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Copenhagen, December 2009

This is a date you should focus on very hard. Why? because it's the next global summit on climate change, following on from Bali and Kyoto. You may not like it, or believe it yet, but it's probably the last chance the world will have to really stop the effect of global warming and climate change. The policies decided at this conference will be implemented in 2012 and if they aren't extreme enough, like an 80% reduction in CO2 (28 gigatonnes worldwide in 2005), the IPCC higher prediction of a rise of 5 degree C in global temperatures in the next hundred years could become reality and Jeremy Clarkson's holiday home on the Isle of Man will be under water. Although he and I will be dead by then so we won't live to see it but our grand children will.

GLOBAL WARMING  - WHAT I'VE LEARNT ABOUT WHERE WE LIVE

For many people, this has become a dead boring subject, but just wait until water is lapping around your kitchen table and the headlines are screaming from the tabloids: "WHY WEREN'T WE WARNED?". 

The good news is scientists are looking at ways to save the planet and I've been involved with the development of one such idea developed by Professor David Keith at the University of Calgary, Canada - an air capture device which could help mitigate CO2 emissions by sucking the CO2 right out of the air and turning it back into a carbonate (where it came from) or pure CO2 which can be stored deep underground. This is already happening off Norway with natural gas which contains about 10% CO2 - the CO2 is extracted at source and reinjected back into what's known as a saline aquifer below the gas field which permanently traps and stores the CO2 as a liquid.

Chief Engineer on the scrubber fabrication was the world's nicest guy, Craig Irish. Craig tragically died in a car crash three days after we finished filming the build and I would like to remember him here for the top bloke he was.

The bad news with the global warming debate is the effects are still largely buried and unseen - despite anecdotal examples of odd weather patterns and everything else. But figures published by www.eia.doe.gov make interesting reading: we produce 28 gigatonnes of CO2 every year. One power station can belch out 24,000 tons of CO2 a day. One cement plant will produce a million tonnes of CO2 for every million tonnes of cement. We are now producing CO2 100 times faster than at any time in the planet's history. That's not a record to be proud of.

Oh, and they are seriously researching methane energy - which does have many benefits. Unfortunately it is twice as bad as CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Luckily it doesn't hang around nearly as long. Reserves of methane dwarf oil and gas deposits. But if we are going to survive methane is not the answer. Fuel has to be greenhouse gas free in the future. Nuclear? Bring it on!

Over the last five years or so I’ve witnessed the hidden effect of global warming and I feel increasingly that there is something happening to our environment akin to a wall starting to topple over - hard to see at first but just try stopping it once it starts to go.  And speaking of walls, the Pentagon predicted the US would have to build one right along its border with Mexico due to an uncontrolled influx due to internal conditions in other countries, drought and flooding being major factors...and guess what's happening now? A wall is being built. 

However, we need to understand that we are not the sole cause of climate change. A cyclical process of warming and change is underway but I do firmly believe our contribution is hastening and distorting the effects.  To illustrate this point graphically, I took the pictures above in Alaska and it's easy to find lots and lots of anecdotal evidence of retreating ice.

But governments charging the individual more duty which does not go straight back into dealing with the problem is not the solution. 

A total halt on all CO2 emissions today worldwide might arrest factors like the slide into increasing acidification of the seas due to CO2 absorption which will eventually kill all the fish in the ocean. The ocean absorbs CO2 when it gets warmer  - ironically  - but it makes the water more acidic as it breaks it down. Acidic water prevents crustaceans from forming shells and destroys coral feeding grounds. The food chain is mortally wounded in the process.  

The Larsen B ice field in Northern Antarctica melted in just six weeks in February 2002. It was an Antarctic ice shelf that was 200 metres thick with a surface area of 3,250 square kilometers.  500 billion tonnes of ice the surface area equivalent to Rhode Island just melted.  

As a result, ice flow into the South Atlantic has apparently increased in speed from 300 meters a year to 2.5 kilometres as the glacial “plug” has been removed. Antarctica could therefore unwind like a melting ice cream into the sea. This will increase sea levels, divert warm currents, decrease sea temperature, its salinity and density.  All bad. 

The Larsen B melt was hastened by the formation of "moulins" - under ice rivers of meltwater which dislodge gigantic areas from the bedrock and cause intact ice to slide off the continental shelf and melt in the open sea. New lakes of melted ice can now be seen from space further inland in Antarctica and guess what is going to happen again? - further massive breakup of the ice shelf. Its rate of disintegration is exponential as rock and water absorb heat, whereas white ice reflects it. The more dark areas, the more heat is retained (albedo effect), the more the ice melts and so on in a dangerous, uncontrollable spiral.

