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Harrabin’s Notes: Getting to the bottom of Climategate

Page last updated at 12:59 GMT, Monday, 5 July 2010 13:59 UK

In his regular column, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin looks at the series of inquiries into the "climategate" controversy at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

Industrial pollution Industrial pollution has been linked to climate change

The Scottish grandee Sir Muir Russell will soon deliver the third and final inquiry report on UEA e-mail affair, in which researchers were accused of cheating over climate science.

The first inquiry, conducted by MPs, cleared the UEA scientists of wrong-doing.

So did the second inquiry, from Lord Oxburgh in conjunction with the Royal Society.

But the tripartite review process has left critics dissatisfied.

This is a tale of three inquiries and the scientific establishment which arranged them.

Between them, the investigations were expected to examine all important aspects of the so-called Climategate affair.

But climate sceptics believe they have been short changed.

We will get a Commons report about the process of the scrutiny of UEA; the Oxburgh report on whether the scientists involved should be disciplined over their published papers; and the Muir Russell review into the hacked e-mails.

But we won't have had an inquiry into the validity of UEA's climate science itself.

Inconsistencies

Critics suspect a whitewash to hide flaws in climate science, but my own lengthy investigations into the background to the inquiries have found no smoking gun.

Continue reading the main story Keyboard (Autocat)

The Lord Oxburgh review found no evidence of 'scientific malpractice'

‘No malpractice’ by climate unit

I have, though, uncovered many inconsistencies – the sort of inconsistencies that look like informality to the science authorities, and conspiracy to climate sceptics.

I conclude that although many scientists say their work has benefited from the public debate generated by Climategate, the scientific establishment has not fully adjusted to the inevitability of scrutiny from the blogosphere and its demands for increased "democratisation" of science.

I have found inconsistencies in two main areas.

First is the remit for the Oxburgh panel itself, which was set up by the UEA in conjunction with the Royal Society and christened the Science Assessment Panel.

The Commons science committee said the panel led by Lord Oxburgh would examine the validity of the climate science at UEA.

The MPs drew this conclusion from evidence they took in committee. This stirred excitement among climate sceptics.

But they did not know that the university's pro-vice chancellor Trevor Davies had actually given Oxburgh a much narrower verbal brief – not to assess UEA climate science overall, but to investigate whether the UEA scientists had done wrong.

Lord Oxburgh's review was still to be called the Science Assessment Panel, but actually it had become a disciplinary assessment panel.

UEA explained that it needed a swift response to determine whether it should launch disciplinary proceedings against the scientists (who were quickly cleared of malpractice by the inquiry).

But sceptics' suspicions were raised by the mismatch between the panel's activities and its title.

And Lord Willis, former chairman of the Commons Science Committee, told me he was unhappy that no broad enquiry would now be done to re-assure the public about the validity of climate science.

He said it was a mistake for UEA to be involved in setting up the inquiries into allegations against its staff.

The second set of Oxburgh anomalies I found concerns the list of scientific papers chosen for his panel to review.

The inquiry's report said that the papers had been selected "on the advice of" the Royal Society. Lord Oxburgh stands by that statement.

But others question whether the wording was appropriate.

Here's why: a previous UEA press release announced that the list of paper had in fact been selected by UEA in conjunction with the society.

What does "in conjunction" mean?

In this case, UEA's Professor Davies passed on the list chosen by the university for approval by the Royal Society, asserting that it included the most controversial UEA papers.

A couple of society Fellows signed off the list after a brief email exchange, even though neither of them was expert in UEA science – and the list was sent on to Lord Oxburgh.

'Lack of care'

Two determined bloggers, Steve McIntyre and Andrew Montford, have been trying to unpick this process. They think it looks at least slack, possibly worse.

Continue reading the main story

The Muir Russell review is planned to set the seal on this long Climategate affair, which has surely been damaging to science

Roger Harrabin

But do the anomalies really matter?

Lord Oxburgh said the society had given him the scope to examine whatever extra papers he wanted in the course of the review.

He confirmed that his team did indeed read widely, although he said he had not kept a record of what exactly had been read – an omission which infuriates his critics.

The bloggers complain of an apparently shifting remit, ambiguous communication and lack of due care by the Royal Society itself.

They say the UEA list of papers did not include the most controversial ones from their viewpoint – and it was the bloggers' queries that sparked the whole UEA crisis.

Critics also complain that the Oxburgh review did not investigate UEA's links with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), especially over the drawing of the controversial "hockey stick" graph on global temperature rise.

There is clearly a gulf in expectation between the two sides in this affair.

