LORD NIGEL LAWSON: Well, a great deal — pretty well everything on the other side. I will focus first on two issues which are so clear that they shouldn’t require long elaboration.
George Monbiot is quite incapable of understanding the difference between a level and a trend. I will explain with a simple example. Supposing a country’s population had been rising and rising and rising, and then it stopped rising. The population flattened out. Then, it would be absolutely true that the population had stopped rising. This is a very significant point, and this is what has happened with recorded temperatures during this century.
It would also be true, of course, to say that the population was at the highest it had been for a long time, because it had flattened out at the level it had reached before. So George is absolutely wrong to say that there is no proof of this. Many scientists — he’s not a scientist, so perhaps he doesn’t know — admit that there has been no recorded global warming so far this century. Anybody who denies that really doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
That is a fact, and it has been revealed in the emails from the CRU. They say it is a travesty that there is no explanation for this unexpected development. That’s in the email traffic. This is very embarrassing for us, they say.
The other thing George Monbiot said is that the great authority on this matter is the Stern Review, and the Stern Review said that to fix this would only cost 1 percent of GDP.
First of all, only a few months after Stern had written that in the review — or his team had written it — he said, oh, by the way, I made a mistake. It’s not 1 percent, it’s 2 percent. And that was actually reported in the Guardian, and quite prominently. But it wasn’t reported in George’s column.
Second, the Stern Review is disregarded by every serious economist who has addressed it. Dieter Helm, Official Fellow in Economics at Oxford, who is concerned about climate change, says that the figures are assumed figures. He gives them no credence at all —things will be much more expensive, he says. William D. Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, says the figures contained in the Stern Review are absurd. Professor Martin Weitzman at Harvard University Department of Economics says the same. Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor at Economics at the University of Cambridge, says the same. Richard S. J. Tol, Professor of Economics at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, who is probably the economist who has studied this matter most extensively, says that the figures in the Stern Review are absolute — he uses a more polite word, but I will summarize it — rubbish.
This is not surprising because there are two things you should know about the Stern Review. First of all, Nicholas Stern was a government employee who was asked by the government to produce a justification for the policies that had already been announced and adopted. Secondly, the Stern Review has never been peer-reviewed. And indeed, it is unlikely it would do very well if it were.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Elizabeth, I want you to answer the question, is the world getting warmer or not? And, George, maybe you can talk about the Stern Review.
ELIZABETH MAY: Well, in terms of the warmest years on record, it is a mug’s game for many scientists.
They don’t like to focus on individual years. It’s very clear from the IPCC that anyone who understands atmospheric chemistry and atmospheric science and climate science knows that we are dealing with very large systems. And land mass does tend to warm up faster than water. So the land mass is warming at a different rate from the oceans; the oceans are the vast volume and surface area of this planet.
By the way, neither Bjørn Lomborg nor Lord Lawson is going to want to tell you what happens with carbon dioxide in our atmosphere: it acidifies our oceans and threatens life there. Perhaps we can touch on that later, because they don’t bother to talk about it in either of their books.
So what do we know about what is happening to global average temperature? Decade on decade, which is what you’d expect to see in terms of timelines, you see increasing warming. In terms of this century, there is a difference. And because Lord Lawson mentioned that we can read it in the emails, I grabbed one of them. I have them all with me and I took the trouble, before wondering whether there was some scandal lurking in what they call “Climategate,” the Climatic Research Unit email controversy, to read all of the emails.
And there is a similarity between Climategate and the Watergate scandal. And it is this: what was stolen is immaterial. The question is, who were the burglars and who paid them? I’d like to know who breaks into university computers and hacks into emails.
Here’s one of the emails, just for fun, discussing the temperature data year on year, and this is a scientist at NASA communicating with a scientist at the University of East Anglia. And they are saying that, yes, we do have a discrepancy. The Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change has got different data than NASA, which reports that 2005 was the warmest year on record and that 2007 tied with 1998 for second place. The Hadley Centre, which was created by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher so that the U.K. would have a good meteorological service looking at climate, is showing temperature decreases after 1998.
The scientists in these emails are speculating that the difference is due to the fact that the Hadley Centre data doesn’t contain as much information from the Arctic. So if you happen to be someone who is reading the private emails of these climate scientists, you can find that on October 8, 2008, 1:50 p.m., an email that was part of this back and forth between scientists makes it clear that the Hadley Centre doesn’t have the same data that NASA has.
The NASA scientists are very clearly saying that 2005 was the warmest year on record, at least tied with 1998. And I’ve checked with the IPCC scientists in Canada, who are the authorities who should be talking to you about this. I’m talking about people like Richard Peltier, a physicist at the University of Toronto; Gordon McBean, a climatologist at the University of Western Ontario, and Andrew J. Weaver, a climate scientist at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, all people who could probably explain this much better than I can.
