Philip Hunter
James Lovelock: not afraid to admit he's been wrong
The words of a nonagenarian may never have been so eagerly awaited as those of James Lovelock when he addressed a Royal Society dinner earlier this month. Lovelock, creator of the controversial Gaia hypothesis, is certainly still capable of original thinking, and it was his verdict on recent environmental controversies—such as the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia—that his audience wanted to hear.
The Gaia hypothesis, which made Lovelock the darling of the emerging green movement of the 1960s, proposes that life on earth is closely coupled with the surface, ocean and atmosphere. Each element co-operates to keep conditions relatively constant—at least in the absence of exceptional external forces. Initially, he was ridiculed: the idea that inanimate objects such as rocks are active participants in a super-organism was understandably controversial, and rejected by most scientists. But the idea that life exerts a strong influence on the environment has come to be widely accepted.
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Fred Pearce
Many of today’s most-respected thinkers, from Stephen Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless we “do something” about population growth. In the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, “in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty years.”
But this is nonsense. For a start, there is no exponential growth. In fact, population growth is slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to women in most of the world has been in decline. Globally, women today have half as many babies as their mothers did, mostly out of choice. They are doing it for their own good, the good of their families, and, if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.
Here are the numbers. Forty years ago, the average woman had between five and six kids. Now she has 2.6. This is getting close to the replacement level which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. As I show in my new book, Peoplequake, half the world already has a fertility rate below the long-term replacement level. That includes all of Europe, much of the Caribbean and the far east from Japan to Vietnam and Thailand, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Tunisia.
It also includes China, where the state decides how many children couples can have. This is brutal and repulsive. But the odd thing is that it may not make much difference any more: Chinese communities around the world have gone the same way without any compulsion—Taiwan, Singapore, and even Hong Kong. When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, it had the lowest fertility rate in the world: below one child per woman.
So why is this happening? Demographers used to say that women only started having fewer children when they got educated and the economy got rich, as in Europe. But tell that to the women of Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest nations, where girls are among the least educated in the world, and mostly marry in their mid-teens. They have just three children now, less than half the number their mothers had. India is even lower, at 2.8. Tell that also to the women of Brazil. In this hotbed of Catholicism, women have two children on average—and this is falling. Nothing the priests say can stop it.
Women are doing this because, for the first time in history, they can. Better healthcare and sanitation mean that most babies now live to grow up. It is no longer necessary to have five or six children to ensure the next generation—so they don’t.
There are holdouts, of course. In parts of rural Africa, women still have five or more children. But even here they are being rational. Women mostly run the farms, and they need the kids to mind the animals and work in the fields.
Then there is the middle east, where traditional patriarchy still rules. In remote villages in Yemen, girls as young as 11 are forced into marriage. They still have six babies on average. But even the middle east is changing. Take Iran. In the past 20 years, Iranian women have gone from having eight children to less than two—1.7 in fact—whatever the mullahs say.
The big story here is that rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, Muslim or Catholic, secular or devout, with or without tough government birth control policies in place, most countries tell the same tale of a reproductive revolution.
That doesn’t mean population growth has ceased. The world’s population is still rising by 70m a year. This is because there is a time lag: the huge numbers of young women born during the earlier baby boom may only have had two children each. That is still a lot of children. But within a generation, the world’s population will almost certainly be stable, and is very likely to be falling by mid-century. In the US they are calling my new book “The Coming Population Crash.”
Is this good news for the environment and for the planet’s resources? Clearly, other things being equal, fewer people will do less damage to the planet. But it won’t on its own do a lot to solve the world’s environmental problems, because the second myth about population growth is that it is the driving force behind our wrecking of the planet.
In fact, rising consumption today far outstrips the rising headcount as a threat to the planet. And most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population, while most of the remaining population growth is in countries with a very small impact on the planet. By almost any measure you choose, a small proportion of the world’s people take the majority of the world’s resources and produce the majority of its pollution.
Let’s look at carbon dioxide emissions: the biggest current concern because of climate change. The world’s richest half billion people—that’s about 7 per cent of the global population—are responsible for half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the poorest 50 per cent of the population are responsible for just 7 per cent of emissions. Virtually all of the extra 2bn or so people expected on this planet in the coming 30 or 40 years will be in this poor half of the world. Stopping that, even if it were possible, would have only a minimal effect on global emissions, or other global threats.
Ah, you say, but what about future generations? All those big families in Africa will have yet bigger families. Well, that’s an issue of course. But let’s be clear about the scale of the difference involved. The carbon emissions of one American today are equivalent to those of around four Chinese, 20 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 40 Nigerians or 250 Ethiopians. A woman in rural Ethiopia can have ten children and, in the unlikely event that those ten children all live to adulthood and have ten children of their own, the entire clan of more than a hundred will still be emitting less carbon dioxide than you or me. It is over-consumption, not over-population that matters.
Economists predict the world’s economy will grow by 400 per cent by 2050. If this does indeed happen, less than a tenth of that growth will be due to rising human numbers. True, some of those extra poor people might one day become rich. And if they do—and I hope they do—their impact on the planet will be greater. But it is the height of arrogance for us in the rich world to downplay the importance of our own environmental footprint because future generations of poor people might one day have the temerity to get as rich and destructive as us. How dare we?
