Duncan Brown
Broken, like its namesake. But is it worth mending?
Andrew Montford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion,” reviewed for Prospect by Matt Ridley, tells a story that will undoubtedly worry those who believe that our climate is warming—and infuriate critics (who are legion) of the book’s protagonist, Steve McIntyre.
If you haven’t come across him before, McIntyre was, in 2003, the first to publish a critique of the “hockey stick” temperature graph: the classic piece of evidence for man-made global warming used since 1998. McIntyre argued that the graph was fundamentally unsound by demonstrating, for example, that the model produced a “hockey stick” shape even when random data was put into it. There followed Montford’s story, of articles suppressed, data sets withheld and “warmist” malfeasance.
Since 2005 McIntyre has edited climateaudit.com, where he and a multitude of commenters dig for assumptions and oversights in every piece of climate science from a position of sceptical empiricism. His chief adversary is the Nasa climatologist Gavin Schmidt and his group of climate scientists at realclimate.org. (McIntyre has a maths degree, but no background in applied science.)
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John Naish
Last year's most pointless gadget
Fancy buying a portable urinal that’s shaped like a golf club? Or maybe you’d prefer a motorised ice-cream cone? Well, someone surely wants them. Such prime examples of human ingenuity have inspired the launch of the 2010 Landfill Prize, the award for Britain’s most useless consumer product.
The golf-club urinal is an early nomination for this year’s award. It’s basically a hollow plastic tube that’s been made to look like a club. The idea is that golfers can wee into it while playing a round. What’s wrong with the time-honoured practice of nipping behind a tree?
The motorised ice-cream cone won last year’s prize for the most gimmick-laden, pointless junk anyone had seen in the previous 12 months. This battery-driven plastic cone whizzes around so that all you have to do is hold your tongue out and apply face to gadget. Bingo—no more dull wrist-twirling, but probably a lot of ice cream down your front.
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Mary Fitzgerald
How do we know that carbon emissions are rising? The worldwide system of measurement is open to error and abuse, and only half of global emissions are properly accounted for.
Industrialised (Annex 1) nations report their domestic CO2 inventories annually to the UNFCCC: this represents about 50 per cent of global emissions. Non-Annex 1 countries like China, India and Brazil are expected to report as well (though the least developed nations, like Bangladesh and Madagascar, can submit at their discretion). But their reports are sporadic and do not undergo the same review procedure as Annex 1 parties.
Countries estimate their emissions from fuel sales and energy demand—for example, household heating needs, gas and petrol sales—and take into account any “clean energy” developments. The problem, though, is what is measured and what is not. They report on their territorial emissions: those produced within their boundaries or under their jurisdiction. But does this necessarily reflect a country’s environmental impact? It excludes, for example, fuel sales for international aviation and shipping (responsible for about 10 per cent of global emissions) as well as fuel used in military operations abroad.
Worse still, emissions associated with imports are omitted. A sizeable portion of Britain’s heavy industry has moved overseas in the past few decades, but though we no longer manufacture many products, we still use and import them, often from non-Annex 1 countries like India and China. So our accountability for the CO2 associated with our lifestyles is simply exported to other countries—and mainly those without any binding emissions reduction target.
Any plan to cut emissions, particularly one that involves trading emissions permits internationally, fails if you can’t verify the data. But how do you force countries to adopt compatible measuring methods or even, say, comply with the demands of a super regulator? How would one insist that China does this, for instance? There is technology available for cross-border monitoring, but using it without permission would further erode trust.
This is why securing an agreement on how to measure emissions (specifically what should be counted, and where) may be the most important, yet least publicly recognised, step in tackling climate change. The chances of this happening at Copenhagen, however, are slim.
Elizabeth Kirkwood
It sounds like the basis for an Edgar Allan Poe story: a woman visits the site of a grave in a remote wood where, one day, she knows she will be buried. It is an uncanny scenario and if it hadn’t been such a bright August afternoon, it would have all the macabre potential of a Victorian gothic. Yet as we walked a secluded coppice near Dianne Neil’s home in Hampshire, where one day she will indeed be buried, she talked in such an animated way about the funeral she has planned that it began to sound like a rather genial affair.
