Cabot Institute for the Environment experts Dame Julia Slingo and Professor Dann Mitchell discuss “What is the Climate Emergency?” while artist Chi-Yien Snow shares a powerful artistic interpretation of the conversation.
What exactly is the climate emergency and why is it so important? This conversation covers not just the science but their experiences of different generations working in climate science, how we’ll need adaptive adaptation to address the climate crisis, and much more!
Transcript:
00:00:07 Cabot Institute
Welcome to Cabot conversations produced by the Cabot Institute for the Environment at the University of Bristol.
00:00:13 Cabot Institute
We are a diverse community of 600 experts united by a common cause protecting our environment and identifying ways of living better with our changing planet. This podcast series brings together our experts and collaborators to discuss complex environmental challenges and solutions to climate change.
00:00:32 Cabot Institute
In this episode, Dame Julia Slingo and Doctor Dann Mitchell discuss what is the climate emergency.
00:00:38 Cabot Institute
You can find out more about the Cabot Institute for the environment at bristol.ac.uk/cabot.
00:00:52 Dame Julia Slingo
My name is Julia Slingo and I was for eight years until I retired over four years ago. Now the chief scientist at the Met Office when I joined the Met Office in 1972, which is a long time ago now. I started that career in climate science and and it’s been a totally amazing.
00:01:13 Dame Julia Slingo
Done.
00:01:14 Dame Julia Slingo
And who would have thought that sitting here today, nearly 50 years later, we would be looking at at climate change as arguably the greatest challenge we face as a society global society in the 21st century?
00:01:29 Dame Julia Slingo
I thought, actually, Dan, I’d, I’d just start by giving a little bit of a historical perspective as I’m an an old scientist now and you know climate change is not really that new, is it? I mean, we can go back to Irenaeus in in 1896, already worked out that actually if you put.
00:01:51 Dame Julia Slingo
Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It’s going to the world is.
00:01:55 Dame Julia Slingo
Going to warm and.
00:01:57 Dame Julia Slingo
He wrote. Actually, it’s very interesting to see what he said. He said the enormous combustion of coal by our industrial establishments suffices to increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air to a perceptible degree. So it already worked out that it was us or our actions.
00:02:16 Dame Julia Slingo
And he then went on to say that any doubling of the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air would raise the temperature of the earth surface by 4°C. Now you know that’s really interesting because that’s well within the range that we think a doubling of of carbon dioxide would give us. So what’s taking us so long?
00:02:36 Dame Julia Slingo
Yeah. And I think it’s actually understanding what all that means because.
00:02:42 Dame Julia Slingo
You know, Arrhenius thought that this would actually be a very good thing for us to have a warmer world. And he says we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the Earth’s ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than present.
00:03:03 Dame Julia Slingo
For the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind, so he’s right that we are a rapidly propagating mankind. But he was wrong in the sense that he thought that this would be a good thing for.
00:03:15 Dame Julia Slingo
Us all.
00:03:16 Dame Julia Slingo
And then actually, if we skip right the way forward now nearly 100 years to 1990.
00:03:24 Dame Julia Slingo
And there’s Margaret Thatcher, who was actually quite a visionary on this and a real political lead on the whole business of climate change. And she said then 30 years ago, we will be taking a great risk with future generations if having received this early warning, we did nothing about it or just took the attitude.
00:03:45 Dame Julia Slingo
Well, it will see me out.
00:03:49 Dame Julia Slingo
The problems do not lie in the future. They are here and now, and it is our children and grandchildren who are already growing up, who will be affected so very profound words from from her to say that actually it’s not just us. We need to think about.
00:04:08 Dame Julia Slingo
It’s my children, your children, my grandchildren. I’m about to become a grandmother. For the first time. And you know your grandchildren, who will reap the disastrous effects of what we’ve done to the planet in the last 150 years.
00:04:27 Dame Julia Slingo
It’s I’m saying it from an old scientist point of view, and I’m now handing, you know, I’ve done my bit. I’m handing the baton over to you, Dan, but it would be great to hear your perspectives of that story.
00:04:43 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah. Well, it’s really nice to hear that overview, Julia. And in fact, you know, I call myself a climate scientist, but I didn’t know some of what you said in there. So it’s great to great.
00:04:53 Prof Dann Mitchell
To hear that.
00:04:55 Prof Dann Mitchell
Just to to back up a little bit and just introduce myself, I’m Dann Mitchell and I’m a a climate scientist based at the University of Bristol.
00:05:03 Prof Dann Mitchell
And I like Julia sort of build and run climate models, and I look at the impacts of those, those climate models on on human systems and and societal systems. You know, the first the first thing that really surprised me actually was that you said that the doubling of CO2 was predicted to cause.
00:05:23 Prof Dann Mitchell
4-4 degrees warming and that’s just outstanding at how close that prediction was over 100 years ago. And and I’ve known the story from Jules Charlie who, who again in the very early days did.
00:05:40 Prof Dann Mitchell
Predict what that number would be, and I think he predicted it at 3.5 and I think that came out of just a random phone call where they had to make up a number in the end based on a a whole bunch of things.
00:05:53 Prof Dann Mitchell
And of course.
00:05:54 Prof Dann Mitchell
Now you know within the last three or four years, our uncertainty is something like 3 1/2° ± a a degree or so. So it encompasses those numbers and.
00:06:05 Prof Dann Mitchell
As you say, you do wonder, you know, it’s clearly a very hard number to come down, but it it’s almost one of the.
00:06:10 Prof Dann Mitchell
Most important.
00:06:11 Prof Dann Mitchell
Things to do because when we know that number, we know how much climate change.
00:06:16 Prof Dann Mitchell
It is happening so.
00:06:18 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah. So it’s really nice to sort of hear those perspectives on things. I guess when I was at school, the climate change issue was not really that prominent in the media. It’s interesting you you mentioned Margaret Thatcher. She I’d say she’s the 1st Prime Minister that I don’t remember because I was too young.
00:06:38 Prof Dann Mitchell
So, so, so a lot of that sort of insight is really, really nice to.
00:06:43 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah, but of course the big environmental issue when I was young was the ozone hole and that was that was very clear. And you know, that’s an example of an environmental problem that we identified and we put solutions into place really fast and we’ve seen an amazing slow down and now recovery of the ozone.
00:07:05
Paul.
00:07:06 Prof Dann Mitchell
And yes, it’s a much more simple problem I’d argue, than climate change problem. And yes, there were readily available solutions there, but it is sort of disappointing to see, you know, we can do it and we show we can do it, but we’re not doing it.
