CLIMATE
CHANGE. THE ULTIMATE POLITICAL CHALLENGE.
Originally published in The Oxford Magazine, October
2014.
Both the science of CO2
related climate change, and the dangers and dilemmas it poses for mankind, are
easy to state. Modern economies still
depend on oil, gas and coal for their large energy needs, resulting in huge emissions
of the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2). Together with other greenhouse gases (GHG), and
in the absence of other natural mechanisms to re-absorb the CO2 or
stabilise Earth’s climate, higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will
result in a warmer planet, a major consequence of which is significant climate
change. Unlike water vapour, an important natural GHG, but one whose
atmospheric concentration tends to be self limiting or self stabilising through
precipitation as rain, CO2 and some of the other man-made GHG are
essentially cumulative.
The timing, scale and distribution
of GHG induced climate change are part of an immensely complex set of
interacting physical and biological processes that make up the world in which
we live. This makes it difficult to know exactly how and when change will
affect temperature and rainfall in particular parts of the world, although, as
we gather more and more information, the science is becoming increasingly
confident on at least some of these questions.
The further consequences in terms of effects on agriculture, water
resources, national economies and mass migration are even harder to predict. But there is little comfort in that uncertainty.
Those possible consequences that can be anticipated seem certain to provoke more
competition for land, water and other resources, increased global migration,
and the potential for conflict that stems from all of these.
It is also quite clear that
there are very substantial risks of seriously adverse or even catastrophic
outcomes. The greater the warming, the higher
the probability that we move well beyond relatively small changes in climate,
to which adaptation might be relatively easy, even if expensive, into much more
severe or even catastrophic changes in our shared global environment, for which
available means of adaptation will not be adequate. Needless to say these changes would impact
first and most severely on the poorest and least able to cope.
The perfect storm of political
and policy problems
The challenges of dealing with
climate change present a possibly unique combination of factors that play to
several human weaknesses, whether at an individual or collective political
level, and make effective responses to the problem difficult. They include the
following.
The first factor is that the problem
is essentially global, as gases, and climate, are not contained within national
or regional boundaries. Collective
agreement and action is therefore a fundamental precondition for any effective
policy. As with other much less
dangerous issues, collective agreements are often hard to achieve nationally.
They are even harder to achieve on a global scale, and in relation to
commodities of huge economic importance associated with substantial vested
interests of all kinds. Action on climate may be in everyone’s collective
interest but it is in no-one’s individual interest.
The second factor is the long
time lag between cause and effect. Thermal inertia means that even the “first
round” and more predictable consequences of a given increase in GHG are only
fully worked through over periods measured in decades, with consequential
effects such as rising sea levels that will continue over much longer periods and
are not reversible other than on geological timescales, even if atmospheric CO2 concentrations
are stabilised or brought down. This
naturally conflicts with the myopic nature of much political debate and our ingrained
human tendencies to ignore or play down risks that currently seem quite distant
in time.
It also serves to introduce
the third factor, the irreversibility of current emissions of CO2,
which does not decay in the atmosphere and is only removed very slowly, if at
all, in the natural carbon cycle. It is the equivalent of a centrally heated
room where the radiator can only be turned up, not down, but the room
temperature responds only slowly to changes in the radiator setting. We currently have no known means of extracting
CO2 at reasonable cost (the artificial “carbon tree”), nor can we have any
confidence that such a technology can or will be developed. In the absence of low cost extraction, this
means that fuel choices made now have irreversible consequences. Without action
to curtail CO2 emissions, there is an alarming prospect that, by the time we
observe actual warming, we will already have baked in a much larger amount of
unavoidable future warming and associated climatic change. At a recent
presentation in Oxford, Thomas Stocker of the Physics Institute, University of
Bern, and co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
estimated that committed peak warming rises 3 to 8 times faster than observed
warming.
A fourth factor is the nature
of the risks and uncertainties involved in any attempt to anticipate the future.
A common observation of human psychology
is that most of us find it difficult to make rational and consistent decisions
between different types of risk, even if the risks themselves are in principle
well understood. From a rational perspective,
the long term threat from climate change is orders of magnitude worse than that
of an accident in civil nuclear power, but that has not prevented a German
government, with Green support, from calling a nuclear moratorium and building
new coal-fired stations, the worst possible option in relation to CO2
emissions.
