Articles — Emma Duncan
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Feeling the heat
Emma Duncan predicts a political climate change
Most of the manifestations of climate change that the world will be talking about next year are not predictable. The north Atlantic hurricane season may or may not be particularly violent; it was brutal in 2004 and 2005, but wasn’t in 2006.There may or may not be heatwaves; there was one in Europe in 2003, but subsequent summers have been only pleasantly warm; there was one in the American West in 2006. Uncertainty is what makes climate change so difficult to deal with. Global warming increases the risk of dangerous events, but the timing and frequency of those events are unpredictable, which makes them hard to prepare for.One development, however, is pretty certain since international bureaucracies are more reliable than the weather: the completion of the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It will be more interesting than it sounds, for it will be gloomier than previous ones, and will cause plenty of argument.
The IPCC was set up by the United Nations to establish a consensus about what is happening to the climate, so that governments should be able to make policy on the basis of some agreed facts. It has produced three reports, but no consensus. Sceptics maintain that it has frozen out dissenters. A hurricane climatologist resigned because the lead author of the chapter on hurricanes and typhoons gave a press conference attributing the increase in the number of intense storms to climate change. There have been complaints that its predictions of the likely spread of malaria are alarmist, given that economic development, rather than temperature, determines the disease’s prevalence. And other critics have complained that the panel’s economics are dodgy. But even if its conclusions are disputed, the IPCC remains the most authoritative body holding forth on climate change, so its reports influence policymaking.
The Heat is On
A survey of climate change
Global warming, it now seems, is for real. Emma Duncan examines the nature of the problem, and possible solutions.THE world’s climate has barely changed since the industrial revolution. The temperature was stable in the 19th century, rose very slightly during the first half of the 20th, fell back in the 1950s-70s, then started rising again. Over the past 100 years, it has gone up by about 0.6°C (1.1°F).
So what’s the fuss about? Not so much the rise in temperature as the reason for it. Previous changes in the world’s climate have been set off by variations either in the angle of the Earth’s rotation or in its distance from the sun. This time there is another factor involved: man-made "greenhouse gases".
When the sun’s energy hits the Earth, most of it bounces back into space. But carbon dioxide and around 30 other greenhouse gases, such as methane, help create a layer that traps some of the heat from the sun, thus warming the planet. And, because of the burning of fossil fuels, which contain the CO2 that the original plants breathed in from the atmosphere, levels of CO2 have increased from around 280 parts per million (ppm) before the industrial revolution to around 380ppm now. Studies of ice cores show that concentrations have not been so high for nearly half a million years. At the current rate of increase, they will have reached 800ppm by the end of this century. Given that CO2 being emitted now stays in the atmosphere for up to 200 years, getting those concentrations down will take a long time.
The first person to spot the connection between temperature and human activity was a 19th-century scientist called Svante Arrhenius. He speculated that emissions from industry could double CO2 levels in 3,000 years, thus warming the planet. Being a Swede, he thought that was just fine. In 1938 a British engineer called Guy Callendar gave a talk to the Royal Meteorological Society in which he claimed to have established that the world was warming, but he was regarded as an eccentric. The idea of global warming seemed bound for the intellectual dustbin.
Cleaning up
A special report on business and climate change
Business is getting down to cutting carbon, but needs more incentives to make much difference to climate change, argues Emma Duncan.
WHEN the notion of global warming first seeped into public consciousness in the 1980s, business took a dim view of it. Admitting that human activity was changing the climate would involve accepting some responsibility, which was likely to mean coughing up cash. So, in 1989, shortly after the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body set up under UN auspices to establish a scienti_c consensus on the issue, the big carbon emitters set up the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). It cast doubt on the science and campaigned against greenhouse-gas reductions.
The GCCfolded in 2002. Its line of argument enjoyed a final f’owering last year, in a startlingly inane television commercial put out by the business-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). It showed pictures of trees (breathing in carbon dioxide) and a happy little girl blowing dandelion seeds (breathing out carbon dioxide). The punchline was: "Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life."
These days very few serious businessmen will say publicly either that climate change is not happening or that it is not worth tackling. Even Exxon Mobil, bête noire of the climate-change activists, has now withdrawn funding from the CEI and appears to accept the need for controls on carbon emissions.