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Think 07

Pen Hadow is one of the world's most accomplished polar explorers. His eye-witness and extreme account of the impact of climate change provides a sobering but motivational backdrop to why we must rethink the way we plan, build and manage the urban environment.

SM Sue McGregor
PH Pen Hadow

You probably know at ten o'clock we'll be joining His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales with a live video link to St James' Palace. He has an important message for us. And again this afternoon there'll be a debate at lunchtime here, a couple of debates.

This afternoon we will have a live video link with former Vice President AI Gore with questions from the floor to Mr Gore, so that will be an unmissable event certainly this afternoon. But as you know, this is going to be three days here at ExCel of bringing together the entire built environment sector to discuss and debate with your help the best practice on how people in the business can adapt the built environment to make it fit for purpose in our newly carbon restrained world.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that the built environment accounts for 50% of carbon emissions. So the way that we plan, design, build, and use, and manage the built environment is going to make a difference, we hope. Over the three days we have no fewer than 150 speakers, 36 conference sessions, a fascinating exhibition, AI Gore, as I mentioned, The Prince of Wales, and many more.

It is a watershed event here because the environment is suddenly at the centre stage of the thinking of all of us and I'm delighted to say that big business is taking this very seriously, as demonstrated by this important event here at ExCel.

We're going to start with the distinguished polar explorer, Pen Hadow, who is going to provide an important backdrop to the whole event and he's going to help us see the bigger picture with his own firsthand account of some of the extreme conditions that he's seen, and I suspect he'll be telling us how the dramatic world with which he's so familiar is in danger of disappearing. After Pen, His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales, at ten o'clock and much more later.

But let me introduce Pen, who I'm sure I don't need to introduce, as one of the world's most distinguished polar explorers. Just to remind you, he's the only person to have trekked solo without re-supply from northern Canada to the Arctic, to the north geographic pole. He's the only person to have trekked without re-supply to both poles and of course, it's the southern hemisphere which has attracted an awful lot of attention, but Pen knows a great deal about the northern and arctic region where the polar bears are, the polar bears that are running out of ice.

So I hope I'll have a chance to ask him a few questions about that. Pen, if I may, over to you. We look forward to hearing what you have to say. Thanks very much.

PH I'm here just to paint a picture really of what the effects of climate change are on our planet from pole to pole. Standing here, working in london, it's quite easy to lose the plot and really see, feel, experience the impacts of daily actions that you have within your business, how that transfers into the real world.

I wonder here, just right now, how many people here are convinced in their own minds that global warming is actually happening. Could I just have a show of hands? Who's convinced it's happening? Okay. Great. Thank you. And who is convinced in their own minds that it is the humans that are responsible for let's say, the majority of that warming? Okay. So I'd say 75% or so. Very good.

The built environment, as Sue has pointed out, in Britain accounts for very roughly 50% of Britain's carbon emissions. Some of you will be aware of a figure which is that Britain, globally, is only responsible for about 2% of carbon emissions and therefore, there is a feeling in some areas, some courses, that really how difference does it really make worldwide if Britain really gets its act together?

I'd just like to lodge two thoughts in your mind that may give you a little bit more confidence that what you do in your businesses amounts to a hill of beans. The first is that, yes, technically to the extent that any of these things are absolutely measurable precisely, which they are not, Britain is responsible from within its shores for 2% year by year globally.

But Britain, since the Industrial Revolution, which is really when it all kicked off in terms of man-made emissions started to impact on our environment, Britain was responsible for nearly 25%. We, here in Britain, 25% of the problem that we now have. There will be an announcement reasonably shortly by a well-known environmental organisation that will put another conteXt, another perspective on this wretched, if you like, 2% figure, this misleading figure and that is that you can't really pretend that Britain's emissions can be realistically limited to what's produced on our island.