The scientific establishment is not used to having its proceedings pulled apart by gadfly inquisitors, often armed with Freedom of Information e-mail chains.

Privately, some senior scientists say they find this relentless probing to be nit-picking, mistrustful, obsessive and corrosive of public trust.

They see it as a waste of time, and therefore of public money.

All the scientific players involved with the Oxburgh review – UEA, Royal Society and Lord Oxburgh himself – insist that they have behaved in an open and honourable way.

Lord Oxburgh response

Lord Oxburgh himself explains the situation this way in an e-mail to me.

He wrote: "I really can't get very worked up about all this!

"There is an underlying presumption of a formality to our activities that simply wasn't there.

"(Critics) are attaching an unrealistic significance to the original list of publications.

"We did not bother unduly about the origin of the list of papers – it reached us via the university and we understood simply that it was the outcome of UEA/Royal Society discussions.

"Willis certainly had no authority to change our remit.

"Such a request was not passed on to us and if it had been I would have resisted, because to meet it would have required a different committee."

The Muir Russell review is planned to set the seal on this long Climategate affair, which has surely been damaging to science but one thing is for certain – the panel will not examine the validity of the UEA climate science overall.

A spokesman for Muir Russell told me recently this was a matter for the Oxburgh Panel – a puzzling comment considering that the Oxburgh review clearly did nothing of the sort.

To the scientific mainstream this has all been a massive distraction.

They point out recent research suggesting that 98% of leading climate scientists are convinced that human activities are warming the planet.

But to critics there is still plenty of room for debate on the details.

And if it wants to avoid a long-running asymmetrical war with the bloggers, establishment science may need to change the way it does some of its business.

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    25 January 10Sci/Tech

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    • The Independent Climate Change Email inquiry
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Harrabin’s Notes: Getting the message

Page last updated at 13:18 GMT, Saturday, 29 May 2010 14:18 UK

In his regular column, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin looks at the fall-out from complaints that some of the Royal Society had oversimplified its messages in public statements on climate change.

Power station and oil refinery Most scientists agree CO2 has warmed Earth over and above natural fluctuations

After years of accusing the fossil fuel lobby of using anti-scientific arguments to undermine climate policy, scientists are now themselves accused of being un-scientific.

There are signs in the Royal Society's current review of its climate communications that they are beginning to understand the seriousness of their predicament and have included some "climate agnostics" on the panels.

But it seems that message has not seeped through to all quarters. And one Fellow of the Royal Society said there's the whiff of "end of empire" in the air as establishments strive to protect their authority as it ebbs away into the blogosphere.

The danger to the credibility of science institutions from the way they communicate uncertainty in climate change is immense.

Surveys show that many people don't believe the truths of scientific orthodoxy anymore and prefer to seek their "facts" in the blogosphere where it's easier to get insouciant endorsement of high-consumption western lifestyles.

The Royal Society is paying a price for the era in which lobbyists were doing their utmost to unpick climate policies. Some members of the establishment may have briefly forgotten that the public expects its authorities to be whiter than white.

I remember Lord May leaning over and assuring me: "I am the President of the Royal Society, and I am telling you the debate on climate change is over."

Lord May's formidable intellect and the power of his personality may have made it hard for others to find a corner from which to dissent. "The debate is over" was a phrase used in order to persuade Tony Blair that policies were needed to tackle the rise in CO2.

It was widely acknowledged that climate sceptics wanted to continue the debate in order to delay action to curb emissions.

But what did the phrase mean? Did it mean the IPCC is unquestionably right? Or that cutting emissions 80% is the only way to save the planet? Or simply that it is basic physics that CO2 is a warming gas?

Even at the Heartland Institute climate sceptics' conference in Chicago last week most scientists seemed to agree that CO2 had probably warmed the planet at the end of the 20th century, over and above natural fluctuations.

But they did not agree that the warming will be dangerous – and they object to being branded fools or hirelings for saying so.

The attitude of the establishment to the sceptics shines through the succession of inquiries into controversial science at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

When at the launch of the Sir Muir Russell inquiry I asked about the credibility of the review panel in the blogosphere, Sir Muir dismissed the enquiry with the flick of a wrist – he had been a senior civil servant and he had run a university, his bona fides were beyond question.

But the blogosphere does not respect past reputations, only current performance. And some of the top performers in the blogosphere are critics of the establishment.

Steve McIntyre, for instance, is a mining engineer who started examining climate statistics as a hobby. He has taken on the scientific establishment on some key issues and won.

He arguably knows more about CRU science than anyone outside the unit – but none of the CRU inquiries has contacted him for input.

