 Fe wneud i chi i gael bod ni'n fawr i ddim yn olygu. Roeddwn i'n gweithio gan oedd ei fawr i'r hyn o'r cyffredinol. Rwy'n gwneud ei fawr i ddim yn unig. Felly, rwy'n dechrau i'r llachion, rwy'n gweithio i'r wych, i'r fawr i gael ymddydd yma'r gweith. Felly, rwy'n gweithio'n ei fawr i'r cyffredinol, ond mae'r cyffredinol sy'n gweithio'r cyffredinol ac mae'r hygyrchu o'r cymhwynt iawn yn cemilfaeth ymlaes daeth ar gyfer llwydaeth yma er gweithio'r flynydddiad yng Nghymru – yng Nghymru, yna ymlaes ymlaes shadow iawn – oherwydd oed rel Coedl arinatedd eraill yma. Rwy'n cynnwys y cwm, mae'r cychwyn oherwydd yn syniad blwyddyn sy'n ei bobl ffordd bobl yn hynny, o'r amlwg sydd wedi'u gwneud i gyd wedi'i gwneud i'r risg gyda wneud argyrchu ymddangos, felly cymdeithasol ym Mhysel. Yr ysgol yma wedi'i gwneud i'r ysgol yma, ond mae'r ysgol iawn i'r ysgol iawn i'r ffordd yw'r cyfrifol ffordd yn ddiweddoli'r ysgol iawn i'r ysgol iawn i'r ffordd yn grwyddon yn cael ei fitfyrddol i'r amlwg o'r ysgol iawn i'r ysgol iawn i'r ffordd. Rwy'n meddwl y cwmhiliadau, mae'r ddefnyddio'r panel y byddai y gallai cyd-dweithio ar y dyfodol yn y ddechrau'r ddweud, ac mae'n ddweud o'r bryd pethau i'r gwmpun o'r gwneud, a ddim yw'r ddweud yn gyfyrddol i'r ddweud. Felly mae'r ddweud yn ddweud yn gweithio'r ddweud, ac mae'r ddweud eich ddweud yn gweithio'r ddweud. First of all, to my right, a man who stepped into the breach at the last minute, for which we're very grateful, Bob Ward, who is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on climate change and environment and LSE. Before that, he was with the Royal Society for eight years, was head of media relations there and is a fellow of the Geological Society. On my far right is Stephen Belcher, who is professor of meteorology at the University of Reading, and also deputy director of climate science at the Met Office, and author of a report earlier this year, Drivers and Impacts of the Seasonal Weather in the UK. So I hope we're going to hear a lot about the flooding from Stephen. George Marshall, on my left, is founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network. He's got 25 years of experience in the environment movement and environment world in general, had positions at Greenpeace and the Rainforest Foundation and is an advisor to the Welsh Government on climate communications. I've seen a quote saying that your standard routine is reasonably entertaining for a two-hour climate change PowerPoint presentation. Yeah, it's a low bar. But first of all, I'd like to start with Stephen. So if you could sort of kick us off and then we'll take you from there. So earlier last year and earlier this year we saw the publication of the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the focus of that report is really on global climate and how that may have changed over the last century and a half or so. So you'll be familiar with the famous plot showing the increase in the global mean surface temperature since the temperature near the surface of the earth averaged over the whole earth and how that's risen over the last 150 years. And what the fifth assessment report was able to say is that the warming is unequivocal, so that's as strong a statement as we can really make in science to say that there is a global signal of warming. And the second conclusion of this report, major conclusion I would say is that that warming is very likely due to human activities. So what I'm trying to say here is that the focus of this report was really on global long-term trends. And I think the reason that we're here today is to think about how this global change, what does it mean for us living in our region and over the course of our lifetime? You know, a global temperature, I don't feel that. I don't think you do. I feel that it's warm today and it may rain next week. So the question that I think we're trying to set up today is what does climate variability, the natural fluctuations in the climate, mean for the seasons? Do we get more hot summers, more wet winters? And what happens to the cold winters? Do we lose them entirely or do we lose them gradually? So it's these really extreme seasons that I think is the main interest for us in the Met Office Hadley centre now. Understanding whether we can, what we can say about the role of climate change in changing the odds of those events and how those events might change into the future. So that's what I mean by climate extreme, which I think is the topic for this evening. And just to set us up a bit further, when we talk about extreme weather, what do we know about the link between extreme weather and climate change? Is there a link? And if so, what is it and what kind of extreme weather are we talking about? So you've heard many climate scientists say that you can't attribute climate change to a single event. I think that means one rain shower. When taken over seasons, actually that's what we're trying to do now. We're trying to say, was that wet winter that we saw that we just had, what was the role of climate change in changing the odds of that event? And we may come back to that later. That's the one that we have trouble saying anything definitive about actually. But if I go back a bit further, 2003, those of you with long memories, in fact I worked in London at that time, was a really hot summer and it broke lots of records right across Europe. It was a hot summer. And we were able to do some analysis at the Hadley Centre that demonstrated that the