In this ClimateGenn Episode I speak with former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government and Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, Sir David King.
The interview was initiated in response to David being quoted in the Financial Times. The article reported on how people in the East of England being forced to evacuate their homes due to erosion from inundation of sea water. A problem that is forecast to see thousands of homes abandoned in the coming years.
We cover a lot of topics in this conversation but they all illustrate the gargantuan size of problem we face and how badly we humans are responding to challenges. For all the talk of Artificial Intelligence, the glaring truth is: if we focussed our collective real intelligence on solving these problems, the horrors accelerating around us might be greatly reduced and even manageable. If only.
I want to say a big thank you to everyone who commented on the last interview with Dr Jennifer Francis, sharing thoughts and examples of how extreme impacts are impacting your regions and communities.
Transcript:
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Sir David, it’s great to see you again. Thank you very much for taking the time. I just want to speak to you because in the US, we’ve had Dr. James Hansen talking about an acceleration of climate warming. And then in a conversation I’ve recorded with Jennifer Francis, she talked about, we should expect record temperatures this year with the El Nino, this forecast. And then just today, I’ve been reading in the Financial Times, you being quoted regarding people that are actually losing their homes from the advancing North Sea. And I just wanted to talk to you about what is actually happening down the east coast of England, and why are residents being forced to abandon their homes?
[Sir David King – Climate Crisis Advisory group]
The interesting thing about the United Kingdom is that we’re sitting on a geological plate. And that geological plate has suffered in the past a collision, and we are recovering from that collision. And the east coast, this is going to be east in my story, the east coast is sinking, the west coast is rising.
Financial Times misquoted me on this. That is the basic problem with the coastline along the east coast, particularly around Norfolk and Suffolk. Add to that, then, rising sea levels.
The west coast, on the other hand, is protected largely from rising sea levels because of this movement of the geological plate we’re sitting on. So there’s a real difference between east and west. Not enough is being done on this or any other part of the challenges of climate change to Great Britain.
We need a comprehensive strategy on adapting to the changes that are bound to happen. And that’s really my bottom line on this.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
I want to come back to the sort of national conversation in a minute. But in this article, I mean, Sizewell Sea, the nuclear facility, is kind of in the midst of all of this. And if you’re saying it’s sinking and sea levels are rising, and they’re expected to keep rising, is there a risk that climate impacts might outrun the planning scenarios that they’re doing for the safety of Sizewell Sea?
[Sir David King – Climate Crisis Advisory group]
This is a very, very critically important question. As it happens, Sizewell Sea is sitting there as an exemplar. But if you ask me where we’re headed into the future, the east coast is going to be severely flooded as we move forward in time.
I’m sitting talking to you from Cambridge, and we in Cambridge are a little bit close to sea level. And we worry about the Ely returning to being an island in the middle of the swampy area around here. It is very likely to happen, I’m afraid.
But it’s going to take quite a few years before we get to that point. But nevertheless, what I would emphasise is the need for a comprehensive strategy, which looks to the future, looks at the worst possible outcomes, and says, what can we do? We at CCAG have been working with cities around the world.
And I’m doing this work largely through the C40 group. And the C40 group now has not 40 cities, but 98 cities. So it’s a comprehensive group.
The chairman is the mayor of London and has been for a while, and he’s very effective in that position. And I’ve been trying to advise cities around the world on how to defend themselves against rising sea levels. Now, obviously, London is one of those cities, and our mayor is very much aware of this.
The best example is actually the mayor of Shanghai and what his office is doing. They have the biggest water pumps in the world already installed. And the people of Shanghai are unaware of any flood risk because the water gets pumped away before they can be aware of it.
So what they are doing is also looking at, for example, if they need to build a wall around the city to defend it from flooding as sea levels rise, why not build the foundations for the wall first below the current sea level so that the people aren’t too worried about this wall being built up. And then you can quickly build the wall up when the need actually arises. When we discussed this with the mayoral office in the city of New York, they of course had this terrible hurricane that came through the city and the city was vacated.
Nobody killed, but the destruction of the city, many parts of the city from the floods that happened that time, 2012 I guess this was, they sent in train the US Army Corps of Engineers to give them a plan. It took them four years, cost a lot of money, and they produced a very good plan, I would say, but the plan involved building a wall around the city to protect it from flooding. And the city fathers decided that that was not a thing they could face up to.
A wall rising from 10 foot above sea level to, in some places, 20 foot above sea level. They just felt they couldn’t enclose the city by a wall of that kind. And they’re still discussing what alternatives there are.
