Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
Sir John Houghton
18 JANUARY 2005
Q40Lord Marsh: They are not only small; they
are outside our control. I am trying to get some sort of handle,
if there is any, on the things we are doing now, because there
were all sorts of forecasts made in the 1800s of what might be
happening in 100 years' time, a lot of which were completely wrong,
and some of the things which are happening today are within the
control of man, and it is those that I am seeking.
Sir John Houghton: Well, if you come to the
20th century, you find that the increase in global average temperature
is phenomenal compared with any variation over the whole millennium.
It has been a steady rising trend during the 20th century. The
early part of it was not due to greenhouse gases; it could not
have been because they were not increasing very much during that
period. We believe that the reason for that is largely because
of slight warming of the sun, and also because of the lack of
volcanoes during that period, and when you feed that information
in you can actually recover that temperature rise quite well.
Then, if you get to the middle of the century, you find the temperature
rise stops somewhat from 1950-70; the reason for that, we believe,
is because of the increasing sulphate particles in the atmosphere
reflecting sunlight, hence losing energy from the system, and
therefore any increase in temperature due to the start of the
rise of greenhouse gases is swamped by the effect of the particles
in the atmosphere. From 1970 to the present time there has been
a very steady increase in tempreture; the rate of increase is
larger than it has been for a very long time, probably for 10,000
years. The total increase during the 20th century is quite out
of scale with any variations known to us other than the ones I
have mentioned and the increase in greenhouse gases. We were saying
this sort of thing ten years ago in the first IPCC report but
since 1990 we have had a continuous increase in global average
temperatures, a steady, consistent increase. The year 1998 happens
to be the warmest year on record, and a more striking statistic
than that is that each of the first eight months of 1998 was the
warmest month on record of that kind. Now when you get eight "ducks"
in a row it is trying to tell you something and there is no doubt
we believe now, or very little doubt at all, that this rate of
increase of temperature from 1970 onwards is because of the increase
in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Q41Lord Lamont of Lerwick: But how do you have
information relating to 10,000 years of temperature?
Sir John Houghton: Well, there is information
that comes from ice cores; you can drill cores from the ice in
the Antarctic and Greenland laid down of hundreds of thousands
of years. The ratio of the isotopes in oxygen within that ice
tells you the temperature at which that ice was formed, so you
get a handle on all the temperatures over the period in which
the ice was laid down. You can drill cores from the mud or the
sediment from the bottom of the ocean and this contains deposits
from living creatures that die and so on, and again the ratio
of isotopes will give you a handle on the temperature that existed
in the oceans at that time. Also, you can get a handle on the
amount of water there was in the oceans, how big the ice caps
were and similar information and so on. There is a lot of information
available there of a proxy kind which gives us substantial data—it
does not give us detail because of course there are variations
all over the surface but there is a great deal of information
to work on.
Q42Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: You mentioned
the particles and the effect they have had on cooling. You may
have seen the Horizon on global dimming last week which
obviously posited quite a dramatic scenario, and one which presumably
would unsettle most of the models, were it true?
Sir John Houghton: We have known the effect
of the particles, of course, for some time and we realise that
the particles will disappear because of the legislation which
prevents sulphur dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere. Certainly
the law in America enforces that, which was not the case in the
70s and 80s. That legislation is also coming into China and India
who are emitting a lot of sulphur gases at the moment. But they
have acid rain problems too, so they are cutting sulphur emissions,
so the number of sulphate particles will go down, and as they
go down we will notice a further increase in global warming because
they have been holding it back, and we are aware of that.
Q43Lord Macdonald of Tradeston: Horizon
suggested that some of this information was relatively recent,
connected to September 2001, and the conclusions that they came
to through the scientist they interviewed seemed very alarming
indeed, and quite short term.
