Getting Warm In Here - Independent On Climate Change Politics In 2006

[hatrack]

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Overall, UK greenhouse gas emissions are 6 per cent higher. Almost all the progress towards meeting our Kyoto targets has come about thanks to the historical accident of Margaret Thatcher and John Major's programme of closing coal-fired power stations in favour of gas - not something for which Tony Blair can claim credit.

Worse, the Government has caved in to the car lobby and begun to spend colossal amounts on road building. According to the transport campaign group Road Block, more than £3bn will be spent on widening the M1 to eight lanes, while another £1.5bn will be spent on widening the M25 to a Los Angeles-style 12 lanes. Spending on these two roads alone greatly exceedsthe amount the Government invests in its entire climate change programme, including its measly support for wind power and other renewables. These outdated priorities still permeate government thinking. In the Highways Agency press release about the M25, the Transport minister Stephen Ladyman sounded 20 years out of date. "New lanes will help to improve traffic flows," he said, despite all the evidence that building new roads simply encourages traffic growth and worsens the problems of congestion and pollution. The bulldozers will begin moving on both mega-projects in 2006.

Again, the challenge to climate campaigners is clear: the Government must no longer be able to hide behind climate-friendly rhetoric while entrenching patterns of social behaviour that make tackling global warming ever more intractable. The Government is fond of reviews. It allows difficult decisions to be postponed indefinitely while placating demands for action with warm-sounding soundbites. Climate change is no different. Early in 2006, Margaret Beckett's long-delayed Climate Change Programme Review is due to report, while Gordon Brown's Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change will hand down its lofty decisions in the autumn. Ominously, its terms of reference include indecipherable expressions such as: "... examine the impact and effectiveness of national and international policies and arrangements in reducing net emissions in a cost-effective way and promoting a dynamic, equitable and sustainable global economy, including distributional effects and impacts on incentives for investment in cleaner technologies". Such gobbledegook, in which Mr Brown seems to specialise, gives little hope that the review might come up with anything even vaguely practical.

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Another lesson of 2005 is that scientists can be wrong about climate change - though not in a way that provides any comfort to the dwindling band of sceptics. For several years, the consensus had been that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet would be a slow process, taking centuries or even millennia. But as Ian Howat, a Greenland expert, explains: "Current models treat the ice sheet like it's just an ice cube sitting up there melting, and we're finding out it's not that simple." Instead, thinning glaciers have been speeding up on the edges of Greenland, dumping more and more melting ice into the sea. Howat estimates that the changing dynamics could "easily cut in half the time it will take to destroy the Greenland ice sheet", suggesting that sea-level rise predictions for this century may well have been underestimated. Increased melt from Greenland and the rapid disappearance of northern polar sea ice - which also surprised scientists by its extent in 2005 - both freshen the surface waters of the north Atlantic, where sinking cold water is the key driver of the Atlantic circulation, which includes the Gulf Stream. Computer models have long predicted that this freshwater "lid" on the Gulf Stream could cool down Scandinavia and Western Europe by several degrees, the apparently far-fetched scenario behind the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow. On its release, scientists queued up to rubbish its apparent abuse of greenhouse physics. But just a few weeks ago, evidence emerged that the Atlantic circulation is actually slowing down - several decades before anyone predicted. Although it is not yet enough to plunge the British Isles into a new ice age, a recent study suggests that further weakening of the Gulf Stream could lead to average winters becoming like 1962/63, when 10ft snowdrifts buried half the country for weeks on end.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article335860.ece