The Infinite Monkey Cage - Climate Change

Episode Date: February 15, 2016

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by guests Dara O Briain, Professor Tony Ryan and Dr Gabrielle Walker to discuss the ever-hot topic of climate change. They take a forensic look at the evidence that the climate is indeed changing, how we know that we are responsible, and what can be done to stop it. The scientific willing may be there, but is the political will finally catching up?

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You know all that stuff that we can't fit in? Yeah, what you mean into the general recording when it goes out on Radio 4? Yeah. Well, I think we should put it in something else. Well, I've made that already and they can listen to it now. Don't know why you've been dragging this down. Oh, the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast. Now. It's now. They're hearing it now.

Well, not now, because I'm still saying now. When I stop saying now, they'll hear it. Simultaneity is a big question in relativity. I don't think there is such a... There's no universal now, so I don't think you should say that. You wonder why we can't fit everything into the recording. It's ridiculous. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the last episode

of this series. We can only do six because, of course, Brian has to be taken away and rebooted and remodelled every five weeks. What, you thought he was human? Look at that face. That is not a human face. There are some scientific subjects that people just can't be bothered to talk about.

There are some scientific subjects that people can't talk about because they've just never heard of them and know nothing about. Here's what I think. Nigel, one of those. I have never seen you do Cockney before and it is fascinating. It's like a revenge of every northerner who said we don't sound like that.

Anyway, there are a few subjects though which some people know everything about and they know the utter truth and they are utterly certain about it and that is the one that we're dealing with tonight because tonight we're dealing with climate change. What is the climate? Is it changing? Is it our fault? And is there anything we can do about it, and that is the one that we're dealing with tonight because tonight we're dealing with climate change. What is the climate? Is it changing? Is it our fault?

And is there anything we can do about it? And should we do anything about it, isn't it about time we just allowed the giant dragonflies to finally rule the world again as we go smiling towards oblivion? So, our panel tonight is... Hello, I'm Dr Gabrielle Walker. I've been a scientist, a broadcaster, a writer. I've written four books on how the climate works.

And I'm chief scientist of Zynteo, a company that works with businesses to help make them fit for the future. And my hope for humanity in the next 100 years is that we collectively manage to avoid putting ourselves as a species out of business. APPLAUSE putting ourselves as a species out of business. People don't normally get applause after that.

That was a very popular choice. Going against the idea of human extinction, they're enjoying that one, which is unusual for Radio 4 and very unusual for Jeremy Vine's audience. Hi, I'm Tony Ryan. I'm the Pro-Vice-Rice Chancellor for the Faculty of Science at the University of Sheffield and Director of the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures. Now, my hope for humanity in the next 100 years

is that we reduce the carbon dioxide level to 300 parts per million and reach a balance of carbon emissions and thermal emissions so that the Earth's surface stays at the same temperature for a long time so we can stay in business. Now, on the clapometer, not as popular as the more general lack of human extinction, but let's see how our final contestant guest will do.

Hello, I'm Darby, a graduate of the University of College of Dublin. I'm the Dean of the School of Neuroscience at Oxford. Light a light, he's got a fellow for the universities in Cambridge and surrounding areas. And my honest hope for humanity for the next 100 years is that we stop producing

DVDs, novels, box sets and video games so I can catch up. And this is our panel. Let's start off with you, Gabriel, and just ask we'll get a few definitions first. When we say climate, what do people mean by climate? What does that term mean? Oh, it's a nice question, because actually people think about climate,

they often think about weather. And weather's something that happens every sort of day, every few minutes, every hour, something that changes all the time. And climate's kind of like the average of weather. It's almost the probability of how likely some weather's going to happen. So climate's really over kind of years, decades, and weather's over minutes, seconds, days. And, Tony, now we've got the definition,

so what is the evidence? Why do we believe it is changing at unexpected rates, shall we say? Well, evidence. So many, many years of measurements, initially by people recording the temperature locally writing it down um instrumental records from surface stations all over the world and then balloons global satellite data there are many uh surface sea surface temperature and depth measurements because a lot of the heat stored in the oceans so there's there a phenomenal amount of data, all of which has

been put together over 300 years of measurement, and then there are many ways of getting further back isotope ratios in ice cores, in calcite deposits. So there's data, data, data, data. When you say isotope ratios,

obviously I have a keen understanding of exactly what you mean, but some of our audience have been paying less attention. When you say isotope ratios, obviously I have a keen understanding of exactly what you mean, but some of our audience have been paying less attention. What do you mean when you say isotope ratio? An isotope, Robin, is an atom of a particular element with a different number of neutrons in it. That's what I mean. I was thinking about others, Brian. I'm sacrificing myself and creating the illusion of stupidity.

Very good on Beowulf and Dombey and Son. But to get back to why the isotope ratio changes... My favourite bit is how the isotope ratio changes. In Beowulf? In Beowulf. You've not seen it. It's a footnote. You need to read the footnotes. So you can get heavier and lighter versions of oxygen and the balance of the two of them tells you

what temperature the ice or snow was when it first formed. But you can also, this is really cool, and the ice cores themselves, there are little bits of air that are trapped. I've actually seen one melted. I've been where they drill it and smelled it. And it can be as old as 800,000 years. So this air was first trapped in the ice before humans were even invented. And you can go all that way back. And for 800,000 years, layer after layer, you can smell it, you can test it, you can see what's inside it. And you can see how much carbon dioxide there is, and you can see what the temperature was when it was formed.

