1.5 v 2 Degrees Celsius: Why Half a Degree Really Counts - a Science Museum Group Climate Talk

[Music] [Laughter] [Music] good evening and welcome to the latest in the science museum groups series of global climate talks a series of year-long debates in the run-up to the most important international climate summit this year the cot 26 in glasgow and throughout this series of global conversations the science museum group is proud to be fostering a scientific debate around tackling the most urgent issue facing humanity with climate scientists economists campaigners and activists from across the globe who are united in trying to address the problem of and solutions to the climate crisis this month we announced our commitment to go net zero by 2033 following the respected science-based target initiative if you're interested to find out more please have a look at the link below tonight's panel of scientists and campaigners will focus on the question of why it is so important that we aim to limit global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels and what action we need to take globally to address this i'm thrilled to hand over to your chair for this evening editor at large for the guardian and presenter of its award-winning podcast today in focus as well as co-presenter of itv's flagship political programme pesten the journalist and broadcaster anushka astana thank you for that introduction and welcome to all of you watching tonight's climate talk wherever in the world you are watching from i'm anish karistana and i'm really pleased to be sharing tonight's discussion the latest in the series of international climate talks organised by the science museum group as you've just heard many great thinkers in science policy and economics from across the world have come together in this series to address the urgent issue of climate change if you're tuning in to the climate talks for the first time you can catch up on previous talks at the science museum's youtube channel and there are plenty more coming um in the run-up to cop 26 and the climate summit but let's focus on tonight's discussion currently the earth is just over one degree celsius hotter than it was in the mid 19th century and right now as everyone knows we have a fight on our hands to keep the planet's temperature from going much further i'm sure many of you will remember the paris agreement at cox 21 in 2015 which was a legally binding treaty to keep global temperature rise to well below two degrees and preferably below 1.5 half a degree might not sound like much but as you're going to hear tonight it is a very significant number we're going to be hearing about what happens if we don't hit the 1.5 degree target the consequences if we fail to even limit global warming to two degrees and the very worrying question of whether we can survive on a planet that's three or even four degrees hotter than in pre-industrial times joining me to help answer these questions is a brilliant international panel of speakers in fact it couldn't get any more international two of our speakers are separated by 20 hours of time difference that is the joy of our new online reality so thank you to the panel for joining us this evening and though we might be separated by many thousands of miles it's a pleasure to be sharing this virtual room together let's meet our speakers in no particular order firstly we have professor julia king baroness brown of cambridge julia is the chair of the adaptation committee for the uk committee on climate change and with the uk's low-carbon business ambassador for 10 years until 2019 she's also a fellow of both the royal society and royal academy of engineering welcome julia next we're joined by cassidy kramer who joins us from i'm sorry say it wrong um boy you're going to remind me in a second in alaska cassidy is a member of the inyupac community who relied on alaska's land for thousands of years and is enrolled in the caleb scholars programme which advocates for protecting article workers through ancestral knowledge she's going to tell us more about that she's also studying to be a science teacher good evening cassidy or should i say good morning to you and it is also good morning to our next distinguished guest although almost a full day ahead of cassidy the former president of kiribati in the central pacific ocean his excellency and oaky tongs twice been nominated for the nobel peace prize and is a tireless campaigner for climate action having met the likes of president obama and pope francis to discuss the plight of small island estates he's also the subject of the brilliant documentary and other which premiered at the sundance film festival in 2018. thank you for joining us annoti and last but by no means least i'm delighted to introduce the world-renowned botanist and ecologist professor gillian france sigilian is a former director of the royal botanical gardens at queue which is very near where i'm sitting right now i spend many happy hours there with my children he is the former science director to the eden project and is a recipient of the victorian medal of honor one of many honors bestowed upon him sigilian has spent more than 30 years exploring the amazon has discovered over 350 new plant species and has lived with 16 different amazonian tribes that is a pretty amazing cv and a remarkable career welcome to gillian so i'm going to start by speaking to each of our panelists separately for a few minutes before we open it up to a broader panel discussion in which i'll also throw some audience questions that have been submitted in advance so a very warm welcome to you all and i'd like to begin with professor julia king julia to start the planet is currently one degree celsius hotter than it was in pre-industrial time i.e the mid-19th century that probably

doesn't sound like much for most people why is that a dangerous level of increase well i'm i'm sorry to disappoint you but actually we're already 1.2 degrees hotter on average both in the uk and globally and it's going up very fast indeed the last 10 years have been the hottest 10 years on record and we seem to break a record depressingly every year and we're already seeing changes in the climate in the united states the wildfire season is now 78 days longer than it was in the 1970s here in the uk we're now regularly seeing heatwave summers and last year we saw our highest ever recorded temperature here in cambridge which is where i am this evening um we're seeing increasing um storms and flooding globally and we've already seen some 16 centimeters of sea level rise and we could be seeing a lot more if we don't uh if we don't manage to reduce emissions very dramatically in the next 20 years or so why does the paris agreement prescribe an ideal maximum temperature of 1.5 degrees what is the significance of that figure it's not an ideal maximum temperature an ideal maximum temperature would be naught but it's a it's a pragmatic this is this is really if we try incredibly hard the best we can probably hope to do is to have a 50 chance of staying below 1.5 degrees um clearly the lower we can we can keep the warming the better but of course we're already at 1.2 degrees and in fact with the emissions that we have in the atmosphere already we're probably going to go up by another 0.6 degrees