emission of greenhouse gases, and so human-induced climate change, doubled the odds of that event. So without the greenhouse gases, we would have halft the probability of that event. And in the intervening 10 years, we've now got 10 more years of data and you may not think there have been heat waves across Europe in that intervening 10 years, but actually, when taken over Southern Europe, including the UK, we've had many other hot summers and in fact we continue on a warming trajectory. So when we did our attribution statement that said that the odds were doubled because of greenhouse gas emissions, we could also say that by the 2040s on the current trajectory of greenhouse gases, a summer like 2003 would become the norm in Europe. Well, I can tell you that the data shows, though, over the last 10 years, we continue on that trend that will take us, we think, by the 2040s that a summer like 2003 will be the norm. So that's what we call in the jargon an attribution statement. Why should we believe those models? I mean, you know, it's very, very hard, notoriously hard to predict the weather. How can you possibly know that the odds were doubled for that 2003 event? So it's notoriously hard to predict the weather, but these are long-term periods of hot weather. So temperature, we're much better at than rainfall. And again, I'm sure we'll come back to that. So temperature tends to have bigger patterns. So we can be more confident that the patterns we're seeing in the models are correct over these seasonal timescales. And the other thing to say is that Europe is a very special place, particularly around the Mediterranean, because as it warms, the soil dries out and that means that the air gets even warmer. So there's kind of a doubling effect. There's the greenhouse gases, but as the ground dries out, any warming warms even more because it can't evaporate moisture any further. And just to rewind slightly, what is the difference between weather and climate? So there's a quote about this. Weather, climate's what you expect, but weather's what you get. So in other words, you know, the summer's warm and the winter's hot. That's a kind of crude statement of climate. Climate is a long-term average over a large area. Weather is what's going to happen in your backyard tomorrow. What we're really talking about here is that middle ground of regional, so continental scale patterns over seasonal durations. So hot summer over Europe or a cold winter over the Northern US or a wet Australia. OK, that's a good starting point. Thanks very much. I should say that George has a book coming out called Don't Even Think About It, Why Are Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. So I'm hoping you're going to tell us a little bit about how people take on information about climate change and then how that affects their behaviour and how they think about the phenomenon. Can you elaborate? Well, as I always assumed, I think like many people working in the field, like many scientists I've spoken to, that increasingly extreme weather events would have a correlating effect on acceptance of climate change or acceptance of the science of what the scientists were saying. This is a private view of many scientists. I'm sure on the Met Office too, but the one would lead to the other, but surely there's a point of which. We know that climate change is a difficult issue for us to come to terms with because it lacks many of the qualities of salience, what, psychological salience, that bring things to our attention because it seems quite distant, it seems far away, it seems in the future. It's not quite clear. It doesn't have an enemy coming at us. We respond very well to things which are direct, visible, happening now and where we can see an enemy. So it's a difficult issue for us. However, with an extreme weather event, it's here, it's now, and you can see it. So the assumption is, of course, that that connects through for people to think that, but to an increased appreciation of the science. That is not necessarily, however, a case because, of course, the reason I might think that is because I'm already convinced of a science. What is very clear from a research is that people tend to assimilate the views on climate change which concur best of the views they already hold. So if you are somebody who is already convinced of climate change, you will see an extreme weather event as very clear evidence that the climate is changing. Indeed, whether, even if the scientists are not saying very clearly that an individual event is caused by climate change, you will interpret it or so. If you're not inclined to accept it, if you're as yet unconvinced when you're inclined to see it as evidence and proof that weather is naturally variable. So in other words, we're tending to perceive what goes on around us very much through the lens of our existing views and our existing worldview. There was a YouGov poll done last year that asked people, do you think that increasingly extreme weather is proof of climate change split right down middle? And the split was very interesting, whilst two-thirds of people with left-leaning politics were inclined to say that it was proof of climate change, two-thirds of people with right-leaning politics were inclined to say it was not. When you see that kind of political polarisation, it is very clear that what is operating here is not really an excess of science, it's an excess of culture, but culture is operating and mediating. So, for