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The first time I filmed the sunrise was just before I started planning this film.
It was completely pot luck really because you don't know where the sun's going to rise
over the horizon. You have to guess where it's going to rise. You have to hope that
the shadows are going to be right. You have to hope that the camera is going to capture
it properly. It's not going to be too bright. You've got the settings right. You've got
to guess everything basically.
What does climate change mean to me? Scary predictions in the newspaper and graphs with
temperature rising and all the obvious things. It's so difficult to come to terms with what
all the predictions might mean or even come to terms with the fact that what humans are
doing could be changing the whole pattern. It's quite hard to feel any connection with
that as a real thing. Climate change is basically just a phrase and banded around so much you
just become immune to it. My hope is that everyone will come away from the film with
something new to think about.
Okay, first of all you might be watching this film because you're already quite concerned
about climate change. Or you might be watching thinking now it's not caused by humans. Or
you might still be slightly undecided in which case you're like me. I haven't completely
made my mind up. So basically what I want to try and do is get clearer in my head how
serious a threat climate change is to us. If in fact it's really a problem at all. Hopefully
I'll be meeting some experts who can tell me how sure or skeptical scientists are at
the moment on evidence for global warming caused by humans as well as asking the public
what they think and I'll be bringing my video camera all along the way. But first of all
what I want to do is go and speak to my grandparents because out of everyone I know they've seen
the most change during their lifetime. I don't just want to know if they've seen climate
change in their life though. I'm going to ask as well how lifestyles are different now
compared to when they were children.
Okay, so let's start with food. What was different about what you ate and where it came from?
The food, the food has changed our whole proportion to what it used to be.
Well the only time we had a lot of meat would be to keep a pig in the backyard and when
our pig was killed we'd share it with neighbours and the same way the neighbours would have
their pig killed and share it with us. Because there were no refrigerators it all got to
be done in the cold weather. You kept your pig, all the milk you put on the allotment
and then you had, if you've got a good crop of onions you'd share with everyone. It was
more share and share about, wasn't it, more neighbours?
There were only seasonal vegetables in the shops in those days. I mean we weren't getting
beans in Kenya or Nigeria or places like that, there was all just home grown produce. What
was ever in season the shops used to sell. Nowadays you can go in the shop and buy grapes
and oranges and bananas all the time. I remember Valerie when she had a, during the war, just
after the war we had a banana and she didn't know you got to peel it. We never saw that
sort of thing.
How about transport, was that different? How did you get around?
Ork.
Bike, bush bike.
Well you were lucky if you had a bush bike.
We were on a bike all the time when we were in it. From when I was about 10 until I was
16 I saw I had a bike. We used to go everywhere on a bike, miles and miles and miles. But
gradually as time went on towards the end of the 50s more cars came each to purchase
and then of course it gradually took off. I mean in those days it was it was a delight
to be able to drive anywhere. We were out all the time, outside all the time doing something.
But there was nothing to do indoors, I mean there was no television.
I'd like to know if the weather's changed, what was the snow like when you were children?
Deep. Lasted a long time. In 1947 it lasted for, that was the year that they had, the
slush frozen straits in Oxford, you know it would go to the side and into a rut and they
had to have pneumatic drills to take all the ice away.
Certainly Ross, the weather has changed. The last few years I can recall maybe winters
but we've barely had a frost. Barely had a frost. Well in years gone by we've had frosts
when the trees were all covered in ice and it might last for a week or 10 days before
it goes. But the last, I would say 10 years it's just started to warmer.
The worst snowfall for 25 years has cast a deep blanket of disruption right across the
meridian region. We're experiencing the worst period of prolonged cold weather for 30 years
and our region is reeling from the effects. Heavy snowfall overnight left many roads
impassable. Okay, it's been about a month or so since
I interviewed my grandparents and as you can see from the field of snow behind me the
weather seems to be trying to do everything it can to prove wrong while my granddad was
saying about things warming up in the past couple of years. This is probably the deepest
snow I've ever seen. It's absolutely freezing and it's not just my area that's had really
cold weather. The whole of the country has had an abnormally cold winter so it would
be easy to think weather like this proves wrong, the theory that the climate's warming
up. What's important to say early on is that climate
is average weather which means it takes into account weather over a longer period of time
often set at 30 years. One cold winter or any one off weather event doesn't make that
big a difference to climate change science because this is the study of trends in the
weather. Unless the normal weather gets repeatedly cold year on year we won't be into global
cooling. More importantly, taking average temperatures from the instrumental record
scientists can look back on the first decade of the 21st century and see it was the warmest
that's been recorded yet. So this leads me on to the first important
piece of information which I'm going to be questioning and using from now on in the film
which is, although it's obviously ironic that I'm standing in a field of snow while
I say it, the science so far and the evidence from temperature records dating back over
the past century is that, like it or not, the climate is actually warming.