In the case of climate science, and even
though the fundamental influences on climate are increasingly well understood,
there have been enough uncertainties relating to specific details and
consequences to allow sceptics, without real evidence, to create the impression
that the science is of dubious reliability as a basis for policy. So this
fourth deadly ingredient is perhaps our inadequate grasp of risk and uncertainty,
or at least our collective inability to comprehend the reality of what the
climate science is with confidence describing, and failure, in the eyes of some
people at least, of the science to provide a sufficiently clear and convincing
narrative around a very complex problem.
Finally these problems are
compounded both by the nature of the particular vested interests threatened by
any action aimed at reducing the use of fossil fuel, and by the central role of
energy in the production and consumption enjoyed by modern economies. Some vested interests are obvious. Nations rich in fossil fuel reserves,
especially oil, have a clear incentive to deny the problem. Distinguished Oxford climate scientist Sir
John Houghton, a former Oxford professor of atmospheric physics, co-chair of
the Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's
(IPCC) scientific assessment working group, and lead editor of first three IPCC
reports, describes this very clearly in his autobiography. Saudi and Kuwaiti representatives in the IPCC
went to great lengths in their efforts to weaken the conclusions of the IPCC
Second Report, and to attribute or exaggerate uncertainty at every opportunity.
Sir John also details a variety of dirty tricks, dishonesty and sophistry
deployed by other parties with a major vested interest in denying the reality
of the climate science.
And of course as energy
consumers or as taxpayers we have own vested interests in not changing our
habits of energy use, and in avoiding some of the short term costs of
mitigating future problems, even if these are, as will be argued below, these
are relatively small in relation to the scale of the dangers they aim to
mitigate. The US has long been the world’s most profligate user of oil, coal and
gas, and has in the past shown a corresponding reluctance to recognise the
issue. China, for whom even the per capita carbon footprint now exceeds the
European average, has taken a path of rapid coal fuelled economic expansion as
it strives to develop.
These five factors also reinforce
one another. Vested interests have
proved anxious to encourage or exploit any perception of uncertainty in the
science, even if this largely relates to the quantum of damage rather than to
fundamental understanding of the physical processes and the risk. The long time
delays between cause and effect made it easier for sceptics to suggest that the
science was mistaken or at least that the risks are exaggerated. The dependence on global agreement, and action
by all, is a disincentive to unilateral action within one country, or even
within such a block as the EU. Long time
lags encourage us to dismiss seemingly distant risks, and make us reluctant to
incur current costs for future protection. Irreversibility amplifies all the dangers of delay.
Confidence in the science
These dangers and difficulties
highlight the scale of the challenge, but of course they also place a great weight on the confidence that we can
place in the science. This means not
just establishing the best available science, but even more on understanding the
nature of its certainties and uncertainties, and their implications for
understanding the dangers we face. So it
is perhaps worth reiterating what we know.
The first part of the science
is very clear. An increase in CO2 does,
in the absence of other factors, cause a warming in the atmosphere. This, like
most of the building blocks of climate analysis, is not a matter of scientific
conjecture, or a “Karl Popper” hypothesis like “dark energy”, that has a real chance of being overturned as science advances. It is
for all practical purposes a fact established by 19th century
physics. A priori we should be worried.
But climate is a product of a
whole set of complex phenomena and processes, not least the natural carbon
cycle, in which plants and oceans release and absorb atmospheric carbon every
year, and whose size dwarfs even the very large scale of annual human CO2
release. It was therefore possible to
hope and plausible to argue, when we first began to examine climate change
seriously, that there might be feedbacks within these complex processes which
would have the effect of dampening any changes and create a built-in tendency
for climate to stabilise.
Candidates for these helpful
negative feedbacks included increased re-absorption of carbon within the
natural carbon cycle, for example through increased plant growth associated
with increased CO2 concentration, and reduced concentrations of
water vapour (a powerful GHG) or changes in cloud cover. Unfortunately there is
so far little evidence for negative feedbacks which will stabilise our climate.