00:07:20 Prof Dann Mitchell
So, so much with climate change.
00:07:23 Dame Julia Slingo
Yeah, I think that I think that’s right, of course. I mean, the ozone hole, as you rightly say as much a simpler problem to fix and it didn’t have the societal implications that climate change does. Again, I mean, if you go back to Margaret Thatcher and her comment on the 1st.
00:07:39 Dame Julia Slingo
IPCC report, which was also published in 1990, says, you know what it predicts will affect our daily lives. Governments and international organisations in every part of the world are going to have to sit up and take notice and respond, and I think it’s the fact that it it’s going to affect.
00:07:59 Dame Julia Slingo
Everybody’s daily Lives is a thing that makes it so, so difficult, and the economic implications.
00:08:06 Dame Julia Slingo
Of fixing the problem, if you want to put it as simply as that are just immense, which is why politicians have never really ever been able to sort of step up and take the long view. Isn’t it? Because you know the sort of policies that you probably have to put in place.
00:08:27 Dame Julia Slingo
Would make the electorate Yukon nuts.
00:08:31 Dame Julia Slingo
And and yet, you know, we’ve, so we’ve left it for 30 years and it’s amazing, isn’t it, when you think that, you know, it took us to 20 to 2015 and the Paris Agreement for enough countries to sign up and say, actually, we really have to do something about this.
00:08:49 Dame Julia Slingo
And I do wonder whether it’s partly that, you know, in the ozone hole, we had a technological solution.
00:08:56 Dame Julia Slingo
And actually it was ready to roll out, and actually people could probably make money from it, actually. And and, you know, we’ve had to wait 30 years.
00:09:07 Dame Julia Slingo
To get now that technological solutions or solutions in insight where people think that actually it is economically not just technologically but economically feasible.
00:09:21 Dame Julia Slingo
So it’s been a a long, long journey, hasn’t it, to reach this point and then you have to ask for why, why emergency now, why wasn’t an emergency in 1990?
00:09:34 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah, exactly. And I, I guess that sort of takes us nicely into what do we actually mean by a climate emergency?
00:09:43 Prof Dann Mitchell
And I I guess to me that’s definitely.
00:09:45 Prof Dann Mitchell
Uh, uh. Touches on your point about the sort of political cycles and and policy. You know, how long does the policy last when you put it into place and?
00:09:56 Prof Dann Mitchell
And and the reason the climate emergency is a climate emergency is just because of how long things like carbon dioxide stay in the atmosphere and and that number is, you know, large proportion of today’s CO2 emissions will stay in for hundreds if not thousands of years. In fact, some of that CO2 will even.
00:10:16 Prof Dann Mitchell
Stay in for sort of up to 10,000 years.
00:10:18 Prof Dann Mitchell
And you sort of think back into history.
00:10:21 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know what was going on 10,000 years ago? That was woolly mammoths and Saber tooth tigers. In time scales are huge and is is humans. We don’t think on those time scales. And as politicians, we definitely don’t think on those time scales. And so I, you know, I think policymakers nowadays they they understand.
00:10:43 Prof Dann Mitchell
The enormity of the problem going forward.
00:10:46 Prof Dann Mitchell
But our our political system still not set up in a way that it can address this properly because it, you know, political systems around the world really do rely on these reelection cycles and.
00:10:58 Prof Dann Mitchell
That’s not a.
00:10:59 Prof Dann Mitchell
Criticism of the politicians. It’s a criticism of the of the the system itself and.
00:11:05 Prof Dann Mitchell
The climate problem and the political system do not align very well at all.
00:11:09 Prof Dann Mitchell
So what I would say to our politicians is that they really need to understand that this this problem is beyond the life cycle that they’ll be in term for and and if you want to make a legacy for yourself, actually this is one way you can make a very long term legacy for yourself.
00:11:29 Prof Dann Mitchell
I I guess that’s my take on it. I don’t know, Julia, if you would agree or you have a different one.
00:11:34 Dame Julia Slingo
Ohh I I absolutely agree and I think you know very simple message is act now and take the Longview. Please don’t always be worried that you know people will not. I think the population increasingly understands the necessity for a long view on this.
00:11:54 Dame Julia Slingo
Uh.
00:11:56 Dame Julia Slingo
The other thing I would say to politicians is, is that we need to and it’s starting actually think about how we.
00:12:07 Dame Julia Slingo
Estimate economic growth and how we we measure the strength of our economies and that has to change.
00:12:16 Dame Julia Slingo
That if you continue always to think of economic growth in terms of GDP, then you are automatically locking in more and more use exploitation of natural resources.
00:12:31 Dame Julia Slingo
So I think you know there are we need to transform.
00:12:36 Dame Julia Slingo
The way in which we operate as a global interconnected society and we need to do it fast because what we know now from from climate change, that was already happening is that we don’t have much time.
00:12:55 Dame Julia Slingo
We have to turn this around within the next 5 to 10 years at pace.
00:13:01 Dame Julia Slingo
And we need to act now and we’ll reap the rewards over the coming decades. So think of next of the next generations and think of our young people who will inherit what the decisions that we make today.
00:13:18 Prof Dann Mitchell
And that’s why it is an emergency every day that we have in it in action we.
00:13:24 Prof Dann Mitchell
We ensure that our our planet has that days worth of CO2 for hundreds and thousands of years and that that’s the real problem.
00:13:33 Dame Julia Slingo
I think that’s right. And I think you know, when we think about.
00:13:37 Dame Julia Slingo
Well, it it’s such a big problem. What can I do about it? Well, of course, as you rightly say, if if every day you put slightly less carbon.
00:13:47 Dame Julia Slingo
Into the atmosphere by deciding to turn your heating down or not to drive or whatever, that’s that little wedge of carbon that doesn’t have to stay there for all that time and continue to cause damage. And I think it’s getting across that it’s the accumulation, it’s your total.
00:14:08 Dame Julia Slingo
Amount of carbon in your life in in in my life that I’ve put into the atmosphere that that is is what I can do something about.
00:14:17 Dame Julia Slingo
That.
00:14:20 Dame Julia Slingo
But you know, I mean, going back to this word emergency, which suggests that, you know, the planet is now, I think, as somebody who has said to me recently on life support, a sense of rather than 30 years ago just coming into A&E looking a bit sick, it’s now on life support.
00:14:39 Dame Julia Slingo
00:14:40 Dame Julia Slingo
So you know, what are we going to do, do. And what do what defines this emergency and what respect is it? Is it an emergency and.