Sir John Houghton: Yes. Sulphates is not the
only story, of course, they were presenting. They were also talking
about aviation and the effect on cloudiness. They got some good
measurements, of course, as a result of 2001 because aircraft
were not flying, so they could try and discover the effect of
aviation on cloudiness. The data is interesting, and it shows
the sort of thing we expect, but of course it is not really certain
because it is only one event. We do not want to repeat, of course,
2001, but we would like to get some further handle on that data
to be absolutely sure about how big the effect will be. But it
does look as if the effect is quite large, and if it is then it
is worrying.
Q44Lord Elder: Still sticking to predictions
and models, we have had a pretty clear indication from you of
your view as to the links between greenhouse gases and warming,
but can I ask a little bit more about the models and the robustness
of models, and particularly whether or not you think that the
models we have are good retrospectively in predicting what has
happened on past data, because that level of robustness would
be some comfort in terms of looking to the future.
Sir John Houghton: Yes. I have already mentioned
models and the climate of the 20th century and they simulate that
climate really rather well, the ups and downs and the variations
of the 20th century as well as the average trend. I will give
you two illustrations of how well models have done. In 1991 there
was the eruption of the Pinatubo volcano which sent a lot of dust
into the high atmosphere; that dust tends to keep the sunlight
out and cool the earth and we are aware of that. The models put
in the amount of dust that was measured, and they predicted that
the global average temperature would go down by half a degree
and the timescale under which it would reduce, the effect on the
oceans and so on, and their prediction was very good. You may
say "Well, that is the global average and not too clever"
and that would be fair, but there was also some very unusual weather
during that period. There were climate anomalies of a regional
kind; there were very cold winters in the Middle East and some
very wet and windy winters here in north west Europe. That anomaly
also appeared in the models, so not only were they getting the
global average right but they were getting one of the major anomalies
that arose as a result of the volcano eruption, so that gave us
some confidence that at least over that sort of timescale the
models were not behaving too badly. The other illustration comes
from people who have tried to reconstruct climates of the past.
If you go back 6,000 years then the radiation regime arising from
the different orbit of the earth was quite different in some regards,
so you get quite a different climate. These radiation changes
are similar to those deriving from the greenhouse effect because
of carbon dioxide changes; they both influence the radiation at
the top of the atmosphere. So if you can simulate the radiation
changes in the past and get something like the right climate,
then you are reasonably confident that what you are doing with
carbon dioxide changes can also be done correctly. The simulations
which have been carried out for that period 6,000 years ago have
been reasonably satisfactory. However, there are problems of inadequate
data—knowing just what the climate was like at that time.
It is not perfect; all over the globe the regional changes are
not all well known; but nevertheless the simulations show a significant
proportion of the different character of the climate of that time
compared with the present, so we have some confidence that models
can simulate in the past. The successful 20th century simulation
also is something that gives us a lot of confidence that we are
about right so far as the future is concerned.
Q45Lord Kingsdown: In your opening remarks I
think you mentioned Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT as being
typical, or one, of the notable doubters to the general scientific
consensus on this. Would you tell us what you think of his or
their arguments against supposing that there is much scientific
basis for human induced warming, because I take it their stance
is that there is not much scientific basis for it. Is that right?
Sir John Houghton: I know Richard Lindzen quite
well. He is not always consistent in what he says but he is a
good scientist, he has done some good scientific work, and he
would not say "There is no global warming." I do not
think he would say that, and I have never heard him say that.
What he says is that the amount of global warming is not large,
that it is small, and his comments on that are twofold. One, he
argues and has argued for a long time that the water vapour feedback
is negative rather than positive; he is I think the only credible
scientist in the world who argues that, but he has argued it for
a long time. He joined the writing team for one of the chapters
in the last IPCC report; we invited him to join us on the chapter
that was most relevant to his interests. The team had a lot of
arguments and he argued—or tried to argue—hard for
his point of view, but unfortunately he is not a man who does
his homework. He does not read the rest of the literature; he
quotes his own papers. His arguments written in a paper over 10
years ago now have been very thoroughly gone through by lots of
other people just because of who he is and because some of the
arguments are quite interesting, but nobody has been able to substantiate
the essentially hand-waving arguments that he uses for negative
water vapour feedback, and hand-waving arguments are no good.
