WHAT’S THE STORY?

WITH North Carolina and South Carolina assessing the grim damage brought about by Hurricane Florence, many people are once again giving thought to the lasting impact of climate change.

"Hurricanes are natural, but climate change is supercharging them!" Kevin Trenberth, a Distinguished Senior Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, told Salon this week, before Florence struck.

"We have the options of stopping or slowing climate change from humans, and/or adapting to and planning for the consequences, but we are not doing enough of either," he added.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said this week that extreme heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods, all of which have been witnessed this year, are among the accelerating impacts of climate change. He warned: "If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us."

He lamented the absence of “leadership, a sense of urgency and a true commitment to a decisive multilateral response”, even after the 2015 Paris Agreement, which sought to respond to climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

CLIMATE-change doubters dismiss climate science and insist that global temperatures have not risen in the last decade. President Trump repeatedly derides climate change and asserts that global warming is a hoax.

But there is a growing awareness that climate change represents an existential threat to the future of the planet. In his newly-published memoirs, former US Secretary of State John Kerry says that among the challenges posed by climate change will be climate refugees fleeing drought, food shortages caused by crop failure, fires, water shortages and a rise in sea levels.

FRAMING A KEY ISSUE

Doug Allan, the prominent Scots-born wildlife and documentary cameraman, and author of the book Freeze Frame, knows more about the issue than most, partly from his frequent journeys over the last 40 years to the frozen polar worlds of the Arctic and the Antarctic.

His work on Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Life, Human Planet and Frozen Planet has taken him all over the world and has won him numerous awards. On October 6, he begins a tour of Scottish venues, in which he will discuss his career and some of his most challenging assignments. Climate change, however, is an issue uppermost in his mind.

“Certainly the climate has changed in the past but the big changes have been caused by naturally occurring catastrophic events, such as massive 'super' volcanoes erupting, or by natural long-term sun activity cycles,” he says. “But the climate has never changed as fast as we humans are changing it now.

“I’ll lay odds that when we look back at 2018, a year when we’ve had heatwaves across almost the entire northern hemisphere, extreme, record-breaking typhoons in Japan, heaviest-ever monsoon rainfall in India, and a worsening drought in Australia, we will see this as a tipping-point in terms of people’s awareness.

“I think people are coming round to the realisation that climate change is happening to a deadly, and even more extensive, degree.

“There were wildfires around the Mediterranean that took out an entire village in Greece and killed around 90 people. Monsoons have killed thousands of people in India and Bangladesh. These are severe impacts, no matter how you look at them, in financial terms and human terms.”

Allan added: “We’ve been watching the ice up in the Arctic for a lot of years now. Ice is going to disappear in the summer over a lot of the Arctic Ocean, but scientists were hoping that the oldest sea ice there, north of Greenland, would remain pretty thick, but this year it began to disintegrate – something that has never happened to it before. And this is a place where normally the ice lasts all year round.

“Plans were under way to declare that area of sea ice an international wildlife sanctuary, but it seems that you can’t depend upon anything these days.

“As the seas warm – and they are warming right now – then the seawater itself expands. It just increases in volume. Much of the sea-level rise we are seeing is because the oceans are getting warmer.

“But as the climate warms in the Arctic, we’re now having an increasing melt of areas like the Greenland ice cap. The ice there is sitting on land: it’s melting and falling into the sea. That is also increasing the volume of the sea.

“If significant amounts of ice come off Greenland, then we could be looking at sea-level rises of several metres rather than several millimetres per decade that we’re seeing at the moment.”

Allan notes the global aim to keep temperature change to below 2C, “but there is increasing fear among scientists that we will pass some tipping-point which will make 2C impossible to achieve and that we will in fact sail past it and into very scary conditions".

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

ALLAN is encouraged by the much-increased awareness of plastics thanks to the Blue Planet II series. But for climate change he believes that much more could be done. For example, he says, how about promoting electric cars? Taxi firms could be given tax-breaks to encourage them to turn their fleet electric.

“It’s a tough one to put out there, but you have to offer people solutions. You have to urge them to vote for, in some cases, new economic targets, green targets, new ways of doing things, which are going to cost more money in the short term.

“We’ve been hard-pressed for money to live on for these last 10 years, so to say to people, ‘we’re going to keep you in a state of austerity in order to tackle climate-change’ … that’s a tough one for people to take.

“Personally, I think you have to balance some optimism with some realism. On my tour I don’t want to give the audience sustained doom and gloom. But by talking about where I’ve filmed in the past, telling them stories from behind the scenes, then moving on to the climate-change issue in the right way, I hope people will respond. If you offer some solutions, they’ll be encouraged to make changes in their lives, to think carefully about green issues at the next election, or consider what bank they use in terms of how their money is invested.

“We need a new way of doing things. It’s clear that our lifestyle model over the last century is not going to be sustainable over the next one. It’s up to the so-called developed nations to dig deep into their souls and lead the way.”

*http://dougallan.com/