00:14:51 Dame Julia Slingo
I think the perspectives on that have changed enormously even since the Paris Agreement actually in the last five years, I don’t know what you.
00:15:00 Dame Julia Slingo
Think.
00:15:02 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah. I mean, I think I think they do, they have as well and you know one of the real problems with climate change and the impacts of climate change is that it’s not immediately obvious even to the scientists that climate change played any role in those those impacts. Because of course, we have weather anyway, we have natural events.
00:15:22 Prof Dann Mitchell
We have extreme.
00:15:24 Prof Dann Mitchell
We have those without climate change. We just feel that a lot of them have been altered significantly by climate.
00:15:32 Prof Dann Mitchell
Change and and getting that sort of way of thinking across to the public. Certainly post Paris Agreement has become a lot more, a lot simpler to do I’d say.
00:15:45 Prof Dann Mitchell
But the numbers of the damages we we talk about?
00:15:48 Prof Dann Mitchell
Are are huge and I still don’t think the public understand.
00:15:53 Prof Dann Mitchell
You you know, the 2003 European heat wave that was 50,000 people died in that heat wave.
00:16:00 Prof Dann Mitchell
We believe that around half of those people probably wouldn’t have died without that increased temperature from climate change.
00:16:08 Prof Dann Mitchell
And and so those numbers are huge, but.
00:16:11 Prof Dann Mitchell
When these things happen, you know when someone dies. They don’t write on the on on the the death certificate died of climate change, you know.
00:16:20 Prof Dann Mitchell
And and so it takes years, if not longer.
00:16:25 Prof Dann Mitchell
To figure out.
00:16:26 Prof Dann Mitchell
What those impacts are, and they might be a crop failure, they might be an economic loss somewhere. You know, there’s all these different things. They might be sea level rise in some sort of loss to coastal ecosystems and things like that.
00:16:41 Prof Dann Mitchell
That really hard to point down, really hard to get that across that. Yes, these things do sometimes happen naturally, but they can be impacted by by changing climate as well.
00:16:54 Dame Julia Slingo
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I think the other thing that’s I think has happened since Paris and and is this greater prominence now on the loss of biodiversity extinction rates and you know, landscape problems and you know all those sorts of things that actually David Attenborough has been so good at highlight.
00:17:15 Dame Julia Slingo
Writing of of how you know it’s not just us human beings that live on this planet. It’s it’s a wonderful array of of animals and and marine life and and plants and insects and all of that. And they’re all under enormous pressure. And of course, be very easy to say that’s climate change. And of course it isn’t.
00:17:38 Dame Julia Slingo
But but because a lot of it’s to do with what I would call the scale of the human enterprise, the fact that there’s far too many of us living on the planet on this planet and not managing it well.
00:17:49 Dame Julia Slingo
But I think what it’s done is it’s made people sit up and look at the natural world and our natural environment and hence our the weather and our climate.
00:18:01 Dame Julia Slingo
As something that is incredibly precious.
00:18:05 Dame Julia Slingo
And so, you know, I think it’s it’s also that.
00:18:09 Dame Julia Slingo
You know, we have a a climate emergency. We also have a a biodiversity emergency and I think those two have really sharpened up all the arguments about, you know, our role as custodians of the of the planet and not here. We’re not here just to exploit it and.
00:18:30 Dame Julia Slingo
And ruin it? We have to. We have to care for it. And part of that is going to be about very much about climate, managing climate change. So I think it’s.
00:18:40
Been.
00:18:41 Dame Julia Slingo
I think really fascinating since Paris, that actually there’s been this massive shift and then we get this concept of net 0 by 2050 coming on the table which didn’t come on and you know really that long ago and and and it you know it started I think in this country you can correct me if I’m wrong.
00:19:03 Dame Julia Slingo
And it started here. I’m I’m just spread.
00:19:08 Dame Julia Slingo
And here we are going in in, in, going into negotiations across the world of and net zero is just there. It’s out there as a a target for everybody to to go for and then you know the fact that we to do that we have to think about nature so it has to be nature based solutions I think it’s an amazing.
00:19:28 Dame Julia Slingo
Missing thing that’s that’s happened since Paris, don’t you?
00:19:33 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I’ll be very interested in.
00:19:38 Prof Dann Mitchell
Your views about.
00:19:40 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know, trying to look at the positives in, in many situations, of course, one of the ongoing things at the moment, it’s very negative is, is COVID but a positive that’s come out of that. It’s so many people going out into nature and I, I do wonder if now more people do just understand what that.
00:20:00 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know that smell of clean air is compared to the polluted air and.
00:20:05 Prof Dann Mitchell
I do wonder.
00:20:05 Prof Dann Mitchell
If those people may, may, you know, change their way of thinking a little bit from being out outdoors more.
00:20:14 Dame Julia Slingo
Yeah, that that, that’s right. I mean, I I thought it would be.
00:20:19 Dame Julia Slingo
Quite useful actually, Dan. If we touched a bit on what, what on Bristol?
00:20:24 Dame Julia Slingo
Thirsty is doing in this because actually I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time as chair of the External Advisory Board for the Cabot Institute. I took that on when I retired and and and one of the things that I’ve known actually through my career is that actually, if you want to.
00:20:44 Dame Julia Slingo
That think work on climate change science. You have to really be a polymath. You have to look at so many different facets of the problem and not not just the simple science. It’s not simple, but the sort of science that Aurelius was talking about that actually.
00:21:02 Dame Julia Slingo
It.
00:21:03 Dame Julia Slingo
If we’re going to find the solutions, we have to look far beyond our own discipline of of, of climate science, and I’ve always really, really loved that. And I think you know, the Cabot is a very special place because it really thinks about the the environmental.
00:21:24 Dame Julia Slingo
Solutions, the sustainable solutions that will allow us to actually move for.
00:21:29 Dame Julia Slingo
Would in in a very positive way, and I think you know it be quite useful to reflect actually bring it back from these sort of very global grant statements that we’ve been talking about to talk about some of the things that are going on.
00:21:46 Dame Julia Slingo
In in Bristol or or the sort of projects that you know are really driving forwards to the solutions. Because I think that’s where we are now. We’ve got to think about the solutions and how we how we bring our science to bear in that widest.
00:22:01 Dame Julia Slingo
Right.
00:22:03 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I, you know, you touching on one of your previous points about it, it’s not just about the science. It’s about, it’s about nature and it’s about how we sort of feel. And Bristol as a city is amazing there because it brings the the prestige of the science with the prestige of the arts and it brings those two together and.
