Speaker 1: Oh, bright lights. Let's take our seats so we can get on to the business of listening to Dr. Sir Robert Watson. Congratulations on your recent knighthood. I'd like to just talk a little bit about introduce Bob. He received a PhD in chemistry from Queen Mary College in London in 1973 and has worked on atmospheric science issues including ozone depletion, global warming, since the 1980s. He's received several awards for his contributions to science, including the NAS award for scientific reviewing from the National Academies. In '92 the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, and in '93 the Insignia of Honorary Companion to St. Michael and St. George from the British government in 2003.
Dr. Watson has worked for NASA. He was a chief scientist for the Mission to Planet Earth, which I just found out coincidentally meant that he helped fund my PhD program and my post-doc, so he's had a direct influence on my personal career. He also worked as the associate director in the White House Office of Environment. He's been with the World Bank and the British government for several years. He was also the chair of IPCC from '97 to 2002, and on the board co-chair for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment from 2000 to 2005.
Again, Watson was knighted just earlier this year for honors to the government of service. He's currently involved in many projects. He's not really tied down to any one affiliation. He's looking at biodiversity and ecosystem services in the UK. He's also working on a biodiversity issues for the IPCC and he's doing some projects in Australia. So please welcome Dr. Watson to the stage to talk about climate change. Let's have a reality check.
Dr. Watson: Thank you. After that introduction the talk will be a total anticlimax, I can assure you. So what I'd like to talk about today basically is climate change. I want to run through it. I do have 79 slides so you can judge that it's going to be at a fast pace. I do want to talk about what are the current observations, what are the current projected changes in the physical system. I want to talk what are the implications of climate change for issues that the average human being cares about: food, water, energy, security, issues of conflict and migration. The average person isn't particularly interested will it be a few degrees warmer. What they really care about is things that affect their everyday life, especially in developing countries.
I then want to talk about predominantly mitigation rather than adaptation, and then basically is the political goal of a two degree world feasible? My answer is no. It is neither politically feasible, even though it's technologically possible. I want to talk about why are we not going to achieve a two degree target and what are some of the implications. And at the very end I want to just give it almost a primer on a program that's being developed now called Future Earth as a program that I think all of you in the audience needs to get involved with.
The first thing to note is that climate change obviously can't be viewed in isolation of other big environmental issues. Climate change affects stratospheric ozone depletion. It affects biodiversity. It affects air quality. In turn, changes in air quality, changes in biodiversity, changes in forest, changes in land albedo all effect the climate change. We need to understand very much, and most of you are involved in this, what are the interrelationships, the interlinkages, between climate change and these other environmental issues. But equally important is we have to understand these interlinkages to make good policy, both at the national and at the international level. The problem is in most national governments these issues are separated in different departments. It's true in the UK. It's true in the US. And internationally, they're also separated. We have international conventions on climate change, international convention on biodiversity, one on land degradation, stratospheric ozone depletion. So we need to bring these issues together, not only scientifically through multidisciplinary research and transdisciplinary research, we've got to bring them together politically much better than we are today.
Now the key issue is these issues are not simply environmental issues. They are development issues. They are security issues. Losing biodiversity, changing the Earth's climate, will affect food, water, energy security. It will affect biodiversity, affects the economy. It clearly affects poverty alleviation, human health, and security all the way from the personal to the regional level. It's an intra- and inter-generational equity issue. What we do today in a developing country affects people in developing countries and vice versa. What we do today will affect our children and our grandchildren. Major, major equity issues.
It's totally clear we're changing the composition of the atmosphere. We're humans. There's also no doubt that most of the observed changes that we're seeing, both in composition and in the Earth's climate, are due to human activities. We're seeing changes in greenhouse gases and in the aerosols. We're seeing changes in temperature, precipitation, sea level, extent of mountain glacier, Arctic ice, Greenland, and the ice cap, and I'll show some information, and extreme weathering. The system is changing and the evidence is strong it's due to we humans.
This simply shows you carbon dioxide emissions and carbon intensity. Carbon dioxide emissions in blue, carbon intensity in red. As you can see, the carbon intensity and the carbon dioxide emissions continue to go up. What's particularly concerning is the very last piece. We had a blip in 2010 when the carbon emissions actually went down just a little bit, but in 2011 they've gone right back up to where they were before. This is the first time that's ever happened. If you look at what happened after the oil crisis, there was a blip. Then it started to increase parallel to the original line. We then saw other reasons where there was a blip and then it went parallel.
In reality, the recent economic downturn in industrialized countries has not affected the rapid increase in carbon dioxide emissions. This shows that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going up. It's a typical record like the Mauna Loa record. So since we actually said we needed to get to grips with carbon dioxide emissions, and 20 years ago when the UNFCC had its first convention ratified, we've literally continued unchanged, and if anything at a higher rate than before. Politicians have not listened to the scientific message.
This shows you just effectively the temperature record and effectively 2011 was the warmest year on record during a La Nina. Many people are climate deniers or climate skeptics. They're saying, "Look, climate hasn't really changed in the last 10 years. You guys have got it completely wrong." But if you actually just aggregate what's happening through an El Nino years, La Nina years, it is clear we're still seeing an increasing temperature, and as you can see from this graph alone, literally all of the hot years have occurred in the last 10 to 20 years.
This is an old IPCC figure. The dark line is actually the observation, whether it's a global observation in the bottom three slides, globally integrated, global land, global ocean. Then you see the regional areas around the world. That's the observation. The blue line are climate models where we only use natural variability to stimulate change in climate, volcanic activity, solar activity. As you can see, the blue line does not simulate the black line either at the global level or at the regional level. If you then bring in not only natural phenomena, but human activities, greenhouse gases, aerosol precursors, changes is stratospheric ozone, changes in land albedo, you get the orange line or the orange pink line, and as you can see both at a global and regional level there's very good correspondence. It's this type of information and others that led the IPCC to conclude in their fourth assessment report that most of the observed warming since 1950 is most likely due to human activity.
