It’s a bit cold this winter – has climate change ended?

The appearance of a bit of snow over the Christmas break has brought out the usual questions about whether climate change is actually happening or not. Well, with unusually cold weather, as much with unusually warm weather, a few local and short term events do not alter the clear and increasingly firm evidence of global warming. You can’t draw conclusions, in any direction, from one or two events.

Indeed the Met Office holds this view regarding our recent couple of years of cold winters. This is just normal variation and is nothing to do with global warming. I am sure this is true, but I think it is quite possible to construct an argument linking this to global climate change. Furthermore this is not to suggest that climate change is not happening but on the contrary may actually be one of its effects.

I stress that this is almost certainly untrue and I will say why later but the argument could go as follows:

In 2007 and again in 2010 the arctic lost huge amounts of ice to the sea. You can look at the evidence for this at the brochure on the Met Office web site at:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/policy-relevant/evidence
This ice loss did not fully recover in subsequent years after 2007. This would mean that large amounts of fresh water would have flowed into the arctic sea so reducing the salinity of the sea at that point. This in turn has the effect of weakening the Gulf Stream, and as we all know, it is the Gulf Stream that brings warm weather up to our islands.

So, global warming has melted ice which could now be weakening the Gulf Stream reducing the tendency for warm weather systems to come in from the south-west and allowing cold polar air to penetrate from the north.

In addition, we also know that the poles are warming up faster than average. The average global temperature increase in the last century has been about 0.8 degrees but at the poles it has been nearer 4 degrees. Furthermore we also know that unusually warm air in the stratosphere over the North Pole in 2009/10 had a knock-on effect of reversing the normal direction of wind over the UK – changing it from warm western winds to cold eastern winds.

So again the polar weather system has become more active and as a result could be pushing cold polar air further south.

It’s interesting to look at the weather maps sometimes and try to guess where the “jet stream” (a narrow band of high speed air marking the boundary between polar weather systems and our temperate weather systems) sits. My perception is that it often sits further south than it did in the past. Even in summer it seems that a run of several weeks of good weather suddenly collapses sometime in July as the jet stream, which should sit over Scotland, suddenly shifts south to run over the Bay of Biscay, and we get nothing but rain! Again is this all a possible effect of more active polar air pushing further south?

At the end of all this, however, it is probably far more likely that, as the Met Office suggests, this is just part of natural variation. All these effects do just happen and are not exceptional or part of a trend. For instance melting ice switching off the Gulf Stream has happened in the past, about 10,000 years ago, but it took truly huge amounts of ice when most of North America was covered in an ice sheet which all suddenly fell into the sea at once. And our ice loss, huge though it is, is nothing like on the same scale.

I’ll be interested if these effects keep happening though!

Wishful thinkers lose again.

After a third enquiry the scientists at the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia have been exonerated again. (You remember – that great outcry caused by some leaked emails that had the media wondering if scientists were just making all this climate change nonsense up). And with this another straw that the climate change deniers have been grasping at has also been taken away.

Even if any fault could ever have been found, this ridiculous hounding of a very small number of legitimate scientists does nothing to counter over 200 years of climate change science.

Around the world there are thousands of scientists working on climate change and the overwhelming vast majority say not only that climate change is happening but that it is humans that are causing it. The wishful thinkers, hoping that this can all be made to disappear, are always looking for any scam to try to deflect reality.

There is a clear and obvious strategy in place by climate change deniers. Make climate change look complicated, confusing, “just a theory”, invent controversy, imply disagreement amongst experts and deflect with all sorts of unsubstantiated claims. It was exactly the same when pro-smoking lobbies tried to undermine the link between smoking and ill-health.

This time, or course, the deniers have a lot on their side. Giving up smoking is easy by comparison. Accepting climate change means that we may have to change our lives – and few people want to hear that. Nevertheless, climate change is happening and trying to find imaginary cop-outs simply delays necessary action.

Perhaps a particularly bad aspect of climate change denial is the anti-intelligence, anti-education culture it relies on. As a result, scientist who have spent a career studying climate change (or anything else for that matter) have become “experts” or worse “government scientists”, so are thought of as esoteric, unreliable and out of touch. I have seen blogs where the view of a self-appointed “man on the street” thinks himself far more respectable than any number of climate change professors. Maybe we should use the same principle in other sectors? Medical doctors for example, have spent decades perfecting their skills so obviously must be way out of touch with reality! Next time we need an operation maybe we should consult some man in the pub instead.

In spite of the deliberate strategies to confuse there are some basic facts from which it is impossible to escape.

200 years of climate science amassing vast amounts of evidence points in the same direction – climate change is happening and we are causing it.

Carbon dioxide is known to create a greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide is increasing and the greenhouse effect is getting stronger.

The measured effects of climate change cannot be explained by natural processes alone. It can only be explained when human-emitted greenhouse gasses are included.

Every year our society emits carbon dioxide that it took nature 3 million years to lock-up! Any logic should tell you that 3 million times too much of anything is unlikely to be good!

At the same time human-caused damage to the world’s ecosystems has never been greater, reducing the ability of nature to respond to any imbalance.

You might claim, against all the evidence, that there is some unknown natural process that is going to save the day. Some unknown negative feed-back loop will appear and soak up the surplus carbon dioxide, or counter the effect of increasing temperature. It would have to be an unknown phenomenon because all the known ones are already incorporated into climate change models. This strikes me as wishful thinking at a neo-religious level! We would not take this approach in the economic arena (just keep spending the money, our bank accounts will magically top themselves up at some stage!) so why does anyone give it any credibility when deniers wish to magic climate change away using the same logic?

