Climate Change Discussion: Hosted by Prof Brian Cox (October 2016)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mnpg-YOnhY

[Applause] well hello and good afternoon ah hang on a second oh I see there's a fire exit speech the firearm hello ladies and gentlemen my name is David Bale I'm the vice Chancellor here at the University of rein and I'd like to welcome you to the Great Hall for this very special occasion uh given the theme I can think of no more appropriate venue than the University of reading to be having this debate and discussion the University of R has been at the Forefront of building understanding about the mechanisms and impacts of climate change for decades our department for meteorology founded 50 years ago has is now a world leading Center for research and teaching in weather and climate our academics play a major role in developing understanding of the mechanisms of climate change not only that they contribute widely to public policy debates and public Communications more widely the University's world-renowned expertise and agriculture food security soil sciences and the like on the impacts of climate change set us apart and we are pleased to be recognized in so many different ways including the confering by her majesty the queen in 2013 of our regious professorship in climate meteorology and climate science on one of our panelists who is here today Professor Keith shine Professor shine is one of four fellows of the Royal Society working on meteorology and climate science at the university the others being Professor s Brian Hoskins also in the panel Professor Ted Shephard and Professor Mike Lockwood I'm sure that we are about to have an interesting and thought-provoking afternoon so without further Ado let me now welcome your host for the afternoon Professor Brian Co thank you well thank you good afternoon um I'm Brian Cox I'm professor of public engagement at the Royal Society which is the UK's National Academy of Sciences and this is the first in the series of events which are called Science Matters and they aim to dis discuss important scientific topics and we start the series as you've heard by talking about climate change now climate change is a a complex scientific subject it requires an understanding and Analysis of large amounts of data collected over many decades and detail modeling having said that however there is a simple message which is humans are changing the climate of the earth and this statement is not controversial from a scientific perspective but it is controversal IAL politically although having said that all major parties in the UK now accept this scientific consensus um absolute certainty however is not a part of science as new data is gathered and new understanding develops new predictions emerge science is a a fluid subject it delivers an everchanging picture of the world no detail is ever settled or certain and also statements from Authority are always to be treated with suspicion the Royal society's motto indeed is nullius in verba on nobody's word so given all this what is the average citizen to make of climate change well we're here today to talk through your questions all the questions I asked will have been submitted by members of this audience and uh we're going to be able to we're going to try at least to answer as many as we can now I have I'm hosting the event I'm not giving the answers I'm a particle physicist but I do have four climate experts here um so I would like to now invite them to introduce themselves thank you Brian I'm Brian Hoskins um I'm a professor in the meteorology Department that the vice Chancellor talked about and have been for 35 years I think and I'm also uh at Imperial College where I've led the Grantham Institute and I'm now chair there so um I'm a mathematician by training and I got into understanding how the atmosphere weather systems and the climate systems work and that's what my research has been about over the years and so this is extremely important in climate change where you're looking at a change of the system to actually try and understand how the system works and then why it might change in the manner we're talking about so that's um that's my interest over the years and the picture I've I we were asked if we wanted to produce an object or a picture and I chose one from the early day of my research in the late 60s early' 70s we had these Apollo pictures of this planet and they really were startling and showing the beauty of this planet and also the power of what was going on so you can see the weather systems in the southern hemisphere there you can see the tropical convection you can see the uh ocean and you can see the impact on land on Africa where in the regions where the tropical conection occurs then there's green underneath and then you can see the desert regions either side so it shows the power of the climate system this is the earth on which we live and this is the system that governs how we can live H hi everyone I'm uh Kate Jones and I'm professor of ecology and biodiversity at University College London and Zoological Society of London London Zoo you um I'm actually not a climate scientist at all I'm a biodiversity scientist and being a biodiversity scientist means looking at the global patterns of living things so wild nature and understanding the processes that produce the patterns that we see on a global scale and then thinking about how to think about uh what processes drive those patterns so we can think about how to predict into the future now climate change is just one of the drivers which is threatening wild species and it's it's a really important thing to think about because it exacerbates some of the um problems that we're seeing with declines of wild nature so my most recent work has been looking at how uh vectors of disease are going to be influenced by climate changes and land Ed changes and human population increases to think about how that changes our understanding of um diseases like Ebola or SARS so I really got into uh climate change and wanting to know more about that because and biodiversity loss because I originally did a PhD on the evolution of bats so you think it's a little bit esoteric but I I bumped into one of the leading conservation scientists in the world and I had lunch with her and she said to me and she kind of outlined the state of nature and how important it was to try to find Solutions and trying to do more predictive modeling about that and that's why I suddenly realized the evolution of bats wasn't that interesting after all and and I really wanted to understand understand that so so we were to bring an object or a picture and I brought um Mumble from Happy Feet so this is actually an emperor penguin chick and I did a lot of maths on the on the web last night it's actually real life size as a uh as a newly born chick and um the the story I wanted to tell you about that is that these species are threatened with climate change as the ice pack decreases under the different models although they they might be under dispute we were discussing that earlier but I think the the key the key point I wanted to make was that climate change effects on biodiversity are really complex so that there are impacts on the Krill that these species eat but also with pollution and um that some antibodies have of diseases of chickens have been found in these populations in the Antarctic possibly from visitors human visitors to these places so climate change exacerbates some of these already um threatening processes and that's the kind of point I wanted to make about complex thank you hi I'm Oliver Morton I'm a science I'm not a scientist I'm a science writer and editor I'm currently working at The Economist and um when I started writing books I realized that um I I really like writing about planets this may be a sort of like Miss uh Miss begotten youth uh spent watching too much Star Trek and such things but I find planets really interesting because they're utterly scientific objects they're scientific in the same way in atomies and at the same time they're very human because the idea of a world of a big uh sphere is something where we can you know let our imaginations place so I wrote a book about Mars great Planet thoroughly recommend it um the other planets nearby are not as interesting as Mars except for the Earth and so I decided to write a book about the Earth that was um uh about an aspect of the earth that's just as real as the oceans and the continents but isn't thought about in quite the same way so I wrote a book about photosynthesis about how plants power this planet that we live on and make all the other life on it possible and that took me I was writing about climate change that took me into the idea of writing a book about what humans are doing to the climate and I think I've got a picture too have I got a picture um yes yes so this is how I got here today and this is a I I think this is a lovely Counterpoint to uh to to to Brian's picture because this is the Great Western Railway uh as pictured by uh Turner in the in the 19th century one one of what is obviously one of the Great greatest pieces of British landscape painting it's also unlike any landscape painting that could be done before the Industrial Revolution because what Turner saw and what Turner gave us in an image which we also know from intellectual history and which we actually feel is that there is no longer the sharp line that there was before between what is human and what is natural there is a there is a something running through this world that Turner uh shows us there is a change running through it you can no longer tell the difference between the natural rain and the artificial Steam and the speed with which they mix together the science of steam engines was the science of thermodynamics which turned out to be the science of the world and there's a way in which in the 19th century not only do humans Change the World by introducing steam engines into it they changed the world by making it an our role in it a steam engine we are inside a world that we are making artificial at the same time as we put artificial things into that world that's the sort of approach that I think really helps you understand the enormity of the transformations in the world and the planet