Climate Cassandra

The cancer in our midst

2011-11-13T11:46:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time - hundreds of millions of years ago - all the animals were single-celled. each pursued its own self-interest - surviving, eating and reproducing basically. But evolution took a hand and some of these animals found advantages in co-operation In time they changed into fishes, amphibia, dinosaurs - and more recently us.

Our cells are co-operative. They reproduce enough to make our organs and then they stop. Well, mostly. Some selfish cells don't stop but reproduce without limit. To do this they grab from our blood nutrients and oxygen that ought to go to other organs.

We call this cancer. Sometimes it kills us.

Human society is not a super-organism; we do not abandon our own interests and judgement to be part of it. But there are parallels. Both provide benefits, such as safety and access to resources, that the individual units could not get separately, Both require solidarity and self-restraint from those units.

And there are social equivalents of cancer. Sometimes the people in one part of society - a clan, a class or a sector - cease to show solidarity and self-restraint. They grab resources that should go to others and swell up so that they threaten the health, even survival, of the whole.

Today the finance sector is just such a social cancer. It's excesses have brought recession to the whole developed world and fierce austerity to Iceland and Ireland - and probably to Greece and Italy in the near future. It has grabbed a great share of our resources and, by increasing inequality, made our societies worse places to live. And it's compulsive pursuit of profit and growth is a major driver for the greenhouse gas emissions which are likely to make the planet deeply hostile to the societies of which it is part.

The finance sector is, like a cancer, damaging social health and threatening social survival. It must be cut back to size and made to see that it must be a partner not a ruler.

Though this blog is about climate change I believe that we cannot solve those problems without putting finance back in its proper place.

Scenario planning for climate change

2011-03-22T04:43:00.000-07:00

The science of climate change is good enough to show that global temperatures will rise unless we cut back drastically on greenhouse gas emissions. What no science can do is show whether we will do so – or what policies nations will adopt if we do – or if we don’t. Nor can we predict the human – health, nutritional, political and economic – consequences of rising temperatures. Yet these are what people care about.

We badly need ways of thinking about the implications of climate change. Most of what’s written gets hung up on the uncertainties of the science. If we don’t know, and we don’t, whether temperatures will increase by two or four or six degrees how can we prepare?

The answer is scenario planning.

In scenario planning, a method pioneered by Shell, we focus on the uncertainties, not on forecasts, and use these to define a set of possible scenarios. If we get this right the actual events will follow one scenario or, more likely, fall between several scenarios. But in any case we’ll have considered what we can and should do before we have to do it.

Climate change is a long-term problem so let’s look at the long-term – 2030 and beyond On that timescale little is certain but there are two big uncertainties.

The first uncertainty is the temperature increase. The global temperature is currently 0.6 degrees higher than that in the pre-industrial period. By 2030 we ought to know whether we’ve managed to keep the increase below two degrees. That’s hardly risk-free but it should be manageable. If we haven’t then we’ll already be aware of the positive feedback effects that will drive the temperature to a four or even six degree increase. (Some models suggest that rises over ten degrees are possible but let’s not go overboard; four degrees is bad enough.) (The environmental consequences of various possible temperatures have been discussed by Mark Lynas in Six degrees. Prof. James Lovelock has discussed the positive feedback effects in The Revenge of Gaia.)

The second uncertainty is the degree of international collaboration on dealing with climate change. The Montreal treaty on CFCs showed that international collaboration is possible. The post-Kyoto experience shows that it’s very hard to get when it requires significant economic sacrifice. However, even politicians and civil servants can learn from experience and worsening climate will provide many powerful lessons. The real uncertainty is whether governments will commit to enough change soon enough to avoid triggering the positive feedbacks.

Now we combine the two to get our four scenarios as shown in the figure. I ignore the possibility that we can keep the temperature increase below two degrees without international collaboration because it’s impossible (unless the scientific consensus is badly wrong).

There are two scenarios for a world without catastrophic climate change. In the Lifeboat scenario this is achieved by international collaboration. In the Emergency Braking scenario collaboration fails and its achieved by unilateral action, mainly geo-engineering, by a major power.

There are also two scenarios that do involve catastrophic climate change. In the Police World scenario the nations collaborate to manage the consequences whilst in the New Dark Age scenario they don’t.

Plausibility

I’m aware that two, perhaps three, of my scenarios may sound more like science fiction than sober reflection. However, these scenarios run forward from 2030 and much of today’s world would have seemed like science fiction to our parents. It’s almost impossible to overstate the impacts of four degrees of warming. It’s inconceivable, at least to me, that our civilization will be unchanged by these impacts and it’s time we took this seriously.

Scenario 4: The New Dark Age

2011-03-18T04:53:00.000-07:00

In the final scenario attempts at international collaboration have failed to prevent temperature rises and have broken down. As temperatures rise nations and subnational groups will fight for survival destroying civilisation and creating a new dark age.

2030
Change will have become irrevocable and some previously fertile land will have gone out of use. Food shortages will be normal and famines common. During famines there will generally not be enough spare food available from outside the stricken area to feed the hungry making starvation common.

Institutions and individuals will generally have recognized that long-term survival with any degree of security and comfort will be possible only in places remote from the equator. Only in these places will the impending climate catastrophe leave land for agriculture.

Since the majority of countries are not remote from the equator their governments will attempt to negotiate access to places that are. Countries that do include high latitude regions will recognize their value and will generally be unwilling to provide access; preferring to keep them for their own inhabitants. They will increase military expenditure and strengthen their defences.

As temperatures rise food shortages will increase and people will migrate away from the equator and the lowlands. Conflicts will arise as the migrating populations press upon national boundaries or encroach on lands previously used by other ethnic groups within the same countries. Darfur may be seen as an early example of such a conflict. These conflicts will arise even where the disputed land provides no long-term security. If faced with the choice between violence and starvation those not actually starving will choose violence.

Some large nations, the USA and Argentina for instance, will include some refuge areas though not enough for their whole populations. Civil wars will result in these nations. In some cases these wars will be encouraged by neighboring nations who hope to grab some of the more attractive land.

These conflicts will often be exacerbated by religious and ethnic differences and recollections of past grievances, actual or supposed. These differences and grievances will be emphasised and exaggerated, and sometimes invented, by unscrupulous opportunistic politicians. (These processes could be seen operating in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.)

Detailed predictions of these conflicts is impossible but with stakes so high – both national survival and the physical survival of whole populations – there is no reason to expect much restraint. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons will be used.

2060
Repeated wars will inflict major damage on the very resources, both agricultural and industrial, that they are trying to control. Continued warfare will also destroy much of humanity’s capacity to innovate, except in military matters, and to do or even understand science and the arts.

As climate pressures increase (over a period of many decades) military power will become the dominant reality in human affairs. Political authority will give way to it. Jared Diamond’s Collapse gives examples of this breakdown.

A new global Dark Age will follow in which most of the survivors will live in militarised refuge areas in high latitudes. Food will be scarce and almost all resources will be devoted to survival – water supply, food production and defence. Commitment to survival goals will be enforced by the authorities and underwritten by new religious ideologies. Dissent will not be tolerated and punishments will be both severe and quick.

Survival outside these refuges will be limited to hunter-gatherer bands and small agricultural villages. As between them, suspicion and violence will be the norm.

After the Dark Age
The new Dark Age will doubtless last several centuries, during which the human population will fall to a fraction of its current level. The best that can be said of this scenario is that it need not last indefinitely. Neither the Greek nor the later European Dark Ages lasted for ever. Each ended and was followed by a notable period of cultural flowering – the Athenian Golden Age and The European Renaissance.

Though we have not previously experienced either a global Dark Age or such abrupt climate change there is reason to hope that our descendants will ultimately be able to rebuild civilization.

Scenario 3: Police World

2011-02-25T07:42:00.000-08:00

In this scenario the nations collaborate against climate change but not in time to prevent catastrophe.

2030
By 2030 China will be suffering from water shortages and the USA from increasingly severe hurricane damage. Every government will have recognised the direction and pace of change. Corporate lobbyists who currently deny the reality of anthropogenic change will have shifted to demanding government help in adapting to that change (whilst denying any meaningful responsibility). It will also be clear that even geo-engineering schemes cannot reverse the trend.

Climate change will already have reduced the area under cultivation and the availability of water for irrigation causing starvation in areas, such as those south of the Sahara, where governments are already weak. The reduction in global food production will make it impossible to provide enough food aid leading to major population movements and wars.