00:22:23 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know, it’s no coincidence as to why we, you know, Greta Thunberg came to Bristol, for instance, to give one of her major talks. It’s no coincidence that Bristol was.
00:22:34 Prof Dann Mitchell
The first European city to declare a a climate emergency and.
00:22:39 Prof Dann Mitchell
In fact, Scotland in Wales and England were the first countries to declare a climate emergency. That’s that’s because of this interplay between the science and the arts that I think Bristol’s so good at and.
00:22:52 Prof Dann Mitchell
The university itself and the Cabot Institute. It’s a huge part of this, nurtures that through the cross disciplinary science. It’s done, and it is moving away from just teaching a a straight physics course and a straight math course and a straight geography course. It’s.
00:23:10 Prof Dann Mitchell
It’s trying to combine those skills and as you say, you’ve almost got to be a polymath to do it and.
00:23:16 Prof Dann Mitchell
I I don’t think in our in our school level. So our primary and secondary schools, they they do it.
00:23:22 Prof Dann Mitchell
To the degree which is required for climate change, you know, climate change is still taught in the geography GCSE. It’s not taught in physics and it’s not taught in maths and chemistry and in others.
00:23:35 Prof Dann Mitchell
And and that really needs to change and there aren’t there is there are people pushing that forward, but it’s not an easy change to do. You know we’re not used to teaching the same subject over in, in multiple different areas. So yeah, and I think Bristol is is leading the way in a lot of that.
00:23:54 Prof Dann Mitchell
Bringing in social scientists, bringing in lawyers, bringing chemists, physicists, mathematicians and.
00:24:03 Prof Dann Mitchell
And again integrating across.
00:24:05 Prof Dann Mitchell
A whole bunch of different time scales, so so paleo time scales. The order of 250 million years ago or even earlier actually to actually hundreds and thousands of years into the future, which can be important for some things like, you know, nuclear waste and things like that. You you need to know what the average.
00:24:26 Prof Dann Mitchell
Time it’s going to be very far and ahead because it lasts so long.
00:24:29 Prof Dann Mitchell
So I think you’re entirely right. We need to bring the different disciplines together. And the Cabot Institute is almost designed to do that. That’s its whole thing. And it, you know, brings in 506 hundred different scientists together and that that’s what’s required there.
00:24:46 Dame Julia Slingo
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I was very struck. I mean, you talked about lawyers and and and things like that. I mean, I remember being very struck when I was in Paris in 2015 and I.
00:25:00 Dame Julia Slingo
Sat on a panel with like, I guess he was the President of Kiribati, actually one of the low lying.
00:25:07 Dame Julia Slingo
Ireland States and you know, he was basically saying all those people who deny that climate change is happening should come and see where I live.
00:25:18 Dame Julia Slingo
Because, he said we will lose our island before very long and he was taking actually quite a positive approach and not just sort of sitting there and waiting for disaster, he said. Actually what I’m doing.
00:25:32 Dame Julia Slingo
Guys skilling up my, my, my citizens to go out into the world and be good citizens somewhere else. But it brings to you know, really to the fore. It was a very personal moment for me about thinking about climate change and justice, which is again a really important theme.
00:25:53 Dame Julia Slingo
I think at Bristol you know and I there’s a quote. I think it was from the UN.
00:26:00 Dame Julia Slingo
Official on climate change, you know, and it’s worth thinking about. And. And they said climate change affects many human rights, undercutting the rights to health, to food, to water. It may even affect the right to self-determination, which is what?
00:26:17 Dame Julia Slingo
That man from Kiribati was talking about and actually, you know, just I think you know there we are at cabots in Bristol really thinking through these things because I mean I think this is going to.
00:26:28 Dame Julia Slingo
The part of this is part of the emergency, isn’t it, really, that we’re beginning to now very much.
00:26:38 Dame Julia Slingo
Affect people’s rights to all sorts of basic securities because of what you know.
00:26:47 Dame Julia Slingo
We are doing, particularly in the developed world.
00:26:51 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah, and and and and Even so the UK, if we, you know, we have to hold up our hand. We were one of the first countries to go through an industrial revolution. And so who are we to go to some of these other countries and say no, you’re not allowed to have greenhouse gases and you’re not allowed to advance in the same way.
00:27:11 Prof Dann Mitchell
That we have because now we know it’s wrong.
00:27:15 Prof Dann Mitchell
It’s a really tough question to come across and you know, some countries are just doing amazing and I’d like to highlight Bangladesh as one of those countries. You know, they they’ve done so much work on, on loss and damage of climate change on policies to put in place. I think they were the 15th.
00:27:34 Prof Dann Mitchell
Country to declare a climate emergency, and certainly the first developing world country.
00:27:42 Prof Dann Mitchell
And one of the reasons is they’re in such a climate sensitive region, you know, they’ve.
00:27:46 Prof Dann Mitchell
Got.
00:27:46 Prof Dann Mitchell
A A a hugely altered it floods and and if that flooding gets worse, it puts out a lot of their systems. There’s storms, surges and tropical cyclones coming and you know.
00:27:59 Prof Dann Mitchell
The I think one of the largest losses of life from any climate event was in Bangladesh, which was a tropical cyclone in at around half a million people unfortunately lost their lives and.
00:28:11 Prof Dann Mitchell
Those numbers are incomprehensible. In in somewhere like the UK, but they’re they’re sort of numbers that those developing countries really have to deal with on a a year by year, yeah.
00:28:26 Dame Julia Slingo
Yeah. So I mean in terms of.
00:28:30 Dame Julia Slingo
The climate emergency.
00:28:34 Dame Julia Slingo
You know, you, I suppose the the the person on the street, the layperson would say, well, well, you know, why is it an emergency? You know, you think of COVID as being an emergency.
00:28:47 Dame Julia Slingo
And and it certainly is and, but the difference with COVID is, is is we’ve touched on is that actually we know how to get ourselves out of this tight spot. You know we will find vaccines that protect most of us most of the time and.
00:29:07 Dame Julia Slingo
You know, we will rebuild our economy and our society in fairly short order.
00:29:15 Dame Julia Slingo
And so, you know, people tend to think of, well, it’s emergency wise what what you’re talking about. You’re talking about 100 years, 1000 years.
00:29:25 Dame Julia Slingo
What’s so special about this particular moment?
00:29:28 Dame Julia Slingo
And I think you know, you’ve already sort of touched on it in saying that.
00:29:36 Dame Julia Slingo
The longer we wait, the worse it gets.
00:29:39 Dame Julia Slingo
00:29:41 Dame Julia Slingo
And we’ve touched a bit on why somehow or other we’ve come to this point.
