Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
MONDAY 10 NOVEMBER 2008
PROFESSOR STEPHEN
SALTER, PROFESSOR
KEN CALDEIRA,
PROFESSOR KLAUS
LACKNER AND
DR VICKY
POPE
Q80 Dr Gibson: You would support
from your experience Tyndall Centres and Hadley Centres doing
this kind of work?
Professor Caldeira: Yes.
Q81 Dr Gibson: In a competitive way?
Professor Caldeira: I am a big
fan of the competitive peer review process. I think all of this
research should be in open literature. There should be nothing
classified or closed. I would like to see it as an open and competitive
process as much as possible.
Professor Salter: I have had a
great deal of help from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research
in Boulder, Colorado, with suggestions and numbers for the work
I have been doing. I think you can mix big laboratories and universities.
I think universities probably have a more rapid response and can
come up with ideas a bit more flexibly than a laboratory where
people are told what to do. I feel, and maybe I do not have any
evidence here, that places like the Hadley Centre would be more
effective if the individuals there could have a fraction of their
time—say 25%—to do exactly what they wanted to do
rather than being told what the government department wants.
Q82 Dr Gibson: There is a challenge
for you. I am sure you agree with that.
Dr Pope: Maybe I should just introduce
the Hadley Centre and my role. I am Head of Climate Change Advice
at the Met Office Hadley Centre. I am sure you all know that the
Met Office provides the weather forecasts everyday but it also
hosts the institution that provides climate science to underpin
government policy. We are commissioned in the Met Office Hadley
Centre by DECC now, formerly Defra, and the MoD to provide independent
climate research to underpin policy. A very large part of that
work is to develop one of the world's leading climate models and
these climate models, as was mentioned earlier, are now getting
into the earth system realm so they can represent both biological
and chemical processes as well as the main climate processes in
the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surface. We do have the
tools available to look at many of these sorts of issues. My role
is to provide the interface between the science and the policy-makers.
I am the person that tells the scientists what to do but, believe
me, they are scientists and they do what they want as well. They
will challenge the steer from policy makers and say these are
the important issues as well and come back to the government departments
and say should we not be looking at this. It is very much a two-way
process and I am very much in the middle of that. If we believe
that something is important for climate change we will look at
it. I wanted to give a couple of examples of two recent studies
that have not been published yet. One has been accepted for publication
and another one has just been submitted that look at some of the
issues involved. One study showed that if you take short term
intervention—the direct climate engineering that people
were talking about that act in the short term—it could actually
mask climate change and when those interventions stop you will
actually end up with higher levels of climate change than you
had before. Really you need to look very carefully at these things.
Another example is if you make changes to the climate on a regional
scale they can have adverse effects in other regions of the globe.
The climate system is very interlinked, so changes in one place
affect other places, and it is only by running climate models
that we can assess those impacts. Even if you switch the engineering
off, the impact could be irreversible, so you could have a long
term detrimental effect that you perhaps had not anticipated.
Q83 Dr Iddon: Dr Pope, we believe
that one of the things that your organisation has been looking
at is the consequences of cloud albedo enhancement. Could you
tell us what that is and how you have been going about it? Is
it modelling, or real experiments, and what are the main lessons
of that research?
Dr Pope: We took the proposal
that Professor Salter came up with to alter the properties of
the clouds and essentially we did not look at any of the engineering
issues; we just assumed that it would work and make a large impact
on the stratocumulus clouds. These are clouds off the coast of
Africa and South America. We looked at what the consequences of
that would be for the climate as a whole. What we found was that
if you changed the cloud sufficiently to have an impact on climate
to actually reduce the warming that will also have consequences
right the way round the world, particularly in the tropics, so
it could change the El Nino, for example, which is very important
for climate variability. It could enhance the destruction of the
rain forest. We already know that climate change is likely to
cause die back of the rain forest and it could make that worse.
If you then switch that engineering off and stop producing the
aerosol and you stop brightening the cloud, the cooling goes away
and you get enhanced warming, but the changes in the rain forest
could effectively be permanent because it takes many thousands
of years for it to recover.
Q84 Dr Iddon: Is this virtual work
or actual work?
Dr Pope: It has to be virtual.