by 2050 even if we could stop um further emissions pretty much now so uh it's uh you know we're on track for 1.7 1.8 degrees already so um it's going to be very tough to keep it down to 1.5 but but every fraction of a degree we can save so to speak reduces the impact on our wildlife reduces the the sea level rise reduces the um increases in in peak temperatures that we're seeing in the summer so every little bit we can do better uh is is a real advantage to us but what you're basically saying is we're already on track to overshoot that target is there a concern that that track gets even faster is there a risk that we're on track to overshoot the two degrees at the moment we're definitely on track to overshoot the two degrees um the uh the if we go on with business you as usual we're going to hit something probably hit on average something more like four degrees by the end of the century if the uh if people don't improve their their pledges their um their ndcs their nationally determined contributions um for the next cop meeting then we could be on track for something like three degrees if they meet some of their their current pledges so we really do need to see all countries stepping up their ambition and really trying to aim for that that 1.5 degrees and we may well overshoot but with uh with the um some of the technologies we now have for negative emissions with using things like tree planting and restoring nature to help absorb more co2 we may be able to to to get back some of that uh overshoot although we will have done permanent damage on the way i mean you've touched on it there and i'm about to ask a huge question which people spend their entire careers thinking about you yourself included but i wonder if you can give me two minutes on it for now and then we'll come back to it later you know what do we need to do to keep to 1.5 degrees

and by when you've mentioned you know new technologies there are there other very clear things that are needed well the the ipcc suggests that the the globe the world needs to get to net zero by um 2070 that means rich countries like the uk and the us need to get there by 2050 to allow the countries who don't have such a big um historic emissions backlog so to speak as we do the ones who haven't already had the chance to become richer on the the technologies of the past to give them a chance um to to get their emissions down just a little bit more more slowly but we're going to need to apply all of the technologies that we have we're going to need to have zero emissions vehicles so that probably means mostly electric we're going to have to stop using pretty much stop using fossil fuels completely unless we can catch the co2 that is emitted when they are burnt so we're going to have to have lots of renewable energy in the uk that probably means something like 100 gigawatts of offshore wind around our shores by 2050 up from about 10 gigawatts that we have in place today so it means dramatic changes uh right across society really okay thanks julia i'll be coming back to you very shortly now we're going to go to our next speaker who has seen firsthand the impacts of climate change on our environment joining us from kotzebue alaska i hope i've got it right that time cassidy and kramer and thanks so much so cassidy i mentioned before you're a member of the indie pack community and are rightly proud of your relationship with the land and the seeds around you i wonder if you could tell us a bit about that relationship and what it means to you yeah of course so what it means to me and what it means to a lot of inuit people is what i like to remember as the acronym speeches uh this is actually taught to me by my father um and s in speeches is for spirituality with our land the na the land nourishes our inua which is our connectedness with the creator and his creation um the p in speeches is for physical health it provides us with nutrition the first e is emotional state and the second e is education and through this we pass on our traditions uh the c in speeches is for culture and the h in speeches is humility which also kind of ties into the spirituality of it all um the land humbles us out there we're not at the top of the food chain we're at the mercy of the land the weather the animals and we want to honor and respect the land and you also when you're out there you feel insignificant and uh while this is a hard feeling to to feel um it is actually quite nice it grounds you and it brings you back to reality and suddenly you start noticing all these blessings that you hadn't noticed before and you start feeling grateful that the land provides for you and you also feel kind of special and cared for it's like when someone gives you a flower and you're like oh for me thank you it's the same thing kind of i get a seal and i'm like oh for me you shouldn't have um so yeah and then uh and then the next is e in speeches for economics the land provides commercial fishermen with an income and a lot and the same thing with trackers and provides them with an income and it also saves the amount of money that we would spend at the store for food um and then that last s in speeches is the social well-being with each other as people we gather together pre-code um to eat together to prepare our food and to hunt together so that is that's what it means to me you mentioned you enrolled or i mentioned you enrolled in something called the caleb scholars program can you tell us about that yeah so the caleb scholars program was made in honor of my grandfather caleb pangowii who was a strong advocate for conservation subsistence and alaska native stewardship stewardship of resources he sadly passed away in 2011 but the caleb scholars program has done has done such a great job at continuing his legacy through the scholars that it supports um it is a unique advocacy advocacy development program that uses cultural educational and professional training strategies with its scholars and in my opinion it's definitely more than a scholarship program they provide us with a mentorship and virtual categories which are gathering so that we can talk to each other about how we're doing in school and in life and also talk about other important topics um and personally the caleb scholars program has done so much for me if you told me a year ago today that i would have been a part of a bbc documentary if i had been part of the live panel at davos and a part of this panel today i would not have believed you the caleb scholarship program has pushed me to advocate for the things that i love and um i'm really grateful for that oh and also oh sorry no go ahead i'm just gonna say um and if anyone listening would like to donate um so that the caleb scholars program can do this for um other other alaska natives um then i could i encourage you to visit their website at calebscholars.org or you can visit their page on