Do you remember, just before Christmas, the biggest ship that ever floated came in from China with all our toys for Christmas? It came into Harwich or Dover or somewhere. Well, the point is we are exporting huge amounts of carbon emissions through the products that we then import. If you added all the imports together and the impacts on the climate on carbon emissions that all those factories had we're up to the sort of 15% mark globally year by year right now. All of which is to give you a little bit more confidence that it really matters what we do here, and I think in the big, big picture Britain kicked off the Industrial Revolution. Britain has an English language which is universal and we sit on the G8 group.

We sit on the United Nations Security Council. We sit on the high table of many international organisations, and I think even if it's not an imperative that we do show some sort of leadership I think that whatever we do do has a resonance around the world that may pleasantly surprise us.

When I was a small boy, there was a time at least 35 years ago, I had that geography lesson and you've all had that geography lesson in which essentially a globe is produced. And you'll recall it has the green and brown splodges, which are the continents. You've got the swathes of blue, the oceans, and at the bottom there was a white cap and at the top there was a white cap. Well, you will have heard through the intergovernmental panel on climate change and its various assessments that have been taking place since the 1990s that there is a prediction, which is that that white cap on the top of our planet will almost certainly disappear. 80% of it will disappear between the years 2060 and 2100. So whatever that is, 55 to 95 years, something like that. Gone.

It'll reform in the winters, but in the summers, by the end of a summer, from that point on, for every summer it will be, to all intensive purposes, an entirely open ocean. A little later I'm going to demonstrate to you why that is almost certainly going to be proved in the next 12 months to be largely erroneous and that actually, it's going to go in everyone's lifetime here. In decades, not in 50 to 100 years.

If the planet Mars started to change colour from orange on its northern cap to dark red over the last 20, 30, 40 years I can pretty much guarantee to you that there will be a sort of global panic that the solar system was collapsing in some shape or form. Something really serious was going on. And yet, the North Pole icecap is going and people find that really quite interesting. The North Pole icecap is only the same distance from here as it is to the Canary Isles where many of you may take your holidays every now and again. It's not very far away and it sort of defeats me as to why we are sitting on a planet going about our daily business.

We are removing one of the biggest, macro, geophysical features on the surface of our planet and everyone's going, fascinating. I hope by the end of this short talk that you'll feel with me that actually, we really need to do something. You may wonder why I got involved, how I got involved with this sort of polar lark.

The short version is that when Scott of the Antarctic died in his tent on his way back from the South Pole having been beaten by Amundsen, his colleagues had almost certainly died already around him in the tent and he wrote four last letters, and one of those letters was to his wife. And he said to his wife; if there's one thing you do with our son, who was Peter, who was three, who went on to become Sir Peter Scott, who went on to set up the Worldwide Fund for Nature, the WWF, if there's one thing you do get the boy interested in the natural world. And it was Scott of the Antarctic that spawned Sir Peter and in effect, therefore the WWF.

I was brought up by the same person that looked after Sir Peter Scott when he was a small boy. She was in her 80s when she looked after me and she brought me up on exactly the same concept - that it is the natural world that we live in and that we work with, and if you don't look after it, if you don't understand it, you have no hope of going on and on in any sort of reasonable, sustainable way.

I headed north in my 20s to the Artic Ocean. I didn't go to the Antarctic a la Scott. I went north, actually rather like Peter Scott. And before I take you on a short journey I want to just explain the role of icecaps. There are only three words you really need to know. They are; recorders of information for the North Pole icecap and the South Pole icecap. They are recorders, they are regulators, and they are indicators. They record. They archive information about our climate - more of that shortly. They regulate the state of play anp they're doing so at the moment, reflecting off the sun's energy and therefore, keeping us effectively cool in a temperature bandwidth that life can happily survive in. And they indicate because when they start to flex and change and respond to changing situations, then they effectively visually show us something is afoot.

That image of a world lit up is made up of thousands of images taken by satellite on clear days or clear nights actually, and I just popped it up there to make you realise I suppose how unlikely it is that with that amount of energy being burned every night around the planet by humans it's a pretty wobbly suggestion that we can't be having any impact at all.