that climate change is bringing about right good afternoon everybody uh my name is Keith Shine the vice chanc has already introduced me as the first Regis professor of meteorology and climate science here at the University of reading I'm very happy to be here and I'm happy that the Royal society organized this event on a Saturday afternoon to coincide with a international break in the domestic football season so thank you um I I I studied physics at Imperial College London uh followed by a PhD in meteorology in Edinburgh and after Spells at Liverpool and Oxford I moved to reading about 30 years ago with the support and encouragement of Brian Hoskins here um and I teach and research climate science and my main so focus is in quantifying the human and natural factors that initiate climate change um I'm never quite sure how I got into meteorology uh during my te teens I remember my father asking me what I wanted to do when I grew up and something possessed me to say Metrology and and that was it um but but also during the 1970s I was greatly influenced by some compelling TV science programs by this Brian's predecessors um which started to talk about the natural and human forces that shape and change our environment and so when given the chance to study the topic I I I grasped it um I don't want to give away my age but a few weeks before I was born in March 1958 um that there was a a major event in climate science um a farsighted American scientist called Dave keing started a a set of measurements of carbon dioxide in Hawaii that continue to this day and for many years it was the only such set of routine measurements and and the Keeling curve as it became known um has documented the increase in carbon dioxide ever since um and in the meantime polar scientists have drilled deep into the Antarctic ice cap and from looking at the air trapped in these ice cores they have reconstructed a record of atmospheric CO2 stretching back almost a million years and so this plot shows that um that I core record going back nearly a million years and the Keeling curve I just talked about is that sharp Spike compressed into the right hand side and and so my striking fact is this that during that almost million years from the depths of the ice ages to the so-called interglacials CO2 never varied by more than um 130 parts per million which is a unit showed here and it never over that period period exceeded 300 parts per million but in the blink of an eye on the right hand side of that plot um and in in the time I since I was born the CO2 has leapt up by more than 25% um to 400 parts per million mostly because of our burning of coal and gas and also over that same period of the Keeling curve that Spike at the end um the global surface temperatures increased by 8° and um the 2013 report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change concluded after assessing the evidence that it was extremely likely that the dominant cause of this rise is human activity and primarily the change in CO2 documented in that Spike at the end so thank you well thank you panel for those introductions and um actually we have a question um on that Keith which I might uh just jump in and out which is a so 400 parts per million so it sounds very small and indeed it's true CO2 comprises a tiny proportion of the atmosphere and and Mike asked um because of that because CO2 is such a tiny proportion how can it have such a huge effect yeah well well that's right so CO2 makes up 0.4% of the Earth's atmosphere um but but the the effect of these gases on the earth atmosphere doesn't just depend on their amount it depends on their ability to absorb and emit infrared energy um and in fact nitrogen and oxygen we make up 99% of the Earth's atmosphere um have only an indirect impact on the Earth's temperature because they they don't absorb very much infrared energy at all so um by contrast CO2 is very good at absorbing infrared energy uh we know this from detailed measurement in the laboratory and in the atmosphere and as we speak there are satellites orbiting the Earth looking down at the energy emitted from the earth and they can see this um signature of where CO2 is absorbing lots of energy but another point about this 0.4% it might sound a tiny fraction but it still means that in a cubic centimeter here I have this cubic centimeter there are 10,000 trillion molecules of carbon dioxide so um it's still a huge number and because these are so effective on a molecule by molecule basis they do absorb a lot of infrared energy there's a there's an amazing calculation by uh an American climate scientist Ken Cera and one of his students where they compared the energy given up when you get one carbon atom out of a fossil fuel by burning it with the energy trapped in the atmosphere by that one carbon atom once it's become carbon dioxide and you think about the huge amounts of fossil fuels that we burn um it turns out that the energy that we're getting from burning the fossil fuels on a carbon atom by carbon atom basis is only a 100,000th of the energy that's being trapped in the atmosphere by the carbon dioxide you trap a 100 and this is because the carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere so long you trap 100,000 times more energy with the waste product of the fossil fuel than you get out of burning the fossil fuel I think that's incredible perhaps I can just uh give a different um perspective on the same thing the average person in this country produces nearly 10 tons of CO2 per person per year so it's we're actually producing a lot in our activities it gets very diluted in the atmosphere but there's a lot there I think this also goes on to a broader question which is asked by several people Sarah Ruth Jo and Allan all asked you are humans really having an impact on climate you obviously argued through the CO2 levels that that we are but this question of all is it a natural cycle you know because there are natural cycles so suppose how do we disentangle the natural cycles from the the things that we are causing yeah well we know climate has always been varying the picture up there showed the Ice Age cycles going back a million years and and so yes how do we know that recent climate change is is due to human activity and so to explain climate change not only do we have to rule in human activity but we we will have to rule out natural caus as major contributors and and this all requires a lot of detailed observations and detailed calculations but the main factors that cause could the main natural factors that could cause climate change over a short period are changes in the energy emitted by the sun and the tiny particles that get put high up into the atmosphere when we have a really big volcanic eruption um and and also even without these factors that the the atmosphere would and the climate system would vary sort of on its own so um so we have to do these detailed calculations of the impact of carbon dioxide and the impact of other aspects of human activities and the kind of conclusion is that if if we look earlier in the 20th century say before 1950 the smaller temperature changes we were seeing there could have been part human and could have been part natural but if we look at the climate change since the um 1950s they're much larger changes and it's simply impossible to explain those climate changes B based on Natural Factors alone in fact there'd be very little temperature change we believe and so um this is the origin of that ipcc statement of the extremely likely that human activity is a dominant cause there's a there's another point that just goes into s like just the basic nature of science is that you should trust things more when people predict them before they happen and then they happen and people looked at the climate system going back to the 19th century back to Tindle and arenius and then in the early 20th century guy called C looked at the system and said you know if carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere then the world's going to get warmer um and for a long time people kind of accept this they just didn't think that carbon dioxide was going to build up in the atmosphere and it was actually the PHD supervisor of uh of Dave keing who's who's part of whose graph you just saw who said you know actually this thing we thought that was happening whereby the ocean was using up the carbon dioxide and it wasn't building up that's not happening carbon dioxide is is beginning to build up and so it will get warmer and then after he had said that he set Keeling on to measuring carbon dioxide and keing showed that carbon dioxide continued to go up and it did get warmer now obviously coincidence doesn't prove causation at the same time when someone from first principles predicts that something is going to happen if such and such another event takes place and it then does and it comes out pretty much as they expected that's a very strong visceral argument for why you should take it seriously I I just wanted to add that we're always looking at a mixture of natural variability as well as the what may be due to uh human activity and if you look at the ice AG GL interg glacial cycle that Keith was showing that's sort of certainly a huge background natural variation but we're taking the system at one of those warm points and we're turning up the radiator suddenly so we're on a warm spot in the natural cycle and we're making it even warmer but the more you come to the local the more the natural variability seems to come to play um if you go back to the December of 2010 which was incredibly cold in in the UK records and there was one day when I know in London the temperature wasn't going above freezing and I looked at in Greenland it was plus 10 that day you know so we're looking at patterns of things that occur and there's pluses and minuses but the uh what we're doing to the system does show globally very clearly now and even locally it's starting to be clear as well just just one other other point is we don't just look at the temperature at the surface when we're looking at climate change we look for other patterns or Fingerprints of climate change and for example how the temperature has changed as we go higher up into the atmosphere and the signal of that temperature change is