I have been told by the review teams that they can read McIntyre's blog if they want to learn about his views. But they can't have read all his blog entries surely? And they would have saved a lot of time and effort if they had asked him to summarise his scientific scrutiny on a couple of sheets of A4.

Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, the Royal Society's lead on climate change, told me he wouldn't look outside the realms of the Royal Society for input into the framing of a society review into the UEA affair.

This again is surely questionable – he admitted that he himself was not very conversant with CRU science. And what's more the society has turned outside its ranks for a couple of panellists on its current climate review.

The deep irony is that critics like Mr McIntyre profess themselves to want to take part in the science, not to destroy it.

And if the great science academies can't find ways of including the best experts from the blogosphere in their deliberations they may find themselves badly left behind.

There will be some who welcome a demolition of the bastions of authority. But for governments and many citizens, the world will be much poorer if they do not know who they can trust.

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May 29th, 2010 in Science

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In his regular column, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin looks at how the nuclear summit in Washington DC could affect public perceptions of nuclear power.

TERRORISM AND NUCLEAR POWER’S POLITICS
Nuclear security summit (Getty)

Will the terrorist concern play into the politics of nuclear power?


President Obama’s nuclear security summit in Washington DC has thrown a little-discussed issue into the headlines. While it’s there we might ponder more deeply on our relationship with radioactivity.

Because President Obama’s warning that a terrorist attack with stolen nuclear material is the greatest threat to humanity sits a little uneasily alongside the assertion from the former UK chief scientist David King that climate change is our biggest threat – necessitating a global drive towards nuclear power.

King’s imperative means we will need much more nuclear fuel round the world, whilst ensuring much improved security for the products of that fuel in order to to sustain public confidence.

The Obama summit resolved to lock down nuclear material, particularly from old weapons. But the publicity for the project may perversely increase fears about nuclear by catapulting a new risk into the headlines when scientists were beginning to succeed in assuaging fears about the previous identified risk – disposal of nuclear waste.

It would be surprising if this nuclear terrorist concern did not eventually play into the public politics of nuclear power.

Imagine if terrorists managed to use a nuclear device against a major city: How would this affect the fragile public acceptance in countries like the UK that nuclear is (in some people’s minds) a necessary evil?

There is, of course, a big difference between the fuel used for most nuclear power stations and highly-enriched weapons-grade uranium.

But in public discourse it’s often hard to make such distinctions, and, anyway, the authorities are nervous of the panic and disruption that would ensue from even a terrorist dirty bomb tainted with low-level nuclear waste.

And it’s not just deliberate acts of terrorism that nuclear planners might fear. The emerging nuclear pact between public and people would surely also be strained by a nuclear accident anywhere in the world, whether terrorists were involved or not.

Nuclear is relatively low down in terms of deaths per kilowatt hour – particularly compared with coal, which is dangerous for people who mine it or inhale its combustion gases.

And at the moment, countries are racing to place orders for nuclear power stations because there’s not remotely enough capacity to meet demand – a problem that so far has attracted little public discussion.

But the more nuclear stations the world builds, the greater the statistical risk of an accident.

Say, hypothetically, that the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown happened tomorrow: China would probably press ahead with its nuclear programme and France – with its massive dependency on nuclear – would probably be undeterred.

But the incident would doubtless fuel latent public mistrust of nuclear power in democracies like the UK or the US.

And the risk of an accident will surely increase as nuclear power expands into developing countries without a long-standing industrial safety culture (this is the implication of the global energy strategy advanced by the low-carbon energy consensus, unless rich nations aspire to rule which countries are fit to generate nuclear power and which are not).

I am not making the case that nuclear is unsafe or undesirable – that is a question for individuals and politicians to decide.

I am making the case that these other issues – the policy risk from a nuclear accident, the moral hazard of denying unstable countries the power that Western governments think necessary, and the lack of nuclear manufacturing capacity require attention as well as the scary issue of nuclear terrorism.

April 15th, 2010 in Science

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In his regular column, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin says that energy reform is meeting economics across the UK’s political parties.

GREEN BANK EMERGES FROM THE RED BOX


Offshore wind turbines (PA)

Mr Darling also promised a review of the privatised energy market

The Chancellor has announced plans for a "green investment bank" to finance clean energy projects in the UK.

The bank would be kick-started with £1bn from the sale of assets like the Channel Tunnel, combined with £1bn of private cash.

Mr Darling also promised a full review of the privatised energy market to make sure low-carbon energy projects get delivered.

Environmentalists welcomed both announcements but said the bank fund is too small.

