SCOTLAND could face a new Ice Age while much of the world fries because of global warming, it has been warned.
Although it is more likely that increasing global temperature will result in Scottish winters being wetter and milder, there is still a one in six chance of an even more catastrophic outcome.
This would see winter temperatures drop to a perishing -30°C in Edinburgh with the country surrounded by sea ice, according to climate expert Dr Tim Lenton.
“It would be like being in an Ice Age – an absolute horror show,” he told the Sunday National.
This could happen if the world fails to prevent global temperatures from rising by two degrees centigrade.
The warning comes as it was reported that although Scotland’s planet-warming emissions have reduced, progress has continued to slow. There was an increase in pollution from domestic transport and international aviation, as well as from buildings in 2024, Scottish Government figures show.
Dr Lenton said that going past a global rise in temperatures of 1.5°C was probably inevitable now, but warming could still be limited to below the 2°C tipping point if countries worked faster to get to zero emissions.
“The best we could hope for might be about 1.7 or 1.8°C, but we could still stay below two, and I would argue we should do everything in our power to do that because every 0.1°C is just upping the risk of catastrophic outcomes,” he said.
“If we stay below 2°C, we can ‘avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable’ but if we just stampede on to two or more, then we don’t avoid the unmanageable.”
For Scotland this could mean that seasonal swings of the climate would be “off the scale”.
“The Scottish skiing resorts might be happy if anybody is bothered to stay in the country to make use of them, but infrastructure would be – let’s put it gently – severely challenged if we end up in that future,” said Dr Lenton.
Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter, Dr Lenton is the founding director of the Global Systems Institute, and told a recent national emergency briefing that the Ice Age scenario is a “legitimate risk”.
“It’s not currently the most likely outcome, but it is the sort of outcome you think we’d want to try hard to avoid,” he said.
If we can’t manage to avoid crossing the tipping point, then the Gulf Stream that currently gives Scotland its mild climate could be pulled away, causing below-freezing winter temperatures all over the UK, but with Scotland hit worst.
There is evidence that the Gulf Stream has already moved, which is what climate scientists expect to happen with the weakening of the broader Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). This is because global warming is melting Arctic and Greenland ice.
Renowned for his work identifying climate tipping points which informed the setting of the 1.5°C climate target in 2021, Dr Lenton is now worried about how fast the climate is changing,
“Even as specialists, we keep getting nasty surprises from the climate – we see things changing, we see bigger impacts from extreme events or more damaging extremes than our best efforts at modelling were forecasting,” he said.
“In general, the problem is that even if we got the temperature prediction roughly right, the damages that are associated with any given level of warming are turning out to be more shocking than we were forecasting.”
The exact tipping point in the ocean circulation is unknown as yet, but Dr Lenton said climate scientists know it is getting closer the more the world warms.
He pointed out that the UK is not prepared for an Alaskan-type climate and is frustrated that more is not being done to either limit emissions or prepare for some “inevitable” changes.
One way to move forward would be to change how electricity is priced rather than have it tied to gas prices, but Dr Lenton said the UK Government had not yet had the “courage to face up to the utilities” to reform it.
“We have an unhelpful electricity pricing system that’s still tied to the gas price, although we know the way to limit risk is to limit warming,” he said.
Speaking as a climate specialist, he said there was no logic to allowing new oil and gas extraction in the UK.
“All we’d be doing is harming ourselves sooner because of the climate changes that will bring about,” he said, adding that it didn’t make a lot of economic sense either.
“Even if you don’t care about climate change, you’d have good reason to push for more renewables and more electrification of the country.
“We need to actually go faster to seize the energy security opportunity, and we need to make sure we’re resilient and do some sensible adaptation towards some inevitable changes, as well as being ready if the nasty shocks start to unfold.
"That's question of spending public money, which is always a political issue, but I think we can see that we’ve already got sectors like farming in the UK that are having a nightmare because the climate and the weather is becoming so unpredictable.
“I think most of us believe we should still have a fair amount of our food produced here if we can, so we need to be supporting resilience in farming.”
Dr Lenton also questioned the UK Government’s push for more nuclear. “Why are we paying such an amazing amount for the electricity that’s going to come from a big new nuclear power station?” he asked.
“It’s a big pill to swallow. I understand there’s some logic behind it, which is just to pay a lot to get this stable, low-carbon, baseload electricity, but it’s a hell of a price to pay when actually batteries and ways of storing electricity are getting way cheaper all the time, making it less and less of a problem to just keep pushing for renewables. I would really invest in renewables and electrification.”
While the anti-net-zero pushback is “very problematic” and the views and policies of Reform’s Nigel Farage and US president Donald Trump are “worrying”, Dr Lenton pointed towards how the Chinese markets are rushing to embrace clean energy.
“They are rubbing their hands in glee that the idiot president in the US is consigning his great nation to the dustbin of history, just like we were consigned to the dustbin of history a while ago,” said Dr Lenton.