research for the book, I asked another question, which is people who have been immediately impacted by climate change, who have just gone through an extreme event which is off the scale in terms of their previous historical experience, does that change what they say or think about climate change? So I went to Bastrop in Texas, but it had wildfires after a record-breaking drought, it had wildfires by a factor of 10 the most destructive ever experienced in Texas, burnt down two-thirds of a town, huge areas of forest burnt down. And I asked people, I allowed people to talk about the foreign experience, and then I asked them a very simple question. I said, could you tell me about the last conversation that you had with somebody about the relationship between what you went through in your experiences and climate change? Not a single person could remember a single conversation that they had ever had linking the two. And the editor of the local newspaper said, oh, sure, it's like we would cover this if we felt that this was relevant to us here in Bastrop County, but we're just a local newspaper covering community issues. So in other words, there's a total detachment between what people were talking about and what was happening wider. I found a similar thing in New Jersey. Now, New Jersey, mind you, is not Republican, it's Democrat, so you would expect people to accept climate change and privately they do. You ask them and they say, yes, climate change is a huge problem, so they're politically inclined to accept it. Same thing. When was the last time you talked about it? They're not talking about climate change in regards to what they've been through, but they are talking about community, pulling together, strength, rebuilding. And really my conclusion on this, and this is an under-researched area, is that the narrative of climate change, because after all we perceive it, through the narrative, this culturally formed narrative, that the narrative of climate change is immensely challenging to communities that have just been through an extreme weather event. There the language is all about community cohesion, pulling together, rebuilding. The last thing anybody there wants to hear about is that this might be for beginning, might be the opening omen of a signal of something which is going to get worse and is going to progressively challenge and threaten their way of life. So people are actively, I would say, pushing this to the edge of their attention. Is it even worse than that, because another part sometimes of that message is that you have to change your way of life. Which is the last thing they want to hear, having just had their action. Exactly, this is a time when people have a reinvested sense of their own identity and their way of life. This is not a good position for people to have the self-reflection which is required for climate change to say maybe we should do things differently. Also a time when people from right across political boundaries have come together in the sense of strong community identity. So they're very, very actively avoiding any discussion of something which might be divisive. I think the other thing to remember is that people, if you have just had, I mean New Jersey I have to say is extraordinary when there's six months after Hurricane Sandy hit, and it's just matchwork. All on the coast just smash the pieces. If you are going into that and you are rebuilding, you are in the act of rebuilding, you are investing in a positive vision of the future. We know psychologically that there is a tendency towards an optimism bias whereby people tend to have an optimism bias whereby people tend to have an optimism bias whereby people tend to have an optimistic view of what's happening. So in some of the research that's been done, people tend to hugely overestimate the chance that the next hurricane will hit somewhere else and hugely underestimate the chances that the next hurricane will hit them. It's a natural psychological response to going through a trauma where you tend to underestimate the likelihood of it hitting you again. So people are gambling. It's a gambler's instinct. You're taking the gamble but it's not going to happen again. And like all gamblers you tend to have an over-optimistic assumption of what's going to come next. So I guess the conclusions of saying that this is extremely complex and I think that the thing I'd say is that alongside the hard science of climate change of the scientific facts of climate change although I realise scientists are aware of the word fact but the scientific facts of climate change there are social facts too and the social facts are what in the end governs people's views and opinion we're constantly looking and monitoring for the views of the people around us the people we trust, our peers and so on for the position we should hold or I would add in these affected areas whether we should be even seen to hold views at all whether it is even appropriate to talk about climate change in the midst. Because that's the final things of saying people are very unwilling to talk about. I'm intrigued by the political observation that you made. Who's fault is that? This can be a very divisive political issue it's not always the case but particularly in the US it's a badge of honour for large sections of the Republican Party to reject the science and anything that flows from it. Whose fault is that? I really don't think it's a matter of fault. I think it is, I think a