On thin ice
I meet David King at the Conduit, a members’ club he visits when in London that brands itself as a “collaborative community”, a “catalyst for positive change”. When we sit down for coffee, a breakfast menu is still laid out on our table— eggs on sourdough and homemade granola with compote. “A changemaker’s breakfast, fuelling your impact”.
King, 84, was the UK’s permanent representative for climate change from 2013 to 2017 and chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007. He was knighted in 2003 after playing a key role in the response to foot-and-mouth disease, but is best known for driving government action on climate change. And in this area, he still has an appetite to make a difference.
As head of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group of independent experts, King has proposed a strategy of “four Rs” to deal with climate change: rapid emissions cuts, removing carbon from the atmosphere, repairing or refreezing the Arctic and resilience—adapting to and preparing to face the locked-in impacts of the climate change that humanity has already caused. “My fourth R—we’re doing really badly on that,” he emphasises.
The third is the most controversial: King backs experiments aimed at stopping the Arctic melting by creating white clouds over the sea in the polar summer. Rather than calling this geoengineering—a term associated with unpredictable interventions, such as erecting sun shields in space— the technique King supports is biomimicry, imitating the way clouds form by generating tiny droplets of water over the ocean. “We would test this at a low level. And the good thing is, you can just stop if there’s a problem,” King says.
“The programme is very ambitious,” he admits. Not just in terms of the science, but the politics too. Tests are being carried out over the Great Barrier Reef, to prevent bleaching, but the team would need permission to work over the Arctic Sea from the UK, Canada, the Scandinavian countries—and Russia, which sees melting ice as a chance to reach resources. “I know the Russian scientists fully understand the scientific case. But that doesn’t mean that’s a political issue.”
“Climate change is the biggest challenge facing our civilisation,” King says, gravely. But he is optimistic about the likelihood of resource-hungry superpowers cooperating on climate action. Getting China, the US, the EU, Brazil