Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-61)
Sir John Houghton
18 JANUARY 2005
Q60Lord Vallance of Tummel: One of the complexities
of this is the interplay between the science and the economics.
They are different languages and different disciplines. Could
you comment firstly on whether the IPCC as a forum allows a genuine
exchange of these two interplaying disciplines—and I have
to say I am slightly sceptical of big international forums allowing
you to do that kind of thing—and, secondly, whether the
models that are used are capable of integrating the two disciplines
and getting sensible answers?
Sir John Houghton: Well, the IPCC started off
very much on the scientific and natural science end but we all
realised when we began that we were only doing this because we
could hand it over to policy people and the economists in the
end, so we felt we should really try and get them on board too.
The natural science end was easier because there is more of a
tradition of scientists working together internationally on something
like climate, whereas there is very little tradition of economists
working together internationally. That is still a problem—I
think economists do not naturally join in that sort of activity
so readily as people in the natural sciences. Nevertheless, the
IPCC has made substantial headway with doing that and when you
put models together which are climate models added to impact models
added to economic models, then you have to be very wary indeed
of the sort of answers you are getting, and how realistic they
are and so on, but nevertheless you have to try to do that sort
of thing in order to help yourself on your way to discover what
the real policy should be. Others can comment on how far you could
do that.
Q61Lord Sheldon: Talking about this business
of a hundred years and things like that, I have an obsession that
over a period of time like this you are going to get as much pure
water as you want from all those oceans. It has astonished me
that if one were alive a hundred years from now we would have
as much water as we wanted. Given that situation does that not
change the position with the problems that you have been describing
or have some effect on them?
Sir John Houghton: We have got used as human
beings to the amount of water that is available in our regions
and in the way we live. If that distribution changes seriously,
if we get a lot less water, then we have got to get it from somewhere
and that is a big infrastructure problem. If we get too much water
we are going to get floods and we have also got to cope with drought.
In the developed world on the whole we can cope with that. In
a hundred years we can build whatever is necessary in order to
cope with those problems and we will probably have to do quite
a lot of that. In developing countries that is a lot harder. In
Bangladesh 10 million people at the moment are living below the
one-metre contour. What are they going to do when the sea level
rises? They will have to move. You cannot build walls around that,
so you get big problems. If you have droughts on a scale in sub-Saharan
Africa which we have not had before, more frequent and more intense,
that is a major problem in the world. We could try and feed them,
of course, by trucking food in, but that is not a way of solving
their problems, of living and working and all that sort of thing.
They will want to move. It is the best thing they could do out
of self-interest and Norman Myers looked at it and wrote a report
on how many refugees we could expect by 2050 and he came up with
a figure of 150 million and it was a conservative report. That
is a lot of people What do you do with them? That is a very serious
issue.
Chairman: I think we ought to draw this
session to a close as we have another witness. I am very grateful
to you for coming and giving us very comprehensive answers to
our questions and I hope we did not show our ignorance too much
in the way we put some of the questions, but at least we are all
wiser as a result of what you have had to tell us this afternoon.
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