Category Archives: Climate Change

2012: Weird Weather or Changing Climate?

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in March 2013

There have been a number of sets of weather and climate-related data published in the last couple of weeks that illustrate just how extreme the weather was in the UK in 2012 and how this fits into a picture of a global climate that appears to be warming at a faster rate than was previously thought.
A report on the drought and flooding experience in the UK in 2012 by the Environment Agency and reported in The Observer on 2nd March shows that flooding was recorded on 20% of days last year and drought on 25%, often in the same parts of the country with some rivers experiencing both their lowest and highest recorded levels within the space of a few months.

Following hot on the heels of this report comes the news that levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii have showed the second largest annual increase on record. Data just released show that the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere rose 2.67 parts per million to 395ppm.

News that global efforts to reduce emissions have not only so far failed to lower the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere but that these levels are actually increasing at a record rate will, or certainly should, make sobering reading for governments and policy makers around the world.
The 2007 Bali Climate Change Declaration formally set out the consensus view of the world’s leading climate scientists that, in order to avert potentially disastrous consequences, the increase in global temperatures should be limited to no more than 2 Degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In order to limit the rise in temperatures to 2 Degrees, the scientists’ view was that atmospheric CO2 levels should be “stabilised at a level well below 450ppm” and that, in order to achieve this, emissions would need to peak and then decline in the 10-15 years following 2007. The fact that, 6 years into this timeframe, CO2 levels are continuing to rise at an increasing rate, casts doubt on the ability of the global community to achieve the 2 Degrees cap on warming. This limit of 2 Degrees has been adopted by many of the world’s developed economies, including the European Union, and the fact that its achievement is now in doubt will come as a major blow to governments and campaigners alike.

The fact is that even a 2 Degrees rise in global temperatures is predicted by many to have dramatic consequences so the prospect of an even greater increase is a grim one indeed.

You would think that an impending global calamity of this nature would be front page news and would galvanise governments into action, spurred on by the demands of their electorates and constant media scrutiny of the progress they were making towards averting disaster. In fact, research published earlier this year by Media Matters in the United States shows that, while 2012 was the warmest year on record, this was not reflected in the coverage the issue received in the mainstream media.

With very little effective pressure from the popular press, politicians are able to continue to dismiss climate change, and environmental concerns in general, as being fringe issues that must not be allowed to thwart efforts to get the economy back on track. In the UK, the widely-reported remarks in a speech by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne that “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business, so let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in Europe” seems to encapsulate the Government’s approach: do what we absolutely have to but be in no rush to adopt a leadership position on the issue.

Also in the papers is the news that the country’s two largest heritage organisations, English Heritage and The National Trust, have won a high court battle to stop a windfarm being built in Northamptonshire in a location that would adversely impact views of and from the Trust’s property at Lyveden New Bield, which is an Elizabethan ruin. Now I used to live very close to Lyveden and it is indeed a remarkable monument and there are many very good arguments for not building a windfarm in its vicinity, not least the fact that Northamptonshire is one of the least windy counties in England. However, I do wonder what could be achieved if the country’s largest heritage charity and a government quango could join forces to demand positive action to respond to the challenge of climate change as well as going to court to challenge misguided efforts to tackle the issues. It is right that these bodies should be vigilant in guarding our national heritage from despoliation but who is taking the same care over our national, and indeed global, future?

Climate Milestone Passes Un-noticed

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in May 2013

To be fair to the Prime Minister, he did have a lot on his mind on 10th May 2013. The Conservative party was embarking on one of its periodic spasms of self-destruction, this time following the strong showing by UKIP at the Tories’ expense in the local elections the previous week. With a Euro-Sceptic backbench rebellion to add to the ongoing unrest about “Gay Marriage” among his MPs, David Cameron could perhaps be excused for allowing the latest news from Hawaii to sink below the surface of the Downing Street In-Tray.

Except this was no ordinary run-of-the-mill bulletin from the Pacific Island paradise; not a weather report of another gloriously sunny day and not the latest breaking news of spectacular surfing exploits. This time the news from Hawaii, and in particular from the Mauna Loa Observatory, was that the levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere had risen to levels not seen since the Pliocene period over 3 million years ago.

Four hundred parts per million does not seem any more momentous than when it is written in its usual, abbreviated form of 400ppm but it is an important landmark , remarkable both for its absolute magnitude and the speed at which it has come about. At the dawn of the industrial age, less than three centuries ago, the level was around 280ppm. When the Mauna Loa observatory was established in 1958, the level had climbed slowly to 315ppm. The Keeling curve that plots the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, named after scientist Dr Charles Keeling who started the Hawaiian observations, has climbed steadily upwards at an increasing rate ever since.

