The Munk Debates

by Rudyard Griffiths

  RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Elizabeth, please present your opening arguments.

  ELIZABETH MAY: I’m very pleased to be here and quite honoured, and I want to thank the Aurea Foundation. And I want to say, with all due respect, that the people here are not the experts. You have before you me, a lawyer who became a politician; Lord Lawson, a journalist who became a politician; Bjørn Lomborg, a statistician who became a best-selling author, and a wonderful Guardian journalist, George Monbiot.

  The real experts on this subject who matter are the scientists on the IPCC, and policy experts around the world. So with all due respect to this debate, I also wish to say that I am grieved that in the year 2009, we’re asking the question, “Should we act in response to the climate crisis, is it a defining issue for humanity?” I would have wished that seven days before the opening of the Copenhagen meetings, which is the fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, we would have accepted what most of the knowledgeable scientists around the globe see as our top threat, the climate crisis, followed very closely by the water crisis, which will be exacerbated by ignoring climate.

  So what have we learned and what did we know, and why do I say that it is a shame that we are debating this issue? Well, we should ask, if we could have rewritten this question, “How do we reach the targets that have been set for us by a scientific community that wants to warn us and avert catastrophe?” Not “if” we should do it.

  I want to take you back to a conference that took place in Toronto in the last week of June 1988. I’m drawn to that as a starting point because, as Canadians, some of us forget that we were ever in the lead on this issue. But we were in those days. And we were the sponsors, along with the United Nations’ agencies, of the first international large scientific comprehensive public gathering to examine the climate crisis. It was called the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security. And a consensus statement from that conference began with this sentence — and I think it answers the question we are examining during this debate: “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment, whose ultimate consequences could be second only to global nuclear war.”

  The science since 1988, despite anything you may have heard, has only gotten stronger. The evidence that has been put together by the IPCC was covered in that year by governments recognizing that not every politician has been a scientist and is able to absorb the data. Although I’d like to give credit to the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, who described herself as a scientist who became a politician and who said in 1990, at the end of the second world climate conference: “The threat to our world comes not only from tyrants and their tanks. It can be more insidious and less visible. The danger of global warming is as yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.”

  What does the science of climate change tell us? It tells us, incontrovertibly, the following things. Humanity has already changed the chemistry of our atmosphere. Through the profligate burning of fossil fuels, we have released so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we have literally changed the chemistry of the atmosphere to the point that this year there is 30 percent more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, more than at any time in the last million years.

  Now, how could we possibly know that? We know that because of some of the most sophisticated science that has ever taken place, twenty-first-century science, examining Antarctic ice core data. We know when the ice was formed, and every piece of ice can be dated. And ice never freezes completely solid. So there are air bubbles, and every air bubble is like a time capsule into the atmosphere, and the chemistry of our atmosphere when that ice was formed.

  We know that carbon dioxide is a powerful warming gas, and that without the natural greenhouse effect this planet would be too cold to sustain life. So we know we’re conducting a vast experiment on very large climate systems over which we’ll have very little control if we don’t reduce fossil fuel use quickly and protect forests and expand them. The science on the climate issue was established in terms of its essentials quite a long time ago. Where the uncertainties were was whether climate change had already started.

  Are we seeing observed levels of climate change that rise above the noise of regular climate variation? And yes, 2005 tied with 1998 as the hottest year on record. But we’re looking at a system with enormous time lags. It’s not about year on year temperature change. These changes are seen in decades, and in those terms it is clear that the trend continues.

  That’s why the scientists around the world, and that’s why the governments around the world, are not troubled by something I’m sure our opposing team members will want to make much of during this debate. But the East Anglia university centre was doing one small piece of the work. I’ve brought with me tonight — and I’ve read all the thousands of emails that were illegally hacked from the university centre’s computer. And when you read all the thousands of emails that were illegally hacked from the university centre’s computer and the whole train of that information, it is very clear there was no dishonesty there. They are decent scientists trying to do their work, and finding they are increasingly unable to do the research they want to do because they are so troubled and harassed, because they have been ensnared in something political. They are honest scientists, but even so their work is only one strand.

  The redundancy of the evidence and the observed effects is overwhelming — millions of square kilometres of ice are gone much faster than the IPCC projected. We’re seeing dramatic changes around the world. We see them in the retreating glaciers, we see them in the rising sea levels — sea levels have risen 80 percent faster than the third IPCC report projected.

  These are the observed effects that match with the theory that match with the evidence that when you throw increasing warming gases into a planet’s atmosphere, you can expect very large and dangerous changes. We know enough to know that we need to act, and that’s why governments around the world signed and ratified the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992.

