Brian Cox presents Science Matters - Climate change

thank you well hello and good afternoon wait a second oh I see there is going to be an emergency exit speech for us ladies and gentlemen my name is David Bale I am the vice chancellor here at the University of Reading and I would like to. welcome you to the Great Hall for this very special occasion given the theme. I can think of no more appropriate place than Reading University to hold this debate and discussion. The University of Reading has been at the forefront of building understanding of the mechanisms. and the impacts of

climate

change

for decades our department of meteorology founded 50 years ago is now a world-leading center for research and teaching in weather and

climate

our academics play an important role in developing understanding of the mechanisms of climate

change

not only contribute widely to public policy debates and public communications generally, the University's world-renowned expertise and agriculture, food security, soil

science

s and similar expertise on the impacts of climate change sets us apart and we are pleased to be recognized in so many different ways, including her confetti. majesty the queen in 2013 of an outrageous chair in climate meteorology and climate

science

s in one of our panelists who is here today, Professor Keith Shime.

Professor Shine is one of four Royal Society Fellows working in meteorology and climate science at the university; the others are teachers. by Brian Hoskins also on the panel Professor Ted Shepherd and Professor Mike Lockwood I'm sure we're about to have an interesting and stimulating afternoon so without further ado let me welcome your host for the afternoon Professor Brian Cox thank you, thank you Well , thank you good afternoon. I'm Brian Cox, I'm Professor of Public Engagement at the Royal Society, which is the National Academy of Sciences in the United Kingdom, and this is the first in a series of events called Science Matters and the aim is to discuss important scientific topics here and we begin the series, as you may have heard, talking about climate change.

Now, climate change is a complex scientific topic that requires understanding and analysis of large amounts of data collected over many decades and detailed modeling. There is a simple message: humans are changing the Earth's climate and this statement is not controversial from a scientific perspective, but it is controversial politically, although, having said that all major parties in the UK now accept this scientific consensus, However, it is not. a part of science as new data is collected and new understanding develops new predictions emerge science is a fluid subject that offers an ever-changing picture of the world no detail is ever established or certain and furthermore the statements of the Authority They should always be treated with suspicion everyone is the motto of society, in fact it is nullius inverber, it is no one's word, so given all this, what does the average citizen think about climate change?

Well, today we are here to analyze his questions. All of the questions that I asked will have been submitted by members of this audience and we're going to be able to, we're going to try to at least answer as many as we can now that I have. I am the host of the event. I'm not going to give the answers. I'm a particle physicist, but I have four climate experts here, so I'd like to invite them now to introduce themselves motherfuckers. I'm Brian Hoskins, I'm a professor in the Department of Meteorology that the vice-chancellor spoke about and I've been for 35 years, I think.

I'm also at Imperial College, where I ran the Grantham Institute and I'm now a lecturer there, so I'm a mathematician by training and I started to understand how the atmosphere, weather systems and climate systems work, and that's what my research is about. has been around over the years, so this is extremely important in climate change, where you're looking at a system change to try to understand how the system works and then why it might change the way we're talking about. That's my interest over the years and the image I have. We were asked if we wanted to produce an object or an image and I chose one from the early days of my research in the late '60s and early '70s.

We had these images of Apollo. of this planet and they really were amazing and showed the beauty of this planet and also the power of what was happening, so you can see the weather systems in the southern hemisphere, there you can see tropical convection, you can see the ocean and you can see the impact on the land in Africa where the regions where tropical convection occurs then there is green underneath and then you can see the desert regions on either side which shows the power of the climate system this is the land we live on and this is the system that governs how we can live Hello everyone, I'm Kate Jones and I'm a professor of ecology and biodiversity at University College London and the Zoological Society of London and diseases here.

Actually, I'm not a climate scientist at all. I'm a biodiversity scientist and being a biodiversity scientist means looking at the global patterns of living things in the wild and understanding the processes that produce the patterns we see on a global scale and then thinking about how to think about what processes drive those patterns. . So we can think about how to predict the future. Now climate change is just one of the factors threatening wildlife species and it's a really important thing to think about because it exacerbates some of the problems we're seeing with the decline of wildlife, so my most recent work has been looking at how disease vectors will be influenced by climate changes and changes in land use and increasing human population to think about how that changes our understanding of diseases like Ebola or SARS, so I really got into it. on a changing climate and wanting to know more about that and biodiversity loss because I originally did a PhD on the evolution of bats, so you think it's a bit esoteric, but I met one of the world's leading conservation scientists and had lunch . with her and she told me and described to me the state of nature and how important it was to try to find solutions and try to make more predictive models about it and that is why I suddenly realized that the evolution of bats did not It was so interesting. after all, I really wanted to understand Sam, so we were allowed to bring an object or a picture and I brought Mumble from Happy Feet, so this is actually an emperor penguin chick and I did a lot of calculations on the Internet last night, It is actually the actual size of a newborn chick and the story I wanted to tell you is that these species are threatened by climate change, only that the ice cover is decreasing according to the different models, although they could be indisputable.

We were discussing that before, but I think the key point I wanted to make was that the effects of climate change on biodiversity are really complex, so there are impacts on the krill that these species eat, but also with pollution and some antibodies that They have against chicken diseases. have been found in these populations in Antarctica possibly from human visitors to these places, so climate change exacerbates some of these processes that are already threatening and that's the kind of point I wanted to make about complexity. Thank you. Hello, I'm Oliver Morton. a science I'm not a scientist I'm a science writer and editor.

I currently work at The Economist and when I started writing books I realized that, I really like writing about planets, this can be something like Miss uh Miss. Youth bred, I spent watching too much Star Trek and things like that, but I find planets really interesting because they are completely scientific objects, as scientific in the same way that an atom is and at the same time they are very human because the idea of ​​a The world of A big sphere is something we can let our imagination run wild on, so I wrote a book about the big planet Mars, but I totally recommend it.

The other nearby planets are not as interesting as Mars, except Earth, so I decided I wrote a book about Earth that was about an aspect of Earth that is as real as the oceans and continents but is not thought of in the same way. way, so I wrote a book on photosynthesis about how plants feed this planet. We live and create all life in it but leveled and that led me to write about climate change. I mean that led me to the idea of ​​writing a book about what humans are doing to the climate and I think I have a picture I also have a picture um yeah that's how I got here today and this is a I think this is a beautiful counterpoint to Brian's photo because this is the Great Western Railway as shown by uh Turner in the 19th century, one of which is obviously one of the best pieces of British landscape painting, it's also unlike any painting of landscapes that could be done before the Industrial Revolution because what Turner saw and what Turner gave us in an image that we also know from intellectuals.

In the story where we really feel is that the clear line that existed before between the human and the natural no longer exists. There is something running through this world that Turner shows us. There is a change running through him. I can no longer tell the difference between natural rain and artificial vapor and the speed at which they mix. The science of steam engines was the science of thermodynamics which turned out to be the science of the world and there is a way in which in the 19th century, humans not only change the world by introducing steam engines, but they change the world by turning it into our working role in it, a steam engine, we are inside a world that we are making artificial at the same time that we put artificial things. in that world that is the kind of approach that I think really helps to understand the enormity of the transformations in the world and the planet that climate change is causing.