This shows you the projections effectively globally averaged, and as you can see it doesn't matter which of those various scenarios which are viewed to be non-intervention scenarios, non-policy scenarios. It's showing effectively that, in addition to the 0.8 degrees Celsius that we've seen already change, we would expect another 1.4 to 6.4 degrees with large uncertainty bars. So relative to preindustrial, this would suggest without policy action, one would see a world that's warmer by between two and seven degrees Celsius by 2100.
However, globally it's important, and it is of course a key issue for sea level rise. But what one really needs to understand where will it change? What are the latitudes, what season, and effective land versus ocean. If you look at the 2020s, it doesn't matter if you got the low emission scenario, which is the one at the top B1, or the high emission scenario, the one at the bottom A2, the maps look almost identical. In each case what you see is land warms more than the ocean and the high latitudes warm more than the tropics. Why are they the same? Fundamentally, the climate in the 2020s and even the 2030s has already been preordained by the emissions we've put into the atmosphere to date. We might be able to change them a little bit. If we get together, we can reduce the short lived gases, black carbon, methane tropospheric ozone. But fundamentally, the climate of the 2020s and much of the 2030s is already preordained which shows not only have we changed climate to date, future change is absolutely inevitable whatever we do with greenhouse gas emissions, therefore we must adapt.
If you look, however, at the decade of the 2090s, as you go from the low emissions scenario to the high emission scenario, there's no question. There's far less change in the B1 scenario than the A2 scenario. This shows that we must try and mitigate as soon as possible in order to limit human induced climate change. You can see if we go to the A2 scenario, the one at the bottom, you'll see in many of the land masses changing by five to ten degrees Celsius. This clearly would have profound negative effects on agriculture, water, biodiversity, human health, and human settlements.
Precipitation, harder to project than temperature. Much more variation from one climate model to another. But the general picture is that the high latitudes and parts of the equator will become wetter and the subtropics will become dryer. The blue areas are where we would project it would become wetter. The brown areas are where it would become dryer. As I say, there's a lot of variation from one climate model to another, but this is a general sense and this is actually an ensemble of different climate projections.
Sea level rise, a crucial issue for many, many millions of people that live in deltaic areas, live in small, low lying, small island states. Issue is thermal expansion of the ocean, fairly well understood. The melting of glaciers and ice sheets. The glaciers well understood, some of the ice sheets not so well understood. Ocean currents and of course the issue of wind and gravity.
This shows you as sort of the black line and the gray shaded areas what was projected by IPCC in 2001, and you see on the top the satellite altimeter data between 1990 and 2010. It's clear the projections of IPCC underestimated what has actually now been observed. The next slide is an interesting one. It shows the Pacific, and what is shows is the area around Australia has a, these are the observations, much higher sea level rise than just off of South America and North America. In other words, it's not a globally average sea level rise. It really does depend where you are on tidal effects, gravity effects. In the West Pacific where many of the small island states are located, like Tuvalu, et cetera, one's seeing a much higher rate of sea level rise than say just off of at South America.
So the question is, okay, what are the projections for the future? This was the fourth assessment report, which was highly criticized by many people that they only really focused on thermal expansion of the ocean, didn't adequately look at Greenland ice sheet or Antarctica, and effectively the question is, did they underestimate the projection and, if so, how much? Of course that is a major issue for the fifth assessment report, of which the drafts are now currently out for peer review.
Well, it's quite likely that we are now seeing an acceleration of loss of ice in Greenland that would contribute to sea level rise. Some parts of Antarctica are melting, others are not. Clearly most people believe now that are experts in this field, which I am not, that we probably will see a higher projection in the fifth assessment report than the fourth assessment report. So the question is, what's the current best guess? It might be that by 2100 a central value of somewhere around one meter is a more likely one. This shows you some of the effectively the recently publications to the left. You see the fourth assessment report of IPCC. As you can see, it's the lowest of all of the projections. Then you see five different papers that are all in the peer reviewed literature, and the average is somewhere around just over a meter, very significant for many low lying areas.
One of the crucial things we've got to note is, of course, fundamentally once you get sea level to respond to a changing temperature, it's got a huge inertia and it doesn't slow down very quickly. This very simply shows where one had an artificial increase in greenhouse gas concentrations for the first 70 years to four times preindustrial level. The red line shows temperature. It fairly rapidly starts to stabilize. It does go up for many hundreds of years, but it goes up slowly.
But the green line is sea level, and as you can see, it just monotonically increases as a thermal expansion only, monotonically increases for thousands of years. In other words, once you set it in motion, you can't turn it around very quickly. It's this inertia of the climate system that is so totally different from air quality that when you get a bad air quality in a city and you understand it and you get rid of the precursors of bad air quality, it turns around in days or weeks because of the short lived nature of the pollutant. Here in climate change, which I don't think the politicians have really got to grips with, is once we've changed the Earth's climate, it's not an easy thing to turn around.
This just shows you another couple of hypothetical calculations, increases in carbon dioxide, and then you've got the blue, light blue, turquoise, red, blue and green lines. Just artificially, an increase in carbon dioxide at 1% per year and then a ramp down at 1% per year. Question is, how did sea level respond after the ramp up and the ramp down? If you look at it, that's what you see. It doesn't respond. The peak comes hundreds of years later and it only very, very slowly responds to this rapid decrease in carbon dioxide, hypothetical of course, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. The thermal inertia is a crucial issue that I'm just not sure governments have to go grips with, other than leaders of small island states.
