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Recently, I read in the report by Sir Nicholas Stern that we must take the collapse of Greenland ice seriously, which is caused because at the heart of Greenland the ice is thickening through precipitation and is pushing the fringes into the sea. At the present rate, he said, sea levels will rise by 0.05 millimetres per year, which is 0.5 centimetres in 100 years. The IPCC report estimates that the main effect will be from the warming of the oceans. Even then it estimates the actual sea rise levels as between 11 and 77 centimetres. That is serious because the rise will be very different in different parts of the world. It could be catastrophic for some people living in the delta areas of the world, but it is not necessarily catastrophic overall. We could, for example, provide aid to Bangladesh to enable it to take the kind of defensive measures which the Dutch have taken. Incidentally, its estimate of sea rise levels was somewhat less than that in the second assessment of the IPCC.
The noble Earl, Lord Selborne, mentioned the disturbing findings by Professor Bryden. But we also heard evidence, in the hearings in the committee on water management, from one of the experts of the Hadley Centre who said that it had not made the Hadley Centre change its basic estimate that there was a very small risk of something very serious happening. One cannot discount that risk, but there are many places where the Gulf Stream has to be measured. It is obviously disturbing that it has slowed down in one place, but in other places, it may have accelerated. The speed of the Gulf Stream changes.
Storms are most frequently mentioned. In its scientific report—there is a slightly different emphasis in the political report—the IPCC stated:
“Recent analyses of changes in severe local weather (e.g., tornadoes, thunderstorm days, and hail) in a few selected regions do not provide compelling evidence to suggest long-term changes”.
I mention that because the IPCC’s scientific section acknowledges these uncertainties, but it still comes to the firm conclusion that global warming is manmade, which is one of the reasons why I find the report convincing. Certainly, the evidence since that report was published suggests that the fourth assessment in 2007 will be more pessimistic than the third, because a number of recent developments suggest that the danger is greater and has strengthened the case that global warming is happening.
I thought that the House of Lords report was a breath of fresh air because it was much more balanced. It came to the conclusion that we cannot look towards Kyoto, which does not include the nations whose actions will be of vital importance. As the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, said, it concludes that in the end the answer must come from technology and creating the right framework for technological development. It will not necessarily come only from technology. Maybe a major part will be played by changes in lifestyle. I do not think that lifestyles will never change. We have changed attitudes towards drinking and driving and there are ways in which people change their attitudes. But I do not altogether place as much hope on this as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle because I do not see
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We do not need imbalance in reporting, exaggeration which is not justified by the evidence and, above all, constant predictions of catastrophe. That approach will undermine the credibility of the threat. It will induce a mood of fatalism. If we are doomed anyway, the attitude is likely to be “Well, let’s make hay while the sun shines. Let’s enjoy life while we can”.
1.07 pm
Lord Beaumont of Whitley: My Lords, I have of course read the report of the Lords committee and most of the evidence, and I am staggered by Members’ erudition, for which I express the usual gratitude. In my youth, I took a degree in agriculture, with agricultural economics as a special subject. It now dawns on me that it was the economics paper which ensured that I got only a fourth class degree, a phenomenon which some noble Lords may remember existed in those days. Although the subject of my speech falls fairly and squarely within the title of the report, I will concentrate on agriculture, which on the whole has been neglected in this debate.
The other day, some of your Lordships were present at the gathering which listened to Vice-President Al Gore’s speech. For many noble Lords, as for me, little that he said was new. However, there was one statement which was new to me, which sent me scurrying to your Lordships’ Library to ask our splendid research staff to find substantiation for it. At first, they could not, but eventually they got hold of a copy of the Vice-President’s book, An Inconvenient Truth, and found that the statement was fully substantiated in the text. On page 121, it states that in the United States and elsewhere soil moisture evaporation increases dramatically with higher temperatures and that unless we act dramatically to contain global warming pollution, one at least of the great bread baskets of the world will disappear within the next 10 years. That spells out catastrophe to us in these overcrowded islands, for which we as Parliament are responsible.
