Interview with Sir David Attenborough
After another summer of intermittent but intense heatwaves across Europe, the challenge of combating climate change is becoming more and more urgent. Sir David Attenborough, the distinguished natural history programme-maker and WWF ambassador, is now convinced that the perils are all too real. He explains why to WWF's Peter Denton.
In his groundbreaking Life on Earth series nearly 30years ago, Sir David Attenborough declared that mankind had unprecedented control over the world and everything in it - so whether we liked it or not, what happened next to the planet was largely up to us.
What happened next was climate change - a global phenomenon that is more in the public's mind now than ever before. "That's so," agrees Sir David. "We're going to find irreversible changes that will vary - in some places it may get colder; in other places it will still get warmer. And there will be more extreme weather. It's not just that in some places there will be more rainfall - there'll be more violent rain storms, and heatwaves will be more extreme."
One long-term result will be modification of vegetation and land, which itself will bring about a new distribution of wildlife. Some species, says Sir David, will lose out completely.
As global warming proceeds northwards across Europe, what will happen in the farthest reaches - to Arctic animals, for example? "They'll have nowhere to go," warns Sir David. "There doesn't seem much doubt that unless something very strange and unpredictable happens, we will go on losing ice in the Arctic and polar bears will find it increasingly hard to hunt. And so the polar bear is certainly on the list of the highly endangered animals - for the first time not because of man's depredations, not because of man's hunting, but because its basic living conditions will have changed and disappeared."
It has taken Sir David some time to accept humanity's part in changing the climate. "The issue was, how great are the variations we are seeing and have seen over the past few years? Are they within the bounds of normal variation that Europe has experienced over the past thousand years, or are they in excess of that? The only way you can answer that sensibly and responsibly - which is the point - is to get the evidence. It's irresponsible to make claims without the evidence. So evidence had to be collected, and that takes time - which is why I’ve taken my time."
WWF's view
So is climate change as serious a problem as WWF says it is? "Yes, I would have thought probably in excess of that. I believe WWF is taking a responsibly conservative view, really. I think that there are very great dangers."
In which case, the question is how to reverse the damage that's already been done. "You can't. A carbon dioxide molecule will survive in the atmosphere for a century or more. So the carbon dioxide that was produced by the fires that I sat beside as a child is still up there. You have to wait for the natural processes that may cause it to disintegrate."
The trouble is, we're piling damage upon damage - "so all we can do is to reduce the rate at which we're adding to it, to try and slow things down".
In addition to the scientific perspective, Sir David believes that there is now a moral aspect to climate change.
"I'm old enough to have been in the war as a kid. Then, you ate what was on your plate because it was wrong to leave it, because food was in short supply. I believe it's that kind of attitude we have to have now - that it's wrong to leave lights burning unnecessarily; it's wrong to burn more petrol than you actually need to get around. If everybody really took the saving of energy seriously, in whatever way they did it, it would have a real effect." (These views are entirely endorsed by WWF's One Planet Future campaign)
We should also empower our politicians to legislate for protection of the environment which "may not immediately make life easier. We have to make clear that we understand, and to give them our backing." Pressure must also be applied to the United States - the biggest per capita carbon polluter by far - "because as long as they deny the connection, the world is in trouble."
We'll never reverse the damage caused by climate change, Sir David says - but if we get to grips with it seriously and learn to mitigate its effects, the catastrophe foreseen by some can be averted. "In the end, it's down to us."