number of unfortunate things have happened I think if I was inclined to say people who have been a bit negligent on it so maybe not fault is I think that Conservatives or people of conservative politics who understand and care about climate change have been far too unwilling and too slow to step forward and to say no this is a conservative issue too and to shape it in lines with their own values and my own organisation coin has done a lot of work with conservatives to try and find new ways of talking about climate change. So I think part of the problem is for people on the right it's become poisoned because it seems to be built entirely around the values of left from their point of view. Is that the fault of people on the left though because it sort of chines with being able to control free enterprise, regulation, all of those things that come more naturally perhaps to people on the left? Well but then again what you just described then is also part of the narrative that has been created by people on the left. You could equally well say that people on the right have to take action on climate change in defence of their freedoms and their property because climate change is the greatest possible threat to those things. There's no reason that it needs to take on any particular shape just as I would always say that the reason it has a polar bear is the icon of climate change is solely because environmentalists were the first of a the starting point when it came to climate change so they stuck a polar bear on it. If they've been human rights organisations it wouldn't have a bear, it would have something very different. But what I do think is that what is interesting is that in the early stages up to about 2000 in the US certainly people, the Democrats and Republicans were about neck and neck in terms of attitudes on climate change that there was not that clear polymerisation and that generally speaking people who knew more about science and were more alert to scientific issues on both sides were more concerned about climate change and then after 2000 it starts pulling apart and what is dangerous with this is rather just as climate change has its own positive and negative feedbacks so does social opinion. So what happens is once it starts moving apart and once you, if you are say a conservative you start to see what people around you who you trust are saying now I don't believe that whilst at the same time people you distrust like we might say Al Gore for example if you were strongly Republican saying yes this is the biggest issue we face that it starts to pull further and further away. The danger of course with any issue now which includes extreme weather events is that the interpretation of what we need is we need everybody to pull together to have a new combined sense of identity and purpose but the danger is that these two interpretations pull people apart so that one group goes ahead saying this is proof of what we're telling you you've got to pay attention and the other saying no this is just evidence that this is a myth and that things can become more polarised and also more fractured through the process of coping with understandable trauma. One of the things of course is that if you've been through a major trauma one of the things which what happens is that people say no this is not the appropriate time to talk about this but people are trying to get in and say no this might be climate change it's like I'll seem to be actively actively undermining people are actively undermining and reinforcing people's suffering. It seems to me what you're saying because it seems to be that everything that surrounds natural disaster type events is actually quite helpful with respect to communicating generally about climate change. There's an interesting piece that my colleague George Mombio wrote today in the paper in which he describes a kind of epiphany moment where he's realised the way he's been talking about a lot of environmental issues has perhaps not been right. He says I've been engaged in contradiction and futility for about 30 years which perhaps some of his detractors might have said earlier. He says we terrify the living day like it's had of people and they will protect themselves at the expense of others in the living world. Does that chime with what you're saying? I have to say as somebody who as you said in your introduction I've worked my entire working life in the environment movement I have to say there is some responsibility there for the way we've done this. I don't think that it is as you asked if it's someone's fault. I don't think it's environment's fault that has been that environmentalists speak to their own constituency just as everybody speaks to their own constituency just as the church speaks to people to go to church or businesses or the CBI speaks to businesses. I think that the problem has been we have not been alert to a need not been alert to the fact that if we're all going to come together on a combined issue we have to have lots of different people speaking in different ways. There's somebody who I find very interesting who's the head of the the Catholic Coalition for the Unborn Child in the States. He's going out there and he's saying climate change is the greatest threats to the rights of the unborn child. I'm thinking wow this is extraordinary when people who are outside of a normal political arena talk about it it looks completely different. Why not? That's what I would say. I'm quite with