any social media platform uh with the handle at caleb scholars okay and you're less than 20 miles from the arctic circle which has seen some of the largest temperature rises on the planet due to global warming what changes have you seen to the local landscape and ecosystem and what changes do the elder people in the community talk about as well yeah so a change that has happened within my lifetime that i've had to witness is that our ice goes out earlier and it forms later um someone in my community observes observes the ice every year and this year he noticed that the ice in the channel here in kotzebue was two feet when it's usually three or four we also used to have pure thick ice and now my dad while creating ice fishing holes has observed that the ice has layers of ice and water and two years ago was also the first time the ocean didn't freeze from places called cape blossom to systolic it was all open water out there in fact an elder told me that when he was little his mom used to dance when flurries came because that meant that the ocean was open and it was time to harvest in the spring and now he sees flurries throughout the year um and the ice is the lifeline of the marine ecosystem so if it is gone it will do a lot of damage on the ecosystem and the people surrounding them and it is also very unpredictable now especially around this time of year so i only hope that the community the people of my community stay safe um and and i can just keep going on and on about changes i've noticed like the growing population of beavers uh growing tree line um and there's just there's just a lot a lot has changed and just and and what will happen if those changes make it impossible to live off the land and follow some of the traditions you've talked about that the inupaka followed for thousands of years i mean will the community be forced to move away um no i think um the indian pact people were very just inuit in general were very adaptable we've had to adapt for for generations for thousands of years um and and i think we would find a way to to make it work for ourselves okay thanks cassidy we'll also speak again shortly but we're going to hear from botanist ecologist and an expert on the brazilian amazon rainforest professor sir gilliam prance good evening for gillian um your first expedition to study the brazilian amazon rainforest was in 1963 one of many when you work for the new york botanical garden what were the major changes you saw over the decades due to human activity and climate change well in 1963 when i went out as a relatively young botanist to a pristine forest and so i began fascinated by the diversity the magnificent trees the animals as a naturalist and was fascinated and i think that described my first 10 years in the amazon but then in 1973 i took my ecology class to visit the construction of the trans amazon highway across the amazon we came back from that to analyze what we'd seen and we were just shocked by the unsustainable colonization program along this and that began to the destruction in a big way in the amazon because the highways opened up the whole of the forest the accessibility for people to go into the amazon rainforest and that actually changed my research emphasis because i could no longer just spend my time fascinated by the flora and fauna but i needed to do something more useful for the people i'd been amongst the indigenous people from whom i'd learned so much and so i turn my research emphasis much more to economic botany and ethnobotany working on ways that we can sustainably manage the rainforest so i've really been working in it in a time when the the forest has really deteriorated a lot i've been there at the time of maximum destruction of the amazon rainforest which is tragedy really and tell me about some of the tribes who you spent time with tell me about your experiences with them and how their lives were being affected by environmental damage i've had a remarkable privilege of visiting so many tribes and spent a lot of time with the yanamari people and so i respect their culture in a wonderful way but i am also really sad that the indigenous people have suffered so much from the development of the amazon the yanamami that i know so much of have been invaded by gold miners their whole territory poisoned by the mercury they've used to extract the gold timber has been taken out illegally from many of the indigenous properties one of the lessons i've learned is when i'm looking at maps of where the forest is best kept and pristine that is in the indigenous territories they have been good keepers of the forest compared to us westerners and that has been a big lesson to me about uh the way they have lived they have used the forest sustainably for their livelihood and the other interesting thing is they are in the most remote places noticing the changes in climate it's affecting them in various ways they depend on various biological observations to as a calendar the migration of various birds the flowering of plants and that tells them when to do various things but i've had several of them telling me that this calendar is no longer working well the the excess droughts and flooding in the amazon is changing their lifestyle and they're having to adapt to it so even in the remote places of the amazon they're aware that the climate is changing can i ask you about this recent study published in nature it suggested the amazon rainforest is on the brink of becoming a net carbon emitter rather than the important carbon sinks that it's been historically how is that possible i'm afraid that that is absolutely true that uh the amazon is indeed no longer such a great sink of carbon as it was in various recent years there have been droughts 2005 was an enormous drought in the amazon i happened to be there and saw the rivers drying mountains of dead fish and it was a real disaster and everyone said that's once in a hundred years happening but then i was back there in 2010 and there was another drought and then perhaps the worst one has been in 2016. so i this is having an effect in the 2016 drought the fires in the amazon were 36 more frequent so this drought is just meaning that the amazon can no longer be the true sink that it has been in in the past the amazon is an incredible hydro system of its rain the rain comes in off the atlantic and then it falls on the east of the amazon and that is recycled by evapotranspiration and blowing a bit further towards the west until it gets near the andes and it goes down to the south well if the forest is cut in the eastern part of the amazon this what the brazilians call flying river no longer works and so we begin to get more and more drought and that's why the amazon is no longer that wonderful sink that's so important to us for absorbing the excess co2 in the atmosphere there have been that have to create genetically modified plants that are better absorbers and stores of co2 just interested in what you make of that approach i mean is there a risk with it you kind of paper over the problem that we're destroying too much of the world flora