In defence of my friends at the Hadley Centre, I have to say that almost everyone concerned with climate change in 2004, and that included me before the visit, had this detached approach to climate research. Sandy and I left with a deep sense that what we had heard was truly serious and the visit profoundly changed my view of the future. Something, I knew was rarely ever true of a dynamic system. There was also a tendency to present the whole Earth system as if it was no more than the simple addition of its parts. This was in itself disturbing much more so was the fact that those concerned, for example, with the melting of polar ice, although aware of a similar vanishing of the tropical forests, seemed to present their own research as something separate from the heating of the whole planet. They told of their research in detail but in a detached – properly scientific manner – almost as if they were describing some other planet, not the Earth. Taken separately, each of these regional investigations presented convincing evidence of positive feedback and accelerating change. These climate scientists with whom we talked spoke of their observations and models of global heating in the regions that each of them were investigating. And we talked of our own concern about the way the ocean life was disappearing as the surface waters warmed. Later in the day we heard from Peter Cox and Richard Betts about the way that the great tropical and boreal forests were changing as the world grew hotter. While there we talked with a range of scientists some were concerned with the melting of ice floating on the Arctic Ocean, others with Greenland’s vanishing glaciers, and still others concerned with global heating in the tropics. It is a place of excellence and an important part of the IPCC. My first intimation that we might be on the brink of disaster came in May 2004 when my wife Sandy and I visited the UK’s primary climate research centre, the Hadley Centre. Sadly, even the most pessimistic of the climate prophets of the IPCC panel do not appear to have noticed how rapidly the climate is changing.
Inevitably the conclusions of the report need constant revision in the light of real climate change. The report itself speaks of the real possibility of severe climate change but it is written in properly cautious scientific language and gives the impression that global heating is serious but the worst consequences are avoidable if we take appropriate action now. Most of you will know by now the main conclusions of the greatly respected Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s, 2007 report and I am sure that we all are proud that they were awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize together with Al Gore. This is a draft copy of the lecture delivered to a public meeting of the Royal Society, 29 October 2007.
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