This is a recent paper by Lee that shows that accelerated loss of ice in the Amundsen Sea sector of Antarctica, clearly potentially contributing to sea level rise. This shows you what's happened this year in Greenland between July the 8th, July the 12th. Fundamentally there was more melting in Greenland this year than ever before. More than 90% of the Greenland ice sheet was subject to melting by mid-July. This is another way of looking at the melting season, and quite clearly the melting in Greenland this year was completely abnormal. It's the highest ever seen. So that's an issue around Greenland which again could contribute to sea level rise.
The Arctic sea ice does not, of course, when it melts contribute to sea level rise, but this shows you a trend in Arctic sea ice from 1979 to the present day. As you can see, a significant decrease in Arctic sea ice. It's not simply the extent, the area, but it's also the volume. The thickness of sea is changing considerably, and this actually shows you through to September the 16th, 2012, is the very, very bottom line and clearly this year we saw the greatest loss of Arctic sea ice in extent than we've ever seen before. It beat the previous record, which was 2007. This is leading many people to speculate how quickly will we see an ice free Arctic in summer, not in winter, in Arctic. Will it occur by 2025? Will it occur by 2025, 2035, 2040? Different speculation, but it's quite clear that the extent and the volume of sea ice is changing quite rapidly.
Clearly there seems to be an indication of the strength of tropical storms. Not necessarily the frequency of tropical storms, but their intensity as we get higher sea surface temperatures. Indeed this is what theory would suggest, and so what we're seeing is a prediction of a doubling in the frequency of category four and five Atlantic storms over the next century. Well, I mean [inaudible 00:18:14]…The hurricane Sandy was only a tropical storm by the time it hit New York, so it wasn't even a genuine hurricane. I once saw the devastation that was caused, especially around New York and much of the East Coast of the USA, even with a strong tropical storm. So a significant increase in the frequen-…Not in the frequency. This one does say frequency, but the intensity is a real issue basically.
So, heat waves. Well, there was one in Chicago in the early 1990s and several hundred people died. There was one in Europe in 2003. The estimate was somewhere between 20 and 50,000 people died of heat stress. There was also a significant heat wave in 2010. You can't blame any one of these heat waves necessarily on human induced climate change, but what you can say is it's these types of extreme events we'll expect to become more frequent in the future. So in many respects, it's not the change in mean climate that may be the most important. It's the change in extremes, whether it's in temperature, precipitation.
So why do we care? Clearly the physical climate system is changing. Well, biodiversity could be significantly adversely affected and I've got a couple of slides on that. Spent most of my last five years working on agriculture and biodiversity, not working on climate change. Clear issue of a decrease in agricultural productivity, which we're already seeing the first signs in the tropics and subtropics, the very area where people go to bed hungry every night. A change in the water quantity and water quality, especially in the arid and semi-arid areas, areas throughout Sub-Saharan Africa where they struggle to have an adequate amount of water even today, let alone clean water.
Increase incidence of vector-borne diseases, waterborne diseases, heat stress mortality, et cetera. A potentially crucial issue, especially in developing countries with very, very poor healthcare systems. The change in vector-borne diseases, a change in waterborne diseases, so say dengue, malaria, for vector-borne, cholera for waterborne, potentially quite serious. And of course the impact of flooding due to coastal erosion, coastal sea level rise, and riverine flooding.
In biodiversity loss, just a slight movement for a second. Five major reasons of indirect drivers: economic growth, demographic change, sociopolitical change is cultural, religious, science and technology. Exactly the same five for climate change. These are the indirect drivers of environmental change, the top five. They play out differently of course in climate change than they do in biodiversity. In climate change it is largely the demand for energy. Also though, however, the demand for food leading to deforestation, so it's not simply an energy issue. It's clearly an agricultural issue, a forestry issue. The direct drivers of loss of biodiversity: habitat change, climate change, invasive species, overexploitation, and pollution. Climate change is a serious issue. It has not been the major driver in the last 50 years, but in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment I co-chaired and also in the National Ecosystem Assessment in UK which I recently co-chaired, climate change may well become the dominant driver of loss of biodiversity and changes of ecosystem services in the next 50 to 100 years.
Well, why do we care? Well we all care about species, charismatic species, but it's fundamental to sustainable development. It's the provisioning services of food, fiber, energy, clean water. It's the cultural services of meaningful places, the social value, the ethical value, the religious value. It's the regulating services of climate, pollination, air quality, protection against storm surges. Then, of course, there's the underlying services, the supporting services, soil formation, prime reproduction. If we lose biodiversity and we change ecosystem services, it's fundamental to life on Earth and climate change is starting to become one of the major drivers. It's quite clear that climate change is already affecting biodiversity. It's clear that if we deal with biodiversity it can help us deal with climate change, both in adaptation and mitigation, and if we deal with that climate change, it can help protect biodiversity.
We've already seen changes in reproduction and migration events of butterflies, of birds. The growing season, especially in Europe, is now about a month longer than it used to be. We've seen changes in the frequency of pest and disease outbreaks. And we've seen when you have coral bleaching, which has often been observed before of course, especially during El Nino events, they've become longer with more mortality than we've seen before. Climate change can effect biodiversity directly through changes in temperature, changes in precipitation, and changes in sea level, but also indirectly through disturbances, through pests, and through wildfires. We also have to recognize not all biodiversity is equally threatened. The risk of extinction is really profound, especially if there's species with low population numbers, a restricted or patchy habitat that's governed by microclimates, and effectively, if you're in the top of a mountain or towards the polar region, you've got nowhere to migrate to. Most ecosystems are going to be threatened by climate change. Potentially the worse affected are coral reefs, mangroves, cloud forests, and those at high altitude and high latitude.
