prediction

As he reaches 100, broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough has spoken of the changes he has seen in his lifetime – and the horrifying consequences of climate change in the years to come

Legendary broadcaster Sir David Attenborough made a worrying prediction for 2030 – and predicted the state of the planet is likely to get worse after that. The iconic naturalist celebrates his 100th birthday on Friday (May 8) and he has long been heralded as the natural world’s biggest champion.

He has also been vocal about the threats facing the Earth. In 2020, as the world was in lockdown as a precaution against Covid-19, Sir David made what he called a “personal witness statement” about the threat of climate change. Many of the dire predictions he made about the world are beginning to come true.

Back in 2020 he warned that 10 years from that date, with much of the Amazon rainforest becoming a dry desert and the polar icecaps shrinking, the effects of climate change will become truly irreversible – and threaten the extinction of humanity.

As he released his Netflix documentary, A Life on Our Planet, Sir David made a personal appeal to world leaders. He said: “There are short-term problems and long-term problems. Politicians are tempted to deal with short-term problems all the time and neglect long-term problems.

“{Climate change] is not only a long-term problem, it is the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. Please examine it, and please respond.”

The prognosis for the rest of the century looks pretty bleak if Sir David’s predictions are to be believed. He said that if he had been born in 2020, instead of 1926, he would be witness to the full range of climate collapse: “In the 2030s, The Amazon Rainforest, cut down until it can no longer produce enough moisture, degrades into a dry savannah, bringing catastrophic species loss… and altering the global water cycle.

“At the same time, the Arctic becomes ice-free in the summer. Without the white ice cap, less of the sun’s energy is reflected back out to space. And the speed of global warming increases.”

By the 2040s, just 14 years from today, Sir David predicts: “Throughout the north, frozen soils thaw, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide, accelerating the rate of climate change dramatically.”

Through the 2050s, as today’s schoolchildren reach middle age, the world’s seas will become a sterile desert: “As the ocean continues to heat and becomes more acidic, coral reefs around the world die. Fish populations crash.”

Into the 2080s, mankind truly becomes an endangered species: “Global food production enters a crisis as soils become exhausted by overuse. Pollinating insects disappear… and the weather is more and more unpredictable.”

The stable climate that has endured longer than human civilisation will be lost forever by 2100, Sir David says.

“Our planet becomes four degrees Celsius warmer,” he adds, “Large parts of the earth are uninhabitable. Millions of people rendered homeless. A sixth mass extinction event… is well underway.”

He describes these various tipping-points as “a series of one-way doors,” with each bringing irreversible change.”

As he muses on his long life, Sir David warren that someone born today who lives as long as he has will see almost unimaginable change: “Within the span of the next lifetime, the security and stability of the Holocene, our Garden of Eden… will be lost.”

Average global temperatures have risen by more than 1C since the 1850s. Since 2015, every successive year has brought record high temperatures – causing heatwaves, floods, droughts, and fires as well as irrevocable habitat loss for many species.

Sir David thinks that humanity is the species most under threat. He said: “I used to think this was about saving the planet, and now I realise it’s not …nature will always look after itself. It’s about saving us.”

He was one of the first to sound the alarm about humanity’s impact on the environment. In 1937, the total human population was around 2.3billion. Carbon in the atmosphere was measured at 280 parts per million, and 66% of the planet remained unspoiled wilderness: “Everywhere you’d go, there was wilderness. Sparkling coastal seas. Vast forests. Immense grasslands. You could fly for hours over the untouched wilderness,” Sir David said.

Sir David was one of the first to sound the alarm about humanity’s impact on the environment. In 1937, the total human population was around 2.3billion. Carbon in the atmosphere was measured at 280 parts per million, and 66% of the planet remained unspoiled wilderness: “Everywhere you’d go, there was wilderness. Sparkling coastal seas. Vast forests. Immense grasslands. You could fly for hours over the untouched wilderness,” Sir David said.

By 1960, less than 30 years later, the change was already measurable. The global population was now three billion, atmospheric carbon was measured at 315 parts per million, and the remaining wilderness had shrunk to 62%.

Fast forward to 1997, the population had more than doubled to almost six billion, carbon in the atmosphere had increased to 360 parts per million, and much more wilderness had been lost – now down to 46%.

“The global air temperature had been relatively stable till the ’90s,” Sir David said. “But it now appeared this was only because the ocean was absorbing much of the excess heat, masking our impact. It was the first indication to me that the earth was beginning to lose its balance.”

Unsustainable logging, overfishing, and above all the reckless use of fossil fuels was pushing the planet to a tipping point, he warned: “The average global temperature today is one degree Celsius warmer than it was when I was born,” he said in A Life on Our Planet,” speed of change that exceeds any in the last 10,000 years. Summer sea ice in the Arctic has reduced by 40% in 40 years.”

The wildlife that has been Sir David’s lifelong interest has been pushed to the margins: “Half of the fertile land on earth is now farmland. 70% of the mass of birds on this planet are domestic birds. The vast majority, chickens.

“We account for over one-third of the weight of mammals on earth. A further 60% are the animals we raise to eat. The rest, from mice to whales, make up just 4%.”

Despite the bleak outlook, Sir David says all hope is not lost. One is to stabilise population growth and another is to switch to renewable energy.

Congratulations to all the young athletes and their teams on The Times All-Area high school basketball teams. I do wonder about the choices the seniors are making in their commitments to colleges and I look to The Times to explain why UCLA is seemingly not on the radar for these young players.

