Interview with Dr. Michael Bittner, atmospheric physicist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR)

"One point is to check if the international conventions that the politicians have agreed on are really working. That is the question that the politicians always pose to us. Are these conventions we have agreed upon the right ones?"
DW-TV: Do you think there is a technical solution to the melting of the permafrost?


Michael Bittner: I don't think so. Permafrost is really a big problem. Due to the climate change we have a rise in the temperatures. All these mountains that we have here in the Alpine region or in the Himalaya are frozen since millions of years and now the melting process leads to the fact that the mountains get unstable.


DW-TV: The melting of the permafrost is really invisible. But what is visible is that the glaciers actually melt. Scheeferne glacier for instance. How many more years do you think it will last?





Michael Bittner: We will give it fifteen to twenty years then the glacier will be gone. As an example this glacier on a dry summers day loses around 35 million liters of water. That's approximately the amount that a city like Augsburg needs on drinking water for a day.


DW-TV: You're a climate researcher too. What do you do up here on Zugspitze?


Michael Bittner: One point is to check if the international conventions that the politicians have agreed on are really working. That is the question that the politicians always pose to us. Are these conventions we have agreed upon the right ones? Do we see a trend in the temperature or not? Now the point is that the trend here on the ground is very low. We have point zero six degrees Celsius per decade rise in temperature on the ground and to check this is statistically significant you need very accurate measurements. If you go up in the atmosphere to 100 kilometres you have the air glow layer we have a temperature trend of 10 to 12 degrees a decade. So that's two orders of magnitude higher and that makes it very easy for us to say do we have a change in the temperature trend or not.



DW-TV: So what we here about one degree of temperature rise over the last century is just an average value?


Michael Bittner: This is an average value, that's right. Here in Bavaria for example since 1970 we have a rise in temperature on the ground of one point five degrees.


DW-TV: Can you tell any consequences of climate change apart from the melting of the glaciers?


Michael Bittner: There is a multitude of consequences. It ranges from medical problems, air quality is a problem. We have a change in the global circulation patterns in the atmosphere that determine our weather.


DW-TV: You live up here for much of the year surrounded by snow, so can you still stand the stuff?


Michael Bittner: We love the snow. Each day is different from the other. We have heavy snow, we have light snow, the snow is dark and then it's bright. So we love it and it really needs to be here.


Interview: Ingolf Baur