So the changes are unavoidable. When people say we've got to stop the loss of biodiversity by 2010, which is what they did say, and now by 2020, it's absolutely impossible. Not only are all of the drivers of biodiversity changing, but climate change is going to continue to change for the next 50 to 100 years, and therefore it will be a very significant threat. As we move above two degrees Celsius, the adverse effects become more pronounced and there's a paper in the literature that may actually be wrong. It suggests for every one degree Celsius rise in temperature, eventually 10% of species will become extinct. Therefore, for a five degree Celsius rise, which I believe we are on the course for, it could be a loss of 50%. Even if it's wrong by a factor of two, it's still profound. If it's wrong by a factor four, it's still profound. So even if that calculation is wrong by a significant amount, it's still a very, very serious issue.
This simply shows you all the way from the long and distance past the natural evolution of species extinction, and that's on the left hand side, moving effectively to the recent past, the last 100 years. As you can see, we're now currently losing species at somewhere between a hundred and 500 times the rate we were, and the projection from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is over the next half century to one century, it will increase by another factor of 10 to another factor of a hundred. In other words, we have a serious problem on our hands.
But it's not only a change in climate. It's a change in ocean acidification. CO2, of course, is one of the major drivers, the major driver, for human induced climate change. But it also, as we've now recognized in the last four, five, ten years, we're changing ocean acidification. The pH is changing significantly with a significant potential threat, especially to shellfish, coral systems, but potentially fisheries as whole. I would argue that the uncertainties are higher associated with ocean acidification than they are with climate change, but this is a very serious issue.
A recent paper has suggested that effectively if you go much above where we are today, there will be long term effects on reefs. If you get to 450, which I'm sure we're going to pass quite easily fairly soon, reefs will stop growing. And if we get to 550, this calculation suggests, and its evidence suggests coral reefs will start dissolving. So clearly, we need to look at this CO2 issue, not only because of human induced climate change, but potentially a serious issue for ocean acidification. So when we call for a two degree world, which would need to stop CO2 rising much above 400, 450, very consistent, if you want to protect coral reefs, that's about the same level you would also have to try and limit CO2 at.
Agriculture, and I'm not going to speak in a…This is a projection from IFPRI, the International Food Policy Research Institute of the Consultative Group of International Research. It's housed in Washington, DC. They looked at irrigated rice. They used an NCAR model for this, and it's very, very high resolution. They looked at what areas would you lose rice production and what areas would you gain. Overall they estimated the global production would decrease by 27% relative to 1990 by 2050. For rain fed rice, a 13% decrease; for irrigated wheat, a 42% decrease; for rain fed wheat, a 28% decrease at the very, very time that we need more food production.
The next slide shows you, the blue or turquoise is the production today. The red, and this is food price, the food price is orange. Let me say that again. Turquoise is today, red is 2050 with no climate change, and yellow is 2050 with climate change. What you can see is human induced climate change is projected to add significantly to the cost of wheat, rice, maize, soybeans, and other grains. This is a major issue for feeding the world. We are not going to have the production we need without some significant change in the way we produce our food. Now one of the big issues on food production is we waste a lot of food. In developing countries, 30 to 40% is wasted before it gets to harvest, but in the USA and Europe, we waste about 35 to 40% once it gets to our supermarket. So clearly food waste is a big issue, but production is also going to be a fairly big issues as well in the future.
Issue of climate change. There's no question that there's the potential, and I want to be careful here, the potential of displacing tens of millions of people, especially in small island states, low lying deltaic areas in Bangladesh, in Egypt, in China, et cetera. There's potentially going to be less food, less clean in water, in areas that are already short of food, short of clean water, especially Sub-Saharan Africa. Poor people depend very much on natural resources, on coral reefs, on mangroves, on forests. Many of these will be adversely affected by climate change.
There will be, as I've already said, potentially an increase in disease, especially in those countries that don't have good healthcare facilities. And there could well be an increase in severe weather events. Therefore, climate change coupled, and I want to stress, coupled with other stresses, population increase, poor governance in many parts of the world, could lead potentially to conflict and migration, but it will depend very specifically on the social, economic, and political circumstances. It's hard to generalize, but this is an issue, in my opinion, we've really got to look at much more carefully.
So where are we on mitigation? Well, this comes from the Stern review, but it's a variant of what came out in the IPCC. Simply says as you get a larger and larger increase in temperature, it will have more and more adverse effects on food, water, ecosystems, extreme weather events, and the potential of risk of abrupt and major irreversible changes. This is why the governments of the world in Copenhagen, Cancun, and Durban, reiterated that we should set a goal of limiting human induced climate change to two degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial. What would that take?
Well, this comes from the Stern report, but there's loads of papers out there has a very similar result. Well, you got a 50/50 shot of a two degree world if we can stabilize at 400 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. Where are we today? Well CO2 alone is over 390. I add on methane, nitrous oxide and other gasses, I end up with a number in the high 400s. I then allow for the fact that we've got some offsets due to aerosols, and so the question is, where are we today?
We're probably already over 400 parts per million of CO2. If we get to 550, got a 50/50 shot of a three degree world. If we get to 650, we got a 50/50 shot of a four degree world. I wrote a paper with other Blue Planet laureates that included some really important people like Paul Ehrlich, Hal Mooney, Nick Stern, Susan Solomon, much more prestigious than me, and our view was we've got a 50/50 shot at best of a three degree world and we think it's not at all unlikely that we'll reach a five degree world. It cannot be ruled out. That would be severe, severe [inaudible 00:31:56].
This is the radiative flux. This comes from the fourth assessment report. It simply shows that CO2 is the major single gasses of greenhouse gas. Then you see methane nitrous oxide, halocarbons. You see ozone both tropospheric, stratospheric is slight offset. Then you see changes in land use and you see changes in the direct and indirect effects of aerosols. The net effect, according to IPCC in 2007, was effectively the negative effects of the aerosols offset the non-greenhouse gases. So the net effect was that the overall force it was very comparable to CO2 alone, which as I say is in the high 390s at the moment. The latest results were out for peer review suggests that the aerosol offset is now much less than that and the net radiative forcing is significantly greater than CO2 alone, so rather in the forcing of 1.7 or 1.75 watts per square meter, the forcing to date could be closer to 2.4 which is very, very significant and that, I think, is going to have to be explained in the next IPCC report, the fifth report, which is out for peer review.