I did this solo journey to the North Pole, no re-supplies. It has never been done. It's been tried by many people. Many sort of polar explorers and special forces folk, all sorts. Everyone had failed, including myself, twice. But I set my heart that this was the defining feat remaining to be done in the polar world. I am not a giant. I am not obviously, seven foot tall. If I was seven foot tall you'd all be saying, well, that's obviously why he's a polar explorer. He just leans into the sledge and off it goes. But I'm not. That wasn't how I got there.

The only way I got there was through what I would call an application of mindset and if there's any big lesson, insight to be drawn from what it took me to pull off that particular feat over 15 years of effort it is that if you do set your mind to something, however challenging it may seem to be in an environmental context impacting on your business and how hard it is to nail down the issues and find suitable responses, all I'll just will you to do is to keep at it. A quick view. I'll save the geography lesson, other than to say I was setting off from the northern most part of Canada, just north of the Resolute Bay, heading out to sea, roughly to the middle of the Artic Ocean.

The Arctic Ocean is just an ocean and it has essentially a cap of ice made up of frozen seawater. I won't embarrass you and ask you how thick, how deep, you think the Antarctic, the equivalent icecap is around the South Pole, but I'll tell you, put you out of your misery. It's about 6,500ft, which is 1.2 miles. So the average thickness of the dollop of ice on top of the Antarctic continent. It's going to be there for a very, very long time.

The average of the thickness of the Arctic Ocean icecap is 9ft. That is all that there is, so it won't surprise you perhaps, knowing that, to see why it may not be there for that much longer. So I was setting off out to sea. And just to paint a picture because this is not an environment that obviously most people are particularly familiar with, I just want to give you a feel for the delicacy really, the fragility of this genuinely unique ecosystem that covers 3% of the Earth's surface. The dark zigzags are areas of open water.

This icecap is made up of billions of plates of ice, rather like lilly pads on a pond. Someone snitched all the stalks from underneath the lily pads; they're free floating and they're moved around, shuffled around, by the tides and the currents, and most particularly winds, which is what makes it a particularly tricky surface to navigate across. When these lily pads come crashing together the forces are so enormous - you've got literally up to 15 million square kilometres of ice on the move. When it hits an immovable object like a coastline it just rucks up, however thick the ice is.

The idea of going due north is obviously a bit of a nonsense; you're going to have to go around certain obstacles. This is made worse, this circuitous route that you have to take, by the fact that the sledge that I took was about 19' and 12 stone at the start, which is bearable until you discover that actually where these plates come together and throw up these ridges of ice, they present these absolute physical obstacles, which I'm sure some of you, if not all of you, are thinking that doesn't look so very hard. It's only about 10 or 12 feet, you could scrabble over that no problem. And that's absolutely true and you could probably pull the sledge as well with a bit of effort up over these ridges.

But, when you bear in mind that these ridges are 4,500 in number and the average height is 2 metres, you can begin to see you're actually pulling a sledge up 9,000 metres, which is a little bit higher than Everest, which is why Polar explorer types complain about being knackered most of the time. Where they pull apart, these plates, you've got open water and the big trick that I had to pull off was to somehow straighten the route. 85% of all North Pole Expeditions have failed over the last 100 years, increasingly as more and more expeditions have taken place the failure rate has actually gone up as well.

And the reason substantially is that global warming, more open water, therefore I would take a more wiggly route to the Pole. And I had to straighten this route out. And the only way I could straighten it out was to essentially develop some technology, some equipment and some techniques, that allowed me to be amphibious so that it didn't really matter whether I came across thin ice or open water, I could just be going straight. The first person to do it. This is the suit known thoroughly unaffectionately as Mr Orange, who I used to climb into, boots and all, and swim my way through the thin ice and open water.

The temperature, just to give you a feel quickly because it's not really key to what I want to say, was -45 to -35 for the first 35 days. Your fridge is +5, your deep freeze is about -15, -17, so I was operating for over a month in conditions that were two to three times colder than the inside of your deep freeze, which is why most expeditions fail. It is the other reason. One is that they hadn't sat down and worked out a strategic solution to straightening the route, which was basically to become amphibious, and the other is that you make mistakes.