They are useful to help you on your way but you cannot argue strongly
on the basis of hand-waving arguments. You have to do very careful
modelling so you can take into account all the non linear processes—
Q46Lord Sheldon: What do you mean by "hand-waving
arguments"?
Sir John Houghton: Well, producing simple arguments.
For instance, he argues there is more water vapour in the lower
atmosphere but he says in many parts of the upper atmosphere there
will be less water vapour because the air dries as it goes up,
so you get dryer air in many parts of the world. Now, you can
put forward that argument and say, therefore, that you have a
negative feedback but you have to substantiate there is less water
in the higher atmosphere, where it is, what the effect of that
change in water vapour is, and what the effect of that feedback
is compared with the positive feedback you get from the increased
water vapour in the lower atmosphere, and he has done none of
those. Lots of others have done it for him and they find his arguments
are not convincing, and the chapter group—and there were
seven or eight lead authors on that chapter, clever people—in
fact, one of them was one of Lindzen's students—
Q47Chairman: Just to show my ignorance, and
as the Chairman I am allowed to do that, what do you mean by negative
feedback and positive feedback?
Sir John Houghton: As you increase the carbon
dioxide, if nothing else changes in the atmosphere then you have
increased the global average temperature at the surface by about
just over 1 degree—if nothing else changes. But, of course,
other things do change, in particular water vapour, because you
have a warmer surface and you get more evaporation, so you have
more water vapour in the atmosphere, and water vapour is a greenhouse
gas so it acts the same as carbon dioxide, so you would expect
it to have an effect. A simple calculation would lead you to believe
that you get about double the effect that would be there in the
absence of the increased water vapour; we call that a positive
feedback because by doing what you have done another effect has
come along that increases the effect you started with. Now Lindzen
argues that, in fact, the feedback would be negative because he
says it is drier in the upper atmosphere rather than wetter and
therefore you have negative feedback and the effect is less. That
is very important because if the effect of doubled carbon dioxide
is only 1 degree, then that is serious but not as serious as 2
or 3 degrees, so we have to get it right. Now, the authors of
the relevant chapter in the IPCC Report argued loudly and for
very long and in the end they summarised in the chapter that the
balance of evidence shows that the water vapour feedback is positive;
they put that unequivocally in their summary despite having Lindzen
as the chapter author, and he had to go along with it. He still
does not go along with it in public but he lost the argument in
private with his colleagues, largely because he does not do his
homework.
Q48Chairman: Is this chapter in the 1995 report?
Sir John Houghton: The 2001 report. The other
problem with Professor Lindzen's public presentations is that
he does not talk at all about impact. He says "Well, what
is 1 or 2 degrees? It is only an increase in temperature, and
it is not large in terms of temperature change in a room",
but in terms of global average temperature it is very large, and
the impact on the world of that sort of increase, the impact in
terms of climate extremes, in terms of heat waves and floods and
droughts, is very large, and Lindzen does not know anything about
that, does not talk about and does not appreciate what it is,
because he likes talking in a negative way about global warming.
Q49Lord Lamont of Lerwick: In your very first
remarks you described the change in temperature, the global warming,
as "very large" or some such phrase. You said he does
not think that; he thinks it is a small change. Over what period
of time is this difference between you and what is the basis of
it, because you are not disputing facts but estimates of what
happened in the past. This is a very fundamental disagreement
about what the past was, and what is the basis of this? He says
small; you say large.
Sir John Houghton: He says small because he
argues that the water vapour feedback is small. Now, the evidence
for that is not good. The evidence from the observations of the
past, the fact that we can construct the climate of the 20th century
using models with positive feedback, and you cannot reproduce
it with models of negative feedback, is a very strong reason for
saying that positive feedback is about right. The more detailed
studies that people have made of water vapour in the atmosphere
and what effect it has in the atmosphere all tend to support a
positive feedback. Lindzen is on his own in the world in supporting
a negative point, and that is talking about thousands of scientists
who are involved, and he is not believed by other people at all.
