Last week I gave you a dummy’s guide to the Climate Safety Report.
Round Two of my wising-up to climate science took place at The Wellcome Trust in Euston. It was an event run by TippingPoint, an organization that sets out to provide up-to-date climate science to artists who might then go off to create something influenced by the knowledge they have ingested and further inspire the people that see their work. The idea is to spread the word to different sectors of society so that collectively we can start coming up with solutions to solve the problem.
We were greeted with a laminated nametag and a cup of mild coffee to prepare us for the (ahem) 5-hour lecture ahead of us. Here’s what I learnt…
Dr Chris West, Director of the UK Climate Impact Programme, was a lovely bear of a man with a comforting voice. He eased us into what would become a scientifically complicated afternoon (zzz) with The Basics. Wonderful. I felt gently steered from point to point and a few ‘basics’ were magically made clear.
Ta-daa…I now know about The Greenhouse Effect: This is when the hot and cold energy in the atmosphere is out of balance and causes the temperature here on earth to rise. The reason why there is this unbalance is because we are emitting too many (hot) greenhouse gases to cool that can’t cool the (hot) radiation that hits us from the sun. There is nowhere for these hot gases to go so they form a stuffy enclosure of concentrated heat around us, just like Kew Gardens.
Higher temperatures cause sea levels to rise and weather patterns to change dramatically. The point to which this cannot continue the aftermath is the problem this afternoon of presentations hopes to explore…
Anthony Costello, head of the Centre for International Health and Development at UCL, talked about the decrease in population of mountain marmots. Well sort of… he did say that it has been predicted 15-37% of species face extinction by 2050 as a direct result of climate change.
Climate change is ‘the global health problem of this century’. We know that Malaria transmissibility is set to increase significantly (hotter climate means more bugs to pass the disease about). Again he said that it is difficult to be certain how climate change will effect worldwide health but that research should focus on examining changing disease patterns, food security, human settlements and migration in relation to sea-level projections and hotter temperatures.
We then had a break and a chocolate biscuit or five. I perused the handouts tried to look insightful.
Tim Lenton, professor of Earth System Science at the University of East Anglia, concentrated on this phenomenon of Tipping Points that had been bugging me. What are they and when do they occur? Well, in a nutshell, a tipping point is a point of no return. If we carry on heating up the planet, scientists predict that we will reach a point where we will go over our limits and enter a new climactic territory –the characteristics of which are uncertain but it’s not likely to be very habitable.
There seems to be some dispute as to whether there is one global tipping point that would lead to ‘runaway’ climate change or many tipping points dotted around the globe. But Tim Lenton was all about multiple tipping points (dirty bugger) that may work in a domino effect.
The Big Ones are the disintegration of arctic sea ice and the melt of the ice sheet in Greenland. Not forgetting the die back of the Amazon rainforest, the collapse of the Atlantic, the Indian monsoon… He summed up with saying that the tipping element is an inevitable component of the earth system and, with this is mind, we should be building future societies that are adaptive and resilient to climate tipping.
Diana Liverman, director of the Environmental Change Institute came on stage apologizing for being attached to her blackberry. She was in fact keeping tabs on the Climate Change Conference in Poznan. This is when a group of people from the U.N. sits around a table and work out how to cut back on global emissions. The 1997 Kyoto Agreement runs out in 2012 so plans are being made now for a new agreement to be decided in Copenhagen in 2009.
As we know, recent climate science calls for much deeper cuts. The proposed cuts are 50% worldwide and 80% in industrial countries, 20% in Europe and 80% in the U.K. The new agreement is set to include developing countries (China, India and Brazil) who have previously had no commitment, and of course the big bad U.S.A.
It is also intended to reform the Clean Development Mechanism (C.D.M), a system whereby developing countries reduce their emissions and developed countries reach their emission targets through joint activities. So far it hasn’t worked very well and there needs to be a big change in the way countries are dealing with/failing to deal with their emission targets. But habits are deep rooted, if we are going to combat global warming, there needs to be a major transformation of our social system.
The question on everyone’s lips was ‘how?’ How do we create change on such a grand scale?
We had hoped that big natural disasters would prompt change but the U.S. government’s failure to do so when Hurricane Katrina hit has squashed that one. So now there’s more focus than ever on pushing for civil mobilization; if our government can’t do it, we can. The recession is seen also to change people’s attitudes. As we have evidence that our old ways are not necessarily working, there should be massive investment into new alternatives such as geo-engineering. The view that high emitting corporations should be attacked directly also got a few nods. Or, as one lady put it nicely, mass social change can be achieved through ‘experiment, extremity and engagement with people who are different. ‘
Tags:
Anthony Costello, Centre of International Health and Development, Climate, Climate Safety Report, Diana Liverman, Earth, Environmental Change Institute, Kyoto Agreement, Tim Lenton, TippingPoint, UK Climate Impact Programme
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good to read for people like me who think they understand but often do not. Lovely images, pertinent but cheerful. Thanks