Why Is Climate Science So Disputed? - Richard Betts

Richard Betts MBE is Head of the Climate Impacts strategic area at the MET Office, the lead author on several reports from the IPCC and a Professor at the University of Exeter. There are few areas of science as contested as the climate. I wanted to speak to someone who has been researching this area for more than 3 decades to discover out why there is so much disagreement over fundamental questions like whether the earth's warming is actually caused by humans? Can we stop it? How accurate are climate models? Should we switch to renewables? What does Richard think of Extinction Rebellion? How much are China to blame? And much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Extra Stuff: Follow Richard on Twitter - https://twitter.com/richardabetts Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #climate #science #physics - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We want to have a good and happy and fulfilling and comfortable life for everybody on earth. That requires certain level of living standards, which we have historically relied on fossil fuels and the use of the land to achieve. But now we're recognising that the way we've done that in the past is ultimately not sustainable in the long term. But at the same time, you can't rip that away immediately because we rely on it so much.

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  I wanted to try and have a conversation with you to work out how there is so much disagreement about climate science. People are prepared to accept that eating too much makes you fat. Well, not everyone, but most people that are saying do. Smoking causes cancer, but climate science seems to probably be one of the most contested areas that I've seen. So for the people that aren't familiar with you and your background, what are your credentials? And what do you do?

• 0:52Speaker 00

  So I'm a climate scientist at the Met Office, which is the UK's National Weather Service and Climate Service, and I'm also a professor at the University of Exeter. So I trained as a physicist. I have a master's in meteorology and a PhD in meteorology. And I've worked in the Met Office's climate research department, the Hadley Centre, for nearly 30 years. So I've been working on the climate modelling and then bringing in observations and these days applying it to risk assessments to understand what we might have to do in response to climate change.

• 1:28Chris Williamson?

  And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, what is the role of that? What's the duty of that?

• 1:37Speaker 00

  So, yes, I'm a lead author on one of the, well, several of the reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. The role of that is to produce authoritative assessments of the science of climate change in many different aspects. So the physical science, understanding the changes that are occurring, what we're expecting for the future, but also the implications for human impacts, biodiversity impacts and so on. And

• 2:07Speaker 00

  And the perhaps more challenge, even more challenging than all that, the the different options for reducing climate change in in terms of mitigation. The IPCC is somewhat unique and it also links very closely to to government. It's not a government document, but it is designed to inform government policy. So part of the process at the end is to work very closely with representatives of the world's governments to to make sure that they are bought in to the the the the science of it. And that's where it gets particularly interesting at the end, the the end of the process. But it is a scientific document ultimately.

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about this tension that I brought up earlier on then. Why is it the case that there can be so much contested about something that to me sounds like a science?

• 2:58Speaker 00

  So I think what is more contested is actually what the responses are and what is what the science is taken to imply, rather than the science itself. I mean, with any science, there's there's always somewhat different views. You can interpret things in somewhat different ways, especially when it's a big and complicated subject. But there's very few people, if any, that contest the basic fundamental science of climate change in terms of greenhouse gases exist, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, greenhouse gases keep the earth warmer than it would have been. As are the gases like methane, water vapour, they're also greenhouse gases.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  Hardly anybody disputes that. Where the controversy comes in, some of it is in terms of what we are expecting for the future in terms of how severe the future impacts will be if we keep building up more greenhouse gases into the in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide. There's a wide range of possible outcomes of that. So people tend to focus on either the worst case or the best case scenarios. But even beyond that, there's the deepest controversies about what this really means, how urgent it is to to reduce emissions, should we just live with the changes that we're putting into place, how severe will those be? So it's when you get further down that chain, the real controversy has come in, I think.

• 4:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. How accurate are the climate models now? Because even I know that the weather guys get it wrong sometimes. And if they can't predict what Newcastle or Austin, Texas is going to see tomorrow, whether it's going to rain or not, I imagine that all of the complexities rolled forward over 10 years globally must be kind of difficult.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, so working in the Met Office, obviously, the main, a main role of the Met Office is to do the weather forecast day to day and week by week and so on. And yes, you can't always predict a few days ahead exactly what's going to happen. We actually are pretty good now within within a few days, perhaps even a week ahead in some cases. But yeah, the atmosphere is very complex. So you're trying to predict individual weather day to day and hour to hour. You can't do that more than a few days ahead. Beyond that, you're looking at trends. So you can look at general trends of whether it's going to be generally warmer or milder winter, for example, but then you're looking kind of more about the balance of likelihoods. When you go beyond that, you can't predict day by day, year by year, because of so much

• 5:23Speaker 00

  complexity. But what you can successfully look at is the longer term trends of warming and general patterns of rainfall change. And actually, the early climate models that were produced in the 1960s and early 1970s, they made predictions which have now been shown to be accurate. So it was predicted in the early 1970s that by the year 2000, the world would warm by 0.6 of a degree Celsius. That turned out to be reasonably accurate. The true figure was about half a degree. So it was a slight overestimate, but not too bad. And the warming has continued since then. So so we're now in a state where we are able to see that the early predictions of climate science are broadly coming true.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  We're now also seeing more extreme weather of some kinds. So more extreme heat waves in some areas, more extreme rainfall, more increased drought in other areas. That gets more difficult to tease out, particularly signals, but we are seeing those starting to change now. So broadly speaking. We we know that we we were saying the right things thirty or fifty years ago. But we still can't really, yes, predict perfectly for many years in the future because the the system is so complex. And so then becomes a a a task of risk assessment rather than trying to make perfect predictions, you see.

• 6:43Chris Williamson?

  Is CO2 the sort of fundamental underpinning or one of the main pillars of what you guys are are looking at with regards to climate change?

