UK science adviser warns of future flooding
Professor Sir John Beddington, the out-going chief scientist to the UK government, has said that floods and droughts could become a more permanent fixture due to the amount of CO2 that is already in the atmosphere.
In an interview with BBC News, Beddington warned: “The [current] variation we are seeing in temperature or rainfall is double the rate of the average. That suggests that we are going to have more droughts, we are going to have more floods, we are going to have more sea surges and we are going to have more storms.
“These are the sort of changes that are going to affect us in quite a short timescale.”
Governments have agreed to try to keep the rise in average global temperatures to below 2°C. Given the slow progress in attempts to curb CO2 emissions at successive climate change talks, many experts believe that target to be unrealistic.
According to Beddington, there is a “need for urgency” in tackling climate change and that the later governments leave it, the harder it will be to combat.
Tackling climate change is a key objective under the Societal Challenges pillar of Horizon 2020.
