Examination of Witnesses (Questions 34-50)
SIR DAVID
KING AND
DR MAARTEN
VAN AALST
13 JANUARY 2010
Chairman: We welcome our second panel
this morning, Dr Maarten van Aalst, who has flown in this morning
from Hollandand we thank you very much indeed, Maarten,
for doing thatand an old friend of the Science and Technology
Committee, former Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Dr Sir
David King. Sadly, we have lost our third panel member, Dr Kilaparti
Ramakrishna, who should have been coming to us from India. Unfortunately,
our video link has not worked, which is sad, but it means we have
more time for our other two distinguished witnesses this morning.
I wonder if I could start with you, Graham Stringer, in this round
of questioning.
Q34 Graham Stringer: Should we be putting
a lot of investment into geoengineering research at the present
time?
Sir David King: Good morning.
I am delighted to be here. Could I congratulate you on conducting
much of this by video conference, which must have saved a lot
of carbon dioxide, and in a sense that reply addresses this question:
because, quite clearly, the major effort has to be around defossilising
our economies, and the point about defossilising our economies
is that it manages a problem which is an anthropogenic problem
directly rather than indirectly, which is what we have been discussing
this morning. It gets right to the root of the problem. I think
that, while there are real concerns about what the impact on economic
growth might be, I do not really share those concerns. If we manage
the transition over the next 40 years into a defossilised economy,
I think we can manage it and, at the same time, even get a boost
to growth through the innovation that follows from this necessity
to move away from high-carbon technologies. The shorter answer
to your question is, however (and it is a very important however),
we need to factor in the probability distribution functions that
the best science can deliver around what the temperature rise
for the planet will be even at a level, let us say, of 450 parts
per million of greenhouse gas CO2 equivalent in the
atmosphere. The best that science can tell us at the moment is
that the eventual temperature rise is going to lie somewhere between
1 Centigrade and 4 Centigrade with a peak in that probability
distribution function above 2 Centigrade, and so we only
have a 50 per cent chance of staying below a 2 Centigrade
rise. There is still, for example, a 20 per cent chance that the
temperature rise will be above 3.5 Centigrade, and I am putting
to you the idea that the 450 parts per million figure is what
we ought to aim for globallyit is the lowest figure that
is manageablebut even there we have to manage risks by
keeping in reserve an alternative way forward.
Q35 Graham Stringer: Dr Aalst?
Dr Aalst: First of all, let me
say that I am not speaking on behalf of either the British Red
Cross or the International Federation of Red Cross/Red Crescent
Societies but in a personal expert capacity. I would echo many
of these remarks. I think we need to be cautious of investing
at too large a scale to even give the impression that this is
a suitable alternative in the short-term to mitigation or, I would
add, much more extensive capacity building and adaptation, especially
among the most vulnerable groups, so I would just add to that.
On the side of the risks, I agree that it is something that we
might want to have up our sleeves, and we are nowhere near the
level of certainty about what these different options are that
we could consider these options that we have at this stage, so
further research, in that sense, on a small scale to get slightly
further in our understanding would be important. To give you my
primary perspective on that right away, it is not about what is
per square metre, it is about people. I think in looking at those
options, those distributional effects (and, in particular, the
effects on the groups already most affected by climate change
as we see it progressing and the end of the probability distribution,
not just in terms of the global temperature rise but also the
impacts from there) would be crucial.
Q36 Graham Stringer: Sir David, when
you were advising on the preparation for the Climate Change Billand
one part of good regulation is that you look at different alternatives
to the proposals in the Climate Change Billdid you seriously
consider geoengineering and the costs and benefits of geoengineering
as against CO2 reduction?
Sir David King: I think the answer
is, yes, seriously consider, but then, following the answer to
your previous question, I do not see that what we are now discussing
with geoengineering issues should be a high profile way forward.
In other words, it is something, to repeat, that should be there,
kept in reserve, there should be a significant effort made both
into research and into regulation at this stage, but I do not
think that the effort should match in any way.
Q37 Graham Stringer: I understand
the arguments. I suppose what I am really asking is when you were
doing the regulatory impact assessment on the Climate Change Bill
did you quantify the costs and benefits of geoengineering against
the mitigation of carbon dioxide?
Sir David King: A very simple
answer is, no, simply because the cost of carbon dioxide capture
from the top end of a coal-fired power station is already rather
large and there is a much higher density of carbon dioxide at
that point of the atmosphere than in the general atmosphere, where
it is only 400 parts per million. The cost at our present estimate
is already expensive from the top end of a coal-fired power station
and, in my view, is prohibitive from the general atmosphere. It
was not eliminated without examination.
