Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me to talk to you today. My name is Nick Guthrie. I am the editor of BBC World Television's Dateline London programme. I am also a visiting fellow of Green College, at Oxford University.

I believe there is one crucial issue facing us today - how we manage climate change.

I would like to start by asking you all to watch this short video

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We are all in the news business and the news business is, as the title suggests, an urgent business. My thesis, which I lay before you is also urgent. There is not any one more important subject for debate and discussion, for all of your readers, viewers, and listeners, across the Commonwealth, than the issue of climate change.

You saw the pictures, words and music, courtesy of President Regan, the Hollies, the Kingston Trio, and Peter Paul, and Mary. Pictures, through, courtesy of global warming. What is happening to our weather? What is the truth about global warming? What is happening to the ozone layer? Why are we having these fires, these floods, these storms, these avalanches, mudslides, famines, and water borne diseases and what can we do about them?

A month before the end of the decade, the last century and millennium, the world learned that the ice cap on the Arctic Ocean is melting fast. American researchers released ice-thickness data, gathered by nuclear submarines, that incidentally, the Pentagon had been sitting on for years. It showed that over the past forty years the ice depth in all regions of the Arctic Ocean has declined by some 40 per cent. All those celebrations of a thousand years of human history, what could they really amount to when the very existence of civilisation, beyond even the next century is open to doubt?

When I heard about the ice cap data, I thought about what the fresh water released from the Arctic ice would end up doing to ocean circulation. I thought about the warming Arctic waters seeping their warmth into the seafloor methane hydrates. Then I read that British scientists had reported decreasing salinity in deep currents flowing south, between Shetland and the Faeroes. Then I learnt that cod had virtually disappeared in the North Sea, not just because of over-fishing but, so the scientists now thought, because the waters had warmed 4 degrees Centigrade in the last six years.

You see, the warming water has been dividing into layers, meaning that there are fewer phytoplankton for the fish to feed. Now we hear that the Canadian Mounted Police have navigated the legendary northwest passage in the Arctic, finding clear water instead of pack ice in a record breaking voyage. The police patrol ship, Nadon, was the first vessel to encounter clear water all the way and this has obviously increased speculation that the northern ice-cap has retreated to such an extent that ships may soon be able to sail, on  a regular basis, through the passage, a goal of explorers since Elizabethan times. This, maybe, good news here is that this could cut 5,000 miles off the trip from Europe to Japan. However, the bad news here is that conservationists fear that such usage could damage the fragile Arctic environment, especially if shipping companies were to put socking great tankers through there.

The first nine months of 1998, each month one by one, broke records for the global hottest ever while 1999 turned out to be the 5^th hottest year on record. In fact, the 10 hottest years in the last 138 years of records, have all been since 1983. The global average temperature is a full 0.7 degrees Centigrade warmer than it was a century ago. It is becoming so obvious. The ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula are in full retreat, having lost 3,000 square kilometres of ice in 1998 alone. The Greenland ice cap is also melting fast. Now an early draft of the Third International Panel on Climate Change Report concludes that a 3.0 degrees Centigrade warming over Greenland would make the melting of the ice cap irreversible, meaning ladies and gentlemen, a seven-metre rise in global sea levels over the next millennium. Seven metres by 2100? Goodbye every hydrocarbon-century coastal city.

Let's look at another area. For many years scientists have thought of coral as an early warning system. Rather like the canaries used by miners years ago, to see if poisonous gases were about in deep shafts. If you left a canary down the mine and if the canary survived, no gas, safe to go down. If it was dead, well, not safe, nasty gases about. Well exactly the same warning can be seen by coral bleaching and this whitening has become endemic in many reef areas. A survey of reefs in the Seychelles, in January 1999, showed that 80 per cent of the coral is dead, with over 90 per cent in some areas. The reefs on the paradise island are on the verge of extinction.

Frontier, the international research group of scientist working for the IMF and the World Bank are just about to publish their findings from a massive survey of coral bleaching around the island of Madagascar. They are talking about 90 per cent of the coral being dead. Why does the coral die? Simple, the water is getting too warm for it to survive. Why does it matter? Simple, with the collapse of the natural barrier reefs, what's to stop the might of the sea from inundating the land mass? Nothing.

Let's take another area of the world. What's happening to the glaciers? In the last century glaciers on Mount Kenya have lost 92 per cent of their mass and glaciers on Mount Kilirmanjaro 73 per cent. The number of glaciers in Spain has decreased from 27 to 13 since 1980. Europe's alpine glaciers have lost about 50 per cent of their volume during the last century. The glaciers of New Zealand have decreased their volume by 26 per cent since 1980 and so on and so on. In one case in Nepal, a high dam is threatened by water flow and the potential disaster to the thousands of villages and their peoples below does not bear thinking about. The same in Tibet the very ceiling of the world. Glacial melting is galloping ahead at unprecedented rates.

The catalogue of storms, floods, droughts, and fires around the world in 1998 alone exceeded all the weather-related insurance losses of the whole of the 1980's. Hurricane Mitch killed over 10,000 in Central America and devastated the entire economy of Honduras. The worst storm in two centuries hit France on Boxing Day 1999. More than 100 million trees fell. Photographs resembled scenes from the first World War. On the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, as the manager of the monument described it, 200 years of history disappeared in an hour.