What we are looking at is not a prediction of the future; it is
a projection of what might happen, so it is about looking at the
danger inherent in the change that you are making. When we look
at projections of climate change and we look at the worst case
outcomes of an unmitigated world, we are looking at the dangers
of that happening. We are not looking at something that will definitely
happen. In this case we are saying if we made this intervention
on climate what is the danger from that?
Professor Lackner: I would argue
that we are not ready to do serious climate engineering in this
day. I do hear people who say we should not even study it for
that reason. I am opposed to that and the answer is, as you have
just heard, there are all sorts of side-effects and I think it
is therefore very important that we do basic research and most
of this will, by its nature, be virtual. It is important to do
that because if there is a crisis we will not have time to do
it and we might go down a road which might be potentially far
more dangerous because we refused to look at it earlier. It is
better to know what the consequences would be so that when there
is a crisis we know how to act because in a crisis we will take
the easy way out of whatever it may be, even if it turns out to
be a bad idea.
Professor Caldeira: If we take
the risk of dangerous climate change seriously and the risk of
a climate emergency seriously, if a climate emergency did occur
there could be great pressure on politicians to do something right
away. Transforming our energy system and reducing greenhouse gas
emissions takes a long time, whereas it is thought that we could
put dust in the stratosphere within a few years and start changing
climate right away. If it turns out that these proposals do not
really reduce climate risk, but merely create new forms of risk,
there could be political pressure to do something right away and
then we do something that is a big mistake and so it is important
to do the research now, even if it is just to show that these
proposals do not really make sense.[3]
I would point out that while these simulations have shown that
climate engineering is unlikely to reproduce the status quo ante,
nearly every simulation has shown that there is the potential
to reduce overall amounts of climate change.
Q85 Dr Gibson: There are still arguments,
are there not, about the models to use for albedo enhancement
and so on. You are not agreed on one model but on several and
scientists are arguing about particular models. Is that the state
of affairs?
Dr Pope: There are obviously uncertainties
in the science and I think this was discussed earlier. All of
the models show that climate is warming. They all share very many
characteristics. What they differ in is the degree of the change
and the details of the regional change. By using a number of different
models that make different assumptions about the science, you
can actually look at the range of possible outcomes and we are
now able to start looking at the probabilities of different outcomes
so that we can assess risk. It is really about risk assessment.
No prediction of the future can give you an absolute prediction
of any sort. What we are really doing is assessing risk.
Q86 Dr Gibson: So you need that variability.
Dr Pope: We do, yes.
Q87 Dr Gibson: What is your interaction
with academic centres and commercial organisations?
Dr Pope: Our interaction with
academic centres is very strong.
Q88 Dr Gibson: Which ones?
Dr Pope: Let me explain how a
climate model works. No one centre anywhere in the world has all
of the expertise that is required to develop an earth system model.
We have to work very closely with people in the academic community.
We work very closely with people in the UK, for example, experts
on the biology of the oceans, experts on the land surface, and
we have joint projects. We are formalising that much more mainly
through the Natural Environmental Research Council and the universities
in many parts of the UK get funding from there.
Q89 Dr Gibson: Am I right that the
Tyndall Centres are ripe within university structures?
Dr Pope: The Tyndall Centre is
a distributed centre of researchers across the university sector
with its hub in the University of East Anglia. They are not really
involved in climate modelling.
Q90 Dr Gibson: I never know the difference
between you and the UEA. It is either you or the UEA in The
Guardian first. You seem to be saying very similar things.
Dr Pope: We say very similar things
because of the broad consensus. If you look at the IPCC report
there is a consensus of all scientists but the structure of the
work that we do is very different. It is very complementary.
Q91 Dr Gibson: What about commercial
interests?
Dr Pope: The Met Office does a
small amount of work for commercial organisations but certainly
not in this area.
Q92 Dr Gibson: Is it insurance companies?
Dr Pope: That kind of thing.
Q93 Dr Gibson: Or really that kind
of thing? The scope of the Environmental UEA was to work with
Norwich Union in the beginning. I remember it well because they
wondered what the weather was going to be like in Pakistan in
20 years' time. Do you have that kind of interaction?
Dr Pope: We have some interaction
with the insurance industry and a lot of interaction with the
energy industry, for example.
