Attenborough:
Climate change is the major challenge facing the world
By
David Attenborough
Published: 24
May 2006 source
I
was sceptical about climate change. I was cautious about crying wolf. I
am always cautious about crying wolf. I think conservationists have to
be careful in saying things are catastrophic when, in fact, they are
less than catastrophic.
I have
seen my job at the BBC as a presenter to produce programmes about
natural history, just as the Natural History Museum would be interested
in showing a range of birds of paradise - that's the sort of thing I've
been doing. And in almost every big series I've made, the most recent
one being Planet Earth, I've ended up by talking about the future, and
possible dangers. But, with climate change, I was sceptical. That is
true.
Also,
I'm not a chemist or a climatologist or a meteorologist; it isn't for
me to suddenly stand up and say I have decided the climate is changing.
That's not my expertise. The television gives you an unfair and
unjustified prominence but just because your face is on the telly
doesn't mean you're an expert on meteorology.
But I'm
no longer sceptical. Now I do not have any doubt at all. I think
climate change is the major challenge facing the world. I have waited
until the proof was conclusive that it was humanity changing the
climate. The thing that really convinced me was the graphs connecting
the increase of carbon dioxide in the environment and the rise in
temperature, with the growth of human population and industrialisation.
The coincidence of the curves made it perfectly clear we have left the
period of natural climatic oscillation behind and have begun on a steep
curve, in terms of temperature rise, beyond anything in terms of
increases that we have seen over many thousands of years.
People
say, everything will be all right in the end. But it's not the case. We
may be facing major disasters on a global scale.
I have
seen the ice melting. I have been to parts of Patagonia and heard
people say: "That's where the glacier was 10 years ago - and that's
where it is today." The most dramatic evidence I have seen was New
Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. Was that climate-change induced, out
of the ordinary? Certainly so. Everyone who does any cooking knows that
if you want to increase a chemical reaction, you put it on the stove
and heat it up. If you increase the temperature of the oceans, above
which there are swirling currents of air, you will increase the energy
in the air currents. It's not a mystery.
So it's
true to say these programmes about climate change are different, in
that previously I have made programmes about natural history, and now
you could say I have an engaged stance. The first is about the fact
that there is climate change and that it is human-induced. I'm well
aware that people say it's all a fuss about nothing, and even if it is
getting warmer, it's nothing to do with us. So I'm glad that the BBC
wanted some clear statement of the evidence as to why these two things
are the case.
The
second programme says, these are some of the changes that are now
almost inevitable, these are the sorts of things that the nations of
the world have to do, to forestall the worst. Will they do it? Who
knows? And many people feel helpless.
Yet the
fact of the matter is, I was brought up as boy during the war and,
during the war, we actually regarded it as immoral, wrong, to leave
food on your plate, you needed to eat what was on your plate because we
didn't have enough. I feel in the same way that it is wrong to waste
energy now, and if that sort of sea change in moral attitude were to
spread amongst the world's population, it would make a difference.
During
the past 50 years, I have been lucky enough to spend my time travelling
around the world looking at its wonders and its splendours. I have seen
many changes, some good many bad.
But
it's only in the past decade that I have come to think about the
question of whether or not what I, or anybody else, has been doing,
could have contributed to the change in the climate of the planet that
is undoubtedly taking place. When I was a boy in the 1930s, the carbon
dioxide level was still below 300 parts per million. This year, it
reached 382, the highest figure for hundreds of thousands of years.
I'm 80
now. It's not that I think, like any old man, that change is wrong. I
recognise that the world has always changed. I know that. But the point
is, it's changing more extremely and swiftly than at any time in the
past several million years. And one of the things I don't want to do is
to look at my grandchildren and hear them say: "Grandfather, you knew
it was happening - and you did nothing."
As
told to Michael McCarthy
www.open2.net/climatechange/