Difficult to figure out what alternatives there are. Now all I’m saying here is, better to have a plan, as in Shanghai, than to sit back and say, well, that doesn’t work, let’s try something else. And I say the same about the east coast of England, the sizeable sea situation.
As we all know, they’re putting a boulder wall around the sizeable sea operation, even before the construction starts. And they can also build a wall, because a boulder wall will still let some water in. But it would be the first defence, and then a second wall would be a second defence.
Now all of these things, if you were EDF and owned sizeable sea as it comes on stream, you would want to make sure that it would operate for quite a few years to pay back the enormous investment in this capital that they are building, the capital of nuclear energy in the UK. So I think it would be silly to think that EDF is unaware of these problems. France is the country that is most aware of nuclear energy.
They have a very high percentage of their electricity from nuclear, the highest in the world as a percentage. And they are very much up to managing the whole nuclear debate. So I’m not too worried about where sizeable sea goes.
I am very worried about what happens to our coastal defences.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
I did see that they’re planning a 14 metre sea wall. It’s going to be like an energy fortress. But you mentioned we need a strategy that encompasses all of these challenges.
And if you take on the winter we’ve just had, which has been terrible for farmers, which adds on to these things like food security, which we seem to be sailing a little bit blind. When you’re going around talking to these cities from within the C40 or C90 plus group, are there conflicting voices? Because I mean, last week, the Tony Blair Institute is advising that we open up the North Sea for more drilling and so on.
And we’re sort of getting into this confusing national conversation about what’s good, what’s bad, what constitutes a sort of a secure future for the UK. How do you start to unpick that when you go to engage with these cities, for example?
[Sir David King – Climate Crisis Advisory group]
What is interesting is that the comment that Tony Blair made, and I would look very carefully at where his funding is coming from. And I say that, because it’s the billionaires who are stepping up and supporting Trump at the moment, who are changing their positions on climate change. Very, very surprising to see how many of them have changed their positions quite dramatically.
And I’m really sorry to see Tony Blair following the same route, because he and I worked so well, I think, together on the whole climate change issue. But the target of my comment is really, I don’t find any of that in people in cities that I’ve talked to. So for example, in Delhi, the problem is not the same.
It’s not a flooding problem. The problem with Delhi and other cities of that kind is where have they been dumping rubbish in the past 100 years plus? And the answer is just outside the city.
Now the city has encompassed this vast dump, which is now mountainous, and it which is now burning constantly. So what you have is the attempt to clean up the air in Delhi by cutting out coal usage around the city, being completely dwarfed by the awful fumes coming from this dump. Now we have talked to them, what do you do about this enormous dump?
And there are things you can do. I mean, it is the same with the capital of Bangladesh, where again, they have a dump, that dump outside Dhaka, that dump was actually a water runoff from over saturation of the city. So the city could run the water off into this valley.
But also there’s a river that comes around the city. And if the river was in flood, it would flood into that floodplain. That plain is now no longer a valley.
It’s mountainous again, with what has been dumped. So these are the kind of challenges that every city is faced with, catching up with past bad practise, and then also dealing with masses of unexpected, unexpected, not by the science community, but unexpected by the city fathers. They are facing right up to the problem.
And anyone who says, well, don’t worry about climate change, they’re not interested in that. What they have to do is try and handle the problem. The city of Jakarta is, if you like my worst case example, the north part of the city is now under seawater, not for part of the year, but for 12 months of the year.
Jakarta is currently the capital, but they’ve announced they’re going to build a new capital across the water on a higher land. But what about the 15 to 16 million people living in Jakarta? What’s been done for them?
As far as we could gather, nothing. So there are real challenges because that city is going to be one of the first big cities to go underwater completely. And of course, the people of Bangladesh are very much aware of flooding.
They have a much better idea of what this is going to deliver to them. But nevertheless, the challenges around the world, they’re very similar. And one of the wonderful things about the C40 group of mayors is that they are exchanging best practise.
So where one mayor gets the hang of it, the others can learn from these people. Every city is involved in this. Paris, for example, perhaps unexpectedly.
But what we are now witnessing is a change in weather patterns. So if we look at Europe, Europe is seeing relatively arid periods during summer and then extreme rainfall during winter. So our whole pattern of weather systems is changing and it’s changing quite dramatically.
And while I’m talking about Europe, I just want to say the bad news about Europe is that while global warming today is 1.5 degrees centigrade above the pre-industrial level average for the whole planet, Europe is heating up much more quickly. And so Europe is now at twice that figure. And the expectation from modelling, and I’m talking about modelling that hasn’t really been changed for the last 20 years, the expectation from modelling is that we’re heading towards a six degree temperature rise over the coming century in Europe, Central Europe.