So we have an accurate record, or a reasonably accurate record, of climate stretching back, as you said, many hundreds of thousands of years. Pieces of air, real pieces of air, not something that's interpreted, but that you can actually see. So what's the evidence that suggests that... that leads us to worry about the rate of change of climate

over the last century, let's say? And what's the evidence that we are the cause of it rather than something else? So there's two things to worry about the pace of change. One of them is that if you look at the way that... Naturally, carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases, they go up, they go down, and temperature just goes up and goes down in different times,

very naturally, and the two go in lockstep. When the temperature's higher, the CO2 is higher. When the temperature's lower, the CO2's lower. You know that there's a strong connection between them by looking in the ice cores, right? So the first thing is we know they're connected. And what's happened very recently is this incredibly rapid and very sudden rise in carbon dioxide

and an incredibly rapid and very sudden rise in temperature, much faster than you see in the record. But there's another thing to worry about, the pace of the change, which is we also know that the climate system in itself can make sudden changes. And if you kick it, if you kick it hard enough, it can change into something else. So we know that the change is happening faster

than it's ever happened before in that record at 800,000 years. And we also know that if you kick the climate system, it can really move. So we're worried about some unpredictability in our understanding as well. There are always oscillations, but it's the rate that's the issue, the rate of change that makes people, well, makes us worried, because we can't predict what that rate of change will produce in a climate.

I think you also asked, Brian, how we know that humans have caused this. So we do know that carbon dioxide changes very naturally. And we also know, though, that we've been burning a lot of fossil fuels, we've been burning down trees, and those are the two things that produce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Also, doing agriculture and using fertilisers produces nitrous oxide. So nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide from burning things, and methane is another greenhouse gas as well that

we've been pulling out of the ground. And when you put those three things together, you can see in the ice core record how much methane and carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide there used to be. And then you can look back 800,000 years and see in that period how much has it changed. And then you can look at the recent times and see how it's gone through the roof. And you can also calculate how much there ought to be there if you look at how much we've burned. And in fact, they match. A lot of it's actually gone into the ocean, but a lot's also gone into the atmosphere. And then the final part of it is, if you try to look for everything else that's going to cause the recent warming, we know it's warming. There's no doubt about it. We know it's

warming. Look at everything else that could have caused it. Changes in the sun, sometimes the sun gets a bit hotter or colder. Or changes in volcanoes, sometimes volcanoes put out particles that block the sun. Or any of the other natural cycles we know about. You put them all into the system and you can't explain the warming. And then you put this one little pinch of chilli powder, which is just this increase in carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxide,

and the models give you the answer to this. I'm just worried now that some people are going to... If they've only partially listened to this show, what they've mainly taken away from it is chilli powder's doing it, and it's actually affecting the amount of methane that we release, and then the number of hipsters are going, I want to go to the Arctic and sniff these gas bubbles. Sounds great.

They smell great, by the way. Well, that's what... Can I just check, just for safety purposes? So, before, you know, we just get our straw straight down to find this, you know, released air from... Should we have any idea what it's going to be? Or just a surprise? Maybe it's methane, maybe it's, you know, oxygen mix. You know, what's the...

You know, is there any danger in this before the hipsters die? I'm slightly disappointed to say the honest truth is it smells like normal air. But the bits of ice core that they gave us were chips of ice that had come from the very bottom of drilling this ice core. And they gave us some in champagne to celebrate the fact that the ice core had been drilled. And, you know, all these bubbles...

These bubbles that had never been breathed by humans before. And we're drinking them in this champagne and they're all toasting it. And it tasted like drilling fluid, right? Dara, how come you get all the telly work with Brian? I mean, I... I mean, cos we've both got wobbly middle-aged faces, so I realise, you know, in terms of that,

but, I mean, is it just charisma? There's a look I give the camera every so often. When he's doing his thing, he doesn't even see me doing it. I give it a little wink and here he goes again. And the people at home feel trusted and loved. That's all it is. I'm doing what I do, because I get weird grief, including the, why is your job just to interrupt Brian Cox?

It's the most common complaint I get about these kind of things Me too. Yes it is because we have to do these things for time so I'm doing what I believe I do and which is I'm shutting up and letting them speak during Oz and I'm happy to do that. I can merely offer this one observation on this topic which is that we were doing tomorrow's food

for BBC One last year and it was shown generally about food production and food science over the next while and it was showed generally about food production and food science over the next while and we just kind of consciously went could we be bothered going to the is this happening or not and uh and shall we just go and and talk about well what are the implications for this is this always a question what what actually will this how will this affect us in any huge way and we had like discoveries about like grain and and different types of grain and the yield, like we basically have chosen our

grain sources to offer maximum yield at this particular temperature and if the temperature shifts one or two degrees specifically, the grain yield will tail off enormously. So we're visiting a place in Nottingham for example that would look at different types of wheat

and root structures of the wheat, whatever, in order to, can we just shift into this wheat instead, because it's better at finding water four feet down rather than two feet down. Yeah, I think we were talking earlier, actually, Gabrielle was saying that the debate does seem to have moved on now. You've just come back from a conference in Chile, haven't you? And you said that, really, the number of sceptics,