Governments will recognise that the Earth cannot support its current population and that existing human institutions cannot survive the huge population movements that these changes will provoke. (In Collapse Jared Diamond has described a variety of precedents for social collapse due to overuse of natural resources.)

Once the inevitability of this collapse becomes clear governments will shift their focus from mitigation to survival. The worst governments will seek their own survival – the best that of as many of their population as they think feasible. Most countries will adopt a ‘war footing’. Specific policy responses will vary according to geography and political feasibility but will typically include:

Bans on immigration – enforced by tighter borders and internal controls
Central direction of food production – including use of genetically-modified crops and lower animal welfare standards.
Forced relocation of people from threatened areas – sometimes to farmlands where human labour will replace diesel engines.

To deal with the inevitable resistance to these measures most governments will suspend many civil rights. Some will suspend elections ‘for the duration of the emergency’ – a suspension that will become permanent.

Even so, most governments will realise that these measures can provide only temporary relief. With large parts of many countries becoming permanently uninhabitable and new farmlands becoming available in the under-populated north the only long-term solution will be a wholesale northward relocation of people and industrial facilities coupled with a reduction in total numbers.

The inevitable strategy will be to identify the territories remote from the equator where the prospects are best and then limit and direct migration into these refuges. The rest of the Earth will be progressively abandoned together with a large part of its population. International institutions will be redirected or created in order to manage the transfer and, more critically, the abandonment and starvation of many millions of people.

This process will play out over many decades and its reality will be generally denied at first.

2050
By 2050 the temperature rise will have exceeded two degrees and major positive feedback effects will be visible. Major floods and severe hurricanes will be much more common making and major habitat changes have already occurred, eg in the Sahara and Amazon basin, leading to a marked reduction in the Earth’s carrying capacity. An increase of at least four degrees will now be certain.

Beyond 2050
The refuges will take on a life of their own. Life in these refuges will be hard but life outside them will become literally impossible; most of those outside them will die. These deaths will be spread over many decades and will mainly be from starvation, though natural disasters and warfare will contribute.

Resistance to the new world order will be severe but the multinational authorities will take large-scale military action to maintain the borders of the refuges. This scenario assumes that the multinational authorities succeed in maintaining law and order and an industrial base but this will be at the price of human rights and ordinary human compassion. The need for vigorous military action against those outside the refuges and direction of labour within them will lead to severe rationing of almost everything and a police state covering all the refuges; in effect a Police World.

If the authorities are unable to maintain law and order and an industrial base we will get scenario 4.

Is the IPCC fit for purpose?

2011-02-23T03:42:00.000-08:00

There’s no doubt that the IPCC’s analysis of climate change has been one of the most impressive scientific efforts of all time, comparable to the Human Genome Project. This was recognised by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

But there have been mistakes. The best known is probably the exaggeration of the threat to the Himalayan glaciers. But the most serious are the IPCC’s understatements of both the severity of the problem and the confidence we can have in the reality of the problem.

The IPCC has done a remarkable job, in the face of considerable hostility and criticism, of describing the problem but its very success has changed the situation. The IPCC was set up to analyse a threat seen as serious but long-term. We now know that the threat is urgent, becoming critical, and what’s needed now is action.

So is the IPCC still fit for purpose? Do we need a scientific body that is able to react faster and describe the necessary policies as well as the problems?

In my view we still need the IPCC – but we need new institutions too.

The government link
It’s important to remember that the IPCC is the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. It was created by the world’s governments to provide independent advice. (And to provide excuses for inaction!) This connection to the world’s governments prevents the IPCC from acting as a critic but makes it more likely that governments will listen to what it says.

The link is therefore functional to the degree that governments remain key actors.

The delays
The IPCC seeks to provide authoritative analysis. To do this it has decided to look only at evidence published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. It also imposes a cut-off date many months prior to the publication of each report. Papers published after that date are not considered. The IPCC thus has time to consider the meaning and importance of each paper.

But this has consequences. It takes time to write a scientific paper – especially if it’s the work of multiple authors based in several countries. Such authorship is particularly important when dealing with a global phenomenon. It then takes time for the paper to pass peer review and be published. This whole process may easily take two years – and can take much longer.

And then there’s the data. The paper cannot be written until the data has been collected and quality checked. This takes time. Then again trend data is typically most valid for the mid-point of the period in which it was collected – pushing the timing back yet further.

Thus the data considered in the 2007 IPCC report (still the most recent) mostly relates to a period ending in 2003 and sometimes to much earlier dates. This compares unfavourably to the reporting of company performance to the stock markets or of military developments to commanders (if not to the public) or of competitive intelligence in most industries.

The need for additional reporting
Delay is the price of the IPCC’s authoritative voice but it’s clear that the world community needs faster reporting; something intermediate between individual scientific papers and the current style of IPCC report.

Two additional kinds of report would be valuable:

Periodic, often annual, publication of measurements that have been pre-agreed to be reliable and important, eg world average temperature, the extent of Arctic ice. These would provide tracking of phenomena that are already reasonably well understood.
Selective alerts on other measurements or research findings. The alert would say something like: This is credible and appears important. It’s more like the judgment formed by an intelligence officer than by a scientist

These reports need an understanding of the science but each needs something additional; process design and management in the first case and good judgment in conditions of uncertainty in the second. Scientists may possess these skills but they aren’t in themselves scientific skills. These kinds of reporting might benefit from the contributions of experts from other fields, notably business and intelligence.

Since the reputation of the IPCC remains strong amongst governments and diplomats these reports should be produced under the oversight of the IPCC rather than of any other body but perhaps by newly-established specialist bodies or committees.

Preparing for action
It’s increasingly clear that an effective response to climate change will require actions by governments, businesses and individuals. A low-carbon economy will require new technologies, eg for power generation and geo-engineering, and changed behaviour from both businesses and individuals, eg less flying and driving. These will have to be encouraged by government and by public opinion and motivated by carbon taxes and new standards for energy-using processes and structures.

There will be plenty of scope for honest disagreement about the relative advantages of the various options and there will therefore be needs for authoritative, independent assessment of the options. The skills required include a variety of sciences and engineering disciplines as well as law and expertise in social change. This certainly goes beyond the scope of the IPCC and may well be beyond the scope of any one body.

Work of this kind has already started, for instance the Royal Society report on geo-engineering published in 2009, but a great deal more will be needed. Although the UN would be the best home for such studies the difficulty of getting agreement and the almost inevitable politicisation of the resulting studies makes this an unattractive approach. It may be better to ask governments, or possibly individual philanthropists, to sponsor learned societies to collaborate on suitable evaluation projects. Suitable international might emerge over time.

Review: Climate Wars

2011-01-03T08:28:00.000-08:00

Most books on climate change focus on either climate science or the policies needed to avoid catastrophic change. Most, therefore, are written by optimists - by people who think that governments will behave better once people understand more.

Well here's one that isn't:

Climate wars: The fight for survival as the world overheats
By Gwynne Dyer. Published by One World.

This focuses on the social, political and military consequences of the change. More importantly, it’s written by a pessimist. Where most commentators say ‘I hope’ or ‘we ought’ Dyer says either ‘we probably won’t’ or ‘what if we don’t?’ Where most concentrate on how we can avoid catastrophe Dyer focuses on what catastrophic climate change might be like and how the nations are likely to respond to it. His inspiration is similar to mine in my scenario planning but his political analysis is much deeper.

Let me be clear. Dyer has interviewed a lot of influential people. He has understood the science and the politics of Kyoto and Copenhagen. Based on this he believes that we won’t get an effective climate change treaty in the foreseeable future and that greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise for a decade or more. His judgments are all too plausible. Indeed, I think them much more likely than not.

He predicts that climate change will produce food and water shortages and that countries will raid their neighbours rather than see their people starve (and their political power decline). Rich countries will, of course, simply close their borders to immigrants.

Starting from these judgments he has created eight scenarios for various regions and dates between 2019 and 2055. These scenarios show how shortages of food and water might play out in a world already divided by money, power, religion and traditional rivalries. They discuss the tensions and wars that might follow.

These are not forecasts – they are more like science fiction stories – stories driven by climate change. None of them are pleasant and some are very frightening - nuclear war between India and Pakistan anyone?

But despite these scenarios Dyer does not despair. If we don't start to get greenhouse gas levels down by 2016 then we'll just have to find something additional to insulation, decarbonisation of power generation, etc., to buy us a decade or two. We'll need to use geo-engineering for that - despite the risks.

Every green optimist should read this book. They should ask themselves: What will we do if we don't get an effective successor to Kyoto?