00:29:46 Dame Julia Slingo
Uh, in 2020.
00:29:50 Dame Julia Slingo
Where actually the sort of natures emergency and the climate emergency have come together.
00:30:01 Dame Julia Slingo
But it’s that how do we make a compelling case for urgent act?
00:30:05 Dame Julia Slingo
Option.
00:30:06 Dame Julia Slingo
What’s different now, other than, you know the dialogue, I suppose, is the science telling us anything new?
00:30:16 Dame Julia Slingo
Why?
00:30:17 Dame Julia Slingo
This is suddenly, so it’s such an imperative that we deal with it.
00:30:22 Dame Julia Slingo
What do you think I mean?
00:30:23 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah, yeah, it’s. I guess it’s interesting. And you know what we talked about the the vaccine being the solution to COVID and you know we we have developed the vaccine for the climate emergency and it’s called renewable energy and it.
00:30:37 Prof Dann Mitchell
Is how we apply that in a cost effective and an efficient way.
00:30:41 Prof Dann Mitchell
They and there are other technologies out there that you know is carbon capture and storage, which which will be very important, but it’s not the solution. You know, you’re not going to extract all of the carbon out of the atmosphere that that’s not physical and.
00:30:58 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know, it might get us 10% down that we’re lucky or something, but it’s implementing these technologies, things like electric cars and electric infrastructure, you know, will be amazing once it’s in place as.
00:31:12 Prof Dann Mitchell
And as as long as things like electric cars are getting their energy from renewable resources, it it it it just being recharged from coal power plants and you would sort of you you you’d be concerned there but we are moving we are moving in a great direction there why why now it’s much harder to answer and.
00:31:32 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know, half of me feels it’s just because the younger generation in particular are just pushing. It is such a strong agenda, you know, high up their list.
00:31:43 Prof Dann Mitchell
The politicians really have no choice but to listen now.
00:31:47 Prof Dann Mitchell
And you know, I really encouraged those generations of, well, all generations actually keep keep pushing that. I mean, I guess it it’s not like your career, Julia, you.
00:31:59 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know you this was all very well known about. And so why do you think that there was not so much action there?
00:32:08 Dame Julia Slingo
I well, I I I think of course we didn’t have really the compelling evidence of how damaging it could be. Of course, you know the models that we use to to predict the effects of climate change.
00:32:20 Dame Julia Slingo
Change.
00:32:21 Dame Julia Slingo
Were pretty basic actually. When you look at what we’ve got today.
00:32:28 Dame Julia Slingo
And you know.
00:32:31 Dame Julia Slingo
We we saw it, I wouldn’t say we saw it as a sort of academic problem, but actually it was sort of well, you know? Yeah, it’s a bit CO2 levels are going up. They’re going up a bit. But, you know, when you get to the point where you’re they’ve gone up 3040% above what is normal.
00:32:51 Dame Julia Slingo
At least for the last 800,000 years, you begin to think. But I think actually what we’re seeing now is real evidence of.
00:33:01 Dame Julia Slingo
Impacts on extreme events and that that’s when it begins to hurt, doesn’t it? I mean, whoever you are, it begins to hurt.
00:33:09 Dame Julia Slingo
I I mean I I think you know you’re COVID in allergy is actually quite quite pertinent in the sense that I think you’re actually right, the vaccine is renewable energy.
00:33:19 Dame Julia Slingo
And but just as we have with COVID, we found other treatments to make its effects less severe. So you know you, you know, you’re right. That actually there are things like carbon capture and storage which will help a bit. There’s also things.
00:33:34 Dame Julia Slingo
About, you know, energy proofing your home for example, so that also will make a quite a big difference actually if our homes were much more energy efficient.
00:33:48 Dame Julia Slingo
And and there’s things like our own personal behaviour. And I mean, COVID is a very good example of how we’ve managed the impacts of COVID by changing quite radically our social.
00:34:01 Dame Julia Slingo
And so I think there’s sort of analogies there that there’s not. There’s not one easy one fix. I mean, of course, you know, the ultimate fix is not burning fossil fuels. It’s quite simple. But beyond that, there’s all sorts of other things that we, as individuals, can do and.
00:34:20 Dame Julia Slingo
Governments and businesses can do to help us.
00:34:24 Dame Julia Slingo
Respond to and I think it is an emergency because we cannot go into a world that’s three or 4° warmer than than pre industrial.
00:34:34 Dame Julia Slingo
I mean, we’re one and a bit degrees warmer now and actually isn’t all good.
00:34:40 Dame Julia Slingo
And and and actually I think you know we could find that it’s all quite actually beneficial and I was looking back at something again that an old friend of mine who was an astronaut, actually Piers sellers who died, actually. I mean he was.
00:35:00 Dame Julia Slingo
He was also a climate scientist in interested me, which is how I knew him. He he he did model the land surface and he went up on the shuttle three times. So it’s quite an extraordinary man and.
00:35:15 Dame Julia Slingo
And he wrote before he died about about climate change. And he wrote new technologies have a way of bettering our lives in ways we cannot anticipate.
00:35:28 Dame Julia Slingo
There is no convincing demonstrated reason to believe that our evolving future will be worse than our present. Assuming careful management of the challenges and risks.
00:35:39 Dame Julia Slingo
History is replete with examples of us humans getting out of tight spots.
00:35:45 Dame Julia Slingo
The winners tended to be realistic, pragmatic and flexible. The losers were often in denial of the threat.
00:35:56 Dame Julia Slingo
And I think you know that that’s the message in a way, isn’t it? Yeah. We’ve got an emergency and actually we’re pretty smart and, you know, we will find ways out of this, but of course, we won’t unless we.
00:36:10 Dame Julia Slingo
Really, I think have a song really strong foundation in science and I wondered what you know, let’s get back to some science because we’re both scientists. I wondered what you thought were the for you as a a a generation after me as a scientist. What you think of the really big advances in science?
00:36:30 Dame Julia Slingo
That we need.
00:36:33 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah. So you know, I I strongly believe that climate science took off significantly when we really started to develop these complex models. And that was your generation, Julia. Who did that and who created the the amazing models, the, the models we use now, of course are.
00:36:52 Prof Dann Mitchell
Advancements on what you’re doing, but I don’t see them being significant. You know we.
00:36:59 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know be adding a slightly better land surface scheme or, you know, treat the chemistry a little bit. But where the increases do come is with the resolution of those models, and that’s the spatial resolution I’m talking about mainly. And that’s because the science has moved on we we.
