunts that they can do, they do capture more attention, but inevitably they polarise opinion a lot more too. On the flip side of that, the stunts which are perhaps much more persuasive and well-meaning and rational, don't capture as much attention, but don't cause the polarity and also don't, it's easy to get people on site. So there is a payoff that you need to decide between exposure and impact or exposure and persuasion. And from my side, based on what I see, I think it feels to me like climate activism is

sacrificing a lot of persuasion for impact. And I think that that being drawn back now, you may be right, maybe that could be assisted through other channels. But from your seats in the middle of the climate debate. What would you do if you were someone whose job it was to try and improve the messaging? You know, it's not good enough to just put Excel spreadsheets up. Like it needs to be engaging,

that has to be a reason for people to take care. But also this undertone that you, because you drive a car to work, you should feel bad about what you're doing. I don't think that, I don't think shaming people into compliances the right way to go about it either. So what would you what your thoughts on the messaging at the moment and moving forward? Yeah, I agree. Nobody likes to be told what to do and nobody likes to be shamed about what they're doing. I much prefer things which are you know more positive and creative and you can find things which are

attention grabbing and creative and more positive. An example here locally, some local activists last year, high load of roadcones and they put in an unofficial cycle path on one of the main roads it goes to the hospital. So they just put the cycle path and it was completely unauthorized and then they sort of sat by and they watched and they filmed people using it to see whether, first of all, to see if people would use it. And they did see that hospital staff, Dr. Fernandez, whose cycle to work were using this is cycle path. Half a day later, the council didn't take it away because it wasn't authorized. But I think I quite like that as a more constructive thing. It didn't do anybody any harm.

And it illustrated the fact that the cycle path there would be really useful. So I would like to see more of that kind of thing, positive, imaginative and creative things that really are helpful rather than negative. That's my personal view. One of the things that I definitely noticed in myself, you brought up the cycle lane. So in Gossworth, which is where I live, in Newcastle, the two lane high street, sorry, the two, besides a four lane high street was reduced down to a two lane high street to accommodate

a cycle lane. The traffic on that now is disgusting. It's absolutely awful. Anybody that tries to get from the great, great North Road down into Newcastle knows what I'm talking about. There's something, there's something about that that is a little bit uncomfortable because that is a little bit uncomfortable because you observe the inconvenience that you suffer from a front row seat. You know that if you're stuck between 3pm and 5pm or 30pm or anytime during the morning on that road, then it's going to take you 10 minutes to do a mile and that's going to annoy you and you also remember the time not long ago when it didn't cause that long. I think creating a grand narrative, creating a more cohesive understanding around why these measures get put in place. So let's say that adding a cycle lane helps to reduce

carbon emissions by whatever percent. I don't know that. I don't know that. I just see whatever percent. I don't know that. I don't know that. I just see what broadly to me looks like a mostly unused cycle lane and a ton of traffic that's tailed back. So what I think is missing, first off, I would suggest to climate activists to dial back the amount of shame that gets put on people. I don't think that that's an effective strategy at all. I think it just makes people kind of resent whatever it is that you're doing. But a broader understanding of the direction that we're trying to move toward and how individual actions contribute to that, I think that that's important because it connects the sacrifice that you make. If someone said to me, if I was able to feel good about the fact that I know I need to set off 10 minutes earlier to get to town, but that by me setting off 10 minutes earlier to get to town, I'm actually helping in a way

to reduce down carbon emissions because we have increased other people's ability to cycle to work. Then I'm like, oh, okay, I kind of feel good about this, or at least it dampens down the inconvenience. Do you understand what I mean? Yes, and I think also we could encourage people to think a little bit outside their own kind of narrow view. Again, I don't mean it's in a negative way, but sometimes people don't realize that they could do things differently. Sometimes they genuinely can't. Sometimes they could do if given a bit of help. So again, using the cycle lanes as an example, there's a lot of people that have no choice but to use a car. That's for sure. I mean, here in Exeter, we were small town, small city, but with a rural area around it. It's very hard to get anywhere in the rural area without a car. Within the city, it's actually much easier than a lot of people think to get around by bikes,

