Hello and welcome to the first of a new series of videos that I'm calling 'Just have another think'.
You may already have been following our weekly Sunday 'Just Have a Think' videos,
which mainly focus on the amazing developments rapidly coming online in the world of
sustainable technology. Those developments are remarkable. They demonstrate human ingenuity
and collaboration at its finest, and I strongly believe they should be celebrated and promoted,
but I also think it's crucial that we don't lose sight of the ecological, environmental
and social challenges that climate change will bring to all of us as we struggle to find our
way in the 21st century. So a couple of times a month from now on, roughly every other Wednesday,
I'm going to 'just have another think' so that I can learn more about those challenges
and what actions are being taken to reduce the impact we humans are having on the
planetary life support systems that keep us and every other species on earth alive.
To kick us off, we're going to look at the latest analysis on the state of our global climate,
and find out what further changes our scientists are predicting over the coming decades.
On the 8th of January 2021 the European Copernicus climate change service, or C3S as it's known,
published a climate update based on information collected from across the planet over the whole of
2020. Copernicus is an earth observation program that accumulates vast amounts of continuous high
quality global data from satellites and from autonomous ground-based airborne and seaborne
measurement systems. That data shows that 2020 was the warmest year on record in Europe. And globally
it was the sixth year in a row that experienced exceptionally warm temperatures, making the
last 10 years the warmest decade on record. The average 2020 temperature across the entire planet
tied 2016 for warmest year ever recorded. That's doubly shocking because 2016's temperatures
were amplified by a strong El Nino event in the equatorial pacific, which warmed those waters and
added extra heat to the planet's atmosphere. 2020 had no such help. In fact the opposite conditions,
known as La Nina, developed during the second half of the year causing slightly lower than
average temperatures in parts of the southern hemisphere. But that local cooling effect was
obliterated by the very high northern hemisphere temperatures. Compared to the 1981-2010 average,
Europe was 1.6 degrees Celsius warmer in 2020, and parts of the arctic region averaged as much
as 6 degrees Celsius warmer. Overall, our planet was 1.25 degrees Celsius above the commonly used
1850-1900 baseline. It's worth pointing out here that some climate scientists argue we
should really be comparing current temperatures to the 1750 to 1850 average instead of 1850 to 1900,
because 1750 is when the coal-powered steam-driven industrial revolution
first got going. Their assertion is that if we use 1750 as our starting point then we'd already
have reached an average global temperature about 1.45 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.
That's a topic we'll have a closer look at in a future video, but for today we'll stick with the
timelines that Copernicus have used. Now you might have heard news reports throughout the course of
last year suggesting the silver lining to the monstrously dark cloud of a COVID 19 pandemic was
the fact that at least our vastly reduced levels of human activity had kept CO2 emissions at bay.
Well, no. Not according to data from Copernicus, which found that although the rate of increase did
slow while we all stayed at home, the actual number still went up by another 2.3 parts per
million to an average maximum of 413 ppm. Lots of things contributed to that course, including the
ramping up of industrial activity in China, Europe and the States following the first lockdown, but
record wildfires in many parts of the world also had a big impact. Just in the arctic circle alone,
Copernicus recorded fires releasing 244 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2020 - over a third more
than the previous record set just a year earlier in 2019. And let's just remind ourselves that
atmospheric CO2 levels remained incredibly stable at about 280 parts per million for 12 000 years or
so following the last ice age, right up to the point where we started burning fossil fuels.
Some folks still cling on to the misguided notion that 400 parts in every 1 million is so negligible
that it makes no difference, which completely misses the point about the relative effects of
each constituent element in the mix. CO2 molecules trap photons of infrared light which heats them
and the area immediately surrounding them up. When the photons are eventually released they go off in
any random direction. Sometimes up into space and sometimes back down to earth again. That's how the
warming is happening. Upping the presence of that warming element from 280 to 413 parts per million
is a 47.5 percent increase. That's why we're seeing such dramatic effects on temperature,
and it's why every additional part per million of CO2 counts. The director of the Copernicus
monitoring program Vincent-Henri Peuch, had this to say about it.
