 So what I'm going to talk to you about tonight is the climate emergency in Scotland and what we can do about it. I could give a science talk about all the things, all the science of climate change, but I'll just give you a little introduction at the beginning to the science. But then I'll focus the rest on what we can do about it as individuals, because I'm often asked, you know, it seems like such a big problem. It's not anything that we as individuals can do about it. Surely it's only governments of big industry that have to play a role. But in fact, we can all make a difference to climate change. And that's the main point I aim to get across in this evening's talk. So the first thing to know is that climate change has really shifted up the agenda. So everybody's talking about it. Until COVID came along, it was probably the most talked about thing in the news. And these are just a few of the headlines that have appeared just recently on climate change. It's all in the media. You see about it on the news all the time. And it's particularly important for us as Pat said, we've got the Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP26, which will be in Glasgow this year. So it's particularly on our minds in Scotland and in the UK at the moment. Climate change is an existential threat. It's something that is going to affect all of us. It's something that is affecting all of us. When we started talking about these issues 20 years ago, we were still trying to try to persuade the skeptics and people who thought that it wasn't happening. The world's moved on really. And people are wanting to make change governments are wanting to make change. Many governments have committed towards towards net net zero targets. So the world is moving on, despite what some people may think about whether it's real or not. So the vast consensus of science, scientific expertise says it is happening. It is, it is produced by humans, and, and the world needs to move swiftly to tackle it. So if we look at this, this slide was produced about six years ago. And you can see that these are the climate change effects around the world, which include animals and fish be affected floods rising sea levels, sea, sea level, sea level, water shortages, crop changes, melting ice and wildfires. And if you just have a look where this is, you can see Australia and the west coast of the US, showing up as particularly important for wildfires. And, you know, since this slide was made there's been the devastating wildfires in Australia and those occurring down the, down the western seaboard of the US currently in Canada and California and such like. We've also seen floods, devastating floods in Europe, which are predicted on this map. We've seen crop failures and changes in famines, resulting from crop failures across the globe, and also changes, impacts on biodiversity, fishes and animals, which are occurring all around the world. So this hotspot map that was produced in 2014. You can see what's what's come to pass, and all of those issues we're actually seeing now so climate change isn't something that's going to affect us in the future. It's something that is affecting us now is very real now. If we look at the climate change impacts, according to NASA, we are expected to experience more frequent and stronger heat waves and the Met Office just last week. Issued its first heat wave, a weather warning for heat waves and that's going to become more prevalent in the future. Heat waves are no longer going to be something that we look forward to. It's going to be something that we that we have to take care to avoid the worst excesses of people dying heat waves. Many thousands died in the European heat wave, and we've had a number of deaths in the UK from recent heat waves. There are more storms project more projected to occur more floods such as those that we've just seen in in Germany last week, more droughts and more famines. It's expected to be about a one meter sea level rise by 2100. That's a blink of an eye in geological time, and we could see a rise of, you know, one meter. That's that's incredible amount. And that could affect many of our coastal communities, even within the lifetimes of some of the people on this call. We'll see more pest and diseases, and we could be seeing an ice free Arctic in the summer before the mid century. There are a number of risks and shown over on the right hand side of the slide are just some of the risks. So we got risk to unique and threatened systems. So these kick in these risks become prevalent after only about one degrees rise in temperature. And as we move through this graph, we've got some of the things which become a higher risk as we get into higher temperatures. As you can see from this graph around two degrees Celsius is when we really start getting into all of the high risks in all of the risk categories. So the limit was set in the Paris agreement that we must not exceed two degrees Celsius above pre industrial temperatures. And I'll come back to that in a moment with with and the Paris agreement also says that we should make every effort to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre industrial levels. And for any of you who are still not convinced about climate change. These are the global average temperatures plotted out from 1850 to the most recent year 2020 for which data is available for the four year. And as you can see we've had this large rise, particularly from the 1960s and 70s through the 1980s 90s 2000s up to 2020. And global temperatures are linked to and driven by changes in global greenhouse gas emissions which I'll come into in a moment. This is just a graph that shows you it plots the five year average from 1880 up to the present time. I'll just show this little animation, because this shows how temperatures have changed globally. What you can see is the blue areas are below the long term average, and the yellow and red areas are above the long term average. So this is, you can have a look at this this is freely available on the NASA website. And I'll just set the set the video going now so that you can see it. So as we start off in the 1800s we got a small area in South Africa there but that disappears. It's fairly blue and we get some yellow and red patches occurring. It heats up around about the time of the second World War but that doesn't last. Look what kicks in after 1970 from 1970 onwards. The map goes entirely red. And that's taken us up to the present time. And you can see there's hardly any blue areas though those below the long term average, and many, many, many, many areas that are yellow and red, which showed that we're above the long term average. And to look at that in a different way the next slide just shows what's called the barcode of climate change. What it is is every year since 1818 30, I can't see that can't see the top of my slide. I can't remember which year is up to 2020. So each year is ordered just on the on the year that it occurred, and the color of the stripe represents blue is below the long term average with dark blues quite a lot below and light blue just a bit below. And those areas are the ones that are above the long term average and what you can see here is a very clear one warming towards the right hand side of the graph is much more red than it is blue. It was blue at the beginning but it's gradually turned red, particularly from about 1970 onwards. And as I mentioned, this is driven largely by changes in greenhouse gas concentrations. This is the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere that's taken from the the keeling curve so called keeling curve, which shows that the greenhouse gas concentration the atmosphere is now consistently above 400 parts per million. Now when I started giving lectures on climate change in round about 2000, I look back at some of the slides I was using. And they were saying we're now up to about 360 parts per million. And if we're not careful we're going to reach 400 parts per million within within a decade or so. And