Everybody struggles to operate successfully a zero tolerance policy to mistakes because of the cold. The cold affects the speed of your thinking by up to four times; you're thinking four times slower and you're also less able to focus on the issues to anticipate the things that are about to go wrong. And even if you could, to then keep that focus so that you can come up with a solution. And then there's a third step in the process to actually act on the decision that you've made. Very few people have managed to do that; that is why they get frostbite and other things go wrong.

Frostbite's not the problem; it's an ability to override the brain's natural response to the cold. If I did anything good on this expedition, it was to override all of that. Here is some evidence that I am actually slightly mad.

[Video]

-30, -35. The first thing I'd like to do is to introduce you to my close friend who's become a great support on the expedition. We met in Resolute. Her name is Mavis and this is Mavis. She's a snowbrush and, as you can see, she's a blond, she's an artificial blond, bless her. And she's been a very busy girl on this expedition, brushing snow endlessly of me and my sleeping bag and my boots and their liners and gloves and mitts.

[Video ends]

PH There, so now you know the truth: I'm clearly stark raving... But you shouldn't let that affect your thinking as to the credibility of what I'm telling you about climate change. Bears, all you need to know about bears if you're travelling up there is that they are the largest carnivores on earth, they regard humans as prey. They're the only carnivores that regard humans as a natural food supply; it's not really a question for them. Their most effective sense is smell; they can smell three parts per million, which is the same as those spaniels at Heathrow.

And why that's significant is because there aren't any smells on the Arctic Ocean except me or you. And if you haven't had a shower or a bath, which you haven't, for two or three months, you are laying down the mother of all trails on an otherwise blank canvass. So you shouldn't be entirely surprised if you get followed by a bear. Now, there is one thing worse than a bear, it has to be said, and that is obviously two bears. Truthfully, there is something worse than two bears and that is no bears.

And there won't be any bears in the lifetime, in my view, of many of you here. They will be extinct. Walruses will be extinct. Certain species of seal will be threatened, if not extinct. 40% of all the phytoplankton species observed 40 years ago that live on the under surface and are the start of the food chain on the Arctic Ocean are now extinct. It is happening.

As the season goes on you're travelling across the sea ice, making your way to the Pole. It's about 500 miles or so. The ice starts to break up and you can see that you can probably wangle a route through that first image, shuffling from lily pad to lily pad, but there comes a point where you know that you can't. So you slip into the orange suit, you walk out, you know you're going to drop through the ice, you're resigned to it, it's very frightening when you're on your own.

I was up to 1,000 miles from the nearest human being and it just felt like an unnatural act. Sometimes when the ice is too thin to walk on but too thick to swim through you're literally climbing up just an icebreaker boat does, and then breaking it through, and up and break and up and break for up to two hours. I actually swam my way to the North Pole for 50 hours out of the 750 hours that I was travelling, which is quite surprising. And often you can't even see the far side that you're swimming to, so big are the areas of open water. And on the very big stretches, two, three, four, five miles across, I was able to use a sledge to paddle; I could literally get on it like a surfboard, like a canoe, more like a surfboard, and paddle across. This is the way it's going to be.

In a few years time people won't be going with sledges, they'll be going with kayaks that can also double up as a sledge. And in many of your lifetimes, if you want to, you'll be able to take your yacht with your children to the North Pole for your summer holidays. I jest not. And the key point is that it's us that are bringing that about. Swimming around with bears. Bears are sea mammals. They're really good swimmers and, as you can see here, evidence I actually did do what I said I was doing, which was this swimming business, that is the iconic visual manifestation of global warming. This is an icecap teetering on the brink of collapse. You won't see that footage anywhere else in the world until next year when I might do some more.