• 6:54Speaker 00

  CO2 is very important. It's not the most important greenhouse gas in terms of its effect on the climate at the moment because the most important gas is water vapor. And we're not directly changing water vapor in terms of human activity, except for very small uh uh areas where we're irrigating. But so we're concerned about CO2 because that's the one that we're increasing the most in the atmosphere and it stays in the atmosphere a very long time. Decades to centuries, if you consider the if if you if you increase the amount of CO2, that increase will be there for for decades or centuries. Ahead because it doesn't break down chemically in the atmosphere. So that's why the focus is on.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Is on CO2, but there's other gases like methane and nitric oxide as well are also greenhouse gases that we are increasing.

• 7:40Chris Williamson?

  What's happening with water vapor?

• 7:42Speaker 00

  So water vapor also changes and that changes in response to climate change. So as the world warms, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water. So water vapor can be a feedback mechanism on climate change. So it can it can actually increase the impact of of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, you see.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  So it's like a catalyst. Let's say that there is a warming on the earth that increases the water vapor, which permits more of a warming.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes, yeah.

• 8:11Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. What about the increased greening from CO2? Because this is something that I've heard about. That the parts per million that you can get if you have greenhouses where farmers and horticulturalists are growing particular things. That they want their PPM to be through the ceiling and that we're nowhere near that amount. Increased greening presumably would mean more plants. More plants would mean that they absorb more CO2, which would then bring the CO2 level down. So. Talk to me about how all of that pieces together.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's something which I've worked on myself and I've published on several times and in fact some of my PhD was on that exact issue actually. So yes, when you put more CO2 in the atmosphere, that enhances photosynthesis, the process through which plants grow. So plants will take up some of the CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. That's a negative feedback. So actually, if that didn't happen, we would have warmed the earth even more because the CO2 was would have been even greater than it has been. So we would have seen probably double the amount of warming than we had seen. CO2 is also taking up in the ocean to some extent as well. So that is extremely important process.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  And so it is part, a large part of the reason of why we're seeing greening of the earth. We can see from the satellite that some areas of the earth have denser vegetation cover, especially kind of semi-arid regions where there's limited water. So higher CO2 means plants need less water, so they can green up more. There's other reasons for the greening that we're seeing, change in land use, also the warming of the climate itself in the very cold regions, simply warmer temperatures when you get longer growing seasons. So there's many factors behind the greening, but CO2 is one of them. The reason that's also important for the future is we don't know for sure whether that

• 10:05Speaker 00

  will continue to the same extent in the future. You know, from laboratory studies that this, the impact of CO2 on photosynthesis, it kind of flattens off at high levels of CO2. But we also know that higher temperatures, as well as leaving a longer growing season in cold regions, that can have a detrimental effect in hot regions. So the key question is, will this beneficial effect of CO2 continue into the future? We need to do more large-scale experiments in real ecosystems with high levels of CO2 to really be sure about that. So again, it's an open question. So when you're considering risk assessments, you need to account for a range of possibilities of how CO2 will affect greening in the future.

• 10:48Chris Williamson?

  How have you been able to tease apart the industrial impact on CO2 in the atmosphere?

• 10:56Speaker 00

  So we know for sure that the CO2 rise is entirely manmade because the amount that we're putting in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning is way more than the amount that we're seeing building up in the atmosphere, about double in fact. So simply by conservation and mass, you know, we're putting 10 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every year from burning fossil fuels, another one or two billion from deforestation. The amount to build up in the atmosphere is only equivalent to about five or so billion tonnes of carbon per year. So simply by the arithmetic there, we know that what the increase is due to

• 11:37Speaker 00

  the industrial impacts, it's been offset by the natural impacts of uptake of CO2 by natural vegetation.

• 11:46Chris Williamson?

  How do you know that that wasn't just a trend that was occurring and that's now been continued?

• 11:51Speaker 00

  Well, we can look back in time over from getting data from ice cores. If you drill down into ice layers, on the layers of ice that have been built up over thousands of years and examining the bubbles of air trapped in the ice as the snow fell and trapped air within it and then turned to ice, you've got a record of the atmosphere going back thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. So you can analyse that and see what the CO2 concentration was. And before we started burning fossil fuels in the industrial revolution, the CO2 levels were hovering around about 280 parts million for many, many thousands of years. And they did go up and down in the more distant past,

• 12:36Speaker 00

  you can infer it from fossil records. It did change naturally in the past in response to very large scale changes in global ecosystems, but in a much slower rate than what we've seen in recent decades. The rate of CO2 increase is just way more than anything's been seen in the previous paleoclimate record.

• 12:55Chris Williamson?

  I heard something about the Milankovitch cycle, which is this sort of climate wobbling up and down in temperature, we're going up and down, and this is part of a small uptrend before we then go further down. How much legitimacy do you see in that?

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that again, that's that's perfectly a good piece of climate science that that colleagues of mine have worked on for many, many decades or more. So the so yeah, this the the the Ice Ages are generally linked to these Milankovich cycles, the change in the Earth's orbit and the the the tilt of the Earth. So that that's yeah, an external forcing on the climate system, we we we call it. So change in the Earth's energy balance, all the patterns of how the energy from the Sun is reaching the Earth, occur due to these changes in Earth's orbit and the and the tilt of the Earth. That can lend these kind of feedback processes, like with the carbon cycle, which mean that, yeah, as vegetation changes over the world, it can bake

• 13:53Speaker 00

  up more CO2 for some periods, or release more CO2 as you come back out of the cycle. And this is all part of our understanding of how a feedback process in the climate system. So the reason that this is important is because that then lets us see when we're looking at how we're warming the worth of Earth, and other forcings, like human caused increase in CO2, how feedbacks may then amplify or dampen that in the future. So all links together as our understanding of the climate system.

• 14:23Chris Williamson?