well you're referring to the work i think done at the salk institute in california where they are genetically engineering the plants to produce more root one of the things that is important in carbon balance are the roots we think a lot of the trees and how much carbon is stored there but there is so much carbon stored in the ground today and one of the ideas there was to enlarge the root system through genetic engineering uh yes that obviously will fix a bit more carbon but we also need to just think about in the normal forest without doing that how important it is to preserve the roots and then two or the peat that is stored under the forest i think that uh such genetic engineering might help a little bit but the real answer is in stopping emitting the co2 into the atmosphere and not such mechanisms so let's stop emitting carbon dioxide and don't think we can save the world by a mechanism like that okay thanks sir gilliam now for the last of our one-on-one conversations before we open this up to the panel i'd like to turn to the former president of the republic of kiribati his excellency and they say tong welcome thank you for joining us i think it's pretty early in the morning that before we speak we're going to see a short clip of the terrific film another issue of climate change remains the most pressing single most pressing challenge for us in cubase who do we appeal to and turn to for our people's right to survive in the challenge of climate change [Music] the nations that contribute the least to climate change often stand to lose the most rising sea levels have already taken a village on one of your islands do you see the possibility of all the people from kiribati one day having to leave if we leave cannabis then our ability to retain our culture as being distinct will no longer be very easy [Music] actually you campaign globally for more protection of low-lying island states such as your own can you tell us about kiribati and some of the effects of climate change that you've seen already let me begin with the word of great may you be blessed um yes i have been at this campaign for quite some time since i took up office in 2003 and it's not busy task and they have been able to to be heard as effective uh what is happening the effects of what the feeling here is um over the years over the decades we had flooding uh we thought this were part of the normal cycle of events but of course once you start reading the the science and the reports that are coming forward and you put the two together what we are experiencing in terms of uh the flooding that we are getting the destruction of food crops the contamination of the water lens and once in a while are getting storms that we're not supposed to get i mean we're on the equator we we're out of the belt yet there's been locations in the past in 2015 we had cyclone um flood all of the islands of tubalu who are further south than us and flood all of our islands to the extent that a lot of food crops that have been there for decades were destroyed of course there are abilities from village communities who had to relocate we have homes which continue to be uh destroyed there is a certain degree of preparedness now as compared to the past but still even early this morning i i had uh waves lapping just next to my porch and if we did get a bit of a wind they would be coming over and into my doorstep so these are the impacts that we already have experience it's absolutely devastating and a report by the intergovernmental terminal and climate change in 2014 reported that places like kilbus could be submerged by rising sea levels i mean you can literally see that happening where you are right now do you have a sense of how long kiribati has and you've mentioned some of it that can this be prevented from happening the uh how i i'm often asked that question i really cannot answer but i believe it keeps changing i mean uh the the ipcc report uh before the 2014 report was a lot more conservative suggesting that we will be submitted by the uh by the next century that keeps changing the 2014 report was saying it might be earlier this morning i'm hearing professor king saying that the the gullible temperature is actually rising faster than ever before and so i'm seeing the impacts of this happening i i think by the middle of the century i can see a lot more destruction a lot more people being affected and i can say that well within this century we would have to find more sustainable solutions with the flooding that we will experience and what can we do uh we can try to raise the islands i've i've been on on recorders examining the possibility of uh floating islands you know that's uh it's a bit bit upset in desperation we have to find a credible solution solutions that at least would give us some sense of hope that we do have a future and so the future is not very bright for us we indeed we may actually have to rule many if not all of our people at some point in time in the future but you talked about politicians and i know you you know met with world leaders scientists to try to work out what can be done i just wondered if you could give us any specific examples of the types of solutions that you've explored and discussed you mentioned floating islands there but there are other things aren't there that are underway and that are being looked at yeah i uh when i first looked into this issue and tried to find struggle my way through it was not easy because i was seeing this extremely difficult challenge which nobody was able to step forward with the solution for i kept attending conferences and i've never yet been able to come back friends in the past during my time in office of 13 years never been able to come back and say that we have a solution in hand uh in my wild games i i said i looked at floating like islands there are the options of raising the the level of the islands as the sea rises how how long we can continue to do that uh i i've reconciled to the reality that as the water rises uh we we will not be able to raise all of our islands we may have to focus on one or two so that our as a nation we can continue but i don't believe that we would have been able we would ever visualize the resources to do what we would like to do i don't think that we we may not need to to remain on the islands given the amount of resources are required to raise the islands and and then again the question is how long can we continue to raise the islands uh above the rising waters i mean you're clearly aren't you right there on the front line of the climate crisis does it sometimes feel lonely i mean how important is it for nations like kiribati to receive the support of larger nations in order to try to tackle climate change well it's uh you're actually corrected and it's been a lonely campaign for me especially at the start where nobody would listen to me when i spoke at the united nations general assembly nobody was listening you know the focus was on terrorism and uh i i was angry frustrated and uh but i had to find some way to be heard and uh but gradually the momentum picked up