They said it would take too long to raise the capital from asset sales, and complained that the sum would need to be rapidly increased in the next Parliament if the UK was to capitalise on green jobs in industries like offshore wind.

Peter Young, chairman of the Aldersgate Group, a coalition of businesses and green groups said: "The new green investment bank is rightly at the heart of the (UK) Government’s growth and jobs strategy. But the total low carbon investment needed by 2020 is at least £250bn."

The government’s plan is similar to schemes already launched by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, which indicates that this idea has at last come of age after years of lobbying.

The Conservatives are studying Germany’s KfW bank – a development bank set up after the war – which invested nearly 20bn euros in environmental projects last year.

All the major parties are now also focused on finding new ways to allow people to get long-term pay-as-you-save loans to insulate their homes and install small-scale renewable power. Plans in this area have been slow to come to fruition because so many different agencies are involved.

Campaign group WWF praised today’s green bank decision. But the World Development Movement said it did not go nearly far enough. A spokesman said the government should instruct the taxpayer-owned RBS to use public money for the kinds of projects it wants to fund under a green investment bank, rather than investing in companies involved in polluting industries.

‘Inevitable’

There was a broad welcome for the Chancellor’s review of the energy market. Civil servants have been convinced since Mrs Thatcher’s time that the market would deliver on two key objectives of low energy prices and secure supply.

But the task for the markets was complicated by the additional requirement for a third objective: low-carbon energy. Experts have complained for several years that the current framework is not capable of delivering all three.

The government insists that energy supplies are secure in the near term but has concluded that the carbon price will not deliver sufficient clean energy in the long term.

It wants to remove some of the barriers that are shutting clean energy innovations out of the market and today’s statement lays out three possible options to guarantee funds: by feed-in tariffs for large generators, by a competitive tender process for low-carbon generation, or by a regulator agreeing an appropriate return on clean energy generated.

Energy policy is so complex and arcane that it generates few of the media headlines that so often drive policy. But politicians have received enormous pressure from green groups and industry alike on this agenda. And whichever party wins the coming election, energy reform looks inevitable.

March 25th, 2010 in Science

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In his regular column, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin asks whether the EU’s biofuels policy will stand up to scrutiny.

BIOFUELS STRATEGY UNDER THE MICROSCOPE


Damaged rainforest

Rainforest being chopped down in Kuala Cenaku, Sumatra, Indonesia.

Legislate in haste, repent at leisure: is that the syndrome afflicting the EU’s biofuels policy?

Environmentalists fear it is – and their latest manoeuvre to stem the biofuel tide is a legal action to force the European Commission to publish thousands of pages of evidence of the impacts of plant fuels on the environment.

The Commission’s evidence is being compiled as part of a cross-directorate investigation into the potential downsides of biofuels, which goes public later in the year.

Green campaigners want to see all the background research immediately because they believe that some of the papers already confirm that biofuels may do more harm than good.

The Commission says it has released more than 8,000 pages of evidence and is still sifting the rest for commercial confidentiality. A Commission spokesman said: "We are not stalling but trying to deal with a massive demand here."

A Commission source speaking to me accused green groups of using the legal action as a publicity stunt. But he admitted that technically the Commission is in breach of its duty to provide information on time, so the demand has now entered the independent General Court – Europe’s second-highest court of appeal.

The environmentalists say they suspect that the Commission’s analysis contains explosive evidence that could blow the EU’s biofuels strategy apart.

Carbon footprint

The EU wants 10% of all transport fuels from "renewable sources" including biofuels by 2020. It is also pushing the role of biofuels in the 20% target for renewable energy from heat and electricity.

But the campaigners say EU evidence already released reveals that driving biofuels policy too hard could create food shortages whilst also driving farmers in the tropics into wetlands and rainforests.

Palm fruits on plantation (AFP)

Palm oil plantations may end up being classified as forests

And Reuters news agency reports one leaked document – between senior agricultural and energy figures in the Commission – saying that taking account of biofuels’ full carbon footprint could "kill" their role in the EU.

The new case against the Commission is being driven by Tim Grabiel from the non-profit lawyers ClientEarth. He told BBC News: "We suspect that biofuel is the ultimate "Emperor’s New Clothes" policy. It is designed to tackle climate change: it may help agro-business and businessmen – but if it doesn’t help tackle climate change, it is useless. The subsidies are simply creating artificial demand."

What’s in a forest?

Green groups have also been angered by a separate EU policy statement leaked to BBC News. They say it could grant plantations of palm oil the same status as natural rainforests.

The draft communication from the Commission to the European Parliament on the sustainability of biofuels, document BI (10) 381, says natural forests have to be protected.