  What's the current projections that you guys have got with regards to temperature and CO2? I don't know, let's say that we don't make too many changes and kind of things were to continue as they are at the moment, what happens to temperature and CO2 concentrations?

• 14:39Speaker 00

  So if we carried on as as we are, we would we would see global warming of anywhere between two and possibly up to four degrees Celsius by the end of this century. It's very hard to be precise because we don't know the strength of all the feedbacks. The best guess is probably somewhere below three degrees warming by the end of the century if we carry on as we are with currently implemented policies on energy and land use.

• 15:04Chris Williamson?

  Just to inject there, Richard, when you say on average, when when a climate scientist says on average an increase in this, how's that figure worked out? Is that an aggregate across all areas around the globe? Because presumably, certain areas will increase by more, certain areas will increase by less. How do you come to that figure?

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So this is all done with climate models, which are essentially the same models that we use for the weather forecast. So these are models based on mathematical equations, which represent our understanding of the physics of the climate system. So we understand the workings of the atmosphere pretty well. So we're able to make these calculations, which can explain past changes in climate and make projections of the future. As I said earlier, you can't make perfect predictions. There's a certain amount of uncertainty. But if you compare the models with what they've done in the past and compare with what we've observed in the past in terms of past warming, you can actually narrow the uncertainties to some extent. So these projections I've just talked about are based

• 16:11Speaker 00

  on an assumption of carrying on emitting as we currently are, as you posed the question, but also how that plays out in terms of the response of the climate system linked to what we understand from past changes.

• 16:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so we've got this water vapour as one of the examples. You have this feedback mechanism. So you have a first order effect, which is an increase of CO2. Then you have a second order effect, which is an increase of water vapour. Then a third order effect, which is CO2 in response to the water vapour and so on and so on. And yeah, so I mean, that, the computers that you've got running these models must be pretty big and pretty sophisticated, because you can already begin to see how, when you put that across an entire globe, just how many degrees of separation you are away from what you're trying to do in, what, eighty years' time to try and arrive at these sort of figures?

• 17:03Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, I mean, so these models are vast. There is two million lines of Fortran code. We still use Fortran, which a lot of computer scientists find amusing, because it's a very old computer language, but it is actually, it's a very well-used language in climate science, because one of the important things is Many people work on these models over years and decades. So it's got to be a particular computer language which it helps with collaboration. It's got to be very clear and structured. So there's dozens, maybe even hundreds of people have worked on the Met Office model over the years. So it's two million lines of Fortran which represent the mathematical equations which represent the physics of the climate system. These calculations are done for tens of thousands of points across the earth's surface

• 17:48Speaker 00

  and many, many layers in the atmosphere. So yeah, huge models which take weeks to actually do the calculations, in fact.

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy. I had heard something to do with where temperatures are detected, temperature changes. How do you ensure that there isn't a discrimination with regards to where temperature changes are measured? Let's say that you take them from particular areas and not from others, or areas are more represented. I'm going to guess that this is something you guys have to account for as well.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. So a colleague of mine in the Met Office and in other institutions across the world have done a lot of work on this. Because there's thousands, tens of thousands of data points of weather information taken across the world every hour, probably even every minute these days, actually. And bringing that together is done routinely for monitoring weather and helping with the weather forecasts. And it's now done very systematically across the world and there's quite high standards for that. If you want to look at climate change in the past, if you go back a few decades, the quality is very good. We've got satellite data as well, which also helps give a big picture. But if you go back, you know, in the eighties and seventies, you haven't got satellite data. If you go back before that,

• 19:04Speaker 00

  the network of weather stations across the world is less systematic. We've got weather was taken from aircraft and ships and weather balloons as well. But when you go back to the start of the early 20th century, you've got much more sparse data and then beyond that, you're much more limited. And sometimes, in many cases, you have to be very careful on whether this data is reliable, especially if weather stations have perhaps even shifted, like a particular town has moved its weather station from one side of town to the other. You've got local effects like an urban area will generate its own temperature impacts and so on. You might have had a forest cut down, a wind, that kind of thing. So you have to account for these by cross-checking.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  The weather stations in in in certain areas, uh, there's a lot of quality control goes into that now, um, and, uh, so it's not, it's not a trivial matter. You can't just look at the raw station data because you will get a very misleading picture. You have to do this kind of cross checking to make sure you get a clear and accurate picture of change over time.

• 20:08Chris Williamson?

  What happens if we get to the end of the century and we're less than three degrees but more than two degrees warmer?

• 20:15Speaker 00

  So, uh, I would say we will probably have initiated, uh, some, uh, some severe long-term sea level rise impacts at the very least because, uh, it seems that mountain glaciers are already melting because we've warmed the world already. So we're already locking ourselves into, uh, putting more meltwater into the oceans and therefore more sea level rise. We're seeing sea level rise happening already. Uh, we may well have initiated some further long-term, uh, impacts of, uh, melting of part of ice sheets in Greenland, uh, and Antarctica. Uh, if we keep warming below three degrees, perhaps we won't, uh, kick off the worst of these, but I think exceeding two

• 20:55Speaker 00

  degrees does risk some major impacts like that. And also we will have changed weather patterns, uh, in many parts of the world, uh, some of the hotter parts of the world, which are already kind of almost on the edge, uh, of what humans can live with day to day, will be going past areas, past, uh, times of extreme heat stress for humans and so on to places like the Indian subcontinent, parts of Africa. Uh, a two-degree world would probably expose about a billion people, uh, to extreme heat stress for more than 10 days, uh, a year, we've calculated. So the hotter parts of the world will be seeing severe impacts and then we'll be seeing impacts on biodiversity, the colder regions of the world where a lot of the ecosystems and species of

• 21:38Speaker 00

  animals and plants are adapted to, uh, to cold, uh, temperatures. They won't be seeing the cold temperatures they're used to, so we'll be seeing massive impacts on biodiversity and and human life there as well, actually. In terms of, yeah, ways of ways of life, which, you know, cultures which are adapted to cold temperatures, you see.