consistent with human activity but it's not consistent with any other cause so these patterns are also important in establishing that it's human and and as you say um the the the the data from many different sources is very clear now that the Earth is warming we see it in many different ways how do you answer people I mean I'm myself had a little altercation with an Australian politician a while ago did you get Tak up hosital I decided that I would um show them the the the data of the surface temperature anomaly so it shows you referred actually to data from the 1940s and 50s and 60s these are data sets that were compiled a long time ago and so there are people who who will argue with the the way that we process the data so I wonder if you could just give a a very quick overview of the challenges Associated process it is a large challenge if we try we often see a temperature record going back to 1850 and over that more than 150 year period the way we've measured temperature has changed for example sea surface temperature used to be measured by a a poor sailor having to throw a bucket over the side of his ship and Hauling it on onto the deck and putting in a thermometer and measuring it and even even the type of bucket changed from wooden to Canvas to insulated and now temperature is often measured by the intake into the the cooling water into the engines and similarly on land the way we've measured temperature has changed and not only that the distribution of of temperature measurements has changed greatly so again if you go back a 100 years we almost none in the Pacific Ocean so we have to take those factors into account and there's been a number of there's three institutes one in the UK well two in the UK I should say and two in the um us who who spend a lot of time developing these temperature records and and adding in these corrections as I understood and a few years ago um a rather skeptical group of scientists at the University of Barkley didn't didn't believe these temperature data sets and set about doing it themselves and hey Presto they came out with the same answer that these other organizations had and so we believe it's a very robust um signal and the ipcc the intergovernmental on panel on climate change doesn't you use the word equivocal very often or very likely and climate the fact that climate has changed is unequivocal if you look at the data too you find some and compare one station with its neighbors it's been found that some were using Fahrenheit instead of Celsius you know and others then you realize that this thermometer that used to be placed out in the country then is not an urban site and so that will change and and Corrections have to be made for those sorts of things as supp it does say it it's worth emphasizing isn't it that most of the science is in we we say correcting the data so the idea that to a scientist that you would un plot uncorrected data on on a graph is is is ridiculous it's virtually meaningless isn't it that's that's where the the skill and the knowledge lies but it does sound I think in my experience anyway somehow suspicious when you say we correct the data in this way and know yeah yeah but you have to homogenize the data sets you have to make sure a measurement made in 1950 is equivalent to a measurement made in 1910 and it's a it's a skilled job and these Corrections aren't made lightly and also a really nice development recently is that some of these data sets are now coming out actually with error bars accepting the fact that you know you that you can't be absolutely sure what the global temperature was in any given year but given what we know about our measurements and the areas in our measurements and that seems to me you know that's highly scientific and I think really really adds credibility to say you know this is the range of what we can say and you can um actually help put some more data in to these models now with citizen science cyber projects so there's a website which you should all go to because it's awesome called Z universe and they have this uh citizen science called project called Old weather and they've digitized all the ships records going back into the 18th century and those exact same records inv exact same records which you're talking about they uh they've kind of had them written down on the ship's logs about the temperature and you go in and pretend to be a ship's captain and you can uh transcribe all the records so people get very addicted to this it's it's awesome you should go and have a look okay well let's let's move on to a very different question actually which I address to Kate first which is from Colin which is what will the overall effect of climate change be on our Wildlife gosh that is a really really complex question and it's a a really active area of current research as well so I mean firstly the first thing to say is that you can already see the changes Happ happening to Wildlife populations around the world and and in the UK we've been monitoring with citizen science projects uh a number of wildlife populations around the country um with you know hundreds of thousands of volunteers taking part in these citizen science projects so there's quite a lot of evidence of uh northward shifts of the ranges of many species in the UK uh stuff like dford warbler or the blue fly but there's also natural natural colonizations from Europe as well so like the emerald Southern Emerald damsel fly and there are there's um a mixture of evidence about the reactions of Northern adapted species kind of uh retreating slightly um at their kind of Southern edge of edges of their ranges so there's kind of adaptations to the northern uh species too so we see more pests and pathogen invasive species in this country for example I don't know whether you saw the stuff about Ash dieback disease but that was uh it kind of it's because of globalization but once these pathogens get into the UK they're much more adapted to any change uh to spread because of the the conditions being more favorable um there's also a report by of giant Asian Hornets the first Nest that's been found in this country I think a couple of weeks ago so the life cycle events are also changing so um flowers and leaves are coming out earlier uh birds are laying eggs earlier um species are arriving from migrations earlier um the leaves are staying on the the trees longer you must have all seen that so that's something that's impacting your lives now so um know but I guess the question is what impact in the long term is this going to have and and that's a really interesting question because you're you're basically asking whether species will decline to Extinction so popul ation will be so affected that there will decrease in range size and then go extinct completely and that's a very difficult question and and mostly is because there's been a lot of studies or a growing body of studies about 100 studies that have looked at this individually and only now are we kind of trying to pull this together in one um in one analysis so these these data are now kind of looking at um you know what what are are the What's the total evidence it's like in medicine when you ask about relationships between Cancer and smoking for example that's the type of analysis that they're doing so I don't want to alarm you anything but one of these studies that was published in nature last year has a mean Global Extinction rate estimated of one sixth of all species which be impacted by climate change and and that means just are their uh Geographic ranges going below a threshold level um and the magnitude of these changes also uh is increasing with increasing uh temperature buildup and and some areas are more at risk than others say um New Zealand Australia and South America seem to be more impacted but there there lots of uncertainties with this and I think that's where the kind of work that we need to do is there's actually a related question from an which is I suppose as as species become extinct new niches open up and the question was Will new species evolve as a result of climate change but then the the comma and will humans like us be around to see them is the more Sinister so I guess if you're a species faced with um a change in climate so that your habitat's not suitable anymore you've kind of got three options right so you can either you know move somewhere else you can go extinct or you can evolve and and I think the problem really is you know the time scales in involved here so species have always adapted to their environments they kind of run to keep up to adapt to environmental pressures but can they do it fast enough or significantly enough to cope with climate change and so you know the evolution of crazy new things takes time and so you need a number of generations and the variation to play on that to evolve those things but subtle adaptations to climate are happening all the time so I don't know whether any of you have seen Golden Rod which is just a kind of Daisy like plant that most people have in their Gardens it's um actually from North America it was introduced here in the 18th century and um it's been naturalized across Europe and the northern populations and the southern populations is now showing so that's a few hundred years and now showing significant adaptations to their local environments and so if you uh translocate Southern populations to the north populations where the north ones do fine they do terribly so you can see adaptations within that time scale uh but really big big changes take a while and and I fear that there are so many other pressures happening so population increasing probably not leveling out until 10 billion people on this planet uh transforming all of the Landscapes on this planet all of the ecosystems I I fear that you know invasive species and globalization they they kind of have this kind of head cockta tail of pressures and climate change is adding into that but but the the end the end of the question will humans be around to see this then so so actually the almost the opposite problem at the moment there's a big lag in other words because you said the population is heading to 10 billion which is going to increase the pressure on other species but there's no there's no suggestion in which we're going to vanish anytime