How much worse does it need to get before Governments – and their peoples – take the drastic action necessary to avert and mitigate by far the most dangerous threat the world faces? The latest report from the Met Office Hadley Centre makes sobering reading. It is already true that the hottest 10 years on record globally have all occurred since 1990. Now this landmark scientific report predicts, on the basis of pooling the results from running 300 versions of their sophisticated climate computer model, that peak summer temperatures in London and the South-East will regularly top 40C by 2080. To put this in context, the highest temperature ever recorded in the UK was 38.5C in Kent in August 2003, and memories of the stifling heat that day are still very live. More importantly, the heatwave in France a few years ago when temperatures reach 40C killed over 20,000 persons from heat-stroke. But there are 3 other reasons too for alarm.

The first is that the concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere, which is almost universally accepted as the central cause of climate change, has reached the highest level for more than 2.1 million years. It is now 387 parts per million (ppm) and rising at a gradually increasing rate of 1 1/2 – 2% per year, and scientists agree that when it passes a threshold of about 450ppm the world is entering uncharted territory with unpredictable, but potentially very dangerous, consequences.
Secondly, hot climates in the palaeontological past millions of years ago were caused by the extreme ranges of natural cycles, but this time such natural cycles have been heavily overlaid by massive carbon emissions generated by worldwide industrialisation, and there is no upper limit to this process which would impose a natural cap on these emissions. And the third very real risk is that this is not a smooth, linear, upward process. Runaway feedback effects will kick in at some point when the interaction between warming systems across the globe produces huge abrupt splurges in carbon emissions leading to sudden dramatic increases in global temperatures.
So what should be done to stop it? The UK is only 1% of world population, though we generate 2% of global emissions. But if we want the other 99% to take radical action, without which we’re all cooked, we have to demonstate incontrovertibly that we’re serious about tackling climate change. At present the UK message is at best mixed. We have adopted tough carbon reduction targets, but it is of course outcomes that matter, not targets, and since 1997 greenhouse gas emissions have hardly decreased at all, certainly nowhere near the downward path required to cut emissions by 80% by 2050. The Government is committed to introduce feed-in tariffs next April, which should give a much-needed boost to solar power in the UK, though on a rather less generous basis than the very successful German system. And Ed Miliband is now negotiating to extend carbon capture and storage (CCS) to a dozen existing coal plants, including Drax, which by 2020 could be emitting about 100m tonnes of carbon a year.
But the debit side more than outbalances this. The Government has approved the third runway at Heathrow, which already uses some 20 million litres of fuel a day, and it will itself alone add 1-2% to Britain’s total emissions. It is still doing too little, too late to switch Britain from petrol-driven cars either to top-class public transport or to electric, hybrid, or hydrogen fuel-cell cars. Industry is still not being required to make substantial cuts in emissions year by year, either on a sector or company basis, with published targets and outcomes to reveal progress (or otherwise). Households are not being introduced to domestic carbon allowances so that a monetary currency is supplemented by an environmental currency. And the Government is still supporting the oil companies to explore and drill for fossil fuels, even in Antarctica, rather than giving absolute priority to raising fast Britain’s pathetic record as by far the lowest generator of electricity from renewable sources of energy.

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