Some green activists need to take a long hard look at themselves. We all like to think of ourselves as progressives. But Robert Malthus, the man who first warned 200 years ago that population growth would produce demographic armageddon, was in his time a favourite of capitalist mill owners. He opposed Victorian charities because he said they were only making matters worse for the poor, encouraging them to breed. He said the workhouses were too lenient. Progressives of the day hated him. Charles Dickens attacked him in several books: when Oliver Twist asked for more gruel in the workhouse, for instance, that was a satire on a newly introduced get-tough law on workhouses, known popularly as Malthus’s Law. In Hard Times, the headmaster obsessed with facts, Thomas Gradgrind, had a son called Malthus. In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was also widely seen at the time as a caricature of Malthus.
Malthus, it should be remembered, spent many years teaching British colonial administrators before they went out to run the empire. They adopted his ideas that famine and disease were the result of overbreeding, so the victims should be allowed to die. It was Malthusian thinking that led to the huge and unnecessary death toll in the Irish potato famine.
We must not follow the lure of Malthus, and blame the world’s poor for the environmental damaged caused overwhelmingly by us: the rich. The truth is that the population bomb is being defused round the world. But the consumption bomb is still primed and ever more dangerous.
Fred Pearce is author of Peoplequake (Eden Project Books)
Read what James Lovelock, Bjorn Lomborg, Ed Miliband and many other experts have to say about climate change in Prospect’s Copenhagen special
Roddy Campbell
An automatic weather station being installed on Butler Island, Antarctica
The belief that man is warming the Earth’s climate via greenhouse gas emissions is supported by evidence showing a modest increase in global temperatures over recent decades. But what is the scale of these increases, and are they in any way abnormal? To find out, we need an accurate record over a long period. This is where the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) comes in, and why the “climategate” scandal over its leaked emails matters so much.
The CRU is one of the world’s leading climatic research bodies. Its scientists, along with the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, build and maintain the world’s temperature record. This may sound easy, especially as the figures they produce always seem precise: in 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put warming over the past 100 years at exactly 0.74°C. But tracking such tiny temperature changes is tricky—even over the last century when we have had decent thermometer coverage. Do you measure highs, lows or averages? Should readings come from Siberia, Antarctica or Australia—and, if all of them, how do you weight the results for a global average? By land area? What about seas?
To get round this the CRU divides the world into geographical grids. It gathers data from meteorological offices all over the world, makes adjustments and obtains a temperature for each grid. Researchers then compare this result against a baseline of historical temperatures for that grid. The average of the differences across every grid reveals how much global temperatures today differ from historical temperatures.
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Oliver Morton
John Latham and Stephen Salter’s idea of spraying up sea salt is one of the proposed schemes that might cool the planet
If you want to know why many people take a dim view of geoengineering—a catch-all term for technological interventions to cool the climate system—look no further than Richard Branson. In October, Branson told the Wall Street Journal that “if we could come up with a geoengineering answer… then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necessary. We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.” But the idea that such schemes—for example, giant mirrors in space, artificially-brightened clouds or vast airborne Hoovers sucking up carbon dioxide—are a reasonable response to carbon emissions that can allow humanity to carry on polluting would strike most people as mad, bad or both. Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace, even said in 2008 that many of these ideas were “outright dangerous.”
If so, Richard Branson isn’t the only dangerous man. In recent months climate fixes have become quite the buzzy topic. In September 2009 the Royal Society released the first major report on the subject by a national academy of science. Around the same time “sceptical environmentalist” Bjørn Lomborg brought together five eminent economists to assess potential climate change solutions. The group concluded that research into geoengineering offered a better “cost-benefit ratio” than any other approach. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will discuss many aspects of the subject when the next of its hugely influential Assessment Reports appears in 2013, having given it only a few pages in its 2007 report. The IPCC’s chair, Rajendra Pachauri, has talked of carbon dioxide removal technologies probably being necessary in the long run. Less significantly, but with far higher visibility, economist Steven D Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner’s book Superfreakonomics served up various unconvincing and breathless claims on the topic with a side order of needless error, leading to epic levels of vituperation in the blogosphere, and many delightfully snarky reviews.
To understand why this debate excites such passion, start with Branson’s idea that geoengineering could permit people to keep on burning fossil fuels. Here environmentalists and scientists agree that no geoengineering scheme can simply cancel out the effects of rising emissions. Greenhouse warming has distinctive effects on the climate that cannot just be reversed by reducing incoming sunlight; removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while continuing to emit more of it cannot in the near term reduce concentrations. So the one all-but-universally agreed opinion on geoengineering is that while it may ameliorate some aspects of climate change, it is not an alternative to reducing emissions. A second round of objections runs that geoengineering would be used to delay tough action on emissions reduction today in favour of technological fixes tomorrow. So not only should we doubt airline-owners like Branson, but we should treat any scientific research on the topic as inherently dangerous. “It is naïve to think that politicians who have failed to deliver on mitigation targets will not jump at the opportunity for a ‘techno-fix,’” says Jim Thomas of Canadian environmental group ETC.
Yet you don’t have to be an expert in deconstruction or denial to sense that behind these geoengineering-is-not-an-alternative arguments lies the fear that, at some level, it really is one. The Royal Society’s report’s press release read: “Stop emitting CO2 or geoengineering could be our only hope.” Its authors thus framed the technology as an unsavoury “plan B” that merited study only to use as an “emergency response” to the imminent collapse of the Greenland ice sheet or similar catastrophe. But what is a Plan B if not an alternative, even if it is not an alternative that you want? To understand geoengineering better, concentrate not on what it isn’t, or what you don’t want it to be; look instead at what it is, and what it could become. Geoengineering is not an alternative, but it can be an addition. This neglected set of ways in which people can alter climate should be part of mainstream debate on climate change, studied and assessed as a part of the whole. And that is going to require a far greater level of research. Despite all the public discussion there are only a few dozen people in the world contributing to the scientific literature.