Good afternoon everyone, my name is Keith Shine, the vice chancellor already introduced me as the first Regis. professor of meteorology and climate sciences here at the University of Reading. I'm very happy to be here and I'm happy that the Royal Society has organized this event on a Saturday afternoon to coincide with an international break in a domestic football season, so thank you. laughter I studied physics at Imperial College London, followed by a PhD in meteorology at Edinburgh and after Spells at Liverpool and Oxford, moved into reading about 30 years ago with the support and encouragement of Brian Hoskins here and teach and research climate science and my main focus is to quantify the human and natural factors that initiate climate change.

I'm never sure how I got into meteorology. During my adolescence. I remember my father asking me what I wanted to do when he grew up and something took over me. let's say meteorology and that was it um but but but also during the 1970s I was very influenced by some compelling science television programs from Brian's predecessors um that began to talk about the natural and human forces that shape and change our environment and so, when given the opportunity to study the subject, I grasped it. I don't want to reveal my age, but a few weeks before I was born, in March 1958, there was an important event in climate science.

A forward-thinking American scientist named Dave Keeling. He began a series of carbon dioxide measurements in Hawaii that continue to this day and for many years was the only set of routine measurements and the Keeling curve, as it became known, has documented the rise in carbon dioxide since then. and in the Meanwhile, Paul, scientists have drilled deep into the Antarctic ice sheet and, by looking at the air trapped in these ice cores, have reconstructed a record of atmospheric CO2 going back almost a million years back, so this graph shows that that ice core record goes back almost a million years and the Keeling curve that I just talked about is that sharp point compressed on the right side and therefore my Surprising fact is that for almost millions of years from the depth of the ice ages to the so-called interglacials CO2 never varied by more than 130 parts per million, which is a unit shown here and never during that period did it exceed 300 parts per million. million, but in the blink of an eye on the right side of that graph, in the time since we were born CO2 has increased by more than 25 percent, up to 400 parts per million, mainly due to our burning of coal and gas and also during the same period of the Keeling curve that Spike at the end the global surface temperature has increased by 0.8 degrees.

C and the 2013 reporter of the intergovernmental panel on climate change concluded after evaluating the evidence that it was extremely likely that the dominant cause of this increase is human activity and mainly the change in CO2 documented in that peak in the end, thank you, good , thank you. panel for those presentations and we actually have a question about Keith, to whichYou might jump in and ask: 400 parts per million, so that sounds very small and in fact it is true that CO2 comprises a small proportion of the atmosphere. and then Mike asked, that's why, because CO2 is such a small proportion, how can it have such a big effect?

Yes, well, that's right, so CO2 makes up 0.04 percent of the Earth's atmosphere, but, but the effect of these gases on the Earth. The atmosphere not only depends on its quantity, it depends on its ability to absorb and emit infrared energy and, in fact, the nitrogen and oxygen that make up 99% of the Earth's atmosphere have only an indirect impact on the temperature of the Earth. Earth because they don't. It absorbs a lot of infrared energy, so, on the contrary, CO2 is very good at absorbing children's energy. We know this from detailed measurements in the laboratory and in the atmosphere and as we speak there.

They are satellites that orbit the Earth and they look at the energy emitted from the Earth and they can see this signature of where the CO2 is absorbing a lot of energy, but another point about the Zero point four percent may seem like a small fraction, but it still means that in one cubic centimeter here I have this cubic centimeter there are 10,000 trillion carbon dioxide molecules, so it's still a huge number and because they are so Effective molecule by molecule, they absorb a lot of infrared energy. There is a surprising calculation. by an American climate scientist Ken Caldera and one of his students where they compared the energy released when you get a carbon atom from a fossil fuel by burning it with the energy trapped in the atmosphere by that carbon atom once it is converted to dioxide and If you think about the enormous amount of fossil fuels we burn, it turns out that the energy we get by burning fossil fuels from carbon and bicarbonate atoms is only one hundred thousandth of the energy that is trapped in the atmosphere with carbon dioxide traps. 100 and this is because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for so long that you trap a hundred thousand times more energy with the waste product of the fossil fuel than you get from burning the fossil fuel.

That's amazing, maybe I can just give a different perspective on the same thing: the average person in this country produces almost 10 tons of CO2 per person per year, so we are actually producing a lot in our activities, it is very diluted in the atmosphere, but there's a lot there, I think this also goes into a broader question that several people asked, Sarah Ruth Johan Allen, they all asked: Are humans the ones who really have an impact on the climate? Obviously, they've argued through the CO2 levels that we are, but this question of or is it a natural cycle?

You know, because there are natural cycles, so I guess how do we separate the natural cycles from the things that we're causing? Yes, well, we know that the weather has always been changing. The image above showed the Ice Age cycles receding. a million years and then yes, how do we know that recent climate changes are due to human activity and therefore to explain climate change we not only have to rule out human activity but we will have to rule out natural causes such as main contributors? And all of this requires many detailed observations and detailed calculations, but the main causing factors could still be natural factors that could cause planned climate change in a short period: changes in the energy emitted by the sun and the small particles that rise . into the atmosphere when we have a really large volcanic eruption, and even without these factors, the atmosphere and the climate system would vary on their own, so we have to do these detailed calculations of the impact of carbon dioxide and the impact of other aspects of the human activities and the kind of conclusion is that if we look at the beginning of the 20th century, say before 1950, the smaller temperature changes that we were seeing could have been partly human and partly natural, but If we look at climate change from the 1950s, are much larger changes and it is simply impossible to explain these climate changes based solely on natural factors.

In fact, we think there would be very little temperature change, so this is the origin of that IPCC statement that human activity is extremely likely to be a dominant cause, there is another point that just gets into the basic nature of the science is that you should trust things more when people predict them before they happen and then they happen and People looked at the climate system from the 19th century, to Tyndall and Arenio, and then in the early 20th century a guy called , looked at the system and said, "You know, if carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, then the world will warm up." and for a long time people accepted this, they just didn't think that carbon dioxide was going to build up in the atmosphere and it was actually Dave Keeling's PhD supervisor, who is part of his graph that you just saw, who said You know We actually thought it was happening that the ocean was consuming the carbon dioxide and it wasn't building up.

That's not happening. The carbon dioxide is starting to build up and so it's going to warm up and then after he said he had Keeling measure the carbon dioxide and Keeling showed that the carbon dioxide continues to rise and it's warmed up now obviously , coincidence does not prove causality at the same time when someone from first principles predicts that something will happen if such and such another event occurs and then it happens and turns out more or less as they expected. It's a very strong visceral argument for why you should take it seriously. I just wanted to add that we are always looking at a mix of natural variability and what may be due to human activity and if you look at the Ice Age interglacial cycle that Keith was showing, it certainly is a huge background natural variation, but we are taking the system to one of those warm spots and we are turning up the radiator.