This actually says, okay, if you wanted to meet a two degree world, this is a UNEP report, what would it take? The very top dash line, I hate the term, is business as usual. Where would be in 2020 if we don't get to grips with our policies and it suggests we'd be around 56 gigatons per year. Now governments all around the world have made commitments of we will reduce our greenhouse gases by 2020. Personally I see very little evidence of it, to be quite honest. So the next four lines show you well what if we do it, and that's sort of that comes out about 50, really rigorous attention and compliance with the commitments, which are not legally binding.
So we drop from something like 58…I should have said 58, yeah. 58 down to 50. But most people don't believe they'll all be committed, so you end up with case one rather than case four. Fundamentally, we're not on a pathway to a two degree world which needs us to be way down in the mid-40s. Even the most stringent and good compliance with the obligations still leaves us four, five gigatons short and we're probably going to be closer to five, six, seven, eight gigatons short. We are not on a pathway to a two degree world.
This shows you at one, I had about six slides on this. I got rid of all but one. This is one calculation said if you want a two degree world the developed world, the blue line, should have peaked by 2010. That clearly hasn't happened. It shows the green line, that developing countries would have had to have peaked by 2020. Highly unlikely to happen, and so clearly the global would have had to have peaked by about 2014 with a very rapid decrease. There is no evidence that that's going to occur. This just shows you another one which says if you peaked in 2010 then you can have a slow decrease in the emissions. 2015, a bit higher. If you wait to 2025, the very last peak, you have to come down in such a way that you need negative emissions by 2040. I do not believe we're going to have negative emissions of carbon dioxide by 2040 whatever the technologists tell me.
So we've got a problem. So where is the problem? Well you've already seen this. I started with this slide. CO2 emissions are going up at an incredible rate. They went up at 5.9% in 2010 relative to 2009, it was a one year blip. Up ‘til then it had been going at 3.2% in the first half of this century and a paper came out only two days ago saying that 2011 was about, I think it was 2.9% above 2010. So CO2 is going up rapidly even at a time of reasonable economic downturn, not quite a recession, in most industrialized countries.
This shows you effectively the contribution from fossil fuel, which is the top line, versus land use change, [inaudible 00:36:12] deforestation, although this includes regrowth. So the dominant factor is indeed fossil fuel, but we must not forget we need to deal with agriculture. We need to deal with methane from ruminants and from rice production. We need to deal with nitrous oxide from fertilizers. We've also go to deal with deforestation, which is largely an issue in developing countries, but a very, very sensitive issue in most developing countries. It's this issue of deforestation that brings together the biodiversity agenda and the climate agenda.
This just shows you where the major emissions are coming from so you can see. Coal is still the dominant single source, oil just behind, and then gas and then cement. Of course with this whole issue of shale gas and fracking, it is quite likely that if shale gas takes off in the way it is already doing in the USA, potentially could in some other parts of the world, there could be a swap of coal to natural gas, assuming we can do the fracking and the shale gas in an environmentally sound way. So we might start to see a change in that picture. That would be good, insofar as obviously gas has roughly half the emissions of CO2 per unit of energy, but it is not the solution. It may buy us a little bit of time, and I'll come back to that in a couple of minutes.
This shows effectively the regions of the world. As you can see since 2000 the USA has been roughly constant. Europe has been roughly constant, maybe a slight downturn. India's been going up, but you can see what's happened to China. Literally in 1990, China was way behind both Europe and USA. Now China is the single biggest emitter, but I'll show you per capita in a second. But let me take the United Kingdom. Is the UK doing well? Are we contributing to the success? Now I say this in front of UK ministers and they never fired me. I worked there until 10 weeks ago. In the UK was committed to a 12% reduction under the Kyoto Protocol by 2012. We're actually 22% below 1990 levels. Boy are we really great. Much of it came from reductions in methane and nitrous oxide and only the reductions in CO2 were 7%, but hey, this is good.
No, it's not good. Why? If I take embedded carbon, let's say I don't only look at my domestic emissions, I look at embedded carbon, the goods I import, and I get a debit for imported carbon. I get a benefit if I export carbon. The UK is plus 18%, one, eight. Not minus 22, plus 18. Why? We're buying all of our goods and services from China. The US has probably got partially the same problem, so have many other European countries. Even though Europe looks good on that, we have to look at embedded carbon. Have we changed the way we live our lives or not? I would argue, at least in the UK, the answer is largely no.
This shows the per capita. It shows the US pretty stable since actually 1980, in fact a slight dip in the last couple of years, but it's still very high compared to Europe. More than a factor of two higher than Europe. China has just about reached Europe now, but still well below the USA. India's still well below everybody. This is why the negotiations that are going on in Doha at this moment are so complicated. It's an equity issue. Who has actually used up the carrying capacity of the atmosphere? Largely the US and other industrialized countries such as Europe, Russia, et cetera. What are the per capita emissions? It's both a historical issue and a current issue of per capita. This is why the negotiations are just very, very difficult.
This just shows us, and you can't read it at all. The black dots to the left are the observed historical emissions. On the right, that ensemble of lines are IPCC scenarios policy, which we've got in the fifth assessment report, and non-policy. So if I simplify it, there's a series of policy scenarios that look at changes in radiative forcing or what the tot-, sorry, what the total radiative forcing was in that 2100, so 8.5 down to 2.6. As you can see by the black line, the observed, we're on the top line, which is what the previous one showed as well. At this moment in time, I am on the line that's more likely to lead to 8.5 rather than 6, rather than 4.5 or 2.6.