Much of the “otherness” of geoengineering stems from the fact that it seems too futuristic and unprecedented. Yet global warming is itself an increasingly deliberate activity. No one pumps oil from 5km below the seabed, refines it into gasoline and sells it through a retail network by accident. Selling—or buying—fossil fuels does not take place for the purpose of climate change, but that change can no longer be seen as an unintended consequence. What is more, other climate-changing processes already exist, and are under our explicit control. As a recent study chaired by David Lee of Manchester Metropolitan University confirmed, the world’s shipping industry provides fairly significant global cooling. Ships burn fuel high in sulphur, and so emit lots of sulphur dioxide. This forms tiny particles of sulphuric acid, that enrich the water-droplet content of low-lying clouds over the oceans. More droplets mean whiter clouds, and whiter clouds mean more sunlight reflected into space. The
shipping industry thus works, in Lee’s words, as a form of “inadvertent geoengineering.”
This example illustrates the complexity of climate change. Far from being a unitary problem to be solved, it is a range of causes, effects, meanings and implications. Along with carbon dioxide, there are the greenhouse gases methane, ozone, nitrous oxide and more. Then there are the problems of deforestation, irrigation, urbanisation, nitrogen deposition, nitrogen run-off, chemical smogs, and so on. These items interact in forbiddingly complex ways, not only with each other but also with the economy, and with people’s values and ideological stances. It makes much more sense to create a home for geoengineering within this complexity than to keep it out. “The climate is complicated,” says Tim Lenton, a professor of Earth systems science at the University of East Anglia who works in this field. “Why would we try to control it using just the one knob?”
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Which knobs should we seek to twiddle? Pull back from the complexity, and imagine our climate to be a bathtub full of energy. The energy flows in from the sunshine tap in the form of visible light, and it flows down the cosmic plughole as infrared radiation—that is, waste heat. Normally the input will match the output, but greenhouse gases have partially blocked the drain. The level of energy in the bath is rising, so the climate is getting hotter. Present responses to climate change are adaptation (goggles and a snorkel) or mitigation (reducing the rate at which the drain gets further blocked). If mitigation succeeds in the way most people envisage—by reducing emissions to more or less zero over the course of this century—the energy will stop rising, but it would not fall back to its old level. The drain might not be becoming more clogged, but it would not be becoming unclogged either.
Geoengineering offers two ways to empty the bath. You can reach out a toe to turn the sunlight tap, or you can find a plunger and unclog the drain. “Tap” methods reflect sunlight away by putting aerosols into the stratosphere or brightening clouds, painting roofs white and so on. “Drain” methods almost all concentrate on removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, either by chemical engineering or by planting trees and crops, which must be disposed of so that the carbon they store during photosynthesis does not get released again.
For almost as long as people have been worrying about global warming, they have been talking about these kinds of geo-engineering solutions. Back in the 1970s Mikhail Budyko, a Soviet climatologist, first suggested putting a veil of sulphate particles into the stratosphere by burning sulphur in jet planes, thus reproducing the cooling hazes known to follow volcanic eruptions. Around the same time, Freeman Dyson, a physicist given to futuristic speculation, worked out a plan to suck up carbon emissions with new forests while also developing alternative energy on the scale required to cut emissions to zero. By the early 1990s, more or less all the forms of geoengineering now under discussion—from the more exotic space mirrors to brightened grasslands and deserts, new forests, fertilising the oceans to create algae blooms and sucking the carbon dioxide out of the sky—had been looked at.
But the research did not take off. Many researchers shunned the topic fearing it a diversion from the real problem. There was a fear, too, of unexpected consequences—what, for example, might a stratospheric veil do to the ozone layer?—not to mention the hubris of it all. So from the 1990s to the mid-2000s, very few scientists worked on the problem and there was very little funding for it. And both those things remain largely true today. As a result, such interest as there has been has often come from outside traditional science. In 2007, Richard Branson launched his Virgin Earth Challenge, a $25m prize for the development of a successful carbon dioxide removal system. Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft, invented a scheme that pumped aerosols into the stratosphere using airship-supported hosepipes (see box p33), which also formed the basis for the controversial chapter in Dubner and Levitt’s Superfreakonomics.
That said, there has been rising academic interest in the past few years, which can be traced to a 2006 paper by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-prize winning chemist and perhaps the world’s most influential atmospheric scientist. In the early 1970s, Crutzen’s studies revealed the fragility of the ozone layer. In the 1980s he raised the possibility that a nuclear winter might result from the smoke and soot produced by a nuclear war. His suggestion in 2000 that human influence on climate is so great that the industrial revolution marked the start of a new geological era—the anthropocene—crystallised how many researchers felt. Crutzen’s scientific reputation gave geoengineering an imprimatur it had never possessed before.
While his paper did not add much substance to what had already been written in the previous ten years, its novelty lay in its suggestions of how recent events could give the idea more traction. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines pumped 10m tonnes of sulphur into the upper atmosphere. Climate monitoring after this event proved the theory of sulphate-aerosol cooling. Crutzen also cited research revealing that emissions acted to acidify the ocean, damaging ecosystems and potentially dooming coral reefs. This gave new weight to the argument that carbon dioxide emissions had to be controlled, regardless of geoengineering.
The greatest fillip for geoengineering research came from the fact that after more than a decade of political pressure for emissions reduction, little progress had been made. There was a real possibility that emissions control would not happen in time, so another solution was needed. All these points were repeated in the subsequent smattering of reports, journals and meetings that have raised the subject’s profile.