Since about 1951, economics—that dismal science—has told us that it was perfectly all right to rely on imports to feed our people and in the course of doing so to allow the small farming industry of this country to disappear and farms to get ever larger, following the rule that we achieved optimum outputs per pound invested in large units. We could forget about food security, that principle which kept us alive during the 1940s.
Today we have think about it again since imported food is going to become less available, and as it does so, a great deal more expensive. The economicsof global warming will dictate that we measure profitability not in terms of outputs of capital but in the total amount of food we can produce. We will find, as we have found before, that that comes from
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If our grandchildren are not going to starve—and if that sounds overly dramatic, let us remember how close we came to it in the early 1940s—we will have to look after our soil, our small farms and our skilled labour. Some noble Lords may have seen a fascinating series of programmes shown recently on TV about introducing black youths to farming in Devon. We are going to need all those who have a gift for farming, and it is not all that long since a great number of the population did have that gift. I remember when in the course of persuading the Church of England that I was a fit person to become a clergyman, I was involved with a troop of Boy Scouts in Hackney, many of whom were the sons of my mother’s Girl Guides from when she was Guide Commissioner for North London. I came across one boy who had a real gift for growing things and a deep feeling for nature, but I was able to do nothing to stop him going into a factory making lavatory-paper rolls.
We are going to have to use all our resources to feed ourselves, and incidentally it will mean saying goodbye to those rather good schemes, popularin your Lordships’ House and which I have enthusiastically supported over a period of time, for biofuels. When it comes to the crunch we will need all the fertile soil available for the growing of food. If I have to choose between consuming diesel and consuming potatoes, I will choose potatoes every time.
Much the most important function of government is to protect the population from harms, and by far the most fundamental of those harms is hunger. It is for that reason that I urge that this debate and others like it should bring about a complete revolution in our agricultural policy in this country.
1.13 pm
Lord Layard: My Lords, as a member of the committee and an economist, I begin by paying tribute to an outstanding economist and wonderful person, Professor David Pearce, our adviser throughout the inquiry—and one might almost say our tutor. His sudden death is a great loss to my profession.
The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, said in his conclusion that much of the concern about global warming was a “mountain of nonsense”, so I must begin with four remarks about the science of climate change before turning to the way forward. First, there is of course a scientific consensus today that manmade emissions are raising world temperature and will continue to do so at an alarming rate unless action is taken. The consensus includes all but a very few climatologists. However, what is much more significant for us is that it is supported by our own Royal Society and by the American Academy of Sciences. I do not really see how non-scientists can take a different view from those bodies unless we want to question their motivation. These bodies are not composed primarily of climatologists, who might
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Secondly, the scientific evidence is not in the form sometimes suggested post hoc propter hoc. It begins with the basic science which shows that increased greenhouse gases would, other things being equal, increase temperature. Only then does it visit the historical record and explain the evolution of the earth’s temperature from the Ice Age to the present day using basic science to make the links.
Thirdly, a key feature of the science is the very long lags in the system, which help to explain some of the paradoxes referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Lawson. I do not know whether noble Lords realise it, but the greenhouse gases we are producing today will remain in the atmosphere for an average of almost 150 years—until 2150—and the effect on temperature will be still further delayed by roughly another 50 years after the build-up of greenhouse gases, so today we are contributing to the world’s temperature in 2200. Given that science, it is absurd to say that we should wait and see. The argument is untenable when the effects are so long delayed. It is interesting to note that, as the scientific evidence accumulates and the models become more firmly based and powerful in their explanation of all the different phenomena referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, some American economists who at one time advocated a “wait and see” approach are increasingly abandoning that position.
Finally, the science is in one sense uncertain, but in another it is certain—a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh. It is uncertain exactly by how much the temperature will rise but it is virtually certain that it will rise substantially. I should like to give noble Lords some figures because not everyone understands why it is almost certain that that will happen. If greenhouse gases stabilise at 550 parts per million, the temperature would eventually rise by between 2.5 and 5.3 degrees centigrade above the pre-industrial level. Those are limits with a 90 per cent probability according to the forecasts of the Met Office’s world-famous Hadley Centre. To give an idea of the scale of the change, even the lower of those figures would have some devastating effects, which I shall come to, but the higher figure is as big as the difference between the temperature today and what it was in the Ice Age; it is not a tiny change as suggested earlier in the debate. Nor do these estimates allow for any of a number of major discontinuous risks, such as the melting of the Arctic permafrost, which would have an even more dramatic impact.
