The CLIMATE Forecaster
Meteorologist Petteri Taalas has the ear of world leaders – and he’s using science, and a cool head, to prompt action on global warming
IN 2010 there was drought in China, a 260-squarekilometre ice island broke off one of Greenland’s main glaciers, wildfires raged across Russia. And Finland recorded its highest ever temperature as the mercury hit 37.2ºC. Professor Petteri Taalas, then head of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, experienced first-hand one consequence of global warming. When he visited his holiday house close to the Russian border, the fires were close enough to set off his smoke alarms.
“When you are close to these things, it has a big impact,” he says today. Now a year into his second four-year term as Secretary- General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), he has the job of sounding the alarm on climate change to the world. And as the world looks forward to a time beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, he argues that the time is right for an environmental reset.
“Climate-related records are being broken all the time,” he says. “We used to say something may happen in the future. But the future is already here. My job is to put the facts on the table and explain what’s happening – and also to bring hope that there’s a chance to solve this problem.”
The 59 year old sits atop the WMO both figuratively and literally. His office is on the top floor of the organisation’s Geneva HQ, a modernist, oval construction, clad in blue and green glass, which was designed to include various energy-efficient features.
In this time of COVID- 19, his greeting is a cheerful, Namaste-style bow of the head, palms together and pointing upwards. The spacious room offers a 180-degree view beyond the floor- to- ceiling tinted glass: on one side is Geneva’s famous Botanical Gardens, on the other, in the distance, is the snow- capped peak of Mont Blanc. “We can see
“WE USED TO SAY SOMETHING MAY HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE. BUT THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE”
UN Secretary- General António Guterres (left) has listened to Taalas and made climate change his top priority
how the glacier is melting,” Taalas observes wryly.
He is formally dressed in suit and tie but exudes an amiable and relaxed air. Taalas is a modest man and his office reflects that. It is a large space, dominated by a boardroom table, but Taalas’s desk is positioned, almost apologetically, in one corner of the room. There’s a large WMO banner and a flag, but the office gives little clue as to the identity of its occupant.
The WMO is a United Nations agency responsible for monitoring what’s happening to global climate, as well as to the planet’s water resources and air quality. It oversees the global network of satellites that produce the real-time data on which our weather forecasts are based. It is a parent organisation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which addresses the implications of climate change.
“We are a scientific and technical organisation, so we don’t tell the US or the Chinese governments how to behave,” says Taalas. “We tell them what we have measured. The IPCC reports describe scenarios for the coming hundred years or so. We also look at how to tackle this problem.”
Taalas delivers his message about the effects of global warming caused by the build-up of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases in person to world leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Boris Johnson. He has also begun courting many of
the world’s big corporations, such as IBM and Google.
“I will always remember his presentation to our board, in which he described how crop yields will drop dramatically in a +3ºC world,” says Jouni Keronen, CEO of the Climate Leadership Coalition, Europe’s largest network of companies trying to speed up the green transition. “After his talk there was a long silence and I believe it was a life-changing moment for several participants.”
According to British science journalist Graham Lawton, Taalas wields his soft power with considerable dexterity. “What’s impressive is that he combines two things you don’t often get in the same person,” says Lawton. “He’s a really good scientist, but he
“THERE’S STILL A CHANCE TO KEEP GLOBAL WARMING UNDER CONTROL – AND THAT’S MY MESSAGE”
Taalas giving a speech during the opening session of the 2017 COP23 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany
also gets politics and diplomacy. He’s not a starry-eyed dreamer who thinks that just because the science says something people will act on the evidence. That works in scientific circles, but it doesn’t always work in politics and diplomacy. Taalas gets that. He has the ear of politicians and they pay attention to him because he knows how to play the game.”
Taalas smiles at this assessment. “You have to be a little bit careful how you express things.” He says he is careful not to apportion blame when he meets world leaders. “I think they’re fairly well aware of the facts and personally they are motivated to do something. That’s even the case when it comes to the key figures in Russia,” he adds, pointing out that the Russian
economy is very much dependent on sales of oil and gas.
He understands that politicians have difficult decisions to make. Living 15 kilometres outside Geneva, across the French border, he saw with his own eyes the ‘ gilets jaunes’
( yellow vests) protests sparked by the French government’s decision to raise taxes on petrol and diesel in order to hasten the country’s transition to green energy.
Taalas tries to find win-win opportunities, where both individuals and the climate benefit, such as, lower taxes for those who buy low-emission vehicles. Or the health benefits of cycling as opposed to driving.
He also practises what he preaches. He gets on a bike and cycles to work most days, and when he doesn’t, he drives an electric car. He follows a mainly pescatarian diet (cattle are signif icant methane producers), and both his homes use energyefficient heat pump technology for heating and cooling, which he says has paid for itself in four years.
