Episode 102 Edited Highlights – Professor Chris Rapley
Michael Liebreich
Let's just start, if you could, by giving us a little bit of an intro to what you're working on, and how you got there.
Professor Chris Rapley
I've had a kind of zigzaggy career. I originally trained as a physicist, so that was my first degree. But I got really interested in space science and became a rocket scientist for quite some time. I spent 10 years running British Antarctic Survey, then spent a while running the Science Museum. Since then, I've been back at University College London, and the question that I've been really interested in is: given the overwhelming evidence that climate change is a problem and a serious one, why is the human response not on a sufficient scale and pace to really address it? I've been working with a really eclectic mix of interesting people for a number of years now, and it’s been something of an embarrassment to realize that my primary instrument, my Mark I Paleolithic brain, was something that I knew very, very little about. In academia, shifting from one specialism to another is quite a dangerous thing to do, and I’ve done it quite a few times. You do pay a price, in terms of number of publications, the ability to establish yourself. But the benefit is that you bring with you tools and insights and you can cross fertilize things in a very productive way. So for those that are thinking of zigzagging around, there's a risk, but there's a huge, huge satisfactory benefit.
Michael Liebreich
While we have you: there's now AR6, another IPCC report. What does it say? Is it getting worse? Is it getting better?
Professor Chris Rapley
Well, I’ll just quote it: it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land, and widespread and rapid changes have occurred in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere. For a long time we were waiting for the signal to creep out of the noise, because there's obviously natural variability in the climate system. And I think AR6 just hammers the nail very, very firmly into it and says, let's not argue about this anymore, we've got a big problem. And then, of course, the Working Group III said it's now or never if you want to limit global warming to one and a half degrees, and without immediate and deep emission reductions across all sectors, it will become impossible.
Michael Liebreich
I have online been very vocal about the use of scenarios that I, as an energy expert, know are completely implausible. If you look at the RCP 8.5 scenario, it is in my view like saying I want to research how cats’ brains respond to 5G, so I'm going to put the cat in the microwave.
Professor Chris Rapley
I'm quite happy to see extreme scenarios looked at, because they're a tool. A tool may be a good tool or a bad tool. Even if it's in principle, a good tool, it can be mishandled by the artists that wields it. You've got to have smart artists and some good tools. But if you talk to strategists, they really like to know what the most extreme set of circumstances might be, even if the probability is close to zero, because it's just useful to have that as a bookend from which we can move back to something which might be more realistic. There is nobody who really understands in depth the whole jigsaw that is climate science. How could they possibly? And so there is a momentum that tends to build up on certain elements of the story, which I think is probably unhelpful and unjustified. If we could go right back to the very beginning: the use of a single global average figure to characterize climate change is incredibly unhelpful. It is thermodynamically nonsense, because the way thermodynamics work... if you heat something up, the rate at which it radiates away as heat is completely nonlinear. So doing a global average of temperature data from around the world is physically meaningless. What we have done by upsetting the opacity of the atmosphere to infrared radiation, and a few other things, is upset the energy balance of the planet. So as we speak, the Earth is accumulating 20 times as much energy as humanity generates each day to run the entire energy system of the world. If you say, by the way, I've meddled in this hugely complex system that I'm never going to fully understand, and I've upset it by a degree, which is an order of magnitude more than the thing I did in the first place, you're going to say that sounds not a very smart thing to do. The aim should be trying to get the energy imbalance back to zero, so the planet will warm up, so that in the end it forces more heat to be radiated away to space. And if we stopped upsetting the atmosphere tomorrow, it would take a while to do that, you know, 30, 40, 50 years, and the consequences will roll out over 1000s of years. But unfortunately, it's chasing its tail because we keep pumping more stuff into the atmosphere. So, just in terms of visualizing what's going on, getting the energy imbalance to zero seems to me to be just a clearer thing to do, than to talk about trying to avoid going through certain temperature thresholds.
Michael Liebreich
I want to talk about attribution studies. If you go to the famous IPCC AR6, it doesn't say there are going to be really big floods in Pakistan, which have been widely blamed on climate change. What is the state of attribution studies?
Professor Chris Rapley
I think it's a really helpful area of research because it does allow you to articulate things in a way that is meaningful to people. I respect the people who do it, I have a lot of confidence in them, people like Peter Stott and so on are extremely careful and thoughtful scientists. Besides, I think some of the results seem to be fairly convincing. To be able to say that the Siberian fires just wouldn't have happened if we hadn't had the elevation of temperatures up there that we've seen, seems to me to be a useful thing to say. The trouble with watching the data, watching the signal emerge from the noise, is that things are happening so quickly that.... We all know that to make a robust climate statement, you probably need 30 years of data, and things are happening on timescales which are much shorter than the 30 years. So there's a problem in terms of keeping up with the data and solidifying the conclusion, on the basis of genuine events statistics. Framing climate change as a problem, which has been the traditional way of doing it, has proved to be very unhelpful. The more clearly you explain what is at stake, the more likely you are to drive your audience into a state of anxiety, fear, guilt, and in particular, helplessness. The human brain has ways of dealing with that discomfort which are very unhelpful, that have militated against having what we were trying to do: to have an adult discussion about where we go from here. So, what we're trying to do at the Climate Action Unit at UCL is to use Mind Science insights to tell a story, which is of action - finding your agency. We are not dealing with people who are still in negation and denial, we're dealing with people who want to do something, but are stuck. And there is a myriad of these, both at the individual level, particularly at the institutional level. We’re trying to get inside people's heads to say, well, what's blocking you? Is it a personal, anxious, helplessness thing? We can help with that. Or is it an institutional blockage of some sort, like an oil and gas company that can't see the route to becoming an energy company without having to trash a whole load of its existing assets. We work as ‘honest brokers’; it's a two-way discussion. Children of the Enlightenment believe that by offering people facts and information, that some magic will go on in people's heads, and they will leap forward and start doing the right thing. That is not the way it works. So that's the final message, that actions drive beliefs, and getting people on that first rung of the ladder is a crucial step and it can be done.