But the devil is in the definition of a forest. It says: "Continuously forested areas are defined as areas where trees have reached, or can reach, a height of five metres, making up a crown cover of more than 30%. They would normally include natural forest, forest plantations and other plantations such as palm oil. This means that a change from forest to oil palm would not per se constitute a breach of the criterion [for sustainability]."

Agri-business in Malaysia has argued strongly for this provision, making the case that palm oil plantations lock up more carbon than, say, scrubland.

Some studies confirm this, but green groups point out that if plantation bosses succeed in redefining palm oil as forestry that will attract double subsidies from European taxpayers – for managing forests and for producing biofuels.

Kenneth Richter from Friends of the Earth said: "This is absolutely appalling – they are bending over backwards to support the palm oil industry. To equate a palm oil plantation in the same category as a rainforest is dishonest and outrageous." When I queried the Commission about this policy, they declined to comment.

Maize

A significant issue is the displacement of food crops by biofuels

The green groups’ fears have been heightened by a recent unpublished report for the British government’s Department for Transport, DfT, by the consultancy E4tech. It suggests that palm oil may produce more CO2 than it saves, and that the CO2 case for using rapeseed oil is marginal. If confirmed this would rule out subsidies for these crops for use on EU roads as EU rules oblige biofuels to save significant CO2 over fossil fuel alternatives.

The E4tech study also warns of immense uncertainties in modelling the future impacts of biofuels on carbon alone. It points to great uncertainty in the IPCC over carbon content of different land types, multiplied by wobbly land-use data from developing countries, then further compounded by the unpredictability of responses from markets and farmers. Some observers say the models are so soaked with uncertainty they are virtually worthless.

A DfT spokesman confirmed the warnings in the E4Tech report. She said: "Many biofuels, such as those from waste, have the potential to provide significant carbon reductions. However, some, such as palm oil produced under the wrong conditions, do not. The challenge is identifying and developing those biofuels which deliver the most environmental benefits."

But environmentalists point out that the E4tech study doesn’t even attempt to factor in the other potentially malign side-effects of fuel crops displacing food crops.

Biofuels policy is becoming a nightmare for politicians who now increasingly refer to fuel from waste when they refer to sustainable biofuel – although this has its limitations too as the world attempts to cut back on waste and to find alternative uses for waste products.

The politicians joined the biofuels game in good faith hoping for a "Get Out of Jail Free" card for climate change. They are now imprisoned between their wish to protect the environment and their need to retain the confidence of investors they have attracted into the game.

Their discomfort means that the UK, for instance, is currently offering subsidies for power generation and transport to fuels shown by its own studies to be counter-productive. Councils like Bristol will be heaping the pressure on whomever wins the election to scrap the subsidies.

Politicians feel the need to tread carefully with business, though. They will need the support from investors to create new energy sources and they won’t win business credibility by putting an entire structure of bio-incentives in place then tearing it apart.

But one thing is for certain – the pressure won’t go away. One of the few points of agreement among many environmentalists and climate sceptics is that biofuels policy as currently framed looks like a serious mistake.

March 10th, 2010 in Science

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In his regular column, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin asks whether bloggers sceptical of man made global warming can be reconciled with the UN’s climate body.

CLIMATE ‘ARMISTICE’


Woman using umbrella in Hungary (AP)

Did cold weather sway recent converts to scepticism?

The newly-announced enquiries into the University of East Anglia (UEA) will shine a light deep into the core of science in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the university.

But critics are calling for a broader review of climate science as a whole? Do they have a case?

Let’s examine the question of UEA science first.

The independent Russell review will extend to examining the methodology behind part of the controversial Hockey Stick graph which has become the emblem of global warming theory.

A separate enquiry by external experts will measure scientific competence over the past few decades at the CRU.

Already we have may have a clue about one possible finding, thanks to an interview for the BBC News website with Phil Jones, the UEA professor who blocked requests for the weather data used in the construction of the modern temperature record.

His colleagues at UEA feel desperately sympathetic with Professor Jones, whose life has been in turmoil since his private conversations were spattered on the web.

They tell me they admire his integrity and accuracy, but they say tidiness is not his strong point. And when I put that suggestion to Professor Jones, he admitted there were shortcomings in his audit trail of weather station data.

The Russell review will consider whether the data procedures at CRU were acceptable by current standards and, crucially, acceptable by the standards of 1990.

And if his account of a hazy paper trail were to be accepted, Professor Jones might be rapped for scientific littering rather than a life sentence for scientific GBH.

Official view

But now to the even more contentious issue about whether the UEA reviews go far enough.