So all of these challenges are challenges that are known. And what I really want to stress is the science is there, but not many people are putting the messages across. The IPCC is now looking at some of these risks.
But the talk of tipping points, for example, somebody needs to sit down and say, how do we define a tipping point that has tipped? So for example, all of the information that we have from Greenland, all of the information from Greenland is now telling us over the last 10 years, on average, Greenland has been losing ice at a rate of about 30 million tonnes an hour. Now, clearly, that means sea levels will rise much more quickly.
And that is actually happening. Now, is it going to stop? We don’t know.
But we should surely be planning to either try and refreeze it, stop it in its tracks, keep the ice that is formed in the winter in place in particular over the Arctic Sea, because that’s what protects Greenland from losing ice. There’s so many things that need to be done. And here, Nick, is the biggest challenge.
We don’t have a coherent, comprehensive plan. We don’t have what I would call and have called in print a planetary solvency plan. If we don’t do this, and Vietnam, for example, goes under seawater.
And I’m talking about the southern part of Vietnam, where the Mekong Delta is where most of the rice paddy fields are the third biggest rice producing area in the world, exporting most of it around the world. Under seawater, we’re expecting now at least two or three months a year, 90% of those paddy fields will be under seawater by mid-century. Now, have we got a plan to manage the situation where rice production fails like this?
And my theory is that Ian McKeown’s latest book, and I advise anyone who hasn’t read it to read it, it’s a magnificent account, imagining himself 100 years from now, looking back on this terrible period we’re going through. He envisages, for example, Russia, US, nuclear war emerging with a terrible situation where a bomb is dropped in the middle of the Atlantic, causing tsunamis that sweep across Europe and Africa, etc. It’s not unrealistic, given the direction of travel for so many parts of the world.
Nick, I’m not a pessimist. I am a born optimist, and I will carry this to my grave that there has to be a plan and we can manage it.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Yeah, part of the problem is that as we think about now, with this forthcoming El Nino, just to make it a bit more right there on our doorstep, is that we’re seeing this heatwave in the Atlantic already. And it’s the evaporation that drives so much rain and so on. What would a plan look like to counter something like the problems we’re having with the Atlantic, with Greenland, which you’ve referenced, you talked about refreezing it.
I mean, we’re finding it very difficult to have a conversation amongst ourselves in the UK, the US has kind of started to roll backwards. I don’t get too bleak on politics. But you can see the way that it’s becoming very difficult to hold conversations.
[Sir David King – Climate Crisis Advisory group]
Have you seen things that are giving you some of the optimism that you can share? I mean, so the first thing is that the one place where you can have this discussion and believe there’s a lot of sanity around you is China. And so let’s not forget that China is leading the way on this problem.
And I visit China more than anywhere else, if only to raise my level of optimism again. But the challenge of another El Nino, the last El Nino, produced a dramatic rise in the average global temperature and exceeding 1.5 over a shorter period of time. But nevertheless, it should have been followed by La Nina, which should have cooled it down again, but we never quite saw that.
So here we are heading into a second El Nino, while the temperature is still hovering at that 1.5 above the pre-industrial level point. And that is a real danger, because we are then likely to hit something like possibly 1.6, 1.7 degrees and even possibly higher. So what do we do about this?
So what the Climate Crisis Advisory Group has always tried to do is put out a comprehensive policy that can manage all these awful changes that are happening. Now, you mentioned rising rainfall as a result of increased moisture in the air. One of the dreadful things that happened over that period in the last El Nino was the rise in the average temperature of the surface water of the oceans.
And that was dramatic. It was more dramatic by far than the average rise in atmospheric temperatures. And of course, up goes the moisture in the air, down comes the heavy rainfall in the rainy seasons.
What do we do? Is there any way we could quickly reduce the global average temperature actually by acting? And the answer is yes.
One of the biggest challenges today is that the world is still focused on one greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. And that is the major problem. Carbon dioxide levels rising is causing all these other changes that occur.
Water vapour increasing in the atmosphere is also a serious greenhouse gas. So there’s another feedback effect as we warm the surface of the oceans. So surface temperatures keep rising with all these effects.
But there’s another factor, which is methane levels. And methane levels are rising much more rapidly. And one of the reasons for this is simply that the amount of methane that is coming naturally from areas that are basically wetlands is rising.
