Myles Allen on understanding climate change

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2020

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Professor Myles Allen has spent thirty years studying global climate change, trying to working out what we can and can't predict. He was one of the first scientists to quantify the extent to which human actions are responsible for global warming. As a lead author on the 3rd Assessment by the International Panel on Climate Change in 2001, he concluded that ‘most of the observed global warming was due to human influence’. More recently, (having established that calculating a safe concentration of greenhouse gases was very difficult indeed), he worked out instead how many tonnes of carbon would be acceptable, a shift in emphasis that paved the way for the current Net Zero carbon emissions policy. Myles tells Jim Al-Khalili how our ability to predict climate change has evolved from the early days when scientists had to rely on the combined computing power of hundreds of thousands of personal computers. He sheds light on how the IPCC works and explains why, he believes, fossil fuel industries must be forced to take back the carbon dioxide that they emit. If carbon capture and storage technologies makes their products more expensive, so be it. Producer: Anna Buckley Image Credit: Fisher Studios, Oxford.

Transcript

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0:48.0	Professor Miles Allen has been at the forefront of understanding global climate change since the 1990s.
0:54.0	He was one of the first scientists to quantify the extent to which human activity
0:59.0	since the Industrial Revolution has been responsible for global warming. The chapter he wrote in the third
1:04.6	assessment for the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001, was
1:10.3	hugely influential. It concluded for the first time in an IPCC report
1:15.2	that most of the global warming is due to human influence. At the heart of
1:20.4	everything he's done is a deep appreciation for the uncertainties involved in
1:24.3	modeling such a complex system. In 2003 he founded the project Climate Prediction.net, the first probabilistic forecast of future climate change.
1:35.0	In 2005 Miles suggested that we should stop measuring global climate change in terms of the
1:39.6	concentration of gases and instead focus on the number of tons of carbon we're putting into the atmosphere.
1:47.0	It might sound like a subtle distinction, but it had profound and radical policy implications.
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