This might seem like stating the obvious to some of you but it's the essential basis
to the theory I'm looking at. From the records I mentioned an average global temperature
increase has been figured out and is agreed to be a rise during the 20th century of more
or less 0.7 degrees Celsius. We've established the climate is warming
which means we've only just got to the really important question, a question that for some
reason never goes away. I'm going to go and ask some people who know a lot more about
this than I do. Are we really causing climate change?
We know perfectly well that the climate of the earth has been oscillating ever since
the ice age after all and it wasn't so long ago there was a mini-ice age and the Thames
froze over. So you know that the climate of the earth
is changing. The question is was that oscillation bigger than could be accounted for by sunspots
or whatever else you might invoke and was humanity the cause of it?
My conviction arrived when I went to a lecture given by a very distinguished American climate
chemist who specialized in the climate of the upper atmosphere and the chemistry of
the upper atmosphere and he produced graphs showing findings over the last 200 years showing
the variation of various elements up there and they all had the same shape, the hockey
stick shape going along like that and then curving upwards and when he's superimposed
on that the industrial revolution, the change in the industrial revolution and the increase
in the humanity of the population, the coincidence was so strong that you couldn't deny it.
There's no single silver bullet that definitely links man-made emissions of greenhouse gases
to warming but there are multiple strands of evidence which the scientists point to
the fact that for the past 800,000 years CO2 levels have never been as high as they are
now, how every single year since the year of my birth, 1958, the level of CO2 has gone
up, not down, the physics of CO2 are quite well known, it warms rather than cools, the
more you add the likelihood is that you will lead to warming.
Obviously there's never been humans before or there's never been any other species which
has transferred very large quantities of carbon from the geological reservoir, so coal and
oil and gas fossil fuels into the atmosphere over such a short space of time.
Scientists know that the billions of tons of fossil fuels we've burnt in just 250 years
since the industrial revolution have changed the atmosphere of the planet.
There are lots of gases involved but the one everybody knows about and the one we're creating
most of is carbon dioxide.
The amount of CO2 is measured in parts per million concentration and this used to be
around about 270 to 280 before we came along in the 18th century and started burning things
and then it began to rise.
In 2009 it was 388, now it will be more and it's increasing every year.
The theory at the heart of the question we're on is as follows, here's the earth and here's
its atmosphere, which we're adding greenhouse gases to, radiation from the sun heats up
our planet, some heat is reflected away and some is absorbed by the planet itself.
When earth re-radiates that heat away into space, some of it is absorbed by carbon dioxide,
methane, water vapor and other greenhouse gases, which then return it back to earth.
The effect is one of trapping the heat, the climate is made warmer and that's the greenhouse
effect.
It's how most scientists think we're contributing to changing the climate.
Some warming is definitely unavoidable.
We've already seen about 0.8 degrees from pre-industrial temperatures.
There's another half a degree also in the system already.
These things are only ever expressed as a range and even that has uncertainty attached
to it.
But I mean the probability is that to stay within two degrees peak temperature this century
we would need to begin to bend the emissions curve down from between 2015 and 2020.
The biggest group of scientists working on predictions is the intergovernmental panel
on climate change.
Because nobody can predict the future exactly, when trying to figure out how much global
temperatures might rise, the IPCC gives a range.
They say by the end of the century, temperatures might only increase a further 1.1 degrees,
but it could be over 6.
It all depends on how much greenhouse gas we emit and how sensitive the climate is to
it.
Different temperatures will bring different effects, but I can't help wondering are they
all going to be terrible?
So next, I asked if climate change is all bad.
Couldn't we do with hot to summers and some local vineyards?