Suddenly we're at a warm point in the natural cycle and we're getting even warmer, but the closer we get to local, the more natural variability seems to come into play if we go back to December 2010, which was incredibly cold in the UK records and there was one day where I know in London the temperature was not above freezing and I looked in Greenland it was plus 10 that day, you know, so we're looking at patterns of things happening. and there are advantages and disadvantages, but what we are doing to the system is shown globally very clearly now and even locally it is starting to become clear as well.

Another point is that we don't just look at surface temperature when we're looking at climate change, we look for other patterns or fingerprints of climate change and, for example, the temperature has changed as we go up in the atmosphere and the signal of that temperature change is consistent with human activity, but it is not consistent with any other cause, so these patterns are also important in establishing that it is human and then, as you say, the data from many different sources is very clear now that the Earth is warming, we see in many different ways, how do you respond to people?

I mean, I myself had a little altercation with an Australian politician. If they involved you, I decided that I would have shown them the surface temperature anomaly data, so it says that you actually referred to data from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, so data sets that were compiled a long time ago, so there are people who will discuss the way we process data, so I'm wondering if you could give a very quick overview of the associated challenges. It's a big challenge if we try, we often see a temperature record going back to 1850 and during that period of over 150 years the way we measure temperature has changed, for example the sea surface temperature used to be measured by a poor sailor who had to throw a bucket over the side of his boat and they took it up on deck and put a thermometer in it and measured it and even the type of bucket changed from wood to canvas to insulated and now the temperature to It is often measured by the cooling water entering the engines and similarly.

On land, the way we measure temperature has changed and not only has the distribution of temperature measurements changed a lot, but if we go back 100 years, almost none in the Pacific Ocean, so we have to take into account those factors and there have been a There are three institutes, one in the UK, well, two in the UK, I should say, and two in the US, that spend a lot of time developing these temperature records and adding these corrections just as they understood it and a few years ago I'm a A fairly skeptical group of scientists at Barkley University didn't believe in these temperature data sets and set out to do it themselves and, well, they got the same answer that these other organizations had , so we think it is a very solid solution. signal and the ipcc the government and the panel on climate change do not use the word equivocal very often or very likely and climate the fact that the climate has changed is unequivocal if you look at the data to find some and compare a station with its neighbors It has discovered that some used Fahrenheit instead of Celsius, you know, and others then you realize that this thermometer that used to be placed in the countryside is an urban site, so that will change and corrections must be made. that kind of thing, I guess you're saying that's worth emphasizing, isn't it, isn't it, most of science is in uh, we say, correcting the data, so the idea that to Scientists, breaking down uncorrected data on a graph, is ridiculous, it's practically meaningless, isn't it?

That's where the skill and knowledge lie, but it sounds. I think, in my experience, anyway, it's somewhat suspicious when you say we correct the data this way. You know, yes, but you have to homogenize the data sets. you have to make sure that a measurement made in 1950 is equivalent to a measurement made in 1910 and it is a work of skill and these corrections are not made lightly and also a really nice development race is that some of these data sets are arriving now. actually with hourly bars, accepting the fact that you know you can't be absolutely sure what the global temperature was in any given year, but given what we know about our measurements and the areas and our measurements, it seems to me that you already know .

That's highly scientific and I think it really adds credibility to say this is the range of what we can say and they can really help put more data into these models now with cyber citizen science projects, so there's a website that everyone should. go because it's awesome called the zuniverse and they have this citizen science school project called Old Weather and they've digitized all the ship's logs going back to the 18th century and those exact same logs, the exact same logs that you're talking about, uh, they. I kind of had them written in the ship's logs about the temperature and you go in and you pretend to be the captain of the ship and you can transcribe all the logs so people get really addicted to this.

It's amazing, you should go and take a look. Ok let's go. Let's move on to a very different question which I'll put first to Kate, who is from Colin, what the overall effect of climate change will be on our wildlife. Gosh, that's a really complex question and it's a very active area of ​​discussion. Current research too, so the first thing I have to say is that you can already see the changes that are occurring in wildlife populations around the world and in the UK we have been monitoring various populations of wildlife throughout the country. You know, hundreds of thousands of volunteers are involved in these citizen science projects, so there is quite a bit of evidence of northward shifts in the ranges of many species in the UK, such as the Dartford warbler or the blue butterfly, but There are also natural colonizations from Europe. it's also like the southern emerald damselfish and there's a mixed bag of evidence about the reactions of northern adapted species retreating slightly on the sort of southern edge of the edges of their ranges so there's also some sort of adaptations to northern species, so I see more pests and invasive species of pathogens in this country, for example.

I don't know if you saw Ash's dieback disease thing, but that was, in a way, due to globalization, but once these pathogens get into the UK, they are much more adapted to any changes to spread because conditions are more favorable, there is also a report of an Asian giant hornet, so I believe the first nest found in this country was a couple of weeks ago, so life cycle events are changing as well. flowers and leaves emerge earlier birds lay eggs earlier species arrive earlier than migrations leaves remain on trees forlonger everyone must have seen that so that's something that's impacting your lives now so um no, but I guess the question is what impact will this have in the long term?

And that's a really interesting question because you're basically asking if species will go extinct, so populations will be so affected that there will be a decline in range size and then they will go extinct. completely and that's a very difficult question and mainly it's because there have been many studies or a growing set of studies, about 100 studies that have looked at this individually and we're only now trying to put this together into one, um into one. analysis, so this data is now being analyzed, you know, what is the total evidence in medicine when you ask about the relationships between cancer and smoking, for example, that is the type of analysis that they are doing, so no No I don't want to alarm you or anything, but one of these studies that was published in Nature last year has an estimated global extinction rate of one sixth of all species that will be affected by climate change and that means that only their range geographical is falling below. a threshold level um and the magnitude of these changes is also increasing with rising temperatures and some areas are at greater risk than others, says um New Zealand, Australia and South America seem to be more affected, but there are a lot of uncertainties with this and I think that's where the kind of work we need to do is there's actually a related question from Anne, which is I.

Suppose that as a species goes extinct new niches open up and the question was: Will new ones evolve? species as a result of climate change? But then the comma and will we be human like us to see them? So I guess if you're a species that's facing a change in climate so that its habitat is no longer suitable, you have three correct options, so you can move somewhere else, you can go extinct or you can evolve and I think the problem really is that you know the time scales involved. Here, species have always adapted to their environments, that kind of race is on to adapt to environmental pressures, but can they do so quickly or significantly enough to cope with climate change?

So, you know, evolving crazy new things takes time, etc. It takes several generations of variation to play with that and evolve those things, but subtle adaptations to climate happen all the time, so I don't know if any of you have seen goldenrod, which is a kind of plant that looks like a daisy than most people. that they have in their gardens, it's actually from North America, it was introduced here in the 18th century and it's been naturalized all over Europe and the northern populations and the southern populations now show it, so a few hundred years ago and now they show significant adaptations to their local environments and So if you move the Southern populations to the Northern populations, where the Northern ones are doing well, doing terribly, then you can see adaptations within that time scale, but the changes Really big ones take a while and I'm afraid there are a lot of other pressures going on, so population growth probably won't level off until there are 10 billion people on this planet transforming every landscape on this planet every ecosystem I'm afraid already.