Q38 Graham Stringer: Geoengineering
is going up the agenda in a way: more people are talking about
it. Where do you think the pressure is coming from for a greater
investment in geoengineering? Is it from industry, NGOs, people
who are profoundly sceptical about global warming?
Sir David King: I do not think
it is any of the above. I think it is more pressure coming from
people who (a) are concerned about us not managing the problem
by defossilising, but (b) a group of people who do not wish to
go down the defossilising route and would like to provide an alternative,
and I fear that there may be quite a largish group emerging, particularly
in the United States, which come from that particular line.
Dr van Aalst: Yes, that is my
impression as well. I think on the scientific side, this debate
was probably started by people with a genuine concern, wanting
to map out these options for that tail end of distribution. I
think we are now in a shift, and with political attention growing,
there is also political attention from the other side. I would
also be cautious, including the caution of establishing very large
research programmes which might be interpreted as on a similar
scale as the investments we are making in mitigation and adaptation.
Q39 Graham Stringer: I was going
to say, do you think that the risks are too high to consider geoengineering,
but in a sense, you have already answered that question by saying
we should have it in reserve. It might be a more pertinent question
to ask: what do you think the major risks of geoengineering are?
Sir David King: I think if I can
now adopt the same approach as the previous group, we need to
separate geoengineering into carbon dioxide capture and solar
radiation management. In terms of solar radiation management,
my own view is that there should be, if possible, a temporary
ban on solar radiation management. I think the unintended consequences
of that are extremely difficult to foresee. I am all in favour
of research that would examine possible consequences of putting
aerosols up in the stratosphere to reflect radiation away. The
concerns expressed by the previous group I would match as well,
the total cost of managing to put sulphates into the stratosphere
is relatively small, and the technology is there, and I do think
that this is something that needs to be addressed immediately,
but now moving on to carbon dioxide capture, carbon dioxide capture
should be dealt with as well in two forms: one is capture from
the atmosphere, and one is capture from the oceans. I think as
soon as we move into capture from the oceans, then again, we are
dealing with an issue of long range pollution and impact problems,
so cross-boundary problems. So the simple categorisation of two
is not in my view sufficient. Let me just go back and make a comment
about solar radiation management. Let us suppose that we could
all be persuaded that Crutzen is right, and we can reduce temperatures
in this way. We would still not be managing the acidification
of the oceans. In other words, carbon dioxide levels going up
means that we would get more carbonic acid formed in the oceans,
and why is this a problem? The oceans are part of the ecosystem
services for humanity. It is the oceans that provide the beginning
of the food chain, and if we do not understand what is going to
happen to the oceans as they become more acidified, and there
are questions about that already being examined by the scientific
community, then I would also be very concerned about this, even
as a potential solution. So I am focusing then on these two methods,
carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere and from the oceans,
and I would say we should be investing in research in those areas,
and we need prior regulation particularly on ocean removal.
Q40 Dr Iddon: Good morning, gentlemen.
Earlier, we were talking about regulating geoengineering, and,
of course, it goes from modelling by computer and in the laboratory
through to pilot scale, you know, on differing scales in the environment.
At what stage do you think the regulation should kick in, assuming
that we can get international agreements? Should it apply to the
research throughout, or just to quite large scale applications
in the environment?
Dr van Aalst: I should say, I
am not an expert on research regulation per se, so with that qualifier,
my impression is that there is probably some regulation in place
for some of the experiments that would be considered. The risks
are primarily on the trans-boundary implications, that is where
we probably do not have the good structure in place, and we need
to look much further; and then there is the moral side of where
you invest and how you look at options, and particularly how you
include all the distributional effects there, which would probably
kick in much earlier. So I think it is clear that we are in that
stage, once we are in the stage of testing, once we are testing,
and I support the previous views that you want regulation in place
before you do large scale testing. For the earlier experiments,
in general, I tend to be in favour of fairly free research, so
that we can explore these options, and I think we are in too large
uncertainty still about many of these options to be able to even
design the right regulations.
Sir David King: I certainly believe
that early regulation in any issue of this kind is essential.
That does not mean that we leap straight into regulation, but
examining what is the optimal form of regulation is well worth
doing in advance. I think, however, that in terms of solar radiation
management, I would move fairly swiftly, as I have suggested,
into a temporary ban, and find the feasible way forward for that.
