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I
am aware that it is easy for there to be a doomsday scenario in
environmental debates, which is perhaps exaggerated and might scare us
away from
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When I saw the title of this report, The Economics of Climate Change, I looked particularly at the bill. What was the cost to us, as a planet, of global warming? Indeed, the report quotes two figures: in net present values, one is $2 trillion, and the worst case scenario is $17 trillion—some 50 per cent of current global GDP. Those figures are themselves quite astonishing, yet the report manages to downgrade that risk to saying that, over a 50-year period, it might represent only 1.3 per cent of global GDP per annum. That almost leads us to the thought that this problem might therefore be quite manageable.
Those estimates are risky. I shall talk about where the report has highlighted important instances of danger, but not pursued them—specifically, the non-linear and irreversible effects of global warming. Most of them are listed in the report. Ocean circulation particularly affects the north Atlantic; there is little scientific evidence at the moment, but a case could be persuasive. Yet we know that if the Gulf Stream was not there, that would decrease temperatures not by the two-thirds of a degree we have had so far this century, but by some eight degrees centigrade. We would all feel that considerably. It is around the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, and the permafrost, particularly in the northern climes of Canada and the Russian Federation, where we would then have a methane loss which would have a double-whammy effect on global warming.
Not specifically listed as a non-linear, irreversible event, though mentioned in the report, is biodiversity. Biodiversity is literally a treasure house of our planet. There are clearly already signs that species are having to change range, with extinctions due to certain species being crowded out by others. Much of that is currently local, but it will become regional and global. We already have dying coral reefs, and a number of bird species have disappeared. I admit that predicting and taking strong action on these unpredictable events is difficult, but they are the largest impacts and something which we cannot ignore. Nor are they costed in this report.
I emphasise the fundamental argument of adaptation versus mitigation. The report says that there should clearly be more emphasis on adaptation. That is true; there must be adaptation activity, but it is a dangerous route to champion too strongly. It is tempting, because it seems a more manageable way forward and does not totally rely on global co-operation, so it is easier. However, the strategy clearly benefits rich countries and is unattainable to those of lower incomes.
I notice that the economic analysis of
the report laid a lot of stress, as did the IPCC, on the convergence of
developing and non-developed economies. While that might be true, there
is going to
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It is not just rich countries that will find that there is no dilemma. I come from the south-west. It is clear that, even in developing economies, we must make choices about where we adapt. If there is a choice between protecting London, the tube system and our financial centres, and keeping the waters out of the Isles of Scilly or the main railway line across the south Devon coast—even last year it cost £9 million to keep it in operation—it will be stark. As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, rightly pointed out, in New Orleans we had an example of the richest, most successful economy in the world utterly failing to adapt sufficiently to a short-term measure. The cost to rebuild and protect New Orleans is estimated at£35 billion.
The report mentions a document with a seductive title about the social costs of carbon, which tries to add up the costs arising from damage by global warming. All sorts of figures can be arrived at, but they are not social costs—they are costs in human life and land, particularly in areas such as Bangladesh where a one-metre rise in sea level would put 17.5 per cent of the country under water and displace35 million people. The phrase “the social cost of carbon” is a euphemism equivalent to “friendly fire” and “ethnic cleansing”.
12.30 pm
Lord Rees of Ludlow: My Lords, it is my privilege to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, onhis maiden speech. He has performed great publicand private services to the south-west, especially Cornwall, which he served as an MEP. It is fitting that his maiden speech has been in today’s debate because he belongs to a party that has contributed so much constructive thought on environmental issues in general and whose crowded Benches today testify to its commitment to discussing this subject.
The report we are debating today is welcome for its focus on the economic challenge of coping with climate change. However, I share the view of earlier speakers that its tone disappointed many people, not just the Government. The report unduly disparaged the IPCC and downplayed current scientific understanding. By highlighting gaps in our knowledge and by contending that,
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Of course, there are uncertainties in the science but they should not obscure the compelling consensus that climate change is a serious issue. Rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are already warming our world and making our oceans more acidic. The cumulative evidence has been documented in scientific papers by many thousands—the overwhelming majority—of independent researchers.