But there’s no question that the warming trend continues, decade on decade. But more importantly than temperature, we have issues of chemistry and the phenomenon of increased CO2 levels, up to 387 parts per million, when at no time in the million years before the Industrial Revolution did it ever exceed 280 parts per million.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: George, did Stern pick the most extreme scenario, the most extreme outcome, in order to gauge public policy, or did he provide a mainstream analysis of the challenge?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, having accused the world’s scientists of effectively making up their temperature record, Nigel Lawson then goes on to accuse the British government of trying to commit economic suicide. Because what he is effectively saying is that the government asked Stern to come up with the most extreme scenario, to justify spending as much money as possible in averting climate change.
What the government asked Stern to do was to find out how much it would cost so that it could adjust its policies accordingly. And it did so. And the Stern Review indicated that the costs were far greater than the government had anticipated. Stern didn’t follow government policy. The result of the Review was bad news that the government didn’t want to hear — that climate change would cost a lot more than was previously anticipated.
Was it an extreme scenario? No. It was the most scholarly and thorough review ever conducted, and far from being not peer-reviewed, it was the great review of reviews. This is about as high as it goes, as far as reviewing is concerned. It reviewed the peer-reviewed literature to come up with an über-review, a meta-review, of what was going on. That’s what the Stern Review is all about.
And I just want very briefly to touch on this temperature issue. Eight of the ten warmest years on record happened in this century. And the question I want to ask is directed to Bjørn. What do you make of Nigel Lawson’s contention that there has been no further warming this century?
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br /> BJØRN LOMBORG: Two things. I will get back to answering your question, but first, let’s just remember the Stern Review, because this is actually important, and I think the point that Elizabeth May made, that we need to listen to scientists, is correct. Of course we do.
I think all of us here have listened to scientists and said, yes, global warming is real and it is an important problem. But we also need to listen to economists, who tell us that we should handle this problem smartly, rather than stupidly.
The problem is that the Stern Review is an extreme example. It is almost universally disparaged by economists. Professor Richard Tol actually did a survey of the implicit carbon price, which is a way of asking, how extreme is it? The Stern Review is in the 97th percentile. It’s not a mainstream review.
And just for your edification, you might want to know that Nature magazine uncovered that before the British government asked Stern, they also asked two other people to work on this review and let those people know, very specifically, that what should come out of this review was a supporting argument for the British government’s policies. And these two people said no.
Now there’s no doubt — and I’ve talked to Stern many times — that he sincerely and honestly believed what he wrote, so he was not being dishonest. But it was very clear that he was asked to do this.
And it’s also very important, as George Monbiot rightly mentioned, to remember that this was a review of other people’s research. Stern didn’t do any research of his own. If you compare the numbers, of all the numbers that he put into the model, they indicate that the damages from climate change range from -1 percent — and that is actually a benefit from global warming — to a damage of 4 percent. The most likely outcome is a damage of about 2 percent. That was something that Nicholas Stern massaged into a number of 5 to 20 percent. It’s simply not credible.
Let’s just remember, if this were George Monbiot looking at us talking about climate science, he would say that there were thousands of scientists that agree with these numbers. And then he would say that you cannot pick only one other scientist who says global warming isn’t true. And I would absolutely agree with that.
But likewise, of course, you can’t mention one economist that happened to be picked out for a very specific political reason, an economist who came up with a totally unjustifiable report, and say, “That’s the report that I am going to look at. That report gives me the right numbers.” You cannot do that when all the other climate economists tell us that what is prescribed in the Stern Review represents a very, very poor way to deal with the problem.
Yes, climate science is important, let’s listen to the large majority of climate scientists telling us global warming is real. But let’s also listen to the vast number of climate economists telling us that the proposed solutions we hear from very many scientists are simply rubbish.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: My next question is to Nigel Lawson. We have dental insurance, car insurance, home insurance — in other words, we take a portion of our incomes each year to mitigate risk in our lives. So how do you address the argument coming out of the Stern Review, which is that it is 1 or 2 percent of GDP, but we’re insuring ourselves against a worst case scenario? Why do you think that this is an argument by which we shouldn’t necessarily be captivated?
LORD NIGEL LAWSON: Well, climate change isn’t a case of insurance, technically. Insurance is a statistically assessed risk, and if the risk eventuates — like the house burning down — you are compensated for the cost of the house burning down. There’s no question of compensation here. This is like making the house thoroughly fireproof for a cost that is more than the house is worth. And that is not a sensible thing to do.
The figures that I was using — and remember, I took a worst case scenario from the IPCC range, which I think they may well exaggerate — are the figures which show that the living standards in the developing world, instead of being nine and a half times what they are today, will only be eight and a half times what they are today.