I am not happy about smaller experiments being conducted at this
stage in time before the unintended consequences have been fully
evaluated. We are dealing with an extraordinarily complex issue
here, and we all know scientifically that complex phenomena, as
complexity increases, we get emergent properties that are not
always easy to predict. So I do think we need to watch the stratosphere
very carefully, but at the same time, in terms of regulation of
the others, get ahead of the game, precisely because firstly,
you want to keep the public on side, if we lose the public, then
we lose the game; and secondly, we want to see that the regulation
encourages the right behaviour. Car exhaust regulation has always
been progressive, saying this is the waythe new cars have
to meet that standard in three years' time, and it has produced
the investment in the right direction. So if the regulatory system
is set out there, everyone knows what the playing field looks
like.
Dr van Aalst: May I just add a
comment, just to clarify? On regulation, I think we definitely
need that sort of regulation once we go towards testing, and I
would agree with the suggestion to have a ban, even on relatively
small scale testing of solar radiation management. I do not think
we can go quickly towards regulation of, say, model experiments
of stratospheric aerosol injection, that would not even be feasible.
I would think that as an alternative, or as a complement to eventual
development of regulations for deployment, the sort of consultations
that were discussed in the end of the previous panel would be
crucial, and those should be international consultations, it should
be very pro-active and engaging the public, because I think that
will be a crucial factor to understand the feasibility, the acceptability
of these options. That discussion needs to take place much before
political decisions about eventual deployment, and I think also
much ahead of actual regulation, except for a regulation to say
let us try and stop it for now. I also think that we need to be
realistic here; there is probably a difference between the sort
of debate now taking place here in the UK and the debate around
the globe, including in several different states which may already
be at the stage of small scale testing of some of these options.
So I think the UK is in a way also operating as an international
arena, and in a way setting moral standards and setting an example
for how globally we should be approaching this, which is a very
important side effect for your own considerations, I think, at
this stage.
Sir David King: Can I come back
very briefly, because I think there is an important scenario or
set of scenarios that we do need to examine here. If we roll forward
in time, and we reach the point where the worst impacts are happening,
temperature rises are quite excessive, and we take on the notion
that came up in the previous discussion about one country protecting
its monsoon, and another country finding it is not acceptable,
this discussion is critically important to have now, well ahead
of time, for two reasons. One, because we want to avoid that being
done; but the second reason is knowing the nature of the possible
challenges in the future is a very sobering way of managing the
business of defossilising. We need to really know what the potential
disastrous eventualities will be, if nations start having to take
matters into their own hands, and away from the international
procedures.
Q41 Dr Iddon: Earlier, Tim Boswell
read out five principles that have been laid down by the geoengineering
community to guide their research. I will not read them out again,
I will just read one: "Geoengineering is to be regulated
as a public good." Do you think everybody understands what
public good is, and who should define it? Who should decide what
is in the interests of the general public?
Sir David King: I feel like saying
"pass".
Q42 Dr Iddon: You leave that to us,
do you not?
Sir David King: It is obviously
a very important issue, and within this, I presume, comes the
issue of intellectual property rights as well, so I think it is
a critically important issue to understand what we mean by the
phrase "public good". If we are saying that there should
be no intellectual property rights capable of being awarded in
this area, I think I would be a bit hesitant to back it.
Q43 Dr Iddon: What is your view on
IPR?
Sir David King: I think it is
a very complex issue, because if we are going to go down the route
of carbon dioxide capture from oceans or atmosphere, and this
is going to be a good thing, we also need to know, where is the
investment going to come from, to take the research into demonstration
phase and into the marketplace, and there will be a marketplace
with a price of carbon dioxide. That is going to be the private
sector companies. If we do not allow protection of IPR, are we
going to actually inhibit that process of investment? So I think
I am a little hesitant to simply back the pure public good argument
without IPR protection.
Dr van Aalst: Yes, I would support
that. If these are good options, then we want the private sector
to play a role in rolling them out, and then we might be excludingbut
again, I think for many of these questions, we are so far from
large scale deployment that it is difficult to even imagine what
we need, but I would say that in principle, good regulation of
the deployment, not regulation of the early stage of research,
but regulation of the deployment, but having the private sector
play a role, might be more effective, if we all agree that there
are options in that whole range of potential techniques that we
do want to use.
