Murnaghan 9.02.14 Interview Dame Julia Slingo, Met Office & Natalie Bennett, Green party leader

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Welcome back to Burrowbridge in the Somerset Levels for a Murnaghan special live on the flooding. The sun is out here for the time being but they know there is much more rain to come and their fingers are well and truly crossed that the Levels with their already swollen rivers don’t rise any more. Behind it all the possible cause of it all has been the issue of climate change. It hasn’t really been discussed an awful lot during the course of this whole crisis but now it’s reached centre stage because the Met Office’s Chief Scientist, Dame Julia Slingo, says all the evidence points to some role in all this for climate change. Well I am joined now by Dame Julia and also by Natalie Bennett, the leader of the Green Party, a very good morning to you both. Dame Julia, if I could start with you first, you look at the role of weather patterns in Indonesia, global weather patterns, just explain the theory.

DAME JULIA SLINGO: Well we know that our atmosphere is global and the weather that we experience often has its roots way across the Atlantic, of course we know that but actually much further beyond that, right out into the Pacific. What we’ve seen through this period of very unsettled weather through December and January and on into February, is that the weather over the Indonesian region has been unusually disturbed and we as scientists understand that when that happens, that really perturbs the jet stream over the Pacific, causes it to buckle in a sense over the West Coast of North America, giving rise to those very exceptionally cold temperatures that we saw at almost the same time that we had our first very severe storm in early January. We understand that very well, that seems to be part of the story.

DM: Part of the story but of course people think of climate change as global warming, a lot of people talk about global warming, you’re talking about exceptionally cold weather.

DAME JULIA SLINGO: Well that was over the US and I think that was indeed part of the natural variability of the climate system. One of the great challenges for us as scientists is that of course, particularly in the UK, our weather is extremely volatile, our climate is extremely variable and it therefore, separating out what could be just natural variability from the effects of global warming is very challenging. They are both in operation, it is never one or the other and although we haven’t yet got a definitive answer on whether the present very prolonged spell now of unsettled weather, which is exceptional, has an influence from climate change. The science that we have says it’s quite likely that there is a contribution, there’s some basic science here that points to a compounding effect if you like of climate change on the very extreme rainfall, very severe levels of storminess and possibly the very prolonged clustering of storms that we’ve seen throughout this winter.

DM: Okay, I want to bring in Natalie Bennett, leader of the Greens then, you’re listening to that and I’m sure you’re nodding along with it. What do you say to those politicians, and I’ve spoken to quite a few of them today, who still raise an eyebrow when they hear that kind of analysis?

JULIA BENNETT: Well I think the first thing we have to say is very much sympathy to everyone out there in Britain who has just had a miserable frightening night, those people who have seen their homes or their businesses suffer from the floods and those who are still going to suffer from them. But I think it’s very clear now we’ve got the science, we had the IPC Report last year that said we must act to avoid catastrophic climate change. We are already seeing the impacts of enormous amounts of extreme weather just occurring more and more often so there really is no question. The debate to be had is how we prevent climate change and how we deal with the effects, there is no debate about climate change anymore.

DM: But Ms Bennett, there is always debate about individual instances of weather and I thought the mantra was you could still not put down on extreme weather event to climate change.

NATALIE BENNETT: Indeed that’s entirely true, as Dame Julia was just saying. The increasing incidence of more extreme weather events can be put down to climate change, the fact that we have already seen and can expect to see more extreme events, events that are going to be a threat to human life, a threat to human property, a threat to all of our futures which means we have to get serious about acting to prevent more climate change than is already built into the system.

DM: Dame Julia, I wanted to ask you about that, about how extreme is extreme? Yes, standing out here on the Somerset Levels it’s bad but people are saying, well we have had weather like this before, of course we’ve had it before, I was mentioning 2007, one thinks of the great storm of 1987 and well beyond that. Is this really extreme, so unusual that you can ascribe it to climate change?

DAME JULIA SLINGO: Well the first thing to say of course is that it is extreme. If we look at records of rainfall for southern England for this time of year, this has not been recorded before since 1766, 248 years. To me that’s extreme. Of course no individual event can be totally attributed to climate change, there is always a natural driver which is the briefing document that we published this morning and available on the Met Office website that says very clearly there are reasons why our jet stream has set up the way it has, there are reasons why the storms have been so severe but what we have to ask though, first of all is the prolonged nature of this severe weather unusual, does climate change have a role in that? The second thing is that we know that extreme rainfall daily and hourly rainfall is becoming more intense so even though the systems are perhaps not in themselves exception or unprecedented, the amount of water that they’re carrying will be more than one would have had without global warning. Then the third issue of course, which I think is really, really important as we look forward to the next few years, decades and what we do to protect ourselves is a question of sea level rise and sea level rise is a great integrator of climate change, of global warming. We know that sea levels have been rising around the UK, they are documented; we know that sea level rise will continue inexorably as the planet comes into balance with the extra greenhouse gases that we put into the atmosphere and we know those effects will continue for centuries so sea level rise has to be part of the story.