George. It's not so much we've talked about it the wrong way but we've been talking about it one way and the need is to find if we're going to bring everybody together on this the need is to find a way which crosses those boundaries and finds common values. What's your perspective? I'm going to dive straight in and come back to the issue of the floods this winter because I think it could prove to be a decisive moment in the UK political debate. There was an article I think it was last week or the week before by in which John Gummer, who is head of the statutory committee on climate change said that he had detected in Westminster a change in attitude amongst conservative MPs since the flooding and they had made the connection between the floods and climate change and were no longer hostile to the idea that they should be acting on it. Steven will give chapter and verse on the science of it Here's some basic facts that help you thought your way through. So it's the wettest winter the UK has experienced as records began in 1910 we have experienced four of the five wettest years have occurred in the UK from the year 2000 onwards and that doesn't count this year with the wettest winter and during that period seven without seven of the warmest years now we know from basic physics you don't need a climate model it forms the atmosphere, it holds more water you expect stronger downpours and that indeed is what we're beginning to see in the UK now there is a tendency in this debate perversely to demand absolute certainty we're not going to accept this climate change so you're absolutely certain and this is a little bit like going to the doctor with lung cancer and being a heavy smoker I'm not going to take it as smoking unless you can tell me categorically which cigarette it is that's given me cancer it's a perverse way of dealing with risk and the risks are very clear and apparent you don't have to be certain but you can see enough to know that there are risks there and these are risks that we have some choices about so there's an inertia in the climate system which means that probably for the next two or three decades this risk is going to grow no matter what we do about greenhouse gas emissions which is the primary driver of these changes we're seeing so we're going to have to adapt in the UK of the next two or three decades to the increase in flood risk beyond that will depend on how well the world mitigates and reduces greenhouse gas emissions now so you don't even have to believe in their being in their being strong action in the future to have to deal with this problem of what happens in the next two or three decades in the UK and it's being driven by two main things so first of all sea level is rising there are parts of the UK that are still readjusting from the last ice age and causing the parts of the coast to rise and sink the south-east is sinking and with sea levels rising it's basically exposed to coastal flooding you remember that the big storm in December which kind of got obliterated from people's memories by the later flooding was the biggest storm surge we've seen for 60 years 1953 was the previous because Ryan had caused a loss of life and led to the process that for instance gave us the building of the London tens barrier so we see the risk very clearly and we have to act and what is worrying is that if you go and see the plans that have been put in place by the Government we see evidence of the of the phenomenon that George described where depending on your point of political view you change, you have a different attitude towards how you should manage that risk and it is unfortunate that Owen Patterson has decided as the Minister responsible primarily the Cabinet Minister responsible for adapting the country to climate change he has spent most of his time disputing the science of climate change and the reason why that is dangerous I'll give you an example so next year the insurance companies and the government have agreed to introduce insurance system flood insurance system at the moment people who live in high risk properties are essentially subsidised by everybody else with flood insurance they don't pay a premium that reflects their risk they play a lower premium and we all pay everybody else pays extra now what's happened is that we're seeing an increase in risk an increase in flood claims insurance industry said to the government this is no longer sustainable and we need to work out a new system up until then the government had agreed with the insurance industry the insurance industry would offer flood insurance to the vast majority of people in return the government would increase its spending on flood defences the government has decided it doesn't really want to do that deal and so they've come up with this new system where there will be a pool of money that will be used to pay for the people who have the highest risk and we will all pay about ten pounds more on your premium so there will be an explicit charge on your insurance for next year that will represent subsidies for those at the highest risk now when this proposal was put out for consultation last June by DEFRA they did not include climate change in their thinking and this is a system that's supposed to run for 25 years to 2040 and all they had to do was go and look at the climate change risk assessment which Owen Patterson's predecessor at DEFRA Caroline Spellman had published showing the predictions for how much an increase in the number