Nevertheless, because he is a distinguished man, he comes from
a distinguished institution, and because he is saying the sort
of things that some people want to hear, he is used a great deal
by the media as somebody who says that this is not happening.
Well, one voice does not make it right. Of course, I know a thousand
voices do not either, but the arguments have been gone through
extremely thoroughly by scientists who are honest and who know
what they are doing and who have been refereed by other scientists
and so on. This problem has been gone over extremely thoroughly,
and I am afraid Professor Lindzen is not speaking—
Chairman: You have made your point very clearly,
and I think we have the point. Lord Sheppard, shall we move on?
Q50Lord Sheppard of Didgemere: Sir John, given
the uncertainty that still exists or arguments that still exist
in the area of science, and certainly in the area of the economic
impact of that science, are we paying too much attention and spending
too much money on trying to find solutions and act on them, or
should we be spending more money on the science, or both?
Sir John Houghton: There are uncertainties but
in 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the people gathered
there and all nations signed the Climate Convention, which said
"Although there are uncertainties we believe that action
is necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to save
damage of the kind that there is strong scientific evidence for".
Now if that was true in 1992 it is much truer now because the
science since then has, on the whole, tended to strengthen the
story we were telling at that time and the concerns that we have
about impacts. At the moment we feel really rather certain that
the warming we are seeing in the atmosphere and the earth's surface
is due to the increase in greenhouse gases; and if we extrapolate
that for the next few decades the warming which that will cause
or bring along with it will cause significant impact in terms
of sea level rise and in terms of extremes. There was the heat
wave in Europe in 2003 which you will remember was responsible
for the deaths of 20,000 people, and was very unusual indeed.
It was five standard deviations, if that means anything to you,
a very long way from the norm, extremely unusual and very damaging
to Europe. The best estimates we have at the moment, if the trend
in warming continues, are that that sort of summer will be the
average summer in Europe in 2050. That is the sort of projection
we are making with some confidence now as to what the impact of
climate change is likely to be on human communities. Although
in the developed world, of course, we can on the whole cope with
whatever happens, because we have the infrastructure and the methods
to cope with it, although it will still be damaging for us in
terms of floods and droughts and heat waves. But for developing
countries there will be some very severe impacts indeed, from
sea level rise and from an increase in frequency and intensity
of floods and droughts which cause the largest impacts. If you
are going to have these, then we have to take some action, and
if that action is going to be desperately expensive and extremely
difficult to do and impossible for the world to face because it
would cause damage of all kinds to the world's economies and so
on, then you would have to look at it very hard, and I do not
believe it is of that kind.
Q51Chairman: You present to us a scenario of
the scientific results and forecasts of it, but underlying that
also must be some economic forecasts which you presumably just
have to operate from. Are you satisfied with the economic basis
which you have given as well as the scientific basis?
Sir John Houghton: Well, costing in economic
terms the damage of all the things that are likely to happen is
very difficult. I am not an economist but I look at what economists
say and write and the sort of damage they are talking about is
substantial. In terms of per cent of gross national product, 1
or 2 per cent perhaps in developed countries but much more than
that in developing countries. I also look at what economists say
about the cost of mitigating action and what I think reliable
economists are saying about the costs of mitigating action is
that the cost is very modest. For instance, the Royal Commission
on Environmental Pollution produced a report on energy recently
and they argued that there should be a 60 per cent reduction in
greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050 in order to meet the
problems of climate change, the sort of impacts I have been talking
about. Such a reduction will not prevent the impact but it will
stop them getting far worse than they would otherwise. The Government's
PIU, Policy Information Unit, in Downing Street also did a study
on energy and they asked for advice from a group of economists
in the Treasury who were presumably not "green" people,
or people who would take a particularly "green" line
or would want to argue very strongly that it was going to cost
very little or anything like that. They came up with an estimate
that for the United Kingdom to cut its emissions by 60 per cent
by 2050 would cost no more than six months' loss of GDP growth
over that period. They were assuming two and a quarter per cent
per year of economic growth and they said you might lose six months
of that in 50 years. But they also said there is the possibility
of innovation and of industry doing well out of innovation and
the like and we might be overestimating what the cost might be.
