Watch the video from Dr Dani Rabaiotti, then you’ll have 20 minutes to reflect on what Dani has said with everyone. You’ll then have a 15-minute screen-break once the session has finished.
Go back to the live chat ❯
The Transcript
Dr Dani Rabaiotti Video, introduced by Lisa Derry
[Lisa] I hope that was a good way to get to know some of the other students here today and see how this platform will work.
Next, we’re going to hear from a researcher whose work is in the field of climate change.[Dr Dani Rabaiotti] Hi there, my name’s Dani and I’m a researcher at the Zoological Society of London. I’m also an author. My research area is climate change impact on wildlife and in particular the African wild dog.
Now I and other people study climate change’s impact on wildlife because this can help us to reform conservation policy and to target our conservation efforts so they work effectively. Not just to prevent extinction now in our current environmental conditions but to prevent extinction in the future when things get hotter and drier under future climate change projections.
I’m going to start with a brief history of climate change. We actually kind of knew, or some people figured out, that what humans were doing, in particular burning coal and other industrial activities, might be heating up the planet as early as 1896. We knew it’s not great and it’s been a problem for a while but back then they were like ‘No big deal.’ ‘I’d actually like some warm weather. Sounds pretty good.’ So no one was really too fussed about it. They thought it might be great and a good thing.
It was still pretty early in 1938 when the first scientific paper was published by an engineer called Guy Calendar. That paper said ‘hi guys, I noticed over the previous decades that there’s been an increase in temperatures and there’s also been an increase in carbon dioxide. I think the two things might be linked so maybe the carbon dioxide is causing climate change.’ You think people would take note and that it sounds bad, but actually, people thought it was a ‘Load of rubbish. This paper sucks. Let’s ignore it.’ So mostly people did.
By the fifties and sixties, there were more papers coming out making this link between greenhouse gases, human activity, and rising temperatures. It was too much for the scientific community to ignore so it was around then that the scientists became pretty settled. People today might say that the scientists didn’t settle but it’s been a good fifty years plus.
Even once that had happened, it didn’t really move into the public sphere or consciousness and no one really did a lot. It wasn’t really high on politicians’ agendas, there were other environmental issues that were considered more important. Things like acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer – can’t really blame them for thinking that was important and wanting to solve that. These had easier solutions compared to climate change.
It wasn’t really until the eighties and nineties that people started discussing this seriously and actually pledging to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. It wasn’t until then that the inter-governmental panel on climate change, who made these climate change predictions, was actually formed. It took a long time between the scientific discovery and any sort of policy efforts. Even at the climate pledge in Kyoto in 1997, that wasn’t legally binding.
So where does that leave us today? We now have some legally binding climate pledges, but actually, no one’s really on track to hit them. There was the Paris agreement, we’re not on track to hit that. As a climate scientist, we don’t really look at the best-case scenario that was put forward by the IPCC anymore. The chance to hit that 1.5 degrees of warming has pretty much passed.
As a result, we’re seeing climate change impacts today. We’re actually tracking the worst-case scenario with our emissions at the moment. As a result, we’re seeing an increase in natural disasters, forest fires, cyclones, and our ice caps are melting at unprecedented rates.
In the natural world, the world I work in, in Botswana, we’ve seen one-degree rise in temperature. Because of that, we’ve seen a fall in African wild dogs surviving to adulthood. We’re seeing coral bleaching, mass die-offs from animals like bats, and habitat loss due to things like fires, like what happened in Australia last year.All in all, not a great picture today. We didn’t really listen to the scientists and we didn’t really do a lot about it. Some countries have been more successful than others. They’ve transitioned to more sustainable energy, but it’s not looking great.
However, the fewer greenhouse gases we emit, the better it’s going to be. All is not lost. Just because we didn’t hit the best case scenario, doesn’t mean we can’t hit the middle case scenario. We can reduce our personal carbon footprints by walking more, taking public transport instead of taking the car, flying less, wasting less food, changing our diets so we eat less beef and dairy in particular because they’re big emitters of greenhouse gases and using sustainable energy at home.
These are the things we can do to reduce our personal carbon footprint, but it goes beyond that. Just 100 companies emit over 70% of the greenhouse gases in the world today and those are all gas companies. There’s not a whole bunch we can do, we can consume less because the more we consume the more greenhouse gases we produce, but actually we need policy change. We need policy buy-in. We need laws to change and we need to, as consumers, to make an informed decision on how much carbon is emitted with the things we buy.
As scientists we engage with policy makers. For example, I went to work in parliament in the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology where I could give them the science and say ‘hey, we think you should maybe do something about it’. Unless people want them to do something about it, the people that vote for them, there’s not really a lot of incentive for politicians to do that. Often climate change doesn’t seem like a vote winner.
What we need is for people to engage with politicians and engage with policy makers. We need people to vote for parties that take sustainability and climate change seriously, to hold their MPs to account, to write and engage with their MPs. To engage with political parties and make sure that climate change is on the agenda when it comes to conference.
These are ways you can influence policy level changes and help prevent climate change at policy level and hold these kind of companies to account. That’s what we need to see if we’re going to curb climate change and if we’re going to reduce greenhouse gas emission now and into the future, to avoid this worst case climate scenario.I know that was all a bit of a depressing start to the day and I’m hoping I haven’t depressed you too much and I have convinced you that there’s something you can do. There is something you can do. I hope you enjoy the rest of the day, you’re inspired to make these changes, and fight climate change impact, get engaged on these issues, and learn more about the science.
[Lisa] Thank you, Dani! You’re now going to have 20 minutes to reflect on what Dani has just said with everyone in a chat room. You’ll then have a 15-minute screen-break once the session has finished.