Even within the past year, the evidence has hardened. A discrepancy between temperature measurements on the ground and in the atmosphere has been resolved, and the evidence that the world is now warmer than at any time in the past four centuries—the “hockey stick” graph—has been firmed up by a reanalysis by the National Academy of Sciences, which pointed out that it was just one of several lines of evidence.
But the most important datum is entirely unambiguous. There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than there has been for at least half a million years: the level has been rising at about0.5 per cent per year. Even if no more CO2 were emitted at all, there is so much inertia in the climate system that the warming could continue for decades.
Not all the impacts of climate change will be negative, though the benefits to crop yields due to rising CO2 have recently been questioned. But the higher the greenhouse gas level climbs, the bigger the adverse effect will become and, still more disquietingly, the greater will be the chance of something grave and irreversible: the melting of the Greenland icecap, the quenching of the Gulf Stream and so forth.
The IPCC explored a variety of demographicand technological projections, and we expect improvements in future reports. Despite all the uncertainties, warming looms as a serious global problem for a wide range of plausible scenarios. The impending warming is threateningly disruptive because it will happen much more rapidly than naturally occurring climate changes in the historical past and will be too fast for human populations and the natural environment to adjust to it. Indeed, some species are struggling to cope with the climate change that has already occurred. The CO2 concentration is now about 380 parts per million. If we go on as usual, it will rise to 550 parts per million—twice the pre-industrial level—within about 50 years. Whether that level is enough to trigger catastrophic changes, we just do not know.
The committee’s report noted that,
but, as the White Paper published this week by DfID cogently emphasises, the most vulnerable people are in Africa, Bangladesh and similar countries and they are the least able to adapt. If we continue business as usual, we will end up with vast areas of the world where no human populations could comfortably live,14 July 2006 : Column 924
According to Sir Nicholas Stern, the intricate economics of climate change is a subject that needs,
We eagerly await the report Sir Nicholas is currently preparing, which may well have a different slant from the report we are debating today. I hope, in particular, that the Stern review will consider the costs and benefits of seeking international agreement for a challenging but attainable CO2 ceiling, such as a limit of 550 parts per million.As the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, reminded us, the UK directly contributes just 2 per cent of the world’s emissions. But the Prime Minister’s effective leadership at Gleneagles last year shows that we have some leverage over the G8, and the wealthy countries, themselves the greatest emitters, have the means and the obligation to take the lead. At St Petersburg this weekend, energy security will be high on the agenda.
As input to the St Petersburg meeting, the Royal Society has joined the science academies of the other G8 nations, plus those of China, India, Brazil and South Africa, to reiterate concerns about global warming and to urge two things: first, greater international efforts to promote, by appropriate policies and economic instruments, acceptably clean fossil fuel, nuclear and the near-market renewable technologies. Secondly, they urge investment in a wider range of exciting prospects that still seem futuristic. There is a substantial worldwide R&D programme into nuclear fusion, even though payback time may be 50 years ahead, but there are other equally challenging and exciting technologies, such as harnessing photosynthesis more efficiently, where the current worldwide R& D is disproportionately small.
Here, the UK can exert special leverage; indeed, we have a special opportunity because our nation punches well above its weight in climate research and in science and innovation generally. Recent government initiatives to promote public/private partnerships in energy research are welcome, as is Defra’s plan to establish an office of climate change.
But should we not we go further, and declare as a national priority the spearheading of the innovation and technology the world needs if the immense challenge of climate change is to be tackled? That will be a step change, as the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, described it. Doing that would have an important bonus: channelling the idealism and commitment of young people towards a high-profile scientific goal would itself be of great educational benefit to the nation.