Crutzen’s most original contribution in that paper, though, is often overlooked. Humans, he pointed out, already produce sulphate aerosols that cool the world. Burning fossil fuels, on land or sea, releases tens of millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide. These form a haze of little particles that diffuse and reflect away sunlight, just as Pinatubo did. But this happens in the lower atmosphere, where the particles get into people’s lungs and damage their health. Rich countries started to scrub sulphur out of their emissions from the 1960s onwards, to reduce a death toll reckoned in the hundreds of thousands. Yet this process of atmospheric cleaning also lets in more sunlight, turning up warming. (Crutzen quoted a study arguing that worldwide air-quality controls could warm the planet by almost 1 degree Centrigrade.)
A choice between warming and deaths due to sulphate is a diabolical one. But, as Crutzen says, there is no need to choose. In the lower atmosphere rain washes the air clean in days; in the dry stratosphere, aerosols stay aloft for years, spreading worldwide. A comparatively small amount of sulphur in the stratosphere could thus preserve the cooling currently provided by a lot of sulphur lower down. Crutzen calculated that the cooling resulting from the 55m tonnes of sulphur emitted into the lower atmosphere every year could be provided instead by 1-2m tonnes of sulphur in the upper atmosphere. Health impacts would be vastly reduced while cooling would be preserved and spread more evenly.
This is not to say that such a “stratospheric veil” would not have implications. It would change the pattern of warmth in the climate, and the winds and ocean currents the Earth uses to move warmth around might behave differently in response. It would also change the water cycle: sunlight is what drives evaporation, and if it is turned down a little, the water cycle will slow down, with less evaporation and less rainfall. This effect is not necessarily dangerous, but it is worth watching—and the thicker the veil, the more problematic it would be. In a world with no emissions reductions and an ever thickening veil to balance an ever thickening greenhouse, this hydrological effect would become ever more extreme. That is one of the reasons why Ken Caldeira, a respected Stanford climate scientist who pioneered geoengineering modelling, insists that any such scheme happen only alongside emissions cuts.
But Crutzen did not imagine thickening the veil continuously. He didn’t even imagine making it thick enough to deal with all the warming associated with carbon dioxide, as most studies have done. He only imagined it thick enough to offset the cooling lost from other pollution reduction. Accepting that geoengineering can be worthwhile even with quite small effects is an important part of understanding its potential application. For example, choosing crops with lighter leaves is a minor geoengineering proposal that would have only a small effect at the global scale, and is therefore discounted by many people. But it should have an effect, and one felt most strongly in summers in the temperate north, where it could hedge against heat waves.
Turning down the sunshine tap is only half the geoengineering story. The other half, clearing the drain, can be done in numerous ways: trees, energy crops, blooms of algae, chemical engineering or hastening the natural reactions between rocks and carbon dioxide that go on in the slow reaches of geological time. Carbon dioxide could be stored in depleted oil fields, in aquifers, or in the ocean depths; biomass could be ploughed into soil in the form of charcoal, or chemically reclaimed carbon dioxide could be transformed into solid carbonate rocks. This range of techniques fits our moral intuitions; if you make a mess, you should clean it up. It also offers hope on ocean acidification. Because of this, such geoengineering by means of carbon dioxide removal is becoming positively mainstream, at least for long-term planning. It offers a way to reduce temperatures from whatever peak they might reach. Nasa climate scientist James Hansen along with other environmentalists (and an increasingly high-profile group called 350.org) argue that the long-term stability of the icecaps needs a lower carbon-dioxide level than today’s. If so, then this can only be guaranteed by the use of some sort of removal technology.
If humans already had the technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as fast as they put it in, a large part of the climate problem would be dealt with. But there is nothing like that capacity at present. Artificial ways of capturing carbon dioxide from the air are still in their infancy. Geological storage of carbon dioxide has yet to be demonstrated on large scales. Forestry schemes large enough to make a big dent require plantations the size of countries. In very rough terms, a removal system capable of dealing with the world’s emissions would be on a similar scale to the industries that mine, pump, refine and transport the fossil fuels responsible for those emissions, and would use similar amounts of energy. Mining, gas and oil are big industries.
While in the near term there is no way that carbon removal can take up more than a tiny fraction of emissions, in the long term such technology will get cheaper and more efficient. But believing that carbon dioxide emitted today can be mopped up later is potentially dangerous. All the time carbon is in the atmosphere it heats the world. So, just as you get a mismatch in the spatial pattern of warming if you heat the world with greenhouse gases while cooling it by turning down the sunshine tap, you can also get a mismatch in time if you heat the world with greenhouse gases and only later take them away by unblocking the drain. Emit a tonne of carbon dioxide today and mop it up in 50 years, and you still have the 50 years of warming to cope with.
Still, in the long term carbon dioxide removal is likely to play a significant role, if it gets cheap enough. Schemes to turn down the sunshine tap could make a difference sooner, as they would be relatively easy to deploy. But that does not make them a cheap solution. A stratospheric veil might cost the turnover of one large global company, rather than a whole industry—just the kind of reasonable price that endeared such schemes to the superfreakonomists, and Bjørn Lomborg’s five economists. But to look at the costs of the veil alone misses the bigger picture. If you accept that there is no merit in a world where the greenhouse effect gets stronger and the stratospheric veil gets thicker (and the climate anomalies caused by the mismatch between the two get worse) then the costs of geoengineering become additional to the costs of emissions reduction, not a substitute for them.