• 21:55Chris Williamson?

  What about if we get closer toward four degrees? Is there a step change that occurs there, or is it just more of the same horrors?

• 22:02Speaker 00

  It's very hard to say whether there's any kind of particular step change. You often hear, you know, uh, uh, about, you know, critical thresholds and so on.

• 22:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, like runaway cyclical natures of stuff.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so so you you can't put your finger on any any particular level of global warming that would that would that would definitely uh kick off any kind of uh chain reaction, but the more warming we put into the system, the more we risk these large scale changes like a a irreversible uh melting of the Greenland ice sheet, for example, which would take centuries to millennia to completely melt away. But you can reach a point of no return with the Greenland ice sheet where, as it melts, the surface of the ice sheet comes down to a warmer temperature in the lower atmosphere and that sort of feeds on itself.

• 22:48Chris Williamson?

  Just explain that to me.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  So the Greenland ice sheet is very thick, it's miles thick. Uh, so as the surface of that uh melts under higher temperatures, the surface comes down lower into the atmosphere and the lower part of the atmosphere is warmer than the higher atmosphere. So you could bring the surface of the Greenland ice sheet into an area of warmer uh temperatures and that could mean the warming and the melting could could could feed on itself, you see. Uh, yeah. So that's one of the irreversible changes.

• 23:15Chris Williamson?

  By being high, you're actually protected and refrigerated and you have a a frozen area which covers over an area that perhaps would be even now prone to melting, but it's kind of, it's almost protected over the top.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, uh, uh, exactly, that's right. So and there's other potential kind of tipping points in the climate system which which which uh which may exist, but we don't know exactly where. So one very famous one uh is the uh Amazon rainforest tipping point where some early models of ours uh projected a very severe warming and drying in the Amazon region.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Most models don't project such severe drying, now it has to be said, so that's actually something of a relief to some extent. However, most models do project something of a drying and warming in that region. And that means that the other impact on the Amazon is from deforestation. So the real threat from to the Amazon probably comes from a combination of deforestation and climate change. So this kind of milder drying of the Amazon, that means that any impacts of deforestation would be worse. Because deforesting the Amazon means that the edges of the forest dry out and become more susceptible to fire. So it's more complex than simply a climate-driven dieback that the older models showed. It's more a link between deforestation and climate.

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  Is the Amazon benefiting from increased greening from CO2? Is that helping it to grow back more quickly?

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Large parts of it at the moment, yes. Some parts of it, no. Some parts of it are now so warm and getting drier and are becoming impacted by deforestation and degradation that they're not benefiting. But large parts of it are. So a key question for us is, how long will that continue in the future? We've recently initiated, well, I say we, colleagues of mine in Brazil are setting up a major experiment in the Amazon rainforest to look at exactly this. Will the rainforest remain resilient and will it take up more CO2 as CO2 levels are increased? So that's a big piece of science that needs to be done to help us narrow down the uncertainty in our models.

• 25:25Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me for a second. I want to try and get into the philosophical underpinning of what climate, not necessarily climate science, but what having a climate-conscious worldview is actually trying to achieve. Whether or not it's trying to keep the planet the same, whether it's trying to make it as hospitable for humans as possible, whether it's trying to keep a hold of biodiversity, whether it's, as my friend and past guest Charles Eisenstein said, just trying to retain the beauty of the planet as much as we can. What do you see as the goal of whatever you would refer to, climate conservation perhaps? What's the actual outcome that we're aiming for?

• 26:09Speaker 00

  So, I mean, that probably comes down to something of a personal view. So I can only offer my personal view on this, and others will have a different view. But for me... It's for the point of view of humans, it's about making sure that we don't make our environment, you know, uncomfortable and ultimately impossible for ourselves in certain places. It stands to reason that we have evolved under a certain range of climates in the past. We've adapted our societies to certain local climates. We are actually fairly adaptable. Humans live in a wide range of places across the world. So to some extent, it can be about keeping the climate what we're used to in a particular

• 26:51Speaker 00

  location because we've built cities based on our own local climates.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  We, but in other cases, it's about making sure that we don't go beyond what is actually tolerable for people in the very, very hot parts of the world where there's an upper limit to what we can cope with as humans, or at least what we can kind of function within. So that's part of it. It's about making sure that we don't make things inconvenient or impossible for ourselves. But also, I think there's more of a, you can imagine there's a moral view on our responsibility to other species as well. Other species on the earth are adapted to certain local climates. We're changing that. So a lot of people, including myself, would regard it as unethical to make life impossible for other species

• 27:43Speaker 00

  ecosystems. And there is some beauty in the earth you can appreciate, you know, in cold regions, glaciers. We love a cold, I love a cold winter's morning, for example. I do feel sad that the cold weather we used to see in the 1980s happens much less frequently now. Although it's inconvenient, but I did like a nice cold winter, you know. So those kind of changes, there can, there's an emotional aspect to that, as well as cultural aspects, but as well as also, you know, human, practical and survival aspects and survival aspects for the species, sort of a whole range of things.

• 28:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's an interesting one. I definitely see it as stewards of the earth. I think that as the only ones aboard Spaceship Earth that aren't just cargo, but we're crew as well, we have some sort of moral obligation, I think, to, you know.

• 28:38Chris Williamson?