or whatever you'd call them, in the sense that people who claim the world is... that the climate is not changing, has diminished. It seems there's broad acceptance now, so it's not even worth debating about that. The difference of opinion now seems to be very part slightly on the cause, but mainly on what you do, as you say,

how you mitigate it, what is the impact. Yeah, I just got back from this meeting in Chile where there was one climate sceptic to five of us saying we needed to act on climate change. And I think the climate sceptic was over-represented compared to the rest of the world. And even he wasn't saying... He was saying, OK, I know it's happening, OK, I know we've caused it,

but we should do something different. And, you know, trust me, the heat is on. The heat is real. And, in fact, one business leader, the CEO of Unilever, Paul Polman, was just lobbying for change, amazingly, in Paris for the Paris meeting. And he said the latest species to enter the endangered species list

is climate change sceptics. So that is over. But, I mean, is that your assessment? Because, obviously, there's the odd kind of loud columnist in the press. But in general now, in the meetings you go to, it's really even the so-called sceptics, the sceptics about how you respond rather than is it happening? The answer is yes, it is now, and that's clear.

And it's all about what we do. But actually, as Dara said, there is a component of if you accept that we are the cause, which virtually everybody does, then one of the things you have to do, as Tony mentioned, is reduce the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. So that requires you to accept the fact that the so-called anthropogenic climate change is...

Even if you accept that humans are causing it, you can still say, oh, it's too expensive, oh, it's too difficult, oh, we should do it in the future, oh, we should delay. There's still plenty of ways that you can try and pull back. And I think that's where the real danger lies now, because the science is absolutely clear. First of all, it's happening, and secondly,

we don't know at what point in the future it will get really bad, but we do know that it will get really bad at some point, and how big a gamble are we ready to take? And that science is very clear, but, you know, you can sort of say, oh, don't be alarmist, oh, don't be so hysterical, oh, let's just have a nice time. And there's a whole load of inertia built in as well, because we're already, you know,

they were talking in Paris about 1.5 degrees. We're never going to... We're talking in Paris about 1.5 degrees. We're never going to... We're not going to stop 1.5 degrees. I mean, there's just so much inertia. It's already built in. There's already another 0.7 or maybe 0.8 of a degree of global warming built into what we have now if we emit no more carbon dioxide.

So it's not that it's happening, it's what do we do about it and when do we start doing stuff about it? And the sceptics now are those who are saying, oh, well, we're all doomed, we really shouldn't do anything because it's too expensive and it will cause the banks to fail again. Well, yes, please. What's the timescale, by the way? So if we were to stop emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow and you say there's still a 0.7 degree rise... All carbon dioxide?

What's the response time? Breathing's allowable. No, no, no. If we all start holding our breath... It's a ridiculous idea. Typical physicist. Net. Net.

OK, good. It just seems very woolly with his language. What's the time lag, roughly? Do we understand the time lag? There are those who say that if we all started holding our breath, that would solve the problem, but actually... It completely would solve the problem, because there wouldn't be any more humans to pump it out, right?

There'd be no more industry to pump it out, there'd be no more consumers buying crap. I thought you'd just explained the joke. Some of my... Thank you. I got it. I was trying to get explained the joke. Some of my... Thank you. I got it. I was trying to get to the punchline. That's right.

Again, he's a physicist. But that doesn't... What I was trying to say is... Sorry, we'll do it neatly again. That will all get chucked out in the edit. We'll keep the bit with Tony explaining the jokes because that will embarrass him. Can you even tell I'm blushing already?

So, if we all held our breath, that would actually solve the problem, but I would prefer that not to happen because many of my best friends are humans and I kind of like to have them around. So, we don't want to hold our breath, but we do want to try and do something about the amount of carbon dioxide that we're putting out. But the timescale for...

Even if we switched off everything now and went to living caves, which we're not going to do, over the next few decades, we will still get more warming. But if we start to act now, we can actually reduce the warming and the increase in carbon dioxide in the future. Just one question about the measurement. So we hear one-degree rise or two-degree average rise.

What does that actually mean? Is that the surface temperature? Is it the air temperature? Is it the ocean temperature? What is that number? So, in fact, that's part of the controversy. Last year was the hottest year on record. And actually the first time that we hit one degree global average

above the pre-industrial level. So that's like we're halfway there to this two degree target that you probably heard a lot about. So what does that mean though? Because you've got warming in the upper atmosphere, you've got warming in the lower atmosphere, you've got warming in the surface of the ocean, you've got warming in the deep ocean, you've got warming on land, you've got warming in different continents, in different places, different ways. So if you try to add all that together it depends how you add it up, which years are the hottest, how you actually measure it.

And so it's possible then to have some kind of controversy with it. As soon as the World Meteorological Organisation came out with last year was the hottest on record, immediately they started with, oh, yeah, but, oh, yeah, but. It depends on how you add it together this way or that. But fundamentally, 15 of the 16 hottest years in the last 150 years have been since the year 2000, have been in this last century. So that's how we know that it's really warming. But it's a complicated story

because part of the reason it's so hot is because there's this El Niño phenomenon happening. I don't know if you talked about El Niño on the programme before, but it's a weird kind of weather pattern that happens in the Pacific that actually changes the global average temperature for a short while. It moves a warm pool of water around in the Pacific. And what happens then is that you change the temperature. The last time there was a really strong one was in 1998, and that was another big record year. So you can also say, yes, it was really hot, but you'd expect it to be hot. You've got this El Nino thing going on.