It used to be known that the Bruins’ academic requirements were a significant barrier to many high school players. Is that still true? Are the local graduates not the cream of the crop that Southern California was known for in past years? Are NIL deals affecting the choices of these future freshmen? Is UCLA not making a strong outreach effort for the top local talent? Is L.A. so awful for these kids that it isn’t even on their radar to stay close to home?

I am sure I am not alone in seeking clarity around the issue of the exodus of local talent to Missouri, Oregon State, Texas, North Carolina, Nevada, and even more confounding, USC.

David Gerne Echt
Torrance

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Imagine waking up early, eager to peep dazzling carpets of brilliant orange flowers at the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve. Instagram posts promised a spectacle.

You drive to the reserve north of Los Angeles, but the rolling hills aren’t alive with color.

Bummer. The bloom is over.

Thanks to AI, and a local scientist, such disappointment may soon be a thing of the past.

This year, Steve Klosterman, a biologist who works on natural climate solutions, launched a “wildflower forecast,” powered by a deep-learning model, satellite imagery and weather data.

In a sense, Klosterman, of Santa Monica, developed the tool to meet his own need.

Last spring, the Midwest transplant was hankering to see some wildflowers. He assumed there was some online resource that offered predictions or leveraged satellite images.

“Surely, there must be something,” he recalled thinking. “But there was nothing.”

There are tools. The state reserve operates a live cam trained on one swath of land. Theodore Payne, a California native plant nursery and education center, runs a wildflower hotline, where people can call in and hear weekly recorded reports on hot spots.

“These are all essential resources,” Klosterman said. “At the same time, they’re limited.”

Klosterman isn’t green when it comes to plants. His PhD, at Harvard, focused on the timing of new leaves on trees in the spring and color change in the fall.

For a class project, a team he was part of built a website that predicted those leaf changes in the Boston area. It was a hit.

California poppies bloom in Lancaster, near the state natural reserve, in mid-March.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

To create the poppy bloom predictor, Klosterman turned to AI initially developed for medical imaging. He has harnessed it to instead analyze satellite images of the Antelope Valley.

The model scans 10-by-10-meter squares of land to determine whether poppies are present by their telltale orange color. (It also identifies tiny yellow flowers called goldfields.)

The model is trained on satellite images — which go back nine years — along with past weather data.

It then uses the current forecast, and recent flower status, to peer into the future.

If the mercury is going to hit 100 degrees and wind is picking up — and in previous years that led to withering flowers — that will guide the prediction.

Right now, the model can forecast five days out and is, as Klosterman puts it, “very much a work in progress.” It would be better, more powerful, if it had 100 years to learn from.

As more data are collected, it might someday be able to forecast a week or two out.

Right now, poppies are popping at the reserve in the western Mojave Desert.

It rained throughout the fall and into winter, and poppies need at least seven inches of rain to make a good showing, said Lori Wear, an interpreter at the reserve.

Snowfall in January seems to push them to another level, but that didn’t happen this season. So it’s a good bloom, but not extraordinary, she said.

Still, poppies — California’s state flower — blanket swaths of the protected land.

“It almost looks like Cheeto dust,” she said, “like somebody had Cheetos on their fingers and just smeared it on the landscape.”

Poppies here have typically peaked around mid-April, but variable weather in recent years has made it hard to predict, she said. Klosterman believes right now is likely the zenith.

Also blooming now: goldfields, purple grape soda lupine and owl’s clover. Wear described the latter, also purple, as looking like a “short owl with little eyes looking at you and a little beak.”

An SUV drives through blooms near the reserve. “It almost looks like … somebody had Cheetos on their fingers and just smeared it on the landscape,” said Lori Wear, an interpreter at the reserve.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

On Sunday, Klosterman experienced the blooms for himself, using his technology as a guide.

It offers predictions in two forms. The first is the amount of the valley — shown in a satellite image — covered in poppies and goldfields, expressed as a percentage. The other is an overlay of orange and yellow splotches on the land.

The map showed a fairly high concentration of poppies near a stretch of Highway 138. He went there and, lo and behold, vibrant flowers awaited him. He sent proof: a smiling selfie in front of a sea of blossoms.

Klosterman’s tool may help answer arguably more complex questions than poppy or no poppy, such as a more precise understanding of the conditions the flowers need to thrive.

Experts know rain is key, but it’s more complicated than that.

Steve Klosterman takes a selfie in a field of California poppies.

(Steve Klosterman)

Heavy rain can supercharge invasive grasses, crowding out the blooms. Natives actually tend to do better after several years of drought, once invasives not adapted to the arid climate die out. That’s what led to an epic superbloom in 2017, Joan Dudney, an assistant professor of forest ecology at UC Santa Barbara, told The Times in 2024.

Klosterman wondered if the recent heatwave would desiccate them. But his model didn’t show that, and neither did his trip. So it’s possible other factors play a significant role in their persistence, such as length of day.

The model could also shed light on what could happen to the flowers as the climate warms. Will they migrate to the north? Will there be fewer blooms?

To game that out, Klosterman said you could invent and plug in a weather forecast with higher temperatures.

For now, Klosterman’s forecast is limited to the Antelope Valley. But if it expands to other areas, and other flower types, it could help people like Karina Silva.

Silva woke up at 5 a.m. last Wednesday to travel from her Las Vegas home to Death Valley National Park, hoping to beat the heat and the crowds to the superbloom.

But several hours later, she and her husband, David, were still trying to find it.

The hillside behind her was sprinkled with desert golds, but the display fell short of the riotous eruption of flowers posted on social media. The superbloom ended in early March, according to park officials.

“I was just thinking it was going to be this explosion of different colors,” Silva said by the side of the road overlooking Badwater Basin.