soon is is there a suggestion that the human population will be so challenged as climate change uh the effects increase that we will begin to see catastrophic reduction in the number of humans on the planet I think that's a very political question I think there's been some work on an's fault not mine uh there's been some work on kind of planetary boundaries and Earth Systems and I think it's a it's um it's been very popular in kind of policy circles to think about Earth Systems as this kind of um we're trying to maintain this Earth system in some kind of um steady state so the steady state that's been around for 12,000 years or so in the holos scene that's been kind of pretty stable in temperatures can we keep everything into that steady state with these planetary boundaries and then people have been trying to think about how you would monitor whether we've gone over those planetary boundaries and I think that's very controversial and I think Brian wouldn't I was I was going to add on this really that um climate change as we see it is going to add to all the other pressures in having 10 billion people on this planet um Can is there going to be enough food in the right places enough water in the right places and what we've seen around historically and in the more recent period in the Middle East is that sometimes that climate that's making life difficult is just the last bit that makes conflict occur um thousands of years ago there would have been migration of humans but we can't do that anymore we have lines on maps we have too many people and that can't happen but then the conflict is much more likely to occur so it's adding to the other strains on this planet actually related question to this from um step and by two Davids apparently on here which which is have we gone past the Tipping Point or a Tipping Point um will it be possible for our climate to return and the question says to it's origal State as you said we can Define we have to Define when we'd like to to but but first of all this idea of Tipping Point okay well perhaps I'll take that then the uh we are not aware that the climate at this moment has passed something which is a Tipping Point and po popular language or maybe a bation as a mathematician but um is there some irreversible change we've gone to a new state um or something is going to happen is essentially irreversible um the perhaps the one concern at the moment is some people think we might have gone beyond the irreversible me melting of Greenland um it would take many thousands of years but um is that irreversible but we aren't aware that we've gone beyond any of these and I think we really are in the stage where we if we can keep this change in temperature to less than two degrees as the Paris agreement went then we can hope that we can mostly cope with that so it's really not oh dear we've gone beyond a Tipping Point give up it's actually this is a call for Action because we may be able to get the climate to stay within bounds that we can handle it's not going to return to some original state I me the the changes we made will be there in the system for thousands of years and the ocean takes a long time for the bottom of the ocean to realize it's warmed up and communicate back the carbon dioxide we put there will be the in the atmosphere for thousands of years years so we it's not going to just disappear suddenly the impact we've had but we hope we can keep it within a range of where the climate's been within the last 10,000 years that humans and other species can mostly cope yeah I'd just like to emphasize this point about irreversibility when you put CO2 into the atmosphere it's got an incredibly long persistence so um a good fraction of it disappears within a few years but then quite a substantial fact action stays there for thousands of years and that's what makes this quite a difficult problem if if the CO2 we put into the atmosphere disappeared within a couple of weeks which is the case for some of the things we put into the atmosphere it would be a much simpler problem I just want to just before I come to you Oliver just clarify so this idea of a two degree rise so could you just sort of Define what that means it's relative to what and what is it and also the question where where are we at the moment I don't mind I can take okay I mentioned it so I'll so we're thinking about two degrees above pre-industrial basically so if you go back um into the 17th the 18th century perhaps or 19th even 19th so we're we're sort of approaching depending what happens this year but generally we're approaching nearly one degree from that now and the question is are we going to add more than one degree to that and the chances of Crossing some threshold the further we go we can probably just cope if we keep it to this 2 degree below 2 degre hopefully but as soon as we start going two to 3 degre 3 to 4 degrees there are many parts of the Earth's system which could actually say that's enough and we're changing to a new state you know you might get methane produced from the melting permafrost or you might get a more local change where the storm track that used to hit on Australia no donger does so they don't get the winter rainfall or the the monsoon system in in India you know so many billions of people depending on that and the remarkable thing is how little it varies but can we rely on that as we go through to these big changes so we think we're probably able to cope just about provided we stay Within These bounds and and we saw the the carbon dioxide graph about 400 PS per million or so now so does that mean that if we we stay there then we there's this inertia in the system and we just tail off and gently settle at two degrees or does it mean that we have to reduce that if if if we could hold it at 400 we'd probably be just about okay but we'd all be walking home and that's that's a challenge but but in within the environment of not just climate changes happening to this planet there's a whole load of other things so those planetary boundaries are kind of trying to address some of the other drivers like the human population food security disease outbreaks you know zootic disease outbreaks like Ebola those kinds of things we there's a huge amount of uncertainty about where those boundaries are and I think we're kind of playing a little bit with fire and just be very clear the the the the two de that's the glob that's the surface temperature that we're talking about there that's right that's the globally average surface temperature which is not what anyone feels you know in in um in the northern polar regions that might be as much as 10 degre particularly in the winter time um and it might be something most of the planet is ocean and maybe that would be 2 degre or even slightly below but the actual rise in temperature is more in the tropical countries when you compare with the variability so somewh like Africa a a two or three degree change in Africa is huge compared with the variability that's been humans have experienced I just wanted to come back to I think it was an's question which led into Stevens and the two Davids but um the I do think there's a real risk of overdramatizing and saying will this drive humans extinct are we saving the planet no climate change is not going to drive humans extinct if you want to really worry about human extinction you should worry and I don't think this could do it either you should worry much more about the risk of nuclear war which certainly could kill hundreds of hundreds of possibly billions of people climate change is going to cause a great deal of harm to hundreds of millions of people maybe to billions of people that's a terrible thing it's not the same thing as Extinction it's not the same thing as I believe George Mia wrote and the guardian the other day sort of like endangering the whole planet the planet is a pretty big tough old thing and we'll be and we'll be going along and we still have a lot of species on them and it would be very sad terrible if many of those species that we treasure were not among them but those aren't the things at risk the things that are really at risk are the world the natural world that we currently inhabit as it is and our fellow humans and it's really important to keep the focus on reducing the harm to people who exist today rather than this overdramatized why about the end of the world or the end of humanity which is not I think what this debate should be about and you know there's a recent report from the lanet on uh climate and People's Health and they said exactly that that it's it's about how climate change is is one of the biggest drivers of of human health and well-being that's going to happen in the near future and they're seriously concerned about all these papers are just you know just Google them they you can see read them for yourself um there's a got a follow-up question to this which is um if what's the one change if you could have one change if indeed there is such a thing that would have the single biggest impact to slow down or manage climate change but let's say reach this two degree Target um what what would it be and H Helen asked that question well we have to Target CO2 is the answer yeah reduce our CO2 emissions to zero as quickly as possible um the net CO2 emissions and that's the answer globally um there's a more measured answer in terms of the UK where um the climate change committee that I'm on has recommended to the UK government that we essentially decarbonize our electricity Supply by 2030 so you know okay reduce Global carbon dioxide to zero but we have a a UK thing which we have a definite Target to do so the electricity you get from your plug should no longer come from a fossil fuel power station so we've got to get to that situation but the problem with answering Helen's question in that way is that saying decarbonizing the society that's not one thing the question was is there one thing can be done that is almost everything that is changing almost every aspect of how Modern Life Goes On from how we build building I don't you say electricity well even so even so but but but that was also the bit I mean Helen's question was about what was the one thing we can do that will have most impact and this is the one of the really difficult things that