Because, irrespective of their findings, some critics demand a full enquiry into the entire field of climate science.

They point to a recent BBC survey suggesting that just 26% of people in the UK now share the official view of governments worldwide that the climate is changing and humans are implicated.

Phil Jones (BBC)

Phil Jones said some data were not well organised

Some recent converts to climate to scepticism may have been swayed by their shivering knees as cold grips a band of the northern hemisphere. They might not have realised that the global temperature in January hit a record high, according to the satellite record at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, US.

The headlines over "Climategate" and "Glaciergate" must have also eroded public confidence too.

Politicians striving for a low carbon economy hope the current storm of climate scepticism is just a cloud in the political weather which might clear if we get a rash of exceptionally warm years globally, as the Met Office suggests.

But what if the Met Office is wrong about climate change, or if the world is in a phase of temporary natural cooling which is masking serious underlying manmade warming?

Politicians will hope that the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) provides a trusted review of the latest science.

But the bloggers who have persuaded so many people to question manmade warming do not trust the IPCC, which they consider a politically-motivated body – as my colleague Richard Black reports.

Showing credentials

But could the bloggers and the IPCC be reconciled?

Some bloggers spin facts to make a political point. But some well-informed bloggers claim an impressively broad knowledge of climate science despite their lack of formal credentials.

The establishment, though, would convulse at the prospect of dealing with amateurs and this "credentialism" will be an important component of the future climate debate.

And debate there will continue to be, because discussion over climate change has been over-simplified to a dangerous degree. Although it is near impossible to find UK academic scientists professing to be "climate sceptic" (more on this in a future column) plenty of them agree there is much uncertainty about climates past and future.

The climate issue has always been a matter of risk and uncertainty – not cast iron fact. The former US presidential candidate John McCain had no difficulty expressing it this way: "We’re not sure of all the facts but the risks at the moment look too great to take," he used to say.

Professor Jones himself is candid about the uncertainties. He stands by the view that humans are most likely to be warming the planet but admits there have been two similar periods of recent warming and confirms that we don’t yet know enough to be sure if the Medieval Warm Period was global and if it was warmer than today.

So what about the assertion from some politicians and science bureaucrats "the debate is over"? Well most (though not all) sceptics agree that increased atmospheric CO2 is heating the Earth.

Peace movement?

But the debate over how much the planet will warm is open, with some suggesting the Earth’s systems will temper the warming and others warning that the volume of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere will overwhelm natural systems and may bring catastrophic warming and ocean acidification. We are back to the question of risk.

There is a spectrum of opinion on climate change but aggression from both extremes has reached such a pitch that experts have been tugged into camps, to the detriment of science. This is accentuated by the media’s tendency to weave a compelling narrative of drama and conflict.

Amid the clamour on the blogosphere, though, there are the seeds of a growing climate peace movement. What a relief it would be if the extremists in the warring factions would lay down the Weapons of Mass Vilification like "denier", "flat-earther", "climate scam" and "climate con".

We are certainly in the right moment for a great Climate Armistice. It was always predictable that after the traumatic climax of Copenhagen, the world might lapse into spell of self-examination. Well, the soul-searching has begun in the UK. And politicians may afford to be a little less tense about it.

The Copenhagen Accord is in place – not nearly strong enough to satisfy those who fear the risks, but certainly an international political acknowledgement that those risks exist. In my view the international politics of climate change were unlikely to shift substantially this year anyway.

So there is space for a debate on the science. If politicians can frame their arguments in terms of uncertainty and risk, they may be better prepared to engage their critics. Shielding their heads behind an IPCC summary report won’t make the debate go away.

February 16th, 2010 in Science

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Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin asks how the UN’s climate change body may be changed by revelations of purported errors in its key report.

REFORMING THE IPCC


Rajendra Pachauri (AP)

Dr Pachauri has refused to apologise for the Himalaya glacier affair

The hue and cry for the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Rajendra Pachauri is in full spate, and he is defiantly refusing to apologise personally for the Glaciergate bungle.

But we should pause for a moment to ask if this particular manhunt will produce a better system of climate science.

Dr Pachauri heads an organisation set up to advise governments on the latest knowledge of climate science, potential impacts, and economic and social solutions.

The task is split into three working groups. Is it realistic to assume that the overall chair will check the reference footnotes in all three sections of a 3,000-page report? I think not.

The Glaciergate mistake (important not because it was made, but because it was not spotted) was the responsibility of WGII. As I mentioned in a recent column, the same working group also failed to reference fears over the Amazon rainforest properly, even though the science itself was solid.