But Taalas insists we shouldn’t let environmental issues become oppressive: “Some people try to limit their whole life and think only of the climate, and that’s not very healthy.”
As a student at Helsinki University in the early 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, Taalas and his future wife, Anni, took part in peace marches.
They were frightened of the possibility of nuclear war and even thought about moving to New Zealand, which at the time they considered was a safe haven. They also agreed that the world was too dangerous a place to bring children into.
The couple have now been married for 34 years, and their five grownup children are no doubt grateful to Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan for bringing the Cold War to an end. Taalas says he sees a parallel today in the way many young people fear the future just as he once did, but this time for environmental reasons.
He has a lot of time for young idealists such as Greta Thunberg. He has met the Swedish teenage activist and speaks warmly of her, even if he doesn’t agree with all that she says. He feels she may have been misinformed.
“I know what it is like to be young and have strong emotions,” he says. “But there is a small number of scientists who tell horror stories about tipping points and how mankind will die and so forth, and I think Greta may have heard too many of these stories. Knowing her personality, it may be a little too black and white, but she has been very vocal and the overall result has been positive.”
Taalas’s meteorology career happened almost by accident. He comes from a medical family but chose to study physics at university. When it came time to specialise, he was drawn to hydrology, but his wife,
whose wisdom and support he credits for much of his success, favoured meteorology. Taalas went to a couple of lectures “and I realised the subject could be something fascinating”.
Taalas received his PhD in 1993 and, as he rose through the ranks of academia, he found himself leading teams, which came naturally to him. Change management is his passion and among his achievements he lists his transformation of the Finnish meteorological office, which he led on and off for 11 years, and the modernisation of the WMO, making it among other things more science-based.
He believes his main impact has been to spread the word on climate change. He works closely with the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, and has succeeded in making him a convert. “For the past two years he’s said that this is priority number one,” says Taalas with a hint of pride. “I’m happy with that. He’s one of the most influential people on the planet.”
Taalas says that when he first started talking about climate change, around 20 years ago, he would be invited to appear on TV, and usually there would be another guest, a climate sceptic, to give an alternative point of view. That rarely happens these days. “There’s very wide attention for our reports, so worldwide awareness is fairly good.” The problem now lies with those who believe the world is acting too slowly to avoid disaster. He describes their fervour in religious terms.
“If you look at Christianity, for example, there are some people who are very extreme and have very strict rules, and then you have more liberal Christians. It’s a little bit the same when it comes to how you handle the climate. Some people would like to be very orthodox and tell other people how to behave. But if the whole climate issue has a label of being something that’s very extreme green, it doesn’t help to get it sorted out.”
Taalas gives short shrift to the methods of activist groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who advocate a strategy of non-violent, disruptive civil disobedience. “I think it’s not helpful for finding a solution to this problem,” he says. “If the public image of climate mitigation is those people, that may even be counterproductive.”
He also feels the term ‘climate emergency’, which has gained currency in recent years, is not appropriate. “We’ll see climate emergency if we fail with mitigation, but there’s still a chance to keep the warming and this change under control, and that’s my message,” he says.
More than a year ago, as the world retreated into lockdown, a glimpse of a different planet was brief ly visible. In major cities, smog cleared to reveal blue skies – skies noticeably empty of planes. Deer, sheep and goats were seen gambolling on deserted highways.
That was then. The so-called ‘ anthropause’ is at an end and pollution levels are heading back towards pre-pandemic levels. But for Taalas, this was a significant moment. “It demonstrated that we can change our behaviour once there’s enough incentive,” he says.
He wor r ies about the ef fect COVID-19 is having on the world economy and fears that governments may be less motivated to invest in climate-friendly technologies. But he’s also heartened by initiatives such as the EU’s ambitious European Green Deal, which aims to make the bloc carbon neutral by 2050.
“I’m an opt imist,” says Taalas. “This is an opportunit y to jump to the new green technology in a speedier manner than would have happened otherwise, and the developed countries can afford it.” He says that what happens to the weaker economies is “another question”, but most of the emissions come from the most developed countries.
The lesson that Taalas learned from his early studies of the effects of acid rain on the lakes and forests of Scandinavia and the damage to the ozone layer from the gases in aerosols and fridges, is that change can happen. Both problems have been pretty much resolved by regulation. Climate change presents a far bigger challenge, but he believes we can succeed in keeping warming to an increase of two or three degrees above pre-industrial levels.
“It’s doable,” he says. “You just have to have international consensus and the science has to be solid enough to convince the decision makers to act.”
The editors of the European editions of Reader’s Digest have named Professor Petteri Taalas as ‘European of the Year’ for 2021 for his role in tackling climate change in Europe and on an international level.