that is in fact what has happened because we failed to tackle climate change. We failed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. And that's recorded in the atmosphere you can see the sawtooth there, which is showing the earth breathing if you like the northern hemisphere absorbing the CO2. There's a larger land mass in the northern hemisphere. And in the northern hemisphere summer, it draws down carbon dioxide as it's fixed by photosynthesis. So that CO2 is released. And that gives this this sawtooth, which is actually the earth breathing but what you can see is the long term average is increasing year on year on year. And it's not only carbon dioxide and it's not only recently that we've seen these issues. We can follow it back by looking at the gas trapped in ice cores. It's going from 10,000 years ago up until the present time. And what you can see is for 10,000 years, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere remains relatively stable. And then when the industrial revolution occurs, we get this massive increase and the blow up of it is shown over here in the inset, which shows from about 1800s onwards up to 1900s to get a gradual increase, and then a rapid increase in carbon dioxide. And then concentrations in the atmosphere. And we get a similar pattern for the other two main biogenic greenhouse gases nitrous oxide, which is again a lot more fluctuation but relatively stable in the long term average over the last 10,000 years, but a massive increase in nitrous oxide emissions since the industrial revolution, and the same with methane relatively flat, but a massive increase industry since the industrial revolution. So putting all these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we know that they trap the heat. So the incoming radiation can get through the atmosphere, but these gases trap the heat within the atmosphere. So we understand the physics perfectly well. And it'd be surprised actually if we didn't see an increase in temperature, knowing these increasing concentrations. So there really is no doubt about the causal link between our emission of greenhouse gases, and the rise in temperature, and the climate change that we are experiencing. So how long is it before we surpass 1.5 degrees so 1.5 degrees was this aspirational target that's in the Paris agreement that's going to be talked about again in Glasgow this November, when the conference apart is meets again. But we're looking back to this target, which was set a target to try and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre industrial times. The bad news is the global temperatures are already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius since the pre industrial times since the industrial revolution. So we've only got about 0.3 degrees until we reach that target. At the current rate of emissions will exceed the 1.5 degree warming target within about five to 12 years. And those were met office and IPCC estimates that were made three years ago. And the estimates from the world meteorological organizations and organizations suggest that one, we have a one in four charts that the world will exceed that target at 1.5 degrees for at least one year by 2025. So we're already pushing up against that limit. That's why we're in a state of climate emergency. We currently emit about 1332 tons of carbon dioxide every second. greenhouse gas emission reductions need to be immediate and extremely aggressive. So the UK, Scotland and many other countries have declared a climate emergency. We're not just calling it climate change anymore, we recognize that we're in a climate emergency, and that we need to address it as such with urgency. We can do about it so we can tackle it in a number of ways. So if we look at this graph that the yellow line shows the business as usual emissions. We currently emit round about 50 gigatons of CO2 per year, that's 1000 million tons so 50,000 million tons of greenhouse gases per year. So we've gone up to around a bit higher by 2020 and under business as usual that will continue to rise until about 2060. The problem is we don't have that long to wait. We can't wait for business as usual. And for those greenhouse gas emissions to come down by themselves. We have to make that happen. So to stay below 1.5 or two degrees Celsius which is shown on the red line. We need a mix of measures. And then the light green here are the conventional abatement technologies. So this is basically swapping out our energy generation our fossil fuels with renewable energy, and perhaps some nuclear, which don't emit CO2. So we can go so far just by changing the way that we use fossil fuels by reducing our use of fossil fuels. We're going to have some emitting technologies, even up to 2050. So there are things like nitrous oxide emissions and methane emissions from agriculture. We have to eat, we can't stop doing agriculture. And there's going to be some emissions of greenhouse gases coming from agriculture. So as well as these conventional abatement technologies, we're going to need something to offset or to mop up these remaining difficult to obey emissions, for example those from those from agriculture, and possibly those from continued use of fossil fuels in aviation. Some carbon removal, removal technologies. I'm not going to talk too much about those today, apart from the nature based solutions for carbon removal. So that's things like forestry and peatland restoration, which absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere, and it can lock up that carbon out of the atmosphere, and that's a negative emission technology, which can offset those remaining emissions. And we know that we're going to need some of those carbon removal options and rapid and aggressive move away from fossil fuels to more towards renewables. And because we've got these emitting technologies still emitting, we need the negative emission technologies to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to allow us to stay on this trajectory of staying below two degrees Celsius, or even better, under 1.5 degrees Celsius. So what are we going to do about it in the UK and Scotland. So firstly, where do our emissions come from in Scotland. These are the latest figures for which we, the latest figures that we have for the year 2018 it takes a while to put these together so it's a couple of years behind. But these are the latest Scottish government figures for where our emissions come from. You can see that about 5% of our emissions are from energy supply that's greatly changed over the last 10 years, as we've transitioned away from fossil fuels, and we're now driving most of our electricity generation from renewables, so that only accounts for 5% Transport as proportion has increased up to 36% of our emissions. So a switch away from fossil fuels to power our vehicles through the internal combustion engine and a move towards electric which you can generate from renewables will be a big step in the right direction for decarbonizing transport, as well as the possibility for hydrogen maybe for some larger vehicles and fleet vehicles. Our industrial processes account for nearly 30% 28% of our greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture has remained steady at around about 18% of our emissions, mainly from nitrous oxide from fertilizer and from methane production mainly from cattle in our agricultural sector. The buildings account for 23% of our emissions waste only 4% but still a little bit, and you can see that forestry has got a minus figure here. That's because our forestry is currently absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere, as it grows. So that is contributing to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So that if you like, is our existing negative emission technology. So that's what we that's where our emissions come from as a country. So what can we do about reducing them. In order to address it. We've had a number of acts in the UK and in Scotland which are world leading in in their ambition