Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Tuesday the 18th of June and I am glad to be in the company of a man who I've actually written quite a lot about his work because he is Professor Paul Williams.

He's Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Meteorology at Reading University.

But more to the point, he is Professor Turbulence. Hello, Paul.

Hello, Simon. I've been admiring you from afar from as long as I can remember. So it's a great pleasure to meet you finally today after all of

these years of following you online. Well, how very kind. So we're four weeks since Singapore

Airlines flight 321 from London Heathrow to Singapore, unfortunately hit very severe turbulence.

I followed your work and it appears that actually it could well be that climate change

is an element in that. Yes, I've been studying turbulence and specifically the kind of turbulence

that affects aircraft for the past 10 years or longer. And the basic question is what's climate change doing to this turbulence.

And the evidence now has built up. We have a catalogue of evidence, including satellite

observations, computer models, basic physical theory about how turbulence has generated. And they're

all telling a consistent story, which is that indeed there's more

turbulence because of climate change, 55% more severe clear air turbulence, that's the invisible

kind, over the North Atlantic today compared to 40 years ago and a projection in a worst

case scenario over a doubling or even a trebling of the amount of severe turbulence

in the atmosphere in the next few decades.

That sounds extremely dangerous, extremely worrying.

Potentially but here's the slightly better news.

I'm not saying that 55% more flights are encountering turbulence today than 40 years ago.

I'm saying there's 55% more turbulence in the atmosphere.

That doesn't necessarily mean more flights are encountering turbulence

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