Keith alluded to about climate change it's not one thing uh ever since um ever since those steam trains started hurtling down the Great Western Railway using fossil fuels is built into almost everything that people in developed countries do many people in less developed and least developed countries would like to be able to do some of those things too forget not that something like 1.3 or 1.4 billion people uh on the on on the face of the planet have no access to electricity at all it's not a question of just doing one simple thing it's a question of changing an entire industrial ecosystem if you want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and I don't think that that's impossible but I don't think it's a single thing and I don't think it's easy this actually unless anyone has has anything else to add about reduce CO2 it does link into a question but from Katherine which is what the panel's views on clean energy so questions like nuclear versus wind or solar can we we generate enough through let's say wind and solar do we need nuclear these questions so well I must say over the last 10 years we have seen staggering progress uh made in terms of solar electricity uh it's still especially in um a country which doesn't enjoy as much sunlight as Britain it's still uh not as much as you would wish but there have been staggering progress made at the same time um the world is still running something like 78 79% on F fuels there is an inertia in these systems that is huge and I think that the idea of decarbonizing British electricity entirely by 2030 2040 is ambitious but just about plausible the idea of doing it for the whole world is very very strikingly different even though and there's no reason that the fact that it's difficult is no reason not to try the question was also about nuclear um the problem with uh nuclear power well the problem with nuclear power we could and indeed some of us have written books um but the uh but the problem with nuclear power is really that at the moment it's expensive largely because you have to buy a huge amount of it to buy any of it at all um you can only buy nuclear power coming from very big nuclear power stations that's not doesn't fit very well with the way that electricity grids and electricity consumption is developing so there are place and the other thing is that although I do believe that nuclear power can be run in a safe and reliable way I also think it's very hard to do that unless you live live in a democracy with a long history of questioning people and good independent Sur oversight so you know I don't worry very much about nuclear power in Finland I worry about it more in say China um or uh various other developing countries where I don't think that the Civil Society to regulate nuclear power is really there um so the short answer is yes we are we have a number of clean power clean power options and we can push them into use faster and faster we can also develop new storage techniques and we can Electrify some things that we don't at the moment use electricity for like transport at the same time to do all that while emitting very little more carbon dioxide and thus giving ourselves a good chance of hitting the 2 degree or the indeed the ambitious 1.5 degree Target in Paris is more or less inconceivable Brian you said you you advised the government on this um so can you give us a brief flavor of the different policy options if we were going to decarbonize electricity by 2030 let's say what what would what were the options you gave to go yeah well we had um we have a high renewable scenario for 2030 where 65% of the energy would come from Renewables so that would be the biggest player would be wind offshore uh but there'd be solar and there' be onshore wind and maybe a bit of Bio in there as well so and demand reduction is important so that's always the number one is actually being p amonous with the energy we use um but and storage is important but we we could get maybe up to 2third of our electricity almost a half our total energy from Renewables by uh by the middle of the by 2030 but that would need then tipping the balance of actually valuing the carbon and making that very clear in the price of energy that people get and the rest would be nuclear would it well it could be it could there could be some nuclear or there could be carbon capture sequestration so that's taking fossil fuel power stations which in the UK would be gas hopefully um and it's taking the stopping the CO2 escape and then you uh take it out of the stack and then you liquefy it and use it if you can or else you store it underground so it doesn't have to be nuclear and there are some downsides of nuclear um Oliver's mentioned and we're continuing to add to our radioactive pile of rubbish from the past as well so you know there's that's not necessarily but we do need something as a base load either nuclear or carbon capture sequestration looks like we're going to get Hinkley point now doesn't it probably and was that was that about 6% of the something in that order yeah so yeah yeah so but that said um in the time that we I mean 20130 I think quite a lot of the existing Fleet of nuclear reactors will have closed down or they'll have had to be extended considerably past their original design life and it's not clear that we're going to get any more new nuclear reactors after hingley though there are projects currently certainly the only place they would be is where they're presently nuclear power stations and and maybe not all those okay so we move on to um this is I'll start with Keith on this question it's uh how useful or important do you think climate model projections are for advising how to react to climate change and that's by Analise yeah well they're abely absolutely crucial um I want to just be clear what a climate model is first the climate models are computer models which incapsulate our understanding of the physics and increasingly the chemistry and the biology of the climate system and their basis is in in the well-known laws of physics such as Newton's laws and the laws of thermodynamics we heard about at school and our most complex climate models use the uh use the most some of the biggest computerss on the planet so um what climate models are important for are telling us the things that we're certain about and so one of those examples is a patterns of climate change as we sorry the patterns of temperature change as we go into the future and some of the things that we're more uncertain about and that one example is the patterns of rainfall change as we go into the future um so so they they're important for distinguishing the certainties and the uncertainties and and these models as well as including processes we understand very well they also include processes which are harder to represent in these models and one of those is cloud formation and dissipation and and clouds play a very important role in determining the temperature of the earth and there's some everyday examples on a on a summer day if it's cloudy we know it's going to be cold course the the um clouds reflect sunlight but on the Winter's Night we know if if it's cloudy it's not going to be Frosty because the clouds topping in infrared energy and and one of our biggest uncertainties in projecting climate change into the future is that uh is is that different institutes develop different models with different representation of clouds and they they don't agree on how the clouds are going to change going on into the future so it's important for policy makers to not only see what we're certain about but also see that error bar of uncertainty yeah because I suppose one of the one of the challenges a government has that I suppose what they're trying to ask you maybe it's a question if they are trying but they say how much is I I do this it's going to cost you know 20 billion P or whatever it's going to cost and the result is going to be this okay is is that right I suppose that's the challenge isn't it I suppose government wants to know how much is it going to cost to do to make this change and what will that change mean is that are we anywhere near been able to answer those question I think we can but it's important that we put an error bar on our estimates to say and Brian talked about the two degree um limit before and he actually put it in probabilistic terms because we don't know exactly how the climate will respond to CO2 we can't say for certain we can say there's a 50% probability that this emissions scenario Will Keep Us within two degrees but if if the climate turns out to be more sensitive than we think it is because for example the way clouds change then it could exceed it so we always and and policy makers they're often making decisions in the face of uncertainty that's really what a politician's life is about I think people do misunderstand quite how risky how um uncertain some of this is I mean the question of not knowing uh what the climate change that you get from a doubling of carbon dioxide is and it's still a quite quite broad AAR would you say what 2 to 4 and a half something like that you know that's a big difference as we were saying two is something that two two to four and a half degrees of warming for a doubling of carbon dioxide and you know that's a big difference cuz I saying 2° is the sort of thing that people think about being able to live with and 4 and 1/2 de is really really unpleasant for large parts of the world but um politicians are used to making decisions in these manners when they they are given a certain risk I think maybe some of the difficulty with our economics modeling is they don't actually give the uncertainty you know so we are being honest and saying well this's this uncertainty and there's a certain risk of this and a certain risk of this outcome just to add to Keith's what Keith said two of the models um they they have been evaluated on past Behavior they don't just run they actually say do they simulate what we've seen seen in detail and in in particular going back in time and then the results from aren't just taken as gospel this is it there actually there's a range of behaviors and people like me try and understand now why is that model doing that and can we have confidence in that so we do have a range of things