  Act well as guardians of the other creatures and the diversity that we've kind of inherited. I wonder whether, I wonder how much there is a price that needs to be paid, if you could almost see it as a balancing act between having an advanced civilization that is able to bring people out of poverty, that is able to raise living standards, that is able to access degrees of health and wellness and flourishing and economic value and so on and so forth, whether, well presumably, I'll put it to you, is there a sacrifice that needs to be made in order for us to get that? Presumably by trying to restrict carbon emissions,

• 29:23Chris Williamson?

  what we're aiming to do is have our cake and eat it too. It's we want to be able to live in a technologically advanced world, but we also don't want these negative externalities that we have from the climate being wrecked.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, and this is why this gets so controversial, because people have different views about where this balance should lie. So, yes, we want to have a good and happy and fulfilling and comfortable life for everybody on earth. And that requires, yes, a certain level of living standards, which we have historically relied on fossil fuels and the use of the land to achieve. But now we're recognizing that the way we've done that in the past is ultimately not sustainable in the long term. But at the same time, you can't rip that away immediately because we rely on it so much. So the phrase just transition

• 30:20Speaker 00

  gets used. So it's about how, where people, individuals, societies, towns and cities, and even countries that rely on the old way of doing things, how they can transition to a more sustainable way of doing things without disadvantaging people. So for example, this whole community is reliant on coal mining. If we just shut down coal mining, as happened in the UK in the 80s, it has devastating effects on the local community. So you have to find ways to get through that and make sure that people have other sources of employment. And you don't just rip the hideout of a community and replace it with nothing else. So it's not a trivial problem to deal with.

• 31:00Chris Williamson?

  I learned that cheap energy is one of the best ways to raise people in developing countries out of poverty and that fossil fuels are one of the best ways to get them that. Is there a tension between trying to reduce fossil fuel use and also still trying to get developing countries up to an acceptable living standard?

• 31:20Speaker 00

  So there is a tension there and the other tension, of course, is the other effects of fossil fuels such as local air pollution and so on. So again, in the UK, we experienced in the 50s and 60s incredible air pollution incidents. My dad, who was from the black country, would remember horrendous smogs where it was just desperately unhealthy to be outside. And a lot of people died of respiratory related problems and so on. So that was all to do with local air pollution. The UK, by getting out of so much coal burning, has reduced those problems. Those problems still exist in other parts of the world as

• 32:01Speaker 00

  well. So, yes, there is this tension, as you said, but there's also the other effects of air quality and so on you need to take into account as well.

• 32:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  That's why we're talking about co-benefits is actually the phrase that gets used. There's other benefits of reducing fossil fuel use beyond the climate impact, like improving air quality and so on.

• 32:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but then there would also be kind of co-costs, which is the reduction of access to energy. It's one of the things that strikes me is that we're kind of fortunate that the planet is as small as it is. I know the Earth's massive. I know that it's big, but we can fly around it in the space of 24 hours pretty much now, if you're on the right plane. And if the planet was even bigger, you would have so many different interest groups, so many different nation-states. I mean, it's already hard to coordinate stuff at the moment with different actors and different agendas and so on. But let's say that Earth was able to sustain itself at the way that it was, but it was maybe twice as big, which would be an awful lot more landmass, an awful lot more humans, an awful lot more nation-states,

• 33:05Chris Williamson?

  even wider varieties in terms of the climates and the countries and so on and so forth.

• 33:12Chris Williamson?

  Trying to get, trying to find a middle ground where you have every different nation's interests aligned. You know, we've recently had COP26 in Glasgow and for all that countries can go there and say that we want to do this, each country has its own different agenda about where it is, what its desires are for growth, for economic policy, for everything. So yeah, I think we're probably quite fortunate that we have, although it's massive, as small a sample size of planet to work with.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's quite a very interesting point, which I'd never heard before. Yeah. So yeah, things could be even worse, is what you're saying.

• 33:53Chris Williamson?

  It could be even more complex. Yeah, you could need 50 million lines of code in order to be able to work out what's going on.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting one. But the complexity of the issue and, you know, the negotiations at COP and so on, it is a huge, a huge problem because governments have responsibilities to their own people and economies and so on. And yes, they want to, on the one hand, to keep, protect their populations from the worst impacts of climate change, but they don't want to just radically change everything, especially the developing world, which is seeing that we're in the developed world of benefit of all this stuff historically. They want, they want some support from us at least making, making this transition, this just transition I was talking about earlier.

• 34:40Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, because they're still playing catch up to try and get their living standards to where they see the West already benefiting from it, whether that be because we got there first, or we have slightly preferable climates, or whatever economic policies. And because of the current state of the climate, you could see it as these bourgeois Western bastards coming in and telling you that, wagging their finger at you and saying, no, no, no, you need to be along with us. And you say, well, we're not in the same boat here. We have completely different living standards and economic structure than you do. So making developing countries sing to the same hymn sheet as a developed country is going to cause even more disparity.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly at the heart of a lot of the negotiations that were happening in the last couple of weeks in Glasgow at COP26. And the other aspect, of course, is the fact that these countries, along with everywhere else, are living with the effects of climate change that are already happening. So they've already warmed the world by over degrees Celsius. We're already seeing some changes in extreme weather. We're already seeing an increase in sea levels in some cases. So the more vulnerable parts of the world, which happened to be often the countries which have contributed less to the issue, are now asking for support in dealing with that, putting in place adaptation measures. Because there's a strong argument comes from some quarters, oh, we should just adapt our way out of climate change, or at least adapt

• 36:05Speaker 00

  our way through it. But you need to actually put things in place to do the adaptation. And again, it's the same countries that need support on getting away from fossil fuels and deforestation that need support in adaptation, because they happen to be in the hotter parts of the world and perhaps low-lying countries and so on. So again, this is another big issue that was addressed at COP26 but not fully resolved.

• 36:29Chris Williamson?

  Did you, what was your, what's your synopsis? What was your sort of summary of that? I mean, I'm going to guess this is kind of like, you've got an illustration of Glastonbury behind you. COP26 must be a little bit like the Glastonbury for climate scientists, but just maybe a little bit less fun. What's your, how did you feel that that went, based on sort of what you know and what you can tell us?

