Actuaries can save the Arctic, according to esteemed chemist and climate-change expert Sir David King. He tells Alex Martin that risk management is as relevant to preserving the planet as groundbreaking science
In 1963, David King arrived in the UK from South Africa to take up a position as a Shell Scholar at Imperial College, London. Armed with a PhD in physical chemistry, he would spend the next 25 years developing a reputation as one of the country’s most proficient physical chemists, ultimately leading to his appointment as ‘1920 Professor of Physical Chemistry’ at the University of Cambridge in 1988.
By chance, Cambridge’s chemistry department was then forging its own path in atmospheric science. This connection would be King’s first step on the road to climate activism, although he is keen to stress that he is first and foremost a scientist. “If I’m described as an activist, it is only in the same way that somebody would be an activist if they discovered a vaccine that saves lives, and wanted people to know about it and be able to use it.”
From here, King would go on to work with four prime ministers as the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, and to lead the UK’s approach to 2015’s COP21 meeting in Paris. In more recent years, he led Independent SAGE, the body of experts that reviewed the government’s COVID-19 pandemic response.
From chemistry to climate
King’s first exposure to climate politics was through the atmospheric chemistry group at Cambridge. During the late 1980s, this group was in the middle of the debate around the use of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) aerosols and their impacts on the ozone layer.
“These were very easy things to ban, with only a limited number of chemical companies producing them – some in the UK and Germany and the majority in America,” he says. However, those opposed to the ban were very vocal, arguing that the science was ‘inconclusive’ – an ominous foreshadowing of the debate around climate change in the mid-2000s.
With the latter, it was the fossil-fuel lobby that gave sceptics a voice, rather than the chemical companies. At the landmark 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, oil companies formed a consortium to, as King describes it, “put out very clear statements that the jury is still out on climate change”. Even in 2022, there were more than 600 fossil-fuel representatives at COP27, calling for a slower pace of change.
Science is one antidote to lobbying, but this hasn’t always been plain sailing. King recalls ‘Climategate’, in which emails at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked and made public. Climate-change denial groups took excerpts from these emails out of context to portray scientists as being “much more interested in managing the political side of getting support for action than in the science,” as King puts it. One of the hack’s main impacts was that it drove the climate-science community “back into their shells” and led them to withdraw from saying what they thought in the media.
New modelling methods
During the past decade, however, we have started to see the media cover climate modelling again.
As we experience more flooding and storms, hotter summers and other changes in the weather, public interest in the frequency and severity of climate impacts has grown.
“We now have an abundance of modellers,” notes King. “However, the modellers need to ensure they are keeping track of the evidence.” This is an issue that will be familiar to any actuary who has worked in assumption setting.
As more evidence comes to light and we can harness ever-greater volumes of data, we will increasingly need to perform reliable ‘backcasting’ alongside forecasting, to ensure the models reflect the real world. “Changes only come about where scientists find they can improve agreement with past happenings,” says King.
Feedback loops are one key area currently influencing model change. They are difficult to detect using past data but, when triggered, can rapidly cause observations to deviate from predictions. An example is in the modelling of Arctic Circle ice. Past models predicted that ice cover would reflect sunlight away from the North Pole until the end of the 22nd century, but observations have diverged from these forecasts as the ice has melted, and nearly half the Arctic Ocean is now exposed to sunlight in the summer. Blue seawater is less reflective than white ice, so it heats more rapidly as more of it is exposed, accelerating the melting of the remaining ice. In addition, as the ice melts, it forms lakes that become bluer as they get deeper – creating more pockets of heat, which melt more ice.
“We need to be continually aware of model improvements so we can begin to understand what needs to be done to create a manageable future,” King warns. We also need to look beyond simply reducing our emissions, he adds; we must think about how we can repair our atmosphere and remove carbon dioxide and methane.
When he was running the negotiations leading up to COP21, King was against any discussion of greenhouse gas removal or repair. His aim was to focus on reduction only, especially given that, at the time, more than 40bn tonnes of greenhouse gas were being released into the atmosphere every year (that figure is now around 50bn tonnes). He was also concerned that “if we began talking about removal, this would encourage the oil and gas industries to continue as normal,” he explains. Those actuaries who remember their definitions from their exams will see here a textbook example of ‘moral hazard’.
Given the increase in climate change impacts, particularly on the Arctic, King has changed his mind: “We need all three… remove, reduce and repair.” In his opinion, the world is yet to catch up to this way of thinking. He recalls that it was Margaret Thatcher who led the international community to ban CFCs and Tony Blair who drove climate change up the political agenda. He believes that the events of the past decade have led governments to focus on short-term crisis management and neglect long-term risk planning, and that we are lacking a global leader who can drive forward multi-national action.
Whale poo and crystal clouds
That does not mean action is not happening. King is leading a group at Cambridge that is looking at two groundbreaking new technologies that could help to protect the icecaps and restore ocean biodiversity.
Perhaps the more interesting of the two options is ‘artificial whale poo’. Large whales typically feed and swim at depths of 300m–500m, where they are unable to excrete faeces due to the extreme water pressure. When whales periodically rise to the surface to breathe, they also expel great clouds of part-digested waste into the ocean. Within days, this excretion has spread across thousands of kilometres of ocean, leaving in its wake a green forest of phytoplankton. As King puts it: “The whales behave like a farmer spreading fertiliser in the sunlit areas of the ocean.” This provides the basis of an ocean-wide food chain that helps to lock carbon within living animals.
We need to be continually aware of model improvements so we can manage our future
However, this process is operating at a fraction of what it once was, with whale populations at around 5% of their historic numbers. This is where the technology comes in: if scientists can find a natural source of minerals with a similar composition to whale poo, they can replicate this process. King’s team has found that volcanic ash is the right type of substance, having high levels of iron, silica, phosphates and nitrates. “It is going to be possible to regenerate ocean populations of all of its biomass if it can be run to scale,” says King – although this would require global legal co-ordination, and investment from public and private sources.
Marine cloud brightening is another technology that could save the Arctic. When a wave crashes against a rock, a small amount of salt spray is sent into the air, where it is caught by the wind. The water evaporates off the spray, leaving behind microscopic salt crystals, which begin to fall under the influence of gravity and collect water, forming clouds. The larger the crystal, the bigger the drops of water collected and the darker the cloud. If the crystals can be made the right size, they will collect tiny droplets of water, making bright white clouds.
King envisages 500 to 1,000 remotely operated ships surrounding the Arctic Circle; if the Met Office were to detect a strong wind pushing up to the North Pole, certain ships would be told to spray salt crystals into the sky to form clouds that would drift over the Arctic Circle, protecting it from the sun’s rays.
This, according to King, is where actuaries come in. Saving the Arctic is a risk-management project on an unprecedented scale. There would be no immediate financial gain for private investors, but the value in offsetting the future damage caused by rising sea levels from a melting Arctic Circle is immense.
There will be criticisms of both technologies, but King is clear that we need to do something – now. Actuaries, he says, are the “world leaders” in risk management, and many have become experts at dealing with complex regulation. It is exactly this skillset that should put them at the centre of these technological discussions, he believes.
Risk management, with its focus on long time horizons and low-probability, high-impact risks, is a core actuarial tool and one that King feels is missing from the world right now. His message to the entire actuarial profession? “Don’t stand back, get engaged – we need you.”