That is the scenario at 550 parts per million, but how likely is it that greenhouses gases will reach that figure? It is virtually certain unless we change course almost immediately. Again, I am going to bore noble Lords with some numbers because they are important and help to put these arguments out in the open. At present we have 425 parts per million. At the current rate of emissions, greenhouse gas concentrations are rising by two parts per million per year. We can all do
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The committee had to consider many different controversies on the assumptions about economic growth that go into the forecast, and of course we need the best estimates for that. But noble Lords can see from the simple arithmetic with which I have bored them that it is not that important how fast economic growth in the future is; all it does is to slightly affect the date on which the awful thing arrives. It does not affect the fundamental structure of the problem in any way at all; it is a diversion.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to forecast the economic effects of any given temperature and our committee rightly stresses that much more work is needed on that. But all analyses agree that higher temperatures will cause more variable weather—more droughts, more floods and more hurricanes. It takes only a 10 per cent change in the Indian monsoon to cause a drought or a flood. As many people have said, the main groups affected by global warming will be the poorest people in Africa and Asia. The effects of the inevitable global warming are almost certain to cancel out any level of aid which is likely to come about, at least in terms of economic development; AIDS control is a different matter.
We should of course discuss the possibilities of adaptation. There will certainly have to be a great deal of adaptation in the coming years, given what is already inevitable. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, said—this is a very important point—the world’s temperature has been fairly stable for most of recorded history, and the whole pattern of human life and human settlement is adapted to that temperature. To adapt to a much higher temperature may well require the migration of billions of people, with all the political and social problems that we know migration involves. Migration is a central issue, in a sense, in the adaptation debate. It could make sense to accept that migration only if the cost of avoiding it were also very large—but I do not believe that it is.
That brings me, finally, to the way forward. I support very much the splendid speech of the noble Lord, Lord Vallance. The obvious solution is to meet our energy needs without the release of carbon. Very interesting evidence originated from the International Energy Agency on the cost of making photovoltaic energy, biomass and carbon sequestration competitive in price with gas and oil. The estimate was that to get these technologies to that point there would have to be a major effort of basic and applied research. This would not be undertaken by the private sector—certainly not the basic science because the results could not be captured by any one company—so there would have to be a charge on the public of the world.
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I support the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, recommended that should be organised. As has been said many times, the Treasury has taken up our recommendation. I think the Stern inquiry is going along the right lines. Radical proposals are needed because of what is happening at this moment and its long-term effects. In particular, it is time we had an international technology treaty aimed at stabilising, in the end, the world temperature at the one we have got used to, which means cutting carbon emissions by two-thirds.
1.24 pm
Lord Tanlaw: My Lords, like many other speakers who have entered the debate, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, and his erudite committee on the time they have spent and the work they have done. It is a little discourteous that that very important report remained so long gathering dust on a shelf. It is slightly out of date, which is its only weakness, and it is a great pity that it was not debated earlier.
I am not really qualified to take part in this debate. Like the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, I got a very poor degree—it was in medieval history rather than agriculture—when we were at Cambridge together. My only claim to fame, as I have said before, is that I was an early whistleblower on the greenhouse effect some 30 years ago. But I have had a Damascus road conversion in regard to climate change which is based on the report before us. Having read it, it appears to me that the climate does not change but it changes; it has changed and will no doubt change again in the future. Therefore I wonder whethera more accurate title for the report would not beThe Economics of Climate Changes rather than The Economics of Climate Change.