[A shorter version of this review was published in Green World.]

Arithmetic of delay

2010-12-17T02:32:00.000-08:00

So the Climate Change conference at Cancun has produced a mouse. What does that tell us about the future?

Let's start by noting our target. In 2009 a group of Nobel winners declared that, to avoid catastrophic climate change, world greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2015. Actually, that gives a us a good chance of avoiding catastrophe - not a guarantee - which doesn't seem good enough. But let's take that for now.

Now what's the best we can realistically hope for internationally?

Principles
To achieve the Lifeboat scenario (my most optimistic scenario) we need a strong, binding, international treaty on climate change. Treaties, however, take time. The 2011 conference in Durban cannot agree a treaty - a year is too little time - but might it agree the principles of a treaty? That requires the US to agree the principle of major emissions cuts by 2050 and China to agree the principle of some restraint to its own emissions. Now these are not independent. China won't agree to anything unless the US agrees cuts and the US won't agree cuts unless China joins the process.

But the Republicans in the US Congress aren't going to agree anything and the earliest we might get a more sensible Congress is 2012 - not that that looks likely. But, just maybe, we might see a change of heart following the 2012 elections allowing agreement on principles in 2013. (Most of any agreement is negotiated in the months before the conference so 2012 is too soon.)

Treaty
So how long to get from principles to treaty?

Effective action on climate change touches every country and industry. Action needs to be decisive - which means that there will be winners and losers. Governments are not global philanthropists - they defend national interests - so they will want their people and companies to be winners not losers. Does two years sound long enough to turn principles into a treaty with teeth?

An optimist might think so. So, just maybe, we could have a successor to Kyoto by 2015.

Ratification
International treaties don't come into force until they've been ratified (ie formally approved) by a majority of the signatories. In many cases this requires approval by the national parliament and some parliaments are not controlled by their governments. (The US comes to mind again.)

It took eight years for the Kyoto Treaty to come into force due to delays by various major states. How long will ratification of the successor treaty take? This is obviously another unanswerable question but if it's eight years we may as well give up now. Can we believe in three years?

Let's make another act of optimism and say three. So the new treaty comes into force in 2018.

Implementation
Of course, we'll still only have words on paper. Now we need to consider the institutions, equipment (eg for greenhouse gas monitoring), staffing, etc. needed. But some of this could be done even before the treaty came into force if some country or group of countries was prepared to fund it. So maybe implementation need only take another year.

Reaching the peak
So, in 2019, the restraint measures in the treaty could begin to bite. Still it's likely that greenhouse gas emissions will have continued to rise since 2010 - as they did in almost every preceding year - and these things have their own momentum. Instant results are impossible even where good will exists (and it is never universal).

So maybe we could see emissions peak in 2021 and reduce, if only by 0.5%, in 2022. That's seven years later than we need to avoid the likelihood of catastrophic climate change.

What are the odds?
The 2022 date is based on five separate optimistic assumptions. Any one is conceivable but that all should prove correct is not. Therefore I conclude that greenhouse gas emissions will not peak by 2022 and may peak much later - if at all.

If saving the world climate depends on achieving peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 then catastrophe is already inevitable. It's past time to confront the real problems we face.

Scenario 1: The Lifeboat Scenario

2010-12-02T02:38:00.000-08:00

In this scenario the nations collaborate soon enough to restrain greenhouse gas concentrations and the temperature increase is kept below two degrees. As a result we avoid catastrophic climate change. I call this the Lifeboat scenario since it requires that every major state recognises that we are all in the same boat and that its resources are barely adequate.

The technology base
In his book Heat George Monbiot has described the technology changes needed in the UK to reduce its emissions sufficiently. He believes that the UK and developed European nations can retain their standard of living (except for flying) by making an extensive set of changes to our industrial base. Most of this is plausible but almost every part is challenging. His conclusion that we can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 80% by 2050 requires that we meet every one of these challenges. Given the lack of political will and lamentable failures of Kyoto this would be absurd even if we started immediately. And, that, of course, requires a binding international agreement.

It’s now clear that the failure at Copenhagen was not a temporary or anomalous result but a true reflection of the understandings and priorities of the major powers – especially China and the USA. It follows that the required international agreement will not be established in the near future. The most optimistic view with any plausibility is that the nations may have agreed on the need for effective action by 2015 – though 2020 is more likely. This has major implications for the actions needed to keep us below two degrees.

In brief we’ll have to use geo-engineering methods either to remove CO2 from the atmosphere or to reduce the amount of sunlight falling on the planet. Since all geo-engineering methods have disadvantages we’ll probably have to do both – and to use multiple methods for each.

We will need to do more either by cutting our standard of living or by reducing our numbers.

Global organisation
The key assumption for this scenario is that the nations collaborate but this collaboration will not be easy. As with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) there will be disputes and we will need a World Climate Authority (WCA), analogous to the World Trade Organisation, to deal with them. The WCA will have, at minimum, to issue emissions permits and to check that actual emissions do not exceed these permissions. It will have to impose sanctions against defaulters. These sanctions will have to be backed by at least the threat of military force, though it’s unclear whether this will require a world police force.

It will also have to regulate the geo-engineering systems. Since these are likely to damage some countries and regions even as they improve world climate this regulation will need to include payments, probably very large payments, of compensation. Such payments are needed not only in the name of justice but also as a highly visible sign of the unsustainability of the combination of excessive GHG emissions and geo-engineering.

Cultural change
This scenario requires changes in production with fewer new products, more repair and recycling and longer product lifetimes. It’s likely that the developed countries will see falls in their standards of living; at least according to such usual measures as GDP per head.

A cultural change will be needed to ensure long-term support for the often uncomfortable policies needed to meet our environmental targets, and I’ll call this Green Puritanism. Green Puritans will disapprove of excessive consumption and travel and these attitudes will reinforce and be reinforced by laws against waste. They will emphasise human solidarity and regard competition as a dangerous force – like fire in the proverb, a good servant but a bad master. They will be sceptical of innovations that do not reduce energy use and our environmental impact.

Green Puritans will disapprove of much fashion, since annual changes drive waste, and of its handmaiden, celebrity culture, since that celebrates excess. Indeed they will disapprove of a great deal of advertising and commerce.

Green Puritans will insist that the public and charitable sectors have inherent value and are not to be seen as inferior copies of the private sector. Indeed, they will demand that these sectors behave differently and will the transformation of public companies into mutual societies and co-operatives.

Green Puritans should not be hostile to pleasure (as conventional puritans have usually been). They will applaud the local and home-based pleasures of food, drink, conversation, sport, sex and family life. They will disapprove of energy-intensive pleasures such as motor-racing and holidays in remote places.

The economy
The Green Puritan change will affect business profoundly. In the developed economies growth will cease to be an acceptable objective and may in some cases actually be penalised. Business leaders will have to find other measures of value, such as sustainability and human well-being, and discover how to link them to their internal performance assessment systems.

Much of the Lifeboat economy will be less volatile than we’ve become used to with fewer fashion shifts and less random change. Exceptions will include:

Energy generation – where the greenhouse gas emissions targets will prove highly demanding.
Energy use – where new opportunities will be sought in all sectors
The use of ICT to replace travel through telepresence, simulations and games.

Life in the lifeboat
Lifeboat will be different from our world but could be a good world to live in. Let’s look at the advantages for people in the developed countries – who would be most effected:

It’s sustainable. People living in this scenario would not be dooming their grandchildren to catastrophe; and would know it.
It’s more relaxed. Without the economic pressure for growth and the psychological pressures of advertising life would be less frantic and people less stressed. People in developed countries would gain health benefits.
It’s healthier with stronger communities. As Wilkinson and Picket have shown inequality undermines health, communities and social order. It increases many bad things including ill-health, drug abuse, obesity and crime.

These advantages will take time to become apparent. The first ten years of the Lifeboat scenario will therefore be especially difficult.

It’s tempting to claim that there would be benefits for the less developed countries too. Sustainability would certainly be a benefit for them – most immediately those, like Kenya, Bangladesh and low-lying island states, in the front-line of climate change. Later, states dependent on seasonal snow-melt for irrigation would see benefits. These include India, Pakistan and China.

In general the emerging middle classes of India, China, etc., would share the other benefits too. Continuing economic growth – with its benefits for the poor – is certainly compatible with this scenario but the degree to it occurs will depend political decisions.

In the long run, of course, the Lifeboat scenario is best because it avoids catastrophic climate change whilst allowing for some justice in the allocation of scarce resources.