and in their in their targets. So the climate change act in the UK set out an emission reduction target of 42% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. The climate change act Scotland 2009 set out similar targets so 40% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. But this has since been superseded by the climate change emission reduction target Scotland act of 2019, which sets the UK, a target of net zero emissions by 2050. Which has already declared a climate emergency as I mentioned net zero emissions by 2045. So that means we need to cut all of our emissions to zero, and those that we can't cut to zero. We need to, we need to have negative, negative, negative emissions technologies or greenhouse gas removal by things like planting forests and restoration to suck up that remaining carbon. I'm going to come back to that a little bit later. For the rest of the talk I'm going to talk about what we can do about it as individuals because I'm frequently asked about this about what can we do about it. People want to know what individual contribution they can make in their everyday lives to reducing climate change and to playing their part in getting us towards net zero. So here are a few ideas about things that we can do, which I'm going to talk about some of them in a little more detail. And then we'll come back to show a little video at the end, which just summarizes all of this information. So some options that can reduce our climate footprint, working from home more if you can. I think COVID, the COVID crisis has been a dreadful, a terrible thing, but as shown us that the world doesn't stop turning when more people work from home. So for people that can work from home, they do work from home. And I think that homeworking will increase in the future. There's been a suggestion that it could in working from home could increase by 550% after the UK lockdown lifts. That's the first lockdown. And already a number of companies and organizations are introducing work from home policies where you can work at least one day or a few days from home. So that we don't need to take that journey into the office when it's not necessary when we can do that work at home. So the University of Aberdeen, for example, who I work for has introduced a new policy, a work from home policy where people can opt into working from home when it suits them. You can also use active transport or take public transport whenever you can by active transport. I just mean walk and bike on short journeys whenever you can, or to car share or to use public transport. So we use our private vehicles, the less impact we have on the environment. We can fly less or not at all. So I used to fly all over the world before the COVID pandemic. I used to have the worst climate footprint I think of anybody in the university through attending meetings, even though I was telling people that we needed to tackle climate change. So, you know, hypocrisy is called out there. But I've learned over the pandemic that I can do a lot of the business and a lot of the meetings that we've had by, by Zoom and by teams the way that we're meeting tonight. On some occasions there's no, there's no, there's no better, better way to meet them than in person. Maybe you're looking forward to getting back to your regular meetings in person where you can see and talk and hear these things live. But for some of the meetings, you know, we don't need to fly to Europe for a two hour meeting and then fly back again. We can do that quite adequately using electronic media. So the emissions, global emissions dropped by about 17% of their peak. But already now they're back up to just 5% below normal. And the emissions for this year are projected to fall back onto the same trajectory as we were on before. So even though we've had a brief blip in emissions, emissions of greenhouse gases, we're now back onto that same trajectory of emitting more and more greenhouse gases. Another thing that you can do in your daily life is eat more fruit and veg and eat less meat and dairy. So that's one of the biggest things that you can do in your life is change your diet. If you're consuming a lot of meat, just eating a little bit less and consuming less dairy has a large climate change impact. So if you're, if you're willing to become vegan or vegetarian, so much the better, but if you're not, lots of people aren't willing to make that once in a lifetime decision, I'm never going to eat me or dairy again. So anybody can make a difference by eating less, not having meat and dairy and every meal by reducing portion sizes, and just eating less by having, for example, a few meals each week, or a few days each week where where you admit meat and dairy and focus on more fruit and veg, and it's better for our health as well, not just for the planet. One of my big bunk bears having lots of stuff around the place and never throwing anything out is to not buy stuff we don't need and to make things last longer. This could have a big impact. Our consumerism is driving greenhouse gas emissions not here necessarily, but elsewhere in the world. So our throwaway culture and our must have must have the latest technology isn't helping the planet. You use less energy by turning down the thermostat, you can insulate your home, which has a great impact on on reducing your energy bills as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You can move to renewable energy to heat your home so when your boiler needs replacing for example, you may be kind of afforded to do it, just off on a win, but when your boiler needs replacing is worth going the extra mile, and to replace it with a for heat pump, which will have much lower emissions. And if you've got the purchase in power also purchase green low greenhouse gas alternatives. So things like electric cars are much better for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and importantly smaller cars. There's been a trend towards bigger and bigger cars SUVs Chelsea tracks as whatever you like to call them, which are large and satisfy the ego, but they're not very very not very good for the climate, because they admit lots of greenhouse gases. So having a smaller car is better. And we can also create some carbon sinks. I'm going to return to that in a moment. So I'm just going to spend a little more time now talking about dietary change and giving you some of the evidence, and also some of the evidence on how we can change land use in Scotland to try and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. So let's start with the diet. Firstly, a quarter of all our global emissions of greenhouse gases come from food. So 2626% of emissions come from food. In fact, if we include all the other things such as a transport refrigeration, the food system is responsible for over 30% of our greenhouse gas emissions. From food over half come from animal products, despite occupying a relatively relatively small share of the protein and the calories and the massive food that we eat. They're responsible for 58% of all greenhouse gas emissions from the food system. And of those animal products, about half of those are from beef and lamb alone. So by reducing our meat and dairy consumption, we can have a really significant impact on our own personal climate footprint. I'll give you a couple of examples. So here's ruminant meat, for example, which is shown over here on the left of the graph in pink. These are the greenhouse gas emissions in kilograms of CO2 equivalents per kilogram of product. You can see that it's many times higher from the ruminant meats, many times higher than the white meats, the pork and poultry, and those are many times higher than the plant based proteins. So if we shift our diets from position A over here, a high proportion of ruminant meat towards B, a higher proportion of fruit and veg, we can greatly reduce the climate footprint. That's because ruminant meat in particular as a climate impact that's about 10 to 100 times greater than that plant based food. That's not 