Time to press the panic button? (Jonathon Porritt)

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« The media and climate change contrarians | Main | Lesson from Kraft's Cadbury takeover »

Time to press the panic button?

Apologies for the six weeks blog-oliday. Put it down to Copenhagen blues!

I’m still reeling from the surreal sight of Lord Whacko Monckton (the climate contrarians’ eccentric of choice), captured on Newsnight last night doing an imitation of Al Gore at a public meeting in Australia. Frightening stuff.

Whenever I see Monckton at work, it reminds me just how desperate people must be to have their doubts and prejudices about climate change affirmed by some public figure – indeed, by any public figure at this stage of the debate.

The politics of climate change in Australia are even worse that they are here in the UK. That may well be, paradoxically, because changes in their own micro-climates over the last 10 years have been so much more visible. And painful. And this has polarised the debate about whether these changes are primarily a consequence of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, or primarily natural climate variability. The end result is that the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, might have to call a general election to break the impasse on his proposals for a carbon-trading scheme.

Could it get that bad here in the UK? Very improbably, but the whole tenor of the debate has deteriorated so badly, so rapidly, that it's now a serious political headache, rather than a minor irritant.

The combination of the ‘climate gate’ fiasco at the University of East Anglia and the growing concerns about the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), broader concerns of the whole peer review process (the so-called ‘Gold Standard’ of scientific research), and the utter failure of Copenhagen has transformed the climate debate here in the UK.

Where they were once thought as contrarian outliers, both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express are now thought to be closely aligned with public opinion. Ed Miliband (the Secretary of State in the Dept of Energy and Climate Change) must be in despair.

So should we be pressing the panic button? I think we should. The damage done to the credibility not just of climate science but also of the UK’s entire approach to climate change is already serious – and getting worse. This could be extremely problematic in the run up to the general election.

So if I was Gordon Brown, I would be asking David Cameron and Nick Clegg to issue a joint invitation to Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society, asking him to convene a high-level Scientific Panel to comment on ‘the state of the science’ two years from the publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report at the end of 2007.

Does it still stack up? What should people make of all these recent revelations? Is the Climate Change Act (to which all three political parties have signed up) still based on robust scientific foundations? Can people still have confidence in the way climate science drives climate policy?

Martin Rees would be asked to recruit three or four top scientists (reflecting different shades of opinion), a couple of business people (like James Dyson or Richard Lambert of the CBI), and a couple of scientifically-literate ‘pillars of the community’ in whom the general public has absolute trust. No NGOs, let alone campaigners!

Give them two months. Bang out a short, sharp report written for lay people, not for scientists. Blitz the media. Run a full-page ad in the Mail and Express for weeks on end – instead of today’s highly questionable ‘Act on CO2 ‘ ads.

Overkill? Possibly. It seems ludicrous that what is still by any standards a rock-solid scientific consensus should have to be shored up by such extreme measures. But if we don’t, might we be looking at an Aussie-style meltdown in public opinion in the near term?

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on February 5, 2010 4:27 PM | Permalink

Comments (12)

How about David Attenborough to lead on this? - as one of the all too rare individuals who commands trust & respect across political parties; sectors & generations.

Posted by Leslie Watson | February 5, 2010 6:11 PM

In a weird way I think this is all evidence of the message getting through. As people broadly come to recognise the strength of the evidence, they are faced with a choice. Either make changes that they suspect may be rather unpleasant, or attack the message.
I have noticed that the stronger the evidence gets, the angrier people get.
"I don't like the personal implications of climate change, so I am not prepared to accept that it is happening or that it might in any way be something to do with the way I live my life."
Perhaps there is hope in all this.

Richard

Posted by Richard Miller | February 5, 2010 8:59 PM

Jonathon, A timely comment. If you'll forgive my plug, it's for these sorts of reasons we are now planning to run a public opinion survey about climate change in Australia and the UK (as well as Canada, USA, France & China) ..

http://www.haddock-research.com/Environmental_Choices_Wave_2_announced

Posted by Peter Winters | February 6, 2010 3:22 AM

A well-timed post Jonathon. A couple of months of bad press demonstrates the frailty of public sentiment in Australia. It will be interesting to see how the political message is delivered in the next few weeks as the government tries for the third time I think to introduce the Emissions Trading System legislation.

Posted by Tim Cable | February 6, 2010 8:43 AM

Jonathon,
Two points.
First, it is rather ironic that Australia is having such problems coming to terms with climate change because as you say they have been affected more than most. If you look at the map of the place, you can see they have a large enough desert region to produce their own electricity and export hydrogen if they covered a fraction of the area with straight forward solar thermal power plant. They would then become independent of oil as well.