Now that’s rising because the temperature is rising. So we get an increase in methane emissions. And methane, we estimate, is responsible for about 30% of global warming that has happened since the industrial revolution.
Now for the first period, that was pretty minimal. But now because methane levels are rising so rapidly, we’re not at 427 parts per million. That’s carbon dioxide.
We’re at 535 is our estimate if you add in methane. So we’ve already doubled the greenhouse gases from 275 in the pre-industrial period to the present time. So what do we do?
Methane has a short half-life in the atmosphere, meaning that in 10-12 years, the amount of methane, if we stopped all emissions, would be reduced dramatically. So can we reduce methane levels sufficiently? Now we can’t do that with the natural causes.
The wetlands must continue to be wet, continue to be methane emitters. But what can we do about the human causes? This is energy, agriculture, and waste in that order.
And the answer is, we can focus on each of those. And we have been going around the world trying to persuade countries, focus on reducing methane emissions. We had two satellites, one American and one European, that were designed to pick up methane emissions.
So we get a top-down view of where methane emissions are occurring. And so I can tell you that we know from the Eurosat that most of our methane emissions are coming from old coal mines. They are still emitting methane.
If we go to South Africa, and I went out there and had this conversation on the President’s Climate Committee, again, their biggest emissions are not only from old coal mines, but from existing coal mines. So if we can reduce emissions, and this is a relatively cheap operation, capture the methane, burn it to make electricity, that’s fine. Carbon dioxide is far less potent than methane per molecule.
So we believe it’s possible to reduce emissions of methane, the human emissions, by something like 40% over a 15-year period, 40% over 15 years. And we could reduce global temperatures by 0.3 degrees centigrade, because the methane levels in the atmosphere will also follow that reduction quite quickly. So there’s a sort of emergency brake that we can put on, that is reducing methane emissions globally.
And that’s a part of what should be an international programme. And by the way, Nick, we cannot manage this without an international programme. Now, the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, we are a relatively small group, we don’t have the power that is needed to drive this through.
We can go and visit country after country, but it is critically important to get a global body that sets out a strategy to have a manageable future for humanity. That’s what we need is a comprehensive strategy. We know we’ve got to reduce emissions deeply and rapidly.
And by the way, we used to talk 2015 language. We used to talk about having a carbon budget left, as if it was safe to carry on emitting any carbon dioxide or methane. We haven’t got a carbon budget left.
We’ve put too much up there already. So I’ve just said 535 parts per million, we’ve got to bring that down to 350 parts per million or less to have a safe future for humanity. Doesn’t look good at the moment.
But I believe if we can have a strategy set out comprehensively by a body of people who are recognised as experts and who understand the social conditions required for the transition, I think it’s perfectly possible that humanity would then back that plan together as things get worse and worse. Watch this El Nino year, that’s where this little part of our conversation began. But you’re quite right, this is looking quite scary.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Yeah, it is looking scary. And you’ve actually answered my last question there with the laying out a whole agenda, which is very, which is good. But at the beginning, when we talked about the Tony Blair Institute, and you said, you know, look at the funding, and there’s a very small number of these billionaires who are dominating the international conversation with all kinds of noise.
But what we actually need is a counter to that. And it sounds like you’re travelling around, speaking to all these people, China is definitely been making remarkable progress. How do we bring that into a sort of a concrete, coherent counter narrative for the future?
I mean, I think that’s really the challenge we seem to be arriving at.
[Sir David King – Climate Crisis Advisory group]
The original hope, and that was certainly my hope, was that we could predict what challenges we were faced with. We could predict how temperatures would rise and impact on humans dying from severe heat stress. We could predict rising sea levels, all of these things.
But we didn’t have to test the prediction, because we knew what to do to avoid it. We’re no longer in that luxurious situation. So now, I believe the only future lies when people become aware of the fact that the unusual things that are happening, unusual, never happened before.
When did Los Angeles ever before have a fire that destroyed a major part of the very wealthy part of that city? And was that by any chance due to climate change? So when people can make that connection, then I believe we’re going to move forward in time.
And this is exactly why, actually since 2015, I’ve been trying to work with the actuaries who are based in the insurance and re-insurance world. And these are people who really understand how to analyse risk in a way that I, as a scientist, don’t. I want everything I do and say to be very accurate.
But these guys can tell you the probability of your house burning down so that they can give you an insurance policy that is realistic. So I think when we talk to the actuaries, and I mentioned the work that they’re doing, the planetary solvency recovery plan, and I’ve been working with them again on that. That is a plan which says we won’t be able to insure people if this continues.