  Since that time, political will has failed to deliver. Some countries have succeeded — and it’s to their credit. But seven days away from the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, now is the time for citizens around the world to double the resolve to speak loudly and clearly to their political leaders and tell them to abide by the warnings of scientists who have made it abundantly clear we have run down the clock, we have run out of all of our time for delay, denial, and procrastination. In the interest of the security of our civilization, our economy, our society, and future generations, this time we have to act.

  BJØRN LOMBORG: It’s a pleasure to be here and it’s an important discussion. Human nature is a funny thing. We don’t seem to be able to take anything seriously unless we add a superlative. It is not enough that things are good; they have to be the best. Or, if it is going to be bad, it has to be really, really bad. It has to be the worst thing ever.

  We are being asked during this debate, “Is this the defining crisis for mankind?” Elizabeth was trying to downplay it a little bit, but she also said that it is the top priority. And, of course, that matters. If it were just “Is this an important issue?” I think we would all agree and we could go home. The question is — is this the most important thing?

  This escalation of rhetoric is not just stylistic. It forces us back to the very essence of a dichotomy. You’re either for us or you’re against us. You either believe that global warming is the worst thing ever to befall mankind or you’re an enemy of humankind. I think this kind of approach is fundamentally unsound. And it actually is a poor way of both helping the world and dealing with global warming.

  Let me elaborate on that. First of all, is global warming really mankind’s defining crisis? There are 3 billion people who live in extreme poverty. There are 2.4 billion people who don’t have access to
clean energy. There are a billion people who will go to bed hungry. There are 3 billion people who don’t have access to clean drinking water and sanitation. In the year 2009, 15 million people — a quarter of everyone who dies in this world — will die from easily curable infectious diseases. Is global warming really the only, and top, priority? I don’t think so.

  We’ve asked some of the world’s leading economists — the Copenhagen Consensus — how can you actually do the most good for the world? These economists looked at all the different problems in the world and told us where we could do the most good.

  They told us it was about investing in ending malnutrition. They told us it was about investing in agriculture and research and development, and immunization of easily curable infectious diseases, and it was about the education of girls. This is all pretty boring stuff. But it’s incredibly important to make sure that we live in a better world.

  And saying that global warming is the defining crisis of mankind cheapens all these other problems. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to tackle climate change. Of course we should. Climate change is real. It is a big problem. But I would also argue that putting so much focus on global warming and claiming that it is the defining issue of mankind neglects that we need to be smarter about global warming.

  Elizabeth said, in a somewhat offended manner, that we have listened to all the evidence from the scientists for so long but we don’t have the political will to actually carry through. That’s true. But maybe we should then start thinking that this is because we’re barking up the wrong tree. Maybe it is because we’re approaching climate change in the wrong way. And as long as we do that we’re going to say, let’s throw everything overboard and focus on this. Let’s cut carbon emissions dramatically in the rich world, right now. But the costs are phenomenal. Economists tell us the costs of doing that, to keep to the two degrees centigrade limit that many nations have signed on to, will cost, by the end of the century, some 40 trillion dollars a year. That is 40 trillion dollars. The net benefit will be to avoid climate damages of about 3 trillion dollars. We are buying a cure that’s much more costly than the ailment.

  Of course we’re having a hard time getting nations on board. That is because we are saying that this is the worst crisis mankind has ever faced. We’ve got to dial it back.

  And the economists surveyed in the Copenhagen Consensus told us that it is about investing in research and development and investing in green energy technology. It is about making sure that future technology becomes so cheap that everybody will want to buy it. We might put up solar panels for now. Rich, well-meaning people will put them up, to show what good people they are. But fundamentally, that is not going to make a difference where global warming is concerned. Only once we have made sure that solar panels and all the other technologies are so cheap that we can get everybody to buy them — the Chinese and the Indians — only then will we have solved the problem of global warming.

  I would argue because we are so singularly focused on global warming, we forget about all the other problems in this world. And because we are so singularly focused on this being the most important problem, we end up making poor policy decisions.

  So I would agree with Elizabeth. We do need a different approach. We need to stop talking about cutting carbon emissions, cutting this, cutting that. We have done that. For twenty years, we have done that. We promised cuts at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development [UNCED] in Rio in 1992, and we didn’t deliver. We promised cuts during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto in 1997, and we didn’t deliver. We promised further cuts and we didn’t deliver. And now we’re going to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and promising even grander gestures.

  If this is going to be anything more than just another conference with confetti and champagne — if we’re going to do something other than waste another ten years not doing anything about global warming — then we’ve got to start being smart.