You know, invasive species and globalization have this kind of heady cocktail of pressures and climate change is adding to that, but in the end, the end of the question, will humans be around to see this? So actually, it's almost the opposite problem right now, there's a big lag, in other words, because you said the populations were 10 billion. which will increase pressure on other species, but there is no suggestion that we are going to disappear anytime soon is there any suggestion that the human population will be so challenged by this climate change that the effects will increase that we will start to see catastrophic?

The reduction in the number of humans on the planet is a very political issue. I think there's been work on boundaries and Earth systems and I think it's been very popular in policy circles to think about Earth systems like this. We're trying to keep this Earth system in some kind of stable state, so the stable state that's existed for about 12,000 years in the Holocene, which has been pretty stable in temperatures, can we keep everything in that stable state? with these planetary boundaries and then people have been trying to think about how to monitor whether we have surpassed those planetary boundaries and I think that's very controversial and I think foreigners are going to add to this really that climate change as we see it.

This will add to all the other pressures of having 10 billion people on this planet: will there be enough food in the right places? Will there be enough water in the right places? and what we have seen historically and in the most recent period in the Middle East is that sometimes that climate that makes life difficult is just the last thing that causes conflicts to occur thousands of years ago there would have been migration of humans but we can no longer do that we have lines on the maps we have too many people and that can't happen, but then conflict is much more likely to occur, so it adds to the other tensions on this planet.

There are actually questions related to this from Stephen and two Davids, apparently, which one is: have we passed the tipping point? a tipping point um is it possible for our climate to return and the question says to its original state so if you said we can define we have to define when we would like to write it as well but first of all this idea of ​​tipping. Well, maybe take that then, uh, we're not aware that the climate right now has gone through something that's a turning point in popular parlance or maybe a bifurcation as a mathematician, but is there some irreversible change that we've experimented? to a new state and or something is going to happen that is essentially reversible and perhaps the only concern at the moment is that some people think that we could have gone beyond the irreversible melting of Greenland which would take many thousands of years, but is that irreversible?

We are not aware that we have gone beyond any of these and I think we are really at the stage where, if we can keep this temperature change to less than two degrees, as the Paris agreement was, then we can expect that we can mostly deal with it, so it's not really, gosh, we've gone beyond a tipping point; This is actually a call to action because we may be able to keep the climate within the limits we can manage and won't return to. some original state, some of the changes we have made will be there in the system for thousands of years and it takes a long time for the ocean to realize that it has warmed up and release the carbon dioxide that you put there . be in the atmosphere for thousands of years, so the impact we've had won't suddenly disappear, but rather we hope we can keep it within a range of where the climate has been over the last 10,000 years that humans and others Most of species can cope.

Yes, I would just like to emphasize this point about irreversibility. When you put CO2 into the atmosphere, it has an incredibly long persistence, so a good chunk of it disappears in a few years, but then a pretty significant chunk stays there. for thousands of years and that's what makes this a pretty difficult problem, if the CO2 that we put into the atmosphere were to disappear in a couple of weeks, as is the case with some of the things we put into the atmosphere, it would be a much simpler problem. I mean just before I talk to you, Oliver, just clarify this idea of ​​a two degree increase.

Could you just define what that means in relation to what and what it is and also the question where are we right now? We're thinking two degrees above pre-industrial times, basically, so if we go back to the 17th century, the 18th century, maybe or the 19th or even the 19th century, then we're getting closer depending on what happens this year, but In general we are getting closer. almost a degree of that now and the question is are we going to add more than a degree to that and the chances of crossing some threshold the further we go, we can probably get by if we keep it at these two degrees below two degrees, hopefully, but As soon as we start to go up two to three degrees, three to four degrees, there are many parts of the Earth system that could say enough is enough and we are changing to a new state.

You know, it's possible that methane is being produced from melting permafrost or there could be a more local change in the track of the storm that used to hit us in Australia, no honey, it's doing it so they don't get the winter rains or the monsoon system in India. You know, so many billions of people depend on that and the extraordinary. It's how little it varies, but can we rely on that as we move toward these big changes? So we think we're probably going to be able to cope as long as we stay within these limits and we saw that the graph for carbon dioxide is about 400 parts per million.

About now, does that mean that if we stay there then there will be this inertia in the system and we'll just slow down and stabilize gently at two degrees or does that mean that we have to reduce that if we could keep it at 400? we'd probably be fine, but we'd all be walking home and that's the challenge within the environment, not only is climate change happening on this planet, but there's a lot of other things, so those planetary boundaries are trying to address some of the other factors, like human population, food security, disease outbreaks, you know, zoonotic disease outbreaks like Ebola, that kind of thing.

There's a lot of uncertainty about where those boundaries are and I think we're playing around a little bit. with fire and be very clear, the two degrees, that is the temperature of the surface of the globe, yes, that is what we are talking about now, that's right, it is the average surface temperature worldwide, which is not what anyone believes that you know in um in the north. polar regions that could be up to 10 degrees, particularly in the winter, um and it could be something that most of the planet is ocean and maybe that would be two degrees or even a little less, but the actual increase in temperatures is greater in tropical countries when compared to the variability, then for someone like Africa, a two or three degree change in Africa is huge compared to the variability that humans have experienced.

I just wanted to go back to I think it was Anne's question that led to Stevens and the two Davids, but Well, I think there's a real risk of overdramatizing and saying, Will this make humans extinct? Are we saving the planet? No, climate change is not going to make humans extinct. If you really want to care about human extinction, you should care and I shouldn't. I don't think this can do it either, we should be much more concerned about the risk of nuclear war which could certainly kill hundreds of hundreds and possibly billions of people. Climate change is going to cause great harm to hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions. of people, that's a terrible thing, it's not the same as Extinction, it's not the same as I think George Mumbai was in the Guardian the other days or endangering the entire planet, the planet is a pretty big and difficult thing and we will do it.

To begin with, we will go ahead and still have many species and it would be very sad and terrible if many of the species we treasure were not among them, but those are not the things at risk, the things that are really at risk are the world, the natural world that we currently inhabit as it is and our fellow human beings, and it's really important to keep the focus on reducing harm to people who exist today rather than this overly dramatized concern about the end of the world. or the end of humanity, which is not. I think what this debate should be about, and you know, there's a recent Lancet report on climate and people's health and they said exactly that, which is about how climate change is one of the biggest drivers of health. and human well-being that is going to happen in the near future and they are seriously concerned about all these articles, just Google them, you can see them, read them yourself and again there is a follow-up question which is um yes what is the only change if you can have a change if in fact there is something that would have the greatest impact on slowing or managing climate change but let's say achieving these two degree targets um what would it be and how does Hellen ask that question: we have to target CO2 is the answer, yes , reduce our CO2 emissions to zero as quickly as possible, net CO2 emissions, and that is the response globally, there is a more measured response in terms of the UK, where, the climate change committee.