coming out of here and what is being presented to the politicians is a risk with some idea of the confidence of what we're giving them yeah I think sorry I was just going to say that um I think that these models the climate change models have and that the way that you do them and set them up has have influenced biological thinking as well like in biodiversity science so that we've been setting up and thinking about biodiversity changes on this global scale and including climate changes in these modeling approaches and getting more process based so putting actual responses to uh individual responses to climate and um land use change in these models so I think that it's it's these these models are actually helped us think about not just climate prediction but thinking about what's going to happen for different species Extinction so I think that's also one of the kind of benefits of having this kind of approach and thinking about uncertainty in a a more jointed way uh okay well there's there's a I suppose one of the questions this is a question from Pam um so relates to this so so we're talking about um you know two degree rise Three Degree rise and what we can do to to to adapt to to keep it there one of the possibilities of course it sounds more science fiction is geoengineering and the question from Pam was uh the current rates of climate change would would geoengineering ever be able to counteract the human impact well yeah that thanks that's uh that I I wrote a book about this one I actually really did write a book about um and it's a really interesting question there two so geoengineering just means a big technological change in the way the world works that's done for a specific reason uh rather than like as a byproduct or something else and there are two types of geoengineering there's actually big debates about what counts of GE engineering what doesn't but at the moment it's widely seen that there are two types of geoengineering one of them is sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere um and one of them is stopping sunlight from getting into the atmosphere Keith mentioned that there are particles in the uh in the stratosphere which reflect back sunlight there are always some such particles after a big volcanic eruption there are more might it be possible to have a have a sort of like permanent layer of them and thus cool the planet slightly that's that's the sunshine option the other option is just to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put it away somewhere no one knows quite where possibly under the carpet possibly um possibly in in in in in in in disused gas Fields but somewhere nice and safe trust us um and the problem with there are various problems with both of these things um but one of them uh is that although the technology is imaginable no one knows the Practical reality of doing it and these things have side effects and the question for me Isn't So Much could you imagine a system that put little particles into the stratosphere and held the temperature at 2° yes you could would you be wise to use such a system if you didn't also do everything you possibly could to reduce carbon diox side emissions at the same time no that would not be wise the question isn't so much can we make geoengineering Technologies CU I think that that's actually fairly easily answered that yes we could the question is can we do that in a way that's safe and just and governable so safe means not just can you do it in a way that you don't mess up other things so for instance if you put something up in the stratosphere are you going to mess up the ozone layer or should you not design what you put into the stratosphere so as not to mess up the ozone layer if you change the Earth's temperature you also have effects on its rainfall uh the effects on rainfall caused by geoengineering are not exactly the reverse of the effects of rainfall caused by global warming so you do not end up just going it's not you go one step forward one step back you sort like it's more like a wall you go one step forward and then one step to the side and then you sort of like if you're like me then just like trip over and it's all all a bit gassy but it doesn't get you back to the same place how and the the other aspect of safe is also if you start doing this and other people object and those other people have armed forces which they are willing to commit to their objection then you get into the sort of altercation that we very much wish to avoid so safety it's very open question whether you can do geoengineering safely other question is can you do it justly and by justly I mean are you going to take into account in particular risks that affect people who are not currently at the table and that includes people in the least developed countries and people who aren't here yet due to not having been born so there are issues of both International and intergenerational Justice that need to be confronted when you start thinking about this sort of technology that said I don't think the fact that it's not obvious that you can do it in a safe or just way means that you should not think about how to do it I think it was actually a very useful exercise to think about how you should do it and I think there may be ways to do it that would genuinely be helpful but they are not going to be helpful unless people have safety and Justice Just as high up in their minds as technology and capability it strikes I want bring Keith it strikes me that we're already doing it though aren't we in the sense that we're filling the atmosphere with CO2 I think some of those there's a there's a there's a guy respect very much he done probably more work on GE engineering than any anyone anyone else in the world guy called David Keith now at har and I think David came up very nicely with a response to that which is and we all know about the uh the conflicts that can be between academic departments but you're kind of insulting engineering if you equate making a mess with engineering we are definitely making a mess of the atmosphere geoengineering is trying to do something rather more targeted with a deliberate effect and I think there is a case that you could say that uh there's been other geoengineering but it's not in the climate I'd say that the way that we've changed the nitrogen cycle on the planet might be argued to be geoengineering but but there I think you do have to make a distinction between stuff that you've thought through and deliberately trying and might fail to do and stuff that you just fell into doing because you had no idea that steam engines did that yeah I think I think the point you made about the geoengineering calculations so far that have gone on have gone on within our climate models we talked about before and actually we've learned quite a lot about the climate system from those experiments but I want to address another issue about this putting tiny particles in the stratosphere we we know from our understanding of past volcanic eruptions like the mount pinba eruption in in the Philippines in the early 1990s that these particles only remain in the atmosphere for about a year and and we talked before about a significant fraction of the CO2 we put into the atmosphere persisting for centuries and so if we went down the geoengineering route we would be committed to replenishing that those stratospheric particles continuously so it wouldn't just be a one-off it would be a continuous process and this would be an intergenerational intergenerational thing we would be committing future generations to continue to do that and that's somewhere where the uh where the two different types of geoengineering seem to sort of like have a certain Synergy because one thing you could say is that that gives you time to use your giant sucking machines specifics not known um to get rid of the carbon dioxide and one things that um and one things I should point out is that the giant sucking machines that I'm uh slightly making fun of are in fact already embedded in policy the most of the scenarios that deliver a all the scenarios that deliver 1.5 degree likelihood um uh from where we are now and an awful lot of the two degree scenarios involve in the second part of this Century some sort of process for actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere what's sometimes called negative emissions technology and I worry about this because now people think that that technology will exist they also think well maybe we can make that technology do a bit more and one of the problems with various ways of doing this technology the one that's most talked about is to use bioenergy and then use the carbon sequestration and storage uh that Brian was talking about one of the problems with this with like burning biofuels and putting the carbon di oxide under the ground so that you're net taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere into the plants plants to PA stations PA stations to reservoirs under the ground one of the problems with this is it takes up huge amounts of land to take out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that way and huge amounts of land are kind of what biodiversity is about if you take away huge amounts of land what are you going to do with the things currently using that land and I think that sort of uh that sort of carbon dioxide reduction could have really terrible impacts on biodiversity arguably could have worse impacts on biodiversity than an extra 1.5 extra .5 degrees of warming um when you think about these geoengineering things I think it makes stopping the CO2 getting in the atmosphere in the first place seem like a pretty good solution absolutely it does but you know um but without wanting to refle how's that working for you at the moment I'm doing okay we well no we're not actually the we're doing all right yes but the UK is a rich developed nation which can afford to do all right I don't think we as a planet if you argue that we plan are doing okay I think that's not quite we're developing the technologies that must actually be transferred around the world and that's the crucial step with the funding and the technology transfer absolutely but you don't think that's happening fast enough to avoid two de do you I think we're really pushed on that um I