[This post replaces the description of the Lifeboat scenario published in November 2007.]

Pessimism in parliament

2010-10-16T01:04:00.000-07:00

Last week’s meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change confirmed my current pessimism. Organised by leading development charity Practical Action on 12 October the meeting focused on the importance of adaptation in a ‘four degree future’.

Speakers from a variety of think-tanks and development organisations explained what was needed (essentially the Lifeboat scenario) and noted that the UN process is not on track to deliver it.

So far as I can see the climate change policies of the developed and some developing nations may be summarised as follows:

Mitigation

We will set greenhouse gas emissions targets that are not strict enough to avoid catastrophic climate change.
We will fail to meet those targets.

Adaptation

We will promise the poorest countries the money to adapt to the climate change we are causing.
We will set the amounts at less than is needed to adapt.
We will fail to provide the amounts we promise, and
We will call much of its loans and later demand repayment.

Mechanisms

We will promise to provide adaptation funds from the Carbon Trading market
We will cheat in allocating quotas.

Will the lawyers save the Earth?

2010-09-02T09:15:00.000-07:00

Unlikely, I know, but let's not underestimate the sheer tenacity of a lawyer in search of someone to sue!

We know that climate change is due to human activity and that it's made extreme weather events more likely. Recent extreme events include Hurricanes Katrina and Catarina, the European 2003 heatwave, the Kenyan drought and the current Pakistani floods. (So that's five continents covered.)

So far judges have ruled the connection between specific human actions and losses due to extreme weather to be too uncertain to support legal action. That's partly a matter of science - the science hasn't been sufficiently clear - but a recent workshop in Colorado shows that that's changing. According to Anil Ananthaswamy in New Scientist last week scientists at the meeting felt that it is now practical to determine how large a contribution climate change has made to a given extreme event.

There have already been several attempts to sue for extreme weather losses. Though none has succeeded improvements in the science are bound to encourage more lawyers and it seems only a matter of time before one of them finds the winning formula.

America's rigidity was one reason for the failure of the Copenhagen conference. Will lawyers bring change that the scientists cannot?

And if so, what will bring the Chinese - the other cause of failure in Copenhagen - on board?

Fencing

2010-07-27T04:06:00.000-07:00

Which prominent country is spending one billion pounds building a 4,000 km fence to keep out its neighbour’s Muslim citizens?

Hint: It’s not Israel.

It’s India.

India has been building a fence along its border with Bangladesh since before 2005. The fence is about eight feet high, though higher in some places. It is accompanied by a road and patrolled by 80,000 troops of the Indian Border Security Force.

India has defended this rather un-neighbourly conduct by pointing to the supposed threats of attack by Islamic extremists and of illegal (Muslim) immigration. The first is real but small. In any case fanatics are more likely to come from Pakistan than from Bangladesh and, as the Mumbai attack showed, can easily arrive from the sea.

There is, of course, no real threat to India from the ten million Bangladeshis living there, many of whom were welcomed after Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan. But there is local friction. Muslims of Bangladeshi origin are thought to comprise 30% of the population of the (mainly Hindu) Indian state of Assam.

These ‘immigrants’ are the subject of the usual accusations, eg ‘they’re taking our jobs’. And, of course, the problem is talked up by rightwing Hindu politicians.

So far, so familiar. But this fence has a broader significance if you look a few decades ahead.

In July 2010 the CIA put Bangladesh’s population at 158 million and its growth rate at 1.3%. That growth is unlikely to be maintained but with a median age of just 23½ and 34% of its people under 14 substantial population growth is inevitable.

By contrast the land area of Bangledesh seems bound to shrink over the coming decades. That’s most obviously because rising sea levels will flood low-lying land but also because more severe storms will make some of that land uninhabitable.

Squeezed out by the rising sea many Bangladeshis will look for somewhere less vulnerable – and where else will they look but India? (Bangladesh’s only other land neighbour is Burma – hardly attractive.)

In this context India’s security fence is a step in creating the Police World scenario described three years ago. It’s not a large step; fencing one’s border is hardly a tyrannical act. But it is through small, defensible, steps that the Police World will be built.

Breaking down the growth fetish

2010-07-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

Today, we face four major crises, two immediate and two slow-burn. There’s an immediate economic crisis due to folly in the banking sector and an immediate crisis of social frustration due to – but I’ll come to that.

The slowburn crises are the threat of disruption from climate change within the next 50-100 years and the threat of loss of species and habitats due to economic and population growth within 20-40 years.

The existence of these crises is beyond reasonable doubt. But what about the solutions?

Climate change

If we keep on as we are we can expect a two degree temperature increase well before 2100 followed, almost certainly, by much more rapid rises as positive feedback effects cut in. I’ve discussed the likely social and political consequences in two scenarios (refs).

It’s fairly obvious that to avoid this we need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions sharply and globally. This requires us to decarbonise energy production, make less stuff and travel less. The exact mix and timing of these actions is far from obvious – except that a start is already overdue. We need to give up our fixation on growth in consumer goods.

Since we emit GHGs mainly to benefit the rich countries (and elites in poor ones) whilst the costs fall largely on the poor justice requires that we allow the poor to improve their situations whilst taking most of the cuts in the developed countries. We also need to stabilise and then reduce world population.

Species loss

We are already losing species and habitats at an alarming rate. Headlong development is decimating the rain forests whilst the ecology of the sea is already impoverished. These losses contribute to climate change, by removing forests, and deprive us of potentially valuable plant products such as medicines. There’s also a more subtle loss when beautiful things are lost.

To avoid these losses we need to stop treating land and sea as infinite resources. In recognising that we are already using many at unsustainable rates we see that current rates of extraction and use are unsustainable. Again growth in physical activity, and especially our fixation on growth, can be seen to be a key driver of the crisis.

And, again, since the rich nations and elites have created these problems (Britain cut down its forests centuries ago) it’s only just that they should bear the brunt of change.

Finance

The financial crisis has already destroyed jobs, undermined pensions and frightened many people. The policies of many governments, including that of the UK, ensure that much of this will continue for years.

At the root of the crisis are irresponsible risk-taking by bankers who believed, rightly, that they had nothing to lose and weak regulation by governments who overlooked the eternal truth that nothing lasts for ever. It’s easy, and certainly right, to condemn the individuals who took the risks and weakened regulation. But behind individual errors we see again the pernicious ideology of unfettered growth. Growth in business, no matter how silly! Growth without limit!

It was the ideology of unlimited growth that led buyers to believe that house prices could only rise and led Gordon Brown to believe that he could relieve poverty out of growing taxes. All were wrong.

The remedies include tighter bank regulation, bank taxes and penalties for excessive risk taking and for bankers to compensate the rest of us for their folly. But we also need to set business and national objectives that are not elaborate ways of saying “Give me more”.

Social frustration

There’s more to a good society than consuming more goods and services each year. We all know that and value relationships, families and our communities. Margaret Thatcher may have said “there is no such thing as society” but not even the Tories now believe this.

There are many social problems to worry about, from litter and obesity to crime and drug abuse. And there are differentials, such as the shorter lives of the poor, that ought to be cause for constant outrage in a civilised society.

Sociologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have shown in The Spirit Level that inequality of income is the single biggest cause of these social problems. In Affluenza Oliver James has shown how this affects individuals. Faced with this evidence a desire for greater equality is more than a political choice, it’s an absolute imperative if we are to live in a more healthy and congenial society.

There are many barriers to reducing inequality. One is the vested interest of the rich – but Wilkinson and Pickett have shown that all but the top few percent would be happier and more fulfilled in a more equal society. Another is our belief that we must, at all costs, have growth.

The fetish of growth

And so we come back to growth.

Growth is the modern philosopher’s stone. It will relieve poverty, reward entrepreneurs, fund social services and provide our pensions. Even to suggest that it’s a problem is enough to mark you as a freak whilst no party except the Green Partyopposes it. Yet growth, in its current form, is entirely unsustainable.

The growth fetish is maintained by a combination of vested interests and a lack of imagination and because, above all, growth is simple. A single number is the measure of economic value.

But no one number is the measure of human value. So I propose the creation of a set of metrics and a process, the social impact statement, to assess them.

The social impact statement

The social impact statement (SIS) is analogous to the environmental impact statement required for a development project. Government, indeed anyone promoting a policy, should be required to produce a social impact statement for that policy. This statement should estimate the impact of the policy on a set of key metrics including economic inequality, health, crime as well as GNP.