for example. I had not a car for two years in that first period. I was actually quite surprised about how easy it was to live without a car. I just use my bike and public transport and trains. Some people, I think a lot of people could do more like that. I recognise a lot of people could not do that, but those who have no choice, their lives would be easier if those who do have a choice could make a different choice. But often those people could only make that choice if they're helped along the way by

having, yes, safe cycling routes and that kind of thing. So it's not all down to individual people. It's about helping, changing the system to help people make these choices. How much do individuals decisions about what they do? You know, one person remembering to turn the lights off or putting the lights on a timer or switching to a hybrid car or an electric vehicle, how much is that going to make an impact, even if you start to scale that on mass across an entire population, and how much of it is from other things that are more out of our control, so perhaps things that are in industry, business control by the government, transportation, owned by companies and stuff like that as opposed to individuals? So the small actually like turns the light off from your chain the energy light bulbs and that kind of thing

would be have a small impact. It is system level change, like entirely different energy sources. So not having coal-fired paracetaceous and having instead renewables or nuclear or whatever. So that's a sort of system level change, which would need to be, people would obviously have to bind to that as consumers.

And it needs to be said but set up in a way which is not disadvantaging people. So you kind of, yeah, it's seeing yourself as part of the bigger picture picture, picture, really. Yeah. What's your thoughts on nuclear energy? Personally speaking, I would be surprised if we could achieve the targets without nuclear

energy. That's a personal view, not as an expert. I'm a climate modeler. This is just from me seeing the debates from where I sit. I see arguments, we say, can we done without nuclear energy. So speaking as a non-expert here, I'd be surprised if we could do it without nuclear energy. I think the problem is so severe that we need to put everything at it, basically. We can't want anything out. That's my view. Why do you think it is that there is a quite a big swath

of climate activists, people who dislike nuclear energy? I think that links to the origins of the Green movement who traditionally were sort of suspicious of any kind of technology. And of course, see that they have been horrendous nuclear accidents in the past, of course. The technology is very different now. And the new nuclear power stations are being designed and built to them yet much much higher standard and The risk assessment is I've done to account for climate change as well. Yeah, yeah, Canada's very high temperatures Oh, so the plants that are being created now are being future-proofed against potential higher global temperatures Exactly Yes, yeah, I mean that's so sophisticated Exactly. Exactly. Yes. I mean, that's so sophisticated.

I had Alex Epstein on the show quite a while ago, the moral case for fossil fuels. So he's a philosopher that's talking about, and I don't understand enough about the impacts of different types of fuels to be able to kind of dig into his data. But what I did take away from it was a surprise at how much most climate activist groups seem to be very averse to nuclear energy, which is, you know, aside from a couple of very big accidents which occurred on version 0.1 reactors and plants that were very unsafe, it surprises me that that isn't just what everybody is throwing their efforts at. I mean, it is true that the high level waste is a long-term problem that you're kind of

you'll be queuing that to future generations, but it's a relatively small amount, you know, in the grand scheme with things, but it does exist. So part of the concern is about what we do with this stuff, which is going to be around for For thousands of years, as well as the obvious concern based on past experience past accidents, but again, this is why it's such a controversial topic and you get very, very pyrethamised views on this. Richard Betts, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with what you do, why should they go? You can follow me on Twitter, Richard A. Betts on Twitter. You can also look at what the Met Office and the University of Exeter are putting out.

I work at both of these places. You could look at the technical report of the University of Exeter, I'm putting out, I work at both of these places. You could look at the technical report of the Climate Change Risk Assessment, which I led, which published this year. So look that up at the UK Climate Risk website. So you can look there for some of my latest work. But yeah, I'm active on social media. So I'm always happy to have a conversation about this.

I just talked to anybody who's interested in climate change, so happy to have a discussion.