CAN WE KICK THE CARBON HABIT?

There’s a big difference between whether we could reduce our carbon emissions and whether we actually will. But it has to happen right now.

A few years ago, I would have said we needed to act decisively within the next decade to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, but now it’s only a few years. We’ve already seen a one degree rise in global temperatures, and we’re moving rapidly towards the 1.5 degree limit set out in the Paris Agreement.

By the time you get beyond a two degree rise, it impacts every aspect of human life – putting huge stress on resources, reducing biodiversity, making agriculture untenable in many regions. You’ve got ice caps and glaciers melting, ecosystems collapsing, increased poverty, lower life expectancy, frequent massive disasters in many regions and life for some rural and indigenous groups just becoming untenable.

What scares me most is what could arise as a consequence – mass migration of people forced to move to survive, hostile competition for ever-more-scarce resources, global famine and war.

Over the last 30 years we’ve seen the growing frequency of all types of severe weather events – tropical cyclones, heatwaves, flooding, or drought. While these are predicted in our climate modelling, the really frightening thing is that the models appear to underestimate what actually transpires.

Scientists tend to be quite conservative in their predictions of how quickly these extremes will happen. They don’t want to be accused of scaremongering.

It’s become more important to develop early warning systems to prepare people for these high-impact weather events. To an extent my work has swung away from the physics of these weather systems towards behavioural science – how do we translate our forecasting into something understandable and useful, and how do you get people to heed the warnings?

There’s a film called Don’t Look Up, about a comet heading for Earth. Scientists try to explain the dangers, but people don't listen. They have the technology to smash the comet but choose not to do it for economic reasons. It’s a brilliant analogy for climate change.

The importance of engaging people with the issues extends to policymakers too. With the five-year political cycle, politicians have no incentive to take a long-sighted view. Contrast that to COVID. Here you had a real and immediate emergency, which required a rapid government response and serious lifestyle changes overnight. We implemented them and came through it. But there are no real consequences for governments not acting on climate change; we keep missing climate targets and there are no repercussions.

But we do live in a democracy and people shouldn't underestimate the value of their own voice. If public opinion pushed climate change to the top of the political agenda, politicians would have to respond.

I’m quite supportive of groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil taking direct action. Of course it’s annoying if they disrupt your sports event or stop you driving to the airport, but in proportion to the impacts of climate change, it’s nothing at all. I'm sure people thought the suffragettes or the black civil rights movement were annoying, but now these people are on the right side of history.

There are things that individuals can do. I keep flying to an absolute minimum and I’m conscious about limiting the temperature on my thermostat, and making sure my house is well insulated. I don’t live like a hippie, but I'm trying not to give in to consumerism.

And if climate change was top of the political agenda, the UK government could do plenty to reduce our nation's impact on the planet. The biggest thing would be changing the way we produce electricity. Actually for the UK, this is already turning into a success story. A graph of electricity production over the last 20 years shows we’ve steadily increased the use of renewables and nuclear energy. One big reason is because of our access to wind power, particularly offshore. It’s maybe not happening quickly enough to get us to net zero, but the numbers are going the right way.

Other countries are also playing their part. People sometimes point fingers at China as major polluters, and though they‘re still developing coal-fired power stations, they are also changing, possibly at a rate faster than ourselves. Their carbon emissions per person might be relatively high but a lot of these are a result of China making goods they export to us. Really, these are our emissions.

Governments could do much more, and there are real co-benefits for doing so. The best example is insulating people's homes. We have the technology for it, it’s relatively inexpensive and also addresses the issue of fuel poverty. And we need to really move away from gas boilers and towards alternative energy sources like the air source heat pumps used in Scandinavia for decades. Between them, these are a great opportunity to invest in high quality green jobs, and if people have well-insulated homes fed by cheap clean energy we won't need to argue about winter fuel payments.

Another big thing is public health and active travel. By raising fuel duty and investing in public transport, incentivising people to get out of their cars, we'll make a big impact on carbon emissions, and the poorest people will benefit most by having access to cheap, reliable buses and trains.

Encouraging people to walk and cycle obviously has huge health benefits too. For me, these offer more than carbon capture. We will only ever capture a small percentage of our emissions. The same goes for companies offsetting emissions by buying carbon credits in the rainforest. There's a lot of evidence this just isn’t working.

It’s far better – both for biodiversity in the rainforest and for the planet as a whole – just to leave the fossil fuels underground.