ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, tomorrow more than a hundred world leaders will make their way to Paris for the United Nations summit on climate change.  This comes as a Sky News survey suggests that the British public is increasingly sceptical that human activity is to blame for global warming.  Earlier I spoke to Sir David Attenborough, the great naturalist and broadcaster, at Kew Gardens about his hopes for the conference and I started by asking him if he’d noticed what changes he’d noticed to the environment during his long broadcasting career.  

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Well oddly enough I am probably the worst person to ask that because my job is to make programmes about the natural world so I go to where the natural world is, not where it has disappeared and it is very easy to be deceived.  I remember in Borneo going up one of the main rivers, the Kalimantan, and as you sail up the river it looks splendid, you can see rain forests rich with orchids and all sorts of things on either side of the river, birds and monkeys but if you go up in a helicopter, you see that in fact that band of rain forest extends no more than a quarter to half a mile on either side of the riverbank.  Beyond it the rainforest has absolutely disappeared and has been replaced by rank after rank after rank of oil palms.  So you have to beware of picking one particular example.  On the other side you can certainly go to where glaciers have retreated in the Arctic for example but equally you can find a place where another one has increased, so picking particular examples is dangerous.  You have to rely on scientific surveys and the scientific surveys make it absolutely clear what is happening.  The increase in temperature year after year after year is proceeding inexorably and is leading, we know what will happen when it reaches certain levels.  

DM: There is also another factor within this though, that you touched on there, which is of course human activity, the chopping down of forests, of hundreds of millions of acres of forests, that’s humans and it’s a human pressure.

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Oh yes, it’s all human pressure or certainly the greater part of it is human pressure.  The figures there are absolutely clear that in the time I have been making television programmes, which doesn’t seem to me to be very long, the human population has tripled, there are three times as many people now as there were then and like you and me, they want places to live, they want food to eat, they want roads, they want schools and so on.  Where do those things come from?  The only place they can come from, a little of it can come from reused industrial sites or something but by and large it comes from the natural world.  So the natural world has been under increasing pressure because of the increased number of human beings.  

DM: And the prediction is that humanity will in the next century probably double again, from 6.5 billion to 11 billion.  

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Yes, that is absolutely clear.  The children who are going to produce more children are already born so we know what is going to happen. In the very long term, it may level off but in the very long term predictions are very unsure.  What we know is that in the immediate future, in the future of my children, my grandchildren, the human race is going to continue increasing in number.  

DM: Let me throw into this then the debate, if there is a debate, about the causes.  There are still those who look and accept climate change but they say look, this is a natural cycle, this is a global cycle.  There was an ice age not too long ago in terms of the scale of time, there was an ice age, that disappeared, that must have been caused by global warming and there weren’t too many humans on the planet then.

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Yes and of course the earth’s climate does change over a very long period but what we are talking about now is huge changes in my lifetime and my children’s lifetime.  The ice age took place ten thousand, twenty thousand years ago, the disaster can happen in a decade and if we are not careful it is going to happen in the next two or three decades.   

DM: And the effects, more on the effects, the effects we are seeing then, we talked about humanity but we see humanity naturally beginning to move away from the places that become inhospitable, the formerly fertile lands that are turned into deserts, the places that don’t produce food anymore and that leads to a whole list of new strains.  

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Yes, the huge migrations of the human race, people getting out of where they can’t grow food and going to places where they can.  It is perhaps facile, too easy to suggest that the migrations that we’re seeing now in Europe are due to climate change, they are due to political unrest and to war, but what has caused the war, what has caused political unrest?  An increase in human population and an increasingly poor way of life, standard of life, people are getting out of where there were deserts.  

DM: The analysis in terms of causes is all well and good, the remedy – okay that can be stated fairly easily as well but then you’ve got to throw into that, there’s a core argument I suppose and we’ll see this in Paris, the core argument is where the developing world says to the developed world, you’re trying to cut off from us the means by which you achieved so much prosperity.

