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David King was Britain's chief scientific adviser from 2000–2007, and last September was appointed the foreign secretary's
special representative for climate change. By Britain's conservative foreign secretary. And as Britain struggles with a series of storms that have left
massive flooding, King has offered a
warning:
Britain needs to face up to a radical change in weather conditions that could be the result of global warming, and spend much more on flood defences, Sir David King, the government's special envoy on climate change, has said.
Amid the worst floods for decades, King said the UK must do more to manage the problem, potentially doubling spending to £1bn a year by 2020, as extreme weather events are likely to become more frequent.
What the wingnuts and climate deniers don't understand—or don't want others to understand—is that climate change means climate
change. It's not that the entire globe will be uniformly warming, and cold weather will go away, it's that extreme weather will become the norm. Higher highs and lower lows and more frequent and more intense storms. Which is
exactly what's happening. And also happening is the continuing pattern of
hotter years for the entire globe.
"The important thing to get across is the simple notion that storms and severe weather conditions that we might have expected to occur once in 100 years, say, in the past may now be happening more frequently," (King) told BBC Radio 5 Live.
"And the reason is – as predicted by scientists – that the climate is changing and as the climate changes we can anticipate quite a radical change in weather conditions."
King recommends that Britain will need to spend up to a £1 billion (roughly $1.6 billion dollars) a
year by 2020, to mitigate the damage from climate change and extreme weather. Of course, the
overall damage from climate change will overwhelm such numbers. The least worst answer, after so many years of reckless irresponsibility by the world's political and economic "leaders," would be a crisis agenda that starts not with mitigating the damage, but with drastically
reducing the
causes, and making
those responsible pay. Because on every level, the costs will be greater the longer we fail to act.