other equally challenged countries began to take pick up pick up the call and uh over time the momentum began to build up but i believe that uh we're still not getting the right kind of responses from those that really need to respond in other words the industrialized countries the countries that are doing this that have been doing this that have the capacity to provide the solutions um even in 2015 that the paris discussions there was a lot of resistance to our call for the those responsible to to acknowledge responsibility for the liabilities okay and uh we we did we do have the green climate fund but that is not the answer i'm afraid that until now we're still struggling to to get uh some kind of agreement on cutting emissions let alone trying to find solutions for those countries which are most challenged whose future is in real jeopardy who may not continue to exist as nations thank you that is terrible to hear let's open this up to a bit more of a panel discussion now and i'm going to throw each question to one of you to start with but then we can open it up to everyone else just give me a wave if you want to speak and i'm also going to throw into that some of the excellent questions that we've been submitted in advance thank you to all of those who have sent them in um i want to start by something that you touched on at the beginning julia which is the idea of not meeting either 1.5 or 2 degrees in terms of target i want to start by asking all of you that maybe first you julia what the world looks like if it's three degrees hotter than pre-industrial level um well you know it it's it's a lot more flooding it's a lot more drought um it's leading to a lot more wildfires leading to to crop failures leading to climate-induced migration we know that that climate change can can fuel conflict in in regions where people's land becomes less productive and so um they become they they you know they move to other land and that can cause um conflict and we could be seeing uh up to a meter of sea level rise by the end of the century so real challenges that noti and and his people in in kiribati um we will of course be seeing very significant damage to the natural environment and to wildlife with a three degree temperature rise i think it's now um very clear we would have lost all of the corals for example so future generations would not see those beautiful coral reefs at all um so so many aspects of of lives would be changed by the end of the century and if we're on if we're heading to between three and four degrees um whilst uh we can adapt probably to something like two degrees we will run out as actually as i think a notee was saying we will run out of ways to adapt and we will have lost quite a number of our our very precious wildlife species as well it will not be a world that we should be thinking of leaving to our children and grandchildren maybe you could just come straight back what what happened to your country in that situation well what one meter is or already it's that i think you you add on the waves and that the water is coming over the land uh for us the solutions we would have no choice but to relocate and uh and this is why what a during my time in office i went to address of purchasing land in fiji as net possibly given the remote possibility the possibility that we may have to relocate that's not easy to for countries like any country to have the brutal reality that you may be planning for the demise of your own country uh but but i think what i've in my in terms of migration uh there's always possibility that uh i mean i've been watching what's been happening in the migration of from north africa to europe that's not a nice scene we don't want to be a part of that we don't we don't want to be climate refugees we would like to do it better and i i propose that we plan deliberately plan for a a program of migration with dignity whereby people are trained qualified and able to to migrate uh into new societies into new communities that was as worthwhile citizens to be part of the community not part of the burden cassidy in alaska what is the thinking about those kind of numbers if we were reaching three four degrees more than pre-industrial time what would that look like where you are well it would throw everything off of the loop um our ecosystems our animals can't handle that that type of heat they're made for the arctic um so we would lose a lot of that and and as a people if we lost our animals i just i don't know what we would do that's that's not even something that i want to think about um to not be able to live a subsistence lifestyle um and for my my children and my grandchildren to not live that lifestyle um it'd be really hard for us sigillian it's obviously a very depressing thought i wonder if we can flip it and think about it slightly more positively and if i could just ask you what would it mean what would we gain if we were able to save half a degree if we were able to be 1.5 instead of 2 or perhaps even less we have to do that what julie just said is so true and if we go out to 4 degrees it would really destroy everywhere let's remember that the sahara area was once a rainforest or a forest and that's what would happen to somewhere like the amazon we most scientists now think that if we deforest 30 percent of the amazon then we've reached a tipping point where it will all turn into a sort of savannah type vegetation so we lose so many species of plants and animals so i think that from the biological point of view it's absolutely desperate that we stop the increase in carbon dioxide at this time and we've heard a lot about c level from another but even in the amazon is so low that much of the area would be flooded as sea level rises i have done some studies in the world's largest mangrove forest in bangladesh the sunda bans and that is now being threatened by rising sea levels too we will lose one of the most interesting and important habitats in the world with sea level rises so let's get on and do something about stopping this julia oh yes go ahead i i was gonna say in and just sort of picking up in a way on on what uh gilliam was saying um the other the other challenge we have is that once we start to get to those um those very high average temperatures that we actually um in we actually stop the processes that naturally absorb um co2 and so you know we start to get runaway buildup we the trees start to die the uh in the uk um the peat gets so heavily degraded that it's no longer a carbon store so actually we the things that we were relying on to help us keep the temperature down start to be unable to do their job and the temperature starts to rise even faster let me all get you to quickly give an answer to danny in nottingham um he's asking for solutions which is a good thing to do but he's asking in particular what would you say is the one most important thing everyone should do to limit warning i want to go to all of you why don't i start with spagilian well uh being a botanist i would say planting as many trees as we can uh because uh that fixes a lot but we have to have still