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Well, that's a very good analogy, actually. These climate conferences are huge. There's so many things going on. At the heart of it, the pyramid stage, if you like, is the negotiations. That's what everyone, the rest of the world sees, where the countries are negotiating about which, what emissions they will, they will cut, and how, and will they support each other in adaptation. Then around that, the rest of the festival, the other stages in the festival, there's also this, many different, even more delegates are having conversations amongst themselves, linking to the negotiations. Updating ourselves on each other's work on climate science, what this means for policy,

• 37:32Speaker 00

  hearing from policymakers about what they need. So it's a big sort of meeting of minds around these negotiations. So there's two different levels to it. The outcome of the negotiations, I would probably say it's not as good as we would have hoped, well, not as good as we needed to keep ourselves on track to meet the Paris Agreement targets of limiting warming well below two degrees. It didn't achieve that yet, but it was a good step along the way. A lot of positive things did happen. There were some good agreements on reducing deforestation, actually specifically identifying coal as an issue that needs to be addressed. There was an aim to get countries to commit to getting out of coal completely. That wasn't achieved, but there was a commitment

• 38:16Speaker 00

  to reduce coal use. There were other things on adaptation, again, not going as far as was hoped, but more than was feared. So it's a halfway house, really. Beyond that, the, I think, having the opportunity of networking and sharing the information, sharing the science, that was reasonably positive. I think there's a good, a shared understanding building as well, which I think that will help inform the next COP in a year's time where more needs to be done on the negotiations.

• 38:47Chris Williamson?

  Is it annual?

• 38:49Speaker 00

  It is, yes. There's one every year, except for last year, when there wasn't one because of the pandemic. So the one from last year, Glasgow was supposed to happen last year, basically, yeah.

• 38:58Chris Williamson?

  Has there ever been one which has attracted as much media attention as the one that we've just seen? Because I, you could have told me that this happened once every five years, and I would have believed you.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this was, this was particularly prominent, especially in the UK, because we were the host nation. But because also, it was, it's been five years since the last prominent one, which was in Paris, the Paris Agreement, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, was at a previous COP, which was very prominent, because that was the first time where there was an actual agreement between all countries to take action on climate change. That had never been achieved before in previous COPs. So that was very prominent. And also, The ambition which had been talked about in previous COPs before Paris was to limit warming to two degrees, global warming. The ambition became to try to limit global

• 39:53Speaker 00

  warming to 1.5 degrees. That was another key thing in Paris. So the Paris one was probably as prominent, almost as prominent as the Glasgow one, but they're not always as prominent as this, that's for sure, yeah.

• 40:05Chris Williamson?

  What's the enforcement mechanism if some nation state doesn't abide by what they're doing? If China just tells you what you want to hear, but then decides to just crack on spunking loads of CO2 out?

• 40:18Speaker 00

  So the commitments can be monitored. There's processes in place to check on how emissions are actually progressing. That can be, that can be, that can be audited. The deforestation can be monitored by satellite. So the data is there. You can measure how much the CO2 is building up in the atmosphere. You can see where emissions are coming from. But in terms of actual enforcement, like with any international agreements, it's actually, fundamentally, it's down to almost peer pressure between the countries, essentially. You know, there's no international law as such. It's basically countries.

• 41:03Chris Williamson?

  Gentlemen's agreement.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yes. Yeah. So like any of these things, it's about the, you know, the community, you know, encouraging itself and policing itself, really.

• 41:17Chris Williamson?

  There's another thing to consider. I want to start talking about China in a second, but we're at least not in open disputes with most of the countries on the planet. Can you imagine how much more difficult it would be if we were seeing some of the nation divides in terms of territories from the 1900s, World War I, World War II, Cold War, lack of communication between different countries, and we had some climate challenges to overcome because you would, there's no way that you get in coordination. In fact, it's perhaps because of the tragedy of the commons, it's maybe even. In the interests of particular countries that might be able to weather the storm of

• 42:01Chris Williamson?

  climate change better, to be able to utilise their industrial machinery to just try and get themselves as far ahead because they're still in conflict with whoever else it might be. Kind of fortunate that we're not at war at the moment.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  Yes, it is. Although another aspect of this is that climate change being an extra stress on certain countries and so on. So again, this is one of the particularly controversial issues about the role of climate change in international security and wars and so on. You can't really pin any specific wars on climate change as such, but you can start to see that it doesn't help when you get more extreme weather in a region which is already under tension, then an additional natural disaster, some of these quite failures and that kind of thing, it's not helping at all. So it's a further thing to bear in mind in the future.

• 42:52Chris Williamson?

  I saw a stat saying that China contributes 30% of the entire world's CO2. Do you know how true that is?

• 43:00Speaker 00

  In terms of emissions, it's the largest emitter. So they do have a huge population and they have ramped up their energy production in the last 20 years as they've undergone a rapid development. So yes, China is the biggest emitter as a country. It's not the biggest emitter per person because they have a very large population. The emissions per person are still smaller than the USA, for example.

• 43:32Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, but in terms of the actual emissions, they're the largest, yeah.

