Jim Skea: If I felt despair, I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last published a report on the science of our warming planet, it painted a stark picture of a world experiencing more extreme weather events and where the window of opportunity to mount an effective response is fast slamming shut. Delivered in 2023 – two years after Glasgow hosted the COP26 climate summit with the goal of ‘keeping 1.5C alive’ – the IPCC’s synthesis report noted that global warming was “more likely than not to reach 1.5C” even with very low levels of greenhouse gases, and “likely or very likely to exceed 1.5C” with higher levels of emissions.

Last month, as an unprecedented wildfire raged in Los Angeles turning once-wealthy neighbourhoods to ash, the European Copernicus climate service confirmed that not only was 2024 the hottest year on record, but also the first where global temperatures exceeded the symbolic figure of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. While that doesn’t mean the target which was first set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement has been breached (the agreement refers to a long-term average) it was nevertheless an unwelcome reminder of the continuing international failure to properly address the crisis.

Since that last IPCC report, the UN body has appointed a new chair – Dundee-born Professor Jim Skea, who previously chaired Scotland’s Just Transition Commission. Skea is avowedly a scientist – not a politician. Yet he’s operating in an environment which has become ever more politicised in recent years amid a backlash against the net zero agenda. The day before our interview, President Donald Trump used his inauguration speech to promise a new era of economic growth built on oil and gas. Later, Trump – who made “drill, baby, drill” one of his rallying calls during the campaign – signed an executive order entitled Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements, which removed the United States from the Paris accord.

While Skea’s role precludes him from commenting on the political decisions of UN members, I ask him if he ever despairs about the overall direction of travel when it comes to tackling the climate crisis.

“If I felt despair, I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning and do my job,” he says. “I’ve been in climate change long enough to see the ebbs and flows of public opinion. I wouldn’t deny that we’re perhaps ebbing a little bit at the moment in terms of momentum, but I don’t expect that to be there forever.” 

Now in his early 70s, Skea was elected chair of the IPCC in 2023 and will lead it through its seventh assessment cycle which culminates with the publication of a report in 2029. Before that, however, the organisation will publish a special report in 2027 on climate change and cities. Even in the early weeks of 2025, we’ve seen the impact of rising temperatures in the LA wildfires and the destructive power of Storm Éowyn which caused widespread structural damage across Britain and Ireland. 

And yet despite the growing scientific and empirical data, there are those who want to row back on the limited commitments already made in the name of reducing emissions. In the run-up to the general election, Reform UK vowed to scrap net zero targets and accelerate the extraction of North Sea oil and gas. Despite polls showing the majority of the UK population accepts that climate change is a man-made phenomenon, Reform actively promoted misinformation in campaign literature, telling voters: “Net zero means reducing man-made CO2 emissions to stop climate change. It can’t. Climate change has happened for millions of years, before man-made CO2 emissions, and will always change. We are better to adapt to warming, rather than pretend we can stop it.” The paragraph was later removed from updated drafts of the party’s manifesto.

Somehow despite clearly impacting us all, climate change has become a wedge issue which populists across Europe and beyond have sought to exploit to their advantage. And while its attempts to foster political consensus are no doubt sincere, the United Nations has perhaps been guilty of creating a sense of fatalism with its general secretary making a series of increasingly dire pronouncements about the scale of the threat.

“We’ve tried to move the conversation to the action that it’s possible to take,” says Skea. “But one of the things I learned as chair of the Scottish Just Transition Commission was that it’s really important to have an honest conversation with people about what kind of actions are needed and what the consequences would be of taking them both in people’s own lives and more generally in terms of the capacity to deal with one of the biggest problems the human race has ever faced. You’re not just giving a bright-eyed Pollyanna-ish kind of view – it’s important to be realistic.”

It’s now almost 20 years since publication of the Stern Review, the hugely influential report which examined the economics of climate change on behalf of the Treasury and set Britain on the path to becoming a low-carbon economy. The UK then became the first country in the world to introduce legally binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, pledging to reach net zero by 2050. Scotland’s legislation commits to do the same but five years earlier in 2045. But while there were early successes, the pace of progress has slowed as the means of reducing CO2 emissions become harder to achieve. 

Fire damage in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles | Alamy

For Skea, time spent involved with Scotland’s Citizens’ Assembly showed him the public is often one step ahead of the policymakers and more radical than politicians in the approaches needed to reduce carbon emissions.

“The people who were engaged with [the Citizens’ Assembly] came up with much more radical solutions than politicians appeared to be able to grapple with. [But] people have made big, bold moves on climate change when a senior politician has grabbed the agenda and actually pushed it. I do think that kind of political leadership is needed. In fact, one of the messages from an IPCC report is that high-level political engagement and drive does make a difference.” 

But while the climate crisis is likely to remain near the top of the agenda for most countries’ politicians, there are undoubtedly signs that the global consensus achieved at Kyoto, Paris and Glasgow may slowly be coming apart. With the US already backsliding on its commitments now that Trump is in the White House, the world’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, recently left a net zero initiative where members pledge to support the goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. And in the UK, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has given her support for the hugely controversial third runway at Heathrow in the name of economic growth.

Voters, too, are increasingly sceptical of the net zero agenda and the impact it’s likely to have on their lives. Polling published last week by Lord Ashcroft showed 62 per cent of those surveyed believed net zero would lead to higher household bills. Asked if achieving net zero is worth it, despite the cost, just over a quarter (28 per cent) said yes. That figure fell to 15 per cent for Tory voters and just five per cent for those who backed Reform in 2024.

Unsurprisingly for someone who has spent much of his life studying climate change, Skea has a good idea of what inaction would look like.

“In the 1.5C to 2C [warming scenario] we’re seeing a difference in things like wildfire damage, the intensity of extreme events, and we would certainly be losing all the warm water corals. By the time you get to 3C, you’re starting to look at impacts on agricultural systems and food productivity. The other thing is the loss of Arctic sea ice. At 2C, we could see an ice-free Arctic every decade instead of every century which has big implications for sea routes…” 

Skea says we already have the “tools” at our disposal to meet the challenge – we just need to “get on with it”.

“In the last [IPCC] report we identified things that could be done in the here and now that would pay for themselves. For example, renewable energy stands at the forefront – it’s the first thing to be getting on with,” he says.

“But we can’t do it all through technical fixes. It is going to involve issues around lifestyle choices, consumption patterns as well. As someone who cycles across central London to get to the office… a lower carbon lifestyle doesn’t have to be a worse lifestyle. You can have a high quality of life while having a low carbon footprint.”

Always the scientist and all about the data, Skea says he has “no idea” whether the world will be on track to meet its climate commitments by the end of the decade, although he must at least have an inkling. By then, the IPCC will have published its next major report, and our changing planet could look quite different – both environmentally and politically.