The one I am in has recommended to the UK government thatlet's essentially decarbonise our electricity supply by 2030. So, you know, it's fine to reduce global carbon dioxide to zero, but we have a thing in the UK and we have a defined target to do it so that the electricity you get. your plug should no longer be coming from a fossil fuel power station, so we have to get to that situation, but the problem with answering Helen's question that way is that saying decarbonize society is not one of the things that question was, is there something? can be done, that's almost all that's changing almost every aspect of how modern life continues, from how we build.

I only said electricity, still, but that was also the best. I mean, Helen's question was about what was the What we can do that would have the biggest impact and this is one of the really difficult things that Keith alluded to about climate change, it's not a thing, since those steam trains They began traveling at full speed on the Great Western Railway using fossil fuels. incorporated into almost everything people in developed countries do, many people in less developed and less developed countries would like to be able to do some of those things to forget, not that something like 1.3 or 1.4 billion of people, uh, in Grant's scam we don't have access to electricity at all, it's not about doing one simple thing, it's about changing an entire industrial ecosystem if you want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and I don't think That's impossible, but I don't think it is. just one thing and I don't think it's easy, actually, unless someone else has something else to add about CO2 reduction, it ties into a question, but from Catherine, what are the panel's views on clean energy?

Questions like nuclear power versus window solar power. Can we generate enough through, say, wind and solar energy? Do we need nuclear energy? These questions are so good. I must say that in the last 10 years we have seen amazing progress in terms of solar electricity, especially in a country that does not enjoy as much energy. As much sunlight as Britain is still not as much as one would like, but amazing progress has been made at the same time that the world is still running on fossil fuels, there is an inertia in these systems that is enormous and I think the idea of ​​completely decarbonizing the British electricity through 2030 2040 is ambitious but almost plausible the idea of ​​doing it for everyone is surprisingly different although I mean there is no reason why the fact that it is difficult should not be a reason not to try it the question was also about nuclear energy the problem with uh nuclear power well the problem with nuclear power we could and in fact some of us have written books um but the problem with nuclear power is that right now it's expensive largely because there are You have to buy a large amount to buy anything.

From it you can only buy nuclear energy from very large nuclear power plants, that knot does not fit very well with the way in which electrical networks and electricity consumption are developing, so there is room and the other thing is that, although I believe that nuclear energy can work safely and reliably. I also think it's very difficult to do unless you live in a democracy with a long history of questioning people and good independent oversight. So I don't worry much about nuclear power. energy in Finland. I'm more concerned about, say, China or other developing countries where I don't think the civil society to regulate nuclear energy is really there, so the short answer is yes, we all have some amount of clean energy. clean energy options and we can drive their use faster and faster, we can also develop new storage techniques and we can electrify some things that we don't use right now, use electricity for transportation, at the same time, to do all that and omitting very little more carbon dioxide and thus having a good chance of reaching two degrees or indeed the ambitious target of 1.5 degrees in Paris is more or less inconceivable Brian, you said you advised the government on this, so Can you give us a brief summary? flavor of the different policy options if we were to decarbonize electricity by 2030, let's say what would be the options that you gave to God, yes, well, we had a highly renewable scenario for 2030 where 65 percent of the energy would come from renewables.

So that would be the biggest player would be offshore wind, but there would be solar and there will be onshore wind and maybe a little bit of biotech as well, and demand reduction is important, so it will always be number one. We look at ammonium with the energy we use, um, but storage is important, but we could get maybe up to two-thirds of our electricity, almost half of our total energy, from renewables by the mid-20s by 2030, but that I would need them. tip the balance by really valuing carbon and making it very clear in the price of energy that people get and the rest would be nuclear, well there could be some nuclear or there could be carbon capture sequestration so that's taking fossil fuel power stations which hopefully in the UK would be gas and you need to stop the CO2 escaping and then you take it out of the chimney and then you liquefy it and use it if you can or store it underground so it doesn't .

It doesn't have to be nuclear and there are some disadvantages to nuclear energy. Oliver mentioned some that we also keep adding to our radioactive pile of junk from the past, so you know that's not necessarily the case, but we also don't need something as a base charge. duration of nuclear sequestration or carbon capture, it looks like we're going to get the Hinckley point now, doesn't it? It was probably about six percent of something on that order, yeah, yeah, yeah, so like I said, um at the time I mean, by 2030, I think a lot of the existing nuclear reactors will have been shut down or there will be had to be extended considerably beyond its original design life and it is not clear that we will get any more new nuclear reactors. reactors after Hinckley, although our projects currently certainly the only place they would be is where there are currently nuclear power plants and maybe not all of them are okay, so let's move on to um, this is.

I'll start with Keith on this question, is uh how Useful or important Do you think that climate model projections serve to advise how to react to climate change and that's from Anna Leaves? Yes, well, they are absolutely crucial. First I want to make clear what the climate model is. They are computer climate models. models that summarize our understanding of the physics and increasingly the chemistry and biology of the climate system and are based on well-known laws of physics, such as Newton's laws and the laws of thermodynamics that we hear in the school and our most complex laws.

Climate models use most of the largest computers on the planet, so which climate models are important in telling us the things we are sure about? So one of those examples is the patterns of climate change as we move forward. Sorry, the patterns of temperature change as we move into the future and some of the things we're most unsure about and that example is the patterns of rainfall change as we move into the future. So, they are important to distinguish. certainties and uncertainties and these models, in addition to including processes that we understand very well, also include processes that are more difficult to represent in these models and one of them is the formation and dissipation of clouds and clouds play a very important role in determining the temperature of the earth and there are some everyday examples of that on a summer day, if it is cloudy, we know that it will be cold because the clouds reflect the sunlight, but on the winter night we know that if it is cloudy, There will be no frost because the clouds are trapped in infrared energy and one of our biggest uncertainties when projecting climate change into the future is that different institutes develop different models with different representations of the clouds and they do not agree on how they will change. clouds. into the future, so it's important for policymakers to not only look at what we're sure about, but also that error bar of uncertainty, yeah, because I guess one of the challenges that the government has is what we're trying to do. asking you maybe it's a question if they are, but they say how much it is.

I do this, it's going to cost you, you know, 20 billion pounds or whatever it's going to cost and the result is going to be this good, is that right? I guess that's the I guess the government wants to know how much it's going to cost them to make this change and what that change will mean. The truth is that we are close to being able to answer these questions well. I think we can, but it's important that we put an error bar on our estimates and Brian talked earlier about the two degree limit and he actually put it in probabilistic terms because we don't know exactly how the climate will respond to CO2, we can't just be left with certainty.

We can say that there is a 50 percent chance that this emissions scenario will keep us within two degrees, but if the climate turns out to be more sensitive than we think it is because, for example, the way clouds change, then it could exceed it, so as long as policymakers often make decisions in the face of uncertainty, that's what the life of a politician is really about. I think people don't understand how risky how uncertain some of this is. I'm referring to the issue of not knowing what climate change you get. of a doubling of carbon dioxide is and remains a pretty wide error bar, would you say two to four and a half something like that?

