Month: November 2021

We can all do something and anything you do will be a positive contribution. For me one of the most impactful things is, I’m just starting my career in renewable energy and I think that if energy or renewable energy is one of your passions then it could be having a career in that sector could be one of the most impactful things that you could do – Henna Bains, Durham University.

I think it is a collective shared problem and whilst the scale of it is very significant, you know there are over seven billion people living on planet Earth and if each person makes a small change then that adds up to something really significant. So for me there are things that I do, choices I make such as working to walk or taking the bus instead of driving. And you too can make choices about what you eat or how you travel – there are lots of little small choices as individuals that each of us can make and together that really adds up to make a very significant contribution – Professor Douglas Halliday, Durham University.

I think on a personal level it’s thinking about the impact that every small action you do has on climate change. Climate change isn’t just an issue about greenhouse gases or power stations as something that we can do to make a positive difference in everything that we do, every action that we take. We should be conscious of that as we go through our daily lives – Alan Patrickson, Durham County Council.

My understanding, is that if we look at the mixture of factors that are affecting climate change, the biggest contributor will be a gas called carbon dioxide and that is a by-product or its emitted or its released when you burn fossil fuels like oil and coal and gas as the by-product. Greenhouse gases are one of the most important contributors to climate change, so if we can reduce the emission of carbon dioxide that will be one of the most important things we can do and that’s where some of the other sources of energy, like renewable energy from wind and solar energy, can replace our reliance on burning coal and oil, things that we call fossil fuels – Professor Chris Stokes, Durham University.

The Paris climate agreement is an agreement where most nations around the world decided or pledged that they would try and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees or at the very least below 2.0 degrees. That is generally viewed by scientists as a realistic target if we want to avoid the very worst consequences of climate change. So I would say that if we can limit warming to below 2.0 degrees, ideally 1.5 degrees, compared to what we call the pre-industrial temperatures, before there was the industrial revolution around the world. Now how long will that take is a very very important question but one that’s quite tricky. I think the consensus among the scientists is that we have to act now. The next 10 years are going to be really crucial. There are some countries who are committing to what we call net zero so their emissions of carbon dioxide are zero by 2050. So that’s the kind of target that we are looking as if we can take action now we can limit warming to 1.5 degrees and we should be able to avert the worst consequences. So we still have time to address climate change but were going to have to be very quick and take action now – Professor Chris Stokes, Durham University.

I think that will be very unlikely. The thing with climate change is we often focus on the warming of the atmosphere and we often talk about global warming but one of the effects of climate change and global warming is that we actually increase the amount of evaporation from the oceans which goes into the atmosphere and actually can create more intense and more frequent rainfall. So some of you might be aware of something called the water cycle which is this process whereby rivers transfer water into the ocean, it evaporates and forms clouds and then it cycles back and forms rain again. And we know from evidence and observations that climate change is causing that water cycle almost to speed up. So I think it’s very unlikely that large lakes and seas will every dry up because we will still be getting lots and lots of rainfall. There will be some parts of the world located very far away from oceans that might experience more droughts but it is very unlikely that somewhere like the Mediterranean would dry up because there will be increased rainfall as well as part of global warming – Chris Stokes.

Like any technology, I think electric vehicles are part of the solution to lifestyle changes and the changes and attitudes will be just in a different way. Part of how we got here in the first place was not understanding the consequences of using certain technologies in the past. One of things that we all have to be very conscious of is not making that mistake again and making sure that we understand as much as we possibly can about the consequences of using any technology at any one time. I think of course electric vehicles are absolutely fantastic; they have no emissions coming out of the tailpipe and they have a much cleaner life cycle. However, in the longer term, although they are definitely part of the solution, I suspect there will be different technologies coming through and eventually, over decades, we will see that electric vehicles were a transition; a really good idea for where we are now but a transition into something else in the future – Alan Patrickson, Durham County Council.

It’s also a little bit about how we use the technology. So at the moment there a lot of vehicles, many people own their own vehicle. But we might move to different mechanisms, say shared ownership structures. So within this transition that we are going through, electric vehicles are part of the solution and it will be interesting to see as we go forward how in different ways we can use them, such as shared ownership – Henna Bains, Durham University.

The thing about energy is it has to come from somewhere and so when you think about electric vehicles you will need a separate independent source of energy to charge up the battery, either overnight or when the battery becomes depleted. So it is also really important to think about what that sort of energy is and the impact that that is also having on the environment. So I think electric vehicles are a really positive step but on their own they are not a complete solution – Professor Douglas Halliday, Durham University.

That’s something that scientists are studying in quite a lot of detail now, so if we did, for example, meet the Paris agreement target of 1.5 degrees of warming by the year 2050. So in about 30 years time, there would still be a little bit of warming that we’re committed to and that gap or that lag time as we could refer to it could be a few decades. So what we will see is that warming would continue over the next few decades and then gradually it would start to come down. So we think if we took action and we limited warming to 1.5 degrees in 2050 over the next 30 to 50 years, temperatures should then lower and become more stable by around about 2100, so in about 80 years time – Professor Chris Stokes.

It’s a very big question. I think it is one of those things like many changes that happen on a societal scale or a community scale or a local scale or an international scale, change happens in such small ways and sometimes we don’t notice the individual change happening until someone stops and says well look at the cumulative effect of everything we have done over the last few years. Of course with climate change there is a huge amount of acceleration in the post-industrial era so there is an awful lot of people in the past doing what they thought was the right thing for the economy, doing what they thought was the right thing for people in their countries without actually understanding the science of what they were doing at the time. Thankfully as our understanding grows and as the science moves on we all can start making different decisions.

Climate change is already affecting the world. We shouldn’t forget that it is not just something that’s happening in the future and it’s not affecting the world equally. In fact, it is something that is hitting those worst who are already more vulnerable and that is between countries and also within countries. So if we think about heat waves, for example, the most vulnerable parts of the population are those over 65 or those with underlying health conditions but also children. And then there are other countries where we already say they’re more affected by food insecurity, by droughts, by heavy precipitation, a lot of rain which leads to landslides because the Earth can’t absorb all this water. We’ve seen that this year actually so generally I think it is true to say that those who are already vulnerable for other reasons are also more vulnerable to climate change. They are also more limited in their capacity to what we call climate change adaptation, so in terms of being prepared for the next event and adapting to these changes that occur in terms of extreme weather events but also these slow onset events where we see changes accumulating over a longer time period. So to keep it short, it is not affecting everyone equally; some have the ability to adapt and are less affected than others – Dr. Petra Minnerop, Durham University.

I think when we have new technologies it is always important to think about the impact on the society and the communities that those technologies are going out to. I think lots of people have different opinions on wind turbines about whether their visual or noise pollution. I personally think they’re very attractive in our landscape but that’s just my opinion. I think one thing that we are doing to address this is wind turbines are now being installed many kilometres offshore and so that removes that visual and noise pollution for those of us onshore.

Antarctica holds most of the world’s ice so if Antarctica melted it would raise global sea levels by 58 metres. So 58 metres would dramatically change the coastlines around the world. The good news is that we don’t think that is going to happen imminently.