Let us be clear. Human-induced climate change is a reasonable hypothesis supported by the vast majority of the evidence and the experts in the field. I have only ever met one or two climate change deniers that I would give any credibility to at all; by and large climate change denial is just an emotional response.

Climate Change - a major report indicates what we can expect in the UK

Climate change is on the agenda again today (indeed it is such an important issue that is should never be off the agenda) as Hilary Benn MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, launched the UK Climate Projections (UKCP09). These give detail to how we might expect the climate of the UK to change in coming decades. for an introduction to these projections go to http://ukcp09.defra.gov.uk/

No-one should be surprised!
Predictably, the projections are not good news, but they should be no surprise to anyone. A “greenhouse effect” was first proposed about 200 years ago and carbon dioxide was identified as the main greenhouse gas around 100 years ago. By the 1970’s it was very clear that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (by burning coal, oil etc), while at the same time damaging the earth’s ability to react to these changes (i.e. by damaging biodiversity) was bound to change the balance of this greenhouse effect - hence global warming. After 30 or 40 years of procrastination at least the subject of global warming is mainstream even if our reaction to it is sluggish.

Inevitable change – adaptation is as important as reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.
The government claims that it will pursue a concerted action programme to address climate change. It remains to be seen whether this will be the case, but they have set out a broad 5-point plan and I am glad to see that “preparing for the future” (i.e. adaptation) is included. Temperatures are very likely to increase by around 2 degrees before 2050 even if we react responsibly now (which we probably wont!), and continue to grow even further after that point. I am not convinced, however, that predictability can be that precise. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if our current relatively amicable climate changed into something that was much more unpredictable, with perhaps wide swings between hot and cold, wet and dry.

A healthy environment must form the basis of any future strategy for climate change.
Whatever happens, our environment must be able to adapt. Consequently we need a long-term vision for land-use. We need a healthier environment where the best sites for nature are conserved, enhanced, expanded and joined up to make the natural environment more robust, allowing people and wildlife to adapt to these changes. For a better idea of what we mean by this see our climate change strategy at:
http://www.sussexwt.org.uk/conservation/page00029.htm
and see our Living Landscape documents at: http://www.sussexwt.org.uk/conservation/living_landscapes/page00002.htm

Furthermore, restoring the natural environment will enhance our essential ecological services, such as carbon storage in peatlands, purification of water through reed beds and flood management in wetlands.

A brave new approach is needed.
However, the current approach of fiddling around the edges of existing policies has failed us for too long. Without a long-term vision for the future of our land with joined up decisions on agriculture, planning, water management and more, the future looks very bleak.

Furthermore, the impacts of climate change on wildlife are not restricted to land. Marine wildlife also needs the flexibility to adapt to climate change. More than 50% of the carbon dioxide we produce is absorbed by the sea which is why we must act now to ensure we manage our marine environment sustainably.


A brave new approach with a large-scale vision is what we are seeking from government.
The Government must now show political will by investing in large-scale habitat restoration and creation. It is vital for the natural environment to be placed at the heart of adaptation programmes.

Climate Change - How can wildlife adapt?

Scientific certainty

There is a high degree of certainty in the scientific community that climate change is happening. The nature, scale and even direction of climate change is, however, probably unpredictable at a Sussex scale. It is also likely that there will be increasing variability in local weather with possible large swings in conditions and less certainty about seasonal weather patterns.

Nevertheless, uncertainty about how climate change will unfold, or what the response of plants, animals and their habitats to climate change will be, must not prevent us from taking action.

A strategy for wildlife conservation
A strategy is needed that presents the best course of action to conserve nature against an unknown and unpredictable future. This means that we need to develop an adaptable environment that is resilient to change, whatever that change might be.

The best chance for wildlife, and therefore for us will be to:

1 – Look after our existing wildlife and wild places.
Future wildlife can only adapt and evolve from the plants and animals that survive today so the importance of conserving current high quality places cannot be overemphasised.

2 – Reduce damage to nature from sources other than climate change.
Nature will have the best chance if we stop pressurising it in other ways.

3 – Increase the variety of our landscape at all scales

In this way so plants and animals always have somewhere to move to in their immediate area as conditions change.

4 – Build ecological networks throughout the landscape at all scales
Maintaining a diversity of habitats, increasing their area and the way they link up and allowing natural processes to shape the ecology and structure of whole landscapes will create the best chance for biodiversity.

The elements above make a good nature conservation strategy even if there was no climate change or if it was not caused by human activity. Building an adaptable, resilient environment is a good approach independently of climate change.

Providing the best chance for wildlife, as well as being a worth while objective in its own right, will also provide the best chance of maintaining a high quality environment that continues to provide the environmental services (such as flood amelioration, climate regulation, nutrient cycling and water purification) on which we all depend. This is not just about conserving the environment for nature, it is also about conserving the environment for people too.


An important element of a strategy for nature in a changing climate is the development of an ecological network for Sussex. This concept will be presented in “A Living Landscape for Sussex”, due to be published in early 2008.

However, and this point is vitally important, even the most effective biodiversity strategy will be overwhelmed if we do not take other action to address the causes of climate change: our continually growing emissions of greenhouse gases.