Q44 Dr Iddon: I just want to finish
by looking at the developing countries, obviously some of the
developing countries are already badly affected by climate change,
more so than some of the developed countries. How do you think
the international community should involve the developing countries
in the geoengineering debate?
Sir David King: Brian has the
difficult questions today! I think it is very clear that one of
the positive things to come out of Copenhagen, and the transformation
of the global community between Kyoto and Copenhagen, is the much
fuller engagement of the emerging powers and of the poorer countries,
and the recognition that we now have at least three categories
of countries: the developed nations, the emerging powers and the
poorer countries. If we talk about the emerging powers in your
question, I would engage them as closely as the developed world,
as part of the world that can afford the investment that we are
now talking about into geoengineering research as a possible way
forward. The poorer countries of the world, I do not believe that
this is the issue that they will be raising, and I am advising
several governments in this category. I think the focus there
has to be on adaptation and low carbon economic growth. I do not
think this is an issue that comes to them.
Dr van Aalst: I would slightly
disagree here. Your first point about the emerging powers is clearly
right, they need to be involved, and I think if you want a good
international regulatory framework, they are going to be crucial.
I think they are going to be the ones very cautious once this
is brought to the UN, because they want to keep all their options
open. So it is also a strategic consideration, if you do want
to move towards some sort of international mechanism. The more
vulnerable ones, I think, are the more difficult ones, I think
they will feel threatened by the possibility that the winners
will protect their wins, and the losers, which clearly are mostly
them, will not get anything. So politically, they are already
very worried. I think there is a second dimension to it, which
is the distributional effects within countries, and we have seen
that in adaptation, which is, of course, much more local than
some of the large scale solutions that we are talking about here,
but these large scale solutions, let us not kid ourselves, we
are talking globally average watts per square metre, but these
options, particularly on the solar radiation management side,
will have specific local impacts as well, and similarly to adaptation,
we will need to manage those as well. On the adaptation side,
we have seen so many examples, I just heard one last week of a
little village in Senegal which was facing increasing flooding,
so you think, go and do something about it; well the city further
downstream was also facing increased flooding, so they made a
little canal to spill some of that floodwater towards the Atlantic,
and the little village got hurt. This is the sort of adaptation
intervention, of which we know so many have side effects, particularly
on the most vulnerable populations, which are not paying for the
solutions so they do not get to have a say. I am really afraid
we will get similar parallels on the geoengineering side, and
I would really like the international debate that will be fostered,
and that we had a little discussion about at the end of the last
panel as well, to really include attention for that human dimension,
and to try and involve that side of the debate early on. They
do not come to the table naturally, and certainly not based on
a call for comments by the Research Council in the UK or anywhere
else in the developed world.
Q45 Dr Iddon: With respect to the
international discussion, where should that be carried on? Should
it be in the United Nations, and if so, is it being carried on
there, to your knowledge, or should it be going on in the scientific/engineering
communities, or both?
Sir David King: I would have said,
in terms of the scientific community, the intergovernmental panel
on climate change ought to be addressing this issue. It is obviously
something that has to become part of their four yearly report
in my view, and that would be the proper focus for the international
scientific community. In terms of the international community,
again I would turn to the United Nations bodies, UNEP, it is a
pity we have not got the UNEP person here, is an obvious body,
but I think this is an issue that, in terms of regulation, would
need to be addressed at a G20 heads of states meeting to have
a real impact. I do think in terms of the solar radiation management,
it is of sufficient importance that it ought to be raised at that
level.
Q46 Dr Iddon: Dr van Aalst, do you
have a view on this?
Dr van Aalst: Let me just be frank,
and say that I hesitate, in the sense that I worry that if we
elevate it to too high a political level too early, we may be
sending the wrong signals, so that would be my concern, putting
it that high on the agenda right away. I do think that there are
more technically oriented United Nations bodies that would be
more appropriate, certainly the IPCC, and I would hope that along
with possibly some conscious efforts at consultation, which should
primarily be looking at risks, and at whether this is an appropriate
thing, and might actually be then guiding us towards more investments
on the mitigation and adaptation sides. I would hope that those
discussions in those UN bodies would then trigger a much wider
debate, involving a larger range of stakeholders, and a more diverse
set of stakeholders than have been taking part in this discussion
so far.