think the Paris agreement made me hope that there really is an international will to make that two degrees a limit um at the moment that what they've agreed on is more like three but um given the necessity for this the the pressure for development which is quite right how is somewhere like India going to get electricity to its Villages it's obvious how it should do it by having solar there and we should help them do it absolutely there there's a actually related question from from Maggie which is we talking about I suppose you referring to the difficulty of getting glob GL agreements and what's clearly a global problem and the question is uh is there anything that that that could real people do something do you see the behavior will change of individuals working together rather than governments could make a an impact or is it does it really have to be absolutely an intergovernmental level that we're going to solve this problem or both in fact I'll have a start I I think it has to be all levels um there's certainly no way we should step back and say all right okay the governments of the world are saying they're doing it now that's it we can get on with whatever we want to do um because it won't happen unless ordinary individuals everywhere around the world say we want this to happen so I think at every level the individuals have to say that we all politicians maybe that's one of them um we elect politicians and we can put pressure on them we have various levels of government uh um in the UK the um devolved Administration from some Scotland doing all sorts of interesting things in terms of trying to do low carbon this might be your mic I it's okay right see if I can get away from the crashes now where do I start anyway all levels are required to do something individuals were incredibly important here I mean I've often had the argument when I've given talk well UK is only one or two% of UK emissions so why should we bother the Chinese are producing all their s absolute rubbish where you go to China and say well we've got this climate change act and we're really working on this they're really impressed that's been very influential on them in their decisions and they've come to the table now China is really a major part of the solution whereas it was looked on as major part of the problem but the we have a lot of influence from our one of what we do here and the Technologies we developed as we said before in doing that are incredibly important to send around the world there are actually I just said that question was asked by Maggie but there's there are two questions here which are related I think to people taking responsibility themselves and putting pressure on their governments one of them asked Kate which is from Magdalena is c can we discern climate change now in our everyday lives when we when we look out of the window or or go for a walk can can we see those effects are they becoming obvious yeah I I think so and I did say this before in one of the other questions you can see plants responding the natural world responding to changes and you know you just need to look outside your window to see this and you know the the health problems of climate of climate change are also becoming more pressing as well so I think that this this isn't just some abstract thing this is happening to us now and we need to we need to take this and take it to our politicians to get them to start doing more to stop the emissions happening I think it's really CR IAL and and there's the very obvious um news story this week the hurricane that's gone through tragic events in Haiti and then on into North America so I know there's often been a lot of debate about whether you can you can point to these extreme weather events or the frequency of them and say that is a signal of climate change so so Keith what what can we read into these events like the one we're seeing playing out now in America well yeah I mean taking an individual event and attributing it to climate change is always difficult so we're always and it's a challenge that the climate science Community is taking up but I mean there's just one example in in the UK over recent years there a a long-term data set called England and Wales precipitation data set and um um colleagues of mine at reading have analyzed that and if you look at the really intense rainfall events lasting for several days um then over the past 15 years we've had events in two the year 2000 Year 2007 2008 2012 2014 and 2015 which were almost unprecedented in the record going back s 17 years so these are kind of strong rainfall events lasting several days and so there's been you know we can't absolutely say that's climate change but um you wouldn't bet against it and I think Brian's probably better better place to talk about the hurricane I think we have a picture of this is um hurcan Matthew as it was just about to hit Haiti a couple of days ago and again the amazing power of these storms dwarfing any power of anything we do um now those storms um are damaging with the winds but they're also more damaging usually with the surge of the ocean that goes with them those Winds Drive the ocean the very low pressure helps the sea rise as well and those surges on Katrina in the states uh was a 6 M surge 6 M you imagine that and I think Sandy was 3 m so those and there's a a record which is way bigger than those as well but um and then the heavy rainfall um over a meter is is not an uncommon thing with one of these tropical Cyclones I think the record is 6 MERS of rainfall with a tropical Cyclone so you're being battered by the wind you've got the surge of the ocean and you got all this rain coming down these are just huge events now what they feed off is the warmth of the ocean they only form over warm tropical waters and in fact the waters that this have passed over are 1 or 2 de warmer than normal uh than and that's the previous normal of the previous 30 years so around 30° those Waters and that makes the energy much more available because the energy for the storm comes from the warm ocean and that's then leads to is this going to change or are they changing and it's it's very difficult because they come in these sort of very extreme numbers just now and then but the evidence is that for the extreme um tropical cycl that they they are increasing um someone's put the number of 40% over 50 years so the extreme ones seem to be increasing now with climate change there's been a lot of discussion about this but the order one hypothesis is if the system warms the ocean warms there is more energy available for the extreme tropical Cyclone now they depend on other things but the that's the evidence we have at the moment and there's nothing in the models to contradict this I think in the latest ones that the extreme tropical Cy Cyclones are liable to increase and also it sorry indirect effects too so if you put more particulates in the atmosphere you're breathing terrible air so that the you know the um the the impacts of having particulate matter in our cities for example while breaking most of the European laws on air quality so these are also having an effect on on us right now this from vehicle emissions yeah so just going back to just going back to Matthew though there's another point which uh Keith was talking about with me with with me before we came on stage which is the thing that Matthew also shows you is how much adaption and resilience comes with being you know on in a more stable richer country look what Matthew has done to the poor people of Haiti compared to what it is doing um to the people of um Florida and I was recently in Florida and there's no picnic well I'm sure but at the same time the devastation that happens when something like this happens in a in a in a in a less developed nation is is incomparably worse and that's something that our whole conversation about climate hasn't really mentioned much at the moment which is when we talk about um climate change there are a number of responses there's mitigation which is reducing um reducing ing emissions rates there could possibly someday be geoengineering there's also adaptation and adaptation is a very important part of climate response to uh in in all the world but particularly in developing countries and it's worth bearing in mind that ad people aren't particularly well adapted in all parts of the world to their current climate let alone to any changes in the climate and there is a fourth thing which is suffering that these things do bring about terrible human suffering I think actually just I I totally agree with that but sometimes the Richer countries thinks they're immune and I I'm I used to give talks and say what would it take to take the US to be serious on climate change and perhaps a tropical Cyclone over Florida or you New York or something well look what happened to New Orleans wiped off the map just about even in a rich country so we're all of us vulnerable but it's much the vulnerability is much higher in the developing world I that's true and you'll be hard to draw a between no no that's absolutely true I was just going to say rather sadly it'd be hard put to draw a line between Katrina and any change in American climate policy this might bring us actually we're in that of time now to to uh I think it's going to be the last question which is uh from Sylvia which is related as how do we better bridge the gap between the scientific research on climate and government's action on climate change well in a minute yeah in a minute I mean I've tried to uh do this influence at some times and I mean it might help if our whole society in the UK had a better image of Science and a better education in science because I think at all levels we're not there is not enough scientific background to to really get this um this agreement one's got to get through Society what what's going to go happen I mean I think the present Parliament has 27 uh MPS with science and technology degree um and none at the PHD level there was one PhD but he lost his seat in the last election so there isn't a great knowledge and I think if you go to the cabinet you'll find it's probably zero um I'm going to be checked on that I'm sure um but so we are dealing with a problem there in terms of actually just what can you use as a as