It's already vineyards in southern England, I've been to vineyard in Stropshire which
produced very high quality wine, nice bubbly as well.
Does that make up for devastating most of Africa?
Probably not, in the view of Africans anyway.
There is a negative side to this.
We'll start to see rainfall patterns change and we're seeing it already.
We've had two consecutive years, 2008 and 2009, where the traditional April showers
were much reduced and we ended up seeing much more rain in the month of August and September
and these so-called climate tipping points where you get feedbacks in the system that
become self-perpetuating are already in the pipeline.
We may well have crossed the first tipping point which is the melting of arctic ice and
there are other tipping points which will follow in hot pursuit.
When I started this job in 2003, the typical forecast for most organisations was that there'd
be no ice in the arctic ocean in the summer time by the end of the century.
People were talking about the 2090s.
A couple of years later they started saying, well maybe it's the 2070s, then the 2060s
and then in 2007 there was an extraordinary melt that fell off the graph.
It was the melt forecast on a linear trend for 2055.
I think probably the biggest tipping point in danger is the release of methane from melting
permafrost.
So yes it's going to get pleasantly warm in Siberia but that means all of the ground
which is frozen will thaw out a lot of its waterlogs and that will release prodigious
quantities of methane which is 30 times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
The rise in temperature of the ocean and the increasing acidification of the ocean can
have huge effects on for example coral reefs.
If coral reefs were to disappear and there are coral reef scientists who maintain that
it is a real possibility for the next 20 or 30 years, if that happens the disturbance
of the ecosystem of the oceans as a whole could result in huge devastation and humanity
which takes a lot of its food from fish and may well find itself starving.
What do we think that's going to happen when we start to face the very severe impacts of
climate change and people stop exporting their food to us and we don't have enough?
We will see the breakdown of civil society.
Now why not get ahead of the curve and start to change our infrastructure now whilst we
live in the economic bubble we have?
Why are we going to wait until we see economic society breakdown and the breakdown of civil
society as well before we start to make those changes?
One reason we might not want to change things is that we don't believe all the claims in
the first place.
Even though scientists' understanding of our effect on the climate has been improving
for decades there's a growing number of skeptics who don't trust the theory of human-induced
climate change.
It is the fault of environmentalists up to a point that the skeptic phenomenon has become
so pervasive and it's because environmentalism is just annoying to everyone else.
If you say to people, because the earth is heating up you can't do all these things,
rather than not doing all those things they'll say the earth isn't heating up and I think
that's more or less what's happened.
It's become more than just a grudge against environmentalists though.
The IPCC and other scientific groups have come under heavy fire from those who deny humans
of the cause, giving rise to numerous scandals, leaked emails and bogus facts have hit the
news.
It seems like the media frenzy is making the general public less trustful.
There have been two pretty major bombshells in the world of climate science, one the leaking
or hacking of emails involving researchers at the University of East Anglia, which appear
to suggest a readiness to interfere with the process of peer review, the system by which
scientists judge each other's work, raising doubts about the integrity of those researchers
and in parallel revelations that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, its latest report, the Fourth Assessment Report, contained pretty serious errors about
the likely melt rates of Himalayan glaciers.
And of course given how many scientists are involved there are bound to be mistakes, errors,
slips in procedure and in some cases in any scientific community there's bound to be
an element of the occasional piece of research that's sort of fraudulent.
And indeed it's not surprising to me at all that what we've discovered is that some of
the behaviour of some of the scientists falls short.
What this exposure has done is increased scepticism.
What it hasn't done is unravel the years of work, the thousands of conferences and calculations
on climate science, and made all the evidence disappear.
Climate change scepticism only makes sense as a conspiracy theory.
The idea that scientists are going to team up together and destroy the business interests
of people at ExxonMobil should strike anyone as being, well, almost absurd.
It doesn't seem very likely to me that everyone's just jumping on the bandwagon for no reason
and saying, yeah, we caused climate change.
Even so, being sceptical doesn't necessarily mean denying we're having a major impact.
Scepticism can be a good thing.
What we need is collaboration with the unbiased common aim of finding out as much as we can
as accurately as possible.
Nothing is certain and we won't know until it happens but we can make a pretty good
guess that things are moving in that direction.