When that goes away, it's going to cool down again. And that's what people are now saying who want to try and challenge this. But I'll go back to that point. 15 of the 16 hottest years on record happened since 2000. You can explain one away. You can explain maybe two away, maybe three away. But you can't explain 15 out of 16 away.

Is heat... I know we're all talking about heat here, but is heat't explain 15 out of 16 away. Is heat, and I know we're all talking about heat here, but is heat like a bad term to use in some way, because heat sounds like something we like, heat sounds like something we pay for, heat sounds like something that we in most of our time would actually like to have more of, as opposed to energy, let's say, that we're pumping more energy into it

so we're getting more violent storms. I know it is heat, but you know what I mean, in selling this thing to people in terms of a lifestyle choice, which is what it is, are there other ways that we could define it in terms of what actually will happen? There'll be more violent storms, or there'll be, you know,

the points where water will interact in the atmosphere. Because essentially it's about the movement of water. Or sea level rise, those ideas. But all of it's about the movement, because the energy has to go somewhere. So it goes into water, it goes into clouds, it goes into water, there are more violent rainstorms, sea levels rise, things like that happen. Is there a better way of talking about it than, Nessie, heat?

There are people who say, actually, that they don't like using global warming, because warming sounds rather nice, and sort of get into a nice warm bath, and so that's why they say heat. But I like energy better, because actually, you don't really experience it. You get more heat waves, but the most dramatic ways that you experience this change are in the form of making the atmosphere much more energetic. So you get more violent storms and you melt glaciers, you melt ice caps and you also heat up the ocean

and that starts to expand and together that means that you get more sea level rise. And on top of that, you get some places where you're evaporating more water, so you get where it's dry, you get drier, where it's wet, you get more sea level rise. And on top of that, you get some places where you're evaporating more water, so you get where it's dry, you get drier, where it's wet, you get wetter. And especially this, where can we have access to water, which is already arguably starting to have effect in places like Darfur and Syria.

They've had, you know, then the effect is people start moving. And when people start moving, the rest of us get affected too. So it's not just about, oh, it might get a bit hotter. Dara, we're talking about the idea of, you know, we need to change things, but actually, individually, are we any good? You know, it's all very... Well, I'm going to tweet a petition, I'm pretty angry about that,

and then I'm going to play a video game, and then, as you were mentioning before, we buy our box sets and we do all these things. So we look towards perhaps the big companies and go, well, they should be doing something, but I need these things because they're nice. Yeah, listen, we all like... We like the life we have. I like my car, I like my flights. I like bringing my car on a flight.

I mean, that's the only thing I've ever told you. You like your flying car? Sometimes it's nice to sit in your car on a plane and roll down the window and go, I'll have the chicken, please. It would be delightful. But there is an answer to which it's what lifestyle would we be wearing? car on a plane and roll down the window and go, I'll have the chicken, please. It would be delightful. But there is an answer to which it's what lifestyle would we be willing to return to

if we were sold that way to a certain extent? Because we have a tendency to take for granted that there is fresh pineapple available at all times that I can feel like the... My four-year-old enjoys fresh pineapple for breakfast and I do go, Jesus what? This was like I, like generation ago, in Ireland in particular, orange juice was a starter.

That's how rare it was that it was a thing you had instead of the prawn cocktail. And even then, it was squeezes from a tub. Anyway, so it is... What is the thing that starts disappearing? Is it, like, orchids at all times of year? Is it, like, pineapples in your fridge in a plastic bag? At what point do we just scale back?

Or is it simply like... It's the flights. My mother, right? We're tapping on immigration. My mother's sister moved to America in the 50s, and then my mother didn't see her then for 30 years, and then we went over, I remember in 1979, it was only the seventh time, went over to visit, and this is a chance for my

mother to see her sister for the first time in 30 years. All of which is to say that we went to America in 1979, when I was seven, and when I came back to school, and for the rest of the time I was in school, I was the boy who went to America. And for my entire school career, I was asked questions about America,

and my opinion about the elections coming up up and the general culture, well I don't see Carter's going to win this one, and because it was that rare a thing and whereas I know obviously there are people who don't all have two holidays a year and stuff like that, we still take for granted

that we do a lot more flying in a way that our parents absolutely did not. What lifestyle do we then return back to that people were perfectly happy having about a generation ago? And is that in some way what's going to happen? In some parts of the world, you know,

the energy budget, so the energy, more energy spent keeping people cold than keeping them hot. So you can go ski in a refrigerated box in Dubai. The things we do that are profligate with energy are amazing. I remember sitting down once and calculating how many power stations were running just to make ice cubes to put in the men's urinals in American bars, right?

I mean, it's just crazy things. Oh, you know about that, Dara. I do. For many years, many have. I do. I do. For many years, many have been selling ice to urinals. People said, you're mad, you won't make a dime. And I said, I certainly will, my friend. We've got to find his calculation out, though. Have you actually done the calculation?

Let's follow that a bit. How did you estimate the number of urinals in the United States? OK, so he asked Dara. How many people are there per bar? Right, so... 1,000 people per bar. Right. Then you take the population of the country. That gives you the number of bars.