So what are the temperature implications? Well the temperature implications, if you look at the top yellow line, the 8.5, by 2100 it's a range of somewhere between about three and six. If we were fortunate and got on the line below, it's still better but it's still well above two degrees Celsius. The only way we'll get onto a two degree Celsius line fundamentally is really to almost decarbonize immediately, and I see no political signs we're doing this. So it's a nice interesting range of policy scenarios, but when you look at the observations, you look at the political debate, it does not fill you with optimism. And it's just simply compared the policy, non-policy.
So, okay, what do we need to do? Well we need technology transformation. We need an evolution. We need to really get to grips with carbon capture and storage, that is to say we still produce electricity from burning fossil fuels, but we capture the carbon dioxide before it's emitted to the atmosphere and we subduct it in depleted oil wells, gas wells, or in saline aquifers. We can have future generation biofuels, not the current ones. First generation put competition with food production and some other issues. It's not always environmentally safe, it's not socially safe and it's certainly not economically safe, with the exception of Brazil which uses sugarcane for bioethanol. That looks fairly good, but most others really don't look good at all, especially maize in the USA. We need to put a price on carbon, in other words make carbon expensive. Try to get a move away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources, say renewable energy, and the next slide talks about that.
You could do it through emissions trading, but you really need a global agreement to make emissions trading work well, and we're not close to that at the moment. You can have a carbon tax. There's some strong points for carbon tax. It's easy to put on, but you've got to work out how much carbon tax would you have to have a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, carbon, and there's also some social issues of distributed effects. And, of course, you can have obviously some regulations on the price. But even if you get the technology right, even if you get the price right, we still need behavior change. We still need behavior change of individuals, citizens, business, and the public sector, and this is really hard to get. Behavior change is essential and again, there's a real lack of change. Again in the UK, only 50% of houses have adequate attic insulation, even with financial incentive programs and it pays back between one and two years. So somehow the public haven't got the issue that they themselves at the individual level can help to address this serious issue.
At the technological level? Yeah. Efficient production and use of energy. We need to go away from, move towards IGCC, integrated gasification combined cycle. We need to have more efficient vehicles, hybrids are a good start. Electric cars, but the electric mustn't be fossil fuel generated. Of course better use of mass transit. Fairly good in the United Kingdom and Europe, not particularly good in the United States. Good urban planning, better buildings, better industries. Fuel shift coal to gas. This is where shale gas and fracking is likely to take place. Renewable energy, wind power, solar power, bioenergy, hydropower. Tidal power could be important, wave power could be important. I don't have them on the slide, but they've got to be given serious consideration.
Carbon capture and storage, I think, is going to be critical to be honest. I personally believe nuclear power is critical and I'm a little concerned about what happened in Japan and the reaction against nuclear in Japan itself and in Germany. It was a very old power plant, it got nailed by a tsunami, and there's some lessons to be learned. We need net safe nuclear power and then, as I've always said, we need to deal with forests and agriculture. I find it very hard to believe we'll have an efficient low carbon system without either carbon capture and storage and/or nuclear or both. I'm not optimistic like Greenpeace that we can do all of this with renewable energy itself. I do believe we're going to need to look at all of these. End use efficiency is going to be crucial, better vehicles, better buildings, better industry. We've also got to produce our energy in a much more low carbon manner.
We can use our ecosystems to help to mitigate. Protect our forests, protect peat lands, more sustainable management of forests. Have better reforestation and add forestation, but we must use native ensembleages. We don't want monocultures of different plants which have other adverse effects on biodiversity among water resources. We can manage our wetlands better and of course better management of agriculture. We need to gain combined biodiversity with the climate change issue. We need to adapt, there's no question. We're already changing the climate. It's going to change. It's inevitable it'll change more. We need to look at it from a risk management perspective. We need to make sure we got the financing available for it. We need the education, communication. We got to do good science. The bottom line though, just like mitigation, is we need good governance, we need good governance and we need good governance.
But adaptation is not a solution. It's going to be required. But there are physical limits to how much we can adapt to. There are behavioral limits. There are technological limits and there are financial limits. I mean trying to protect effectively Bangladesh and the deltaic system there is well beyond any costs. Now in London, we're actually designing now a new barrier for the Thames that will allow for a 2.3 meter sea level. The Netherlands is planning for a two meter sea level. They can afford it. Bangladesh, small island states, they've really unfortunately got a monstrous problem on their hands.
That again we can use ecosystem to help adapt isn't a solution. Rather than building sea walls, let's protect our coastal wetlands, our mangroves, our coral reefs. That will help to protects those coastal communities from erosion, from sea level rise. Let's make sure that we really work with our wetlands, maintain our wetlands, maintain our flood plains. That would help with water quantity, flow, and the quality basically. The restoration of forests will actually make them much more resilient to climate change and therefore help on water flow, et cetera. So again, linking the biodiversity issue with the climate issue I think is a very high priority.
What do we need? Well we need a post-Kyoto framework. We need a long term goal. We need an action from all major emitters recognizing differentiated responsibility. The industrialized countries do need to do more in the short term, but countries such as India, China, Mexico will also have to do stuff. We need technology evolution. We need to adapt. It's not just an energy issue. As I've said, we got to look at our forests, agricultural system, and we need to bring in the whole issue of aviation and maritime.
There's some things we could potentially do in the short term by looking at the short term climate forces, things like black carbon, tropospheric ozone. If we could get to grips with those, and the black carbon's a major issue for human health, so is urban tropospheric ozone. If we can get to grips with these issues, you could have a slight effect in the next few decades. So there's a political movement afoot, a scientific and political movement, to try and actually get a better understanding of black carbon, tropospheric ozone, even methane, and see if we could get regulations on those in the short term.