00:37:18 Prof Dann Mitchell
We’re not interested in if humans are causing climate change anymore, we we know they are. We’re interested in how are they doing it and what are those impacts.
00:37:28 Prof Dann Mitchell
And those impacts?
00:37:30 Prof Dann Mitchell
This this is where there’s a little bit of confusion, I think, because we always talk about these global mean temperatures of 1° or two degrees, and I always ask my students, I say, if you had two pots of water, it was 3° different from each other. Could you really tell the difference that you put your hands in, especially if you waited an hour between the two? And the answer, of course, is no.
00:37:51 Prof Dann Mitchell
You you’d have no idea. You could also ask people what’s the weather yesterday, cooler or warmer and they wouldn’t be able to get it.
00:37:59 Prof Dann Mitchell
Within 5° often.
00:38:01 Prof Dann Mitchell
And and of course, from the scientists that that’s actually quite obvious, because 1° over such a large area of a planet’s surface is huge.
00:38:12 Prof Dann Mitchell
And we know that that affects things in very non linear ways and much more local scale.
00:38:17
You know.
00:38:18 Prof Dann Mitchell
And that’s why I think the resolution of models has to increase. But there’s a problem there as we are getting to the limit of our computation power. You know the you can’t just keep adding on more processes because they don’t scale so well. They those processors have to communicate with each other and it gets a little less efficient.
00:38:39 Prof Dann Mitchell
Like.
00:38:40 Prof Dann Mitchell
The problem is we are topping out at that level in, you know, there are advancements that have been talked about a little bit beyond my expertise. If I’m honest, things like quantum computing. You know, I don’t know how realistic that is in the next couple of decades, but.
00:38:58 Prof Dann Mitchell
There’s sort of increases in in computational power I think are just essential because we need to get our models to the to the kilometer scale resolution. So we can look at.
00:39:10 Prof Dann Mitchell
The local crop impacts health impacts. All those things you know, over cities rather than.
00:39:17 Prof Dann Mitchell
Rather than at the moment where our models you know at best are a sort of 100 kilometre grid box than we which tells us a hell of a lot. But it’s it’s not the questions we’re asking now. So that’s where I’d say the science needs to go in the future and it’s.
00:39:31 Prof Dann Mitchell
Not.
00:39:32 Prof Dann Mitchell
Depressingly, for me, it’s not just a science question. It’s a sort of technical question as well now.
00:39:37 Dame Julia Slingo
Ohh, that that’s undoubtedly right actually. But I mean I I think because because our climate is already changing, you know actually quite significantly in many ways. You know we’ve we’ve got to start adaptation now we can’t just.
00:39:54 Dame Julia Slingo
Put it off and say, well, let’s see where we get to and then think about it. We have to start adapting now and that that means, you know, building at doing adaptation that is at the right level so that it’s actually future future.
00:40:13 Dame Julia Slingo
Proofing our cities and our our, our, our countryside, whatever it is we’re interested in and and that means you know we have to have the information not maybe out to 2100, but certainly for the next two or three decades.
00:40:30 Dame Julia Slingo
Of what we think the climate and the statistics of our weather, really, what our exposure to to extreme events at a very local level and and and we don’t actually if we’re brutally honest, we don’t have that information yet and the climate, the message here is climate science is not done.
00:40:52 Dame Julia Slingo
And we really, really need to push very hard now to get the the investment in, in infrastructure, in the compute and data facilities that we need to get down to those scales. So people can make, as I’ve always say, wise choices.
00:41:11 Dame Julia Slingo
About how they choose to, uh. Adapt.
00:41:17 Dame Julia Slingo
Our, our, our cities and their lives and all those things and that’s I think hugely challenging, but I think it’s actually in our grasp and.
00:41:28 Dame Julia Slingo
It’s just a question I think of of international coordination again.
00:41:35 Dame Julia Slingo
And I think the other the other message here is that you know, as we start that adaptation, we have to remember that the pathway to net zero.
00:41:46 Dame Julia Slingo
Is not clearly defined. Actually there are many things that could derail us from that pathway to net zero, such as.
00:41:55 Dame Julia Slingo
System surprises, you know, we know from the part you will know from the past climate where that the Earth system can change.
00:42:05 Dame Julia Slingo
Quite rapidly, we don’t really know what will happen to our carbon budgets and things like that because of what natural systems will do. So we have to think about, I call it adaptive adaptation.
00:42:20 Dame Julia Slingo
But we can’t wait. We really do have to get on with that. Otherwise, the economic impacts of even today’s weather and climate will be really profound.
00:42:31 Dame Julia Slingo
So I mean, I don’t know what your views are on on, on the range of uncertainties we face going towards net zero in terms of what’s needed from the climate science actually and why adaptive adaptation has to be the right way forward.
00:42:50 Prof Dann Mitchell
You’re like, oh, I really like that term adaptive adaptation. Actually, Julia, I’m not sure I’ve heard that before, but it makes perfect sense. Actually. Of course. And.
00:42:59 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know, you again, let’s focus focusing on the UK then.
00:43:03 Prof Dann Mitchell
One of our major problems is with, which is such an old country. You know, we’ve built our infrastructure over millennia, which is probably one of the only countries in the world who could say that and.
00:43:15 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know, our infrastructure is not necessarily built around what we’d expect. It’s it’s built around rivers for, for transport and resources and it’s built in locations that are good for defending against invaders and.
00:43:30 Prof Dann Mitchell
And what that means is it’s not necessarily good for flow of air through. So we have very stagnant air flows in rivers, in cities, sorry. And they’re not, they’re not what I call climate efficient cities in the slightest. Whether you go over to America or, you know, or UAE.
00:43:49 Prof Dann Mitchell
Or country or places like that their roads are in grids and the air flows much more nicely and and the drainage of flooding is much better. But.
00:44:00 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know, if the centre of London flooded from the Thames we would lose all of our infrastructure. You know, it would be devastating. We’d lose our government, our our security services, our economy.
00:44:13 Prof Dann Mitchell
And so the question of what adaptation we do to prevent that it might be there might be a low chance, but the impact is so great that that we say the risk is very high.
00:44:25 Prof Dann Mitchell
The.
00:44:26 Prof Dann Mitchell
So there’s questions that we have to make on on how high do we build the Thames barrier, which is the barrier, of course, that defends the center of of London from flooding.
00:44:39 Prof Dann Mitchell
And it’s not an easy question to answer, because of course something like every meter you build on top of that barrier costs X billion pounds to do so. Yes, we’d love to build it 10 metres higher, but that’s just not not feasible and so.