So there would be a consensus that the climate is changing and that humans are the cause
of that change and that that change is likely to intensify and that consensus I think would
be shared by 97, 98, 99% of experts.
We are doomed to live in a world of uncertainty and the question is, what do you do when you
think something might happen but you're not sure it's going to happen?
We are doomed to live with uncertainty.
Still, it is very likely the net effect of our actions is changing the climate.
Predictions say sea levels might rise by metres, the Sahara might expand into Europe, more
people might be starving and without water.
They might not, but the risk is there and it's a big risk.
So from what I've heard so far, most experts are concerned and would say there's a serious
risk, but I know that's not true of everyone.
Even if climate change is something that's in the newspaper or on television every day,
lots of people, if not most people, don't really care very much.
It's not something we want to worry about and lots of people feel they don't need to.
But some groups of people are already taking action.
Not everybody is just thinking who cares.
For 15 years the UN has been meeting to talk about climate change and for last 15 years
emissions have only been going up.
Well leaders, I'm just very doubtful about how much they truly care.
I'm not convinced that they really value climate change as any kind of big deal.
Climate camp is a movement of lots of various individuals coming together to take action
on climate change and the root causes of climate change.
It raises awareness in society because there's significant media coverage of this and people
do question and say, well hold on, why are they taking it so seriously?
Why is it growing every year?
Why are we seeing more and more camps this year for the first time?
We've seen a camp in Wales, we've seen a camp in Scotland, they're spreading over Europe,
we're seeing them in the US, all happening in the last four years.
Why are people so concerned?
Now just them asking that question is very good news.
And these are interesting times now, in all times in the balance, so shake off your indifference
and don't kneel at bayon, it's time to wake up and freak out, shake up and speak out.
For us what really needs to happen is for everybody to get together and for everybody
to make the changes and for everybody to take the action necessary to deal with climate
change, that has to come from individuals, from local groups, it has to come right from
the bottom.
Not everybody aware of the challenge thinks that's the way forward though.
It's easy to be cynical about how much effect would come from us making simple little changes
to our day to day lives, especially when you see soaring pollution in other countries like
that from China's coal expansion.
So should it really be the governments of the world tackling this?
And is it worth us individuals making any changes at all?
It's a bit like saying if I black out my windows when an enemy air force comes over Britain
to bomb it, will I make much difference?
Well it's better that you do than you don't, but what you really need is an air force up
there to deal with the problem.
It's a problem of scale and that's why it has to be governmental and it has to have
an international dimension.
You only have the international level really to come together and agree on a common framework,
common direction, guidelines for everyone on the ground.
So it is an important element I think of the solution.
But as we're seeing we're not really making a lot of progress, we're not getting the kind
of guidance and direction that we really need so that direction is currently failing us.
You end up everyone pointing at everyone else, demanding that everyone else does something
and no one being prepared to make the first move.
Looking forward you have to ask how is it that it could possibly be the case that the
nations of the world could actually come together in a global agreement to reduce climate change
emissions because the reality is that western industrial lifestyles are so phenomenally
unsustainable.
There's no single answer to his question.
You might even say there's no chance of success.
But to say that alone would only be giving half the picture.
The other half is a vision of change of attitudes that could have widespread influence, affecting
decisions we make, as well as those made by businesses and even government.
I think that what it amounts to is a change of moral stance, how may sound sort of airy-fairly
and vague.
You see I'm old enough to remember the last war, and in the last war we ate everything
that was put in front of us because not because we thought that if I ate up that rather unpleasant
piece of gristle or whatever, that I was going to defeat Hitto in itself.
But because it was morally wrong to waste things, at that time this country was short
of food, everybody was short of food, so it was wrong to throw food away, even if you
were lucky enough to have it.
It was wrong to throw it away.
And equally I think now there has to be a moral change, a moral attitude that says it
is wrong to waste energy.
And of course energy underlies everything, underlies packaging, it underlies food, it
underlies energy is what drives the whole system.
So wasting of anything, whether it's petrol in your motor car which is bigger than you
need or leaving on a light which is unnecessary, that is waste.
Now you may say well that's sort of airy-fairy stuff and who cares and would it ever happen?
Well I'm putting in mind the fact that within the 19th century, at one moment of the 19th
century, it was perfectly acceptable for people in this country, educated people or people
of sense, to accept that other human beings could be slaves.