10% higher. That's 10 times higher or 100 times higher in the worst case. So this is a real massive impact that you can have in your everyday lives to eat less meat and dairy and more fruit and veg. Here's an example of the greenhouse gas, the relative difference in the greenhouse gas footprint of different diets. The vegan diet is 40% to 50% less greenhouse gas emissions than the typical diet. Vegetarian diet is much, also much reduced, maybe about 30% less than your average diet. The vegan diet also reduces it a bit and reducing meat can also have an impact, maybe up to about 10% reduction in emissions. So vegan diets have the lowest climate impact than vegetarian diets, but all reductions in meat and dairy can deliver climate benefits. So if you want to make a difference, consider eating less meat and dairy. You can see the climate change impact that is so much greater for ruminant meat or for animal products. If we have a look at this graph, these are the impacts on climate change, land use, energy, air quality and water quality. So you can see for all of these metrics, the ruminant meat performs up to 10 to 100 times worse than the plant based foods in all of these metrics. The amount of land that's used, the amount of energy consumed, the impacts on air quality and the impacts on water quality. So you're not only helping by reducing your meat consumption, you're not only helping the climate, you're also freeing up land and freeing up water and improving air and water quality. So can we use the land that's freed if we eat less meat and dairy? Can we use that to free up that land to use it for other things like a tackling climate change? Well, over 30% of the crops that are grown on the planet are fed to livestock rather than humans. So that's over 30% of the land that we could be using to feed ourselves. So eating less meat and dairy would free up land to use for other things like protected biodiversity or tackling climate change. And this works because when plants grow, they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That's the most important greenhouse gas as I've described. And when they absorb that carbon dioxide, they lock it up in a form that is not in the atmosphere and they store it away for years to decades. So the land can therefore be used to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help to tackle climate change. It's one of those so-called negative emissions technologies. So nature-based solutions like protecting wetlands and peatlands, restoring degraded peatlands and woodlands, better managing our woodlands and soils, and creating new native woodland is really good for biodiversity and can help us to address climate change at the same time. So it makes sense to invest in a better form of better form of agriculture, a better form of a better food system, and to use some of the land that's freed through these improvements for nature-based solutions. Nature-based solutions can be a really important tool in our arsenal to tackle climate change. So the emission reduction potential of improving our peatlands, planting new woodlands, restoring degraded peatlands, and forests and coastal marine systems, and better managing our woodlands can be up to 500 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year just in the UK alone by 2050. So that's a significant technology that we can use to tackle climate change. But some words of caution, the land can't do it all. There's not enough land to soak up emissions from all the other sectors like transport, energy generation, aviation. So we can't just say it's okay, we'll plant more trees and we can go on with business as usual. We need immediate and aggressive action across all sectors of the economy if we're to meet our net zero targets. And the other thing is that not all land-based solutions are necessarily good for biodiversity. If you think about planting production forestry like conifers like sicker spruce, that is not so good for biodiversity as planting native woodlands. So they need to be chosen carefully and implemented carefully so that we can get the multiple benefits both for biodiversity and for climate change only in that way are they truly nature-based solutions. But if implemented carefully, nature-based solutions are good for biodiversity, good for people, and good for climate change adaptation and mitigation. But obviously this needs to be fair to citizens, especially disadvantaged groups, and to the farmers and land managers who are going to be asking to change practices and to change the way potentially that they make their livelihoods. And we need to help them in a just transition towards a net zero future. So what's needed? I think EU exit gives us the opportunity to rethink how we will reward landowners for good management that is beneficial for climate change. We're out of the EU now and we're out of the common agricultural policy, which means that we no longer need to pay farmers just for having the land or to produce food for which there's no market. So we can rethink how we reward landowners to take care of the land and to provide stewardship of the land for the benefit of biodiversity and climate. The workforce needed to implement nature-based solutions in the rural environment is insufficient in number skills and training to deliver nature-based solutions at the pace required to achieve net zero by 2045. So we're in a position now where the COVID-19 economic recovery package, which we all agree that we need, needs to offer opportunities to invest in rural low carbon jobs for a green recovery that delivers net zero by 2040. So let's not try and recover in the same way as we were. Let's not go back to the industries that were emitting the greenhouse gases. Let's invest in new industries and new jobs and green jobs for a brighter future. Here's some examples. Over on the left, this is the green recovery levelling up through nature by the Green Alliance, which came out a couple of months ago. This is looking at the labour market challenge, so where there's the most challenge in the labour market. And these are the woodland creation opportunities, the seagrass opportunities, and the bog restoration opportunities, which is shown on these maps. You can see they quite often overlap with the areas that have the highest labour market challenge. So if we can create jobs in these areas to support these nature-based solutions, we can create good sustainable jobs for the future. And just an example. These are the total of nearly 200,000 jobs were available in the nature-based sectors in 2016. And here's an example from the Ken Goms Connect project, which looks at the direct jobs created by nature-based solutions and the supporting jobs, for example, in hospitality, tourism, recreation and management and support activities. It creates all sorts of jobs in the rural economy. So we could use our economic recovery package to invest in these green jobs, which would also help rural, sustainable rural livelihoods to be developed, but also allow us to hit and net zero targets. Right, I'd like to finish now with a short video. Yeah, I'm just about on time. I'd like to finish with a short video that just summarizes some of the individual things that everyone can do in their everyday lives. This is something that we put together in our local community, a small community in rural Aberdeenshire. We're working towards net zero ourselves as a small community. And one of the talented people who does videos and design and our community use some figures that are available to show, put this video together to show what can be done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the individual level. I'll just play this video and then I'll finish off. We'd like to take up the challenge to also cut. The first question is from somebody, Brian Allen, who's asking about whether we might flip much faster than is predicted. Is it possible that there'll be a catastrophic flip in one of the next few years, never mind a decade or two? Yeah, so that that's a possibility. So