Then you have the number of kilograms of ice. You know the... ..amphipath fusion of water, you know how far you have to cool it, you can work out how much energy is needed. You need to know the average temperature of urine as well, I suppose. Well, it's pretty much 37 degrees. Yeah, idiot.

Oh, look at Brian, he's never even checked the temperature of his urine. That'd be biology, that, wouldn't it? I want to know where they put the ice. No, it's in the urinal to stop the smell. I did not know that. It's not that common, I think. It's not like we glide around having our urine cooled for a second.

I, in the car, have a urine cooling unit. So when I drive it onto the plane, I can have my urine cooling. I apologise for choosing that example, but it's just one of many examples. How many power stations was it, ultimately? I'd have to sit down and do the calculation. Look, you can't go through the

whole, the ice, the urinals, these thousand people pubs. Just give me a minute or two. None of us have even actually heard of this ice. I mean, we don't really much... This ice, it seems to be some kind of Narnia urinal. I'm not sure you are.

Dara, you're elevated to scientist. He's becoming comedy guest now, OK? Got to take the ice out of the urinals. That's the only thing we can say. World leaders standing at urinals going, oh, really? So, here we go. The ice in the urinal has now been replaced

by a piece of plastic, a polymer, that is tuned to emit a fragrance when 37-degree fluid hits it. So now there's no longer an odour. We're all right then, then. So the problem's solved. Is this what came out of the Paris climate change? No, no, no. But then you need to do the energy balance to make...

How much does it cost to make the plastic, to infuse it with the fragrance, versus how much does it cost to make any ice? So, there we are. Aren't they the sort of questions you do with every day? So, yeah, again, the casual listener has found out that the two causes

of climate change are chilli powder and urinals. That's it. Great. What an educational final episode this has turned out to be. But, talking about... You were at the Paris climate change summit. I was. We both were. So this... We saw the headline.

You mentioned it earlier, the two-degree goal and the one-and-a-half-degree aspiration, which you said was probably beyond us already. So where does that figure come from, that two-degree...? It's become a totemic figure, almost, hasn't it, for climate change? We have to stay below two degrees. In a way, here's one of the things, that you have to try and set a target of some kind.

And there's no science that says if you go to 1.99 degrees, everything will be all right, and if you go to 2.01 degrees, everything will go horribly wrong. It's not a cliff like that. What it is, is a kind of estimate, if you like, that if we go beyond two degrees, then the probability of really bad things happening starts to accelerate, it starts to increase. And some of those really bad things are the things that keep me up at night. They're the sort of nightmare scenarios, the tipping points, if you like, where

instead of increasing in temperature and increasing in a way that we might be able to adapt to and actually do something about, then something falls over a cliff. And so it can be things like in the northern permafrost, right, this is a stretch right across Siberia and across northern Canada, where the soil is full of carbon. We don't even know how much carbon there is down there, but we know it's an awful lot. Twigs and leaves and stuff that's been trapped in there and frozen. And as it's starting to thaw, and it is starting to thaw, it's a bit like you turned your freezer off and everything in it starts to rot. When it starts to rot, it gives out carbon dioxide or methane, right?

Greenhouse gases. So what happens is you warm it up a bit, it starts to rot, gives out greenhouse gases. It gets a bit warmer, starts to rot more, gives out more greenhouse gases. And the whole thing accelerates until you end up with this positive feedback and a right old mess. And the sort of thing where it wouldn't matter what we did, we'd just have to dance around the bonfire. ac mae'n cynyddu hyd at y cyfnod cyffredinol a'r fes gywir. Felly, byddwn ni'n rhaid i ni ddansio o gwmpas y ffwrdd.

Efallai y byddwch yn gofyn i mi beth fydd y teimlad hwnnw'n digwydd. Y cwestiwn yw, nid ydw i'n gwybod, ond ni ddim yn gwybod. Ni fydd unrhyw un yn gwybod. Ac wrth i ni fynd ymlaen 2 gradd, byddwn ni'n cael ymwybodol iawn a fwyaf o bethau fel hyn yn gallu digwydd. Ac mae'n cyflwyno ni i le oedd y climate yn gallu bod yn wahanol iawn, We just get likelier and likelier that things like that can happen and take us to a place where the climate could be very, very different and the Earth wouldn't really care, but us humans trying to live on it would have a real problem.

And so, you know, the whole saving the planet thing's kind of an anathema because the planet's going to be just fine, right? I mean, there will be a planet and it will have stuff living on it. It just won't be us. I mean, there will be a planet, and it will have stuff living on it. It just won't be us. And it'll happily just kind of keep going round and round for quite some time. I'm sorry, this is the one thing I was going to say.

Why won't it be us? I don't mean that flippantly, and I don't mean that in any kind of necessarily auto-sceptic way. Why won't we cope? What will happen that will be impossible for us to continue to survive to change, to just survive within a different climate as this

occurs? You've already mentioned some of it, which is food production. So if the climate changes then the cultivars that we have now that we all depend upon won't work. So if the climate changes quickly and the temperature rises quickly,

we won't have the right plants to grow the food that we need. They'll need different amounts of fertiliser, different pests will come in. So there'll be monster food shortages and they cause wars. And then there'll be water shortages and they cause wars. And people will try and move from one place to another and politicians will start putting fences up and that they cause wars. And people will try and move from one place to another. And politicians will start putting fences up. And that'll cause wars.