Scientists who study the
Earth realise that our planet's history spans millions of centuries,
but even in that perspective, there is something
special—unique—about our century. It is the first in
which one species—ours—can ravage the entire biosphere
and jeopardise life’s long-term future. Most of us have more
constricted time horizons than geologists, but all of us in this
Chamber can surely think in centuries,
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12.40 pm
Lord Soley: My Lords, I echo the complimentary comments of the noble Lord, Lord Rees, to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on his maiden speech. It was very good and thoughtful and I look forward to hearing more from him. I also welcome the report, issued by the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, which is very constructive and thoughtful although, like one or two others, I think that the tone is not quite right. It does not get over the importance of the issue. I can see the effect that the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, may have had on the Committee with his doubts about the importance and significance of climate change and whether it is really happening. Unlike him, I think that the precautionary principle is very important here.
I accept that the precautionary principle is a little like common sense. Common sense can turn out to be common nonsense. Plenty of people from the Middle Ages would now be shuffling their feet with embarrassment, having argued convincingly that the Sun went round the Earth because you can see it doing so. They would be embarrassed to discover that the reverse was true. In the same way, the precautionary principle can be overdone, but it is so important here because all the evidence suggests to me that climate change is happening and is driven, at least in large part, by human activity. We should therefore adopt the precautionary principle and try to address it. As several noble Lords have made clear, the big advantage of doing so is that, as the report says, if done well, it can be economically advantageous. That is an important point that we must all address.
Although I do not intend to speak primarily about aviation today, I will mention it, so I ought to declare an interest as campaign director of Future Heathrow. I want to focus on the growing public awareness of the issue of climate change—what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle called the tipping point of awareness. He is right. The public are increasingly willing to consider it as a serious problem. Like my noble friend Lord Giddens, I am somewhat critical of some of the green movement. I do not want to be too critical because, over the years, it has done a very good job, but I stopped supporting a couple of groups over the Brent Spar incident, when they resisted the sinking of the oil rig in the North Sea. They got the science wrong and, more importantly, as my noble friend said, seemed not to acknowledge that science and technology provide a large part of the answer to the problem.
The other reason that I
am critical is that the green movement has a tendency to try to make
people feel guilty about flying, driving or whatever. Guilt is a
singularly bad way to try to change people's behaviour for a
generalised problem of this type. It
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I want to spend a little time on that. My message would be the classic one of TheHitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy: “Don’t panic”. If the evidence from science was so strong that global warming was accelerating to the point where it was irreversible and catastrophic for life on this planet, I have no doubt that we would have to take action so drastic as to change the nature of civilisation and life as we have known it for hundreds of years. We would then go back to a pre-industrial society and heaven knows what the world would look like. It is not sensible to do that or even to talk about doing that unless the evidence is so strong that we have only a very short time to react.
Evidence at the moment suggests that if we take the right action, we can deal with the problem. It involves a combination of science and technology together with changing people’s attitudes and behaviour. I shall give a few examples, because this is where I want more assistance, including from the green movement.
I remember being in the studio of a well known, well respected radio programme. I was not there to talk about climate change—I was dealing with other political matters which, from time to time, come to pass—but climate change was being discussed. There was a lot of emphasis on what the Government should do, what certain industries should do and so on. The discussion was taking place in an office at least one-third the size of a football field, brilliantly lit with good light from natural sources—the windows. There were about six people working there because it was about 7 am. Every light was on in that office, yet the discussion concerned climate change.
Lest noble Lords think that I am picking on one particular media programme—I am certainly not, because I have a lot of respect for that programme—I say that if we look around this House of Lords, we should say, “Hang on a minute, are we doing as much as we could?”. Noble Lords may have seen me late at night scrabbling around behind 19th-century oak panels looking for light switches precisely because I think that we need to do more.