This is not to say that geoengineering could offer no economic advantages. Shortly after Paul Crutzen’s 2006 article, Tom Wigley, a respected climate scientist then at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, looked at ways of combining emissions reduction and sunlight reduction. Wigley suggested that sulphates might be squirted into the stratosphere in the near term as a way to slow the rate of warming and buy time for the massive and costly industrial shift to alternative energy. Wigley’s “buying time” approach has not enjoyed much enthusiasm from other researchers, who fear that it will reduce the sense of urgency needed to drive emissions elimination. The Royal Society report spoke for many in treating geoengineering techniques only as an insurance policy. But this is also inconsistent. Rejecting the Wigley scenario reflects a view that political decision-making cannot summon the nuanced, self-disciplined approach needed to geoengineer a little without losing your commitment to reducing emissions a lot. The “Plan B” scenario rests on a political process with characteristics just as unlikely: it requires schemes to be researched in depth but to stay unused until (but only until) some unspecified assessment commanding international political assent deems disaster imminent but not unavoidable. Good luck with that.
Whichever scenario you prefer, both require research into how to make the various schemes work and what their effects might be. Some of this can be done with models, but field trials will also be desirable, especially with schemes that aim to affect clouds. Here Britain may have something to offer. The number and size of the water droplets in a cloud depends on the number of tiny particles called “condensation nuclei” in the air. Other things being equal more droplets makes for a brighter, whiter, more reflective cloud. Over the oceans, where there is a dearth of condensation nuclei, clouds are less white. In 1990 a British cloud physicist (and poet), John Latham, suggested that adding condensation nuclei in the form of a fine mist of sea salt might brighten maritime clouds enough to cool the climate. No one paid much attention, but a decade or so later Stephen Salter, a wildly inventive marine engineer at Edinburgh University, got wind of the idea and talked to Latham about schemes whereby such particles might be made. He hit on the idea of a fleet of thousands of wacky-looking sailing ships, using electricity from underwater turbines to spray up the required mist of tiny particles.
Set against the alternative of pumping or lifting a million tonnes of sulphur into the stratosphere every year, the idea of simply spraying up sea salt seems eminently feasible. Add the amiable presence of elderly British academics and hardware that looks like something out of Thunderbirds, and the idea appears charming. Real questions remain as to whether it would work—not just questions about how such cooling, if applied to relatively small patches of the ocean, would affect the global climate, but also more basic questions about whether the particles would actually get into the clouds, and whether the clouds would get whiter. Yet a limited field trial could be carried out quickly, and with minimal if any environmental risk—albeit probably not without some objections.
Such trials look even more plausible if put in the context of another cooling process that is being reversed: that of sulphur emissions from shipping. As mentioned before, the global shipping industry burns sulphur-rich fuel, and the sulphate particles from that fuel produce much of their cooling effect by brightening clouds. The industry’s carbon emissions—roughly the same as Germany’s—are likely to be regulated before too long, but are nevertheless rising. Its sulphate emissions, meanwhile, came under new regulation in 2008, and will be pretty much phased out by 2020. So relatively obscure shipping regulations designed to protect public health near ports and shipping lanes will inadvertently commit the world to a significant extra warming. Looked at this way, the case for trialling systems that deliberately try to restore a similar cooling, with no damage to health, seems strong.
Crafting policy approaches to geoengineering that treat it neither as pariah nor panacea will be hard—perhaps, in the end, impossible. Alan Robock, a climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who works on geoengineering ideas in an adversarial but fair way, has put together an impressive list of “20 reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea.” Some of these can be firmed up or crossed off the list by further research, and he has deleted three since the list was first published in 2008. But other problems on Robock’s list are more permanent and troubling—none more so than the question of who controls the process. To see geoengineering as just another form of climate change, as I think we should, is not to deny that it has distinct features. Stratospheric aerosol options, in particular, may be cheap and practical enough to be undertaken by a single country, like China, or even conceivably, a single rich individual, like Richard Branson. In short, climate change could be undertaken unilaterally.
This is a real risk, and one to take seriously. But it is perhaps not as unusual as it seems. Countries, especially large ones, already have powers beyond their borders. But a repertoire of tactics exists to restrain their use. An individual, or a small country, that tried to geoengineer could easily be forced to desist, militarily if need be. For bigger powers there is less that can be done. But there are already lots of tensions between large powers—over trade, economics, nuclear proliferation and indeed climate. Geoengineering might sharpen such questions, but climate issues are already effectively in the hands of China, America and Europe.
The lack of a system of governance for something as potentially powerful as geoengineering is alarming. But so is the lack of an effective system of governance for most of the rest of climate change. In trying to put together such a system, as at the Copenhagen summit, people and governments have accepted the idea that something can be done, that at least some of the responses of Earth’s system can be predicted, that the risks of climate change can, in some way, be governed, and that there are ways of choosing between better outcomes and worse ones. They are, in short, seeking to manage the risks of climate change. To research, judiciously, new technical means by which to do so is not to change the game, but simply to expand its possibilities. It is a natural outcome of taking climate change seriously—not as a single problem with a specific solution, but as the context in which the next century’s history is going to be made.
David King
The science of climate change is clear, despite those leaked UEA emails. The technology to tackle the problem either exists, or is on its way. Now we need to handle the finance. That’s why putting a price on carbon was the most important negotiating point at the Copenhagen summit. It’s also why the next government needs to consider a radical new step: parachuting climate scientists and energy technologists into the Bank of England.