a sort of background information to make this um make this get the information through but we do do have in the UK the climate change act and we I'm on the climate change committee and we are we are recommending sorry we are recommending that I have a proper microphone that was I was going to say that was Donald Trump's exec say anything about I'm not going to say anything like Donald Trump um yeah okay I I'll keep off the politics um yeah so we are we do have the climate change at the climate change committee makes its recommendations it's five out of the eight members of the climate change committee do are PhD level in science and technology and the information we give is based on um a high level of input in this area and we do find that we can actually communicate that through um so I think having the right structures where the information can get across enables that information to get get there but it would certainly um be much easier if the level of scientific awareness was higher in all levels of community okay so yeah it might be good we go along the panel actually with the last question I think it's up to the scientists to be a bit more engaging as well you know so it's not just it's not just people you know not engaging with science but science engaging with people and and understanding that we're fairly normal um people and that you know that we are we want diversity in our kind of scientific Community we want equal numbers of unrepresentative groups like women and other um um unrepresented groups on these panels I think it's it's kind of up to us really like having um meetings like this where loads of people come and and you can kind of engage with us I think that those are things that we need to be doing more of so it's it's up to us as well not just you know educating people to be interested in s yeah I'm not sure I see this as the as as a core problem uh because I think there's a I'm not entirely happy with the idea that everything's better if the scientists can push a policy that they that they like um I think that understanding the science is crucial but I also think that there's a reason why politicians are called politicians they do politics and they do tradeoffs with other things and the way way to get politicians to act act more in the way that you want is not necessarily to increase um their scientific awareness I don't think that there's a clear and not least because the scientific awareness really has to be in the sort like policy advisor place the politicians make choices and make tradeoffs and if you want them to act differently you need to let them know that you they will want for your support if they make certain sorts of decisions I think that the politics really has to be track tracked mainly politically yeah I want to talk about some just messages of Hope from other environmental problems we've had and I want to focus on the ozone depletion problem the stratospheric ozone depletion which was a very big issue in the 1980s and 1990s and solving that problem was a a very good example of the healthy interplay between scientists government and Industry which led to the United Nations Montreal protocol and this led to a a very rapid phase out of emissions of the CFC or chlorofluorocarbon gases that we were using in our fridges and air conditioning um and these were the gases that were destroying the ozone layer and um Al although um we've now almost completely banned emissions of these gases and although it will take 30 or 40 years or maybe a bit longer before the stratospheric ozone layer completely recovers we're beginning to see that recovery now so um um there's no doubt that solving the stratospheric ozone problem was a much easier problem than solving the climate change problem but it does show how scientists government and Industry can work together towards a common goal yeah I wonder whether anyone wanted to pick up on what Oliver said just at the end briefly because this is one of the the central challenges the cent of the question actually it's almost like if only the politicians in society would do what we tell them everything would be fine there's a sense of that so so all had makes a good point that's that's is I was going to say that's not necessarily true I might actually believe it is but I'm not trying to what's the yeah that um what we've got to do is make sure that we get a scientifically based view in there but the decision is a political one um along the climate change committee we've got to take on board uh issues of poverty um you the availability of electricity W to wall the UK economy all these sort of things come into play and this the scientific input and techn technological input is just part of the uh part of the scene there but it's interesting that actually the UK was leading on this issue from the time Margaret Thatcher with a science degree actually took it up before anyone else in the world and I didn't like everything she did but she was amazing in this one she took it up and led that one in back in 1988 in a speech at the Royal Society and there was the scientist who felt able to take that issue on board anyone else there's what the last followup question we've got about two minutes left I i' Brian because because you said you want to avoid politics I'll start with you on the last question which is from from gay it says does brexit have the potential to undermine International collaboration regarding climate change I that was a mean question the answer the answer to that the international collaboration will occur what it's done I think has made the UK contribution to that much more questionable well I sorry I I would I think there's been some talk in the kind of biodiversity conservation community that that although we don't um a lot of people don't like the fact that we're brexiting maybe that it's an opportunity as well to uh understand our relationship with the environment a bit better so that we can put more protection in for the environment and understand emissions rather than less so maybe it's an opportun I don't want to be too optimistic but maybe it's an opportunity rather than a uh terrible disaster in the sense of what agricultural practices because one of them one of the drivers state of nature report a couple of months ago came out with that intensification of Agriculture has been one of the main drivers of biodiversity declines in the UK and perhaps if we could have a more joined up policy with farmers and talking in collaboration with them and how we we manage you know multiple multiple problems like food security but but also managing our Wildlife populations it might be actually be better well we've talked a lot about um sorry we've talked a lot about uncertainty in climate change here um and and perhaps the one word I would say that's the biggest problem with brexit at the moment it's not whether brexit is a good or a bad thing but the uncertainty it's it's uncertain whether we'll have access to European funding for our research it's uncertain about how we will collaborate with Partners in Europe now it's we we have a very strong and healthy exchange of scientists between UK and other countries and it's uncertain how that will be at the moment so it's it's really the problem of I see at the moment is the uncertainty I think there and there's a sort of like policy on a political answer I policy answer I think is that if you're going to a much more heavily renewable electricity system which we have to um it does really help to be part of a big system because um if the sun's not shining here it's probably not shining in slau but it may well be sh shining in stutgart um and so if you can move electricity around more easily then you can go renewable more easily and I think the there are various European projects in increasing energy infrastructure and I think we can be fairly sure that at the margins we're going to be less involved with those than we were before and this also actually goes to the question of possibly doing carbon capture and storage there's a lot of talk about using um the North Sea as a resource there and again that would be made more difficult I think more worrying for me on a British point of view is that the political agenda of the people who were keenest on brexit tends to be very similar to the political agenda of the people who are least keen on action on climate change people like Owen p or Peter Lily who are rather dubious about the benefits of acting against climate change and also dubious about the benefits of being part of the European Union and I think the evidence of the Tory party conference is that that side of the Tory party is doing pretty well at the moment and so I think in terms of domestic climate policy the ascendancy of that particular view is likely to be quite um damaging I just wanted to add one thing about something we should have been very proud of that the the UK actually LED for the the Europe for the EU in the Paris negotiations now you probably weren't aware of that but there was the UK leading for this huge block of Nations uh on this important issue and the influence that provided for us was huge and of course that won't be available to us in the future okay well um I'm just going to say that I'm glad if this was a BBC program I'd have to try and provide some balance to that but uh this is the Royal Society so I don't that's right [Applause] good thank you I just like to well unfortunately we've we've run out of time so um I'd like to mention that we we didn't have time to answer all the questions um but some of the other questions that we didn't have time to answer will be filmed and we're going to put the video answers available on online at the Royal Cy soon so if your question wasn't then you'll be able to see the answers there um I'd like to thank again so Brian Hoskins Professor Kate Jones Oliver and Professor Keith shine and uh so actually we thank the panel please thank you thank you again and then just one one last thing I should mention that there's there's a superb document I think which is available on the Royal s's website which is a Q&A on climate change and um and that was done with the National Academy of Sciences in the in the United States and that is at rocet y.org climate change but um thank you for listening thanks for
