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Climate change gets a relaunch

by Melanie Thompson
Get Sust

After the 'Climategate' science scandal and a wave of pressing humanitarian and financial disasters, climate change has dropped down the news agenda and we've almost stopped thinking about it. But with news that the UK is missing its targets and dawdling on policy shifts, it's time to put it firmly back on our radar.

Last week (14 and 15 September 2011) former US Vice President Al Gore led a 24-hour-long media campaign to remind the world of the dramatic impact that climate change is already having, and the potentially devastating future impacts if we don't take drastic action to reduce global emissions of anthropogenic (human-made) greenhouse gases. Dubbed '24 hours of Reality', the event featured broadcasts from around the world showing local impacts of extreme weather events and natural disasters, along with studio discussions of climate science and the problem of engaging the public in the face of sometimes vociferous opposition (particularly in the US) and seemingly more pressing problems such as the global economic crisis.

For all it's worthiness, I doubt that the event will prove to be the grand unifying call to arms its organizers hope, especially for those of us outside the US who are already 'engaged' with the climate change issue. Watch a few clips yourself then reflect for a moment on the questions: who is this talking to and what impact might it have?

Nevertheless, the fact that Al Gore and his team thought it necessary to 'relaunch' climate change after the worldwide acclaim for his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth tells us something about prevailing attitudes to the issue. Some might say we've had more important things to think about for the past few years; money makes the world go around, and that's where attention has been focused for three years or more in the West. And anyway, we've got climate change under control here in the UK, haven't we, with tougher Building Regulations, a raft of policy initiatives and legally binding carbon emission reductions?

Off course on carbon cutting

Dream on! Bang on cue, the day after Al Gore's film show came the news that the UK's 'greenest ever' government is not living up to expectations and if we don't get a grip on the situation, we'll seriously miss the targets set since in the 1990s.

Cambridge Econometrics, an independent company owned by a charity, the Cambridge Trust for the Promotion of New Thinking in Economics, says that the UK has missed the target of cutting carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2010 which had been set by the Labour Party before coming to power in 1997. It also looks likely that we will narrowly miss the legally binding targets up to 2017, and miss further targets by wider margins after that.

This damning assessment of the UK's carbon-cutting performance, UK Energy and the Environment, was released on 16 September. Professor Paul Ekins of the Energy Institute at University College London, author of the report, explained that it had been clear for some time that the 2010 target would not be met, although the recession during 2009 brought it almost within reach.

He warned that 'The unmistakable lesson from the effect of emissions reduction policies is that policies tend to have a lower impact than forecast, and therefore their strength needs to be increased if targets are to be achieved'.

The government has agreed 'carbon budgets' for four successive five-year periods, running from 2008-2027, following recommendations from the Committee on Climate Change (CCC). The 2027 target amounts to a halving of emissions from the 1990 baseline.

The Cambridge Econometrics report goes into considerable detail about the likely impact of various policies on total emissions, and carefully explains which of the most recent policies have not been accounted for in this latest assessment (e.g. the Renewable Heat Incentive and the Green Deal), because they were too new or insufficiently developed at the time of the study.

Of key interest to the construction sector is the data showing that the majority of greenhouse gas reductions in recent years have been secured in gases other than CO₂, mainly by curbing methane release from landfill sites.

The Cambridge Econometrics team also forecast that investment in renewable electricity generation will not be enough to meet the UK's target, under EU legislation, of producing 15% of its electricity by renewable technologies by 2020.

Seven greens, 16 amber and six red

Unfortunately for the coalition government, the bad news didn't end there. On the same day the Green Alliance, an umbrella group representing several environmental and development charities, released its assessment of the government's performance on 29 low-carbon commitments. Using a traffic light indicator system the Green Alliance reports that the government is making good progress on just seven of the 29 commitments, ironically singling out as particularly noteworthy the government's commitments to the CCC targets which the Cambridge Econometrics report had just said it might not reach!

Of the other 22 commitments, 16 were given the amber light, with a warning that nine of these could also fail without adequate cross-government cooperation, and six commitments are already in the red zone. The Treasury and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills were identified as having 'curbed the government's ambition at crucial moments'.

None of this is good news, for the government, the country or the planet. To make matters worse, few will be surprised by it.

Political action on climate change dates back to the late 1980s, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) held its first meeting in Geneva in November 1988, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher drew attention to the emerging science on climate change, opening the Met Office Hadley Centre for climate research two years later. Despite public awareness campaigns, policy measures and countless debates, we are still failing to get a grip on the situation.

According to the Met Office's most recent report, there is a growing body of evidence that the world is warming and that humans have contributed to that warming. What's more, following the 'Climategate' scandal of 2009/10 over research data, much of the information is now freely available.

A summary publication, Evidence - the state of the climate, records that the period 2000–2009 was warmer than the 1990s which, in turn, were warmer than 1980s, and that the average temperature over the first decade of the 21st century was significantly warmer than any preceding decade in the instrumental record, stretching back 160 years. Although there is variability from year to year there is a clear underlying trend of increasing global temperatures from the late 1970s of about 0.16°C per decade.

The Met Office acknowledges that models and simulations are far from perfect, and details a number of factors that may skew the figures, though understanding of these is growing daily. Nevertheless, the warming trend is expected to increase. Just last week (11 September 2011) studies published separately by scientists at the Institute of Environmental Physics in Bremen, Germany and the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado both report significant melting of Arctic sea ice, with further implications for speeding up the rate of warming via the 'albedo' effect (sea water absorbs more heat than white reflecting ice).

Taken as a whole, last week's climate news seems like a cause for despair. After twenty plus years of effort – grappling with regular changes to regulations, taxation, technology and countless awareness-raising campaigns – it has come to this. Perhaps we should bow to the climate sceptics and agree that our efforts in the face of energy-hungry emerging economies like India and China are paltry and worthless?

But just in the nick of time, two interesting pieces of research landed in the Get Sust in-tray. The first came courtesy of Andrew Warren of the Association for the Conservation of Energy (UKACE), who recently met Mark Levine of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories in California, a China specialist who has spent 25 years studying the Chinese economy and energy usage. Levine's recent report Assessment of China's energy-saving and emission-reduction accomplishments and opportunities during the 11th Five Year Plan, published in the journal Energy Policy, says that China successfully broke the link between economic output (GDP) and energy consumption between 1990 and 2002, though for three years from 2002–2005 energy consumption rose steeply. However, the Chinese government quickly spotted this and has implemented a new raft of policies on energy saving and consumption which are beginning to bear fruit, with emissions set to decline in the 2030s.

The second is a paper from a special issue of the journal Building Research and Information (BRI), which highlights the success of a cap-and-trade scheme launched in Tokyo, which has proved that small and large buildings alike can get a grip on their carbon emissions by working at a local level, guided by the city's government (Yuko Nishida and Ying Hua, Motivating stakeholders to deliver change: Tokyo's Cap-and-Trade Program).

It is worth noting that Japan has restated its commitment to its 2009 pledge to cut emissions by 2020, despite last year's nuclear disaster and its ongoing impact, not least on energy supply.

Schmaltzy films from far off lands no longer push our 'action' buttons. But long-term data and considered research point to the inconvenient truth. Maybe Al Gore is right after all – it is high time we all got a grip on what really matters.