Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

Nigel Lawson, the former Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer under Thatcher, never known for modesty, has taken it upon himself to write what he sees as the definitive tract in denial of climate change. Despite the polemics, it is well enough documented to be worth taking him on.

He rightly rejects the easy assumption that every major catastrophe, like Hurricane Katrina, is simply due to climate change. It is more complex than that, and whilst global warming may make such events more likely, other factors may well play a significant role. He is right that the science of the immense inter-connectedness of climatic phenomena, both within the Earth’s atmosphere as well as solar activity and cosmic rays, still has many uncertainties, and that disentangling the natural variability of the climate which has always existed from that which is new and man-made is fraught with difficulty.

He is right too to mock at some of the solutions that have been all too readily peddled. The EU Emissions Trading Scheme, so favoured by the marketers, has, as he admits, turned out to be a gigantic scam allowing businesses to invent a host of devices to cream off billions of pounds from making imaginary carbon reductions. He is right that the current stampede into biofuels is hugely counter-productive both in leading to the destruction of rain-forests and in competing for land with food crops, thus forcing up world food prices. And he is right too that carbon offsets, so beloved of today’s political and business jet-setting classes, are no better than the sale of indulgences by the mediaeval church which allowed the sinner to go on sinning so long as he paid the going price for it.

But Lawson wants to go further than tilting his lance at the sillier eccentricities of what he sees as the climate change establishment. He wants to demolish the entire infrastructure of climate change theory. But here his arguments are badly flawed.

His attack centres on three main contentions. First he argues that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere do not automatically translate into rising average global temperatures, since there was a pause in the latter between 1940-1975 and again between 2001-2007, and therefore the basic theory fails. However, what he neglects is the much bigger picture provided by the Antarctica Vostok Station’s deep drilling which has found that carbon dioxide and methane, the two main greenhouse gases, rose and fell in near-lockstep with average global temperatures over the last half-million years. Thus the basic theory holds, even if the factors that cause short intermittent fluctuations are not yet fully understood.

Second, he contends that even on the most pessimistic economic scenario – that global warming will cut world GDP by 5% by 2100 – people will still be greatly better off by then and global warming will reduce that only very slightly per person, so we shouldn’t be too bothered about it. But averaging it out across the planet gives a very false impression. Whilst most people may be not greatly affected, hundreds of millions of others may die. It’s like saying that the Asian flu pandemic of 1918 may have killed 40 millions and the Second World War 60 millions, but when the global population was 2 billion, we can live with that because world economic growth per capita was only slightly interrupted. Not an argument that will I think appeal to most people, especially when we cannot tell in advance who will get through in a much more dangerous world and who will die.

His third contention is that the authoritative Stern Review, published last year, understates the economic costs of taking early action now to head off a potential future global catastrophe and overstates the benefits for future generations. He may well be right that Stern has taken too low a discount rate for his calculations, but in one important sense Stern may actually be underestimating future climatic and economic costs. This is because global climate change is not a linear process where warming grows smoothly and proportionately, but rather is beset by feedback mechanisms which abruptly, and maybe uncontrollably, magnify the climatic change with unpredictable consequences. Scientists are still uncertain whether some of the known mass extinctions in the Earth’s history of the last half-billion years may have happened for these reasons. Such mechanisms might include the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheets, the die-back of the world’s rainforests, and the mass release of methane hydrates from the ocean seabed.

When we may still be only in the early stages of climate change with very much worse to come and when the delay in the dissipation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may take centuries, a precautionary policy is the only sensible course. That should include switching out of fossil fuels into renewable sources of energy at the fastest practicable pace, a high carbon price to incentivise decarbonisation, and carbon capture and storage when developing countries insist on large-scale coal-burning.