that little risk diagram that I showed that was between yellow and purple. The one on the extreme right was the risk of these large scale discontinuities. So that would be things like slowing down of the of the flow of warm water from the Gulf Stream to our shores which would plunge us into a much colder conditions. So that's one of them. The other ones are methane hydrates being released from the seafloor as the arctic warms, and also the release of carbon from permafrost. So these are so called tipping points because that's when we go from a gradual climate change, which is bad enough to positive feedback loops between climate change, causing more greenhouse gas emissions released, which causes more climate change and then more greenhouse gas gases to be released. So we get into that downward spiral of increasing climate change. So there is a very real risk of that and the more the higher the temperature increase we are willing to accept the higher the risk of those discontinuities occurring. That's why the global community set the targets at two degrees Celsius as a bare minimum with a with an effort to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It's thought that that's unlikely if we can stay within those limits. If we push much above those limits then we're in uncharted territory and those discontinuities could happen. Good question. Another question about the potential of just genetically engineering crops to make them fix carbon more. Is that something you think might be feasible and useful in Scotland. There's a few people doing work on this using either traditional genetic modification and also CRISPR technologies CRISPR technologies just remove genes they don't put any foreign DNA into the material so that there's there's work going on in both of those. There's an institute called the Salk Institute in California which is doing work into breeding crops which have deeper deeper roots which are more difficult to break down so they don't decompose as easily. So that's another way of improving crops so that they they actually sequester more carbon so they store more carbon. I should say that there's there's no big appetite for genetic modification in Scotland in the UK and in the EU in fact it's banned in the EU. Of course that may have a role in some parts of the world I don't think anytime soon it's going to have a big role to play here so I think we have to do the best with the tools that we've currently got available in the crops that we've covered. Another question about the net zero target for Scotland by 2045. Is that realistic and is it anyway too late. It wouldn't be too late if everybody were to meet net zero by around about mid century. It would be potentially it would keep us within that two degree limit, especially have if we have some negative emissions some removal of carbon dioxide from the UK is a delicate balance between what's what's possible that the 2050 the 2050 target in the UK and the 2045 target in Scotland is already massively massively ambitious if you look at what we've got to do to get there you know in the space of only only you know three decades what was it 2020 yeah 23 in three decades we've got a totally transform our society. It could go quicker, but and we should aim for net net neutral net net zero before 2045 if we can, but we have to balance it with between what's realistic if it's too unrealistic. I fear that the public and politicians will say, well we've missed our targets is too late we can't do anything about it. So it has to stretch us but it has to be achievable. A few people have been asking about the size of the human population and human population growth, which is something you didn't mention. Yeah, it always comes. Yeah, always comes up that one that is true that the consumption is driven by individuals and the more individuals we have on the planet, the more we emit greenhouse gases to feed to feed that consumption. I know that the best way to deal with that is to is to raise people out of poverty. So I'm not an epidemiologist or a population specialist, but I talk to people who are, and they tell me that the women's education, improving the livelihoods and in raising people out of poverty people have more kids than they need, because they need people to look after them when they're older and they, and when a number of your children are likely to die you tend to have more. So there's a correlation, an excellent correlation in fact by raising people out of poverty and a falling birthrate. So the best thing we can do is tackle poverty, particularly in the least developed countries. That's the best way that we can tackle tackle population rise. It's projected to be round about a nine to 10 billion people by 2050, and we're projected to have maybe 12 billion, but that is that is then leveling off by 2100. And with that, with the trajectory of people coming out of poverty, that should take care of itself but we can't be complacent, but it's probably probably best not to have draconian laws like a one child policy like China did a few years ago it's better to do that by raising people out of poverty. A question about governments and their willingness, for example, to redesign cities. There's a mention of cities which have been redesigned to discourage short car journeys, for example, and the question is, do you think Scottish politicians are serious enough about the climate emergency to take those kind of steps. Well, I hope so. The Climate Change Assembly Scotland reported recently, and there were some really far reaching recommendations just from members of the public. So the jury or the committee was selected, well, not randomly was selected to represent all sectors of the community from all geographical regions. They reported back to the Scottish government recently, and they're, they're basically saying the people are telling the government, you're not going fast enough and you're not doing enough and we want you to do more. I think that was a great, a great example of the people telling government to get a move on and to put their foot on it and to show more ambition. You know, I was worried that it was going to be that it wouldn't come up with these sort of radical solutions but I think they really, they really told the government that they need to step on it. There are also some questions about, for example, the high price of electricity relative to gas and heat pumps and so on. And do you think the government could intervene more to balance these costs and also to promote things like district heating systems and so on. I think it has to, yeah, so district heating system is good for, good for large, you know, for densely populated areas, but I think there also has to be some rebalancing, you know, gas. If you consider that the environment of damage that fossil fuels cause, that's not included in the price of gas. So if we had a carbon price, a carbon price on all products that would push gas much more expensive, and it would make electricity much cheaper. So I think that those are the sorts of things that we need to be looking at to provide the incentives for these things to happen. Also providing, you know, providing a government grant scheme, which allows people to switch to heat pumps or other forms when it's coming up for time renewing their gas boilers or for rural properties renewing their oil boilers to subsidize the fitting of heat pumps. So I think that's got to be the way to go. Yeah, and there are other questions about the need for incentives and the inbuilt resistance of many people to change. Yeah. And, and what, you know, do you think incentives will work and what might they be incentives will work. Money always talks if something's more expensive people are less willing to do it. If, if, if, if, if you come if it comes up to the time to replace your gas boiler and your gas for it costs 1500 pounds to replace it. If there's a government subsidy that makes it much cheaper to install the heat pump, including sort of retrofitting your radius if that