of properties that are going to be at high risk of flooding and they simply ignored evidence that they had published and that is an example I'm afraid where an ideological approach deciding you're not going to believe in climate change has real consequences for people it's going to be a problem because potentially this new scheme that they're launching next year is going to be unsustainable because they haven't planned for any increase in the number of claims for flooding is there from their own department that that's what they expect You started off by saying that you thought that the winter flooding events would be instrumental and be a real turning point and that there was political movement in Patterson's own party are you saying that that just hasn't impacted on him or that department One test will be to see whether Owen Patterson remains environment secretary after the reshuffle that's coming up I mean this be clear it's not just flooding that he's having problems with remember he's the one who accused the badgers of moving they go post when the coal didn't quite kill off the badgers as they were expecting so he's been struggling with the whole of his brief but frankly staying in that position and the way he's done it he's taken a team that's responsible for climate change adaptation and he cut it from 38 down to 6 people and that I don't know you'll have your chance to speak in a minute so they've cut this team that's responsible for over taking an overview of our resilience to to climate change and that's the kind of thing that's going to have a big impact because you're seeing that now the report today one of the things it didn't do was point out as the committee on climate change has done is that government spending on flood defences is not rising in line with the recommendations of the environment agency about how you build the flood defences to keep pace with climate change and the way it's increasing flood risk and let's be clear flood defences are not going to be the way in which we deal with this it's one way of dealing with it in particular in London our biggest risk from flooding is surface water flooding which will potentially overwhelm our very old sewer system and we saw ample evidence of that in many cities in 2007 when we had more than 3 billion pounds worth of damage done across the country most of which was inflicted in cities in fact ironically in Hull suffered a lot of flooding in the centre of this is having just opened a massive tidal defence mechanism to protect them from storm surges so we are going to have to deal with the fact that sea level is rising increasing the risk of coastal flooding that there's evidence that the rain that's falling and falling and more intense bouts that's going to cause an increased risk potentially of river flooding and surface water flooding and beyond that beyond the next two or three decades will depend on how successful the UK and every other country is at cutting greenhouse gas emissions which is why we equally have to pay attention to the political process now leading forward to trying to sign an international agreement in Paris in 2015 last point here is that you should go and have a look at this joint statement that's been released by the Chinese Prime Minister and David Cameron today on climate change in which both countries acknowledge the seriousness and the urgency of the problem of climate change amongst those who argue against action they always go oh the Chinese don't care they're just going to carry on they're people who have either never spoken to anybody from China or have never been there China takes climate change very very seriously because it understands that there's no point bringing a lot of people out of poverty if you're going to plunge them back in because they'll be spending all their time dealing with increased damage from weather they understand that poor people are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and that's why we should be understanding that this process now of both driving towards our own responsibilities cutting our emissions by 2050 we have to do and we also have to encourage every other country to similarly take action I think that none of the argument here is a lot of things you've talked about both on the adaptation side and on the mitigation side are incredibly expensive and going back to your analogy of the smoker going to the doctor it's useful up to a point isn't it because the difference is that the smoker all they've got to do is give up smoking and that maybe it's too late but it might help whereas what you're asking people to do is to go in for a lot of expensive measures that could harm the economy people argue and therefore you're not just asking them to do something that won't have much of an impact and all of that is based on a risk calculation that you can't be sure about so that's why it's difficult isn't it well I mean it's interesting to ask how much would somebody be willing to spend to avoid death is there a level at which they say no you know what I'm not going to pay that I'd much rather spend it on something else so it is really about the risk here and the risks we're talking about are very, very serious risks one of the dangers is that we look at the climate change that's already happening and we think that climate change in future is going to be slightly worth fersia now we're talking about potential risks here that are almost unimaginable so we're heading towards the situation