2:24pm Wednesday 4th June 2008
ADRIAN HILTON'S head must be a scary place to live. It's full of the future, the place where we will all live in a couple of decades' time.
And the future is a place of flood and fire and very altered lifestyles.
He'd like us to think that we were living in a box just 1,000 metres square.
"People see the atmosphere as being absolutely vast," he says. "The scale compared to us is massive. But it isn't.
"In October last year, the population passed 6.5bn. For each person on the planet, there's a box of troposphere 1,000 metres by 1,000 metres by 1,000 metres. If you had to live in that for your entire life, there'd be a lot more thought before you threw a lot of gases into it."
Adrian is the North-East climate change co-ordinator. This doesn't mean that he co-ordinates the way the world is warming up, rather that he prepares the region for dealing with it and even for profiting from it.
He tries not to talk apocalyptically.
But still he has the potential to scare.
"We are not looking at massive changes, but there are impacts that we need to look at," he says, downplaying the effect climate change will have on day-to-day to lives.
"We have significant vulnerabilities now. If you take the storm pattern that hit South Yorkshire and run it 150 miles north, the impact would be very significant."
He's been in the post a year - a post funded by the North-East Assembly, the Environment Agency, One NorthEast and Defra - and has produced the Adaption Survey, which begins to show what sort of climate the region should adapt to living in by 2050.
The headlines are all about the changes in weather patterns. The amount of rainfall will go down by up to ten per cent - but when it comes, it will be in "intense events", like the one that hit Doncaster, Barnsley, Rotherham and Sheffield last June.
"We are not all going to drown in our sleep, but we are expecting to see these high-intensity rainfall events,"
says Adrian, "and we have a period of time to put in new systems to cope with them."
They will create a new kind of floods. In the past, snowmelt has usually caused the North-East's spate rivers to overflow, but with snowfall reducing by up to 87 per cent, future floods will all be about rain.
"It's a miserable experience to be flooded even by an inch of water, and there are still houses with problems from the 2000 floods in Carlisle, so our housing should be either resilient or resistant to it," says Adrian.
"There should be no chipboard floors or plasterboard walls, or plasterboards should be placed horizontally so they can be easily replaced.
Sockets should be slightly higher, with wiring coming down rather than going up."
Summer rainfall will be reduced by up to 40 per cent, causing a new hazard: grassfires.
"On the uplands they are starting to see the sort of conditions reserved for Spain or Portugal," says Adrian.
"There was a fire in the Cheviots last year that needed 200 people to tackle it. We are putting the emergency services under increased pressure. We have a window of opportunity to address that."
Such dry conditions could even threaten the stability of some houses.
Large parts of the Tees Valley are built on clay soils, which will shrink and crack in the new climate, possibly causing structural damage.
Agriculture is already changing, and will have to adapt further as, by 2050, the average temperature will have risen by 1.8 to 2.2 degrees.
"You have already started to see an increase in rape and maize," says Adrian. "Agriculture is moving up.
The hills are being taken out of grassland and put into crop production, so we will see changes within the landscape of the North-East - there will be an interesting debate about how aesthetics and bio-diversity are maintained."
Everyone likes to talk about the weather and how it affects them, but the biggest effect of climate change on most people will be carbon reduction.
The carbon pumped out by our energy use is, most scientists agree, altering our climate. The Government wants our carbon emissions to be cut by 60 per cent by 2050, although many advisors believe that the target will have to be nearer 80 per cent if we are to stabilise our climate.
This will change the way we live, the way we travel, the way we do business. It will be tough, but there will be some benefits. "If you are using less energy, it means you are more efficient and that will benefit your bottom-line," says Adrian.
"It's about persuading people to move away from what they have accepted as the norm. The reality is that on a whole lot of levels, there's the potential for us to work and live smarter and more efficiently.
"The concern is that we are throwing systems out of balance so, where practicable, we should be looking to reduce our emissions.
"We are not climate change zealots. Our climate modelling represents the consensus of scientific opinion. People want certainty and we can't give them absolute certainty, but we can say that the scientific information says these are the likely risks, so how do we adapt to them?"
He's beginning to sound scarily apocalyptic again, but reassuringly he finishes: "It may not happen, but the people of the North-East have the right to expect that those in positions of power have considered this and ensured that the impacts should be minimised.
"For example, not even half the people living in flood zones, and only eight per cent of businesses, take up flood warnings.
"It isn't the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.
"We have the opportunity to do something about it."
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