• 43:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting. So I had a conversation the other day which really opened my eyes to this. So I'm quite concerned about China. I think that globally it's a threat that we need to be taking far more seriously. And I started talking about this particular statistic, that it's the largest single contributor of CO2 on the planet. And the person I was speaking to, Richard, decided to say, well, Yeah, that may be true, but you have to also think that one of the benefits that we've seen in somewhere like the UK is that we've outsourced a lot of our industrial production to China. So the fact that you can then point to China and say, look at all of the

• 44:19Chris Williamson?

  stuff that you're throwing out into the atmosphere is, and we can stand on a high horse and say, look at how green we are. It's facilitated by the fact that a lot of our production is now being outsourced there, that we're getting electronics and machine parts and so on and so forth from that country.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly right. So when you're looking at a country's claims on how well it's reduced its own emissions, so the UK, for example, monitors our own emissions. We were the first country to put in place the Climate Change Act, so a legal obligation on the government to reduce emissions. And the Climate Change Committee, this independent advisory body, will track the UK's progress against its commitments. And you have to be very clear about whether the emissions reductions being quoted are the total emissions that the nation is responsible for, including what's called offshoring, yeah, what we've been, what we're buying from other countries elsewhere in the world, which includes China,

• 45:17Speaker 00

  but other places as well. Are you including that? Or are you just not talking about domestic emissions, what we're emitting locally? So you're absolutely right, that you have to look at the bigger picture. We're responsible ultimately for emissions elsewhere in the world.

• 45:32Chris Williamson?

  What we consume as well as what we create. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:36Chris Williamson?

  I found, I mean, understanding stuff like that, I find very interesting. I think that, you know, having that in the back of your mind, when, I can still be concerned about China, but having that as a little bit of a caveat was, was interesting. Does it, does it annoy you that climate science sometimes gets forgotten or tarnished due to crazy stunts and protests that grab attention?

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's an interesting one. It can.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  So I, I, I, I think that some things can be unhelpful if, if they're, you know, annoying a large part of the, uh, yeah, the, the population when people are, uh, you know, particularly if they're obstructing public transport or something. I, I personally think that is sending out the wrong message, you know, I, I'm an advocate of public transport and, and, and cycling and that kind of thing. Um, so when some people have, have used public transport to get their message across, uh, I think that was a wrong target.

• 46:34Chris Williamson?

  A bit self-defeating.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. The, uh, uh, on the other hand, uh, I can see how keeping the issue in the news, uh, is a useful thing, uh, as well. Uh, the, I mean, whether they're breaking the law, you know, and when people are perhaps, uh, e- e- even potentially endangering other people, then I get, you know, I'm, I'm not, not happy with that. Um, so the, you know, if you, if, if, if you go as far as, yeah, some things can, some things can be counterproductive. So you have to be quite, quite careful about what, what, what, what you're doing. I, I think it's, uh, it's a very difficult area. I would much rather, uh, that, uh, say that

• 47:18Speaker 00

  the, the media, news media, for example, um, gave prominence to, to, to climate science, uh, in a, in an unbiased way. Uh, one of the protests last year was particularly targeting certain, uh, sections of the media, wasn't it? And the reasons that the protesters gave for that was that they still saw that this, uh, certain sections of the media, that, that they were saying didn't give a true picture. Uh, I would rather the media, uh, cover climate change in a, in a, a good, unbiased, fact-based way, so that people then didn't have to feel they had to take this kind of radical action.

• 47:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, um, I read an article a while ago by Scott Alexander from Slate Star Codex. It's called the Toxoplasma of Rage. It's very interesting. And he talks about the fact that...

• 48:08Chris Williamson?

  Activists or anybody that's trying to push forward a narrative or an agenda, they have a balancing act to make that the more outlandish and gregarious stunts that they can do, they do capture more attention, but inevitably they polarise opinion a lot more too. On the flip side of that, the stunts which are perhaps much more persuasive and well meaning and rational, don't capture as much attention, but don't cause the polarity and also don't, it's easy to get people on side. So there is a payoff that you need

• 48:46Chris Williamson?

  to decide between exposure and impact or exposure and persuasion. And from my side, based on what I see, I think it feels to me like climate activism is sacrificing a lot of persuasion for impact. And I think that that being drawn back, now you may be right, maybe that could be assisted through other channels. But from your seat in the middle of the climate debate, what would you do if you were someone whose job it was to try and improve the messaging? You know, it's not good enough to just put Excel spreadsheets up. Like it needs to be engaging. There has to be a reason for people to take

• 49:28Chris Williamson?

  care. But also this, this undertone that you, because you drive a car to work, you should feel bad about what you're doing. I don't think that, I don't think shaming people into compliance is the right way to go about it either. So what would you, what are your thoughts on the messaging at the moment and moving forward?

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree. Nobody likes to be told what to do. And nobody likes to be shamed about what they're doing. I much prefer things which are, you know, more positive and creative. And you can find things which are attention grabbing and creative and more positive. An example here locally, some local activists last year.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Hired a load of roadcombs and they put in an unofficial cycle path on one of the main roads in Exeter that goes to the hospital. So they just put this cycle path and it was completely unauthorized. And then they sort of sat by and they and they watched and they filmed people using it to see whether first of all to see if people would use it. And they did see that hospital staff, doctors and nurses who cycled to work were using this this cycle path. Half a day later, the council then took it away because it wasn't authorized. But I think I I quite like that as a more kind of constructive thing. It didn't do anybody any harm. And it illustrated the fact that the cycle path there would be really useful. So I would like to see more of that kind of thing. Yeah, more more more positive imaginative and and creative

• 50:54Speaker 00

  things that that really are helpful rather than rather than negative. That's my personal view.

• 51:01Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I definitely noticed in myself, you brought up the cycle lane. So in Gosforth, which is where I live in Newcastle, the two lane high street, sorry, the two per side. So a four lane high street was reduced down to a two lane high street to accommodate a cycle lane. The traffic on that now is is disgusting. It's absolutely awful. Anybody that tries to get from the great, great north roads down into Newcastle knows what I'm talking about.

• 51:28Chris Williamson?