Second,do not despair. I have now got my web site up and running and you can see in there that LibDem Councils are really working at Climate Change issues.
No one was surprised that when the Government announced their two recent initatives on boilers and renewables, they totally by-passed the suggestion of input from local Councils. However, undismayed, Islington for example has not only adopted a carbon control plan of its own, they have led their local strategic partnership into signing up as well. As you can see, their climate change partnership represents about 50% of the total emissions in the Borough.I have already circulated this to all the other LibDem Councils engcouraging them to do the same.

Please believe me, you have such a high profile, if you were to very publicly endorse what some of these Councils are doing you would have a tremendous impact. Not only would you encourage oher LibDem Councils to try harder, you would provoke Labour and Conservative Councils to out- perform the LibDems. Wouldn't it be great if a majority of Councils in Britain signed up for the 10:10 campaign. Then you could beat up the national parties and challenge them to match this effort at national level.
Go for it. The world is waiting for you and I'll give you every help I can!
David

Posted by David Pollard | February 6, 2010 3:31 PM

I agree, the last few months with the weather we've had in the UK more and more people have said to me 'climate change what climate change?'

Someone needs to give Mr Brown a kick up the arse and I hope he reads this blog and takes note.

Posted by Luke Walsh | February 9, 2010 12:44 PM

Hi Jonathon
What else should we expect when our agenda is finally moving into the mainstream, except several megatons of abuse from threatened free market fundamentalists?

I agree that we need to respond to the mounting sceptic hysteria, but a committee of the great and the good might not be the best way of going about it, since said G&G are widely perceived as simultaneously having their snouts in the trough and their fingers in the till, while riding the gravy train.

Instead, how about full page newspaper advertisements explaining the science, in 4 steps:
1 CO2 absorbs IR
2 GHGs up 37%
3 temps rising
4 only way to explain temp rise is by combining enhanced GHGs with natural variations?

I don't mean just in those words, of course, but that's the take home message.

With graphs, each of which is worth 1000 words.

Linked to a nice website with all the FAQs and Daily Express 100 points answered.

Like this one here. But better.

Posted by Richard Lawson | February 9, 2010 7:29 PM

Jonathon,

you grossly underestimate the scale of attack in Australia - it
is unbelievably weird. A quick look at:

joannenova.com.au

gives you a sense how a boring climate scientist (me) is attacked when he mentioned that there is a well funded and well organised campaign against the science - of course the ~300 e-mails within 72 hours with some common text does not point to an organised campaign right ?

I think this is directly dangerous and I have called for a Royal Commission in Australia - similar to your call for an enquiry in the UK, Interestingly, when I did this some of the worse sceptics shut up about an independent enquiry - since this would be a legally enforced, under oath, full disclosure of all aspects of the science, and funding on all sides.

We need a circuit breaker. Here, the sceptics are already undermining AR5 - "biased selection of authors" for example [odd since the authors are not selected yet] and have stated that even if the science could prove X, Y and Z even that would not means anything was true. And its a decade long slog to prove X, Y and Z.

It would be funny if it were not for what the science shows us.

Andy Pitman
Sydney, Australia

Posted by Andy Pitman | February 9, 2010 10:24 PM

Oh dear. As usual the Lib Dems jump on the fastest band wagon in site, regardless of whether its heading in the right direction.

David Pollard:
"they have a large enough desert region to produce their own electricity and export hydrogen if they covered a fraction of the area with straight forward solar thermal power plant"

David, are you aware that storing hydrogen requires it be kept near absolute zero and at considerable pressure? The best engineered tank of hydrogen will be empty in a fortnight, regardless of the energy expended keeping it pressurised and cool as the molecule is so small and volatile. Allow me to quote Merrick at length:

"
To be liquefied, hydrogen needs to be cooled to -253 degrees centigrade. The energy used to do this is equivalent to 30- 40% of the energy the hydrogen contains6.

Let’s look at that from a climate perspective. It takes 12.5-15 kilowatt-hours of electricity to liquefy 1kg of hydrogen7. With the UK’s emissions from generating electricity, that’s 6kg-7.2kg of CO2 emissions8. Burning a gallon of petrol - which contains around the same amount of energy as 1kg of hydrogen - releases around 8.8kg of CO29.