The co-chairs who oversaw WGII have served their term. They were the British scientist Professor Martin Parry and Argentinian meteorologist Dr Osvaldo Canziani.

Professor Parry has repeatedly refused to answer my questions about the genesis of the errors, and his out-of-office assistant now says he is travelling for a month.

But the question we need to ask is how the IPCC can be reformed in a way that doesn’t make it worse.

Some critics want the IPCC abolished altogether, but without a mutually-accepted source of information it is inconceivable that nations of the world will be able to agree a joint resolve to cut emissions (this is exactly the outcome that fossil fuel lobbyists in the US have sought).

Hard to resist?

China is demanding that future IPCC reports contain "sceptical" points of view, which will go some way to satisfying complaints from sceptics that their views are brushed under the carpet in the name of consensus.

It will be hard to resist this demand; but if granted, it will place more onus on the main authors of the report to draw up a synthesis of opinions and explain why they favour one over another. There is an argument for creating full-time posts of the role of working group chair – currently a spare time job.

There is also an argument for a core of inter-governmental experts sitting in the same place, filtering information together, asking for further research in certain areas. But libertarians will see this as consolidating power in the hands of the few, which will lead to huge rows over who should be appointed to this "Climate Supreme Court".

Then there is the question of what to do about so-called "grey literature" – evidence that has not gone through a scientific peer-review process, like the WWF claim over glaciers.

I was shocked to see WWF "science" included in the IPCC report, but several scientists have since said that it’s essential to spread the search for climate facts beyond the narrow realms of peer-reviewed journals. They point out that the IPCC set out to be inclusive, allowing input from firms, pressure groups and ordinary people.

Indeed on the BBC World Service programme World Have Your Say this week, Indian campaigner Vandana Shiva argued for more emphasis on "people’s science" – the knowledge of farmers passed from generation to generation of when the rains should come. This is a different form of knowledge, she says, but cannot be written off just because it has not been written up.

Mighty task

The question of timing is another vital one to be addressed.

Currently, the IPCC reports every four to five years. But the science is changing all the time, and negotiations over emissions are ongoing.

What’s more it can take two to three years from a scientific paper first being written to having it published and approved by the IPCC.

That can lead to a massive delay. How the IPCC tackles this is one of the most difficult questions.

Finally (for now – because there will be other issues) there is the matter of openness. I do not think that the IPCC will be allowed to publish again without greater transparency – that means better labelling of categories of "grey" material, and scrutiny from the worldwide web.

The web is the home of right-wing bloggers who campaign politically against the IPCC. But, for all its frequent vitriol and false accusations, the blogosphere has been proven at least partially right on occasions. Any future iteration of the IPCC will have to find a way of taking the serious bloggers seriously.

A final few thoughts on Dr Pachauri.

I note that he is being mocked in some newspapers for "not even being a scientist". Dr Pachauri is indeed an economist. He was appointed after the Bush administration staged a coup to oust the previous IPCC chair – a scientist who was making too much noise about climate change.

The Americans thought Pachauri would promote a development-centred economist’s view and soft-pedal on the science.

He did for a while, but then became exasperated by politicians’ sluggishness on cutting emissions. After years of being hounded by sceptics he is now snarling defiance like an animal at bay.

However, Dr Pachauri rashly dismissed initial allegations over Glaciergate. He might be undone by allegations over an alleged conflict of interest between his research institute and his IPCC role – a conflict he denies.

And there are many, including some environmentalists, who think he should go. But whoever takes over his IPCC role will have a mighty job on their hands.

February 4th, 2010 in Science

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Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin says that one certainty in the climate debate is the existence of uncertainty – and that it must be addressed.

STEPPING UP TO THE MIC
Today programme production

Being at the business end of a microphone presents its own challenges


Commenting on climate change for the popular media is a miserable business – especially when it involves attempting to convey subtle and complex information whilst being interviewed live.

Sometimes I pity those scientists, politicians and climate sceptics who try to make their case on the airwaves. And I am more convinced than ever about the need for a new language of climate change, based not on scientific certainty but on uncertainty, risk and values.

Because the inquisitorial style of media interrogation based on the "battle for scientific truth" or the "search for right and wrong" regularly forces commentators into statements that are not quite accurate and often not helpful.

In one recent broadcast, for instance, I found myself uttering the words: "So climate science has not changed, but public opinion is changing." Now, this statement is at once right and toe-curlingly wrong. I’ll explain how we got to it.

We started the two-way (in the BBC that’s what we call an interview with a correspondent) skipping through the news about the latest deadline for announcing controls greenhouse gas emissions. So far, so straightforward.