that if we do not reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases we could by the end of the century be talking about temperatures in excess of 2 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times now the earth has not had experienced that level of temperature on a sustained basis for millions of years so millions of years humans have been around for a modern human species about 200,000 years most of civilisation was built in the last 12,000 years since the last major ice age so we're talking about going towards this period about 3 million years ago when the polar ice caps were much smaller and sea level global sea level was about 5 to 10 metres higher than it is today that's where we're heading if we do not reduce our emissions everybody who tells me ah you know what we'll just adapt I mean it's just madness that is no way to manage risk we don't have experience in this world we don't have evolutionary experience of that climate we're creating a prehistoric climate and what's more it's not just our lives and livelihoods we have to worry about it's all the future generations who will have to deal with the consequences is are you willing to take that gamble are you willing to say you know what doctor unless you can tell me which cigarette I'm not going to give up smoking or are you going to say you know what I understand this and I'm going to take measures so let's deal with the cost issue the cost of so there is an investment to be made in order to convert from our current economy which is largely dependent on fossil fuels to high carbon and convert it towards one that is low carbon and that is an investment but at the moment remember we're essentially pumping out greenhouse gases into the atmosphere which is a form of pollution because it causes harm and nobody pays that you pick it up in terms of the damage that's done to you through climate change it's not a charge on the polluters so at the moment the cost of products and services that involve the release of greenhouse gases emissions are artificially cheap that's the basis for putting an extra charge the carbon price on so once you start doing this and you start investing in alternatives that don't release greenhouse gas emissions you start to see a convergence and the fact is that in the future we're going to probably need to as a world invest about 1% of global GDP in order to avoid the very, very serious risks now that's not an insubstantial sum but given the alternative it is quite affordable and what's more it won't be just the fact that we avoid the climate risks the Chinese are interested for instance in shutting down their coal-fired power station because there would be an immediate benefit in terms of an increase in the quality of air in their cities Beijing suffering from deadly smogs, terrible smogs which is disrupting lives disrupting economic activity so all those other co-benefits as I said we're creating a cleaner more efficient economy so there is plenty there for us to want and it's very attractive and it's affordable I'd like to bring things back to the UK in your introduction Stephen you talked about how your job is about understanding what this kind of means for us and you alluded to the attributing the link between climate change and the winter flooding and that being a little bit complicated could you get into some of that this is the chapter and verse that Bob kindly introduced me so yes, here's the chapter and verse so I talked about attributing hot periods so high temperatures to climate change and we can do that fairly well now so we heard earlier from George about the Texas heat wave and we can make an attribution that's much more likely because of climate change I don't have the numbers with me rainfall is much more difficult and it's kind of interestingly difficult so when we get high rainfall over a winter like we did this time it's the product of two effects it's the amount of rain you get out of a single storm multiplied if you like by the number of storms you get and what we got this winter was an awful lot of storms chucking out an awful lot of rain so it's those two things which respond differently potentially to climate change that we have to unravel, this is why scientifically it's a difficult task so the amount of rain that each storm dumps on us that's the thing that Bob mentioned that in a warmer world the atmosphere holds more water so it can rain more out so we're really very confident of that and there is evidence accumulating around the world not specific to the UK that that is we're observing that effect what is much more difficult to say anything about is whether we are seeing more storms because of climate change and that's really the next generation of climate science to try and understand that and it's hard for the reason that you challenged me earlier because what we're trying to understand is how weather systems are going to change in a change in climate and you challenge me as to whether the models are good enough for this kind of thing so we're beginning to get better but there's a lot more work to do on that so that's why rainfall is difficult it's the amount of rain in individual storm that is higher but it's the number of storms that's more difficult to assess and in terms of the work that's been done on the storms in this winter particularly where are we with that so the group at Oxford led by Miles Allen I think Adam is a member of his group have done one of these attribution