You know it's a big difference, like we were saying, two is something that was careful degrees two four and a half degree of warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide and you know it's a big difference because two degrees is the kind of thing that people think it's livable and four and a half degrees is really unpleasant for much of the world. world, but politicians are used to making decisions this way when given a certain risk. I think maybe part of the difficulty with our economic models is that they don't really give the uncertainty, you know, so we're being honest and saying this right. there's uncertainty and there's some risk of this and some risk of this outcome just to add to what Keith said, two are the models, um, they've been evaluated based on past behavior, they don't just run, they actually say, they simulate what we have seen in detail and in particular going back in time and then the results of that are simply taken as gospel, this is it, there are actually a variety of behaviors and people like me try to understand now why that model does that and can we have confidence in that?

So we have a series of things coming out of here and what is being presented to politicians is a risk with some idea of ​​the confidence of what we are giving them. Sorry, I was just going to say that. I think these models, the climate change models, and the way they make and configure them have influenced biological thinking as well as biodiversity science, so we have been shaping and thinking about biodiversity changes in this world. scale up and include climate changes in these modeling approaches and become more process-based to include real responses to individual responses to climate and land use change in these models, so I think it's these models that have really helped us to think not only about climate prediction but also to think about what's going to happen to different species, extinction, so I think that's also one of the benefits of having this kind of approach and thinking about uncertainty in a way more joint.

Well, well, I guess one of the questions is a question from Pam um, so it relates to this, so we're talking about um, you know, a two degree increase. A three degree increase and what we can do to adapt and keep it there. One of the possibilities, of course, some sounds more like science fiction. geoengineering and Pam's question was, uh, the current rates of climate change, could geoengineering ever counteract human impact? Oh yes, thank you for that. That's, uh, I wrote a book about this one. I actually wrote a book about um and It's a really interesting question, but geoengineering just means a big technological change in the way the world works that is done for a specific reason, rather than being a byproduct of something else, and there are two types of geoengineering, there are actually big debates about what judges cancer or what not, but right now it is widely seen that the two types of geoengineering, one of them is sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and the other It is preventing sunlight from entering the atmosphere.

Keith mentioned that there are particles in the stratosphere that reflect sunlight. There are always some of those particles after a big eruptionvolcanic. There was more. Could it be possible that we could have a kind of permanent layer of them and thus cool the planet slightly? that's the sun's option, the other option is to just suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it somewhere no one really knows where, possibly under the rug, possibly, um, possibly, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, disused gas fields, but somewhere nice and safe, trust us. um and the problem with both things there were several problems um but one of them uh is that although the technology is imaginable no one knows the practical reality of doing it and these things have side effects and the question for me is not so much, could you imagine a system that would put small particles in the stratosphere and keep the temperature at two degrees?

Yes, it could. Would it be wise to use such a system if it didn't also do everything possible to reduce carbon dioxide emissions? At the same time, no, that would not be wise, the question is not so much: can we create geoengineering technologies?, because I think it can actually be answered quite easily: yes, we could. The question is: can we do it in a way that is safe and fair? Safely governable means not only that you can do it in a way that you don't mess up other things, for example, if you put something in the stratosphere, are you going to mess up the ozone layer or, rather, shouldn't you decide what you're going to mess up? placed in the stratosphere so as not to damage the ozone layer, if you change the Earth's temperature you also have effects on precipitation.

The effects on precipitation caused by geoengineering are not exactly the opposite of the effect on precipitation caused by global warming. don't end up just going it's not like you go one step forward one step back it's all like it's more like you have a step forward and then a step to the side and then you like if you're like me then you just stumble and it's a little bit of gasoline but it doesn't get you back to the same place, then the other security aspect as well is if you start doing this and other people object and those other people have armed forces that are willing to engage with their objection, then you get into the type of altercation that we want to avoid, so security is a very open question as to whether you can do geoengineering safely.

Another question is: can you do it fairly and with justice I mean? We are going to take into account in particular the risks that affect people who are not currently at the negotiating table and that includes people in less developed countries and people who are not here yet because they have not been born, so There are both international and intergenerational issues. fairness that you have to face when you start thinking about this kind of technology who said, "I don't think that the fact that it's not obvious that you can do it in a safe or fair way means that you shouldn't think about how to do it." I think it was actually a very useful exercise to think about how you should do it and I think there may be ways to do it that would be really useful, but they won't be unless people have security and justice.

As high in their minds as technology and capability. It smells good, responding to Keith, but I'm surprised we're already doing it. But aren't we in the sense that we are filling the atmosphere with CO2? I think some of those are there's a guy I respect a lot who probably works more on geoengineering than anyone else in the world. David Keith now at Harvard I think David gave a very good answer to what it is and we all know the conflicts there can be between academic departments, but you are insulting engineering if you are great at making a mess.

With engineering we are definitely making a mess in the atmosphere. Is your engineering trying to do something more specific with a deliberate effect and I think there is a case where you could say there has been other geoengineering but it's not in climate? I would say you could argue that the way we've changed the nitrogen cycle on the planet is geoengineering, but I think there's a distinction to be made between things that you've thought through carefully and that you've deliberately tried that might not be achieved. do and things that you just started doing because you had no idea that steam engines did that, yeah, I think I think a point that you made about the geographic engineering calculations that have been done so far has been done within our models. climatic conditions that we talked about before. and we've actually learned a lot about the climate system from those experiments, but I want to address another issue about putting tiny particles in the stratosphere and we know this from our understanding of past volcanic eruptions like the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in the early from the 1990s that these particles only remain in the atmosphere for about a year and we have talked before that a significant fraction of the CO2 we put into the atmosphere persists for centuries, so if we went down the path of geoengineering we would be compromised. . to replenish those stratospheric particles continually so that it's not a one-time thing, it would be an ongoing process and this would be something intergenerational, we would be committing future generations to continue doing that and that's somewhere where, uh, where The two different types of geoengineering They seem to have some kind of synergy because one thing you could say is that it gives you time to use your giant sucking machines, details not known, to get rid of the carbon dioxide, and one thing is that, um. and one thing I should point out is that the John sucking machines that I'm making fun of a little bit are, in fact, already built into the policy, most scenarios offering a 1.5 degree probability of where we are now. and many of the two degree scenarios involve in the second part of this century some kind of process to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is sometimes called negative emissions technology, and this worries me because now people think that this technology will exist.

I also think well, maybe we can make that technology do a little bit more and one of the problems with the various ways of doing this technology, the one that's talked about the most is using bioenergy and then using carbon sequestration and storage, which Brian was talking. of the problems with this like burning biofuels and putting the carbon dioxide underground so that your network takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to the plants, from the plants to the power plants, from the power plants to the underground reservoirs, one of The points of this is that taking up huge amounts of land to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that way and huge amounts of land are what biodiversity is all about, if you take away huge amounts of land what are you going to do with the things that currently use that land?

I think that kind of carbon dioxide reduction could have really terrible impacts on biodiversity, arguably it could have worse impacts on biodiversity than an additional 1.5 1.5 degrees of warming. When you think about these Duo engineering things, I think it's important to stop CO2. Going into the atmosphere in the first place seemed like a pretty good solution, yes it absolutely is, but without wanting to reflect on how that works for you at the moment, well no we're not, it's a developed nation that can afford to do it well. I don't think we as a planet if you argue that we as a plant are doing well.