needs to be done and such like then that's going to be the option that people choose. So the government has to put his money where its mouth is and spend some of that money that it's got committed to reducing our climate change impact on making it easier for us to make the changes. I tried to show in the video and in the, in the, in the talk the things that we can make changes in our everyday life, but some of those were big ticket items like changing your boiler insulation changing your car to electric. Those sort of decisions that you only make every few years, every five or 10 years, they have to be incentivized as well. Okay, there's also a question about the potential conflict, not necessarily just in Scotland or even the UK, but of clearing forests in order to grow more plant based products. That's a good one that comes up quite often as well. So it's easy to eat. I don't eat meat and dairy now for climate change reasons. I gave up dairy last year as well because I was talking about it enough I thought it's about time I put my money where my mouth is. So there's a lot of things you can buy. So I don't buy almond milk, for example, because almond milk is imported from California or wherever it's produced. And they use lots of pesticides and the bees are moved around to fertilize the almonds and such like. I tend to buy oat milk partly because I prefer the flavor and partly because you can grow it in temperate climates and you don't have such a big climate impact. So there is a big climate impact of soya, especially when it's from South America, and there's a big climate impact for example of oil palm if it's from Southeast Asia. So you have to be careful in what you choose because a vegan or vegetarian diet doesn't necessarily mean it's more sustainable or better for the planet. But it doesn't mean that we need to grow more vegetables as I mentioned in the talk, 30% of all the food we grow on the planet is fed to livestock. So rather than humans, and then we eat the livestock, it would be much more efficient to use that land to grow food for human consumption. And then we need to expand the agricultural area at all we could do it all on that, that land that was currently used for producing feed feed for livestock. There's a question about working working from home, a couple of questions along these lines that you know you were saying work from home if you can but of course in a country like Scotland where it's cold in winter individuals all heating their own home is not necessarily going to save energy. That's, that's a really good point. Yeah, so that's a fairly broad brush thing, which balances out the home heating against the transport costs. So it tends to work out on average, better, but it's much better to work at home in the, in the summer when you don't eat home than it is in the winter that that benefit is is much more eroded in the winter where you're having to, to eat homes. So that's that's a really good point and one that I should have brought out in the talk. And staying with Scotland for the moment. The land ownership in Scotland of course a high proportion of the land is owned by a small number of people and we may cover some of this in our next talk also, but is that land ownership a barrier to nature based solutions. It could be a barrier, or it could be a benefit if you look at it in one way with with relatively few landowners. There are fewer people to persuade that it's a good idea, especially if there's money to be made. So if the, if the system of subsidy of farming and land ownership and land use converts to one where you are rewarded for doing something that's beneficial for the climate. Large areas of unforested land could be reforested large areas of degraded P lands could be restored, and there would be grants available for that. So actually potentially those landowners could make money from doing nature based solutions, and the fact that you've only got a few people are relatively few people to persuade to do that could make it easier. So there's I'm in no way making excuses for the land ownership in Scotland, you know, there are many other things wrong with it, but from a climate change perspective, it doesn't necessarily have to be be a barrier. And, and still as Scotland. Questions about whether we can actually producing enough electricity to power houses and homes and also some of the housing stock in Scotland, especially the tenements are not really suited to having individual heat pumps or anything like that. So, you know, what do you think about electricity production capacity and also the ability to heat these kind of homes with renewables. It's good question. So I think we the grid will cope will be able to produce enough electricity. I've no doubt about that. I think about tenements is is an important one. District heating in those densely populated areas may be a better option, renewably generated district heating systems, rather than individual heat pumps may be a better solution and I think that's something which the large urban areas in Scotland need to consider. It's something that you know there's a couple of examples in Edinburgh I know about probably some in Glasgow, I know less about, but that needs to needs to continue to develop rapidly I think over the next decade. Graph that you showed or the graphic that you showed of opportunities in Scotland for people restoration they seem you seem to imply there were none in Scotland they were in the north of England. Yeah, so that was the that was the analysis that was done for the the Green Alliance which didn't include Scottish data for that particular one. Okay. Because we have got quite a lot of, we've got the greatest potential because we have the most people and about 80% of them are in less than perfect condition so we've got a massive opportunity there with people and restoration. And in fact the people that action program which is administered through Nature Scott with funding from the Scottish government is is desperately trying to ramp up the people restoration I think we could we could be a demonstrated for the world I'm hoping that the next 2026 will be will be the will be the place where we can show up we what we can do in our natural ecosystems, not just through plant entries but also through treatment restoration. And then someone else raises the issue that further development of oil fields that we don't want for example at Campbell. Is this going to delay the rapid reduction in emissions. I think I think we need to, we need to support the oil and gas industry in transitioning away from fossil fuels. So we're probably going to need some, some geological carbon capture and storage, and the oil and gas industry have all the knowledge and the skills and the technology and the infrastructure to do that so if we're going to use CCS we have to put the oil and gas industry from one that digs fossil fuel out of the ground for us to one that puts fossil CO2 back into the ground for us is probably still they've made money out of us by selling us oil by digging up the oil. And now they're going to make money out of us probably by being paid to put CO2 back underground, but we definitely shouldn't be exploring new gas fields. Well, the North Sea is over material as you know already. So that that should be it should be should be managed decline and decommissioning. And then there are also questions about potential feedback loops, you know associated with loss of sea ice release of wetland methane and subsea hydrates I guess even the flipping of the Gulf Stream for us. And Scott and how serious are these risks. Yeah, so that's similar to the first question so there are serious risks but they tend to kick in. They're projected to say we don't have any certainty, but they're projected to kick in at higher degrees of warming. So if we miss the two degree target and we move to something like three degrees. Then we were in serious risk of at least some of these positive feedback effects kicking in. And then we're in a really dangerous situation