That is not a lot of money compared with the damage we are talking
about to the world if we allow climate change to go unrestrained.
Q52Lord Skidelsky: Could I rephrase the Chairman's
question a little bit? Forecasts of the rate of emissions depend
crucially on forecasts of the rates of economic growth. They do
not only depend on that but they depend to a large extent on that.
Are you satisfied with those forecasts? Do you have any independent
judgment of them or do you simply take what, let's say, a consensus
of IPCC economists tell you about that?
Sir John Houghton: The IPCC for its 2001 report
had an independent report of its own on the emission scenarios.
There was a knowledgeable group based in Vienna which produced
these and I am not an expert on this or anything like it, but
the range of scenarios they came up with was very wide. At the
top end you had them assuming very high rates of economic growth
in developing countries—in fact, convergence—and that
led to very high emissions. Global emissions at the moment are
about 7 billion tons of carbon per year, and the result of that
sort of scenario would give you 20 plus billion tons of carbon
by the year 2100. But at the other end of the scale they had various
families of scenarios, and if you took another scenario you might
see that they were assuming, or saying, "Well, let's assume
very different sort of futures. Let's assume a future in which
the world population drops over this period. Let's assume a period
over which economic growth does not occur too much. Let's assume
also that there will be green arguments for going to renewable
energies and less fossil fuel rich resources and so on".
So there was a very wide range of scenarios but none of them was
adequate for the purposes of mitigating climate change. They were
told "Don't assume that there are strong drivers or there
is legislation or international agreements about cutting emissions,
but just assume a range of scenarios". . . That is why we
have in 2100 in the IPCC projections a range from one and a half
to nearly 6 degrees in terms of the likely global average temperature
rise over that period. The 6 degrees is associated with the very
high economic growth scenario which you may think is quite unrealistic,
but at the bottom end of one and a half degrees you have the scenario
with lower populations and so on which again seem unrealistic.
Even the 1.5 degrees, which is one and a half degrees from now,
if you add that to what has occurred already, you are already
warming the earth in that scenario by about 2.5 degrees by 2100,
which is a big increase in temperature.
Q53Lord Sheppard of Didgemere: Am I right in
saying that the latest estimates of climate increases reflect
the latest scientific knowledge on global dimming? They may have
distorted the historicals but in the statistical estimates in
the future they would be taken into account, would they?
Sir John Houghton: The estimates in the 2001
report, where global average increased between 1.5 and 5.8 in
2100, assumed less sulphate particles, so they had some of the
global dimming arguments within it. Not all the arguments that
were presented last Thursday night were within the 2001 report.
There were other arguments too which have come up since 2001,
to do with the global carbon cycle and things of that kind, which
suggest there might be more carbon emitted through the respiration
of soils. Infact there are number of bits of science that have
come up since 2001, which we knew a bit about in 2001 but did
not feel confident enough to spell out too much, which on the
whole make the figures bigger rather than smaller. The science
is getting stronger in terms of the things we were not certain
about and therefore did not want to talk about too much in 2001
because we did not want to overstate the situation. So the situation
is actually worse than we might have expected before then.
Q54Lord Sheldon: Is it not a bit ridiculous
talking about 2100? One hundred years ago we thought we would
be running out of coal and the whole of the country would have
to deal with this major problem of civilisation. In a hundred
years all sorts of things can happen and I am a bit uneasy about
that. But what makes me feel a bit uneasy too is we are not talking
about offsetting the advantages of global warming, or only in
certain areas, for example, Siberia, temperate countries, where
there could be some advantages in global warming. I know there
are disadvantages elsewhere, but you have to offset the one against
the other, and I do not hear any arguments about the way in which
certain countries could benefit from global warming. When you
talk about flooding of 20,000 people, think of the advantages
that could come from the enormous increase in certain countries.
The whole of Siberia, for example, could become a great grain
producing area. There are all sorts of things where we look ahead
so far, there are so many uncertainties and unknowables that we
have to be really cautious about how strongly you present the
arguments in these matters.
