Britain to spend millions of pounds and deploy robots to tackle climate change

The United Kingdom wants the impacts of climate change to be monitored and kept under control. As part of a multi-year programme, it will therefore spend £81 million on research into climate phenomena that could threaten, for example, agriculture in the British Isles.

Britain will provide £81 million to scientists launching a mission to create an “early warning system” for two so-called climate change “tipping points”: critical thresholds whose crossing could plunge Britain and much of the world into a new reality of extreme weather and food shortages.

“Governments have a duty to think about the unthinkable,” said Laurie Laybourn, a climate and security researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank.

Full details of the project will be announced in early 2025. Politico.eu reports.

Ocean circulation under scrutiny

One task is to monitor changes in ocean circulation, temperature and ice melt caused by global warming that could signal the collapse of the subpolar gyre (SPG). This system of ocean currents plays a key role in maintaining a mild climate in northern Europe. The project will also assess the related risk of the Greenland ice sheet collapsing.

If signs emerged that the subpolar gyre was about to collapse, anyone paying attention would know that potentially existential changes in global conditions could be on the way.

Scientists still have considerable doubts, but some climate models suggest the SPG could collapse as early as 2040, resulting in colder, snowier winters and warmer summers in the UK and Europe, while also disrupting monsoon rains that are vital to food security in West Africa.

The goal, then, is to create a permanent monitoring system that would alert policymakers to an approaching tipping point and give governments and their populations crucial time to prepare.

Part of a bigger problem

However, warning signs from the subpolar gyre could be just the first stage of an even bigger tipping point: the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change considers a sudden collapse of the AMOC this century unlikely. If it did happen, however, scientists predict catastrophic global consequences.

A recent IPPR report written by Laurie Laybourn, a climate and security expert, concluded that an AMOC collapse would bring such extreme cold that it would “effectively destroy crop cultivation in the UK”. Its wider impacts could cause “catastrophic losses in key crops worldwide”, the report says.

Robots in action

All this will be monitored by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), an independent government-funded body established at the urging of former Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings.

According to its own mission statement, ARIA is tasked with carrying out research considered “too speculative, too difficult or too interdisciplinary to be conducted elsewhere”.

As part of the multi-year programme, robots—dubbed WALL-E by some experts in honour of the robotic hero of Pixar’s environmental film—could also be deployed to monitor the impacts of climate change in the Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic. The money will also be used for supercomputer models of historical climate data.