And so what will most likely kill us off, to a great extent, is conflict. I agree that that's a possible future. I don't think it's the one we're going to get to. You just said, why won't we cope and Dara I think we will cope actually I really think we do and one of the reasons I think that

I've been working on this for 20 years and for 20 years I've been banging my head against a brick wall saying things that the science is telling us and not getting absolutely anywhere and now in the last year my phone's ringing off the hook from really unusual places we've heard we need to act on climate change from military leaders,

from business leaders, from the Pope. You know, and we've also... And the meeting in Paris, the reason I was really excited about that meeting, and, in fact, if you add up all of the things that all the different countries committed to, it's not nearly enough for what we need to do. However, the reason I was excited about it

was all the stuff that was going on behind the scenes and on the side, because Paris was actually full of... It was full of businesses, and it was full of trade unionists, and it had NGOs, and they were all working with each other, and they were all putting pressure on the politicians, saying, we are already doing this. There's this fantastic moment. Christiana Figueres, who is the head of the whole enterprise

trying to steer the United Nations to deal with climate change, she actually read out a list of all the announcements that had been made by the businesses and then by the cities, the mayors and all the other people. And it was about five or six pages. It took her about 15 minutes just to say, these are all the things that are already happening, all the announcements that have now been made.

So it's just this massive momentum. And when, you know, I think when humans, as I said, many of my best friends are humans, right? So, and I think we're quite, we can be creative, we can be inventive when we decide to do it, we do. So I think we will cope. Is that a reaction to data or a reaction to the, based on an acceptance of the modelling

and acceptance of the science? Because we've seen this data, as you say. It is quite obvious now that we're getting hotter years. I think people even see it in their own back gardens, as it were, and they see the probability of extreme weather feels as if it's rising. So is that what's causing this renewed acceptance? Or is it really an acceptance of the science and the politicians coming together and saying,

no, I actually believe that your models are now good? I think it's a combination of accepting the changes that we're already seeing, and it's actually already with us, and also understanding better the potential of what could come if we don't deal with this. And then if you look at many of the, like I said, the big businesses, they understand that they need to get their energy from somewhere. They need to get their water from somewhere. They need to be able to deliver to people who are actually able to buy the

stuff that they sell. In some cases, it's reputation. But in other cases, it's just we won't be able to operate. We need to make ourselves ready for what's coming or we won't be in business. I stood with Brian Gulvary on a platform at the Royal Society, and he's the finance director of BP, and he was advocating a carbon tax. So this was a company saying we need to tax... an energy company saying we need to tax carbon,

because they realise that they have a stranded asset. There's all this stuff under the ground that they own that they can't get out and dig. They can't dig it out and burn it because we can't afford to. So we need to change our business practices to allow this changing lifestyle, right? And so business as usual in the climate change sense ain't going to work,

but business as usual in the business sense ain't going to work because you need to have an unfair playing field. Right? You know, we signed up to... The UK signed up to making all these changes, and then a week later took away the subsidy on solar panels. Bonkers. Right? You can't have... If you're not paying for the damage you do by fossil fuels,

the things you... Because all you pay for is digging it out of the ground and burning it. You don't pay for the loss of amenity for future generations. You don't pay for the environmental change. Then it's easy to compete with a solar panel that doesn't have all those advantages in the economic sense. So we need to take those advantages, those economic advantages away Mae'n rhaid i ni ddod i ffwrdd â'r cyffrediniaethau o ran y cyfrifol. Felly mae angen i ni ddod i ffwrdd â'r cyfrifol,

y cyfrifol economaidd, o ran ein defnyddio ffosilol, a rhoi'r cyfrifol economaidd hynny i ffyrddau newydd, i brosesau cymhwyso, i dechnolegau a fydd yn cymryd carbon di-o-c-sid yn ffyrdd. Mae angen i ni roi cyffrediniaeth i'w gosod. carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. We need to give them an advantage, a tax break, a subsidy. Often what changes people's minds

won't be necessarily evidence or political will, but market forces. If the prices of things change, then people will shift into what they're doing. The most interesting announcement in some ways was Coca-Cola, who went on saying, we have to move three bottling plants because water isn't

coming to where we used to come to. So we can't bottle here anymore. And that is a massive financial decision made by a large corporation. And so when that starts affecting people, that will make people, even places in America where people are very, very business-minded, I presume.

Am I wrong about that? I'm sure you're quite right about the bottling plants. I just think the economic driver can't be the market as we understand the market now. It needs to be a regulated market. I think I'm going to jump in here because, you know, it can be we don't have enough water so we're going to change. But the businesses that I'm working with are actually, they're actually being more leaders, I think, than many of the other sectors and certainly more than

politicians. So, for example, Apple, I just met the, Apple has hired as their Director of Environment, Lisa Jackson, who used to be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and she's the one who got carbon dioxide called a pollutant in America. She's now head of environmental stuff at Apple. So 100% of Apple's operations in the US are now fully

renewable energy sourced. 100%. 80% of their worldwide operations come from renewable energy. And the way that they've done it, and they're trying to get the last 13%, the way that they've done it is where there wasn't any renewable energy. They've partnered with a solar energy company and they built it.