Sir John Houghton: I agree with you, 2100 is
a long way off. My grandchildren will probably not be alive in
2100 but they will be alive in 2030, 40 and 50, by which time
we will see many of these things occurring. 2100 happens to be
the end of the period that the IPCC studied and that is why I
talked about it, but it does not mean you are going to have to
wait until 2100 for these things to appear. We are going to be
seeing much more of events of the kind presumably that we had
in 2003 which was this enormous heatwave in Europe which, as I
say, was responsible for the deaths of 20,000 people. That is
a big event and we will see more of that occurring. You are quite
right to point out that we talk more about the negative impacts
rather than the positive impacts, and there will be positive impacts.
Siberia is a good place to mention. It will get warmer, it is
getting warmer now, and providing your house is not built on the
permafrost in which case it will fall down—but then you
can rebuild it so that is not a big problem—and also, of
course, carbon dioxide is a fertiliser and some crops grow better
with increased carbon dioxide, everything else being equal, and
providing you have got water as well you can get bigger yields
out of a carbon dioxide rich atmosphere, so there are positive
things that occur. These have been thoroughly looked at by the
IPCC and if you want to know more, go to the second volume of
the IPCC report where they spell these positive impacts out as
honestly as the negative ones, but the negative ones certainly
seem to be dominant so far as most of the impacts on human communities
are concerned. Sea level rise is the first negative impact for
almost everybody; it does not do anybody any good and that is
very bad news for places like Bangladesh. We are likely to get
big droughts, actually, and Siberia is likely to get much more
droughts than before, and you cannot grow crops if you cannot
get water and the impact on water worldwide will be very considerable.
So when you look in detail at the impact on human communities
as they are at the moment, yes, you can say communities can adapt,
the cost of adaptation will be substantial, but some people may
be better off. There may be some parts of North America that can
grow more grain, and parts of Europe may have the same impact,
or parts of Russia, so there are some positive things but by and
large most of the impacts, especially when you get above one or
two degrees of warming, are adverse and that is a serious problem,
but these have been looked at very hard.
Q55Lord Layard: It seems to me that, if you
look at these forecasts, whatever we do about energy use in the
next 50 years, there is going to be a big increase in temperature.
That is true of all these forecasts. So is not the key issue how
we produce energy, and ought we not to be taking much more seriously
the issue of producing energy without carbon? What would be the
major ameliorative action that could be taken? Would it not be
to try and treat the issue of non-carbon-producing energy with
the same approach that we did the moon landing, or the world did
the moon landing? Should we not be throwing massive billions at
the issue of how to produce a new non-carbon-producing source
of energy rather than focusing on energy use exclusively, as we
do?
Sir John Houghton: I think we have to concentrate
on both. I think there is a lot we can do to cut our use of energy
beneficially without increase of cost, of course, but we just
have to learn to do that and persuade people that is a good thing
to do. But I am sure also, as you say, we will not be able to
solve the problem without changing the way in which we get our
energy from non-fossil-fuel sources. Now, we should have a big
drive at that and the United Kingdom, for instance, is well placed
to exploit certain sorts of renewable energy—
Q56Lord Layard: I was meaning in particular
hydrogen or whatever. Some completely new, non-existent technology
that would change the situation.
Sir John Houghton: The existing technology would
make a big change, actually. We are generating a certain amount
of wind energy and that is one way towards doing it. But we have
some of the biggest tides in the world in the United Kingdom.
Tidal energy is a great possibility for producing non-carbon energy,
and with tidal energy you know exactly when it is coming because
you know when the tides occur; it is not intermittent in the way
wind energy is; and there are plenty of places around the United
Kingdom where we could build lagoons and build turbines and generate
very substantial amounts of energy. A substantial proportion of
the United Kingdom's energy could be produced that way. Now, there
are also local ways in which we can generate energy using waste
materials. There is a project in Wales not far from my home where
they are building a boiler which will burn forest residue which
will heat the whole village. Now, there are many projects of that
kind that could be generated but we need incentives for people
to do this sort of thing, incentives and drive and encouragement
of a kind which is not being produced at the moment.