Post-Copenhagen, the world must work towards a global cap-and-trade scheme, in which all carbon dioxide emitted comes with a paid-for permit. If a country doesn’t control its emissions, it will pay through penalties. But this global scheme must also be underpinned by new, innovative national measures. Gordon Brown did well in this regard in 1998 with his “renewables obligation,” requiring power companies to put a rising amount of renewable energy on the grid. With the proceeds he created both the Carbon Trust and the Energy Saving Trust, two independent
bodies that have already proved their mettle in the fight against climate change.
However, I have the sense—just as when I was the government’s chief scientist—that Alistair Darling’s treasury is now pulling in the wrong direction. The wasted opportunity of the current economic stimulus package was a case in point. Most of that money could have been directed into low-carbon projects, such as energy efficiency boosts for our ageing housing stock. This also would put unemployed construction workers back to work. South Korea committed 80 per cent of its stimulus money to low-carbon growth. Even China managed 50 per cent. How shaming and frustrating, then, that Britain limped in with barely 10 per cent.
Even without climate change, there is no economic case for the high-carbon status quo. The world spends $1.7 trillion a year on Gulf oil alone. Britain should instead invest its share of this in home-grown energy, boosting the economy and reducing unemployment—the treasury’s own economic goals.
We should welcome the shadow chancellor George Osborne’s declaration that he wants to put the treasury at the heart of the fight against climate change. Indeed, half a dozen Tory speeches outlined an impressive range of measures in late November, from a so-called “green investment bank” to a commitment to cut emissions from government itself more quickly.
But there is a deep-rooted problem that needs to be tackled first. Our economic mandarins are caught in a trap. At best, the treasury sees carbon reduction as a distraction from their primary focus: GDP growth, reducing unemployment, and raising productivity. At worst, they follow the Nigel Lawson school: that even if climate change is real, we should let pure markets operate to solve it. The same is often true for central bankers, who rarely even consider carbon as an important byproduct of a stable money supply and low inflation.
And yet climate change has shown how spectacularly impure markets can be. It is the granddaddy of market failure. The only effective response will be market collaboration, with a global carbon price. At the national level, it must also mean putting climate change right into our nation’s economic heart: the old lady of Threadneedle street herself.
The problem is that any big levers the government might support—carbon pricing, long-term rules forcing more renewables and nuclear energy into the grid, much higher road tax and congestion charges—could be partially undone by the Bank of England, if monetary policy is used to push for less sustainable patterns of growth. So what to do? The obvious option is simply to relocate the climate change committee—to the Bank itself. Established under the 2008 Climate Change Act, the committee is an arm’s length government body—just like the Bank—designed to keep tabs on government emissions. Every five years it holds them accountable for their carbon budget. When I was in government, I recommended bringing energy, climate change and the environment together under one roof: now the new department of energy and climate change (DECC) is well placed to resolve conflicts between the energy industry and the environmental lobby. Similarly, we need to make sure that the Bank of England’s management of the economy is always done with an eye on the carbon implications, and vice versa.
In the first instance, the chairman of the climate change committee should be on Mervyn King’s board of governors. Better still would be if the committee as a whole were run under the Bank’s auspices, so that their respective secretariats were constantly rubbing shoulders and comparing notes. In practice, the climate committee’s staff could also take part in the monthly behind-closed-doors debate at the Bank about the economy and interest rates—known internally as the “Pre-MPC” process—feeding in relevant data to help inform a sustainable monetary policy. A climate expert should be appointed to the Bank of England “court,” its advisory body. And most radically, why not have a climate scientist or an energy technologist on the monetary policy committee itself? Generally there is one labour market economist in the group to stop the monetarists riding roughshod over the jobless. Unemployment is not a price worth paying for low inflation. Climate change isn’t either.
Philip Hunter
CO2: on the rise, but do we really know what this will do?
The Climategate scandal of leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) has thrust the inner workings of the once obscure scientific community onto the world stage. CRU scientists are reported to be walking around in a daze, wondering what the great Godfather of climatology and former CRU director, Professor HH Lamb, would have made of it all.
That question, at least, is easy to answer. Lamb alerted the world to the instability and constant variability of global climate, and his name has been recruited to the cause of both consensus-mongers and sceptics in the global warming debate. But he would have resented absolutely anything that smacks of scientific censorship. His death in 1997 robbed the climate research community of a strong figurehead who would perhaps have steered it clear of the rocks upon which it may now be foundering.
Essentially, the leaked emails reveal that the global warming consensus, far from being watertight, is actually an uneasy coalition bonded together by an unholy glue of environmental fundamentalism and a misplaced moral compass. The “consensus” is trying to brush off Climategate by arguing that while it affects climate politics, it will have no impact on climate science. This is laughably disingenuous, for the incident shows precisely how tightly entwined climate science and politics have become. It reveals that climate scientists have been under pressure, not just subliminally but also in terms of their very livelihoods, to fall in line.
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Anna Shepard
I used to write a column for the Saturday Times called “Eco Worrier,” advising readers on how to green their lives. Yet now I find myself questioning its worth. While I still class myself as an eco-optimist, I can’t help wondering how much difference I have made composting my kitchen scraps, diligently sorting my household waste and installing gloomy low-energy lights. When set against the huge task faced at Copenhagen, there are moments when I suspect my daily actions are irrelevant.
Like others, I’m suffering from green fatigue. New research by the IPPR concludes that while most people believe in climate change, many are bored of hearing about it. “It’s one of those things you think about for a few minutes, get depressed and move on,” said one respondent. Not enough people are taking the green living advice—turning their heating down a degree, cutting back on short-haul flights—to make a big enough difference.