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Yes, that is indeed so and of course there is a lot of truth in that argument which is why in fact we have to take a global view of this and not take an individual country’s view of it, why it’s imperative that the nations of the world get together.  Now people say, you know, that’s happened before and we haven’t had any results and one thing and another – it has never in the history of the world been the case that human beings of all kinds have got together and agreed on something, heaven’s above.  So certainly it is going to be hugely difficult to get agreement but if we don’t,. we’re in for disaster.  

DM: But isn’t the message clear for those of us who are lucky enough, we know, we should know how lucky we are to live in countries like our own just in terms of wealth and prosperity, that if we do take this seriously inevitably it has got to involve some kind of change at least to our lifestyle and properly to I suppose the amount of money we have.  

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Yes, that is so.  There are one or two simple things that can be done you know, one of the most hopeful as far as I’m concerned is a move to stop using carbon based fuels, oil and petrol and coal, and to go to renewables.  Now there are plenty of people who say, oh you mean wind and the ocean and so on – do you realise that if we could capture one five-thousandth part of the energy that the sun sprays on the earth every day, one five-thousandth part, we could deal with all the power requirements of humanity, like that.  So what needs to be done?  If we could find a way of capturing, storing and distributing energy from renewable resources, we could undercut the cost of digging for coal and oil and because we could make it cheaper, that source of pollution would disappear within decades and we would solve our problems.  So what we need is a universal plan where the scientific brains of the world get together and work out a roadmap to solve where the jams are, where the difficulties are and to do it within the next ten years.   If you could put a man on the moon in ten years, we could surely do that and if we did that, the source of global warming would disappear.  

DM: Is the problem that we tend to be just too short term?  In the background is this issue almost to any sentient human being but then the realities of their own individual lives and the political cycle, issues such as terrorism, prosperity, health, education, they push it into the background and it is never put front and centre in the way you are talking about?  

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Yes of course and that is one of the problems that you have about political systems, is that any government is going to deal with something that is in the way they will get a reward within the period that they have been elected to govern so that they will be elected again. It is only too easy to say well we won’t talk about that because we won’t possibly see any benefit of that, the electorate won’t see a benefit of that for another twenty years so we’ll ignore it.  People do say that forever, they have always said that.

DM: On an individual basis, again people, you must have heard this, we’ve all heard it, people in the United Kingdom have been told to recycle this and not consume that and not burn this or wear that and there is the oft-quoted statistic that the Chinese, they open new coal fired power stations once every week, there’s no point us doing anything, we are only a tiny proportion of CO2 output on the planet.  

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Yes, that is so and any one person can say that, any one nation can say that but in fact the Chinese are doing a very great deal, they are very well aware of the disasters, the ecological disasters that are already overcoming them, I mean the fogs and the industrial pollution in China is awful and they are taking some very strong lines about this. So yes, any one nation can say we haven’t got the answer but we have to act together.  

DM: And your message to the individual who feels it’s a bit irksome to sort their rubbish out?

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Of course you need it for your own conscience in my view not to waste things, not to waste power, not to waste food.  Food, production of food causes great demands on the natural world and to throw it away to the degree that we do, it’s really wicked, really wicked.  We can only do our individual things and should for our own peace of mind let alone anything else but we also have to act as a democratic people on a national scale and the nations have to act on an international scale.  Only then can we deal with trouble.  The time when we thought what we did in our own back yard was just up to us and didn’t affect anybody else has gone.  I can remember a time when cities in this country were pouring raw sewage into the sea on the grounds that somehow the sea was so big, the oceans were so big, it would just wash away and you wouldn’t know about it.  Can you believe that?  But it was true but now you know perfectly well that we have poisoned the sea, that the oceans of the world are in trouble because of increasing temperatures, if we can solve that problem – and no one nation acting by itself can deal with it – we have to act internationally.  That’s why these talks are so crucially important.

DM: Sir David Attenborough talking to me in Kew Gardens.