Geoengineering, whether it's solar radiation management or carbon management, my argument on this is it's a second best. I would argue we should go for a low carbon economy. I'm concerned if we put too many eggs in the basket of geoengineering it'll take our mind and our financing off a low carbon economy, but we need to do the research. We need to do more theoretical modeling of whether or not you can change radiation balance in the troposphere, stratosphere, or even in outer space. That one I don't like, personally. Or can we change the carbon management whether it is through effectively up taking to the oceans through seeding, although the question is whether it would work. My argument on geoengineering is we've screwed up the planet by not understanding the planet. To be honest, it's a little bit unwise of us to think we can geoengineer it. However, I do believe it's a very active area for more research as a potential backup or, in the extreme, to complement the low carbon economy.
I want to spend the last two minutes by saying this is something you should all get involved in. It's an advert for a town hall meeting tomorrow. Future Earth, it's a major program that's just starting on global sustainability. It will integrate intellectually the big programs that many of you know about, The World Climate Change Research Program, IGBP, IHDP, International Human Dimension, Diversitas which is a biodiversity program, and The Earth System Science Programs. So the idea is to try and integrate these, recognizing it with every challenge we got is multidisciplinary. We need the social sciences to work with the natural sciences, the biologists to work with the climate specialists, the atmospheric dynamicists, et cetera. But it also has to be transdisciplinary, which I'll quickly mention.
The broad conceptual framework is nice and simple. What drives change, how does the global environment respond to human and natural drivers, so both human and natural, and what are the impacts on human well-being? So the three things link, very similar to the conceptual framework The Millennium Ecosystem, and the key in the middle is, how do we become sustainable? What are the transformation processes that are technological, economic, sociopolitical? So the whole idea is how do we transform society to become more sustainable? It should work at the local, national, regional, and global level.
The three research themes therefore are transformation, understanding a dynamic planet, and how do we develop. So it's bringing together environmental issues with development issues. So the dynamic planet is how does the Earth system work? How are we interacting with the system? Are there thresholds? Are there risks? The development issues, okay, what's the interface between our pathway for development and the key issues of food, water, security, human health, energy, and the whole issue of biodiversity. And the transformation of that simply said is, how do we understand transformation? What are the human values? What are our ideals? What are the technologies? What sort of economic system would we need? How do we govern the planet? How do we govern it from the local town all the way to a national level and the international level? All of this is to say that we are have…The last part, sorry, before the final advert.
This fundament has go to be co-designed. This must not just be designed by scientists. We've got to bring together the users, the governments, the private sector, the NGOs, civil society. What are the challenge? They'll vary from Sub-Saharan Africa to North America to Europe to Latin America. What do the users believe are crucial at the local scale to the global scale? So this shows you very simply the governance structure strongly driven by world class science, but also informed by the information needs and there will be a town hall meeting, 12:30 to 1:30 in Moscone West, 2005, moderated by the president elect of the AGU, Margaret Leinen. There's a series over there including myself. But coming back to the main talk, the conclusions.
We are not on a pathway to a two degree world, much more likely three to five. It's not just, climate change is not just an energy issue, but it's the way we manage our land. We've got a major challenge of producing the food we need for nine billion people by 2050 while simultaneously reducing emissions from agriculture. We absolutely need governance reform from the national to the global level. Vested interests in certain parts of the industry are controlling the debate. We've got to get this through governance invested interest. We've got to eliminate perverse subsidies in transportation, energy, and agriculture. They do little for the federal treasury and they adversely affect the environment.
We need to incentivize new policies to get them to penetrate the marketplace, some of the new renewable energy policies. We clearly need an Apollo-scale project on things such as carbon capture and storage. No single country should go it alone. We need Europe to work together with the US, Japan, China, and the private sector for the technologies we need for tomorrow. It's quite clear there are cost effective and equitable solutions to climate change, but we need moral leadership, political will. They both seem to be a little bit in short supply at the moment. And it will require substantial changes in policies, practice, and technologies, and they're not currently underway. Thank you.
If there are any questions I believe there's about 5 minute for questions.
Speaker 3: [inaudible 00:54:50] behind the microphone.
Dr. Watson: If there is a question [inaudible 00:54:55] could you line up behind the microphone. Okay, I see someone over there. The light's blinding me, but I think there's someone over there.
Speaker 4: So Bob, surely the most important thing is to bring the US government and public on board. Apart from getting you onto prime time television, do you have any suggestions how that might happen?
Dr. Watson: We've clearly got to get the US, but we need all of the major emitters. Without the US, China and India are not going to move, so it's a stalemate at the moment. There's also a stalemate around the financing issue. So absolutely we've got to have the US on board. I think we need to get big business that understands the climate issue and understands the opportunities of a low carbon economy. We need the religious leaders to take this as a moral and ethical issue. We need mayors of towns, governors of state. So I think it's an issue that we've got to get the public on board and they're not on board at the moment. But we also need the leaders from industry, from religious groups, from the NGOs, et cetera. We need everybody on board. So, yes, I agree, but it can't be just the US. American leadership is needed, but we've got to get India, China, Europe, et cetera all to get on board as well.
One more there, then we'll go there, then we'll go there.
Speaker 5: Well thank you for that very evangelical talk. It's great to hear that evangelism can come from across the Atlantic too. You referred to moving toward a three to five degree world. I presume you know that you're preaching to a choir here, but one thing that you could have pushed, and there is an elephant in the room, is that the equilibrium state of sea level rise with a three to five degree world is getting upwards of 25 meters. For a two degree world, it's about 6.6 meters. Now that equilibrium state takes some time to get to and we don't know how long it takes to get there, nor do we know how. But, you can comment on that.