In other words, hydrogen causes 68-82% of the emissions of burning petrol just for the liquefaction process! This is before we count the emissions of the raw material involved in production (if it came from natural gas, that's another 9kg of CO210). This fuel is worse than petrol."

http://www.headheritage.co.uk/uknow/features/?id=85

Now for a quick question: How many times was the word "carbon" used in the Lib Dem's 2005 manifesto? The answer is a number between one and minus one.

Posted by punkscience | February 10, 2010 11:08 PM

The debates surrounding global warming are extremely contentious and wide-ranging; Leo Roodhart (President of the Society of Petroleum Engineers) has framed the discussion in an interesting context in his article for the Future Agenda Project (http://www.futureagenda.org/?cat=5), where he presents his thoughts on the future possibilities and challenges for the energy sector and argues for a “major decarbonisation of the world’s energy systems” in a bid to beat the “major challenge” of climate change.

Posted by Gregory Ingram | February 11, 2010 2:33 PM

I’m not really surprised to hear that people are now suspicious of the global warming information that has come out in recent times; scientists have to report their findings with honesty, not lie or spin results that seem to conflict with prediction and/or expectation, or what is the point? False information reporting is far worse than mistaken information. Anyone can make a mistake, but to hide behind false information or purposely misleading statistics is the worst kind of science, leave the spinning to politicians.
It must be said this seems to be a particular problem with a number of scientific fields just of late so the climate scientists should not, perhaps be singled out; rather the peer system needs to be reviewed. It seems to me, if someone finds a result that differs from perceived wisdom in any science subject that person is immediately vilified and/or told they are obviously wrong, stupid or incompetent.
All of which may be true until you find that the peer group are either too busy, lazy or just don’t like the results. It really isn’t surprising science sometimes enters blind alleys or struggles to move forward. Scientists above all people should remember that perceived wisdom is often just that, perceived!
It seems to me that if you want to engage with “the people” you need to treat them with a little respect, and believe they can understand complex issues if explained properly. So you as scientists and politicians believe global warming is at least in part caused by human activity i.e. the burning of fossil fuels. O.K. this is one of the most complex of issues involving inputs from the sun, atmosphere, sea, deforestation and other human activities to produce energy.
Keeping it very simple, I would recommend a more holistic approach to the subject and avoid using absolutes and scare tactics, you can point out that even though there is a huge natural carbon cycle that takes place each year, human activity is a net additional input of carbon (that can and has been measured?) and could be a factor in increasing global warming, you can point out that the sea takes in a huge amount of carbon each year as part of the carbon cycle, so do plants on the land but before human activity really got going the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere was almost exactly balanced by the amount of carbon that was removed by plankton and plants. Since Mans increased activity there is today, a net increase of carbon left in the atmosphere due to the addition created by burning fossil fuels and a reduction of carbon removal from the atmosphere due to deforestation, this at least is believed to be partly responsible for global warming or at least speeding the process up.
The last statement is referring to the fact that the largest single influence on our planet is the sun, which is a cyclical beast and goes through various cycles of getting warmer and cooler and unsurprisingly has a major direct effect on the earth. Some people believe that this alone is responsible for global warming, but a surprising correlation has been seen between the rates of global warming in line with the rate of fossil fuel extraction over the last approximately one hundred years that would sagest that human activity is having an adverse effect on our climate.
I would like to point out that regardless of your position with regard to global warming; human activity is polluting our planet at a great rate of knots (a technical term!). The by-products of oil including fertilizers and insecticides are getting into our ground water and rivers, contaminated by farming derived effluents and the manufacture of various plastics. Various pollutants now affect many of our rivers ether rendering them lifeless except for microbes and bacteria or more innocuously turning all the fish female, this is all entering our seas.
Large areas of land are being contaminated due to oil spillage, fly ash from coal burning and many other industrial contaminates. Combustion products of allsorts goes into our atmosphere not just carbon dioxide, this is mainly driven form our desire for energy.
This is an oversimplification of what is trying to be relayed to people to point out our responsibilities to our environment but hopefully it gives the general idea of the how. It should be remembered by all of us we are not trying to save the planet here, mother nature has been quite happy to do things in the long term even after major setbacks such as massive volcanoes and asteroids, she’s been doing it for approximately five billion years before humans arrived and she will carry on for about the same amount of time whether we survive or not.

Posted by P Hayward | February 15, 2010 10:44 AM

All this discussion on climate change indicates there is an engagement in the debate - but this is only by the few???

Therefore we need to engage more people in this, but more in terms of action - how do we do that?

It needs to be mainstreamed and it needs young people involved who really care - just my (delayed) thoughts...

Posted by Jo Anna Reed Johnson | March 3, 2010 3:09 AM

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