We’ve also begun to mistrust the ways that companies try to look good by flagging up their green credentials—known as “greenwash.” With an increasingly sceptical media and a host of NGOs and campaigning bodies such as Greenpeace and Ethical Consumer magazine, greenwash is not the problem it used to be. But the perception still exists that the green movement has been taken over by PR froth.
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Dick Taverne
The green movement has done much to warn us about climate change. But now that global warming is widely accepted, do green campaigners do more to hinder than help us tackle it? They stress the likelihood of catastrophe if we do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They urge governments to adopt demanding targets and they tell us what we must not do. Don’t fly, don’t drive unless you have to, don’t build new power stations, whether fired by coal, gas or oil—let alone by nuclear reactions. Apply the precautionary principle just in case technological developments might damage the environment. Their song is: “Accentuate the negative.”
But is this the best way to win support? The trouble with prohibitions and prophecies of doom is that they seldom motivate positive action. In their book Breakthrough (March 2009), Nordhaus and Shellenberger ask if Martin Luther King would have inspired the civil rights movement with the cry: “I have a nightmare.” If you are told armageddon is inevitable unless you give up the things you care for, fatalism is the likely response. Yet sensational scare stories—like about “Frankenfoods!”—are the stock in trade of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Scares recruit members.
Tirades against car use, for example, do not reduce car use, because most people depend on their car for shopping, taking children to school and other activities important to their lives. People also like cars because they increase choice. In fact it has been plausibly estimated that by 2050 there will be four times as many in the world as there are today, whatever we do. The best way to reduce carbon emissions from motorcars is therefore through technology: using a different source of power, like environmentally friendly biofuels or rechargable batteries.
Britain is faced with two problems: reduction of carbon emissions and security of power supply. Yet green campaigners tend to ignore the latter. Greenpeace’s demonstration against the King’s North coal-fired power station was, for them, a great success. (Plans for the plant have now been postponed or shelved, though the company blames a “lack of demand.”) But what if we build no new coal-fired stations? Old ones will have to be closed because they will not meet the EU’s environmental standards. Old nuclear power plants, which supply 16 per cent of our electricity, will soon be phased out too and new ones, bitterly opposed by greens, will only slowly come into use. Imported oil offers no security and will probably become unaffordably expensive when the recession ends. And renewables, now a tiny proportion of our sources of electricity, cannot possibly fill the gap. In practice, renewables mean mainly wind power, which has to be backed by fossil-fuelled stations for the days when the wind does not blow. To stop the lights going out, then, we will have to depend on gas from Russia—that is, on Putin’s goodwill and the hope that Gazprom will undergo a miraculous conversion to efficiency. Its present incompetent management and lack of investment suggests that in time most of its production will be needed by Russia itself.
Both of these problems—carbon emissions and energy security—will therefore not be solved by calls for a change of lifestyle or by dramatic attacks on the towers of Kings North, but by science and technology. Of all the major current sources of electricity in the world, coal is likely to grow fastest, and so a massive investment to solve the technical problems of carbon capture and storage (see Damian Kayha’s account of this developing technology) is obviously what is needed.
Will an international deal at Copenhagen on binding targets for reducing emissions be the spur to such investment? Even if such agreement is reached, will targets be enforced and achieved? Kyoto is not a happy precedent. At the time we were told that those targets were essential to any hope of averting climate catastrophe. Ignoring the fact that important countries like US and China did not sign the treaty, those who did performed no better in limiting emissions than those who did not. Currently, in terms of carbon emissions per head, France and Sweden are among the best performers—France because 80 per cent of its electricity is generated by nuclear power, while Sweden relies heavily on hydroelectric power as well.
What matters more than targets, then, is progress with technology, and here the greens’ approach generally suffers from a fundamental weakness: a mistrust of science. The precautionary principle is either so obvious it is otiose—“If there is significant evidence of risk, be careful”—or so vague as to be are virtually meaningless, or positively harmful. It tells us that even when there is no significant scientific evidence of harm, no product should be licensed unless first proved safe. This is impossible because science cannot prove certainties. It also concentrates entirely on risk, without weighing risk against benefit.
If, as I believe, the application of science and technology is the best hope for mitigating or adapting to global warming, the obvious conclusion is that green campaigners, for all their good intentions, ultimately do more harm than good.
David Goodhart
To whom do we owe obligations? With whom do we feel solidarity? These are two of the oldest questions in politics, but they are posed in a stark new way by the fallout from climate change. Most people in rich countries feel a vague sense of obligation and even empathy towards those struggling to get by in poor countries, but they practise a much stronger sense of “fellow citizen favouritism” towards the people in their own nations. And it is good that they do. Without such favouritism there would be no point to the nation state. This does not, however, mean that national solidarity must conflict with global solidarity—if anything it seems to be a condition of it. In recent years the British government has sharply increased both domestic social spending and global aid, and the rich countries most generous with aid have high levels of national solidarity too.
Yet will rich-country citizens really make big sacrifices to stop Bangladesh from disappearing in 25 years’ time? Is it even plausible to expect rich countries to accept the principle that the right to emit carbon should be equally shared across the world’s population? After all, as Vijay Joshi points out on p15 of our Copenhagen special, no one argues that natural resources like oil should be equally shared, and it is not clear that rich-country citizens should be forced to pay for having done something (using up the safe, carbon-absorbing capacity of the atmosphere) unwittingly. Yet the Copenhagen summit will commit rich countries to very large transfers of resources to poor ones, in order to limit their emissions without choking off growth. Understandably, legitimacy for this idea has been sought on grounds of self-interest, not global solidarity: rich-country politicians argue (see Ed Miliband, p21 of the Copenhagen special) that we too will suffer the floods or have to fend off the migrating masses if the climate turns nasty.