Q94 Dr Gibson: Do you feel that your
work is independent from what they want?
Dr Pope: All of our scientific
research is published and is independent.
Q95 Dr Gibson: Is it funded by them?
Dr Pope: Not work in climate change,
no, or in this sort of area.
Q96 Dr Gibson: But in other areas?
Dr Pope: In other areas, yes.
Q97 Dr Gibson: How much?
Dr Pope: I am not sure of the
exact figures but we can get that for you.
Professor Salter: I wanted to
say something about the particular study that Dr Pope mentioned.
What they did was to pick the three most sensitive areas in the
world for doing the cloud albedo change and put a very large stimulus
into those. This produced some interesting effects in other places
as well as what you would expect to get locally. They were not
quite the same as the predictions from another model that was
done in America at Boulder. One of the differences was that they
used what is called a "slab" ocean model whereas the
Boulder one allowed the ocean to respond to what you had done
to the air above it. The comparison with what we would like to
do compared with what they have analysed is much more like somebody
who says he thinks he can cure back pain with the right kind of
massage and this is tested out by a terrible punch in the solar
plexus. We would not want to do the distribution of the spray
in that particular way. We are not surprised that it produced
funny things in other places. I think what you do depends on where
you do it and the time of year that you do it. I would love to
see an experiment where I did one thing on one side of the pacific
and then on the other and see how I could adjust this musical
instrument to produce nice chords rather than the first rather
nasty sound that we got when we just did that to it.
Q98 Chairman: I am getting quite
depressed now. I am sorry, Professor Lackner, it is a feature
of my personality, but I expected this afternoon there to be a
great deal more enthusiasm for geo-engineering coming over. Professor
Lackner, there has been a number of companies in the United States
who actually have seen that they can make a profit out of putting
iron filings into the sea. For instance, Climos, a company that
is still trading in the United States, believes that they can
actually make a profit there. Do you think that any of these commercial
companies have a hope in hell of making a profit out of this particular
geo-engineering technique if, in fact, carbon starts trading on
the world markets?
Professor Lackner: If your goal
is to put sulphate in the atmosphere I do not see how you are
going to do that.
Q99 Chairman: Let's put iron into
the oceans. Is that going to bring me a return on my investment?
Professor Lackner: In this particular
case I doubt it because the environmental consequences are hard
to understand but, if you start getting into carbon capture and
storage more broadly, I think it is very likely that people can
make money provided there is the political will to put a price
on carbon. I do believe you have already started that in Europe
successfully, so it is possible to build things around this model
but you have to show the carbon and you have to put it somewhere
and demonstrate that it is indeed put away. The particular issue
you raised with the iron fertilisation is: is it really put away,
or is it coming back in 20 years from now? What are the environmental
consequences of doing it? I do believe there is a large spectrum
of options. Maybe I am biased because I am involved in one of
them, but capturing carbon dioxide in a power plant or from the
air by biomass, or by chemical means, is feasible and does not
have to have a big environmental impact. In that sense we can
be enthusiastic that the world can move towards a zero carbon
energy infrastructure which may still, to a large extent, be driven
by fossil fuels. This is quite possible and quite real. Frankly,
it has to be what we do because it cannot keep going up every
year for the next 150 years. This is the trajectory we are on
and even holding that rise constant requires drastic changes in
our energy infrastructure, so it is absolutely necessary that
we focus on carbon capture and storage in managing the carbon
cycle. I think there is no way around that and it is feasible
and possible.
3 Note from the witness: "It should be
noted that a climate emergency could occur far sooner than generally
recognized. Arctic sea ice has been declining more rapidly than
had been foreseen. Some scientists believe that we may already
be committed to losing much of the Greenland ice sheet, committing
us to several meters of sea level rise. There is also a risk that
large amounts of methane could be emitted by thawing permafrost
in Siberia, accelerating global warming. Thus, it might be that
environmental risk reduction would require deployment of climate
engineering sooner rather than later. Consequently, there is a
high degree of urgency to do the research now to understand potential
options for reducing these risks. Emissions reductions can reduce
longer-term risks, but cannot significantly reduce climate risks
we face over the next decade or two. We would be remiss if we
did not address this near-term risk reduction with a high degree
of urgency." Back
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