Climate Change

I beg to move,"That this House has considered the matter of climate change: preparation for the Copenhagen climate change conference." As Members will know, the United Nations Copenhagen climate change conference will open in a month's time. At this critical time, the Government believe that it is important for the House to have a chance to discuss our preparations for the conference. In the time available to me, I want to explain why we believe that we need an agreement at Copenhagen, the sort of agreement that we wish to try to secure there, and the steps that we are taking in that respect. Let me start by addressing the question of why we need an agreement. In the last year, I have had the privilege of meeting people in places from the northern desert of China to the Amazon rain forest in Brazil. I think that in such places we see the reality of climate change, in the sense that we are utterly interdependent. Actions in one country will affect those in another, and it is often the poorest and most vulnerable in our world, who have done the least to cause the problem of climate change, who face the greatest additional vulnerability. None of us, however, can insulate ourselves from the effects of climate change. The urgency of climate change and, indeed, Copenhagen lies in the science. Atmospheric concentrations are at their highest level for at least 650,000 years. In the United Kingdom, nine of the 10 warmest years on record occurred during the last 15. In 2007, for the first time in recorded history, the north-west passage of the Arctic was ice-free and open to shipping in the summer. All those facts are important, and remaking the case for the science seems to me to be important as well. We hear siren voices saying that the science is not real and that it is utterly contested and divided, and coming up with a whole range of explanations. I think that all of us in the House have a responsibility in that regard. I am not a scientist, but I am advised by a range of scientists—many of whom do not work for me, but work for organisations from the Royal Society to the Hadley Centre and a range of other institutions—and I think that remaking that case is very important.