DM: And so Natalie Bennett, that throws it over to the politicians, getting them to grasp those realities and try to prepare for the future.

NATALIE BENNETT: Exactly and that’s what we see with the example of the loss of our rail line down into the West Country. What we need to very much is think about resilience and there’s been a lot of really quite painful party politics, quite disastrous party politics being played about this. The fact is, our current government and the previous government weren’t spending enough on flood defences, weren’t spending enough on making sure we have systems that can survive in more risky times and we have to think about what we should be doing, first of all, is reversing the very significant cuts that this government has made to the Environment Agency, we need to invest in flood defences, we need to invest in planning to prepare for and mitigate against climate change and that means things for example like relying on one vulnerable rail line down into the south-west isn’t adequate. We need to look into ensuring that there’s at least a failsafe, at least two systems, two lines that are running, all of those kind of things. The other thing that we really do have to ask the question is, and I think David Cameron really should be looking at whether he should have an Environment Secretary who has shown he doesn’t grasp the reality of climate change. Indeed he is not very good at grasping reality at all or indeed taking scientific advice, as with the badger cull so I really think we need to see a new Environment Secretary and a need to see the reversal of the cuts the Environment Agency has suffered.

DM: But a lot of what you’ve been talking about, Natalie Bennett has been talking about is the symptoms, presumably you want to see progress still being made on what you describe the causes, the CO2 for instance that’s being pumped into the atmosphere?

NATALIE BENNETT: Very much so, of course. Britain is absolutely not taking the policy steps that it needs to and these are policy steps that are also positive in terms of our economy, in terms of jobs. If we think about our energy policy, we’re chasing after this dangerous fantasy of fracking and we had Quadrilla, the drilling company, who said in five years’ time we’ll know if there is any viable shale gas in Britain and the government is saying this is Britain’s energy future. What we should be doing instead is energy conservation, making sure everybody has a warm comfortable home that’s affordable to heat because it doesn’t need much energy because let’s face it, both the greenest and cheapest energy that you can have is the energy you don’t use but also looking in terms of generating and using renewable energy. We saw last week a very exciting application for tidal energy in Cardiff Bay and that’s a schemes which hopes in the next ten years to put in five new plants using British technology which could produce 10% of our energy needs and the government needs to be focusing on that, on offshore and onshore wind, on solar, on the technologies that are zero carbon or very low carbon for our energy future.

DM: Dame Julia, can I bring you in on that issue? You describe rising sea levels, the clouds dumping much more rain onto the land, is it too late to try to stop that process getting worse?

DAME JULIA SLINGO: Well unfortunately in the short term, yes, it probably is because we know that we’re committed to a certain level of climate change for the next 20 to 30 years and it is very important that we work with that, knowing that and make sure we make the right investments in our infrastructure, in our coastal and flood defences, taking account of that. Beyond that of course there’s a lot we can do and this is where we’re working very hard at the Met Office to provide the government with the best possible scientifically based evidence on what the different options might mean to how dangerous climate change becomes for all of us, not just in the UK but around the world, by the end of this century.

DM: Dame Julia, can I just ask you, would you defend the Met Office’s work alongside the Environment Agency? Obviously a lot of criticism mainly aimed at the Environment Agency but there has been a lot more co-ordination between you, hasn’t there, over the last few years?

DAME JULIA SLINGO: Yes, as Hilary Benn said earlier on, the Flood Forecasting Centre, which is a joint activity between the Met Office and the Environment Agency and now indeed housed in the Met Office building in Exeter, has been a great success and shows that when agencies work together in a very joined up way, we can make fantastic progress in providing what the public needs in terms of longer term warning so that they can take action to protect themselves. I think if you look at the period of extreme weather that we’ve experienced right through this winter, the forecasts not just of the weather but also the impacts of the weather on waves, storm surges, flooding, has been exceptionally good and that I think is down to the actions that the Environment Agency and the Met Office have taken together since the Pitt Review in 2007.

DM: Okay, I must end it there. Dame Julia, thank you very much indeed, Dame Julia Slingo there and our thanks also to Natalie Bennett, the leader of the Green Party.