I reached the Pole after 63 days and although I'd spent 15 years travelling, guiding groups on the Arctic Ocean's icecap, I suppose what really happened over those 63 days is that I felt I'd developed a relationship with that environment in a way that I hadn't done before. When I came back I wrote a book and when I did some research on the book I came across a report by the US Navy. And the report said that over the next 50 years US Naval surface vessels are going to need to have to have responded and adapted and changed their architecture to be able to operate on the Arctic Ocean because it was going to become increasingly an open ocean. And at this point in time, when that report was written three years ago, no US Naval shipping could operate on the Arctic Ocean, which was a worry for them.

I read this report and it was my Damascan moment. I read it in bed while researching my book and I realised in a few pages all the personal ad hoc anecdotal stories that I'd been collecting, experiences I'd been collecting on the ice that related to something - I didn't know what it was - fitted a pattern. There was an explanation and it was this whole notion of global warming through a changing climate driven by man made emissions.

For example, I was at the North Pole in the year 2001 and there was a mother bear with her cub, a young cub, in April, unheard of. Why was it there? Well, it was a classic biological indicator. What actually happened was as the ice breaks up earlier and earlier each season, the seals that need to come up and breed move further and further north. They migrate north towards the Pole. And a bear likes to eat [7] a seal every four or five days and there were so many seals around that the mother felt able to travel right out to the middle of the Arctic Ocean, even in what's technically the first month of spring, a classic indicator.

Expeditions: it's virtually impossible now to set off from the beach and walk out onto the icecap from the Russian coast. It's not cold enough anymore. It's open water all the time so the idea of doing a total journey from beach to Pole, the classic explorer's journey, is no longer possible more often than not and it's tracking away from being a possibility. I mentioned earlier that the Pole's caps are archives. What do I mean by that?

Much of climate change science comes out of Antarctica; huge resources from various countries have been ploughed into doing scientific research in Antarctica and some really good stuff has come out to do with climate change. The most important is this. I'll try and get it reasonably coordinated. They drill down through the ice. Every year a layer of snow gets put down, just like rings in a tree. We've now got a complete record for every single year for 1.2 million years back from today.

They look at each of those rings, those layers, and they draw out with a syringe, if you like, a bubble of air; it's full of bubbles of air. They draw it out and they analyse it and they have worked out what the correlation is between different assemblages of oxygen, oxygen isotopes, and global average surface temperatures. So they put it on a graph and what came out very strikingly, very close correlation, is that whenever greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide in particular, goes up, so does global average surface temperatures.

At the time of the Industrial Revolution, just before it all kicked off, there were 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air on average on the surface of the Earth. Last year it was reported that we are now at 381 parts per million. That is higher than any other time in the last 1.2 million years. No-one knows what the safe limit is for carbon dioxide levels. The best brains in the business, it's a finger in the wind, but their general view is 450 to 500 parts per million and, from that point on, there is real concern that it is no longer a "safe" level.

The Arctic Ocean is predicted to disappear at the moment in 50 to 100 years. That is based on birds-eye views from satellites, looking at the shrinkage. It's very good at seeing the total area occupied in any given day, any given month, any given year of the North Pole icecap. And what's been happening over the three decades is that it's been shrinking by about 8%, which is about the equivalent of the size of France, every decade. And on that basis the IPCC report in general terms has said, right, at this rate of shrinkage there will not be an icecap in 50 to 100 years but area is not the key. That's a two-dimensional view. The key is likely to be the three-dimensional view which incorporates also the thickness. So if you've got the area and the thickness you've got a volume. The volume is the key to the lifespan of the Arctic Ocean.

Now, you may wonder what do you plan doing, you're talking a good game here, you seem to be quite interested, even passionate, about the consequences, at least for your icecap. What am I doing? Now, by way of a spur to action or a call to arms, a sort of come on, you can do it, I have been running a business for 15 years encouraging people to go to the Arctic Ocean, and indeed Antarctica, on expeditions, frankly for adventure, not to tutor them, mentor them in such a way that they return as ambassadors for those regions.