00:44:54 Prof Dann Mitchell
Your your question about adaptation is.
00:44:58 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know, I answer it as a scientist, but I understand why a politician or a town planner might answer it differently. And it’s exactly as you say, it’s what’s the risk of that, that impact occurring and.
00:45:12 Prof Dann Mitchell
If we get it wrong, it can.
00:45:13 Prof Dann Mitchell
Be really bad.
00:45:14 Prof Dann Mitchell
In in an example, is of course. Again going back to flooding, if we build up river defences on either side of a a river and we get it wrong and they’re too low when that river does flood, it floods in a worse way than it would have otherwise, because you’ve got a.
00:45:31 Prof Dann Mitchell
You get the breaking of those banks and therefore you get a massive water rather than the trickling and so.
00:45:38 Prof Dann Mitchell
There’s a really big responsibility on us to to get these adaptation measures right, and that’s why I particularly like your your phrase adaptive adaptation. Because yes, I think if we if we if we get something wrong and we just hold up our hands and say yes, right, we need to do better at that particular thing.
00:45:57 Dame Julia Slingo
Yeah, that that, that’s right. And I think you know, let’s not forget the range of potential warming from 2 times CO2, as you said, is still between sort of two and five. So we’ve still got a lot of uncertainty.
00:46:14 Dame Julia Slingo
In what our best efforts to get to net zero will mean in terms?
00:46:20 Dame Julia Slingo
Of.
00:46:20 Dame Julia Slingo
First global mean temperature, which as as you rightly say, is not a very meaningful metric for most people. But but you know, let let’s stick with it. But I mean the possibilities of what we could be looking at.
00:46:35 Dame Julia Slingo
Are still still hugely uncertain actually.
00:46:38 Dame Julia Slingo
And so I think, you know, there’s massive still for climate science to do. In fact, I’m actually quite envious that.
00:46:47 Dame Julia Slingo
That you’re that much younger than me cause I’m.
00:46:50 Dame Julia Slingo
I’m finished. And you’re just you’re, you know, at the the beginning of your really exciting career in, in a time when actually I think the problems are.
00:47:00 Dame Julia Slingo
Are really quite profound, more so than they were when I was doing my work in, in a way, because there’s so much at stake, actually. And. And, you know, unless we are really we, we have the scientific base.
00:47:17 Dame Julia Slingo
This on which to make the decisions and it doesn’t matter whether it’s adaptation or mitigation actually cause actually there’s a a real blur now between those two, what have been somewhat independent action lines.
00:47:35 Dame Julia Slingo
That that, you know, if we don’t have a really strong science base and we don’t have a, a really a good risk assessment actually of what is is really dangerous for planet Earth.
00:47:52 Dame Julia Slingo
As we know it.
00:47:54 Dame Julia Slingo
And and we don’t know that actually of what is dangerous.
00:47:59 Dame Julia Slingo
Then.
00:48:00 Dame Julia Slingo
Then you know we’re flying blind. Actually. So, I mean, I think it’s it’s it’s a really exciting time.
00:48:08 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah, I mean I I would agree, although the the, the bit of that, I would definitely disagree with is you know I I look back at people like yourself together and I’m envious of, you know, being it there where you know it was your generation in, in and in fact some of your primary research which really.
00:48:26 Prof Dann Mitchell
Highlighted to the rest of the world that this was a huge problem, so I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on some of those things when they were being developed.
00:48:36 Dame Julia Slingo
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s the sort of another really quite long conversation. But it was quite extraordinary that actually the first global models that we built in the early 70s.
00:48:49 Dame Julia Slingo
Really had 75% of the answer getting now down towards the complexity and the local nature of.
00:48:58 Dame Julia Slingo
What is now needed is so much more difficult.
00:49:02 Prof Dann Mitchell
Yeah. And in these models, you know?
00:49:06 Prof Dann Mitchell
For for those, those people who are not used to to using them, I don’t think people appreciate how complex they are. You know, I I feel it takes an entire Met Office to fully understand and run these things. And you know, they’re millions of lines of code.
00:49:22 Prof Dann Mitchell
They are extremely complex in their in their latest sort of formation, but there are parts of climate models we we don’t trust in, you know, we don’t like to talk about clouds so much because they are not so well represented in our models.
00:49:37 Prof Dann Mitchell
And and and that will affect some local climate that in terms of that global mean response and in terms of some of the primary impacts of climate change, we just got huge amounts of data and very high confidence in what we’re saying with these things.
00:49:55 Dame Julia Slingo
That that. That’s right. Absolutely. And of course, you know those of us and I have worked on clouds quite a bit of my career and and and cumulus convection and things like that. And we know now that actually until we get to that kilometre scale of these global models, we will not fix that problem. I think that’s of a fundamental gap in our knowledge actually which we.
00:50:17 Dame Julia Slingo
We need to be very honest about it and.
00:50:21 Dame Julia Slingo
And it’s only when you get models down to the cloud to scale and we’ve done them and we know we know how to do these that you you really get sort of absolutely a transformation.
00:50:33 Dame Julia Slingo
In our ability to represent clouds and and and cumulus convection rain bearing systems basically whether they’re fronts or or or thunderstorms or tropical cyclones, it doesn’t really matter, but you know they we have to be at those scales and there’s no doubt about that.
00:50:52 Dame Julia Slingo
One thing I did want to just get your opinion on that because I mean one of the things that always struck me when I was certainly at at Reading University and then at the Met Office is how difficult it is to. I used to call it bridging the valley of death between our sort of fundamental science.
00:51:11 Dame Julia Slingo
And it then its application into societally relevant.
00:51:17 Dame Julia Slingo
Quantities or metrics or whatever. Until we do that, actually our ability to do adaptation or find good solutions or to understand the risks are are not going to be very good actually. So what are, what do you think are the challenges?
00:51:36 Dame Julia Slingo
There.
00:51:37 Prof Dann Mitchell
Well, it’s a really good question. I and again, I I don’t think people quite appreciate.
00:51:43 Prof Dann Mitchell
How many moving parts there are in the Earth system before you even get to the societal system? And I think you and I are a great example of that cause, you know from the outside we’re both climate scientists and you think, right? We’re exactly on the same page. But actually you’re a you’re a tropical climate scientist, and I’m an extratropical climate scientist.
00:52:03 Prof Dann Mitchell
It actually, I suspect if we, you know, we worked together, we we you know it would there would be some challenges in understanding both the two systems and.
00:52:15 Prof Dann Mitchell
And and that’s.