Since the relationships between policies and outcomes are often contested we should create an Office of Social Responsibility (analogous to the Office of Budget Responsibility) to help government departments produce sound SISs. The OSR would be funded to commission good research on the consequences of policies and the relationships between policies and the key metrics.

These changes would not produce a revolution. They would not in themselves block vested interests or defuse the bile of the tabloid press. They would be embarrassing for all parties since all have indefensible policies.

But they would contribute to a rational discussion of policies from which we would all benefit.

Scenario 4: Emergency braking

2010-06-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

In this scenario the nations do not collaborate effectively but the temperature increase is kept below two degrees nonetheless. Here’s how this might happen.

Copenhagen showed that the USA and China were unwilling to make the changes necessary to achieve the lifeboat scenario whilst China wasn’t even willing for other countries to make the necessary commitments. In this situation most major GHG emitters will give climate change a low priority and the pace of climate change will accelerate in line with the IPCC’s business-as-usual scenario.

By about 2020 the political leaderships of China, India and USA will have recognised that the threat of climate change is serious and urgent but they will remain locked into existing attitudes and policies.

There will then be a serious climate crisis. It might be a storm, flood, drought or fire. Its immediate consequences may be very severe – thousands of deaths and $Bs lost in property damage. However its largest impact may come from symbolic damage, eg the collapse of the Statue of Liberty in a major storm-surge.

This will lead one major nation, let’s call it Maverick, to a realistic re-examination of the climate change threat. It will conclude that it is already too late for the orderly conservation-based approach described in the Lifeboat scenario. As a result, Maverick will take unilateral action in the form of one or more major geo-engineering programmes. Maverick will also introduce strong domestic emission-reduction policies and launch a major campaign for international collaboration. These programmes will restrain the temperature growth within ten years but will probably have a variety of adverse effects on other nations.

At least some of these nations will oppose these geo-engineering programmes but Maverick will use its diplomatic, cultural, financial and commercial muscle to neutralise this opposition. It’s not clear whether war can be completely avoided in this scenario but I’m assuming that any military action against Maverick will not stop its geo-engineering efforts. Maverick will also use its leverage to prevent other powers from benefiting disproportionately from its expenditure on geo-engineering.

The initial hostility to Maverick’s unilateralism will, eventually, be followed by acceptance of its inevitability and even desirability. This scenario is unstable and could degenerate into either of the high temperature scenarios. However, Maverick’s unilateralism may buy enough time for the creation of a consensus between the main powers. This consensus could allow this scenario to evolve into Lifeboat. It will not be sustainable if it doesn’t.

Time for Plan B?

2009-12-02T01:32:00.000-08:00

It's less than a week to Copenhagen. On Monday evening I heard Douglas Alexander, minister for International Development, say how important it is to get a deal and how hard the UK government will be working. I'd like to believe it. And it MIGHT happen. That is, we might get a deal that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enough to keep the temperature increase below two degrees.

But we also might not. In business and war it's always wise to have a backup plan in case your main plan doesn't work. So what should be in the UK's plan B?

We'll need Plan B if we can't keep the temperature rise below two degrees. The Plan B world will be defined by rising temperatures and sea levels, more extreme weather events and more refugees, both nationally and internationally. These effects will continue for several, perhaps many, decades with no certainty about the end point.

Disaster planning

With more storms, tornados, etc., we can expect more floods and other damaging events.

Plan B should include higher standards for buildings and more investment in flood defences. New building on vulnerable land should be forbidden and some existing buildings will have to be strengthened or abandoned. We will also need extra investment in warning systems and the emergency services.

The cost of disasters will rise despite these measures and insurance premiums will rise in anticipation. The government will need to ensure that we have the right balance between prevention and compensation.

Land

We are already abandoning some coastal land to the sea. This will happen increasingly fast in Plan B with obvious impacts on housing and agriculture. There may be some gains on high ground and in northern England and Scotland but the net effect will be negative.

All land use will have to become more intensive. In China, where land hunger is a permanent feature, almost everyone lives in tower blocks. We'll need to go in that direction, reserving all agricultural land for agriculture. The planning system will have to become more restrictive and, probably, more directive. Wasteful use of land must become first socially disapproved and then illegal.

Agriculture

The world will progressively lose agricultural land so the price of imported food will rise. The UK will therefore have to become more self-sufficient in food whilst using less fossil fuel for agriculture.

Plan B for agriculture will require a switch away from meat production to make more efficient use of the land and more intensive arable farming. New crop varieties will be needed to make best use of the new growing conditions and genetic engineering will be an essential tool if we are to do this in time.

Energy

If Copenhagen fails then there won't be a much point in cutting UK carbon emissions. However, energy security will be a big issue as climate change destabilises many of the areas from which we import oil and gas.

The keys to keeping the lights on in an increasingly unstable world will be demand reduction, diversity of energy sources and increased fuel reserves. Plan B will reduce demand by subsidising better building insulation, improving public transport and discouraging flights and driving. Much the same as Plan A in fact.

Plan B will also include a shift to sustainable forms of energy generation. Increased use of wind and tide will reduce our oil and gas imports. To provide diversity nuclear power will have a place, if we can secure access to Uranium, and it may be worth considering re-opening some coal mines.

Immigration

At best the UK will struggle to feed its people. Since most of the world will be worse affected than the UK the number of people trying to come here will continue to increase. If we cannot feed our current population we can hardly admit significant numbers of new residents. Therefore we won't.

Plan B will require much stricter immigration controls which must, in time, apply to EU citizens. Since that is contrary to EU principles Plan B requires us to at least consider withdrawl from the EU. Plan B will also require strengthening of border controls and a generally tougher attitude to would-be immigrants.

Population

But that won't be enough. It will become apparent, over time, that we cannot feed our existing population.

Plan B will therefore involve measures to reduce the population. It's unlikely that emmigration can contribute much to this so we need to concentrate on the birth rate. Forward planning will allow us to do this by voluntary means if we do it soon enough. If not, compulsion may be necesary.

Civil liberties

Each of the policies I've discussed so far implies a reduction in traditional liberties. Several will create conflict with minority communities which will increase the need for social control.

Plan B will include strengthening of the internal security apparatus. Our record over the last 20 years suggests that too much control will be a greater threat than too little. Plan B should therefore set out the liberties that can be maintained as well as those that cannot.

Timescale

The biggest remaining uncertainty from a planing perspective is the pace of change. Today's IPCC projections show gradual worsening over many decades. Given foresight and determination it ought to be possible for the UK to implement Plan B.

However, several lines of evidence show that the climate could shift very much faster than that, in years rather than decades. Planning for this is probably pointless since there is no precedent for change on this scale since the death of the dinosaurs 65 muillion years ago. The human species will doubtless survive - we are very adaptable - but few human institutions would be likely to.

Deniers grow desperate

2009-02-05T03:58:00.000-08:00

A few days ago someone sent me a link to an article in The Register in which Dr John Theon, ex-NASA scientist, declared that climate change is not man-made. He made a number of curious claims:

“The [climate] models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit.”
“Some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results” without explaining why.”
Jim “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting."

It didn’t take long to throw serious doubt on all this. For instance, a posting on ScienceBlogs.com pointed to criticism of many of the supposed facts. In particular the claim that the Bush White House did not attempt to muzzle Jim Hansen is absurd given all the coverage on this. (See, in particular: http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20071210101633.pdf. )

Now it turns out that Theon has been a climate change denier for a few years – which makes me wonder why this has come up now. His views are being promoted by Senator James Inhofe, Republican Senator for Oklahoma. The person most criticized in Theon’s statement is Jim Hansen and Jim Hansen is a leading supporter of energetic action against climate change. Maybe this is an attempt to discredit Hansen and thus to encourage Obama not to take the action needed.

If so it shows how desperate the denial lobby has become. What we have here is opinions from one man that relate largely to a period years after he ceased to work on climate issues. Not exactly compelling.

The body of evidence for man-made global warming, by contrast, is huge. It wouldn't be disturbed by the opinions of a former NASA climate scientist even if he were Mandela, Einstein and Pauling rolled into one!

Pricing carbon emissions

2009-01-16T05:08:00.000-08:00

We all know that the long-term survival of our civilisation, if not of our species, depends on sharply reducing our use of fossil fuels. The UK government has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. The single most important tool must be to charge companies and individuals for their emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) and this may be done by imposing a tax or by requiring permits (which have to be paid for). But what should the price be? And how should it be set?