Q57Lord Layard: But could you tell us anything
about the possibilities of a major scientific breakthrough on
some new way of producing energy?
Sir John Houghton: Many people feel that in
the end solar cells which will be able to produce hydrogen from
hydrolysis of water will be the fuel of the future, and that could
well be. The solar cell technology is developing all the time,
and both BP and Shell have projects doing that sort of thing with
big industry. We still have to get the economies of scale to bring
the price down, and economies of scale could do that. The Germans
are doing well at it. They have plans for 100,000 roofs with PV
solar cells on within a few years. I am just about to put a solar
cell roof on my home in Wales facing the sun. There are tens of
domestic roofs with these cells in the United Kingdom, that is
all, and compared with what the Germans are doing we are doing
very little. Now, that is a technology which is bound to break
through in the future quite a lot and we should be pushing it,
because when the economies of scale arrive then we will be doing
it. We need a way of storing hydrogen, we need a way of storing
hydrogen in motorcars in a satisfactory manner, and there are
various possibilities for that; we need R&D to go into that
and a certain amount is going in, but we have not solved those
problems yet. The possibility of solving them is around the corner.
We should be having a big drive in that, as you say. Rather than
saying "are we going to do this?" we just need to do
it. The United Kingdom is a technological country with a lot of
scientific and technical skill and we have the resources to work
with others on some of these issues to the benefit of our own
industry and to the benefit of developing countries, too, and
help them with technology. There is a great deal that can be done.
Q58Lord Skidelsky: I think you have already
answered some of the points in question seven but could I concentrate
on just one sentence in that, and again go over it? Is it not
reasonable to assume that technical change will come about and
solve some of these problems irrespective of and without requiring
a global policy? I am thinking, for example, of predictions by
people like Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s of mass starvation, and
then you had a revolution in crop fertilisers and so on, and that
has happened time and time again. Once a problem is identified,
forces are set in motion and there tends to be a challenge to
overcome it—forces of demand and forces of science. Secondly,
what do you think the relationship is between science and the
media at this particular point? Are the media helpful in displaying
this problem? Do they distract people from the serious issue,
or do they simply create hysteria?
Sir John Houghton: Dealing with the media, first
I think the media act in a variety of ways. Some of their programmes
are good and some of their education is quite good. On the other
hand, they do confuse the public a great deal because they produce
all sorts of messages without giving clear answers, and we need
badly to inform the public rather thoroughly about what the issue
is about. We need to have a really good awareness education campaign
for the public to explain to them what global warming is and what
the problems are, why we believe what we do. Some of the material
in some of our reports should be packaged in a way that the general
public can understand, and you can get them on board to feel that
they are part of the solution as well as eyeing the problem. Government
would be a lot more confident to act if they felt the public were
behind them and if there was a really good information campaign
which the media could help with, and some of us are working at
that issue.
Q59Lord Skidelsky: But do we need Kyoto? Do
we need global policy, rather than allowing science and technology
to work on it?
Sir John Houghton: The global policy cannot
be too prescriptive, clearly, because there are many possible
solutions to the problem. On the other hand, it is a global problem
and we do need all countries to address it. There is a fear, of
course, that some countries are addressing this with a lot of
cost while other countries are free riders on it. Just to talk
about Kyoto, it is small in terms of what it will achieve but
it is very big in terms of getting countries together, because
countries have agreed to get together over the issue. They have
developed mechanisms for trading in carbon which are very exciting,
particularly for people who like trading, and for people who enjoy
the market, and for people who feel they are going to make money
out of it and also get some real benefit, and trading is beginning
to work now so that you can reduce carbon emission in the cheapest
possible way and in places where it is cheap to do so. So Kyoto
is a great step forward. I just wish America would join in. American
industry may well begin to join in. California and New York, for
instance, are beginning to trade in carbon emission, and there
is no reason why they cannot join the Kyoto agreement and try
to join its trading scheme.
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