00:52:17 Prof Dann Mitchell
Already really closely related. So you take the next step and you say, OK, well, let’s go outside of climate science and let’s think about societal systems or economic systems.
00:52:28 Prof Dann Mitchell
And suddenly you’re just you’re talking a different language, you know? So those things are difficult and.
00:52:35 Prof Dann Mitchell
Let’s talk about a little bit about the water emergency and that requires the coming together of climate scientists and hydrologists in the first incidence.
00:52:45 Prof Dann Mitchell
And those, you know, the different models that are used, the different assumptions that go in there, the way we validate them are so different in you know in my group in particular we we’ve got a number of PhD students and postdocs who actually have been Co trained in both disciplines. And I think that’s the way forward.
00:53:05 Prof Dann Mitchell
I think.
00:53:06 Prof Dann Mitchell
It’s all very, very well and good to say. Let’s put a hydrologist in a kind of scientist together, but actually.
00:53:14 Prof Dann Mitchell
They’ve all. They’ve always think their subject is the more important one. It’s just human behaviour, I think. Whether you could train these people to to be in both communities, I think that’s.
00:53:25 Prof Dann Mitchell
The real way forward and you know we haven’t necessarily done it in my group with social scientists, but I would say that is an amazing step and I would love to have a PhD student it it, it goes across the two and understand.
00:53:39 Prof Dann Mitchell
Maybe some of the conceptual models that social scientists think about and the way they collect qualitative data versus our more quantitative approach because.
00:53:50 Prof Dann Mitchell
We know you need both sides of the coin.
00:53:53 Dame Julia Slingo
I think you know well, of course, one the wonderful thing about I think the Cabot Institute is that it is actually really beginning to bridge the valley of death. And we’ve got this wonderful Masters program now on on, bringing, bringing young people in to work on these cross disciplinary problems and environmental science.
00:54:14 Dame Julia Slingo
And and you know, there’s fascinating array of of of projects and I think that is I mean I think the next generation you know not you not me the next one the young people coming in today that’s what they really do want to work on these sort of multifaceted complex problems.
00:54:34 Dame Julia Slingo
Don’t they cause they do see which we didn’t. Actually they they see now the global implications of of all these emergencies, if you like and how they are all coming together.
00:54:48 Dame Julia Slingo
And I think we could probably getting to the end of our conversation actually there, but I thought it would it it to come back to you know, the climate emergency problem. I was go back to my old friend, Sir John Beddington, who was the chair of the Cabot Board.
00:55:08 Dame Julia Slingo
Before me actually, and I worked with him when he was government chief scientist and.
00:55:14 Dame Julia Slingo
And he really talks about the perfect storm and I think this is this is the real message of why.
00:55:23
Me.
00:55:24 Dame Julia Slingo
This is an emergency today because, he says, can 9 billion people, which is where we’re heading, be fed equitably, healthily and sustainably. Can we cope with the future demands on water? Can we provide enough energy to supply the growing population coming out of poverty?
00:55:46 Dame Julia Slingo
Can we do all this?
00:55:48 Dame Julia Slingo
Us mitigating and adapting to climate change.
00:55:52 Dame Julia Slingo
So, you know, even without climate change, we have an emergency. You add climate change into it, and we’re and we are in a very, very challenging place and there is no time.
00:56:06 Dame Julia Slingo
We we have to start acting across all these fronts right away. And I mean, if we think about.
00:56:13 Dame Julia Slingo
All those securities that we rely on, our water, our food, our energy, our health, our political security actually and and and the questions of migration, they’re all tied up with, you know, fundamentally our weather and climate, it’s variability and it’s changes.
00:56:34 Dame Julia Slingo
And it’s tied up, of course, with urbanization, population growth and fundamentally limited natural resources. So and I always come back to water, of course.
00:56:48 Dame Julia Slingo
But you know, I think he kind of.
00:56:51 Dame Julia Slingo
Said it probably as succinctly as anybody could. Really, we are facing the perfect storm.
00:56:57 Dame Julia Slingo
And what he didn’t comment on was natural, the natural world and biodiversity, and that just makes it even more of a perfect storm. So, you know, I think I think it it it it it so much is an emergency, isn’t it? When you look in that way?
00:57:14 Prof Dann Mitchell
Completely agree and I you’ve highlighted.
00:57:17 Prof Dann Mitchell
The complexities of the different systems there and they’re all coming together, you know, societal, environmental, human induced.
00:57:26 Prof Dann Mitchell
And.
00:57:27 Prof Dann Mitchell
You know, we’re just not smart enough as a race to understand, you know, in 50 years time how that will play out. But we do know it’s going to be negative because everything points towards it being negative and hard and and so we should.
00:57:41 Prof Dann Mitchell
Just.
00:57:42 Prof Dann Mitchell
We we should just understand that and and work towards making it less negative as much as we can.
00:57:47 Prof Dann Mitchell
And I think that’s.
00:57:49 Prof Dann Mitchell
That’s the best we can do at this stage and you know, I think that would be a great outcome if we do work, you know, we we put our money where you know where we need to to make this problem.
00:58:03 Prof Dann Mitchell
Deviate itself as much as possible.
00:58:06 Dame Julia Slingo
And I suppose you know, at the end of that, I’m going to come back to my great hero, which is Sir Robert is Amber Robert Fitzroy. There was a huge storm in in 1859 and many, many ships were wrecked. He wrote to the times after that and he said very perceptively the following.
00:58:26 Dame Julia Slingo
Man cannot still the raging of the wind, but he can predict it.
00:58:31 Dame Julia Slingo
He cannot appease the storm, but he can escape its violence. And if all the appliances available for the salvation of life, in this case from shipwreck were but properly employed, the effects of these awful visitations might be wonderfully mitigated. Well, that’s, you know.
00:58:51 Dame Julia Slingo
A very long time ago now, and the key thing here is that the ability to predict something allows you to.
00:59:04 Dame Julia Slingo
Protect yourself and take the relevant actions, and actually that’s still true today. I mean, his words were about a shipping forecast, but it they are equally true for predicting what climate change will mean for us and what how we’re going to handle this.
00:59:24 Dame Julia Slingo
Emergency and and we can escape its violence and you know, and and we can bring all the appliances available for the salvation of life to bear. We can bring those to bear. Then we may well avoid that the.
00:59:42 Dame Julia Slingo
The worst of climate change, and it might even be wonderfully mitigated, as he would say.
00:59:52 Cabot Institute
You can find out more about the Cabot Institute for the environment at bristol.ac.uk/cabot.
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