Dr. Watson: No, it's a very good point. Obviously if one does lose the Greenland ice sheet, part of the West Antarctic ice sheet, I'm not the exact number you quoted, but clearly we're talking about many, many meters. I believe Greenland alone can give seven meters, West Antarctic ice sheet seven meters. I agree. I should have had a slide on that. I would hope that the latest IPCC Summary for Policymakers would bring out some of these issues. I've read the draft, I shouldn't comment on it. I find it long. It's good, but it needs a few really punchy things like you've just mentioned basically.
Why don't we go over to one in the middle and then we'll go to one at that side.
Stephen Mulkey: Thank you for a wonderful talk. I'm Stephen Mulkey, President of Unity College in Maine. We worry a lot about ecosystem sustainability and biological community integrity, and one of the things you mentioned was ecosystem adaptation. It strikes me that we've got a larger issue than you were perhaps able to cover in your message today, and that is our climate zones are moving northward faster than the regeneration time of the dominant species in those ecosystems. I was wondering if you could comment a little bit on that. I would just say that it seems to me that we're way behind the curve in learning the ecosystem engineering that we need to know about.
Dr. Watson: I totally agree. The Millennium Ecosystem pointed this out. I mean many scientists in this audience have pointed out that the rate of change is a critical systems for ecosystems. Clearly different species will move at different rates. We'll see different ensembleages of species. The fact that we've actually now got roads everywhere, cities everywhere, makes migration more difficult it was. The opportunistic species, the weedy species, are probably going to start to dominate basically. So some areas might get an increase in biodiversity, but not necessarily the sort of biodiversity mixtures that we actually need.
I am pleased to say that I chaired some international negotiations that we have now established the equivalent of IPCC for biodiversity called The International Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Its first full meeting is going to be in January in Bonn and it's going to do what IPCC does and a bit more. I'm hoping we can raise the visibility of biodiversity and the coupling of biodiversity with climate change far more than we've managed to do today. But your point's well taken.
I think, is there…No one over there, so let's go back over here then.
Speaker 7: I agree with all what you said, but I think you missed one important point and that is demographics. We wouldn't have a lot of problems if we were only one billion people on this planet. Can you say something how we can decrease growth rate and maybe have a goal that fewer people on the planet a hundred years from now than there are today.
Dr. Watson: I mean the demographic issue's obviously a crucial one. Thank goodness we at least seem only to be aiming to a world of nine to ten billion people by 2100, not the 15 to 17 which were the high projections 10, 20 years ago. And clearly the meeting in Cairo in 1994 got it right when it said we need to educate girls, we need to empower women, and we need to make sure that culturally acceptable forms of contraception were available to all. That was reiterated in Rio+20 earlier this year.
This is a very moral issue. Some leading religions, as we know, oppose birth control. It's clear that the smaller number of people we've got the more viable the planet is. But let's be quite candid, between now and 2050 the population is likely to go from seven to nine, so whatever that is, a 35% increase. But world GDP is likely to go by a factor of three or four. Once we get out of this recession it will take off again. So it's not just the number of people, it's their ability to buy goods and services, the ability to buy food, the ability to purchase energy, the ability to consume or use water. What we've got to do is rethink the whole way we produce goods and we use goods. So we've got to have sustainable consumption and production where we use the materials we got in a much more viable way. I do not have any suggestions how to decrease the population. I would simply say that demographic change is important, but also it's the ability consume that probably dominates it.
I don't think there's any, yeah.
Speaker 8: It's been clear since about 1980s on the basis of physics that increased CO2 was going to warm our planet, but it wasn't until the third assessment that this was clearly put by the IPCC. Could you comment about why the IPCC was so slow or foot dragging I might say.
Dr. Watson: Well, it's because Bert Berlin chaired the first two and I chaired the third. No, I strongly support the way we did it. Bert was a brilliant leader of IPCC and John Horton, who chaired working group one for all of the first three, equally a superb chair. So that first comment was very facetious, hope you realize that.
We were careful and conservative, and also the evidence was not overwhelming. What we viewed, and I viewed it when I chaired the ozone assessments and when I've chaired assessments on biodiversity. We have to be very careful. If we ever have a strong statement that's later proven to be wrong, we will lose all credibility as a science community. I believe the statements in the working group one in both the first and second assessment certainly showed that human induced climate change was a serious issue. It stopped short of a very strong, as you're inferring correctly, an attribution statement. So the first really strong attribution statement was the third assessment report, and then it became even stronger in the fourth assessment report.
But basically I think if you read those first two assessment reports it clearly showed that we were very, very worried about human induced climate change, but we had to weigh how good was the evidence to make a strong attribution statement, and it wasn't until the third one, and we got some criticism even on that, that we thought we could make it basically. I think we should always be slightly on the side of being conservative, otherwise we're going to get ripped apart by the climate deniers if we even make the most simple mistake, as you saw happen with the Himalayan glacier issue about a year and a half ago.
Speaker 9: Thank you, Sir Robert, for a fascinating and morally upsetting talk. I think one of the major issues, or the major issue, is really political. There's the inertia that you so elegantly pointed out of climate change, but there's also the inertia of political systems. Political systems don't react unless they are severely and immediately threatened. So I'll leave you with the words of Sir Winston Churchill, "The United States always does the right thing after exhausting all the other alternatives." Thank you.
Dr. Watson: Yes, in fact I should have used the slide. I've used it many times and I agree completely with that sentiment. This time, of course, it's not only the US. It's literally the whole world. And the challenge is how do you bring the US on board and at the same time bring China? I think China would move if indeed the US moved. I think India probably has more equity concerns than China at the moment, but we need all the major emitters. There's no question. And we need to do it now, we have no choice. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Thanks everyone for all the questions. Bob, will you be around outside to talk to other people on other questions? Thank you again for a great Frontiers lecture and attendance, and enjoy the meeting.