Analysis of bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice sheets suggests that, for the 800,000 years preceding the Industrial Revolution, global atmospheric CO2 levels had remained between 200 and 300ppm. To jump from this long term stable average to the present 400ppm level in a mere 250 years represents a rate of increase – some 75 times faster than the pre-industrial average – that has no precedent in the geological record. What the evidence does suggest is that, the last time that the 400ppm threshold was crossed, global average temperatures were 3 or 4 degrees Centigrade warmer than today and around 8 degrees warmer at the poles. Reef corals suffered major extinction and areas around the Arctic Circle that are today a frozen wilderness were covered in lush forest growth. There is always a lag between the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increasing and the manifestation of its warming effects on the climate so, even if levels were to miraculously stabilise at their current magnitude tomorrow, there would still be a certain amount of warming to come. And CO2 levels show no signs of stabilising; in fact, anything but.

Even if the latest news on the global CO2 front passed the Prime Minister by, he cannot have failed to notice the report by the Government’s own Committee on Climate Change that highlighted the fact that, although domestic production of CO2 is down by 20% over the past two decades, the UK’s carbon footprint has actually increased by 10% as “embodied emissions” in imported goods have increased at a faster rate than UK-based production emissions.

This trend is cause for concern from both environmental and economic policy standpoints. If the UK is effectively “offshoring” its CO2 emissions by replacing domestic manufacturing production with imports, this is bad news for the British manufacturing sector and bad news for UK workers as jobs go to companies based overseas. It also suggests a weak base for any Green Recovery from the ongoing economic downturn. Gaining market share and decarbonising production would be significant challenges individually for the manufacturing sector to face. To ask firms to adopt low carbon technologies whilst at the same time competing to regain market share previously lost to imports is a big ask indeed.

Chancellor George Osborne has attracted a lot of criticism (not least from me) for his assertion that: “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business”. The latest evidence suggests that we are currently failing to save the economy and, if governments do not start according the reduction of CO2 levels the priority it desperately requires, we are in very real danger of putting the planet out of business.

Margaret Thatcher – Unsung Environmentalist?

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in April 2013

Since the announcement of the death on Monday 8th April of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (latterly Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven), the British media has been awash with tributes to, and retrospective critiques of, her record as the longest serving United Kingdom Prime Minister of the 20th Century

Whilst most of the coverage has focussed on the legacy of her economic and industrial policies including such milestones as the privatisation of many State-owned companies such as British Telecom and the long-running and bitterly divisive strikes in the mining and printing industries, little consideration has been given to Thatcher the Environmentalist.

As a trained scientist – she studied Chemistry at Oxford University and worked as an industrial chemist before entering politics – Mrs Thatcher was probably better equipped intellectually than any subsequent Prime Minister to fully grasp the fundamental science behind climate change and other contemporary environmental issues.

Although such issues did not start to be widely discussed and debated outside academic circles until the 1990s, Margaret Thatcher delivered a speech to the Royal Society in 1988 that touched on the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, the hole in the ozone layer that had recently been discovered over the Antarctic and acid deposition from power stations and industry.

This address to a British learned society, which could possibly have been dismissed as the Prime Minister, as a Fellow of the Royal Society, seeking to demonstrate her scientific credentials to her peers, was followed in 1989 by a speech to the United Nations General Assembly that contained the lines:
“The result [of human impacts on the environment] is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world’s climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all.”

The fact that we may be surprised to hear such sentiments being articulated by a politician who is viewed as a champion of the Right demonstrates the extent to which the issue of climate change has become dominated by political, as opposed to scientific, considerations. Ultimately, it would seem that Thatcher could not bring herself to embrace the type of trans-national policies that are required to tackle global environmental challenges, especially when these involved challenging the hegemony of free market economics.

In her 2003 book Statecraft, Thatcher criticised the “alarmist” pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and warned that “the new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes.”

A further statement appears to foreshadow the approach of the current UK Government that action on the environment must not be allowed to derail economic growth. “Whatever international action we agree upon to deal with environmental problems, we must enable our economies to grow and develop, because without growth you cannot generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment.” One can almost imagine current Chancellor George Osborne uttering these words in support of his assertion that “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business”.

At the end of the day it seems that the concerns of Margaret Thatcher the scientist were over-ruled by Prime Minister Thatcher the free market ideologue. With all the current debate surrounding her legacy, it is salutary to speculate what it might have been had those late 1980s speeches been translated into concrete policy prescriptions. Mrs Thatcher Saves the Planet?