Yes, every year, we put up prices based on our analysis of risk going forward in time. But we only do that at the beginning of a year, and we look at the end of the year to see what the risks will be. So annually, they’re pushing up prices, but they are also saying there are areas we cannot insure.
And there’s an awful statistic coming out about the number of homes that have been constructed in the last five years in Britain that are in floodplains. Those are uninsurable going forward in time. So the solvency crisis begins with lack of insurance, but it also begins with the fact that loss and damage year on year, this is the critical number.
From last year where the estimate is around half a trillion dollars, the estimate that we published in our latest planetary solvency plan is that this will rise to 10 to 15 trillion dollars a year by 2050. So if you look at that, that means you’re losing 10 to 15 percent of global GDP each year in the form of loss and damage. It puts the crisis of 2008, the bank solvency crisis, that puts it way into the background as something that wasn’t very important.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
We used to discuss with the late Salim al-Haq about loss and damage, and it was always in the context of the climate vulnerable nations. Now we see that the globe is one big climate vulnerable entity, and we’re not able to even discuss it properly. We need to radically shift on how we’re talking about, thinking about what we’re voting on, the policies and everything.
[Sir David King – Climate Crisis Advisory group]
What you’re saying, it’s interesting how Trump’s policies are reversing the globalised economic system, and that’s what I’m discussing looks very dangerous. If you live in a city, you’re extremely vulnerable anywhere because of what’s happening elsewhere in the world. How do you get the food you need?
How do you get the electricity you need? Et cetera, et cetera. We depend on mining, we depend on food production, even though we’re living comfortably in cities.
So I think if I was putting out a plan for a family to escape into the future, it would be going to a high place in Africa and live off the land. That’s more likely a survival route than anywhere that depends on imports, whether over a large distance or a small distance into where you’re living.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
What is the next step for CCAG, the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, in everything you’ve been talking about and looking forward into this year? We’ve highlighted it as a tricky year, but what’s on the work agenda?
[Sir David King – Climate Crisis Advisory group]
Right, so we’ve got a good number of strands to our work now, and deep and rapid emissions reduction, we’ve got to manage that. We’ve got to bring down levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. How can we encourage research in the wealthy countries into that area?
Britain, interestingly, is developing research in those areas, perhaps more than anywhere else. So we are doing well there. We are focused heavily on persuading countries that everything is changing, and we need to prepare ourselves for a changed future, and that means adapting, creating resilience locally.
We need to do all those things, and at the same time, we need to be talking to leaders, and we’re talking about leaders in both the business sector and in the political sector. Now, the most important thing that happened, I believe, in COP 30 in Brazil was the formation of the 80 plus group of nations. It was 82 nations that formed this progressive group of countries that are meeting in April this year in Bogota, in Colombia.
And under the watchful eye of the President of Colombia, I really admire what he’s doing on that. And that group of 80 nations is potentially very powerful, by which I mean, if they were all to massively reduce their dependence on oil, coal, and gas, we could see that we would starve the companies that depend on those markets of the finance that they need. So it could be quite effective.
So I’m putting quite a lot of faith in that group. They are quite a heterogeneous group. But Nick, you will probably know that Kenya has made amazing advances in renewable energy, the highest, apart from Norway, the second highest level of renewable energy for electricity on the grid in the world.
And just seven years ago, that was practically zero. And they’ve done this by bringing in geothermal and geothermal energy along the Rift Valley in Africa, where the two parts of Africa are shifting apart, and where humanity began, that area is just ripe for geothermal energy. They’re putting Kenyans to work, they are no longer importing coal and gas to make electricity.
It’s all good for their economy. This is such an important message, that the countries in that 80 plus group, which include China, but now my little caveat on the 80 plus group, it doesn’t include India. Prime Minister Modi went back to the original arguments being made before he became Prime Minister in India, which is the developed nations created this problem, and they should deal with it before we should do anything.
This is unbelievable from a Prime Minister who came in and said, we will solarise India from top to bottom. Both China and India, by the way, 2025 good news, reduced their dependence on coal, both China and India. So India has been making lots of progress.
I am off to India next month. And this is the final answer to your question on a CCAG mission to India to try and persuade them to join the 80 plus group. Because if you’ve got China, India, most of Europe, the United Kingdom, countries like South Africa, Australia in the group, you’ve got a potential for taking the whole issue forward comprehensively, if possible.
And that’s what we’re going to try and influence. But in any case, give hope to the world.
[Nick Breeze – Genn.cc]
Yeah, we get to see how this all pans out. Because this is exactly what we do need.