And within 20 years it was intolerable.
That was a change of moral attitude which swept the world and we needed another change
of moral attitude to treat the world about climate.
In two days time the UN summit on climate change starts in Copenhagen.
I'm back in London because today thousands of people who are already concerned are coming
together to march to the houses of parliament and demand more real action.
I thought I should come along and see what's going on.
I asked some of the people on the march why they were there.
Because I think the government aren't taking it seriously enough.
And I have very strong feelings that we need to do something about climate change.
Because I think we need a strong climate change in Copenhagen.
Because as a Muslim my faith inspires me to do more as a student of nature.
And we're here because we want to feature our children.
I like blue face paint so I thought it would be a good idea.
Anything to do with the climate?
Really?
Yeah.
You know if saved like the economy, if the economy crashes it will come back up again.
I think it's important that we need to demonstrate because there's so much going on in Copenhagen.
And you know I think it is the last chance for us to do something about it.
And the more people there are showing their support I think the more likely it is that
something is actually going to happen.
It will take more than this to definitely tackle climate change.
We come a long way but we have much further to go.
This was meant to be the pivotal moment where after two decades of concern about climate
change the international community set itself a rigorous set of globally agreed targets.
What did emerge eventually was what's been widely regarded as an incredibly watery rather
inconsequential agreement.
You know the reality is that there were big countries who didn't want to make commitments
and those big countries were primarily developing countries this time around.
It's always been the Americans who were bad guys before.
This time it was India and China.
And so it was a new situation that no one was prepared for I think to see the developing
world block the deal.
Climate change threatens us all therefore we must bridge all divides and build new partnerships
to meet this great challenge of our time.
It opened with some optimism because so many countries were offering to cart or curb greenhouse
gases but very quickly the talks faltered as Ed Miliband put it the sheer process the
sheer number of countries involved seemed to be strangling any chance of a successful
outcome.
The intention had been to set a series of targets for cuts in greenhouse gases.
The atmosphere was incredibly uncomfortable and ultimately unproductive.
The United Nations meets every year to pass laws on this.
So Copenhagen wasn't the be-all and end-all even if it seemed like it at the time.
What's more important are attitudes towards climate change.
Like I said at the beginning it seems intangible, it's political, global, something far off
and easy to ignore.
Changing the current situation, burning less of the fossil fuels we use so much, would
need action across society by governments and individuals and every group in between.
That's nothing new though.
We've known it for a long time and not much has happened yet so is there any realistic
chance it's ever going to happen let alone in the next few years when we need it most?
It is likely people in the future will be more aware of the energy they use but for us, the
people around today, we're the ones who could change parts of the framework, rebuild the
systems of energy or economy that affect us.
We probably won't get round to it though unless there's a benefit we ourselves can appreciate.
Not just saving polar bears or stopping some other country from flooding.
Looking forward I've begun to see there are different ways climate change can become somehow
relevant to each of us through the different things we each care about.
There are so many other issues which are attached to climate change which people perhaps care
about more and which are more closely connected to their day to day lives.
It's only just recently that the conversation has moved out of environment and into economy
and justice and all these other areas of life that people are beginning to think more broadly
about it.
The thing which frustrates me is that just because I care about climate change doesn't
make me an environmentalist.
You don't have to be an environmentalist to want to eat healthy food.
You don't have to be an environmentalist to want cheaper heating bills, for instance.
And I think that's constantly the message that we're putting across.
For those who are either climate skeptics or who just don't want to care, they root
climate change in environmentalism and environmentalism is something they fundamentally dislike
so that makes it a lot more difficult.
You need mass mobilisation of not just the green movement, not just the climate movement
but of everybody because then you'll see real change in parliament.
We look at what the climate movement is seeking to achieve.
We're seeking to achieve things like better, cheaper, more affordable public transport.
We're looking to secure energy independence for the UK so we're not relying on Russian
gas and Middle Eastern oil.
We're campaigning for lower energy costs, cleaner roads, cleaner streets.
All of the things which we're campaigning for, any sane person would agree on.
If it wasn't for all these negative stereotypes standing in our way and all these distractions
and debates and vested interests, this would be the easiest sell-in history.