So Apple has been building solar energy plants around the world so that they can source renewable energy. Google's going to do the same thing. Look at what IKEA... I love this, actually. IKEA's head of sustainability, which is actually very significant in IKEA because they build sustainability into their model, has just said,

we want to go more into a circular economy instead of just selling more and more stuff. He said, I believe that we have reached peak curtains. LAUGHTER So, I love that phrase. It's interesting because one of the things that I get depressed about, and you mentioned it, is the lack of political action.

It seems large-scale global politics is an extremely difficult thing. But what you're suggesting, in fact, is that the politics is essentially being circumvented, in a sense, by business. Not circumvented. Not circumvented. Because if you look at what happened in Paris, I think that what happened in Paris, we managed to get it because this pressure was going on on the politicians and the policy makers from the businesses and all the other places.

But they also managed to do it. And I think there's a lot of fantastic policy that happens outside the main centres. We found that the best policy is happening in cities, in regions, in states, and behind closed doors and where policymakers are talking to NGOs and they're talking to businesses and they're saying, what do we all need to do to make this happen?

And it makes me very... If you look in Washington and you see the way that the Congress are just all battering their heads against each other and getting absolutely nowhere, it's infuriating. But in the meantime, in the US, the states and regions, there's associations of mayors, they're all just doing it anyway. And in the end, it's not going to matter what Congress says or does.

And so I don't think policy-making, politicians have a really hard job trying to get around all the things that are put in place to stop them changing anything. And I think the ones that we talk to are really happy to have leaders from business come along and say, we can help you do it and they're helping in the right way now and not the wrong way and all those businesses you mentioned are big high-end high-added value businesses that can afford to do these things

right but you know if you look at a loaf of bread 40% of the embedded energy in a loaf of bread so all the things that have been put in there to make the loaf of bread, 40% of that is to produce the fertiliser. Right? To take nitrogen out of the air, make it into ammonia, make it into fertiliser, take it to the farm. Because all the plants we eat, all our cereal depends on fertiliser, and that fertiliser depends on energy that has to come from somewhere. And at the moment, it comes from coal, oil, gas, nuclear.

But really, that fertiliser either needs to come from the sun, by some solar-powered process, or from the 7 billion getting on to 10 billion fertiliser producers that are called human beings. You mentioned energy use there. The way that we generate energy is obviously of concern and one of the major contributors to CO2 emissions. So what is your feeling about the way we should be generating energy?

I hear a lot, especially from people who are saying we shouldn't act on this, that there's a lot of subsidies going into renewable energy and there shouldn't be. What people don't really know is how much a subsidy is going into fossil fuel industry around the world. And in fact, if we just took away all the subsidies, then that would be a very big help to start with. That would help to level the playing field.

But in terms of what needs to happen to make the energy... I mean, every energy company that I've been working with, and the utilities as well, and the people who buy their energy from these companies are all talking about the energy transition, the energy transition. Everyone knows we need to do it. And the only controversy is how fast we do it

and how we make it happen. So it's utterly clear that it's happening. But how it happens has to be... The policymakers have to put this kind of system in place where they don't keep pulling the rug out from under, you know, we're going to do it this way, then we're going to change it and do it that way the businesses need to figure out how they can change their way of making money so they can move from one to the other and the really

clever people need to come up with brilliant new inventions that change the whole landscape and I think one of the ones to look out for by the way this is I know this is a comedy program so it's not very funny but batteries storage that's actually the thing that's going to make all the difference in the world if If you can make energy in one place, stick it in your pocket, or on your ship, or in your car, and take it somewhere else, that will change everything. And then it won't matter what the governments do, or anyone else. It'll just

put a... If you can do it cheap enough. If you can do it cheap enough. The thing that will make a real difference is if we can learn to do what plants do, which is to store the sun's energy as a chemical bond that we can then release do what plants do, which is to store the sun's energy as a chemical bond that we can then release somewhere else. Because actually, burning stuff is brilliant.

So a chocolate chip cookie, right? Same energy in a chocolate chip cookie. You'd need 250 AA batteries. OK? Because most of the mass for the combustion comes from the air. So nature, photosynthesis, turning sunshine into chemical bonds that you can subsequently reuse, can be a closed system, yeah?

And you just use the carbon to kind of go round and round and round and round. And that's what we need to learn to do. I like the fact we're just going through your shopping list today. Bread, cookies, ice, urine freshness. You've mentioned talking about those things. I wonder, there hasn't really been... Nuclear, which has been, you know... What about that? Renewables talked about a lot,

but there have been, over the last ten years, more and more people who said, well, actually, nuclear might be one of the... Perhaps working in tandem as well, renewable and you know, nuclear might be one of the... perhaps working in tandem as well, renewable and nuclear. So... OK, so for me, the really logical thing to do would be... ..would be to build either a biomass plant or a coal-burning power plant next to a nuclear power plant,

use the nuclear power plant to split water, get the heat and the electricity, but split some water, and then use the... burn the coal, burn the biomass, and combine the hydrogen from the splitting water with the carbon dioxide that comes out of the chimney to make methanol. You've got a new fuel that's a liquid

fuel, use the same liquid infrastructure, you could use every bit of biomass twice. Getting planning permission for a biomass power plant next to a nuclear power plant, not going to happen. So your solution's unworkable. Well, it's a really logical solution, but we have to put them all in the social and economic context.