  Global warming is a big problem. It’s definitely one of the things we need to fix in the twenty-first century. But we have many problems to fix. We need to fix global warming with intelligence. So I would suggest that you should vote “no” to this resolution, not because you don’t want to do good, but exactly because you want to do the most good possible. You want to recognize that we should deal with climate change, but you want to recognize that it should be dealt with smartly. And you want to recognize that global warming, while important, is by no means the only challenge we face this century. I ask you to vote “no” to this resolution.

  GEORGE MONBIOT: Hidden in the motion before you is a question. How lucky do you feel? Lord Nigel Lawson and Bjørn Lomborg tell us that we should feel very lucky indeed. What they are telling us is that we should prepare not for the worst case scenario, not for the middle case scenario, not even for the best case scenario, but for the better than best case scenario.

  That is because the projections and the costs of climate change they are talking about are more optimistic than the most optimistic end of the spectrum in all the major reports. Lord Nigel Lawson tells us that so flawed and unsatisfactory is climate science that despite everything we know, there has been no further warming this century. I congratulate him. He has single-handedly beat those scientists at their little game, exposed their dastardly plans, and demonstrated that the entire temperature series produced by all the monitoring stations around the world must be wrong, because what they tell us is that eight out of the ten warmest years ever recorded have taken place since 2001. How lucky do you feel?

  Bjørn takes a different tack and says that, yes, climate change is real. He doesn’t go in for this stuff about it being a great conspiracy, or that warming isn’t happening and that all the climate scientists have got it wrong. What he tells us is that, actually, the costs of living with climate change are very low, and the costs of trying to prevent runaway climate change are very high. Well, this is exactly the opposite conclusion to the one reached by the most thorough scholarly and lengthy review into the economic costs of climate change, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, commissioned by the U.K. government and headed up by economist Lord Nicholas Stern and his vast team. They proposed that the costs of preventing high levels of climate change were roughly 1 percent of the gross domestic product [GDP] — which sounds quite a lot.

  But the costs of trying to live with those levels of climate change, at the very best case, amounted to 5 percent of GDP, and at the worst case amounted to 20 percent of GDP. So who do you believe? Do you believe Bjørn Lomborg or do you believe the Stern Review? How lucky do you feel?

  Both men have talked breezily about adaptation. We can adapt to climate change. Whatever it throws at us, we are ingenious, remarkable apes who can sort out solutions to these troubles. Yes, I believe that in the rich world we can probably get along with two or three degrees of climate change — for a few decades, at any rate — and we can potentially adapt to it. But it’s a very different story in the parts of the poor world with which I am familiar.

  We hear that adaptation technologies can be used to ensure that the crisis can be staved off. Drip irrigation, new crop varieties, air conditioning — it sounds all very orderly and very sensible. But in the real world that’s not how it works.

  I worked for a long time in the Horn of Africa, the region that includes the countries of Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethopia, and Somalia, and I saw the first of the great climate change droughts which have stricken that region, hitting it again and again. These are droughts of the scale and severity that they once experienced every forty or fifty years, but have been happening every two or three years recently.

  You’ve probably been seeing horrendous pictures of what has been happening to the Turkana people of northwest Kenya, hit by droughts which even in their oral traditions — which go back a long way — are unprecedented. What is the adaptation technology of choice there? It’s not drip irrigation. It’s th
e AK-47. As soon as a severe drought hits, the killing begins. Bjørn presents us with a choice of investing in foreign aid and helping the world’s people to avoid poverty, famine, malaria, and other diseases, or investing in preventing climate change.

  But why should the money for preventing climate change come out of the foreign aid budget? Is that a major part of government spending? It is far from it. Foreign aid is a tiny part of government spending. Why shouldn’t it come out of the military budget for invading Iraq? Or the tens of billions of dollars used to subsidize the oil and gas industries, or the completely unnecessary subsidies for the agricultural industry? The answer to the question of whether we should invest in foreign aid or whether we should invest in climate change prevention is “yes, we should invest in climate change prevention.”

  This is the time to face the greatest threat I believe humanity has faced, without which we cannot tackle any of the other problems that Bjørn has so rightly highlighted, and that all of us are concerned about. The conference in Copenhagen is, I believe, a historic moment for humankind.

  And the question before the members at the Copenhagen Climate Conference and the question before us during this debate is this. It’s very simple. Do we carry on as we are, dumping our costs on people who are not responsible for climate change but who must carry those costs? Or do we pick up our responsibility, do we recognize the scale of this huge defining crisis, and do we produce a response commensurate with that crisis? How lucky do you feel?

  RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I want to allow each of you to rebut each other in terms of what you’ve heard. Nigel, since you spoke first, I’d like you to start. What have you heard that you fundamentally disagree with?