Appropriate to be scared at pace of change, UK scientist says
LONDON: A top British scientist says it is ‘‘appropriate to be scared’’ about the pace at which climate change is taking place.
Former chief UK government scientist Prof Sir David King said the situation was so grave the UK should bring forward the date for cutting greenhouse gas emissions to almost zero from 2050 to 2040, the BBC reported.
Another scientist told the broadcaster about the ‘‘numbing inevitability’’ of climate change, while another expressed concern about public fear around the issue and compared it to the fear of nuclear war in his youth.
Prof King told the BBC: ‘‘It’s appropriate to be scared. We predicted temperatures would rise, but we didn’t foresee these sorts of extreme events we’re getting so soon.’’
He said the world could not wait for scientific certainty on events such as Hurricane Dorian, but said he believed the likelihood that Dorian was a climate change event was ‘‘very high’’, adding: ‘‘I can’t say that with 100% certainty, but what I can say is that the energy from the hurricane comes from the warm ocean and if that ocean gets warmer we must expect more energy in hurricanes.’’
He continued: ‘‘If you got in a plane with a one in 100 chance of crashing, you would be appropriately scared.
‘‘But we are experimenting with the climate in a way that throws up probabilities of very severe consequences of much more than that.’’
Physicist Prof Jo Haigh, from Imperial College London, told the BBC: ‘‘David King is right to be scared — I’m scared too.’’
Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told the broadcaster: ‘‘I have a sense of the numbing inevitability of it all.
‘‘It’s like seeing a locomotive coming at you for 40 years — you could see it coming and were waving the warning flags but were powerless to stop it.’’
Petteri Taalas, secretarygeneral of the World Meteorological Organisation, said that he wanted to ‘‘stick to the facts’’, which were ‘‘quite convincing and dramatic enough. We should avoid interpreting them too much. When I was young we were afraid of nuclear war.
‘‘We seriously thought it’s better not to have children.
‘‘I’m feeling the same sentiment among young people at the moment. So we have to be a bit careful with our communication style,’’ he said. — BPA
HEATWAVES, deluges, rising seas: climate change isn’t a future scenario but one we’re living in now.
How bad it will get all depends on what happens over the next few decades, or even the next one.
Bestcase scenario
The bestcase scenario is that the world succeeds in ramping down manmade emissions of carbon dioxide, within this century, to net zero.
Mean global warming would likely flatten off a little under 2degC above preindustrial temperatures — the target number of the Paris Agreement that New Zealand and about 200 other nations are signed up to.
But even under this optimistic trajectory, our world would still be transformed and face a big change in extreme events like floods and droughts.
The world’s rainfall levels could rise or drop by 10%, and the number of heatwaves and the risk of forest fires would soar.
The worstcase scenario
A highcarbon future — as the world is on track to experience if it continued to pump out carbon dioxide at its current rate — would be much bleaker.
‘‘By just another human lifetime away, people could be living in a climate outside anything that any of us have ever experienced,’’ Victoria University climate scientist Prof James Renwick said.
‘‘The potential for mayhem is astronomical and it really could be catastrophic.’’
The Arctic could lose all of its summer time sea ice and oceans could be 1.5m higher, with another 10m locked in over coming centuries.
In New Zealand, only another metre of sea level rise would add 116,000 people to the 72,000 — and $12.5 billion worth of buildings — already exposed to extreme coastal flooding.
Temperatures might be 3degC or 4degC higher than today, and warm summer days in Canterbury and Hawke’s Bay could reach the high 40s, he said.
Most of New Zealand could be in a subtropical climate, at least, with heavy rainfall events possibly double the current amounts.
Drier, eastern parts of the country would have long, very severe droughts, and forest fire risks would rise by a factor of five.
By the end of the century, many parts of the country would record more than 80 days a year above 25degC.
Most places typically experienced those temperatures for only between 20 and 40 days now, but, already, about 14 elderly people in Auckland and Christchurch have died when temperatures exceeded 20degC.
With about one in four New Zealanders projected to be 65 and over by 2043, the problem would be amplified.
In the Pacific, where about half the population live within 1.5km of the ocean, even a further 2degC of warming could result in small island countries being inundated by sealevel rise.
What needs to happen now
If warming continues at the current rate, the Paris Agreement’s aspirational threshold of 1.5degC — and that of New Zealand’s Zero Carbon Bill — will be crossed at some point between 2030 and 2052. If the 1.5degC threshold can be held, the world could escape an extra 10cm of sea level rise, above what’s already been locked in for this century.
If the world cannot hold the line, then the 2degC threshold — the ultimate limit the Paris Agreement was built around — could be overshot only about a decade later.
‘‘I can guarantee that climate models do not lie.
‘‘If we don’t take action, it’s going to be a very difficult future,’’ Prof Renwick said.
This story originally appeared in The New Zealand Herald. It is republished here, in edited form, as part of the Otago Daily Times’ partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.