One thing that is not well
known—this is where the green movement can do more to inform
people—is that you can buy your electricity from renewable
sources from most of the big producers. Old buildings of this type are
ideally placed to do just that. Modern buildings can be built to much
higher standards, so energy use can be low. That cannot be done so
easily in older buildings such as this, but their electricity can be
bought from renewable sources. I do that in my home. It is more
expensive, but it pushes up the investment in renewables. That is
another area where I
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What does not help—here I touch on aviation—is if people run around saying, “You must not fly; you are going to fry the planet”. In fact, the most modern aircraft are not dissimilar in their carbon footprint per passenger mile to a family car. We are not far from the point where we can say that it is more environmentally responsible to fly to a destination in Europe than to drive there. Here we get into the psychology. If the green movement argues that we must all stop flying, people will not respond. They may feel guilty, but they will still do it, just as they may feel guilty hopping into their car to drive the kids to school and worry about whether they are frying the planet. It will not actually change their behaviour. Behaviour change is what we want and there are many other ways of doing that.
Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Woodland Trust and others recently spent a large amount of money on adverts in national papers basically saying, “There are too many aeroplanes flying”. That is not a sensible response. It also has a dramatic effect: if you say, “We are going to bear down on some of the drivers of high technology and science”, you will produce the opposite effect of what you want, in terms of the changes we need in society. That, incidentally, is why I think those organisations are wrong on nuclear power. Although nuclear power is not what we would use in an ideal world, it is necessary for dealing with the serious situation we have.
My message on this issue is to all of us, myself and everyone else, not to individual industries. We should not pick on aviation, the car industry or the media. “Big Brother” probably produces more CO2 than many other programmes, and I could make a good case for saying it is not necessary, but if people want to watch it I do not want to stop them. I want to ensure we reduce the carbon imprint overall, and the way to do that is to recognise, whether in our personal lives, our workplaces—like your Lordships’ House—or in industry as a whole, that we can deal with this problem. However, we will not do so with a panicked reaction that tries to take us back to a pre-industrial phase. For a country such as Britain, which led the Industrial Revolution and the science-based revolution, it would be a terrible mistake.
12.51 pm
The
Earl of Selborne: My Lords, like other speakers I
start by congratulating my noble friend Lord Wakeham on the report and
on the manner in which he has introduced the debate today. My noble
friend gave a helpful two-paragraph summary of the
14 July 2006 : Column 928
The report calls for a balance. I think, particularly having heard the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, that that is clearly a case for more reliance on adaptation, and more reliance on adaptation than would be wise. Paragraph 2 of the report correctly warns us that the science of human-induced warming remains uncertain. That uncertainty dictates caution and taking out of insurance against the worst risks. I agree; this is all about risk assessment and what isthe necessary insurance. The United Kingdom Government, and other Governments, have a responsibility on behalf of present and future generations to determine what insurance is appropriate, and to take the best advice on what the worst risks might be and the order of probability. It should then be possible to determine what insurance is the most appropriate, and indeed what is most equitable, between generations, between developed and developing countries and between affluent communities and the impoverished.
There is impressive agreement on the scientific advice. The noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, acknowledged that it is a remarkable phenomenon to have this number of independent scientists working for the IPCC come up with the sort of results they have achieved. The report notes that majorities do not necessarily embody the truth, but that the major associations of scientists have adopted similar positions. It would be reasonable to expect that we treat with care and caution any recommendations coming out of the IPCC with clearer judgments on the probabilities of the projected temperature increases.
The report calls for the IPCC to pay more attention to those dissenting scientists who do not accept the scientific consensus, and claims there are weaknesses in the way the scientific community, and the IPCC in particular, treats the impact of climate change. It calls for a more balanced approach. Yet the committee states in paragraph 4 that it decided to restrict the scope of its investigation to certain aspects of the economics of climate change. I find that rather modest aspiration difficult to reconcile with the sweeping judgments on the IPCC, its scientific conclusions and its process of operation.