a climate that will tolerate those trees as julia just said uh and then the other thing is that we can't just go and plant any tree anywhere some habitats are made for trees principally the ones where we've already removed the trees from around the world we need all the other types of habitats tundra savannah etc and it won't help to plant trees on some of those ecosys systems and there's a lot of carbon stored in peat bogs and things like that so it's we have to be careful with planting trees uh and the other thing i would say is when we do plant native trees not aliens that don't really belong there okay um to put it simply i would just say give back to the earth that has provided you and many generations before you with so much um and giving back to the earth can mean so many different things for each individual person um you can plant trees and you can take action within your community to preserve your lands um and you can also just not do uh any further damage to the to the earth so anything you could do that that would uh decrease the amount of damage that you would and they say what message would you like to scream to all corners of the air i'm a former politician and in many ways still is and i think the uh the problem remains the politicians all right the we come as politicians to these international conferences we come from mauro national uh countries and uh with our own national agenda we've got to get away from that mindset we got to truly understand that the future of this planet not the future of our individual countries is in the hand is in our decisions as global leaders not national leaders and i think we've got to get away from politicians climate change we've seen change in the uh you your administration the u.s every

different part of the world in our part of the world was that the change in policy to climate change we need to change that we need we need to get our politicians to act for the sake of the people and julia if you could answer the question from danny on the one thing but also on that we did see this huge uprising didn't we in 2019 people were really thinking about this and talking about it and then of course we've had coped and everything's changed and the conversation has changed you still think there is that kind of interest and care to try and build on and to try and get people and politicians perhaps most importantly to change on this well i think the the thing that uh i think we we need to get the world to do is to move as quickly as possible away from burning fossil fuels and particularly the rich countries need to support the developing world to have power to have the electricity that can benefit people but to make sure they support them to to have that through renewable technologies and not by burning coal or ideally even burning gas um and do i in some ways i think i think covid has has focused people's attention on um the the sort of uh disasters that could happen to us and i think there is there is some link to not suggesting that that kovid is a climate change issue but there is some link to the kind of problems that that climate change could bring um and so i think people's interest and concern about climate change has as far as we can see from surveys remained very high um through the covert pandemic which is which is very positive and uh hopefully once um once in the uk certainly once our government's attention can be back on on other policies they will move quickly to to start implementing some of the policy announcements that we've had over the last few months want to come back to you on the fossil fuel industry but spaghetti and i think i did read at one point during the pandemic that the destruction of the amazon does actually make things like covid um more likely that these things are actually all linked together i just wanted to ask you about that well the big thing about covid and many other diseases that it is from what we are doing most of these diseases have come to us via animals and they're eating animals bush meat and this sort of thing and uh in the the amazon one of the things i've seen is a spread of malaria from the way the forest has been cut down and water is accumulated and the mosquitoes go in when i first began to visit the north the yanomami indians there was no malaria there once the gold miners came in malaria came in and many other diseases so there is a big link between the diseases the other thing that is very interesting is that every year about five new species of insects enter the uk and uh the possibility of diseases spreading that we associate as tropical as spreading gradually north and into our country is very real so climate change is affecting disease in a very big way so it's important that we are aware of that and we are ready to control it it seems obvious to me that one thing that has to happen is that we need to learn to live more harm and harmoniously with the land sea and ecosystems but the question is how we do that julia touched on it a moment ago and let's just kind of delve into this there's a question here from ruth how can we ensure this is our government she said so i'll start with you julia on this takes action rather than just makes woolly promises of future action apart from moving from coal to gas the sense of urgency restarts does not seem to be there and additionally on that you said we have to stop people using fossil fuels how do you actually practically do that particularly with countries other than your own do you want to start on that julia and then i'll take it around well i'm i'm not the best person to to talk about countries other than the uk because my work with the climate change committee of course we focus on on the uk um we've had a lot of um very good announcements from our government we've had um the ten point plan we've had um an energy white paper uh we're expecting a hydrogen strategy and a net zero strategy very shortly um what's going to be absolutely key is that uh those become more than announcements those actually become action and one of the things the climate change committee will will be doing is is monitoring government action very closely indeed and i think you know that's that's what people should be doing we've we've got local elections to vote in coming up in in the uk um we should be all of us be making sure that um our politicians are delivering on those uh on those commitments that they're making i know i think the ipcc said recently that one thing that was frustrating was that so many countries say we'll go net zero by such and such date but the reality of the path from a to b doesn't seem to be set out quite so clearly do you think that a lot of these promises the cut missions are not matched by enough action to actually get down the path in that direction i think this that's definitely the case i um i i was in australia uh recently and i i during the elections just before the elections and climate change was one of the issues that was part of the election test yet when the new government came in it reversed all of this position and that i think it's the it's the lack