I think that's not exactly developing the technologies that really need to be transferred around the world and that's the crucial step with financing and technology transfer, but you don't do it. I don't think that's happening fast enough to avoid tutors. I think we're really stretched on that and I think the Paris agreement made me hope that there really is an international will to make those two degrees a limit right now. What has been agreed is more like three, but given the need for this, the pressures for development, which is quite correct, how is someone like India going to bring electricity to their villages?

It's obvious how they should do it by having solar power there and we should help them. do it absolutely, actually there's a related question from Maggie, which is I guess you're referring to the difficulty of getting global agreements and what is clearly a global problem and the question is, is there anything that real people can do? It is seen that behavioral change from individuals working together rather than governments could have an impact. So does it really have to be absolutely at an intergovernmental level that we're going to solve this problem or both? I'll actually have a start, I think so. it has to be all levels um there's certainly no way for us to step back and say okay, okay, the governments of the world are saying they're doing it now, that's it, we can get on with whatever we want to do because we don't will happen. unless ordinary people around the world say we want this to happen, so I think at all levels individuals have to say we allow politicians, maybe that's one of them, we elect politicians and we can pressure them , we have several levels of government.

In the UK, evolved administrations, for example Scotland, are doing all sorts of interesting things in terms of trying to achieve low carbon emissions. This could be your microphone. Okay, let's see if I can escape the accidents. Now where do I start? Anyway, all levels are. Something needed to be done, people were incredibly important here. I mean, I've often had the argument when I've given talks, well, the UK is only one or two per cent of the UK's emissions, so why should we bother the Chinese? uh, producing all its emissions, absolute garbage. We go to China and say, well, we have this climate change law and we're really working on this.

They are really impressed because it has been very influential in their decisions and they have come to the table now that China is really a major part of the solution, whereas it was considered a major part of the problem, but we have a lot of influence from what we do here and the technologies that we develop, as we said before, are incredibly important to ship. In the world, I should actually say that Maggie asked that question, but there are two questions here that are related, I think, to people taking responsibility and putting pressure on governments. One of them asked Kate, who is from Magdalena, can we discern? climate change now in our daily lives when we look out the window I go for a walk can we see those effects?

Are they becoming obvious? Yes, I think so and I said this before in one of the other questions you can see. plants respond to the natural world responding to changes and you know you just need to look out the window to see this and you know the climate health issues of climate change are also becoming more pressing so I think this is not the case. It's just an abstract thing that's happening to us now and we need to take this and take it to our politicians so they start doing more to stop emissions. I think it's really critical and it's very obvious news. story this week, the hurricane that went through the tragic events in Haiti and then I went to North America, so I know that there has often been a lot of debate about whether you can point to these extreme weather events with another frequency and say that it is a sign of climate change, Keith, what can we read into these events like the one we are seeing now in the United States?

Well, yeah, I mean, taking an individual event and attributing it to climate change is always difficult, so we're always and it's a challenge that the climate science community is taking on, but I mean there's just one example in the UK. in recent years, there is a long-term data set called the England and Wales precipitation data set and my reading colleagues have looked at it and If you look at really intense rain events that last several days, in recent years 15 years we have had events in the year 2000, in the year 2007, 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2015, which are almost unprecedented in the record going back seven 17 years.

These are heavy rain events that last several days, so there have been, you know, we can't absolutely say it's climate change, but you wouldn't bet against it and I think Brian is probably a better place to talk about the hurricane. This is Hurricane Matthew, as it was about to hit Haiti a couple of days ago and I hit the incredible power of these storms that eclipse any power of anything we do now, those storms are damaging with the winds, but they are also more damaging generally with this ocean surge that accompanies them, those winds drive the ocean, the very low pressure helps the sea to rise as well and those waves in Katrina in the United States were a wave of six meters, six meters, you can tell. you imagine and I think Sandy was three meters so that those and there's a record that's a lot bigger than those too, but um and then heavy rains of over a meter are not uncommon with oneof these tropical cyclones.

I think the record is six meters of rain with a tropical cyclone. so you're getting hit by the wind, you've got the ocean swell and all this rain coming down, these are just huge events, now what they feed on is the heat of the ocean, they only form over warm tropical areas. waters and in fact the waters have been one or two degrees warmer than normal and that is the previous normal for the previous 30 years, so around 30 degrees those waters and that makes the energy much more available because the energy for the storm comes from the warm ocean and that then leads to whether this is going to change or are they changing and it's very difficult because they come in these kinds of very extreme numbers from time to time, but the evidence is that for the extreme tropical cyclones that are increasing, someone has put the number 40 in 50 years, so the extremes seem to be increasing now with climate change.

There has been a lot of discussion about this, but the order one hypothesis is that if the system heats up, the ocean heats up, there is more energy. available for the extreme tropical cyclone now depend on other things, but that is the evidence we have at the moment and there is nothing in the models that contradicts this. I think that in recent extreme tropical cyclones indirect effects may also increase. If you put more particles in the atmosphere, you are breathing terrible air, so you know that the impacts of having particles in our cities, for example, are violating most European laws on air quality, so they are also having an effect. on us right now because of vehicle emissions, yeah, so back to Matthew, although there's another point that Keith was talking to me about before we went on stage, which is what Matthew also shows you is how much The adaptation and the Resilience comes with being, you know, in a richer, more stable country.

Look at what Matthew has done to the poor people of Haiti compared to what he is doing to the people of Florida. I was recently in Florida and there is no picnic. I'm sure, but at the same time the devastation that occurs when something like this happens in a less developed nation is incomparably worse and that's something that our entire climate conversation hasn't mentioned much at the moment. which is when we talk about climate change there are a series of responses there is mitigation which is to reduce um with the reduction of emissions rates possibly one day there could be geoengineering there is also adaptation and adaptation is a very important part of the climate response to uh in all over the world but particularly in developing countries and it is worth keeping in mind that Arab peoples are not particularly well adapted in all parts of the world to their current climate let alone changes in climate and there is a fourth thing which is suffer that these things cause terrible human suffering.

I think I totally agree with that actually, but sometimes richer countries think they're immune and I used to give talks and say what it would take for the United States to get serious about climate change and maybe a tropical cyclone over Florida or New York or something, look, what happened in New Orleans was wiped off the map almost even in a rich country, so we're all vulnerable, but the vulnerability is much greater in the developing world. true and it will be difficult to draw a line between no, that is absolutely true. I was just going to say rather sadly that it would be difficult to draw a line between Katrina and whatever changes in the American climate this may bring us, we're actually at that point now to uh, I think what the last question will be that's from Sylvia, Which is related, I guess, how can we better close the gap between scientific research on climate and government action on climate change.

I mean, I've tried to influence this at times and I mean it might help if our whole society in the UK had a better image of science and better science education because I think at all levels, there's not enough scientific basis. To really achieve this agreement, one has to get it through society, what is going to happen and what is going to happen. I mean, I think the current Parliament has 27 MPs with degrees in science and technology. and none at PhD level, there was one PhD, but he lost his position in the last election, so there is not a lot of awareness and I think if you go to cabinet you will find it is probably zero.

