Some believe this could lead people to feel disengaged from the issue, and to believe that total catastrophe is now inevitable. “We were playing the leadership role globally.”ĭespite these efforts, the IPCC confirmed in August what scientists had feared all along: that climate change tipping points are being reached, and that the damage may be irreversible. King would go on to lead international climate negotiations for the Foreign Office under David Cameron, who, to his surprise, gave the negotiators a budget of £4.5bn over 10 years – an amount that was increased to £9bn in 2015. “We appointed 165 climate experts to our embassies around the world, and got all our ambassadors to understand that this issue was absolutely critical going forward.”
“We started what I call real action on climate change,” he says. In 2000, King was headhunted for the position of chief scientific adviser to then prime minister Tony Blair, and stayed on in the role during Gordon Brown’s premiership. That was my introduction to climate change.” “I had admiration for the work, and for the science behind changing atmospheric conditions due to increased emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). The university had undertaken groundbreaking research into the depletion of the ozone layer – research that played a key role in the creation of the 1987 Montreal Protocol. His interest in climate change came after he was made head of physical chemistry at Cambridge University in 1988. “I arrived in Britain as a refugee, but I was happily employed at Imperial College London as a postdoctoral fellow with funding from Shell, which set my scientific career off.” It was a big political awakening for me.”Īfter obtaining his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 1963, he was kicked out of South Africa for his affiliation with the anti-apartheid movement. “My upbringing exposed me to massive disparities in wellbeing – if you were black, you were unable to rise in society at all.
“Mandela was leading the movement, but he had gone underground, and I was writing open letters to newspapers setting out the reasons why this system could not continue,” he says. King worked with the African National Congress in the early 1960s, during apartheid in South Africa. In his latest role as chair of the recently formed Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG), King hopes to guide the public, governments and financial institutions through the steps needed to protect and repair the planet. Despite this “code red for humanity”, scientists say a total catastrophe can be avoided if the world acts fast to deliver the emissions cuts required to stabilise rising temperatures. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed earlier this year that human activity’s impact on the climate is “unequivocal”, setting in motion “unprecedented” damage that may be “irreversible” for thousands of years. The UK government’s former chief scientific adviser Sir David King talks to Chris Seekings about his career, the latest IPCC report, COVID-19 and COP26Ī refugee who fled South African apartheid and rose to become the UK’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King has for decades warned against the political and economic choices that have led to the climate crisis.
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