Q47 Mr Boswell: It is coming across
to me, gentlemen, that it seems that witnesses are looking at
this as being a contingency if defossilisation does not do the
job, and I suppose it is the nature of a contingency that it needs
to be ready to go fairly quickly if that situation arises, although
we are not committing ourselves to that yet. I am really asking
a little bit more, if I may, about research into the impacts,
and the importance of doing that now, and also, and this has been
touched on in evidence, in particular research into the differential
impacts, either by nation states, and that may be a contingent
matter, or regionally, or within quite small areas or different
categories of people. I can think of hill farming, for example,
if one was looking at that. I just wonder if Sir David and Dr
van Aalst could say something about the importance of that research,
as it were, digging down into this, in terms of physical impacts,
also possibly economic impacts, which I suspect spills back into
public acceptability, and the final point would be, to bring all
this together, what about having some prior understanding about
whether or not there needed to be some compensation mechanism,
so that if we did have to use these weapons at short notice, if
I may call them that, would we have got the machinery in place,
and we would not be bogged down in yet another round of international
argument about who should compensate who, or what could be done
to mitigate it in individual cases. Is that clear? So with the
backdrop of possible need to deploy at short notice, and a need
to keep the political debate going, it is really looking at what
research do we need to do, and in particular, how do we need to
handle the findings of that research in relation to smaller impacts
on individual groups?
Dr van Aalst: I think these are
the critical questions, and also the questions where we have to
be quite honest, particularly for the solar radiation management
techniques, we are now in a stage of such high uncertainty that
we are not really yet doing risk management, it is dealing with
vast uncertainties.
Q48 Mr Boswell: So we need to get
on with that in some sense.
Dr van Aalst: Yes, getting on
with that in some sense to get a slightly clearer picture on what
we are actually looking at is important, so I also think we are
not yet at a stage where we can do proper economic impact assessments,
I think the uncertainties are probably too large for most of these
techniques, although you can do some back of the envelope calculations
possibly. I would caution against purely economic impact assessments,
in the sense that they tend to lose out on the perspective of
the most vulnerable groups, which do not count much on the economic
analysis side sometimes, so that is something to consider. On
the compensation side, again, my previous comment hints at the
fact that I think we are very early in the game to be talking
about that even, but if we were, the attribution question is going
to be as difficult or probably more difficult as it is for mitigation,
or for carbon dioxide emissions. So I think that is a critical
one, that we need to consider in how we treat this as a risk management
option in the end. If we would ever deploy these options, we would
be throwing it out on the world, and the attribution would make
it difficult for anyone actually to take the blame, so there will
be losers, but the losers will not be able to defend themselves
in court possibly, to some extent, unless we go towards precautionary
principles and so forth, but then from my perspective, at this
stage in the game, we should be keeping them off the table mostly.
Sir David King: I think the issue
in terms of the research into impacts, both in terms of the physical
and economic impacts, would need to take into account the impacts
from rising temperature. In other words, we are talking about
an issue that would come into play if we are in that piece of
the distribution curve that we are hoping we are not going to
move into. So this is going to be playing off a temperature rise
of, let us say, 3.5 degrees centigrade against the impacts of
whatever might happen if we, for example, put up sulphates into
the stratosphere.
Q49 Mr Boswell: There are always
choices, are there not, between two difficult scenarios?
Sir David King: Right. I think
this is an enormously complicated series of questions. If we look
at the impacts from temperature rise, whether it is purely temperature
rise, whether it is the changes in weather patterns, rainfall
patterns, and therefore food productivity, sea level rises, if
you look at all those impacts against the possible impacts of
an intervention of the kind we are now discussing, I think that
this is an issue that we cannot really tackle in advance. We are
now talking 40 years in advance of the situation arising. But
we just need to remember that it is going to be a balance of impacts.
Q50 Mr Boswell: I am going to ask
you a contingency question prompted by that, which is if we were
into that position, or thinking ahead at least, to look at the
scenario, what kind of mechanism would be the best one for looking
at this? Because clearly, there are political feedback loops and
inputs as well, and people will be trying to avoid a situation
where they or their country or their region may lose out. I mean,
how on earth do we keep the integrity of this process if we need
it, and the management of it, because of its scale?
Sir David King: We are already
seeing, Mr Boswell, the problems of trying to achieve equity in
negotiations around dealing with CO2 emissions, and
the equity issues that would arise around what we are now discussing
would be much more severe. That is why I think that the most important
thing is to recognise the problems associated with going down
this route, so that we amplify the need to go down the route of
defossilising our economy.
Chairman: On that note, we will bring
this session to an end. Could I thank you very much indeed, Dr
van Aalst, for coming and joining us this morning; and thank you,
Professor Sir David King, for joining us too.
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