David Shukman on Environmental Change

You’ve started with Why We Disagree About Climate Change by Mike Hulme, a leading climate scientist.

Hulme takes a very interesting position. He makes clear that he believes there is a man-made impact on the climate, but he is very opposed to people who assume the science is settled. He takes a view which I think is very healthy, that ‘science needs the oxygen of scepticism’. So Hulme is someone who conceivably straddles the divide that has opened up between those who passionately believe that we have to stop emitting greenhouse gases to prevent dangerous climate change and those who think it isn’t really a problem at all. And I think that’s very important, because there aren’t enough people doing that. The fact he does so from his great position of credibility and strength is a really valuable contribution.

The book is not an easy read – at least sections of it aren’t. But it is remarkably clear about what science can do, and what it can’t. So a great phrase of his, which I like, is ‘Science always speaks with a conditional voice.’ There are always uncertainties about science. If you ask a serious climate scientist, ‘What is going to happen?’ their answer will be hedged around with uncertainties. Hulme’s point is that, all too often, the nuances and the uncertainties of science and what’s being said about climate change are lost and all people hear is, ‘We’re going to die tomorrow!’ or that Greenland is going to melt and drown London or New York.

And that alarmism alienates people.

Yes, because people either hear that we’re going to die tomorrow and just don’t believe it, or they hear it and then it doesn’t happen. It’s probably one thing that has contributed to the hostility, the acrimony, about this debate – that people seem to have exaggerated.

Your next book is Coral by Steve Jones, subtitled A Pessimist in Paradise.

This is a wonderful book. Steve Jones obviously had great fun writing it. It’s full of a great mass of not always relevant, but always fascinating, elements, an incredibly eclectic collection of things to do with coral and man’s relation with coral. It’s just an amazing sweep: he takes you from Darwin and Captain Cook through to the nuclear blast in Bikini Atoll, through to global warming, and what that means. He shows how the coral, over the eons, has served an amazing service to the planet, and indirectly to us, by absorbing vast amounts of carbon. But, as we burn off the carbon, it warms the oceans, and that threatens the coral. He has a wonderful line about how coral reefs tell the tale of how life began, and also record many of its catastrophes. Like ice cores, there’s a lot of climate history to be learned from the coral.

Coral is an incredibly precious resource, and when it’s allowed to thrive it’s amazingly life-affirming. For example, it’ll form around a wreck – you think of a wreck as a terrible loss but, actually, for the marine wildlife, it’s a fantastic asset, and the coral thrives on it – as well as in all sorts of other places, like the legs of oil platforms. The book combines some fantastic imagery, very very clear science, an incredible range of different stories, and this warmth: it’s a wonderfully personal narrative. For a science book – for any book – it’s a fantastic read.

Your next choice is The End of the Line by Charles Clover, arguing that soon we won’t have any fish left?

I know Charles and he is a very sober, solid journalist – you’d never accuse him of sensationalism. He has researched this issue for years, and the book is a journey of his around all manner of places: the Tokyo fish market, the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, English fishing ports… And there’s a simmering, developing anger. it’s different from the anger of an environmental campaigner, demanding action on something. It’s this sense of building outrage, never losing the plot, never going over the top, but always very well-founded on fact and his own research. It’s a slow build, as he travels around and sees the staggering rape of the oceans. He’s got a description of some of the largest fishing nets – which are big enough to catch half a dozen Boeing 747s if they were flying formation. Images like that are incredibly powerful and in terms of awareness-raising, it’s absolutely staggering.

It’s hard to eat fish having read this book. It’s been turned into a documentary that was released as a movie. I haven’t seen it, but I can see why they did it.

You mean the visuals, actually seeing a net that big?

It’s also such a hot topic. There’s this constant battle between the political imperative of helping fishing communities and meeting market demand, and what the science is saying about what’s happening to the oceans. It’s a very passionate but I think level-headed book. He describes fishing with modern techniques – with radar, and these huge nets – as the most destructive activity on earth. He says that over-fishing is changing the world. We don’t see it, because it’s underwater, but if the same went on, on land – imagine if you had miles of net dragged over the plains of Africa, catching everything – it just wouldn’t be tolerated. But that’s what’s going on underwater.