Since I read that report I have not taken on any other clients. What amounted to my life's work has stopped. I have stopped it and, as I speak here now, in the last few weeks I have started to set up a foundation, a charitable organisation, whose sole purpose will be to focus people's attention and understanding, not just on the fact that there's an icecap that won't be with us for long, 3% of the earth's surface, to be precise, that we are removing, but to explain what the consequences are going to be.

And they're going to be serious and they're going to be very real and they're going to be coming at you fast. I haven't got time to explain what they all are now, but just let me give you a clue. If you take this protective shield off the top of the planet, it was knocking back 85% of all the incoming solar energy. It's now an open ocean. Open ocean absorbs by quirk of numbers 85%. It doesn't reflect it; it absorbs it. So you've actually got, for the mathematicians amongst you, 70% as a net gain of energy absorption.

The greatest part of sea level rise globally is not because water is melting out of ice caps out of Antarctica, out of Greenland, and being dumped into the sea. It's just purely through thermal expansion; liquids warming up get bigger, occupying more space. So the first outcome will be a rise in sea level, which for people living in London I would advise is going to be a huge, huge issue when it happens, when that storm surge happens. More generally, and just as one example, it's not just going to be the extreme events that you've heard about. It'll be the very subtle changes in rainfall pattern which will mean that areas, whole continents, that when the agriculture doesn't work, when the taps don't work, people die where they are. When that happens in southern Italy, southern Spain, southern Portugal, I think you can take it from me that they're not going to accept it. They're going to move.

And the day that the water stops coming out of the tap is the day that you, everybody, moves. Life ceases to be tenable where you are. Sydney was down to its last 10%, a major urban advanced capital city. There's a nasty part of me that doesn't wish, but is intrigued by the idea that if the taps had run dry in Sydney, that city would have emptied within a day and I think people would have got the message that big stuff can happen very fast. So, just to finish, I would just like to say, to encourage you to grasp within your businesses the issue of climate change, of carbon emissions, the built environment, 50% of the problem is coming out of areas that you can make a difference to, to the good. I hope you have a good conference. Thank you very much.

SM Thank you for your warm applause for Pen. I'm sure you'll agree with me that was completely riveting. Modestly he told us how he had made his own observances. I have to ask you one thing, which I'm sure is puzzling people, Pen, before I let you go, which is, how did you... ?

PH How did I take the photographs?

SM Take the photographs, even when you were swimming? Presumably you put a camera...?

PH And allegedly solo? Yes. 

SM Allegedly solo, yes!

PH Well, there are still people that really do do things like they seem. It's not all made for telly these days, even these days. I used to set a camera up. If I was maybe crossing a lead and I thought it a particularly interesting situation, push the go button, swim out across, finish the shot on the far side, turn around, swim all the way back, collect the camera, turn if off, and then swim back again. I didn't do it that many times, to be honest.

SM Well, amazing. Really, terrific stuff. You've given us a wonderful start for the conference.

In a couple of minutes, literally, His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales, will be taking your place. So, thank you very much indeed on behalf of everyone, and good luck for next year.

And I've got your notes here, Pen, too. I took them away before. I don't know whether you want them back. Ladies and gentlemen, stretch your legs if you would for literally two minutes because we'll be getting the link from St James' Palace within that period of time, I hope. I'm going to get a verbal clue as to that in a moment.

What you will see is His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales, live from St James' Palace and it's part of his Business in the Community May Day conference when he also is going to challenge British businesses to meet the demands of climate change and, as we know, he also has had an interest in this subject for a very long time. So, bear with us, stay with us, and hopefully a picture will appear any moment now. And I've also got Pen's watch. That must be worth something. Pen, I can't hang on to it. I'll be with you again in a second. Thank you.

[Music]

SM Can you hear me, ladies and gentlemen? There's a slightly revised time for The Prince of Wales. I make it about one and a half minutes past ten. I reckon in about six and a half minutes from now, His Royal Highness will be up on that screen. A slight delay from St James' Palace, but he will be with us live in just over five minutes, so your patience for that time. Thank you.

[Music]