The Met Office is normally one of the soberest and most careful of organisations. It doesn’t like risking its reputation for reliable forecasts lightly. The entire future of that organisation depends on getting its predictions right a lot more often than they are wrong. It’s prediction for the UK is that if nothing is done to reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses being generated then the UK could be 5.4 degrees warmer by 2070.
This is an astonishing prediction. I have long argued that a balanced evidenced based debate over climate change is not one about whether it is happening but about how fast and how soon and how much the damage is already costing. I have worried that scientists have been cautious in their predictions in order to avoid risking their reputations. Yet even I never thought that the possibility of over 5 degrees of warming in the next 50 years was a serious and credible prediction. Now it is.
It remains incredibly hard to put a baseline on the changes to the global climate because of the short period in which we have fully reliable data and the impact of natural events like volcanic eruptions, sun spot activity rates. Despite this there is reasonable consensus amongst the scientists that it is running at around one degree of warming above the pre industrial levels.
In other words all the shrinkage of glaciers and ice caps that we have seen and all the increases in the violence of storms, droughts, floods, and wild fires have been caused by a single degree of global warming. What will five degrees in 50 years bring? How does the London waterfront cope with a one metre increase in sea levels? How many nuclear power plants are built on estuaries that are vulnerable to a three foot rise in sea levels?
In the face of such drastic predictions from normally cautious sources t would be good if we could take comfort from the fact that this is what the Met Office’s is predicting for Britain in the event that no significant actions are taken to mitigate climate change. Unfortunately, we also got this week the latest data on carbon dioxide emissions. They have gone up not down globally and we have reached 407 parts per million. There is only one possible explanation for the increase and that is human activity. There is also only one possible outcome from that increase. As a matter of indisputable scientific fact this must trap more heat and inject more energy into an already destabilizing system.
Any reasonable politician or economist looking at these data sets would conclude that this is now the single biggest issue facing humanity. All hope of providing a genuinely sustainable and prosperous economy, society and ecology depends on taking serious and sustained rapid action.
Unfortunately human decision making isn’t always driven by rational scientific analysis. Emotion and self interest comes into it. If the facts are indicating that your current way of life is unsustainable and there needs to be radical change there are two possible ways of behaving. One is to start planning and implementing that change on the scale that is needed. The other is to get cross and to become defensive and aggressive.
That gut emotional wish for a problem to go away is hugely significant. If people are told that environmental campaigners are the reason they are having to pay more to drive their car and pay for their heating it isn’t hard to turn voters against necessary action. That is the raw self interest that Donald Trump has tapped into. It is also exactly what is behind the decision of the new Brazilian President to cut down more of the rain forest in order to make a bit more profit for loggers and provide land for soya bean farming.
We are therefore in a pretty fundamental battle of ideologies. On one side we have the clearest and most obvious reaction to difficult but necessary change that has ever been seen. This view boils down to: “Bugger the science, can I win the election with a bit of short term self interest!” On the other side we have campaigners asking us to make hard choices to act now in order to limit the scale of a developing disaster.
There is no guarantee that common sense will win out over short term self-interest. In my view that means that those of us who do recognise the scale of the challenge have to be intelligent about the way that we campaign and the measures we pressurise governments to adopt. If everything is posed in terms of disaster and of what we cannot do then it is entirely possible that voters will opt to believe those who tell them that all this scientific stuff is no more valuable than anything else a politician says and they can carry on carrying on. Few people enjoy being asked to pay more to carry on doing things they’ve always done or forced into changing ingrained habits. It is only when we pose the necessary changes as a positive that we maximise our chances of winning. Many of the same people who hate being forced to change are keen to keep up with the latest trends and to adopt a new and interesting solution. Particularly if it is not just cleaner but cheaper and more effective.
Campaigners and governments need to focus on tipping the balance in favour of more sustainable lifestyles and more sustainable technology. We need to make it financially advantageous to ordinary citizens to change instead of just inflicting the costs on them of doing so. We need to do the same for business. Investing in changing technology and being the first adopter of new ways of working and living can be expensive. Governments need to be subsidising individuals and businesses to re-engineer production and consumption not just relying on customer pressure at the supermarkets to reduce waste and increase recycling. Family budgets can be helped by cutting fuel bills as a result of subsidies to insulate homes. They are not helped by paying out good money to buy food that is shipped across the world to be sold out of season.
The kind of radical re-think of government spending priorities that this requires goes well beyond the tokenistic tinkering that comes from the likes of the two currently major political parties in Britain. Michael Gove banning plastic straws is all very nice but it doesn’t exactly deal with the true scale of the problem especially when he backs fracking. Jeremy Corbyn eventually opposing fracking, after his party started to lose votes on the issue, is a lot better. But when push comes to shove who is he going to back the first time a trade union wants jobs in heavy polluting industry to be protected?
The climate crisis we are facing has now reached such a pitch that it needs to be centre stage in policy making. Individuals can and do make an enormous difference by every consumption decision that they make and it is encouraging to see how quickly supermarket practices are changing under consumer pressure. Radical campaigners can and do make a difference and I believe actions will be needed like refusing to buy anything made in Brazil if their government is determined to destroy the rain forest to produce palm oil. But there is no substitute for intelligent political action. That is why the performance of the Green Party at the next election is so critical. Every vote that the Green Party gets sends a message that someone understands what needs to be done. Every time someone decides that the issue isn’t as important as getting rid of the Tories we get locked into the old binary political choices and there is a temptation for the next government to decide that voters don’t care about it. Given the urgency of the challenges we face it is vital that a strong independent voice for change comes through loud and clear.