Met Office boss slams Emma-Thompson’s 4˚warming BBC claim
ONE of Britain’s top climate scientists has launched a blistering attack on actress Emma Thompson and the BBC, accusing them of ‘scaremongering’ over the speed of global warming – and risking a worsening of the refugee crisis.
Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the Met Office and a professor at Exeter University, launched his attack on Twitter about an interview Ms Thompson gave to Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis last Wednesday.
He followed it up with a longer critique – an extract of which this newspaper publishes today – on the website of HELIX, a prestigious EU-wide climate research programme which he also directs.
The actress, a Greenpeace activist who that morning had taken part in a protest against Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic, warned that if the drilling went ahead, the world would be a staggering 4C hotter by 2030. She said: ‘If they take out of the Earth all the oil they want to take out, if you look at the science, our temperature will rise 4 degrees Celsius by 2030, and that’s not sustainable.’ Ms Maitlis did not challenge her. In his first tweet, Prof Betts asked: ‘Who briefed Emma Thompson? Clearly not someone who actually knows about climate science.’
He added: ‘Has it occurred to scaremongers like Emma Thompson that exaggerating climate change could drive more migration unnecessarily? Irresponsible.’
Other scientists were equally critical. Dr Ed Hawkins, at Reading University, told this newspaper: ‘Climate change poses substantial risks to humans and ecosystems, but what Emma Thompson said about the timescales of predicted warming was inaccurate.’
In his blog post, Prof Betts points out that the authoritative UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives a ‘wide range of estimates of the speed of future warm- ing’ – but none of them is anywhere near 4C by 2030. He adds that under the highest scenario for future emissions, ‘the earliest time of reaching 4C above pre-industrial was around 2070, and the latest sometime after 2100’.
Ms Thompson hit back yesterday, saying: ‘I’d like to say to him [Richard Betts]: Are you insane, have you been to the Arctic, have you seen the state of the glaciers? I’ve talked to the experts... this is not scaremongering.’ A BBC spokeswoman said: ‘In a longer interview Emily would have pressed Thompson to justify her assertion.’ She refused to say whether the BBC would be correcting Ms Thompson’s statement.