Last summer Friends of the Earth ran a seminar to discuss the options. The 26 participants were drawn from a mixture of academic, consulting and campaigning backgrounds. Perhaps surprisingly, for an FoE event, the seminar did not come to a simple conclusion but did look at four approaches:

Social cost, ie the cost to society.
Marginal cost of abatement, ie the cost of reducing emissions.
Market cost
“Precaution and pragmatism”

None of these approaches produces a clearly correct result (estimates of the costs vary wildly) and each is open to several criticisms. In particular, in each case the number you get depends on the assumptions you make about both the physics of climate change and the policies that governments will follow over several decades. For instance, the more effective we suppose future policies to be:

the lower the calculated social cost per ton and likely market price but,
the greater, probably, will be the marginal cost of abatement.

In addition:

The social cost depends on the values we assign to human life and convenience, ecosystem services and various kinds of damage to life and the environment.
The current market price, e24/ton, is based on a badly flawed trading scheme and is absurdly low.

The meeting was unable to decide which approach would be best. I, however, am less cautious.

The reason for setting a price is to enable market mechanisms and organisations’ own decision-making processes to make the decisions that will reduce GHG emissions. We ought to accept the logic of this and set the price so that it produces, in the short-term, the change we need. If, for instance, we need to reduce emissions by 3% pa then we set a price that we expect to do this. If, after a year, we are wrong we adjust the price. We should also, obviously, not make or permit investments that encourage additional emissions.

This, in fact, is the “Precaution and pragmatism” approach. It has five important advantages:

If pursued seriously, it’s almost certain to produce the required reduction
It defines the issue as political and does not seek to hide political choices behind a technocratic smokescreen.
The accountability for setting the price is explicit
The accountable body, the government, is subject to democratic recall.
The link between goal and price is simple and explicit.

On this approach the key decision is just how fast to reduce GHG emissions. My own preference is for 4% pa – which would reduce emission levels by 35% by 2020 and by 80% by 2050. This isn’t very different from the budgets set by the UK Climate Change Committee.

There are, obviously, several disadvantages. First the carbon price may fluctuate wildly in the early years since we don’t really know how business and consumers will respond to price signals. Second, government has to review, and possibly revise, the price every year. This provides many opportunities for bad decisions, especially in difficult economic times.

Despite this “Precaution and pragmatism” is the best choice precisely because it is so straightforward.

Avoiding the shock of geo-engineering

2008-08-01T01:09:00.000-07:00

If current policies and behaviour continue increases in greenhouse gases will drive temperature to two degrees above the pre-industrial level. From there it's likely that feedback effects will drive the increase to at least four degrees - quite possibly more.

We need to stop any net increase in emissions within five to ten years and then to bring emissions down.

At present there seems little chance of us meeting this demanding target. But there will come a point (perhaps after 2018) at which the key players - the governments of the US and China - recognise the need for action. At that point they will combine to insist on a world response. If it's too late to handle the growth in emissions then geo-engineering may be the only option. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_change.html)

Several geo-engineering schemes have been proposed. Some obstruct incoming sunlight or reflect it back whilst others collect CO2 from the atmosphere and store it underground. All will be very expensive and will be required in addition to, not in place of, energy efficiency, reductions in aviation, renewable power generation, etc.

Most geo-engineering schemes will have significant side effects, eg they may warm some areas whilst cooling others. Inevitably there will be winners and losers. So what's needed is:

First, honesty about the possibility that our current efforts will fail.
Second, real R&D on geo-engineering schemes and their likely costs and effects.
Third, study of the forms of governance that such schemes will need.

The third is particularly significant. It's obvious that expensive schemes with world-scale impacts need effective governance. I, like most people of goodwill, would favour international governance aimed to solving the problem with the least damage to people and their environments.

But that is not what we are likely to get. In her book The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein has shown how the US government and major international organisations, especially the IMF, have used a series of crises, eg Iraq, the asian tsunami, New Orleans, to advance a neoconservative political agenda. Indeed, in some cases, and not just in Iraq, they have deliberately created the crises.

The effects of these political interventions have been to increase enrich certain major corporations whilst increasing violence, corruption, sectarianism and the gaps between rich and poor. More to my point - the proportion of the money spent that has produced real benefits on the ground has been astonishingly small.

These interventions - driven by an unholy alliance of China and the US - would constitute a big step towards the Police World scenario.

The neocons have been able to achieve these perverse effects because of their strong position - control of the US government is a big advantage - and because they have been always ready to propose - indeed impose - their preferred solutions. The challenge for people of goodwill is therefore to think through what's really needed before panic induces governments to adopt simplistic and counter-productive solutions.

Measuring international collaboration

2008-07-04T05:55:00.000-07:00

My scenarios for climate change – really for the social and political consequences of climate change – vary according to the degree to which nations will co-operate, long-term, to avoid and ameliorate the change.

I had given no thought to how we might measure that co-operation until I saw research by Michèle Bättig and others at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Battig’s group has created a co-operation index which combines five factors:

Speed of ratification of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Speed of ratification of the Kyoto protocol,
Frequency of payments to the UNFCCC
Timeliness in submitting emissions reports
Reductions in CO2 emissions relative to per capita GDP.

Inevitably, being a first attempt at something quite difficult, this index is imperfect. For instance, it is largely blind to actions, even relevant collaborative actions, taken below the level of the national government. That’s unfortunate since such actions may be precursors to a change in national policy – as appears to be happening in the USA.

More worryingly it does not seem to have been validated, ie shown to predict behaviour not used to calculate it. Therefore the authors’ findings about the causes of co-operative behaviour (though weak) are suspect.

Changes over time

An online summary of the work says “…co-operative behavior of countries within the climate change regime … is only little influenced by the results from climate change research,...”. However, since the study looked at variations between countries rather than changes over time it would not reveal changes due to climate change research that affects all or most countries. It seems almost certain that the increasing confidence that the IPCC has attached to its warnings has affected some governments – and has prompted some electorates, eg Australia, to change their governments.

A study of variations over time could look at whether changes in the severity and confidence level of IPCC warnings, both local and global, have influenced national and international policies. If they have, and if other drivers can be found, we would have a useful contribution to forecasting changes in willingness to co-operate in the future.

Pale green policies won’t keep the global lifeboat afloat

2008-06-25T01:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Irwin Stelzer of the Hudson Institute had an article in the Guardian (Brown’s pale green policies are more honest than most, 24 June 08) in which he praised Gordon Brown with faint damns. The article made some good points. ‘Cleaning up the environment’, ie changing our ways to use Earth’s resources sustainably, will be expensive. And, yes, politicians are hypocritical and short-sighted in wanting to take the credit for action without dealing with the electoral unpopularity that effective action will produce.

But what does Stelzer recommend? ‘Pale green policies’. That is, policies that do too little to achieve sustainability. Policies that will continue to drive global warming.

Stelzer’s real concern, as his website makes clear, is to promote ‘market solutions’ even if they do not actually solve the problems. He does not address the need to treat climate change as a global emergency that will make the Earth unable to support even its current population if left unchecked. In an emergency we put aside our normal preoccupations and focus on solving the problem. In WW2, for instance, we formed a government of national unity which took control of the economy.

Climate change is not one issue amongst many – just another environmental issue. It is the central survival issue of our time. It poses as great a threat as world war – just a less immediate one.

Today the whole human race is in one lifeboat. Because it’s a planet-sized lifeboat many people do not recognise this. But because we are in a lifeboat we need to put our effort into bailing – not selling our emergency supplies to each other!

Open letter to Piers Corbyn

2008-05-08T06:04:00.000-07:00

Piers Corbyn is a physicist who has published research on superconductivity, cosmology, solar physics, Sun-Earth relations and the weather. He runs a commercial weather forecasting business (www.weatheraction.com) and disagrees with the IPCC consensus on global warming.

Piers has challenged the IPCC '...to admit that there is no observational evidence … that CO2 levels (whether from man or nature) have driven or are driving world temperatures or climate change'. He’s issued a general challenge: 'If you believe there is evidence of the CO2 driver theory in the available data please present a graph of it'.

Here is my reply to the challenge.

Dear Piers,

Let me respond to your request for evidence by explaining why I won’t be providing any.

Since I’m not a climate scientist I must, even though I have a science degree, approach the issue as an informed layman. How is the informed layman to proceed in such a case?

a) He can ask whether the claimed effect is plausible based on what he does know. For instance I know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that there’s more in the atmosphere than there was before the industrial revolution and that temperatures and sea levels are rising globally. Now that doesn’t prove causation but it is consistent with it.