"While carbon dioxide concentrations have risen slightly less in 2020 than in 2019,
this is no cause for complacency. Until the net global emissions reduce to zero,
CO2 will continue to accumulate in the atmosphere and drive further climate change".
So what is the current prognosis for our future? Are we going to hit 1.5 degrees,
or even the dreaded 2 degrees Celsius that scientists tell us would start to bring
catastrophic consequences? And if so, when might that happen? Well that's a seriously complicated
question and well beyond my brain's computing capacity, so to find the answer I turned to
this superb report by Zeke Hausfather published in December 2020 on the website Carbon Brief.
The report is based on the latest generation of climate models being produced for the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC. The models have the catchy title of CMIP6,
and they'll be used as part of the IPCC's sixth climate assessment report,
which is due for publication sometime in 2021 or early 2022. Now Zeke points out that there is
some variation between observational temperature records from different agencies around the world,
so a fair and balanced analysis has to have a spread of possibilities,
from least to worst case scenario. And natural events like El Ninos, or volcanic eruptions can
make any single year as much as 0.2 degrees cooler or warmer than it would otherwise have been as
a result of long-term human activity. The World Meteorological Organization reckons there's a 20%
chance that one of these events could result in a single year showing a 1.5 degree Celsius
increase before 2025. But that would most likely not be representative of the prevailing average,
so Carbon Brief took an approach that removes these short-term variations and focuses instead
on the likely future temperature rises based on the results of those climate models. First of all
you have to track atmospheric warming from 1850 to the present day. Fortunately, those temperatures
have been fastidiously recorded every year by several agencies all around the world, and this
chart shows a smoothed out average of all those data points. Then we add a bit of spaghetti on the
end just to really confuse the issue. So what's all this lot in aid of? Well these colourful lines
represent the range of possible atmospheric temperature increases based on what the IPCC
so helpfully refer to as SSP2 and RCP4.5. I did an 'explainer' on what those abbreviations all mean
back in 2018, when the IPCC released their special SR15 climate report. And you can click up there
to jump back to that video. In a nutshell though, SSP stands for Shared Socioeconomic Pathway, which
essentially means how we all choose to behave ourselves as a global society in the 21st century.
RCP stands for Representative Concentration Pathway, which is the predicted increase in
greenhouse gas emissions based on how we choose to behave. Both of these measures
are graded from best case to worst case scenario. To keep things reasonably balanced, Carbon Brief
used the midpoint scenario of SSP2 and RCP4.5, which is the trajectory that the International
Energy Agency says the world is currently following. You've got that wide spread of possible
projections that I talked about earlier, but none of them are great are they? All of them continue
to push relentlessly upwards as we move through the coming decades. The steepest line takes us
through 1.5 degrees in about five years, and on past two degrees about a decade or so later.
Based on that modelling, if the world doesn't immediately start to drastically reduce emissions,
then the ambition of the Paris Agreement to keep the world below 1.5 degrees of warming is almost
certainly already unachievable. If all we manage to do is stop increasing the level of emissions,
and only pump out the same amount each year, then the world would exceed 2 degrees at some point
between 2040 and 2070. But if we keep increasing our emission levels as we're currently doing,
notwithstanding the weird 2020 lockdown aberration,
then we'll hit that catastrophic milestone as early as the 2030s, and almost certainly no later
than the 2050s. Most of the heavy lifting on emission reductions in the coming decades will
absolutely need to be done by our governments, by incentives like subsidies for green enterprises
and penalties like a carbon tax between a hundred and two hundred dollars per ton.
Forward-looking businesses know this is coming, and the best of them are already fundamentally
reorganizing the way they operate to ensure they don't fall behind in what would be a very
different looking marketplace. What can you do as an individual? Well here's a few suggestions,
some of which we'll delve into in more detail in future videos. Now you might think that adapting
your lifestyle along these lines will just be a drop in the ocean, so why bother right?
But to quote a well-worn cliche - each individual action might look like a drop in the ocean,
but oceans are made up of drops. So if we all get involved using our collective consumer power as
leverage, then things will start to change very quickly indeed. So there we are then folks - a
little bit of extra food for thought! Thanks very much for listening, and I'll see you on Sunday