Faster pace of climate change is 'scary', former chief scientist says

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49689018

By Roger Harrabin BBC environment analyst
16 September 2019

Prof Sir David King says he's been scared by the number of extreme events, and he called for the UK to advance its climate targets by 10 years.

But the UN's weather chief said using words like “scared” could make young people depressed and anxious.

Campaigners argue that people won't act unless they feel fearful.

Speaking to the BBC, Prof King, a former chief scientific adviser to the government, said: “It’s appropriate to be scared. We predicted temperatures would rise, but we didn’t foresee these sorts of extreme events we’re getting so soon.”

He said the world had changed faster than generally predicted in the fifth assessment report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2014.

He referred especially to the loss of land ice and sea ice, and to the weather extremes in which he said warming probably played a role.

Several other scientists contacted by the BBC supported his emotive language.

The physicist Prof Jo Haigh from Imperial College London said: “David King is right to be scared – I’m scared too."

“We do the analysis, we think what’s going to happen, then publish in a very scientific way.

"Then we have a human response to that… and it is scary.”

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Dr Taalas agrees polar ice is melting faster than expected, but he’s concerned that public fear could lead to paralysis – and also to mental health problems amongst the young.

“We are fully behind climate science and fully behind the (upcoming) New York climate summit", he said.

“But I want to stick to the facts, which are quite convincing and dramatic enough. We should avoid interpreting them too much.

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Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, told us he’d been anticipating changes like these for four decades, although he hadn't been certain when they would arrive.

“I have a sense of the numbing inevitability of it all,” he said.

Few of the scientists we contacted had faith that governments would do what was needed to rescue the climate in time.

They’re alarmed that global warming of just over 1C so far has already created a new normal in which historic temperature records will inevitably be broken more often. This is the predictable side of climate change.

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Prof King said the world could not wait for scientific certainty on events like Hurricane Dorian. “Scientists like to be certain,” he said.

“But these events are all about probabilities. What is the likelihood that (Dorian) is a climate change event? I’m going to say ‘very high’.

“I can’t say that with 100% certainty, but what I can say is that the energy from the hurricane comes from the warm ocean and if that ocean gets warmer we must expect more energy in hurricanes.”

He continued: “If you got in a plane with a one in 100 chance of crashing you would be appropriately scared.

“But we are experimenting with the climate in a way that throws up probabilities of very severe consequences of much more than that.”

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