A couple of weeks ago, VB friend and contributor, Rowan Adams, armed with her notebook and bundles of enthusiasm made her way to a climate change conference being held at Cowes Yacht Haven. Her father, Mike Adams, who happens to be a civil engineer father helped make her attendance possible. Here’s her report. Ed
Thinking globally and talking locally, the Isle of Wight hosted six world-class speakers on climate change on 20 November.
Local environmental consultant Dr Bruce Denness was one of the people who advised the South-East branch of the Institution of Civil Engineers about the subject and possible speakers for this year’s conference at Cowes Yacht Haven and he suggested Climate Change and Engineering.
There were three themes to the day: the science of climate change, predicting the future, and how engineers can help.
Before lunch we had two excellent talks on the science of climate change.
Professor Martin Culshaw
First was a task that I’d have thought would daunt even a former Director of the British Geological Survey. But Professor Martin Culshaw’s presentation, “Climate Change and ‘Deep Time’ – what the geological record can tell us” did the job splendidly.
In less than an hour he gave us a fascinating whistle-stop insight into almost a thousand million years of Earth history. This helps to put the current climate change into context, and helps climate scientists check that their models fit the observed facts from the distant past as well as the present.
The final point of Professor Culshaw’s talk is the most sobering of all: of all the mass extinctions in the fossil record, the current mass extinction being caused by us human beings is happening at a faster rate than any that has gone before.
Bob Thomas
Glaciologist Bob Thomas, who once managed NASA’s Polar Research Programme, then brought us up to date on the glacier science at the forefront of research into climate change, in a talk titled “Man-made climate change – a recent phenomenon”.
Glaciers and ice caps outside the poles are even more susceptible to rising global temperatures than polar ice caps, so they’re the ‘canary in the coal mine’ of climate change, and have caused most of the sea level rises that have happened recently. But even the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps are now thinning and melting.
Later in the day, Bob Thomas said that even with the latest climate models it is hard to predict what will happen with ice, but research carried out by glaciologists suggests that, thanks to melting ice and seas expanding as they warm up, sea level will rise a metre or more by 2100.
All that gloom and doom didn’t bode well for a healthy appetite, but perhaps instead we had something like a Blitz spirit as people from all over the room got talking over lunch.
Dr Howard Cattle
We next had two speakers on climate models: Dr Howard Cattle from the National Oceanographic Centre at Southampton University, and the Island’s very own Dr Bruce Denness, formerly Professor of Ocean Engineering at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and now an independent environmental consultant.
Dr Cattle gave us a potted history of climate models, and how they have grown more complex over time, including more and more of the variables which affect climate.
Dr Denness
Next up Dr Denness told us about the model he has developed independently. What is striking is that the models agree on what they say about the current global warming – that if we enter into the models only the natural variations over geological time, we can’t predict the current rise in global temperatures.
If we put in only the changes caused by humans, we can’t predict the current rise in global temperatures. Only by putting in both the natural variations and the extra greenhouse gases caused by humans can we get the models to predict the current situation. And if we use the models, now checked against all that we know about past climates, to predict the future, we get frightening figures for the possible rise in global temperatures, and what that might mean for our weather.
More heat waves, more intense rainfall, more droughts, more sea surges, more intense cyclones and hurricanes.
Dr Denness’ model predicts a levelling-off of temperature a few years from now, and lasting about a decade or more, thanks to the natural variability reducing the man-made increase.
He warned us not to be fooled, and he fears that if temperatures don’t keep going up that people who don’t know about climate models will think everything is alright and do nothing to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But his model predicts that after that level period, there will a steep rise again, and the temperatures will then keep rising.
The final leg
So after tea the last two speakers then had the hard task of cheering us all up again and helping us believe that we could choose some hope rather than despair.
President of the Institution of Civil Engineers
Dr Jean Venables from Crane Environmental Consulting, and President of the Institution of Civil Engineers for 2008-2009, went straight to the heart of the problem with the title of her talk: “Adapting to climate change – what civil engineers can do”.
Her speciality is in the management of water resources, land drainage and water levels, and flood risk – something we will need increasingly as climate change increases the risk of flooding from both the sea and from rivers.
Although she spoke mostly about adapting to unavoidable climate change, she did also call for engineers to help prevent climate change reaching even more dangerous levels.
Professor John Sheppard
Last up of the speakers was Professor John Sheppard from the National Oceanographic Centre at Southampton University, and a Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
He recently chaired the Royal Society study on Geoengineering the Climate, and spoke about their conclusions. He argued very persuasively that although we should consider geoengineering only as a last resort, we still need to do the research now.
We may hope that Plan A will work and that we will prevent catastrophic runaway climate change, but we need to have Plan B in reserve, just in case.
At the end of the day we had a ‘Question Time’-style final session.
Diverse attendance
At the conference were people from all over South-East England. The Islanders included several tables-full of local sixth-formers, thanks to “Cowes Town Waterfront Trust sponsoring their places.
Not ones to push themselves forward, they had sat themselves down at the back. But by the end of the day they’d resumed what I trust is their normal confidence, and asked several good questions.
The adults among us are from the generation that has made their future so uncertain, and I believe we owe it to them to do what we can to prevent catastrophic climate change.
Parting words
Now that the Council’s Planning Committee have rejected the Cheverton wind turbine application on Thursday 3 December maybe we could say yes to some other renwable energy proposals?!
And for anybody out there considering their future career, as a biology graduate and tree-loving gardener, of course I ought to stick up for all things wild and environmental. But the Institution of Civil Engineers have a good slogan for anybody else: ‘Build a better world… become a civil engineer’.
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