When we go back to the 1960s and look at the way the civil rights movement started up,
civil rights movement didn't start when Martin Luther King got up at a bed one day and said,
hey look, I'm going to sort this issue.
It started when people started to get together in living rooms and around dining room tables
talking about these issues and telling each other stories and thinking, well, you know,
that really isn't right, we need to do something about this, this needs to change.
And if we get together and talk together and work together, we can actually achieve something.
So I'm not one of these people that sort of says that if you sort your bottles into
the right bin, you know, you're going to sort the world.
But what I would say is if you want to change the world, then get together with people,
you know, let's be a bit more social because it's much more fun that way.
If you get your friends and your family on board and talk to them about these issues
and work with them on these issues, then it's a hell of a lot more empowering and experience.
And there's a much, much greater chance of us achieving something on it.
Excuse me, do you have 20 seconds to answer a quick question?
Great, that's good, thanks a lot.
Can deal with that.
We are really passionate about our future and what happens to it.
And we're ready to do something that's completely different to what's been done before.
And we just need your, you know, we just need political support in order to go forward with it.
Right, the question is...
Imagine, like, having a life where you could be in abundance of doing what you love
and not having to worry about harming anyone or running out of the energy to do it
because we're in such a sustainable, like, living that we can.
And that is very possible with tackling climate change in a really effective way.
The times come for us to get out the sidelines and shape the future that we seek.
That's why I came to Copenhagen today and that's why I committed to working in common effort with countries around the world.
That's also why I believe what we have achieved in Copenhagen will not be the end
but rather the beginning of the new era of international action.
That's a good question.
More bikes.
More sunshine.
Less meat.
More green spaces.
Less flights.
Try to find better technologies to take care of the environment.
Just to have really a season, spring, summer, autumn, winter, that would be ideal.
Making sure that we've got new engines that would help us achieve a less, less pollution.
Renewable energy is my answer. Renewable energy.
More people walking than driving.
No global warming.
Well, I guess that there needs to be a lot of change in people's behaviour
and how they use the planet's resources.
It was a much better start of living.
Worrying about all the stuff that's being pumped into the atmosphere.
It must. It just got to have some effect.
I mean, if anybody talked to me from now to next week, they wouldn't convince me otherwise.
We've been damaging the environment ever since humans came out of the plains of Africa.
In fact, human history has been about damaging the environment.
We have felled trees. We have plowed up fields.
We've harvest oceans. We've interfered with nature along the way.
We don't actually understand and we don't see the planet as an integrated system.
We still see it in a very sectional way.
We see one compartment, one compartment and we try to affect trains there
without real understanding of how it impacts on the whole.
I would say we're on the brink of two pathways, two choices.
And all kinds of decisions in the next few months and the next couple of years
will frame which way the world goes.
Maybe we will be able to reinvent our lifestyles in a way that are more just,
that are more fun, that, you know, we're happier people.
So there is reason for hope.
The worst thing to do is to say, right, they're not doing it so I'm not going to do it either.
There's no argument for that at all in my view.
I'd probably say less cars on the road, more public transport,
or better public transport in all honesty.
Everything that seems to get proposed seems to get swept under the mat.
Everyone talks about it but nothing ever really happens.
And for people to actually start going through with things.
It's not about climate change.
It's about being able to do what you want to do, you know, for the rest of your life
because it's what you believe in and it's what you value.
And nothing, climate change, is not going to stop you doing it.
It's about taking control and knowing what you want
and doing everything that you can do in order to achieve that.
Now that I've finished answering my questions
and spoken to all the different people I've met,
the way I see it is that if there's a chance other people are going to suffer,
if there's a chance habitats and wildlife are going to be destroyed,
if there's a chance the quality of our own lives in the future will be worse,
because of what we've done,
then surely we need to act on the risk regardless of small uncertainties in the science.
We could build a world where we have the things we want,
live the way we want,
and are happy without having to worry about the climate,
without stopping other people doing the same.
And I can't help but think he wouldn't want that future.
There is a multiple danger.
There is a danger which is overtaking humanity
and we will not solve it unless we all put together,
unless we all agree to do something.
Now that is a fantastically difficult thing to achieve.
I mean it's never happened in the history of humanity
that all of humanity has agreed.
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