I also know that most of the reports I see on advances in climate science (in New Scientist for instance) suggest that change is now happening faster than was expected in the last IPCC report.

b) He can ask whether MOST of those who are competent to form a genuinely independent scientific judgement are agreed. In this case there’s a very broad agreement that increases in atmospheric CO2 are driving global warming. He’s entitled to note that there are always dissidents in science. Their existence is not evidence that the consensus is wrong.

c) He can ask whether the issue has thoroughly studied. Given the IPCC process climate change has perhaps been studied more thoroughly than any other comparable question.

d) He can ask whether the consensus is getting stronger or weaker. Plainly it’s getting stronger.

e) He can ask whether vested interests have been operating so as to undermine the science. In this case some of the world’s strongest vested interests have lobbied against accepting that increases in atmospheric CO2 are driving global warming:

The White House has censored US government scientists.
It has also pressed for the weakest form of words in IPCC drafting work.
Major multinationals have paid supposed climate scientists to contest the consensus in just the way that Big Tobacco sought to resist the evidence on smoking. (NB I don’t, of course, suggest you have been suborned in this way.)

f) He can ask whether people he knows personally have well-founded views on the science. In this case I know you. But I also knew David King at UEA’s School of Chemical Sciences in the 70s. So let’s call that a tie.

g) He can ask whether prominent non-scientists who are well advised on the science have accepted the consensus. Here I see that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, the UK Prime Minister, the US President and an overwhelming majority of senior business executives polled by McKinsey last year have either accepted or moved towards acceptance of the consensus. Insofar as any of these have a vested interest it lies for the majority in denying, not affirming, the evidence for man-driven climate change. Evidence against interest always weighs more heavily than the contrary.

So out of the seven tests that I, as an informed layman, can make six encourage me to believe that increases in atmospheric CO2 are driving global warming. One is inconclusive. Actually, that’s about as good as it gets.

Now none of this creates certainty but neither, in practice, does science. Science is always somewhat provisional.

The real question now is that of public policy and here a version of Pascal’s Wager applies. If the consensus is right it would be dangerous to the lives of many people to wait the years that may be needed to approach certainty more closely. If the consensus is wrong and we act as if it were true we will waste money on insulation, wind farms and carbon offsets and some of us will take fewer foreign trips.

Morally, I don’t find that a difficult decision.

Is climate change politics working for the poor?

2008-04-29T05:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes politics is knockabout comedy. Sometimes it’s tragic farce. And, just sometimes, it looks as if it might do some good. At last Tuesday’s meeting on the climate change bill I felt several times that here was politics that could do good. But was I right?

Climate Change Bill Public Meeting, 22 April 2008

Speakers:

Hilary Benn
Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Peter Ainsworth
Conservative Shadow Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary
Steve Webb
Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Energy, Food and Rural Affairs
Tony Juniper
Director of Friends of the Earth and representative of the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition

Chair : Anne McElvoy, Executive Editor of the Evening Standard.

The speakers were Hilary Benn and his Tory and LibDem shadows, plus Tony Juniper of FoE – which had organised the meeting. The speakers told a packed and often enthusiastic, house – the main meeting hall at London’s Friends’ House – that climate change was a vital, urgent problem and that they were committed to serious action. They agreed that a target of 60% reduction by 2050 would not be enough.

They congratulated each other on their shared commitment and on making the UK the first country in the world to set itself legally-binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions. And they congratulated the NGOs, like PA, and the audience on their roles in putting climate change on the political agenda. Continued public pressure will be needed, they agreed, to keep up the momentum. Though disagreements emerged they seemed minor.

It seems churlish to object when people are talking sense. And yet – with the exception of one man who called Hilary Benn a murderer – there didn’t seem to be the sense of moral outrage the situation requires. Benn spoke of targets for 2050 and five year budgeting. The opposition claimed credit for demanding a tougher target and annual reports. There was more than a touch of complacency that we were doing the right thing.

Yet LibDem spokesman Steve Webb argued that if we count aviation and shipping emissions the UK has made NO cut since 1990. Yet we need to cut emissions by three per cent EACH year to reach even the 60% target.

In my view Sarah Mukherjee of the BBC asked the key question: “Shouldn’t we just use less stuff?”. No politician was prepared to agree. Even Steve Webb described it as “a possible second term strategy for the LibDems”.

Afterwards a group of Practical Action supporters shared experiences at a local pub. We also met Tory spokesman Peter Ainsworth, who was rather franker than he’d been in public. Politicians and public are moving. But are they moving fast enough?

Energy use in the lifeboat scenario

2008-03-10T02:27:00.000-07:00

This post now relates to a revised version of the Lifeboat scenario.

The lifeboat scenario is the least unpleasant of my three climate change scenarios. However, it will be extremely difficult to realize as can be seen by considering the central issue of energy use. Though the uncertainties are too great to say exactly what changes will be needed to keep the lifeboat afloat we’ll almost certainly need to act in at least four ways.

First we must improve our efficiency in using energy, eg by community heat and power schemes, better house insulation and more fuel-efficient cars. This ought to be the easiest option because in cutting energy use we also save money. If people, businesses and governments aren’t doing what’s needed – and they mostly aren’t – that’s because of inertia and a preference for short-term convenience over long-term savings. Information campaigns, carbon taxes and stricter standards can all drive savings here.

Second we must reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation by:

a) Introducing low-carbon sources of energy such as wind, tidal, solar and nuclear.

b) Adding carbon capture and storage facilities to gas, coal and oil-fired power stations.

These steps are expensive and some of the technologies are unproven at least on the scale required. Moreover the effects of making these changes will only be felt over many years but their impact is large.

Third, we must replace other uses of fossil fuels, eg petrol for cars, with low-carbon electricity. This probably means settling for some loss of performance and perhaps of comfort and safety (since comfort and safety often add weight thus increasing fuel consumption). However, a great deal of driving is short journeys in which comfort is secondary and high speed a positive disadvantage.

Fourth, we must reduce our total demand for energy-consuming goods and services. We must:

a) Do less of the things that consume energy, eg travel, especially by car and plane, and eating meat.

b) Replace the things we buy less often.

c) Reduce the world population.

Now, there should be something in this list to offend everyone! Why will we need to do all these things? Because it’s likely that by the time we get international action on climate change we will be approaching, or even past, the point at which positive feedback effects cut in to drive increasing temperature gain. Indeed, some experts, Prof. James Lovelock for one, think that we have already passed the tipping point. So we will not be able to organize a soft landing. We’ll have to use all the means we can find.

It’s entirely possible that all of the first four measures will be insufficient by the time we actually apply them. If so we’ll have to take actions of a fifth kind. That’s steps to effect the global climate directly, eg by using genetically engineering plankton to capture CO2 from the atmosphere or dispersing aerosols in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight.

Now I accept that the science is uncertain so perhaps we won’t have to treat this as a global emergency. But the lack of progress in addressing climate change and the track record of international institutions suggest that a pessimistic view is most likely to be correct. After all, if the nations can’t stop such visible horrors as the genocide in Darfur, how likely is it that they’ll take timely action on the infinitely harder and less visible problem of climate change?

The only safe assumption is that we’ll have to do all of these things is we are to avoid the horrors of the police world and Hobbes world scenarios.

And to do them requires both vigorous inter-governmental action and a major change in social attitudes. These are needed both to motivate governments to act and to make the costs and loss of goods and services acceptable.

Does Business ‘Get’ Climate Change?

2008-03-04T04:17:00.000-08:00

A recent survey of nearly 3,000 top managers by McKinsey, the world’s leading management consultancy, shows a change in thinking about climate change. 51% see “environmental issues including climate change” as one of the top three issues that will affect public and political attention over the next five years. A similar proportion put it in the top three for impact on ‘shareholder value’ (ie the share price). The environment was rated a top three issue by more managers than any other issue.

This was reinforced for me at the Financial Times Innovation conference in London last year. Although climate change was not on the agenda it kept coming up and Gary Hamel, one of the world’s leading management thinkers, told the audience “Climate change is now one of humanity’s greatest challenges and therefore a challenge for any company.”

The good news is that this is up from 31% two years ago. 87% are personally worried about climate change and 81% see a role for government in addressing the issue. Overall they expect government to take the lead.

The bad news is that 49% of top managers don’t put it in the top three. And this proportion is 55% in China, 59% in North America and 67% in India.

The opinions of top managers matter both for the resources they control directly and because of their influence with governments and other businesses. 97% believe that the climate is changing. We haven’t yet persuaded them to take responsibility but we’re well on the way.