So, yeah, absolutely. The future has to be sunshine. We have to go back to being an economy So, yeah, absolutely. You know, the soul of the future has to be sunshine, right? You know, we have to go back to being an economy that's powered purely by sunshine, because that's what gives us that energy balance. We already are. We already are. Everything, all the energy comes from the sun fundamentally. Because it's fossilised. Yeah, they were fossilised.

But we can't afford the fossils anymore, can we? That's the issue, right? So, you know, to be fair, the sun has always and always will provide almost all of our energy. Not all of it, actually. Because that's one of the things I actually love about nuclear power, is that you're releasing energy that was trapped in a supernova, right? So,

in fact, nuclear power is the only source of energy on Earth that is not powered by our own sun. Geothermal. Geothermal. Oh, no, you're right. OK. Nuclear power and geothermal power are the only two sources. That sounds fine in the edit. Amongst the many forms of energy.

Right, let's build it up then. So tidal, geothermal. We're going to argue about tidal. You're going to say tidal's not the sun? It's the sun and the moon. Eh, OK. Right. Hang on a minute. That wasn't a supernova. That was not a supernova. The moon was sun and the moon. Eh, okay. Right. Hang on a minute.

That wasn't a supernova. That was not a supernova. The moon was not responsible for it. It's half supernova. Yeah, but the moon is. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is... So, where should we get our energy from in the future? Obviously, it needs to be stuff that we can

renew ultimately. Some of the challenges with nuclear power are it's not technically renewable because of the stuff you put in it, you have to mine it, and also you have to figure out what to do about the waste and also you have the potential both for nuclear proliferation and for accidents. And I think that with modern-day nuclear plants,

you can do a lot about the accidents problem, you can also do a lot about the danger of terrorism. I think it depends whether you're already making nuclear energy, if it makes sense. Because if you're a new country starting with a nuclear waste problem, that's a big problem. Whereas if you're like the UK, where you already have a nuclear waste problem,

you can add to it a little bit and you can make a lot of energy. And so that makes a bit more sense, I think. Economically, it's very expensive. And there are plenty of people who say you shouldn't put the money into nuclear, you should put the money into solar, into wind, into tidal, into the other things. It'll be cheaper, you'll get

it better and you won't leave something for future generations. And I think the answer for nuclear is it depends on the circumstances. But I don't think we can rule anything out of the mix. I think we need everything to solve this problem. And we are in complete agreement there. One of the things we need to think about

is the concern we have about nuclear is the waste. And the waste problems are actually the waste problems from the legacy of nuclear weapons and that technology leading to nuclear energy if you just do nuclear energy then then the waste problem is much much smaller than our legacy nuclear waste are you optimistic dara because it seems that you need a in order to get political action you need a shift in public opinion which seems to have happened to some extent. But are you optimistic about the future here? Do you think we can deal with this one?

I think the problem could be better set than it has been. And I think once we get past the hump of there being people who just want to put fingers in their ears and say this isn't happening and begin to regard them as flat Earth and there was no moon landing, people. And not that there's all of that. But I think you get into a more interesting discussion. I'd also like to get to the point where the two of you don't look,

as you occasionally do, they're nervous to be seen to disagree, as if that somehow would be... But you know what I mean, that there isn't consensus, because there should be healthy debate occurring within these fields, and you may have We disagree about all sorts of things. No we don't Anything you said there could you say we should we should there is nothing great than seeing two scientists do a joke together It's one of my favorite

That reaction as you that is a way that could power, I think, the future of the internet. So, this is... I think we'll end the discussion on that. Dara, would you like a final... Can I ask one very, very quick question? If we could invent a thing in the morning, silver bullet, if people were putting money into things, rather than necessarily returnable rockets or Wi-Fi

for all far-from-places, which is the billionaire businessman's current choice of thing to invest in. What would be the thing? You say batteries rather than... Can you sink carbon? What would be a... I say storage. When I say batteries, it can be batteries of any form.

It might be something that looks like a plant, but any way of storing the energy and moving it around would change everything. And that is one of Elon Musk's great... He's doing it. ..so the billionaire businessmen do that, don't they? I'm not dissing them. I'm not dissing them. But, you know, but the... Other, yeah, billionaire businessmen are available, I should say.

We asked our audience a question, and that question was, what do you think are the most nightmarish possibilities for planet Earth in the next 100 years? Tim Morgan says, the moon has moved so far away that the BBC acts the programme Stargazing Live because with the moon gone, they have nothing else to talk about.

Oh, cloud cover. There's one. The planet is taken over by immortal strawberries. They run out of reasons to regenerate the Doctor. I don't know how I'm going to tell my eight-year-old, by the way, that there's no series this year. He'd better not listen to this, in fact.

You know, you're talking about reset homework. A Radio 4 series. This is a proper Radio 4 answer. It's like, either of our daughters passing their driving tests. That's the end of the series, and we're going to be answering your emails and letters in a special over on Radio 4 Extra in the next few weeks, and then we're going to be back in the summer. And if you do, by the way, write into the Radio 4 Extra show

that we're doing about various things we've dealt with, please do not start your letters with Y-O-Y-O-Y, because Brian thinks that's the beginning of an equation he doesn't understand. So, thank you very much and goodbye. Turned out nice again. This is the first radio ad you can smell. Monkey Cage. Turned out nice again. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart only at Wendy's.

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