INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR NIGEL ARNELL, WALKER INSTITUTE, READING, UK BROADCAST OCTOBER 7TH, 2008.

COMMENTARY

A satellite view of Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike wreaking havoc in the Caribbean.

Many fear storms like these are only the beginning of a climate apocolypse as global warming changes our weather.

But how much of this speculation is science fact?

Nigel Arnell is a world expert on climate change As Director of the Walker Institute, Professor Arnell heads a team of scientists dedicated to climate system research and the effects of global warming.

Euronews spoke to Professor Arnell on the campus at Reading University in the UK where the Walker Institute is based.

What is his weather forecast for the future?

INTERVIEWER

"We all have anecdotal evidence of climate change, but is there in fact any real scientific vidence that the climate has changed, say, in a century?"

NIGEL ARNELL, DIRECTOR, WALKER INSTITUTE

"There's quite a lot of evidence. Of the twelve warmest years globally since 1850, eleven have been in the last twelve years. So global temperatures are clearly increasing and there is evidence to suggest that that increase is the most rapid and temperatures are higher now than they have been for at least 1300 years, probably more.The last time temperatures in the Arctic were as high as they are now was several tens of thousands of years ago. So there's lots of evidence that the climate is changing."

INTERVIEWER

"So far there's been only a very small increase in global temperatures of less than one degree."

NIGEL ARNELL, DIRECTOR, WALKER INSTITUTE

"Over the last century global average temperatures have gone up by about one degree, but that's really just an indicator of the sorts of changes we've seen. The real cause of change is an increase in radiation and energy at the surface of the Earth caused by an increase in the concentration of greehouse gases. And one of the indicators of that is global temperature. But that change in energy is manifest in changes in temperature across the world in different ways and changes in the distribution of energy across the world through storms and so on, and through changes in rainfall. So local changes may be really quite dramatic, so a global average change of one degree doesn't sound much. The difference between an ice age and now is between four and seven degrees."

INTERVIEWER

"So the effects that we're seeing - drought in the Mediterranean, drought in Asia and Australia, increasing storm events in the Caribbean, flooding events in Britain - are these due to global warming?"

NIGEL ARNELL, DIRECTOR, WALKER INSTITUTE

"We can't blame individual events on global warming because we've always had extreme events over recorded human history, but what we will be able to tell, and I think the evidence is beginning to stack up, is that in the last few years the frequency of these events has become more extreme. A good analogy is with rolling a dice. if you roll a dice and get a six you could get a six by chance. If you continue getting sixes you begin to suspect that the dice is loaded. And I think what we're seeing is more and more sixes over the last few years and as we go through the beginning of this century we'll see more sixes."

INTERVIEWER

"At the Walker Institute you're actually advising government bodies and others..."

NIGEL ARNELL, DIRECTOR, WALKER INSTITUTE

"Most of the research that we do is funded publicly and is produced in international journals and is cited in things like the IPCC reports and so on. So it has an indirect influence on policy. But what we're increasingly finding is that lots of organisations including government departments, including industry are asking more specific questions about what climate change means for their policy targets, or for their particular actions and strategies."

INTERVIEWER

"So insurance companies would be interested I guess, would they?"

NIGEL ARNELL, DIRECTOR, WALKER INSTITUTE

"Yes, the insurance industry is very concerned about climate change largely through a perception of an increased risk of losses during extreme events such as tropical cyclones, such as floods in the UK, or wind storms and, to a lesser extent, heat waves. So the insurance industry as a whole is really quite interested in finding out how these risks and hazards might change over the future."

INTERVIEWER

"What will the world's climate be like in twenty years time?"

NIGEL ARNELL, DIRECTOR, WALKER INSTITUTE

"Well, as the world gets warmer global average temperatures go up, but in the Arctic and high latitude regions temperatures go up by even more for various physical reasons. Rainfall patterns will change and we'll see across Europe, for example, there's likely to be increased rain in winter and less rain during summer. In other parts of the world as well there will be seasonal changes in rainfall regimes and that's going to have quite a big effect on things like availability of water, exposure to flood hazards and, quite importantly, on food and crop productivity."

INTERVIEWER

"Do you belive that the weather is going to change radically in the next twenty years?"

NIGEL ARNELL, DIRECTOR, WALKER INSTITUTE

"I would not be surprised if we were to see a much greater drought than we have seen before, or a series of greater floods than we've seen before. I'm not predicting that, but the weather system we know is so changeable and is so sensitive to relatively small changes in the energy balance that these sort of things could happen. At the same time we also know that there are rythms in the North Atlantic and we may be heading towards a relatively cool phase in the North Atlantic so things may cool down relatively for a few years. The more we understand about the system the more likely we will be able to make projections of the chance of strange things happening."

INTERVIEWER

"The rapid climate change that we're going to experience has enormous social implications. What would you advise society to do?"

NIGEL ARNELL, DIRECTOR, WALKER INSTITUTE

"We do need to change and there are lots of ways we can encourage and incentivise change. And I think what will happen is that people will begin to use less energy, they'll see the benefits in doing so. I don't see us relying on some new technological fix - there may be one, but we can't assume that there will be one just around the corner, I think that's a bit of a dangerous route. I think we've got to encourage people, industries, governments to use less energy - which doesn't mean doing fewer things -it just means using energy more efficiently. And I think there must be scope for being much more energy efficient."