Ask any meteorologist and they will say that every day is meteorologically different. No one day is the same as the last; the wind, the clouds, the pressure and the temperature will always be slightly different. So it is with climate. It is well known that the Milankovitch cycles, the procession of equinoxes and the variations of the Earth’s tilt have been the main contributors to major climatic changes in the distant past. More recently, as shown in the hockey-stick graph before us, the climate has apparently been stable for the past 1,000 years and then changes with a sudden rise in temperature in the northern hemisphere. This upward turn has given the graph its title, because of its outline.
But the question I ask is: is it historically true? There may be a problem with this graph in that it seems to have become the sacred mandala of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and is, in effect, the basis of all eco-fundamentalism. It has been strongly criticised by scientists who are outside the loop of the IPCC and who have given written or
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I received a letter from my long-standing friend,Dr Michael Cole, a distinguished doctor of science from Cambridge, who has advised me as a non-scientist how one might approach this anomaly. I shall try to encapsulate his advice, which I consider to be quite fair and helpful to this controversial debate, which is far from one-sided. The critics of the global warming theory propounded by the IPCC are dismissed as a small number of people who do not know what they are talking about. Thousands of scientists connected with the IPCC are unanimous in perceiving the manmade disaster lying ahead, so it is very difficult—certainly as a non-scientist—to say anything against it. But this may not be the case at all because its critics include a large number of well respected scientists in major world-class institutions. The main thing that they have in common is that they are not funded by or connected with the IPCC.
In the report, the global warming protagonists make two important claims. The first is that the current increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing the current climate to go through an unprecedented warm period, reaching the highest temperature for a millennium, and that this will inevitably lead to a serious catastrophe in global warming. This has been repeated time and again by other speakers. The second claim, based on computer models, is that dangerously high temperatures will lead to damaging weather conditions in a few decades ahead.
But a brief look at medieval history—I am trying to remember some of it—shows that between 900 and 1300 AD the climate was considerably warmer than at present. Why is it that the Viking farmers were able to farm part of Greenland, so named because it was, presumably, green? Why is it that the ocean east of Greenland towards Iceland was largely free of ice and routinely navigated, as was the ocean to the west of Greenland towards Baffin Island? Why is it that in England, successful vineyards were in production as far north as Northumberland? When I look out of the window of my house in Scotland, I see signs of cultivation on the northern face of hilltops which are 600 feet to 900 feet above sea level. Why is tree level in the Alps 200 metres above the current level?
This warm period was known as the medieval warm period. From the middle of the 14thcentury, the climate cooled abruptly, causing widespread crop failure in Europe and Greenland and the Greenland farms to be covered in permanent ice. The old sea passages to Iceland and Baffin Island became impassable because of the ice. The cool period, which lasted until the mid-19th century, has been known as the mini-Ice Age. We are now seeing a recovery from
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There is nothing new or startling about the current rise in temperature. The IPCC’s first report on global warming produced a graph of temperature versus time, clearly showing temperatures in the medieval warm period climbing to levels higher than those we are experiencing today. There was no hockey stick in that graph then. I speak as an ordinary member of the public trying to read the report; why did the IPCC’s third report produce a different graph of temperature versus time, showing a more or less flat temperature between 1000 BC and 1850 AD, followed by a steep rise thereafter, thus coming to be known as the hockey-stick graph? This graph has been strongly criticised by Professor Ross McKitrick, as I have already said. If the graph is wrong, so is everything else, and there may not be a crisis. I am sure there is a very simple answer to this question, and I would like to hear it.
There is another problem, which I hope the economists will not take amiss. The projections of carbon dioxide in global temperature are based on computer models. There is a difference between economists and stockbrokers. Economists deal with computer models and graphs, and look to the future; stockbrokers deal with the market forces of the day. Why are stockbrokers richer than economists? It is because they are working with the real facts of the reality of the day-to-day market, while economists use projections. Even the smallest variation in a projection that takes place in the years ahead completely unbalances it.
Who are the beneficiaries of the Kyoto mitigation policies? Nobody has said. The earth might be—although I am not so sure that it will be—but so are the ministries, bureaucracies, consultants and quangos. A number of speakers have said how many such policies have to be produced because people are so worried about what is happening. That is why I think that mitigation has a lot of self-interest; a lot of the areas involved are government-connected.
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