And that is not the biggest catastrophe — I don’t want that to happen, I’d like living standards to be nine and a half times, or even better — but that is not the biggest catastrophe that could impact the planet. Nor is it right to expect countries in the developing world to condemn millions of people to unnecessary death, which is what going to more expensive energy implies, simply because it will make you feel good.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Let me go to you, Elizabeth, because I think that’s on many people’s minds. Mitigating climate probably means not doing many other things. There are cost trade-offs in what you’re proposing. We live in a world of finite budgets, we have a finite global economy. So how do you respond to the charge that aggressive action on climate change could lead to less support for all those essential human needs in the developing world?
ELIZABETH MAY: Well, I wish there was someone here from the developing world to make this point very clearly. A lot of people in the developing world are very concerned about the impact of the climate crisis, which as George Monbiot has already pointed out has caused extreme drought and extreme difficulties around the world.
The reality of it is that we might have believed it was hard to find money and that there were competing trade-offs, before we just went through a year in which four trillion dollars went to bailing out the financial system in the U.S. And I don’t remember any economist — Bjørn, you never thrust yourself in front of the moving economic stimulus package juggernaut to say, “Wait, is that the best choice? We have competing values!” Bjørn functions as a propagandist to stop action on the climate crisis.
BJØRN LOMBORG: Elizabeth, if you’re going to make that claim, you have to be honest and say, this is not about saying, should we do all the good things for the Third World and —
ELIZABETH MAY: I’ve been very honest, Bjørn, but you are someone who has broken integrity.
BJØRN LOMBORG: We spend 90, 95, 98 percent of our money on ourselves. Obviously, money would be much better spent on the Third World for hospitals and everything else. I’m simply asking about the money that we do spend on the Third World. Should we spend it well, or poorly?
ELIZABETH MAY: You seem to throw yourself in front of stopping action on the climate crisis, when other money is being spent. Where are you and your Copenhagen Consensus? Let me just make clear, last night I happened to be talking with a minister for poverty alleviation from the government of Lesotho. It was during an event in Ottawa with King Letsie III of Lesotho, where a lot of us work on actually trying to help this country in Africa, which has the third highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world with 40 percent of its children orphaned.
And I put to the minister that I would be debating someone from Denmark who wanted to make the claim that it would be wrong to spend too much averting the climate crisis, because we should put our money into poverty alleviation and fighting HIV/AIDS instead.
And he said — and I must say, he was enraged: “But the climate crisis is making HIV/AIDS worse in my country every day.” He said, “We are suffering” —
BJØRN LOMBORG: How is that possible, Elizabeth?
ELIZABETH MAY: “We cannot grow our food,” the minister for poverty alleviation in Lesotho told me last night!
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Let’s hear George Monbiot talk about the trade-offs between spending money now to cope with foreign aid versus the long-term challenge of global warming.
GEORGE MONBIOT: The first thing to bear in mind is that very little is spent on foreign aid. I would love to see us spend a lot more. And I don’t know a single climate change activist who isn’t also concerned about poverty, who isn’t also concerned about disease, who isn’t also concerned about hunger. In fact, that’s why we’re climate change activists. Climate change exacerbates all of those problems. You laugh at Elizabeth’s example about AIDS, but I heard someone from Oxfam recently explaining exactly how it works, and they were talking about Malawi. They said climate change causes drought, and the drought forces the
men off the land, as they have to go and find work elsewhere. So they leave the land, they leave their villages, they find work elsewhere, and of course they meet prostitutes, and then they bring AIDS back to their communities. So it might sound like an implausible and crazy suggestion, but according to Oxfam, it’s quite true.
Now, we’re presented with this choice over costs: if, on the one hand, we spend nothing and carry on as we are, and on the other hand we spend a lot of money and potentially bankrupt ourselves in doing so.
But if you read the latest World Energy Outlook by the International Energy Agency [IEA], published in November 2009, it says that in order to maintain global energy supplies, not using some sort of wacky transition of any kind at all, just carrying on the way we are, between now and 2030, we need to spend 25.6 trillion U.S. dollars.
The report says that because of the concentration of oil reserves in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC], the net transfer of wealth from the non-OPEC nations to the OPEC nations, between now and 2030, will be a further 30 trillion U.S. dollars.
This isn’t a choice between carrying on as we are and dancing through the buttercups and watching the bunnies hopping around and not spending anything, or splashing out huge amounts of money on alternative energy. Either way, if we’re going to maintain energy supplies, we have to spend a huge amount of money.
And bear in mind that the IEA figures assume that those energy supplies hold up, and that the price of oil does not peak during that period. If oil does peak, those costs will go through the roof. The 150 dollars a barrel that we saw last year would be nothing by comparison to the cost of oil.
And there are a lot of other reasons why, for our economic well-being, we should cast aside our dependency on fossil fuels as quickly as we can.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I would like to ask Nigel Lawson if you disagree with the worst case scenarios. Do you feel that there are secondary effects that could be quite positive as a result of the defossilization of our economy? Let’s say, more energy independence. Let’s say, less conflict affecting a world where our economy is quite fragile and depends on globalization. Do you sense that those kinds of secondary effects could be valuable?
The Munk Debates Page 16