Ref:

Assessing the impact of societal issues. The McKinsey Quarterly, 24 November 2007. (Also on the web.)

Global warming is not an 'environmental' problem

2007-11-20T11:47:00.001-08:00

We've wrestled with environmental problems for many decades. Those problems include, in most people's opinion and in no particular order, preservation of threatened species, green spaces and wilderness areas, clean air, reduction of landfill, keeping GM crops out of the food chain and encouragement of walking and cycling to work.

Now I don't say these things don't matter. They do. But the cost of getting them wrong is, on the scale of national finances, fairly small. Getting GM crops into the food chain won't poison anyone. The extinction of the Yangtse River Dolphin has made many people sad and no one will die because of it.

Global warming is different. Failing to deal with that will lead to millions of deaths (though not all at once) from storms, floods and starvation. Global warming does not threaten the survival of our species. The Black Death killed about a third of us but we bounced back within a century.

Yesterday I was at ?What If!'s Good Profit conference in London (an excellent event by the way). With the sainted Al Gore giving a dynamic keynote speech no-one there can have doubted the reality of the threat. Yet even there I heard people say how difficult it was to "choose between properity and the environment".

That's not the issue. The issue is choosing between a sustainable ecomony and one that will probably crash, physically or finacially, killing large numbers and undermining the right of the survivors to call themselves civilised.

Scenario planning for climate change

2007-11-19T01:17:00.000-08:00

This post is obsolete. It has been replaced by a new set of scenarios.

We badly need ways of thinking about the implications of climate change. Most of what’s written gets hung up on the uncertainties of the science. If we don’t know, and we don’t, whether temperatures will increase by one or two or four degrees how can we prepare?

The answer is scenario planning.

Climate change is a long-term problem so let’s look at the long-term – 2050. On that timescale little is certain but there are two big uncertainties.

The first uncertainty is the temperature increase. The global temperature is currently 0.6 degrees higher than that in the pre-industrial period. By 2050 we will know whether we’ve managed to keep the increase below two degrees. That’s hardly risk-free but it should be manageable. If we haven’t then we’ll already be aware of the positive feedback effects that will drive the temperature to a four or even six degree increase. (Some models suggest that rises over ten degrees are possible but let’s not go overboard; four degrees is bad enough.) (The environmental consequences of various possible temperatures have been discussed by Mark Lynas in Six degrees. Prof. James Lovelock has discussed the positive feedback effects in The Revenge of Gaia.)

The second uncertainty is the degree of international collaboration on dealing with climate change. The Montreal treaty on CFCs showed that international collaboration is possible. The post-Kyoto experience shows that it’s very hard to get when it requires significant economic sacrifices. However, sentiment is already changing and a recent survey of business executives by McKinsey showed significant concern about climate change. Action now seems likely. The real uncertainty is whether governments will commit to enough change soon enough to avoid triggering the positive feedbacks.

Now we combine the two to get our scenarios. I ignore the possibility that we can keep the temperature increase below two degrees without international collaboration because it’s impossible (unless the scientific consensus is badly wrong).

Scenario 1: Lifeboat

In this scenario the nations do collaborate soon enough to restrain CO2 emissions and the increase is kept below two degrees. I call this the Lifeboat scenario since it requires that every state recognises that we are all in the same boat and that its resources are barely adequate.

In his book Heat George Monbiot has described the technology changes that will be needed to realise the Lifeboat scenario in the UK. He believes that the UK and developed European nations can retain their standard of living (except for flying) by making an extensive set of changes to our industrial base. Most of this is plausible but almost every part is challenging. His conclusion requires that we meet every one of these challenges and this seems very optimistic. We will need to do more either by cutting our standard of living or by reducing our numbers.

The key assumption for this scenario is that the nations collaborate but this collaboration will not be easy. As with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) there will be disputes and we will need a World Climate Authority (WCA), analogous to the World Trade Organisation, to deal with them. The WCA will have, at minimum, to issue emissions permits and to check that actual emissions do not exceed these permissions. It will have to impose sanctions against defaulters. These sanctions will have to be backed by at least the threat of military force, though it’s unclear whether this will require a world police force.

This scenario requires changes in production with fewer new products, more repair and recycling and longer product lifetimes. A significant cultural change will be needed which I’ll call green Puritanism. Green Puritans will disapprove of excessive consumption and travel and these attitudes will reinforce and be reinforced by laws against waste.

Lifeboat will be different from our world but could be a good world to live in.

Scenario 2: Police World

In scenario 2 the nations have begun to collaborate against climate change but not in time. By 2050 the temperature rise has already exceeded two degrees and major positive feedback effects are visible.

Major habitat changes have already occurred, eg in the Sahara and Amazon basin, leading to a marked reduction in the Earth’s carrying capacity. An increase of at least four degrees is now certain.

It’s clear that the Earth cannot support its current population and that existing human institutions cannot survive the huge population movements that these changes will provoke. In Collapse Jared Diamond has described a variety of precedents for social collapse due to overuse of natural resources.

Once the inevitability of this collapse becomes clear the multinational bodies will shift their focus from mitigation to survival. They will therefore collaborate to ensure that some people and institutions survive. They will identify the territories remote from the equator where the prospects are best and then limit and direct migration into these refuges. The rest of the Earth will be progressively abandoned.

Life in these refuges will be hard but life outside them will become literally impossible; most of those outside them will die. These deaths will be spread over many decades and will mainly be from starvation, though natural disasters and fighting will contribute.

Resistance to the new world order will be severe but the multinational authorities will take large-scale military action to maintain the borders of the refuges. This scenario assumes that the multinational authorities succeed in maintaining law and order and an industrial base but this will be at the price of human rights and ordinary human compassion. The need for vigorous military action against those outside the refuges and direction of labour within them will lead to severe rationing of almost everything and a world-wide police state.

Scenario 3: New Dark Age

In this final scenario attempts to international collaboration have failed to prevent temperature rises and have broken down. As the value of those cold regions in which people will be able to survive becomes clear those nations with such regions will prepare their defences. The others will attempt to negotiate access to these regions. When this fails they will resort to war.

Some large nations (eg Russia and Argentina) will include some refuge areas though not enough for their whole populations. Civil wars will result.

As climate pressures increase (over a period of many decades) military power will become the dominant reality in human affairs. Political authority will give way to it. Jared Diamond’s Collapse shows examples of this breakdown.

Repeated wars will inflict major damage on the very resources, both agricultural and industrial, that they are trying to control. Wars will also destroy much of humanity’s capacity to innovate, except in military matters, and to do or even understand science and the arts. A new global Dark Age will follow.

The new Dark Age will doubtless last several centuries, during which the human population will fall to a fraction of its current level. The best that can be said of this scenario is that it need not last indefinitely. The Greek and later European Dark Ages both ended and were followed by the renaissance of culture and learning. Though we have not previously experienced either a global Dark Age or such abrupt climate change there is reason to hope that our descendants will ultimately be able to rebuild a civilization.

Plausibility

I’m aware that two of my scenarios may sound more like science fiction than sober reflection. However, these scenarios run forward from 2050 and much of today’s world would have seemed like science fiction to our grandparents.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the impacts of four degrees of warming. It’s inconceivable, at least to me, that our civilization will be unchanged by these impacts and it’s time we took this seriously. I’ll return to the scenarios in greater depth in future posts.

When should we panic?

2007-11-16T01:32:00.000-08:00

The evidence for human-driven climate change is compelling. If you doubt this then this blog is not for you. (Perhaps you should read the latest IPCC report.)

A rise of two degrees now seems inevitable and much larger rises entirely possible. The consequences of a two degree rise will be serious. We, I speak globally, will lose agricultural production and human habitat. People will migrate in unprecedented numbers and come into conflict with their luckier neighbours. People will starve and some will, with justice, blame the developed nations.

It is, probably, possible to restrain temperature growth so that we experience no more than two degrees of warming. This is technically difficult because of the delays in the climate system and politically difficult because it requires real sacrifices from so many people.

But this is irrelevant because we really aren't trying. No government of a developed country has yet committed itself to a sufficient degree of emissions reduction and several governments of developing countries seem committed to increased emissions. The only relevant international agreement, the Kyoto treaty, would be inadequate even if the US had joined - which it hasn't.

We need significant action within the next decade yet itstead of applying the brakes on climate change we are currently using the accelerator.

So my question is this. How long must be wait before concluding that saving the climate is a lost cause? When should we panic?