Sir David King
Founder and Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group
Sir David King is one of the world’s foremost climate change leaders, renowned for his tireless work in confronting the global climate crisis. Serving as the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser from 2000 to 2007, he was instrumental in placing climate change at the top of the international agenda.
As Founder and Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, Sir David continues to influence global decision-makers, offering science-driven solutions to protect the planet’s future. His leadership spans academia, government, and international diplomacy, earning him recognition as a trusted voice on sustainability and environmental action.
In this exclusive interview with The Sustainability Speakers Agency, Sir David King shares his insights on the causes of climate change, the urgent actions needed for a sustainable future, and the responsibility leaders carry in shaping humanity’s survival.
1. From your perspective as a leading climate scientist, what do you see as the primary drivers of climate change, and what urgent steps must humanity take to reduce its impact?
Sir David King: The major cause of climate change is, with our growing population and the growing amount of finance in that population, our use of fossil fuels has been expanding rapidly over the last 120 years. The result of this is that we’ve put an enormous amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
So I have to give numbers because I’m a scientist. In the pre-industrial period, there were 270–275 parts per million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Today, we’re at over 500 parts per million. That’s what we’ve done.
And if I could put a very simple phrase into that, it means that imagine that you’re lying on a bed and you’re feeling cold, you pull a duvet over yourself and that duvet keeps you warm. That’s the function of greenhouse gases — it keeps us warm like a duvet. But if you put a second duvet on your bed, which is what we’ve been doing quite simply, you get hot.
Now that’s where we are today. And the biggest challenge for all of us in humanity — and this is the biggest challenge we’ve ever had to face up to — is what is happening in the Arctic Circle region.
The average temperature rise since the pre-industrial period today is about 1.35 degrees Centigrade across the whole planet. But the Arctic Circle region is at three degrees Centigrade above the pre-industrial level. Now everyone acknowledges that 1.5 is the figure we should not exceed.
Well, we’ve already exceeded it in the Arctic Circle region and what’s happening there is going to influence, and is already influencing, the whole planet. So what we see happening is, first of all, Greenland ice is now melting irreversibly, which means eventually sea levels will rise by 24 feet.
Of course, London will be underwater way before then. And secondly, the planet will change its shape. We’ll lose all of our cities sitting on coastal areas around the world.
Then secondly, there’s a wind that blows around the North Pole in an anti-clockwise direction. That wind has now become badly distorted — it’s no longer circular, it’s become badly distorted because over the North Pole during the polar summer the ice that used to cover the Arctic Sea has now melted.
During the summer, 50 percent of that blue sea is exposed to sunlight. Temperatures there are rising so rapidly that we’ve got warm air over the North Pole region and that is pushing cold air down and completely distorting the weather patterns of the world.
This is why along the west coast of America temperatures of 49.7 degrees Centigrade were observed in Canada, in a small town in British Columbia. Now that’s what we’re experiencing now.
But in addition, there is in the permafrost regions — so the North Pole is sea surrounded by land — in the permafrost regions on the land in Russia, Canada etc., what we have is a vast amount of methane trapped in there. Explosive release of methane is now happening. Methane is about 120 times more effective per molecule than carbon dioxide in global warming.
When that is all released, let’s suppose it was released in 20 years, global temperatures will rise by five to eight degrees Centigrade. Right, so what we’re talking about is a potential calamity that brings our civilisation to an end.
How long will it take? I don’t know — 50 years, 100 years — but we can look back at our civilisation for thousands of years. That’s the nature of the threat that we’re all faced with. Whatever we do, whatever position we hold, we have to use that position to see that we attempt to manage a safer future for humanity.
2. For individuals and organisations seeking to act more sustainably, what immediate lifestyle or business changes should take priority?
Sir David King: Yes, but we can take many, many steps. One of the things I haven’t yet mentioned is the loss of forests, and we’re losing forests at a fantastic rate such that now the Amazon, which used to be one of the lungs of the Earth taking up all the carbon dioxide and producing oxygen, is now in reverse. It’s producing more carbon dioxide than it’s taking up. That’s because of all the deforestation occurring.
Why is that occurring? We are demanding the products. For example, beef. We are eating more and more meat around the world as prosperity rises, and the result is you take out more forests to meet the demand so that you can allow cattle to roam there. That’s just one example. We need to look at what we eat, how we eat, how we live.
Are we all ready to go into electric vehicles? That’s the only way we should be travelling privately. And of course, we shouldn’t be travelling privately wherever possible. We need to be travelling publicly — travelling in trains, travelling in buses. It all depends on whether you live close enough to a railway station, whether you can achieve that.
Now, I’m very fortunate, I live in Cambridge. I get around everywhere on a bicycle and it doesn’t take me long to get to the railway station. So I will not use a private vehicle in my travelling. Each one of us is in a different situation and we need to be looking carefully at how we can reduce our carbon footprint.
3. How should businesses take responsibility for their supply chains and communicate climate risk standards effectively?
Sir David King: This is such an important question because what businesses must recognise is that their supply chain may include a product that is causing the removal of forests. It may be totally reliant on products which are contributing massively to climate change.
“For example, if your products have to be flown by air into your factories, then that in itself is a big carbon footprint. But I’m always keen on seeing that when businesses communicate their climate change strategy, they set out what the value of the carbon emissions is from their supply chain. That is critically important.”
4. What message would you give to governments and organisations that have yet to invest seriously in climate risk strategies?
Sir David King: I think the first message is to simply get us all to understand that this is a challenge about the future of humanity. And I mean, I happen to be old enough that I’ve got grandchildren. My youngest grandchild is a daughter, Lola, age three. And Lola will be 70 plus by the end of the century — or will she? Is she going to be surviving to the end of the century becomes a real question.
And this isn’t me just trying to exaggerate the situation. I think each one of us as a family, each one of us belongs to a larger family — humanity. And we need to be worried about whether we believe it’s a good idea for humanity to continue. Because frankly, if we don’t operate in a proper fashion and very quickly, we will no longer survive as a civilisation.
The world will continue. Our ecosystems will continue. The biological systems will continue — but without us. They’ll do better unless we learn that managing our ecosystems instead of dumping rubbish into them, dumping carbon dioxide into them, managing our ecosystems is critically important to our own lives.
5. When addressing audiences, what do you hope they take away from your public speeches?
Sir David King: I think what I’m always very keen to say is: yes, I can’t pull punches on the nature of the challenge we’re faced with. I think it’s phoney to simply say, “Oh, we can manage this.” But I am always keen to say there is a way forward.
In other words, yes, even at this last minute that I’m describing now, where it’s all upon us, we have set out here in Cambridge a strategy. This strategy involves, first of all, finding out how we can reduce our emissions deeply and rapidly. Net zero by mid-century is too late — we need to do it much more rapidly than that.
But the second thing is: reduce. The second is: remove excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. We are working on processes, and this is using biomimicry. We’re operating on the basis of mimicking natural processes to remove excess greenhouse gases that we’ve already put into the atmosphere.
And then thirdly, we need to buy time by learning how we might be able to intervene and re-freeze the Arctic. So I guess what I’m keen to do is get across this message that if we all shift together, then we can manage this — what is the biggest challenge that we’re all faced with.
Our societies are consumer-driven, and in that consumption we don’t put a value on our ecosystems. And so there is also a problem with our economic system, and we need to tackle that as well.
This exclusive interview with Sir David King was conducted by Jack Hayes of The Champions Speakers Agency.
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