of appreciation of what is truly at stake and of course the uh the overwhelming influence fossil fuel industry our political leaders i think we must not get around that we must acknowledge that and we must uh we must even challenge that maybe our political leaders are maybe too much in the control of the uh the very powerful uh energy corporations and i think this is part of the reason that we've never been able to have success we have responded over 90 but not in the way that uh that we should have done but we should have done that with climate change because that's a much larger challenge than congratulations and so i think that is the problem there's nobody challenging but what is happening government united but on climate change the world is divided between the poor and the rich cassidy one of the responses to the climate crisis often seems to be like a personal one like what can consumers do to try and make this better in the uk i don't know if this is the same in alaska there was a huge focus on plastics at one point and the things that people needed to do to reduce plastic use for instance and my colleague george monbio i'm not going to say it because he swears but he thinks that this is basically everyone focusing on micro issues that don't really matter and on the way to think about them we ignore huge issues like industrialized overfishing for example do you think that is the case do you think that there is too much focus on what individuals need to do without enough focus on some of the bigger issues um no i would say um i mean it all starts with the individual we need to focus on um what they can do first in order to bring it to a more broader um more broader action being taken against climate change so so the fight against plastics um it really does help if people if people are involved and committed to that um but also not only that they need to push past that and talk about industrialized fishing and and even the highways that are uh going on in the arctic waters that are ruining the marine ecosystem and all that so i i believe that um it does start with the individual um but it does need to be pushed past that uh to a more broader broader person how can we ensure that those not on course to adhere to carbon emission targets from energy companies to car manufacturers among many other industries and even to some country are held to account that is a very important question i think that it calls on all individuals who are into interested not just to do the little things these little things mount up and make a lot to help abate carbon dioxide but more important is for the individuals to be political activists and do something about get making this change real we will not make a change uh while there are some of the things that we've just heard about the link between the politicians and the oil companies between the politicians and the fishing industries and so the only way we'll get these things changed if individuals individual citizens become politically active in this way we're not doing enough of this at this time we need to shame them into action we need to work on a politic political system that isolates this commercial side from the from the politics we just uh are not going to get very far when too many of the politicians of interest interests in big industries thank you uh loti i wanted to put this question to you from paul lehrer in bedford is wind power a sustainable source of renewable energy wood power is not new dude because we've been using wind power from water um but we've done some wind mapping may not be sustainable in different parts of the country because we don't have enough wind it would be a very sustainable and a critical option in fact and we'll continue to use that uh to pump generic electricity at this time i think we should try anything as well but then also this question from terry summerfield in london if ever if eventually everyone wanted an electric car how could we possibly hope to generate enough electricity to power them assuming that car usage continues at the same or greater level than at present well i'm sorry so i just wanted to add my my question on this this might be me being stupid but i i also wonder about this a lot we sort of think of electric cars as this wonderful shift that can kind of save us but they are using electricity so i'm just quite kind of interested in their own carbon footprint as well the the um the amazing thing about using electricity directly is that in general it's a very efficient way of using energy so in the climate change committee's pathway to net zero by 2050 for the uk we move from using about in total about um 2 000 uh terawatt hours of um of energy that's electricity and gas a little bit of coal and and oil to using by 2050 even with a fully electrified fleet only about 1 000 terawatt hours of of total energy so then that's a lot of that is because an internal combustion engine is about 30 efficient in a car so we're wasting seventy percent of the energy in form of petrol diesel that's going in whereas an electric car is something like seventy to eighty percent efficient in terms of the electricity it uses so you can run two electric cars if you like for for one for one um for one um internal combustion engine you know we're wasting so much less energy that actually we've become a much more efficient energy efficient um society in by 2050 in meeting net zero we dramatically reduce our energy use but we move most of it to electricity because electricity can heat our homes much more efficiently than burning gas does electricity can run our cars much more efficiently than than burning petrol or diesel in an internal combustion engine does um but but of course there will be other challenges there will be some of the metals that go into the electric motors there will be potentially the lithium that goes into the batteries all of these things we need to recognize are very precious resources and we need to get much much better at recycling and indeed reusing to thinking about the circular economy so that we're not using up the earth's resources we don't just use them once and throw them away we continue to use those same resources again and again and again when you're thinking about all these things julia and you're thinking about how society will shift in the direction to try to prevent the kind of you know horrific outcomes that all of you have described potential outcomes that you have described what are the things that you think people need to understand about how our lives will have to change to try to help prevent this process i think we do all need to think about consumption um you know there are various studies that tell us how fast we're we're consuming the world's resources uh and at a rate that that we just can't go on doing that so i think you know the the circular economy concept is a hugely important one this move that we now have in in western countries um which will be entirely familiar to people in in kiribati but this move we have to remember that you can repair things uh that you don't just throw them away if