of runaway climate change where climate change feeds losses of greenhouse gases, which feeds more climate change and so on and so forth. So we really must avoid that costs. And staying with, you know, feedback loops and so on or how, you know, things can become circular if one person is asking if we use trees to capture CO2. Do we risk the run the risk, do we increase the risk of fires, wildfires releasing that back into the atmosphere too quickly. So, so that's if that were a fuel for wildfire. And that was not managed by putting in fire breaks, for example, black badly planned forestry can burn. It's probably, it's probably not going to be as severe here as it would be for example in California, but we've seen some forests in California that were planted specifically to sequester carbon and that the offsets were sold. The carbon offsets were sold and now those carbon offsets have gone up in smoke and all that CO2 is backed up in the atmosphere. So we really do have to be careful about how we implement nature based solutions to make sure that we are we we manage that risk of reversal. That's the same for soil carbon as well. And the question about individual responsibility relative to government responsibility and you know, you have emphasized that we can do things as individuals, presumably you don't mean we let the government off the hook. No, no, absolutely not. No, no, we hold the government to account and we get them to create the enabling conditions, which allow us to make the necessary changes. So first we're going to have to have electric cars, which we probably are from the sale of petrol diesel cars and even hybrids is going to be banned in 2030 at least. So we're going to have electric cars we need to have reliable charging points we need it needs to be affordable. We need to we need to have all the infrastructure in place to do that. So that's that the government has to create the enabling conditions so that we can make those choices. So I was just emphasizing individual choices because quite often people feel helpless about climate change they feel like it's out of their hands, or that it's somebody else's problem. I'm not trying to suggest that we do, we do it all and we let the government off doing anything. I'm suggesting that we have the government has to act, and we have to act, everybody has to act, because this is going to be extremely challenging. We don't have time to knock a bell. We've got to get on with it. So coming back to Scotland in particular and the land use practices and so on. Linking that to fires as a question about your burn and how big is that as in terms of carbon emissions contributing to ensure it. People claim it's carbon neutral. Yeah, so some people say that the carbon that's absorbed during the growth of the header is then just released to the atmosphere so in that respect it's carbon neutral. But the other way of looking at it is if you didn't burn that then the carbon would stay locked up in the vegetation so it would be carbon negative. So the fact that it's carbon neutral is nothing to boast about it could be carbon negative. What's difficult about me a burn is that when when the header is burned it creates more recalcitrant material so that that burned material that char is less decomposable. So it has been argued that by creating a burned material that sticks around for longer, you're actually sequestering carbon from the atmosphere for longer, and the jurors still out on that I think. But generally speaking, we should be aiming to restore our peatlands to full functionality. And that means rewetting them and allowing the growth of particularly of sphagnum moss. And burning, burning ground grouse malls, for example, is not consistent with that aim. So I would say that if you had to prioritize one thing, it wouldn't be your burn. It would be the restoration of those people to their former glory. Yeah, I'm sticking with land use in Scotland questions been raised about hill sheep farming. And you mentioned ruminants were a particular problem. What alternative use would there be for that kind of very rough grazing that's used for sheep. Yeah, well it used to contain trees. So when the Caledonian forest was there, it was sequestering carbon. You've obviously got to consider the social justice and equity issues associated with that, because many people farming sheep in the uplands are just about making a living. So you've got to consider how we incentivize, if we're going to move away from upland sheep farming, which I think we'll probably need to do to some extent, we have to make sure that there are the people involved in those communities. I gave a talk similar to this once at the Scottish government, and somebody came up to me afterwards and said, you know what you're saying there about sheep farming could be the Highland clearances all over again. At last, you know, we don't have, you know, we don't want to drive drive the people off the land. We want to give them alternative sources of income sources of income and alternative ways that they can provide stewardship the land that gives them gives them gives them a source of living that is not producing something that's ultimately damaging for the environment. I'm coming back to food and diet and so on. There's a question about fish. I guess this would apply to both marine and fresh or water fish. Where do they feature in terms of, you know, being good or bad or carbon costly in other particular groups of fish that are better than others. Yeah, so the answer about the groups of fishes that I don't know. Fish are another form of livestock, particularly aquaculture. They're not remnant so they don't produce methane in the same way. So they're not going to be as per unit of product per kilogram of fish or per kilogram of meat. They're not going to have the same climate impact as ruminant meat, but they do have a climate impact and we know the trawl fish bottom trawl fish especially have an environment impact that goes beyond climate change. It also includes disturbing the seabed, which is bad for biodiversity. I'm sure you're already aware of that, that fish may seem like the obvious choice if you're moving away from, moving away from land animal meat, but it's not without its costs. And then there's a question about quality of life and whether the changes we need to make would reduce our quality of life or could we do it in such a way that we could maintain. I think, I think so. I think we could do it in a way that maintained or improved it. So that was one of the, one of the suggestions that came out of the Climate Change Assembly was to move away from using GDP growth as our indicator of wellbeing of the way that how well Scotland is doing is measured by its GDP growth and to move towards a measure that measured human happiness and wellbeing. And, you know, ultimately, I don't know, I don't know what the, what the meaning of life is apart from 42, but we all want to be happy. And it is not necessarily, it's not necessarily best for the planet or for the individual to just keep on chasing economic economic growth, which is unsustainably predicated on the use of the unsustainable use of resources. So that discussion, that discussion has been had by the climate, by the, by the Climate Assembly. And one of the recommendations was to government was to start looking at other ways to measure how we are performing as a country, how well we're doing as a country shouldn't be measured just by GDP growth but by some measure of happiness and wellbeing. A few questions about the potential conflicts in use of land. For example, draining peat bogs to plant trees or growing biofuels for electricity and creating a monoculture and so on. What processes do we have in place in Scotland in particular to try to arrive at a balance between these potential conflicts. Yeah, I don't, I don't think it's good enough at the moment. So there are good ways and bad ways of doing, doing everything. So draining a drain and a peat to plant it with trees is a disaster