We know we are in the process of cooking our planet with greenhouse gases from oil, coal, and gas. Climate scientists have become more and more alarmed and increasingly willing to voice their fears.

A new model by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Officer suggests that in a world without deep emission reductions, warming will kill many tropical forests in the second half of the 21^st century, returning a vast quantity of carbon to the atmosphere. This would run the risk of tipping the world into a runaway global warming.

Already the latest signs of the hole in the ozone later are not good. Just last month NASA reported the ozone hole now to be the biggest and boldest, and most frightening, yet. It covers three times the size of America. It spreads over about 11 million square miles and appears as a giant blue blob, totally covering Antarctica and stretching to the southern tip of South of America.

The International Panel on Climate Change has announced that it will make sudden and chaotic climate change a central feature of its third report, due in June next year. Incidentally, the second report, in 1995, had precisely two paragraphs on the subject. But it seems that scientists can’t wait. They are indeed so worried at what they are finding that they are leaking next year’s report to all and sundry. The situation, they warned, is critical.

What we are talking about is, of course, climate change, driven by carbon emissions and the real question now, is not whether deep emission reductions (far more than agreed to at Kyoto, now hopelessly inadequate) can do anything to stop ferocious climate change around the globe, but rather, will the renewable revolution come in time to stop catastrophe?

I am not a catastrophe theorist. I am not a pessimist, rather an optimist by nature. But I have to remind you that all previous civilisations have crashed. None, over time, has reached a well regulated, steady state in population, environment, and resources in balance. None.

Why am I am optimist? Simple really. We already have the solutions. It’s just that nobody is taking them seriously and that is where you, the editors, come in. It is vital that you bring to the attention of your readers, your audience, whenever you get the chance, the facts.

There is a terrific peg coming up. Next month, the second round of climate talks begins in the Hague. It is here that governments are supposed to ratify what was agreed at Kyoto. There , 84 countries signed the protocol but only seven have ratified it and 55 will have to do so before it comes into force. The real point here, ladies and gentlemen, is that the targets set of eight per cent emission reduction in CO₂ are hopeless. Sixty per cent reduction are required just to stop catastrophic climate change.

The public need to know there are solutions. It is not all doom, gloom, and despondency. Right now we have the technologies, solar power, renewables in general, and hydrogen fuel cells. We are at a critical stage in our economic history. Do we give in to oil or announce we are going to invest, big time, in alternatives? We have alternatives to oil as the engine of our economies but we have not developed them because we are in the thrall of the oil industry and the car industry. We owe them a great deal in terms of economic growth, international trade and personal freedom. But they owe us in terms of pollution and climate change. 

We must replace fossil fuels with the whole range of new clean energy sources: wave, wind, solar, thermal etc. This needs draconian measures by governments on a global scale. So, just to recap, here are some headlines for you:

• In the last 40 years the ice depth in the Arctic Ocean has declined by 40 per cent;
• The 10 hottest years in 138 years have all been since 1983;
• The global average temperature is a full 0.7 degrees centigrade warmer than it was a century ago;
• The ice shelves in the Antarctica are in full retreat;
• The Greenland ice cap is also melting;
• Coral bleaching has become endemic in many reef areas;
• The North Sea has warmed by four degrees in the past six years and cod has virtually disappeared.

Even one metre rise in sea levels, now confidentially predicted for 2030, will inundate every deltatic region of the world. Yes, the Mekong Delta, the Nile Delta etc. "Well, it’s not really in my backyard," is the cry. Nobody much cares about Bangladesh, or the Maldives, or Tuval. But a metre rise also inundates the eastern seaboard of the USA. Here are a few more facts for you:

• There will be a billion cars by 2025, up from 40 million since World War II;
• 80 per cent of forests have been cleared;
• A billion city dwellers are exposed to health-threatening levels of air pollution;
• The global population will reach 8.9 billion in 2050, up from 6.0 billion now.

Big business also steps in here. Investments in environmentally or socially screened accounts have tripled between 95 and 97. The insurance industry took $2 trillion in premiums within the $20 trillion world economy. Much of this invested in the largest companies in the world and many of these are carbon fuel based companies which threaten the insurance industry with bankruptcy. The banking industry with huge loss of building assets in which capital is tied up and the capital markets with climate related meltdown. There is only on solution - deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Decarbonisation, in other words.

"Buy silicon, sell carbon" has to be the cry and the rapid advancement of renewable, clean, energy sources for tomorrow's sustainable planet.

"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. The Earth’s ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite and we are fast approaching many of the Earth’s limits. Pressures resulting from the unrestrained pollution growth, put demands on the natural world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future. No more than one or just a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity and nature immeasurably diminished."

That was the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1992, signed by 1,680 scientific leaders from 70 countries, including 104 Nobel laureates.

Remember you ain't seen nothing yet, so I thought I would end where I began and I would like you just to watch this short video. This time it is the words and music from Louis Armstrong, the pictures are all from global warming.

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