THE globe will not notice Kyoto — but we will notice, because it will cost us a bomb. What is the collective noun for environmental modellers? Try a catastrophe.
The “scientific consensus” on global warming is not only that it is occurring, and that heavy use of fossil fuels is mainly to blame, but also that the impact on the Earth will be catastrophic unless the trend can be slowed or reversed by dramatic — and dramatically expensive — policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This progression moves from established fact to reasonably high level of probability to the realm of guesswork — and the farther into the future, the wilder the guesses.
That would be the flattest of truisms were it not that on global warming, government policy is increasingly driven by alarmist scenarios about the world in 2100 that make long-range weather forecasting look rock solid by comparison.
A recent scientific conference at Exeter University, summoned to provide Tony Blair with environmental ammunition for the G8 summit, became like a contest between horror stories — the Vanishing Gulf Stream, Millions Dead of Malaria in the Midlands, the Parboiled Polar Bear — that would do the best job of making the public’s flesh creep. As spin for the Government’s case that climate change is a threat greater than terrorism, this was all no doubt effective.
But these scenarios are what scientific insiders know as “computer-aided story lines”, not reliable predictions. Tall stories have no place at G8 summits. To base decisions on them would be not only absurd, but pernicious. For example: a shutdown in the thermohaline circulation that produces the Gulf Stream would indeed be disastrous for Europe but it is what scientists call a “low- probability high-consequence event” — in plain language, it has a more than 95 per cent chance of not happening. Malaria could indeed make a comeback in Europe, but this is a land-use and public health issue more than a climatic one. Polar bears . . . pass.
It is no doubt fascinating to feed a load of worst-case assumptions through computers to see what happens. Climate change modelling involves assumptions about all sorts of things — population levels, rates of economic growth, energy efficiency and the weight of fossil fuels in future energy production — that are hard to forecast over an extended period. These assumptions are then fed into models that predict how the climate would react in the future. Uncertainties abound.
So long as it is made clear that these flights of fancy are in no sense forecasts of what is likely to happen, there can be no objection. But the phrase “scientific consensus” produces a tremor of doubt among people who admire scientists for their inherent distrust of received wisdom. And that tremor becomes an apprehensive shudder when these speculative “images of alternative futures” come to be thought of as “the latest scientific evidence” and work their way into the decisions that politicians take and taxpayers and consumers pay for. In climate change, careless talk costs livelihoods.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has drawn up scenarios of mean temperature rises from 2000 to 2100 of between 1.5C (34.7F) and 5.8C above 1990 levels. The difference between these two guesstimates is, baldly, from inherently manageable to seriously alarming. The top-end IPCC scenario, codenamed A1FI, assumes that per capita carbon emissions rise to four times current levels (they have been stable since the early 1970s) and that methane concentrations more than double (they are currently declining).
Another high-end scenario, A2, not only puts the world population in 2100 at 15.1 billion, half again as high as the 10.4 billion projected by the UN, but assumes more carbon- intensive energy use — turning the historical trend on its head. Both scenarios artificially inflate the magnitude of the challenge of climate change.
These top-end 5.8C scenarios are constantly cited and are distorting policy. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which comes into force tomorrow, already has “Past sell-by date” stickers all over it. The argument is that Kyoto does not go far enough. The proposed remedy is “Kyoto plus” — more stringent emissions cuts applied to more countries. But this would compound the deleterious consequences of a product so flawed that it should never have been put on the market.
For a start, the protocol’s implementation will require such heavy-handed regulation that Andrei Illarionov, the senior economic adviser to President Vladimir Putin who opposed Russia’s ratification of Kyoto, sees it as a recrudescence of the command economy. Appealing last week to Mr Blair to listen more to informed sceptics, he asked: “Have there been any international agreements to limit economic growth and development before Kyoto? Yes, there were two: Communism and Nazism.”
It is not necessary to go that far to see that in cost-benefit terms Kyoto is inherently inefficient. It obliges industrialised countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions to 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. Along with other developing countries, India and China are permitted unlimited emissions. Instead of going for emissions cuts with the lowest marginal cost, Kyoto imposes reductions on those countries that have already taken the “easy” steps to less carbon-intensive growth.
Energy conservation makes sense for many reasons. I am tempted to suggest that if Mr Blair and Gordon Brown were serious they would levy standard 17.5 per cent VAT on domestic gas and electricity bills, offer tax breaks for solar panels and replace the Millennium Dome with one of China’s pebble- technology nuclear reactors.
But cost-benefit analysis should still apply to energy conservation. Last week the National Audit Office pointed out how the UK’s Renewables Obligation — which compels electricity suppliers to buy quotas from wind farms and other renewable sources of power at nearly three times the market rate of £25 per megawatt hour — will add more than £1 billion a year to consumers’ bills within five years.
A conservative estimate of the cost of meeting the Kyoto target is £150 billion. Britain’s bills will be disproportionately high, since Mr Blair has decreed that Britain shall exceed the target by cutting carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2010 and 60 per cent by 2050.
It is legitimate to ask whether this is value for money. Even Kyoto supporters concede that in the industrialised world the economic costs will outweigh the expected benefits. Emissions targets are an expensive and highly bureaucratic way to achieve next to nothing.
These targets penalise economic success and reward failure. Spain would have to cut emissions by 40 per cent to meet the Kyoto target, whereas Russia, where economic collapse has helped to reduce emissions to 38.5 per cent below the 1990 baseline, stands to profit from selling emissions quotas.
Kyoto will not “save the planet”. Even if the US signed up and Kyoto were implemented in full by the 39 industrialised countries on which the burden has been laid, the Earth would barely notice the difference. By 2100, Kyoto may shave a little off the expected increase in global temperatures. But what it will undoubtedly do is take a chunk off the GDPs of industrialised nations.
The end of the world is not nigh. Money might be better spent on global water conservation than global warming, since water scarcity will affect more than six billion people by 2080. We should question the claim that there is no time to lose. We should go with what we know, not with inaccurate, long-range scenarios.
We need more flexible policies that give greater emphasis to reducing our vulnerability to the impacts of global warming. Such strategies would cost less and yield greater benefits than climate-mitigation blueprints. The European Commission is leery of “Kyoto plus” and it is right. The Prime Minister’s drive to show “Britain leading the way” is taking him over the cliff’s edge.