  There's something, there's something about that that is a little bit uncomfortable because you observe the inconvenience that you suffer from a front row seat. You know that if you're stuck between 3pm and 5.30pm or anytime during the morning on that road, that it's going to take you 10 minutes to do a mile and that's going to annoy you. And you knew you'd also remember a time not long ago when it didn't cause that long. I think creating a grand narrative, creating a more cohesive understanding around why these measures get put in place. So let's

• 52:08Chris Williamson?

  say that adding a cycle lane helps to reduce carbon emissions by whatever percent. I don't know that. I don't know that. I just see. What broadly to me looks like a mostly unused cycle lane and a ton of traffic that's tailed back. So what I think is missing, first off, I would suggest to climate activists to dial back the amount of shame that gets put onto people. I don't think that that's an effective strategy at all. I think it just makes people kind of resent whatever it is that you're doing. But a broader understanding of the direction that we're trying to move toward and how individual actions contribute to that. I think that that's important because it connects the

• 52:48Chris Williamson?

  sacrifice that you make. If someone said to me, if I was able to feel good about the fact that I know I need to set off 10 minutes earlier to get to town, but that by me setting off 10 minutes earlier to get to town, I'm actually helping in a way to reduce down carbon emissions because we have increased other people's ability to cycle to work. Then I'm like, oh, okay, I kind of feel, I kind of feel good about this. Or at least it dampens down the inconvenience. Do you understand what I mean?

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, and I think also we could encourage people to think a little bit outside their own kind of narrow view. I don't mean this in a negative way, but sometimes people don't realise that they could do things differently. Sometimes they genuinely can't. Sometimes they could do if given a bit of help. So again, using the cycle lanes one as an example, there's a lot of people that have no choice but to use a car, that's for sure. I mean, here in Exeter, we're a small town, a small city, but with a rural area around it. It's very hard to get anywhere in the rural area without a car. Within the city, it's actually much easier than a lot of people think to get around by bike, for example. I haven't had a car for two years.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  In that first period, I was actually quite surprised about how easy it was to live without a car. I just use my bike and public transport and trains. Some people, I think a lot of people could do more like that. I recognise a lot of people could not do that. But those who have no choice, their lives would be easier if those who do have a choice could make a different choice. But often those people could only make that choice if they're helped along the way by having, yes, safe cycling routes and that kind of thing. So it's not all down to individual people. It's about helping, changing the system to help people make these choices.

• 54:41Chris Williamson?

  How much do individuals' decisions about what they do, you know, one person remembering to turn the lights off or putting the the lights on a timer or switching to a hybrid car or an electric vehicle, how much is that going to make an impact, even if you start to scale that on mass across an entire population, and how much of it is from other things that are more out of our control, so perhaps things that are in industry, business, controlled by the government, transportation owned by companies and stuff like that as opposed to individuals?

• 55:13Speaker 00

  So the, yeah, the small action like turning the lights off or changing the LED light bulbs and that kind of thing, yeah, have a have a have a small impact. It is system level change, like entirely different energy sources, so not having coal-fired power stations, having instead renewables or nuclear or whatever. So that's a sort of system level change, which would need to be, people would would obviously have to buy into that as consumers and and it needs to be set up in a way which is not disadvantaging people. So you kind of, yeah, it's seeing yourself as as part of the bigger bigger picture, picture,

• 55:58Speaker 00

  really, yeah.

• 55:59Chris Williamson?

  What's your thoughts on nuclear energy?

• 56:02Speaker 00

  Personally, speaking, I would be surprised if we could achieve the targets without nuclear energy. That's a personal view, not as an expert. You know, I'm a climate modeler. This is just from, yeah, me seeing the debates from where I from where I sit. I see arguments which say can't be done without nuclear energy. So, you know, I'm speaking as a non-expert here, I'd be surprised if we could do it without without nuclear energy. I think the problem is so severe that we need to throw everything at it, basically. We can't rule anything out. That's my view.

• 56:38Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think it is that there is a quite a big swath of climate activist people who dislike nuclear energy?

• 56:48Speaker 00

  I think that that links to the the the the origins of the green movement.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Who who traditionally were sort of suspicious of any any kind of technology. And of course, there have been horrendous nuclear accidents in in the past, of course. The technology is very different now and the new nuclear power stations are are being designed and built to yeah, much, much higher standard and the risk assessments are done to account for climate change as well. Yeah, carrying very high temperatures.

• 57:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so nuclear plants that are being created now are being future proofed against potential higher global temperatures.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly, yes.

• 57:34Chris Williamson?

  I mean, that's so sophisticated. I had Alex Epstein on the show quite a while ago, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. So he's a philosopher that's talking about and I I don't understand enough about the impacts of different types of fuels to be able to kind of dig into his data. But what I did take away from it was a surprise at how much most climate activist groups seem to be very averse to nuclear energy, which is, you know, aside from a couple of very big accidents which occurred on version 0.1 reactors and plants that were very unsafe.

• 58:16Chris Williamson?

  It it it surprises me that that isn't just what everybody is throwing throwing their efforts at.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  I mean, it it it is true that the high level waste is is a long term problem. That you're kind of, yeah, you'll be queuing that to future generations. But it's a relatively small amount, you know, in the in the grand scheme of things, but it but it does exist. So part of the concern is about what we do with this stuff, which is going to be around for for thousands of years, as well as the obvious concern based on past experience and past accidents. But again, this is why it's such such a controversial topic and you get very, very polarized views on it.

• 58:58Chris Williamson?

  Richard Betts, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with what you do, why should they go?

• 59:05Speaker 00

  You can follow me on Twitter, Richard A. Betts on Twitter. You can also look at what the Met Office and the University of Exeter are putting out. I work at both of these places. You could, you could look at the technical report of the climate change risk assessment, which I led, which was published this year. So look that up, it's the UK Climate Risk, it's a website. So you can look there for some of my latest work. But yeah, I'm active on social media. So I'm always happy to have a conversation about this. I just talk to anybody who's interested in climate change. So happy to have a discussion.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  Thanks for today, mate. Mr. President, my company, the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this, that's. And Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 59:57Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:00:05Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.