Dianne is one of a growing number of people in Britain to have visited their own grave. “It looks just like an ordinary wood, but I find it comforting to know that this is where they’ll put me when my time comes.” At the age of 69 she decided to pick out her own plot at a natural burial ground, not because she is terminally ill, but so that she is guaranteed an environmentally-friendly funeral.
Standing side by side, we stared down at the small square of mossy grass at our feet. This, she confirmed, will be the spot. After a short silence, Dianne explained: “I’m drawn to the idea of leaving a gentle mark on the Earth. The thought that when I die, my beliefs will go out the window saddens me—as if it no longer matters how I’ve chosen to live. If you were a Christian, no doubt, you’d want to ensure you were having a Christian burial.”
Since they first started taking place in Britain roughly ten years ago, the popularity of green funerals has grown enormously, and today they are the most requested alternative to conventional burial. Whilst there is no strict definition of what constitutes an eco-burial, the main distinction places an onus on using carbon-friendly materials and methods wherever possible. Experts at the Natural Death Centre, a charity that supports those trying to arrange inexpensive, family-organised and environmentally-friendly funerals, has predicted that 20,000 people in Britain will be buried in a green way by 2010 (the number is currently around 11,000).
Why opt for a green funeral? For a start, conventional burials generate an astonishing CO2 footprint: they tend to include MDF or hardwood coffins with plastic (non-biodegradable) handles, lined with synthetic material, topped off with an “air-mile heavy” granite headstone quarried, almost inevitably, in China. Embalming processes commonly use formaldehyde which leaks into the soil, making most graveyards toxic waste grounds that are inhospitable to local wildlife.
And while often considered the greener option, on closer inspection cremations are also surprisingly carbon heavy: the average one produces around 70kg of CO2, the equivalent output of a family household every two weeks. Worse still are the associated mercury emissions. Cremations pump out 15-16 per cent of mercury released into Britain’s air—this figure is on the rise as more people opt for cremation, thanks to diminishing burial space and, in turn, the soaring price for an empty plot. Out of morbid curiosity, I recently enquired how much a burial spot in Highgate cemetery would cost me—the cheapest was a mere £4,500, whilst the more “elite” plot comes in at around £100,000. Compared to this, eco-funerals (typically between £2,000-£3,000) look like a bargain; although cremation (between £400-£500) still comes out cheapest.
The prospect of a cardboard coffin may fill some with horror, but eco-coffins have come a long way since their rudimentary beginnings. The current trend is to handpaint a cardboard coffin, or, a little more peculiarly, to Photoshop images of the deceased onto it. Alternatively you could choose a willow or bamboo casket, which, though they occasionally resemble over-sized picnic hampers, do otherwise suggest a dignified simplicity, and allow friends and family to decorate them with flowers and ribbon. Flowers too, can be sourced locally by “green” florists to save air miles.
It is this “organic” aspect of an eco funeral which Jeremy Smith, director of the undertakers Green Ending, suggests makes them so appealing: “We spend a long time talking to the family about the deceased, to get a good idea of the person as they were and then build the funeral around that discussion. We never say you have to do this or have that, but encourage people to create something individual.” He relates many stories, some deeply poignant, others darkly comic. There was the child’s funeral, where the grave was lined with moss to create a nest effect. Or the pub landlord who wanted a 1970s disco theme. Or the elderly lady who wanted to be buried in a blanket only, without a coffin. This, he says, was logistically almost impossible, yet they did it.
The appeal of this “hands-on” organic process was central to Dianne’s decision, who, as we walked on through the burial site, explained that she has planned far more than where she’ll be buried. “I’m a gregarious dresser, so I’m insisting everyone come dressed to the nines—top hat and tails, stomping through the woods. I’m having a humanist minister reading, and a horse pull my coffin to the woods on a cart. A friend, who’s a jazz musician, is going to play. And if my two dogs don’t beat me to it, they’re going to be there too. Though I imagine they’ll be more interested in running through the woods rather than see me off.”