Measured CO2 is increasing,
so natural re-absorption is not happening on a sufficient scale. At the same
time there is increasing concern about dangerous positive feedbacks, such as
reductions in polar ice cover, reducing the reflection of sunlight, and melting
permafrost which releases methane, another GHG. It is of course possible that
some new factor, not previously investigated, will turn up, but it would seem
foolhardy to rely on such a happy accident. It is not the kind of foolish risk
taking that would be countenanced in most human activities.
Of course the final
irrefutable proof that actual man-made climate change is an existential problem,
and not just a distant threat, comes only with observed actual warming. Initially that may have been difficult to
disentangle from natural variability and natural cycles, such as El Nino, in
Earth’s climate. And further measurement problems arise in determining how much
of the additional heat is being taken up at a given time in the different
levels of atmosphere and in the oceans.
However in spite of these difficulties the evidence of a steady decade
on decade increase in temperature, corresponding to the past acceleration of CO2
emissions and enhanced concentration, is now incontrovertible and has not so
far been challenged by any serious science.
Arguments and inadequacies in
meeting the political challenge
For anyone concerned with
these issues, one of the most frustrating features of the debates on climate
policy has been the argument that we cannot afford the cost of actions to
mitigate climate change. These are
generally estimated at around one or two percent of GDP, substantial amounts,
but comparable to the shocks and changes imposed on national economies by the
oil price shocks of recent decades, which have for developed economies been
easily accomodated. Similar shocks are regularly imposed by shifts in
government spending patterns, let alone the cost of the post 2008 financial
sector induced recession, which is estimated to have sliced perhaps fifteen
percent off national income, with a corresponding impact on living standards.
Expressed in other terms, building up to an expenditure of an additional 1-2 %
per annum of global GDP on mitigation could, by 2050, merely amount to reaching
the same standard of living a few months later.
Nor should the availability of
investment funds, or their cost, be a constraint. Globally, capital has rarely
been so plentiful or so cheap. Its deployment in the energy sector, for
“essential” investment in low carbon “utility” and infrastructure projects,
should be an intrinsically low risk investment, implying a low cost of capital.
Failure to secure investment capital on reasonable terms can only result from
poor or absent policy frameworks, policy uncertainty or lack of policy
commitment by governments. Nothing better demonstrates the economic feasibility
of substantial investment in CO2 reduction, or “decarbonisation”, than the
French achievements of the 1980s and 1990s, giving them a much lower carbon
footprint than most of Europe, and cheaper electricity as well. The French achievement was based on nuclear,
but its real message is that large scale transformative change is perfectly feasible
without adverse economic consequences.
At the same time we should
also question the extent to which global policies are even beginning to treat
this subject seriously. A simple truth for policy makers is that anti-social
activities, or those that cause general damage, should suffer penalties, and
should not be encouraged by subsidies. Yet the International Energy Agency
(IEA) estimates that the global subsidies for fossil fuel production and
consumption still amount to some 500 billion dollars per annum, equivalent to a
subsidy of over 100 dollars per tonne of CO2 emitted into the
atmosphere. The European Union, which
has at least made a first stab at penalising emissions and is therefore ahead
of much of the world, but has produced a carbon price of less than 10 dollars
per tonne, wholly insufficient to incentivise low carbon investment on the
scale required. The global disparity between subsidies and penalties is very
evident.
Conclusions
Our conclusions should be very
simple. The issue is a proven threat, posing potentially extreme dangers to the
global community. Early action carries a double benefit in postponing adverse
outcomes, and improving options both for mitigation and adaptation, but is so
far lamentably absent. Primacy of policy on climate is essential for the future
of humanity, even if this is sometimes at some limited short term detriment to
other objectives.
Fortunately there are signs
that the two largest emitters, the US and China, are now appreciating the need
for much more effective action. The EU and the UK, whatever criticisms might be
levelled against their application of policy, have already shown at least some
degree of leadership and responsibility. The UK, with its 2008 Climate Act, was
first in embodying emissions targets in law.
All this attaches a great
weight to next year’s climate negotiations in Paris, under the auspices of the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The conference
objective is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate,
from all the nations of the world. This will be an extremely challenging task
but it has never seemed more important.
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