statements and they do show a small increase in the rainfall because of climate change and I think it is this warmer world holding more moisture the interesting step that they're now taking is saying okay given that rainfall how does that affect the flood risk and actually they see a much bigger effect of human induced climate change on the flood risk compared to the rainfall it's because of where the rain fell and the kind of duration of it and on the modelling overall I suspect this is something that people in New Orleans will have heard a bit about there hasn't been a great deal of warming since 1998 what's going on there the models didn't predict that why should we trust your models now so this is back to the global mean temperature so since in the last 15 years or so the global mean temperature has risen slightly but much less rapidly than it did since the 1970s if you look at model simulations of warming due to greenhouse gases over a period of 100 years we expect about two periods of 15 years when there is little warming we expect other periods when there is more rapid warming than average so this is what I was trying to say at the beginning that climate change is really the science of global averages over long 30, 40 year time scales so it's not unexpected if we interrogate the models these regions have less warming it's very important to say that although the global mean temperature hasn't risen there are many other indicators of all warming worlds so shrinking sea ice in the Arctic shrinking glaciers, less snow for me the most persuasive is the increase in sea level so we see a sustained increase of sea level in about two millimetres per year continuing right through the last 15 years and that's a signature of a climate system that's continuing to accumulate more heat and energy and do you going back to the impact on communication of these of these kind of extreme events when extreme events happen is there a kind of huge influx of inquiries to the Met Office from people or do you get those inquiries all the time anyway? We do get lots of inquiries all the time but you're right things like the winter so Julius Llingo, my boss and I put together a report on the the metrology that led to the flooding and the potential role of climate change on that 40,000 times now when climate is red 40,000 times but there's massive interest and clearly we are coming full circle now it's events like this through which we will see the impacts of climate change it's events like this that raises it in all of our minds and there are four categories it's either too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry those are the canonical events that bring it to our minds I think Okay we're nearing the time when you can go and get some more wine which I'm sure is very important to everyone but some sort of final thoughts before we before we have a break Anything that Bob said that sort of I'm kind of struck there's a slight contradiction in the sense that Bob was saying that the winter flooding is a sort of turning point event in the political discourse in the UK you were saying that actually extreme events are a little bit unhelpful in certain ways is there a contradiction there? I think the thing I keep coming back to is that the wave of public attitudes and we could say belief or now I'm wary of a belief word because it has religious connotations but we could say the conviction that climate change is happening is extremely complex without the direct correlation we cannot assume just as we cannot say an individual weather event is necessarily caused by climate change we cannot necessarily assume that a single trigger is going to produce a change in public attitude and whilst I don't doubt that for some people this will be a seminal moment attitudes to climate change are generally speaking people often talk about there being a moment when the light goes on or a moment when they move from a situation of being unsure about it to a situation of being certain so for some people that will undoubtedly happen but I would say overall that I am doubtful about whether that is happening across the population as a whole so for people who are very much involved in the policy arena this may be the case but I think it is with all respect to Bob I think it is very hard for people like ourselves and I suspect people in the audience who are both very involved in climate change in terms of utter conviction but also possibly in the audience who are not so sure about it is very hard for us to see anything concerning this issue with objectivity because we are so emotionally involved in what we wish to see so we are all run by the same set of biases it is one thing that we all have in common so I would love to believe that this is a moment for the transforming public opinion but the truth is 20 years now we have been talking about climate change over that 20 years we have had a number of extreme weather events they have been clocking up there have been records broken time and time and time again and yet the base level of general concern about climate change has still over that time not shifted significantly in fact over the last few years it has tended somewhat to go down so we are not seeing if this was medicine if this was epidemiology we would be expecting to see some kind of correlation between the two ok we are pretty much bang on for our break so I encourage you to go and charge your glasses and come back with your questions for the second half