Climate game
Brace yourself
Like many scientists, Myles Allen didn’t believe that climate change was man-made. But he became frustrated observing the debate. “It was obvious that neither party to the argument had a way of objectively defending their climate models. It broke down into a slanging match.”
So in 1999, at a conference, the Oxford University physics lecturer made a proposal. “I suggested that we run a simulation of climate many, many times, as they do with weather.”
The point was to create a range of different outcomes, out of which clear patterns would emerge. Uncertainty would be substantially reduced. But what he suggested was deemed impossible. “At the time, people were proud to have run a model four times, not four thousand times. The next speaker got a big laugh by making lots of jokes about my idea.”
Nobody’s laughing now. As principle investigator behind the climateprediction.net project, Allen deserves credit for launching the most detailed climate projection ever undertaken.
“People were used to the idea that you can only run climate models on a supercomputer,” he explains. “These are incredibly complicated processes. But the modern PC can do what a supercomputer could do only a few years ago.”
Allen set up a website asking if anyone would be prepared to leave a PC on for 6 months to run our climate model. Twenty thousand people signed up in a couple of days. He took the idea to BBC managers, who liked it, and invited viewers to join the experiment.
Now the data has been analysed, and in a BBC One special this evening, Sir David Attenborough will present the results. The programme will show in detail the alarming consequences for Britain – how climate change will affect us all.
Specifically, Attenborough presents three snapshots, from the years 2020 2050 and 2080. “The scientific surprise is how tight the results are,” says Allen. “The uncertainties are not so much ‘whether’ but ‘when’.”
One key point is the increased likelihood of heat waves. The murderous summer of 2003 is 25 times more likely to recur by 2020. It will be regarded as a normal summer by 2050 – and refreshingly cool by 2080.
Another area of impact is changes in rainfall: water shortages in summer and floods in winter. Some floods will be caused by lots of rain over long period, as happened in Glasgow in 2002. Others will be caused by short but heavy downpours, as affected Boscastle in 2004.
“There are going to be winners and losers,” says Allen. The programme shows a farmer in Devon making a cunning investment in climate change by planting olive trees. “But it’s going to be a postcode lottery. Even within a street. At the high end you might comfortably enjoy warmer summers, but at the lower end you will be flooded. That’s a crude example, but in my opinion the public has not yet grasped just how unfair they are going to find the process.
“One of the things people need to do is assess their own vulnerability. Living in a changing climate is going to be expensive.”
It could be worse even than Allen’s model suggests. One scientist who appears on the programme is professor Peter Cox, of Exeter University, a leading authority on the world’s natural carbon “sinks” – the plants and oceans that soak up as much as half of the emissions caused by humans. Cox is watching out for signs that the sinks might “fail”, causing the quantities of atmospheric carbon to increase rapidly. The signs might include sudden changes in ocean circulation, the death of the Amazon and other rainforests, or the release of vast quantities of methane from permafrost that has already started melting.
Sceptics might argue that to talk about the worst possible outcomes is scaremongering. But Cox points out that his approach is the kind taken by insurers and businesses. “The aviation industry doesn’t devote its resources to tackling the most likely cause of injury to hurt passengers – bumping your head on lockers. It spends money on the very, very unlikely event of crash or engine failure.”
The UK Climate Impacts Programme is funded by government to help decision makers understand climate change and adapt to it. Dr Chris West, UKCIP’s director, was one of the outsiders who vetted the script for the BBC. “I think that increasingly people are accepting that as well as trying to reduce emissions we have to deal with the changes that are, for the next 20 years or so, inevitable.” (Carbon already released into the atmosphere can’t suddenly be sequestrated.)
Take railways: rails snap in cold weather or buckle when it’s hot. To avoid problems, operators increasingly need to introduce speed limits, to the immense frustration of travellers. As the world heats up, they may need to reset every rail.
Sewers, already struggling to cope with rainfall, will need to be enlarged and house may need stronger and broader guttering. “Gutters are designed to take a certain amount of water,” explains West. “If there’s more than that amount once or twice, that’s OK. But if it’s frequent the exterior of the house will be damaged.”
Building standards today were designed to deal cold winters. Many homes are badly suited to hot summers. Fitting air-conditioning would be costly – and would increase emissions.
“A lot of houses were built with the Victorian climate in mind,” says Allen. “One thing our climate is not going to be is Victorian. Will our grandchildren make sense of Dickens? It will be like another country.”
Indeed, the programme speculates that the British seaside will become more popular with tourists than the too-hot Mediterranean.
At the moment, West says, heat waves are for only a few days every few years. In future it may be the whole of August, every year. Some lines on London’s Underground, too narrow to fit air-con, may be rendered unusable for weeks on end. “And we may have to stop people working outdoors in the middle of the day.”
But he’s not all doom. “Some of the things that need to be done are very simple. For instance, someone had the smart idea of painting London buses white on the roof. It didn’t cost anything, but it reduced the heat burden on passengers.
“This is an issue that is global in scale and it’s going to last for a long time. When people say you can help by changing a light bulb the difference in scale between the problem and the solution makes some people disbelieve, and switch off. But the fact is that a lot of people doing a little bit really is effective.”
West believes his paymasters in government are finally getting to the point of asking, before introducing any new policy, ‘Is this robust under climate change?’ That may be so, but the programme shows the folly of recent decisions, such as John Prescott’s plan to build hundreds of thousands of homes on the Thames Gateway. These will use up scarce freshwater and are also at grave risk of flooding. Building a new Thames barrier further out will cost an estimated £20bn. Smaller communities elsewhere, unlikely to get similar protection, will protest fiercely.
To be fair, the decisions facing government are difficult, as the BBC makes clear in another new initiative – an interactive game, Climate Challenge, launched this week on its website. As “President of Europe”, players choose policies to reduce emissions over the 21st century, while making sure there is enough electricity, water and food for the people, and managing spending to remain popular with voters.
As a game of strategy like Sim City, Climate Challenge should enjoy wide appeal. The BBC expects as many as 10m unique plays.
Like the climate modelling underlying Attenborough’s programme, Climate Challenge would not have come about without Myles Allen, who happened to be in the pub one day with a colleague and her husband, eco-worrier Gobion Rowlands.
“When I started looking into climate change,” says Rowlands, managing director of an Oxford-based games company, “I was frankly rather depressed. But as we looked into it we realised there’s a lot we can do.” Allen encouraged him to create the game, provided technical input, and introduced Rowlands to the BBC.
In trials, participants reported that they felt more positively about their own role in tackling climate change as a result of playing the game. Nearly half said the game had given them a better understanding of climate change. The World Economic Forum recently used it to train executives about the issues surrounding climate change.
Trying the game myself, I introduced policies that “emitted a very low level of carbon… well done!” (As the game told me.) Better still, the economy grew continuously under my charge. But I was soon voted out of office: “You were a deeply unpopular leader who cared nothing for the happiness of the population.” My least popular policies were discouraging flying, and raising the retirement age to 70.
Keep trying, says Rowlands, who based the policies on actual government policy documents. “It’s a good game for replaying. Some players have actively tried to destroy the world. And that’s fine, because they learn from that too.”
Allen, likewise, urges ongoing effort. “My only criticism of the documentary is that you might watch and think it’s all over. As scientists we are very keen for people to keep doing climate simulations.”
Does he think, on balance, that humankind is doomed? “In the very long term I’m relatively optimistic, simply because our children won’t tolerate what they see around them. But I’m less optimistic that we will solve it in the most economic manner, as soon as possible, as the Stern Report recommended. Past performance on other problems suggests we may leave it too late.”
21 January 07