Climate Change

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, for giving us an opportunity to discuss this subject. I shall make a subjective intervention in the debate. Before I do so, however, I want to congratulate Sir Ranulph Fiennes on getting to the top of Everest at the age of 65; it is an example to us all. I shall also draw on my personal experience of working on the Indian subcontinent for six years and living for two months of each of the past 20 years in south-east Asia, where I have some declared interests. I am intervening today also because of a pledge that I gave to my late friend Dr Michael Cole, a Cambridge physical scientist, to put forward some of his alternative views—which I share with him and with my clan chiefs, the noble Lords, Lord Reay and Lord Lawson—on global warming. Dr Cole and other distinguished scientists have had many doubts about the relationship between the IPCC scientists who formulated the Kyoto treaty and the politicians around the world who supported them. The scientific facts as presented by the IPCC scientists to support the treaty have led to the publication of the Stern review, to the Climate Change Bill and many other related papers, and, indeed, to this debate, but they may not be quite as clear-cut as they should. It therefore may be worth while for a non-scientist such as myself to spend a moment checking out some fundamentals regarding the role of science as a reliable guide for us in the political spectrum, and for political decisions to be made in general. A good question for starters is, what is "science"? Terence Kealey, the vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, where I have a declared interest, raised that in his very readable book entitled Sex, Science & Profits, which he sent to me last month. He provides a good answer on page 274: ""There is no such thing as ‘science’—there are only scientists"." Kealey goes on to say that many people—including myself—used to believe, along with Francis Bacon, ""that science was dispassionate, with scientists collecting a mass of objective data dispassionately and inducing theories dispassionately … But if science is, in fact, factional and verificational, then its funding by government must inevitably favour one faction or another. And because politicians are effectively unaccountable in many of their funding decisions, their funding removes science from those ultimate tests of credibility, namely the collective judgements of the market, civil society and of the disinterested parts of the scientific community"." I believe that that is particularly relevant to the subject that we are discussing today. My first experience of the two sides of science was when I raised the matter of atmospheric carbon in this House with an Unstarred Question as long ago as 1978. My Question was put as a result of reading Sir John Mason’s scientific paper to the Royal Society when he was head of the Meteorological Office. However, I was surprised that the Royal Society—and I say this cautiously, bearing in mind that my noble friend, who is its president, is sitting behind me—did not sound the alarm bells that were ringing at that time, despite the fact that the science on which Mason’s paper was based has not altered one iota between now and then. We had to wait for Kyoto and the IPCC team of scientists to warn the world about the apparently serious implications of an increase in atmospheric carbon. Everything then changed with the publication of my noble friend’s review, The Economics of Climate Change. This great work has had a profound influence on society and its governance around the planet. That is despite the fact that my noble friend Lord Stern is not a scientist but a very distinguished economist who, in my view, may one day also be recognised as the post-modern alchemist who revealed to the world a magical formula for transmuting atmospheric carbon into gold dust for government departments and profits for big business. Perhaps we can prove that point. Can the Minister say how many extra staff, NGOs, consultants and advisers have been added to his department since the publication of the Stern review? Can he also say whether atmospheric carbon has been increasing or decreasing since the publication of the Stern review and the Climate Change Bill? The Minister will undoubtedly recall that the right honourable gentleman Mr David Miliband, the architect of the Climate Change Bill, wrote in its foreword that the Bill would, ""create a new expert Committee on Climate Change to advise the Government on the best pathway to 2050"." Can he say what qualifications are represented by the members of the present Committee on Climate Change to classify them as "expert"? Can he also say where we can find carbon dioxide targets established by this expert committee? The Printed Paper Office could not find any reference to them prior to this debate. That is possibly my fault, but I should have thought that it would have something on them. Are we then to presume without this information that the targets are the same as those in the Climate Change Bill? If so, does this mean that the UK’s cumulative carbon budget of emissions for the years 2000 to 2050 will be between 5.5 billion and 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide? The Minister will be aware that, under the Kyoto treaty, this target figure does not include the aviation and maritime figures which, if included, would raise the UK’s total emissions to between 7 billion and 7.5 billion tonnes for the years 2000 to 2050. According to the Tyndall centre, the UK must emit no more than 4.5 billion to 5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide if it is to maintain its agreed target of atmospheric concentrations of no more than 450 parts per million. Can the Minister confirm this? What the Tyndall centre is saying is that the science does not support the Government's targets as set out in the Bill, which craftily exclude the total volume over the target period by including annual emission levels only at two fixed points—2020 and 2050. Can the Minister say whether these fundamental errors have now been corrected by the climate change committee? If so, what are the new targets, and are they in his opinion attainable? With respect to the right reverend Prelate, I do not think that there is a snowball’s chance in hell of attaining those targets—if those figures are correct—if the maritime and aviation pollution figures are included. What are you going to do with them—sweep them under the carpet, or just hope that they go away? Is this not proof that there is a clear division between real science and the political science utilised not only by this Government but by Governments around the world? Is there not a need for the climate change committee to draw on all known methods of atmospheric carbon reduction, especially where power generation is concerned? Therefore, when the committee took evidence from experts in power generation on four different occasions in the past two months—on 1, 22 and 29 April and on 6 May—why was daylight saving, which could save at least 2 per cent of generated electricity per year, never put on the agenda? Is this debate not about saving energy and atmospheric carbon? Why was Dr Elizabeth Garnsey, from the Institute for Manufacturing at Cambridge, not called to submit her well-researched and erudite paper on the subject? Her report, of which the Government must be aware, clearly demonstrates that daylight saving is energy efficient and would assist the UK in meeting its challenging emissions targets. It would have prevented an extra 46 million tonnes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere since 1971. Dr Garnsey’s sources, including the National Grid, are almost precisely the same as those that gave evidence to the climate change committee. Why did they exclude the subject of daylight saving from their evidence to the committee? Why did they not even bother to look it up? Why was it not included? The Government must be fed up with my mentioning this all the time—but others have also mentioned it. So why does the committee, which calls itself a climate change committee, not put it on its agenda? Is it because it cannot prove that daylight saving does not save electricity and atmospheric carbon? Where is the proof that I and others who support daylight saving are wrong? Let us have the proof and I will stop mentioning it and give you all a bit of relief. This leads me to a more serious point. As almost every speaker has said, the concept of slowing down global warming, or atmospheric carbon, depends on the great subcontinents of India and China reducing their emissions. As I said, I lived in India for six years. One of the greatest needs of India, Indonesia and, to a certain extent, China, is rural electrification. If you fly over India at night, or even during the day, you will see the great brown haze caused by the burning of lumps of wood or cow dung in cooking stoves. For their standard of education to match that of the rest of the world, these people need to be able to cook without cutting down their forests and polluting the atmosphere to the extent that they do. Therefore, rural electrification should be very high on any agenda for these countries. We are trying to encourage India, China and other countries to engage in carbon capture. This is an untried system and, from what I gather, is extremely inefficient. In fact, it could well be a net producer of atmospheric carbon, as opposed to a net reducer. When I visit the Far East every year, I detect increasing hostility to the concepts of carbon capture and carbon trading—which was dreamt up by the same people who got the world into its present financial crisis—as simply being devices to slow down economies that compete with western economies. That serious criticism underlies policies in China, India, Indonesia and other countries. We should proceed with great care and stop calling these countries developing countries. The great countries of India and China are the empires of the future and were empires in the past. If we do not acknowledge that, or their economic strength, and if we suggest silly ideas to them, we will create serious political problems stretching far beyond that of atmospheric carbon.