And now the Wilkins icefield in western Antarctica has broken up and disappeared in six weeks. An ice field the size of Northern Ireland which was not due to start disintegrating for another 30 years at least has gone. NOAA say the summer ice in Alaska will be down to 10 percent or nothing at all next summer. That has exceeded the prediction by 50 years  - and the adjustment has occurred over 3 years - no time at all.

Forget egotistical and politically-motivated arguing over who predicted what weather and were they right in their predictions this season or that season.  This is a creeping problem which will profoundly and permanently affect the planet.  Although do understand that CO2 levels are not necessarily the sole trigger the media have latched on to with mind-numbing repetition. 

It's thought that year on year, temperature fluctuations are much more allied to solar flare activity versus cosmic rays which increase cloud cover and  create cooling in years with less solar activity. Therefore C02 levels follow temperature change triggered by solar flares, they don't actually cause it initially - so CO2 levels are a result and symptom of warming, not the base cause. But everyone is becoming obsessed with carbon levels as once they rise, they do contribute to retaining heat which would otherwise escape into the troposphere. 

It's all semantics really (as I've just demonstrated!) - whatever the interpretation of the cause, the planet is unarguably getting hotter.  Britain has just had its warmest winter in the last 125 years. 

Read Mark Lynas's book "Six Degrees" to understand the predicted result of incremental one degree c increases in temperature. In the book he reflects scientific predictions from the IPCC that a one degree C increase will cause a one metre rise in sea levels every 20 years from ice melt. The one degree C increase in temperatures in the last 100 years has only made a difference of millimeters gainsayers claim. Well, that was before we hit the albedo tipping point - when the level of exposed rock which used to be covered with snow and ice throws out lots more radiation which is trapped by the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. We got the bonfire of our own vanity (!) going with a big flame (the industrial revolution) but little effect but now the bonfire has caught and it's burning.

That's an increase in sea levels of 5 metres in 100 years. 

London, New York, the Hague, Shanghai, and Bangladesh would be under water. And we've undergone a one degree c increase globally in the last ten years. I met professor Walter Dudley, a scientist in Hawaii who is responsible for monitoring sea temperatures in tenths of a degree for the university, and he's had to recalibrate his instruments recently as sea temperature increases were off his scale.

But as we will need the equivalent of two planets to feed the population by 2050 due to an explosion in numbers since 1945, it’s probably academic. Maybe the effect of global warming will mean Russia, Asia and America will be able to produce enough crops for bio-ethanol fuel in a sustainable way! But so far, all that has happened is a widening of the food crisis in countries which are growing crops for bio fuels at the expense of food. India banned some types of rice being exported this year and Pakistan has for the first time refused to supply Afghanistan - its neighbour and ally. Add drought and flooding to that bio fuels issue and guess why they think the weather has been so ruinous for the crop.

There is a pattern of connected cause and effect which we will see more and more of.  Ethiopia and Somalia are feeling the brunt of the effects of climate change and these poor, long-suffering people are dying in their thousands. There are people trying to live on a cup of water a day and eating their livestock feed while their cattle and camels die around them.

Meanwhile, funding for research in the US on global warming has increased from 175 million dollars to 2 billion dollars per year over the last 20 years, so now a lot of people in the scientific community who otherwise couldn't give a stuff  have an opinion  - and while they write their reports and go to conferences, Africa's population is quietly starving to death. Time - really - is running out now. 

We need a decisive, huge swing in the way we live - today.

If the US and the UK had spent the three trillion dollars we've blown fighting two wars in the Middle East over, let's face it, oil on developing a new energy source instead, greenhouse gases could be a thing of the past and the power balance amongst the world’s energy producers would have a totally different complexion now.  But don't forget the President is a Texan and Texans love their oil! And if our cars all ran on hydrogen, we'd need a global network of nuclear power stations to produce the massive volumes of power needed to produce the hydrogen. Which uses vast amounts of water which creates a potential problem and it presently boils away after a week in your fuel tank  anyway.

It was a close run thing for oil. Henry Ford almost elected to go for bio-ethanol fuel for his Model T Ford motor, but felt, understandably that the US had far greater, readily-available reserves of oil at the time. Texas was pumping it out of the ground by the billion barrel load and the mid-west had blown away in a massive dust storm thanks to over farming so there were no crops to produce bio-ethanol fuel. It was a decision which had a more significant influence on the oil industry than anything else since.

Imagine a situation where we are at war, there is no clean water, food is running out and people are dying in their thousands. It may not be a reality in Surrey yet but it is in Africa and South America and it's here to stay. And the socio-economic reasons which intertwine civil unrest and greed with factors in our climate will eventually lay their hand on your shoulder too.

Simon Ludgate 2008