They are going to check me. I'm sure of that, but we're dealing with an issue in terms of what can be used as sort of background information to make this, um, make this convey the information, but we have in the UK the climate change law. and we, I'm on the climate change committee and we're recommending, I'm sorry, we're recommending that you have a proper microphone like Donald Trump, yeah, okay, I'll stay away from politics, yeah, so we've got the climate. climate change that the climate change committee makes its recommendations, five of the eight members of the climate change committee have our doctorate level in science and technology and the information we provide is based on a high level of input in this area and we found that We can actually communicate that through um so I think having the right structures where information can be transmitted allows that information to get there, but it will certainly be much easier because the level of scientific awareness was higher at all levels of the community, okay, so yeah.

In fact, I could go to the panel with the last question. I think it's up to scientists to be a little more participatory, so it's not just about not engaging with science, but about science engaging with people and understanding. that we are pretty normal people and you know we are, we want diversity in our kind of scientific community, we want an equal number of unrepresented groups like women and other unrepresented groups on these panels. I think it depends on us. I really like having meetings like this where a lot of people come and you can get involved with this.

I think those are the things we need to do more of, so it's up to us too, not just educate people. being interested in science, yeah, I'm not sure I see this as a central problem because I think there's a I'm not entirely happy with the idea that everything is better if scientists can push for policy that they like um I think understanding science is crucial, but I also think there's a reason why politicians are called politicians: they make politics and they make compromises with other things and the way to get politicians to act more the way you want is not necessarily to increase your scientific awareness.

I don't think there is a clear solution, especially since scientific awareness really has to be in the place of political advisors, politicians make decisions and make concessions, and if you want them to act differently, you have to do it. Let them know that they will need your support if they make certain types of decisions. I think politics really should be traced primarily from the political point of view. Yes, I want to talk about some fair messages of hope from other environmental issues we've had. I want to focus on the problem of ozone depletion, the stratum where it is depleted, which was a very important issue in the 1980s and 1990s and solving that problem was a very good example of healthy interaction between scientists, government and industry which he brought to the United States.

United Nations Montreal Protocol and this led to a very rapid elimination of the omissions of the CFC gases or chlorofluorocarbons that we used in our refrigerators and air conditioning and these were the gases that were destroying the ozone layer and um or although now almost We have completely banned emissions of these gases and although it will be 30 or 40 years or maybe a little longer before the stratospheric ozone layer fully recovers, we are starting to see that recovery now, so there is no doubt that solving the stratospheric ozone problem was a much more difficult task. easier problem than solving the problem of climate change, but it shows how scientists, government and industry can work together towards a common goal.

Yeah, I'm wondering if anyone wanted to briefly pick up on what Oliver said at the end because this is one of the central themes. It defies the point of the question, actually it's almost like if only the politicians in society did what we tell them, everything would be fine, but there is a sense to that, so Oliver had a good point, that's right, well, I was going To do it. I'm saying that's not necessarily true, I might actually believe that it is, but I'm not trying to know what the yes is, what we have to do is make sure that we have a science-based view, but the decision is a political one at that. along the way. climate change committee we have to address the issues of poverty, you know, the availability of electricity reaches across the entire UK economy, all these sorts of things come into play and this scientific and technological input is just one part of the scene there, but it's interesting that actually the UK was a leader on this issue from the time Margaret Thatcher, with a science degree, really took it before anyone else in the world and I didn't like everything she did, but it was amazing. on this one, she took it and addressed it in 1988 in a Royal Society speech and there was a scientist who felt able to address that in the last follow-up question, we have about two minutes left.

I would say to Brian because since you said you wanted to avoid politics, I'll start with you on the last question, which is a gay one and asks whether Brexit has the potential to undermine international collaboration on climate change. I responded that international collaboration happening what has been done, I think has made the UK's contribution to that much more questionable, I'm sorry, I think there's been talk in the biodiversity conservation kind of community that, Although we don't like it, a lot of people don't like the fact that we're Brexit, maybe it's also an opportunity to understand our relationship with the environment a little better so that we can protect the environment more and understand emissions rather than less, so maybe it's an opportunity I don't want.

Let's be optimistic, but maybe it's an opportunity rather than a terrible disaster in the sense of agricultural practices, because one of the drivers of the state of nature report a couple of months ago came out with the intensification of agriculture as one of the main drivers of biodiversity decline in the UK and maybe if we could have a more joint policy with farmers and talk collaboratively with them and how we manage, you know, multiple issues like food security but also management of our wildlife populations, it could be really better well we've talked a lot about um so we've talked a lot about the uncertainty in climate change here um and and maybe the one word I would say is the biggest problem with plexus in This moment is not whether Brexit is a good or bad thing, but the uncertainty is that it is uncertain if we will have access to European funding for our research, it is uncertain how we will collaborate with partners in Europe, we now have a very strong and healthy exchange of scientists between we.

UK and other countries and it's not clear what that will look like at the moment, so the problem I see at the moment is the uncertainty holiday, I think, and there is a kind of policy that responds to a political response, that is, a political response, I think. is that if we go to a much more renewable electricity system, which we need to do, it really helps to be part of a big system because, if the sun doesn't shine here, it probably won't shine in Slough, but it may well be. shining in Stuttgart um and if you can move electricity more easily then you can go renewable more easily and I think there are several European projects to increase energy infrastructure and I think we can be pretty sure that at the margins we are going to be less involved with them That before this also refers to the question of the possibility of capturing and storing carbon.

There is a lot of talk about using the North Sea as a resource over and over again, which would make it more difficult, I think. What worries me from a British point of view is that the political agenda of people who were pro-Brexit tends to be very similar to the political agenda of people who are less interested in action on climate change, like Owen Patterson or Peter Lilly, who We have quite a few doubts about the benefits of acting on climate change and we also have doubts about the benefits of being part of the European Union and I think the evidence from the Conservative party conference is that on that side of the Conservative party He's doing pretty well right now.

So I think in terms of domestic climate policy, the dominance of that particular view is probably quite damaging. I just wanted to add one thing about something we should have been very proud of: that the UK actually led Europe during the The EU in the Paris negotiations now probably wasn't aware ofthat, but there was the UK leading this huge bloc of nations on this important issue and the influence that it gave us was enormous and of course it won't be available to us in the future, okay, I'm just going to say that I'm glad that if this were a BBC show I'd have to try to give it some balance, but this is the Royal Society so it's not like that.

Well, that's very good, thank you. I decided that unfortunately we ran out of time, so I would like to mention that we didn't have time to answer all the questions, but some of the other questions we asked. I didn't have time to answer it will be filmed and we will soon be making the video answers available online at the Royal Society, so if your question was not asked you will be able to see the answers there. I would like to thank Mr Brian Hoskins again, Professor Kate Jones, Oliver Morrison and Professor Keith shine and actually thank the panel, thank you, thank you again and then just one, one last thing.

I should mention that there is an excellent paper, I think it's available on the Royal Society website, which is a question about climate change and I think that was done with the US National Academy of Sciences and it's at the Royal Society .org on climate change, but thank you for listening, thank you.