12 June 2007Matthew Weaver
Sir David said the government must make preparations to deal with future floods. Photograph: Edmond Terakopian/PA Flash floods in Britain are likely to be the biggest immediate problem caused by climate change, the government's chief scientist warned today.
Sir David King told a committee of MPs that global warming has already altered the climate and the country will have to prepare for extreme weather such as heat waves and "torrential downpours".
He said the summer of 2003, which killed an estimated 32,000 people across Europe, was a "climate change-driven event" and one of the world's biggest natural disasters.
"It took the French, Spanish and Italian government by surprise. It focused the minds of government on the need for mitigation. We need preparations to be put in place," he said.
He predicted summer temperatures of the kind experienced in 2003 would become the norm by the middle of this century. But while mainland Europe would have to cope with the heat, it was rain that Britain needed to worry about, Sir David said.
"The most serious impact in Britain is flash floods. The Victorians left us with a drainage infrastructure that is good for soft rain, but with torrential down pours it can't cope," he told the committee.
He said the government urgently needed to increase spending to replace outdated drainage systems.
"We will have to have considerable more investment in redoing those systems," Sir David said.
In the long-term, he warned that if Greenland ice disappeared, rising sea levels would wipe out Britain's coastal town and cities.
Sir David, who retires at the end of this year, said the current interest in global warming had to be more than a passing fad.
"The message that climate change is the biggest change our civilisation has ever had to face up to is getting out there. It's almost become fashionable to talk about it, but fashions come and go," he said.
"This is a problem that we have to tackle over the next 100 years. I hope this is a sea change in culture, not just a blip."
Sir David also defended the government's advocacy of a new generation of nuclear power stations.
He said that government's target of reducing carbon emissions by 60% by 2050 would be "extremely challenging to meet" without nuclear power.
Sir David said the contribution of nuclear power to reducing green house gases would help overcome political objection to new power stations, and pointed out that renewable energy was not necessarily more acceptable to the public.
"Public acceptability is not a simple issue. In Cumbria, I think people would be happier about a new nuclear power station than they would be about a wind farm on the mountains that we so like to climb," he told the committee.
Sir David said the government's target of 60% reductions in emissions by 2050 was a "very good goal at this stage."
"It's very important that we set goals that are tough but doable," he said.
"If it became apparent that we were not going to achieve it then confidence in the goal would flow away."
But he added the target may need to be "ratcheted up" as technologies improved and the evidence about climate change became clearer."
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2101261,00.html