uh if they're broken that we design things so they can be repaired and upgraded not just used once and disposed of we've got to get away from that idea that you know we can have as much as we like and and use it once and throw it away um we've got to be to learn to be more sparing with energy but also critically with water because although we're worried about sea level rise and flooding we're also going to be worried about drought in in the uk we could be seeing by the end of the century we could be seeing something like 45 less summer rainfall so we're all going to have to think about how do we use less water in our homes how do we make sure there is water available for farmers to grow crops and things um so again i think we have a lot to learn from um from countries like kiribati where they and and indeed from our friends in in alaska where they have this huge respect for the resources of the land and of not being extravagant with them cassidy do you want to comment on that yeah i i 100 agree um you know that our resources they are so important to us and for us to uh just use them once and throw them away that's i feel like that's a huge disrespect to our earth um and so i i do agree with julia on that thank you so i've got a couple of very quick questions for gillian and um and other gillian do you have something you want to say as well and then i've got a final question for you all i just wanted to say that uh the indigenous people would teach us i've lived with many societies in the amazon where possessions are not important everything belongs to the community and we could learn a great deal more by studying the way that indigenous peoples live and that would answer some of this materialism that we have been talking against at the moment um thank you so gillian i just want to throw this question from stephanie to you is tree planting i suspect you've already answered it partly but is tree planting really the panacea to solve climate change yes i i did mention this already it's not the panacea no but it is part of the solution it's the there are multiple solutions to this tree planting is very important plant the trees in the right place and plant native species and then it will certainly help the situation but we need to do all these other things it's not the penalty great and then i've just got one final quick one and then one where i'm going to get you all to do a quick answer an ot we talked about politics it feels as if the left and the right certainly a country in the uk think that they've got different solutions to the climate crisis although they both very much care about it and come at it from different directions do you think there is a debate about how to approach this and about how to solve it politically or do you think that there's just it's obvious where we have to go and politicians need to agree to get there i don't think it's a better for debate i think the science is pretty categorical i suspect that politicization of climate change is part of the strategy of those who believe loose by the remedies that need to be put in place to deal with climate change and that's uh unfortunately we've we've caught on to it and uh we began to be a part of the process there should be no politics i think climate change continues to happen whatever political party is in place you've got to understand so thank you all for answering all those questions it's been fascinating and thought provoking um we're going to bring the discussion to a close but i'd like to ask you each for a final thought and i'm going to give you a minute or less for it so hopefully that's okay how hopeful are you on a scale of one to ten that we can do what it takes to ensure that we keep the temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels cassidy um i'm pretty hopeful i believe uh that when large groups of people get together we can get a lot done um and i gave my story on what the land means to me and my people and while my experiences are different from yours or they may be different from yours we have in common that the earth has been so generous to us for generations for all people groups um and so i'm pretty hopeful that we can we can get it done if we start taking action now do you want to mark it out of 10 you don't have to i'll take that as very hopeful that's nice the gillian i would mark it at about seven at present so [Music] i'm mildly optimistic that we can do something about it thank you i i do think that to some extent covered 19 has shown you that the world certainly can take action when there is an imminent threat and as i know he said this is an even bigger one julia what about you i think i'm i'm with with gillian i i am an optimist i i know we have the means to do it uh we just have to have the will and i hope that i sincerely hope that that we do it um i think it's it's it's you know actually it's a 50 chance of keeping it below 1.5 in terms of the ipcc paths rather than a certainty that we'll be able to keep it below 1.5 but you know i think we don't have a choice we have to try hello t i'd love to be optimist but i've got to be a realist be very practical and uh so far i've seen no signs that we're going to turn this around so i would give it less than five and uh it's it's i'm not being pessimistic i'm just being realistic because i'm not seeing any signals i've been at this for quite some time and i'm not seeing any signs that the world is going to swing around with seeing a lot of momentum build up but not where it needs to be done at the people and the corporations that we need to get to act so perhaps before well that's sad hopefully the world will change its way and start to really respond to this in a very serious way that is all we have time for this evening but i'm sure you'll all agree with me that it has been a vital and poignant debate on this incredibly urgent issue so it just leaves me to thank our speakers and oti tong cassidy kramer gilliam prance and julia king and of course thanks to you the audience for joining you tonight for joining us tonight if you enjoyed this science museum group climate talks debate there are many more in the run-up to the international climate summit the cop 26 in glasgow this november and beyond the next one is on may the 13th when a panel featuring quasi quartens um business secretary malawian inventor william and physicist jim al-khalili are among several experts examining the clean energy revolution because tackling climate change is the most urgent challenge facing our humanity and our biodiversity the science museum group has made all of them free to everyone across the globe and you can book a free ticket and find out more about the rest of the climate talk series by clicking on the museum's link now finally if you would like to support the science museum group in its mission to inspire the next generation of scientists technicians engineers and mathematicians you can find a link to make a donation in the description below this event thank you for joining us and good night you

2021-05-05 06:38

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