I
will mention just one risk that is referred to several times in the
report, and for which a judgment by international Governments has to be
made on what insurance, if any, is appropriate. It was mentioned in the
excellent maiden speech by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and is
referred to in paragraph 38 of the report under the heading
“Large scale one-off changes”. The paragraph draws
attention to the reversal or shutdown of the Atlantic
14 July 2006 : Column 929
Since the report was published last year, Professor Bryden and his team at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton published in Nature, on21 December 2005, measurements of the strength of the meridional overturning circulation, which seems to have weakened by about 30 per cent in the past decade or so. Such a slowdown has been predictedby some climate models, and I believe these measurements are evidence that the models could be right. If circulation were switched off we would seea change in temperature in north-west Europe happening relatively quickly, and the consequences would be very far-reaching. More measurements will be needed over the next decade or more to say with greater certainty if changes observed from 1957 to 2004 represent actual long-term changes in the meridional overturning circulation.
In paragraph 40 the report acknowledges that these risks are being monitored, and says there is a balance to be struck. The report always comes back to this word “balance”, which I believe is code for saying “more reliance on adaptation”. I would say there is a decision to be made based on the scientific evidence which is consistent with these models. Do we continue to try and adapt, or do we mediate? How on earth do you adapt to turning off the Gulf Stream? That is not something for which there is any method of adaptation. We have to recognise that there is a risk of a major shift in our global climate through disrupting thermohaline circulation, or THC, as it is referred to in the report. It has happened before, possibly more than once since the last ice age, and at least one of the events was a direct result of the Earth becoming warmer.
The United Kingdom Government are right to be preoccupied with setting emission targets. The message from the debate today must be clear and unequivocal: we cannot rely solely on adaptation and alternative approaches as the main strategy for managing climate change. That is not a realistic option in the light of the scientific evidence available to us today. We must continue to try and set emission targets at the international level, recognising, for all the reasons set out in the debate today, how difficult that will be. The noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, reminded us that we need to recognise that the energy requirements of China and India will be the key to trying to achieve international emission targets, which are certainly a challenge.
12.58 pm
Lord Taverne: My Lords, I too add my tribute to the maiden speech made by my noble friend Lord Teverson. I thought it was a major contribution to the discussion.
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One or two speakers have suggested that, although they generally agree with the House of Lords report on the economic effects of climate change, it struck the wrong tone—the balance was not quite right. I take rather a different view, because discussions on environmental issues tend to suffer from hyperbole. I shall give an example: the question of nuclear power, which could play a major role in dealing with climate change. Greenpeace, which seems to regard the risk of radiation from nuclear power as a risk almost as great, or as great, as that from global warming, said recently that the outfall from Chernobyl would be more than 100,000 deaths. I have argued, in this House and in print, that the dangers of radiation are greatly exaggerated, that the linear no-threshold theory on which most of the prognostications were based is not supported by evidence, and that small doses of radiation seem to be helpful or beneficial.
I do not know how many noble Lords saw the “Horizon” programme last night, which was an unusually good television programme on science. It produced convincing evidence that the number of deaths to be expected as a result of Chernobyl— which has generally been around 4,000, not 100,000—was greatly overestimated. It showed that people living in areas of high natural radiation are less likely to suffer from cancer; that the linear no-threshold theory is mistaken and not supported by the evidence; and that evidence from animals examined in the Chernobyl area indicates that small doses of radiation can protect against the risk of cancer. I mention that because it shows that we must judge conventional wisdom, particularly alarmist prognostications, by evidence and not hype. To echo what the noble Lords, Lord Soley and Lord Giddens, said, scare stories spread by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth must be treated with great caution. Generally, they do more harm than good. As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, the environmental movement should be rescued from some of the green activists.
That brings me to climate change. I was a sceptic about climate change because I remember the confident warnings when we were thought to be facing a new ice age. But I became convinced not only that global warming was happening, but also that there was a very significant anthropogenic element. I read through most of volume 1 of the report from the International Panel on Climate Change. Incidentally, it is a formidable volume which I have had out of the Library for more than one and a half years. Unlike most publications one borrows, there has been no request for its return; so, clearly, no one else has bothered to read it.
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