Climate Change: The Facts

We've had some hot days this summer

but nothing like what we're going to get into, starting tomorrow.

Today, the mercury hit a scorching 35 degrees Celsius.

Temperatures are set to rise even further this week and could even

break the all-time record.

Right now, we are facing our greatest threat

in thousands of years.

Climate change.

For a long time, climate change was something that scientists

were predicting that would happen in the future.

But that's no longer the case.

What we're doing right now is we're so rapidly changing

the climate, for the first time in the world's history,

people can see the impact of climate change.

Greater storms, greater floods, greater heat waves,

extreme sea level rises.

All of this is happening far faster than many of us thought possible.

Scientists across the globe are in no doubt that at the

current rate of warming, we risk a devastating future.

It's difficult to see how the population of the world

will actually feed itself.

It's happening in your world.

It's happening in my world.

Time is very short.

There's still time but there isn't much time left.

The science is now clear that urgent action is needed.

We're at a tipping point.

We can change history.

Right now!

What happens now, and in these next few years,

will profoundly affect the next few thousand years.

What can be done to avert disaster and ensure the survival

of our civilisations…

…and the natural world upon which we depend?

It's our future.

We can't just let it slip away from us.

Standing here in the English countryside, it may not seem obvious

but we are facing a man-made disaster on a global scale.

In the 20 years since I first started talking about the impact

of climate change on our world, conditions have changed far faster

than I ever imagined.

It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is

that if we have not taken dramatic action within the

next decade, we could face irreversible damage

to the natural world

and the collapse of our societies.

We're running out of time, but there is still hope.

I believe that if we better understand the threat we face,

the more likely it is that we can avoid such a catastrophic future.

Our climate is changing because of one simple fact.

Our world is getting hotter.

We have temperature records going back over 100 years.

There are dips and troughs.

There are so many years that are not as warm as other years.

But what we've seen is this steady and unremitting temperature trend.

20 of the warmest years on record have all occurred

in the last 22 years.

It's not just Met Office records that are showing this trend.

Data from the US Climate Centre, NOAA, the Japanese Met Office

and NASA all show the same sharp rise in temperatures.

When scientists first became concerned about these increasing

temperatures, nobody could be sure exactly what was driving them.

Four decades of research later, on land, at sea,

and in the far reaches of our atmosphere,

the evidence is now unequivocal.

What's striking is that warming trend cannot be explained

by natural factors…

but is caused by human activities.

In particular, by use of fossil fuels.

The problem is that everything we do, our entire economy,

from the moment you wake up in the morning and turn on the light,

or look at your cellphone, to the moment you go to bed

at night, and even then because your cellphone

is still drawing power at night, I mean, we're all using energy

all the time.

And in the industrialised world, that energy is almost

entirely fossil fuels.

When you burn fossil fuels, coal, gas and oil,

to power our energy generation, to heat our homes,

to drive our factories, to power our cars and our trains,

and travel around the world.

When we burn fossil fuels, it produces carbon dioxide

as a waste product.

Carbon dioxide acts like a blanket.

It absorbs the heat radiation from the Earth's surface

and that keeps the surface warmer than it would be otherwise.

The problem is what we're doing now is we're adding extra

carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

So we're increasing the thickness of this blanket.

Before we started to burn coal, the amount of carbon dioxide

in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million.

It's now over 400 parts per million.

And the planet gets warmer and warmer.

We have pumped so much carbon dioxide into our atmosphere

that our world is now around one degree Celsius hotter

than it was in pre-industrial times.

This warming is enough to bring about the raft of effects

we call climate change.

One degree Celsius global warming may not sound like much,

but it's having a dramatic effect on our weather.

You warm up the planet, of course you're going to get

more intense and more frequent heat waves.

You're going to dry out the soils.

You're going to get worse drought.

We're seeing extreme heat in southern Africa,

Japan, North America, in the UK as well.

It is officially the hottest day of the year so far.

Often, the question is, did climate change cause a certain event?

You can never really answer that question.

But what scientists do is to look at whether climate change

made a certain event more or less likely,

or more or less intense.

Last year, we had a heat wave that was actually the joint warmest

on record, alongside 1976.

And we have been analysing this here at the Met Office.

What that showed us was that the chances of that heat wave

had increased by about 30 times.

So it's now about 30 times more likely that we had that heat wave

than we would have had without climate change.

Today, the mercury hit a scorching 35 degrees Celsius.

So it doesn't mean to say that every single weather event

is due to climate change.

But what climate change does mean is that with the baseline climate

having changed, then the frequency of the

extreme temperatures is increasing.

And that has a substantial effect.

In November last year, when temperatures in Cairns, Australia,

hit 42 degrees, even creatures specifically adapted

to heat were unable to survive.

They're just…

everywhere.

When we got here in the morning, it was the first time

really we saw it.

There were just dead bats as far as the eye could see.

There was a deafening sound of babies crying.

You just don't know where to start.

So we just started finding babies, basically.

There's a little baby attached to its dead mum.

Like all species, flying foxes have ways of dealing

with the conditions of their environment.

But it seems their usual cooling methods are no longer enough

for the kind of temperatures Australia is now facing.

Last year, temperature records were broken across the country.

Scientists have shown that it's simply inconceivable that you would

see these temperatures without the fact of climate change.

We saved about 350.

The rest are dead.

Over 11,000 died from that colony.

And if you have two more events like we had,

the species is gone.

This is climate change in action.

We need to wake up.

I've seen for myself that in addition to the many other

threats they face, animals of all kinds are now

struggling to adapt to rapidly changing conditions.

Think of the equator.

As climate change occurs, that central part of the world

becomes increasingly uninhabitable.

If climate change is too fast, we're pushing them

off the planet, in effect.

We're causing extinction of species already.

And that's irreversible.

Scientists believe that 8% of species are now at threat

of extinction solely due to climate change.

This isn't just about losing wonders of nature.

With the loss of even the smallest organisms,

we destabilise and ultimately risk collapsing the world's ecosystems.

The networks that support the whole of life on Earth.

What's been happening in recent years is really showing us

what one degree Celsius really means.

Not just for wildlife, but for people, for their safety,

for their livelihoods and for their futures.

As temperatures rise, the threats we face multiply.

Last year saw record-breaking wildfires take hold

across the globe.

Firefighters are working around the clock.

It has to be seen to be believed.

Australia is seeing some of its worst fires in years.

We've seen wildfires break out in Greece,

even in the Arctic.

Wildfire, sweeping across some of the coldest countries on Earth.

We've seen a tripling in the extent of wildfire

in the western US, California.

The fires that swept through California last year

caused $24 billion worth of damage.

106 people lost their lives.

We're not just talking about an inconvenience.

We're talking about people's lives,

their livelihoods and their communities being damaged.

The wildfires need an ignition source.

What?

Maybe cigarette butts, or lightning, and then you need

the weather conditions that are conducive to that fire spreading.

GASPS

Do I go?

I don't want to get trapped.

Research has shown that the chances of having these very hot,

dry conditions has increased as a result of climate change.

Easy, easy. Oh, my God!

Easy, easy.