The problem is not that our politicians are being sneaky about the degree of altruism we are being asked to show; and the vast sums of money look more manageable when spread over decades. The real trouble is that, except in wartime, western democracies are not good at appealing to citizens’ “better selves” to make sacrifices for their own futures—it is distance in time more than place that makes it so hard to respond to climate change. Authoritarian China has shown that it can do economic growth as well as the democracies (at least in the early stages). And if climate pessimists are right and big lifestyle changes are required, authoritarianism may prove good at that too (see China’s one child policy). The fact that China seems likely to bring more to Copenhagen than the US could be a straw in the wind.
Sam Knight
So here we are. Copenhagen. Showtime. In the course of 11 days this December, the leaders of the world must agree on their self-appointed task of saving it. Seventeen years after they first convened at the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio and acknowledged the threat of global warming, the calamity has advanced on every front. The ice is melting, the waters are drying or rising, the birds and the beasts and the bees are dying. Yet humanity, perversely, flourishes—since that summit, the world’s population has grown by 1.5bn and it will grow again by 50 per cent by 2050 to a total of 9bn, just when our worst prophecies may be coming to a head. Nature’s breakdown will be society’s. And for this reason, climate change has joined our everyday thinking. We hear about it on the news. We see it even where it is not there: on balmy winter mornings and in the mottled outbreaks in the garden. Its invisible, enveloping nature has made it part of our human lament. We worry about putting out the recycling but we know this is not enough, because everything we do now—stay too long in the shower, eat a foreign vegetable, fly off on a foreign holiday—is making it worse. Our condition, our comfort, is killing the polar bears, and it is going to kill us too.
So what can 11 days in Copenhagen do about it? The aim is to conclude a new global political agreement on how to stop the damage. Whatever is agreed at Copenhagen will come into force on 1st January 2013, and supersede the last attempt to save the environment, the Kyoto protocol. Kyoto took aim at the emissions of six greenhouse gases (mostly CO2, methane and nitrous oxide) that have upset the preindustrial, prelapsarian blend of air in the earth’s atmosphere. Adopted on 11th December 1997, the treaty bound by law the world’s 37 richest countries (a group known as “Annex 1”) to cut their emissions by 5.2 per cent from 1990 levels by 2012. America pulled out of the negotiating process (and has increased its emissions by almost 20 per cent since 1990) but much of the rest of the rich world stuck with it and now, in 2009, it looks like we will make it. Some countries, like Spain, Italy and South Korea, will miss their targets, but as a group, we are on target—a corrective to the critics who dismiss Kyoto as a failure. True, the collapse of heavy industry in the Soviet Union has been the biggest single contributor to cutting global emissions since 1990, but other Kyoto-related policies have helped. In 2005, the EU launched the world’s largest carbon-trading market, covering 40 per cent of the bloc’s emissions, and in 2008, helped by the financial crisis, achieved a cut of nearly 3 per cent in a year.
Yet the countries that have, by hook and crook, met their Kyoto obligations now account for only about a quarter of the world’s emissions. The action has moved elsewhere. Now it is the major developing economies of India, China and Brazil, and the millions of people who are buying their first televisions, refrigerators and cars, that are inflicting their first meaningful injuries on the atmosphere. Per head, their emissions are paltry—ten Indians have the carbon footprints of a single European—but as a collective, heading fast down the same fossil-fuelled path that led to this predicament, they have the capacity to finish us off. Greenhouse gas emissions from the developing world account for around 46 per cent of the whole—less than its fair share, but more than enough.
So Copenhagen can, and must, do three things. It must take the cuts agreed by the 37 Annex 1 countries at Kyoto and make them much deeper. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body that advises the UN’s climate negotiations, these new cuts must be in the range of 25 to 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020. In the longer term, rich countries are under pressure to agree cuts of up to 80 per cent by 2050 (Britain has already signed up to this). Second, Copenhagen must bring the Americans on board. The US may have been surpassed by China as the world’s largest emitter, but the hegemon still produces 20 per cent of the planet’s carbon emissions and its people consume energy like no other. Even more important, Copenhagen needs America because without Washington, without Barack Obama, there is no chance of the talks’ highest and most necessary aim: the devising of the grand pact under which the world’s industrialising billions will agree not to follow the same riches-for-planetary-ruin path that the rest of us have done. The price of placing environmental constraints—“actions” rather than emissions targets—on the economic appetites of China, India, Latin America and Africa will mean tens of billions of dollars and the sharing of green technology. The institutions, the funding and the monitoring to make it work are what need to be resolved. If the deal can be done, Copenhagen could turn the apocalypse into a plan.
***
So who are the people who are going to engineer this covenant? Everyone agrees that Obama and President Hu Jintao of China must attend if there is the chance of something significant being agreed. But it is the figures in the background that I want to introduce, the faces you do not recognise, who have spent the past two years in hotel ballrooms, airport canteens and the offices of environment ministries, haggling and fiddling over paragraphs, phrases and words. These are the men and women of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), unknown delegates from every government on Earth. In the end they will duck out and let their ministers take the glory, or blame, in Copenhagen. But the slender text that is agreed in December is theirs, and the world of rules and rivalries, process and paranoia, in which that text was conceived is their world.
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