Where’s Winston?  

The Guardian has an article on political concern about rising sea levels in Britain - Prepare for global temperature rise of 4C (via frogblog).

“There is no doubt that we should aim to limit changes in the global mean surface temperature to 2C above pre-industrial,” Watson, the chief scientific adviser to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told the Guardian. “But given this is an ambitious target, and we don’t know in detail how to limit greenhouse gas emissions to realise a 2 degree target, we should be prepared to adapt to 4C.

Globally, a 4C temperature rise would have a catastrophic impact.

He said a two-and-half-year analysis by the government’s Foresight programme on the implications for coastal defences had more impact in the corridors of power than any other research on the effects of climate change that he presented.

No other single factor focussed the minds of the cabinet more than the analysis that I produced through that … We begin to have to talk about ordered retreat from some areas of Britain because it becomes impossible to defend,” he said. “There’s no choice here between adaptation and mitigation, we have to do both.