Eco-burials can take place in traditional graveyards; however, those wanting a truly green ending often choose to be buried in one of the Britain’s natural burial sites—this country has over 200 of them, mainly woodlands and meadows. The majority do not allow headstones, instead encouraging the planting of a tree as a living memorial, or a small wooden grave marker. And the effect of this restriction, in the site I visited with Dianne, is surprisingly poignant. Compared to a single white ribbon tied to a tree branch, or a line of smooth, round pebbles arranged in a simple circle, a traditional granite gravestone seems almost brutal. Whether or not you care about your carbon footprint after you’re dead and gone, at the very least an eco-burial can be a philosophical choice—conveying a sense of peaceful humility in the face of our inevitable mortality.
Isabel Hilton
Last year, David Wheeler, a researcher at the Centre for Global Development in Washington, calculated that if nothing changed, by 2075 the combined greenhouse-gas emissions of India and China would equal all the historic and current emissions of the world’s richest countries. In other words, even if we could magic away the climate impacts of all the industrial revolutions that took place before 1990, it would make little difference. Absent a dramatic change in the way India and China do business, we would only postpone the day of reckoning by a few decades; come 2060, we would be back where we are now, scrambling around against the clock to avoid catastrophe.
It was a sobering piece of work, not least for India and China. In their public postures, both countries were sticking firmly to the Kyoto-based division of the world into Annex 1 countries—those that had grown rich on emitting carbon—and non-Annex 1 countries, roughly categorised as blameless victims. At Kyoto, Annex 1 countries accepted that their historic responsibility imposed on them the obligation both to reduce their own emissions and to fund developing countries’ adaptation to the impacts of climate change, and to a less damaging, if more expensive, path to prosperity.
When the Kyoto protocol was being negotiated in the early 1990s, India and China had hardly begun their dizzying development of the past two decades. The landmark moment, 18 months ago, when China overtook the US as the world’s biggest emitter of CO2, was barely imaginable then. Both nations had been grouped with other developing countries.
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Vijay Joshi
Delegates at Copenhagen will be bitterly divided on how the cost of tackling climate change should be shared between advanced and developing countries. After all, the concept of ideal fairness is highly controversial: philosophers have debated it for centuries. When it comes to a deal on global emissions, is such a thing even possible?
Developing countries (DCs) make two arguments about fair burden-sharing. The first is based on historic responsibility for the accumulated stock of carbon emitted by advanced countries (ACs). The ACs have used up a large part of the safe carbon-absorbing capacity of the atmosphere and should compensate the DCs for this—a persuasive point. Even so, it runs up against some powerful moral intuitions. The ACs did not expropriate knowingly. They acted in the belief, universally held until recently, that the atmosphere was an infinite resource. Moreover, the expropriators are mostly dead and gone. Should their descendants be held responsible for acts they did not themselves commit? True, ACs benefit hugely from their past carbon-intensive industrialisation, but should they be liable for all of this?
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Brian Semple
Home Insulation: the first step in reducing carbon emissions
Further evidence (if any was necessary) that Prospect’s influence stretches right to the very highest echelons of British political power: following John Beddington’s call in these pages for UK homes to be made more carbon friendly, the government will announce plans this week to give one in four homes a complete eco-makeover.
According to today’s Guardian, the campaign will involve “giving 7m houses and flats a complete refit to improve insulation, and will be compared to the 10-year programme that converted British homes to gas central heating in the 1960s and 1970s. Householders could also be encouraged to install small-scale renewable and low-carbon heating systems such as solar panels and wood-burning boilers.”
Sound familiar? Beddington, the government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, had already outlined in December 2008’s issue of Prospect the importance of adapting our buildings in the fight to lower UK carbon emissions.
“If we really want to sustain the planet, we must first fix the buildings where we live, work and play…Only a third of British homes have good loft insulation. Even modest improvements, when combined with modern boilers, can cut energy use for heating by over 30 per cent. And compared to ambitious “micro-generation” installations—new ways of producing power in small amounts, close to home—most of these measures pay their way relatively quickly.”
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