for the, for biodiversity. And it is asked to for climate change because the emissions from the drained peatland far outweigh those that far outweigh the carbon that you're getting getting into the trees. Whatever that makes no sense whatsoever. The same, the same could be true of bio, monoculture biofuels or even monoculture production forestry. But I think it's not really so much what we do it's how we do it. So it's, you know, there are different ways of doing it and we have to ensure that, you know, if we're going to, going to use bioenergy crops and we're going to need some forestry, because part of the climate change ambitions means that we, we need to use more timber and reduce the amount of steel and concrete that we use in building. So if we do that we're going to need production forestry. So what we have to do is make sure that that's integrated in a sustainably managed landscape, so that we not just got big blocks of monoculture going for hundreds and hundreds of miles. So that we can mix that with other with other species and other forms of multifunctional land use so that we're not locked into this sort of, you know, a particularly bad area for biodiversity, which is only used for forestry and another area which is used for something else you know we need multifunctional landscapes, which are integrated and we could do that much better in Scotland in the UK as a whole in fact. I remember people are pointing out that we talked for example about home heating, but increasingly people are concerned about cooling their homes as well. Placed with hot weather obviously in some parts of the world that's a huge problem and probably more energy is expended on air conditioning than on heating. I have a question about international cooperation. How do we get countries to cooperate together whether it's heat they need or cooling or whatever, do you think that at the forthcoming conference there'll be enough will to cooperate to try and achieve targets that we need but that means implementing them as well. So that's the issue isn't it I think, I think everybody is signed up to it so 196 countries signed up to it. The US was out but now it's back in again so we got 196 again. So that's just about all the all the countries in the world including the poorest and those that have the least ability to adapt to climate change. So everybody's on board, but the critical thing will be turning those promises into action. A really important thing was to allow the countries to make their own commitments through their nationally determined contributions and not to have a top down the G 20 says that you must do this. But to allow the countries to offer their own ambition from the bottom up. That was really important. It's a lot of mitigation most of the most of the rising climate change is happening in developing countries. So we in the global north have to have to, it's been agreed that there has to be a flow of finance from the global north to the global south to allow this transition to happen to allow the country is there to leap from the data technologies that we use to grow rich. And grow and prosper without using those dirty and emitting technologies. And that's going to need a flow of finance. And that's something that has to be tackled in in Glasgow. It failed in the last one which was, which is meant to be in Chile wasn't it before Peru but then it was held in Madrid. And it failed to be a breakthrough on that. So I think that'll be one of the, the key, the key measures of success is has Glasgow has Glasgow being a successful conference will be if there's an agreement on that flow of finance. And that's that I think will be one of the key outcomes. We've got loads of questions still, Pete, but we're not going to have time for many more, but one question is about the process whereby the Scottish government is obtaining its information and consulting with experts like yourself for example and others are those processes satisfactory is the Scottish government consulting widely enough. So I think it's pretty good. So it's done the, it's done the climate change assembly, which was good thing to get the, get the views of the people of a selective group of people, you know, stratified so that there was all social economic groups and all gender and ethnic diversity and gender, et cetera, et cetera were represented within that. So it's doing is doing its best to listen. And it does consult with. So as I, as you mentioned at the beginning on the science director of climate exchange. That's, that's a body, an independent body which provides advice to government on climate change issues. It also listens to the independent UK Committee on climate change which also sets its targets for emission reduction and such like. So it's pretty good at engaging in Scotland because we're a relatively small country. There's a good link between government there are a few level fewer levels of bureaucracy in between the people doing the science who know about it, and the people making the decisions. So that's an advantage living in a, in a smaller country like Scotland compared to the government in Westminster when there's many more levels of bureaucracy between the decision makers and the scientists so I think we've got an advantage in that respect in Scotland. I think there are another question about some countries that seem not to be really on board like Australia, perhaps, and, and Poland, is it going to be possible to cool those countries in. I don't know, I think under the current leadership in those governments, maybe not. But we can see how rapidly that can change so so Trump's gone thank goodness. So Biden in now and Biden has made his net zero commitment for 2050. So governments come and go, but long term commitments remain so they can be, they can be pushed back on. But when a change in government happens, then we can gradually edge forward, even if we have a few governments who are pulling in the same direction Canada a few years ago was in that, in that that particular bracket of people who were pulling in the wrong direction. And then Trudeau got in and it came back into the fold. And I've just given them another example. Hungary and Poland are another example of, and Joe Bolsonaro, of course, in Brazil, who are, who are not overly keen on the, on the process, but they will be gone at some stage. It's approaching nine o'clock and I'm sorry. I think we have to get to let Pete finish up. But before I just thank him Peter a lot of people have been asking two things one, which I can tell them the answer to can they replay this talk and yes, it will be available on philosophical society website in due course so you will be able eventually to watch it again. Some people have been asking the little video that you showed is that, you know, they're obviously interested in perhaps looking at that again showing it maybe to their own communities and so on. Yes, it's on Facebook and it's on YouTube. I don't have the link here. I think I put the link in at the end at the end of the talk so if you play back the playback the recording you should see the link at the end. But if you look for sea change slains and colostom which I'll put in the chat now, you should be able to find it on that on that website. Okay, well I'm sorry apologies to everybody. There were detailed questions about electric cars and so on that I thought you probably wouldn't have time to deal with but there is a lot of information about that. I'm sorry we didn't get through everybody's questions, but we got through as many as we can. And that was really a great talk. We covered lots of ground and also told us what we could do as individuals, which is important but also what governments need to do for us and so on and while it's of course a somewhat depressing topic. Hope is not yet lost, I hope. Thank you very much indeed Pete and a big round of applause from everybody. Unfortunately, you just can't hear it. So thank you very much. And we'll just end the webinar there. My pleasure. Thank you, Pat. Bye.