Siding with Sammy

There are a few milestones in everyone's life when you find yourself thinking or saying something you thought you never would. Like when you hear yourself sounding like your parents as you're talking to your children; or when you see Neil Diamond performing and you think 'some of those tunes aren't bad you know'. And the real killer: when you're listening to Sammy Wilson from the DUP and you find yourself in agreement. Oh Lord not this one, please, not this one ...

Sammy has just been appointed Northern Ireland's Environment Minister and he has already incurred the wrath of what he calls 'green fanatics' by suggesting that jobs and the economy are just as important as the environment. And no, he wasn't referring to Sinn Féin. Here he was speaking after his appointment earlier this week:

As minister for the environment I've got a duty to ensure that there's a good balance set between the need to develop our economy, to provide homes, factories, roads etc and at the same time to protect the environment.

I think he's right - there, I said it ...

He also reflects a wider groundswell of opinion among European politicians that maybe they need to be more balanced about the economy/environment debate. Witness the decision by Italy to re-start its nuclear programme, and Germany's to stop the closure of its facilities. Morever, the 'OPEC tax' is already having a bigger impact than any proposed 'carbon tax', as illustrated by a 20 percent decline in petrol sales in the UK over the past 12 months and the rise of the 'hypermiling' movement in the United States.

I don't think our own Environment Minister John Gormley will be siding with Sammy any time soon mind. Only this week he gave his imprimatur to yet another department funded study that took the most extreme assumptions about climate change to generate the most extreme projections for Ireland and then call them 'scientific predictions'. Sounds more convincing than 'scientific conjectures' I guess. At least the IPCC had the integrity to call them illustrative marker scenarios, not predictions: because real scientists don't do 'predictions' for 50 or 100 year's time. They leave predictions to astrologers, charlatans and, er, politicians.

But not Sammy ...

An Inconvenient Cooling

The recent spell of global warming peaked in 1998 - a full decade ago - with each year subsequently recording cooler temperatures (and in the case of the recent winter in the Northern Hemisphere, extremely cold). There is an interesting debate taking place (even though we're told 'the debate is over') which suggests, according to Don Easterbrook, that we may have entered a thirty year cycle of cooling (with the next cycle of warming due some time after 2020).

The BBC's More or Less programme has got in on it with a wager between two climate watchers about whether we'll see a year warmer than 1998 by 2011. If we do then it will be pretty clear that we are still in a warming phase (with all the implications for human involvement in global warming and responsibility for doing something about it). If we don't then it suggests that the global cooling proponents may have got it right (this time).

Of course there are those who don't think we have the luxury of waiting until 2011 to see which side is 'right' - James Hansen and Bill McKibben among them. Personally I think they sound like the lyrics of David Bowie's Five Years - inciting panic when panic is unwarranted. If anything it looks like we are tracking the least threatening of the IPCC's illustrative marker scenarios (see table SPM.3 on page 13). Some prudent preparations for a less benign scenario are called for in my opinion - not least because the main beneficial side effect I foresee is that we will solve the energy and food crisis before we face a real environmental crisis.

But if I was going to a 'Five Years' moment it would be about the prospect of us flipping into another ice age (the next one is 1,000 years overdue). A colder climate is far, far deadlier than a warmer climate - the former means starvation, the latter means longer growth seasons. Time, as always, will tell.

Carbon Sunk

Sometimes it pays to read the small print. Richard Tol, Ireland's most prodigious economist, writes in the latest issue of the ESRI's Quarterly Economic Commentary about just one of the targets set out in the 86 page Agreement for Government signed by Fiánna Fail, the Greens and PDs in June last year. On page 19 of the Agreement we read that:

... the Government will set a target for this administration of a reduction of 3% per year on average in our greenhouse gas emissions.

As Tol points out, this amounts to a five year goal for the present government of reducing CO2 emissions by up to 25%. Or 'a considerable task' as he wryly puts it.

So what would it take for the Government to deliver on this one goal? Given that we're more or less stuck with the energy infrastructure, housing and transport systems that will predominate even by 2012 (as these things take decades to change), then more radical measures are required. Here are some of Tol's calculations of what it would (hypothetically) require for the Government to succeed:

• Reduce the number of cattle in Ireland by 50% between now and 2012, or


• Reduce the number of people in Ireland by 50%, or


• Reduce energy usage per resident by 50% or


• Move two fifths of industrial and service production off-shore

Tol therefore proposes that the Government actually abandons its target. I'm inclined to agree with him on this one. Remarkably, Tol's analysis has gone completely unchallenged by the Government, suggesting perhaps that they've realised the error of their ways and have indeed decided to quietly abandon this particular target. I hope so.

The wider context for the issues Tol addresses is one of political wishful thinking, economic ignorance and doomsday weather forecasts. Most people (including me) reckon that there are signs of significant climate change and that human activity has played a part in these changes. But beyond that there is a wide divergence of opinion about how fast, how far and how bad these changes will be. You only have to read the International Panel for Climate Change Working Group 1 Report "The Physical Science Basis" to appreciate that there is significant uncertainty about the future nature and impact of climate change in the short, medium and long term (though consensus that there will be some change and impact).

This is not to council doing nothing. Rather, as a number of critics of both the IPCC and the Stern Review (including Tol here) have argued in some fairly robust discussions in the Journal of World Economics and elsewhere, the balance of probabilities leads to a policy of introducing and gradually increasing measures such as carbon taxes. But the same probabilities in relation to climate change do not justify the kind of Khmer Rouge Year Zero extremism implied by targets such as the Government's above.

Climate skepticism does not necessarily mean 'climate change doubting': read the considered scepticism of the folk at Climate Resistance. But it does mean standing up to nonsense, even if it's nonsense with the imprimatur of binding orthodox consensus stamped on it. And anyway, we could always do what David Keith proposes, and inject a cloud of ash into the air above the poles, bringing the melting of the ice caps to a halt within days.

Mind you, I don't expect any consensus on that one any time soon ...

Staying Married for the Environment

We've all heard that divorce is bad for children. Now we learn that it is bad for the environment as well. New research shows that divorce inevitably increases the number of households ('one' becomes 'two') and that therefore the environmental footprint of the family affected in effect doubles.

As one of the authors put it:

People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered.

Maybe the next IPCC report will encourage governments to restrict access to divorce as part of the response to climate change? Or perhaps as part of the Irish Government's new climate campaign we will see a call to fractious couples to 'stay married for the sake of the environment'?

I doubt it somehow. Still it's a relief to come across research that shifts the focus away from all the harm climate change is apparently causing (some 600 effects and counting), to what is causing climate change.