[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Whistling in the Wind

[Bill Totten]

The new climate change report falls miles short of what we need. Here
are some of the emergency measures it should have contained.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (December 02 2008)


Lord Turner has two jobs. The first, as chair of the Financial Services
Authority, is to save capitalism. The second, as chair of the Committee
on Climate Change, is to save the biosphere from the impacts of
capitalism. I have no idea how well he is discharging the first task,
but if his approach to the second one is anything to go by, you should
dump your shares and buy gold.

His climate change report, published yesterday, is long, detailed and
impressive {1}. It has the admirable objective of trying to cap global
warming at two degrees or a little more. This, it says, means that
greenhouse gas pollution in the UK should fall by 80% by 2050 and by 31%
by 2020. But there's a problem. There is no longer any likely
relationship between an 80% cut and two degrees of warming. This gets a
little complicated, but please bear with me while I explain why Turner's
proposal is about as likely to stop runaway climate change as the
Maginot Line was to hold back the Luftwaffe.

The 80% cut he recommends for the UK more or less matches a global
target of 50% by 2050. A 50% global cut, the report says, would make
roughly two degrees of warming a "central expectation" and would reduce
the probability of four degrees (which it calls "extremely dangerous
climate change") to less than one per cent {2}.

Turner claims that to keep the temperature rise close to two degrees,
the world's greenhouse gas emissions must peak in 2016 then fall by
either three or four per cent a year. A 3% rate of decline is most
likely to deliver a temperature rise of 2.2 degrees this century; a 4%
annual cut would produce about 2.1% {3}. That's more or less consistent
with his 2050 targets.

So far so good. But a recent paper in the Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society, using the same sources, comes to completely different
conclusions {4}. It agrees that to deliver a reasonable chance of
preventing more than two degrees of warming, greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere need to stabilise at a maximum of 450 parts per million,
carbon dioxide equivalent (ppmCO2e). But it shows that to achieve this,
global emissions of greenhouse gases from the parts of the system we can
control need to peak by 2015, then fall by six to eight per cent a year
between 2020 and 2040, leading to "full decarbonization sometime soon
after 2050". Even this, it shows, relies on an optimistic reading of the
current data. Turner's suggested cuts are more likely to produce four
degrees of warming than two degrees.

The difference between the two reports comes down to this: Turner
assumes that greenhouse gases can rise to 500 ppmCO2e before falling
back to 450 {5}. The other paper shows that this is a dangerous
assumption. Not only does this mean that the cut comes too late, but far
from falling back, the enhanced levels in the atmosphere are likely to
trigger more emissions, as the biosphere starts producing more
greenhouse gases than it absorbs. We cannot afford to overshoot {6}.

Last week a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters produced
what could be the first hard evidence that runaway global feedback has
begun {7}. In 2007, methane levels in the atmosphere, which had
previously levelled off, began rising again. The most likely reason is
that the Siberian permafrost is melting, as a result of the runaway
warming of the Arctic. This wasn't supposed to happen for another eighty
years. The great global meltdown appears to have started, yet Turner
proposes that we carry on with the old plan as if nothing has changed.
We're still digging trenches, even as the sky fills with bomber planes.

My reading of the new projections suggests that to play its part in
preventing two degrees of global warming, the UK needs to cut greenhouse
gases by roughly 25% from current levels by the end of 2012 - a quarter
in four years. But how the heck could this be done? Here is a list of
measures which could be enacted almost immediately. They require no
economic or technological miracles; but they do demand that the
government is brave enough to govern.

1. Immediately renegotiate the European Emissions Trading Scheme,
imposing a lower cap on carbon pollution and the mandatory sale of all
emissions permits to the industries covered by the scheme (at the moment
over 90% are given away) {8}.

2. Use the money this raises for:

a. A crash programme for training builders. As the major component of a
green new deal, delivering jobs as well as carbon cuts, the government
will immediately launch training schemes for tens of thousands of
specialist builders, insulators, window-fitters, plasterers and decorators.

b. A home improvement scheme like Germany's, but twice as fast. Every
year between January 2010 and 2020, 10% of homes will be fully insulated
and fitted with good windows or secondary glazing, at state expense.
Landlords will have a legal obligation to join or lose their right to
take tenants. Announce that when the scheme is complete, gas and
electricity bills will be subject to an escalating tariff: the more you
use, the more you will have to pay for every unit.

3. Announce that incandescent lightbulbs will no longer be sold in the
United Kingdom by next April. Announce that no fridge or freezer with an
energy rating below grade A++ and no other appliance rated below grade A
will be sold from July.

4. Increase vehicle excise duty for the most polluting cars to GBP 3000
a year (from the current GBP 400). Use the money this raises to:

a. Start closing key urban streets to private cars and dedicating them
to public transport and cycling.

b. Increase the public subsidy for bus and train journeys. Oblige the
bus companies to sign contracts providing a wider range of services.
Give us the integrated low-carbon transport we have long been promised,
in which buses are scheduled to meet trains, trains and buses carry
bicycles and safe cycle lanes connect with each other across entire cities.

c. Train thousands of new coach drivers and public transport operators.
Create coach lanes on all the motorways and start moving coach stations
from the city centres to the motorway junctions, to enable coach travel
to become as fast and efficient as car travel. Link them to city centres
with dedicated bus lanes {9}.

d. Scrap the airport expansion programme. Set a cap on the number of
landing slots, which will fall every year until it reaches 5% of current
capacity.

5. Stop the burning of moorland: because this exposes and oxidises peat,
grouse shoots (which are mostly responsible) produce a staggering
proportion of the UK's emissions {10}.

6. Stop all opencast coal mining and rescind planning permission for new
works. Impose stonking taxes on the extraction of all fossil fuels.

Is this enough? No. But it puts us on the right track. It's all a gamble
from now on: the only reliable advice is that we shouldn't start from
here. But two decades of procrastination ensure that only emergency
measures now have a chance of preventing a climate disaster. What
Turner's report - polite, measured and impressive as it is - proposes is
more procrastination.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Committee on Climate Change, December 2008. Building a Low Carbon
Economy: the UK's contribution to tackling climate change.
http://hmccc.s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs/TSO-ClimateChange.pdf

2. Page xiv.

3. Page 21.

4. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, 2008. Reframing the climate change
challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society A. Published online.
doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/journal_papers/fulltext.pdf

5. Page xiv.

6. A forthcoming paper in Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences
also suggests that, above a certain level in the atmosphere, CO2 could
take much longer to be absorbed than most studies assume, as the global
sinks become saturated. See: Geoffrey Lean, 30th November 2008.
Greenhouse gases will heat up planet 'for ever'. The Independent.

7. M Rigby et al, 2008. Renewed growth of atmospheric methane.
Geophysical Research Letters, Vol 35, L22805, doi:10.1029/2008GL036037.

8. Nature, 26th November 2008. United Kingdom auctions carbon emissions
permits. Nature 456, 435. doi:10.1038/456435d

9. There's more on this proposal (and some of the others here) in George
Monbiot, 2007. Heat: how to stop the planet burning. Penguin, London.

10. See Fred Pearce, 12th August 2006. Grouse-shooting popularity boosts
global warming. New Scientist.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/12/02/whistling-in-the-wind/


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