Their tactic of declaring war on sceptics and denying that debate exists is also almost certainly counter-productive, as well as being wrong

Then we delved into the scientific controversies that have dominated headlines – the embarrassing Climategate, the inexplicable Glaciergate and the inconsequential false alarm over what some bloggers have dubbed Amazongate (which I discussed in my last column).

Then to the broadcast words I regret in my upsum: I declaimed that despite the media frenzy recently, climate science hadn’t changed – but the battle for public opinion was changing.

On one level that’s correct, on another it’s nonsense. Studying the climate is the most complicated systems science ever attempted, and in all sorts of ways the science is changing all the time.

There were, for instance, two important scientific advances last week – or at least, they look important from the point in understanding that we’re at now. Both of them narrow bands of uncertainty.

One shows how the oceans and forests conspire to increase man-made warming, but by not nearly as much as previously believed. The other shows that shifts in water vapour in the atmosphere have contributed to recent temperature changes.

Based on past evidence, both studies suggest that the largest extremes of climate projections may not be realised. This is good news (although some scientists warn that the climate may be much more volatile in the future).

The bad news is that the authors of both studies insist that increasing levels of CO2 are stressing the planet beyond its capacity for self-regulation. And CO2 emissions are booming and will continue to do so, the way global politics is going.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of uncertainties about what will happen. The trouble is that the climate debate has become so febrile that the people who govern us, and thus our emissions, are loath to mention the U-word.

You have to survey the history of the debate to see why: from the early days when climate science was emerging, the fossil fuel industry funded multi-million dollar campaigns promoting uncertainty to delay action to control emissions.

Climate scientists have grown used to reacting in a defensive way. And just such a mentality could underlie the reluctance of the University of East Anglia (UEA) to release raw data to be picked apart by sceptics.

The polarisation has left casualties on both sides. Some of the individuals questioning climate science with a properly sceptical mind – and they are almost all individuals rather institutions – are accused of being lackeys of the fossil fuel companies, or of being climate change "deniers", a divisive and insulting term which simply inflames the situation.

The politicians are casualties too. Imagine the following hypothetical broadcast interview.

Minister: "Of course, there are still uncertainties over how exactly the climate will change, but…"

Presenter interrupts: "Sorry, minister, did I hear you say there are uncertainties, with people’s fuel bills rising. Are you telling us you are not 100% certain about all the science?"

Now you can see where this is heading, and in a spin-savvy world, most politicians have decided that this is not a profitable route to follow. But in my view their tactic of declaring war on sceptics and denying that debate exists is also almost certainly counter-productive, as well as being wrong.

What we need is a new discourse which acknowledges the majority view on climate science, accepts uncertainties and encourages debate among scientists over their observations of the world – a debate framed in the language of risk and uncertainty in which economics and societal values play a central role.

Will we see such a debate? Don’t bet on it. There is more fun to be had for some journalists when combatants are throwing bricks at each other. The pity is that it’s public understanding of climate change that’s being damaged, and maybe the planet as well.

February 2nd, 2010 in Science

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Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin considers whether another mistake by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has come to light.

ANOTHER ERROR?


Amazon Rainforest (IPCC)

An IPCC statement on the fate of the Amazon has been questioned

After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted it had made a mistake in its Himalaya glacier forecast in its Fourth Assessment Report, climate "sceptics" are busy searching the rest of the panel’s report for more mistakes.

It appears that this week, they have found one. In parts of the blogosphere it has been dubbed "Amazongate".

There was a dire warning in chapter 13 of the report of IPCC Working Group II:

"Up to 40% of Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation," it observed.

"It is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannas."

Closer inspection reveals that the authors referenced for this work are, in fact, an expert linked to environmental group WWF and a green journalist.

Euro-sceptic blogger Richard North said: "The IPCC also made false predictions on the Amazon rainforests, referenced to a non-peer reviewed paper produced by an advocacy group working with the WWF.

"This time though, the claim made is not even supported by the report and seems to be a complete fabrication," he observed.


The IPCC statement is basically correct but poorly written, and bizarrely referenced

Dr Simon Lewis
Leeds University

A blunder perhaps, but maybe of a different kind, because there is indeed plenty of published science warning about drought in the Amazon.

Authors of some of that research are not happy that the IPCC chose to reference WWF rather than the basic science itself.

Dr Simon Lewis from Leeds University, who co-authored a paper on the Amazon in the journal Science, says the forest is surprisingly sensitive to drought.

He told me: "The IPCC statement is basically correct but poorly written, and bizarrely referenced.

"It is very well known that in Amazonia, tropical forests exist when there is more than about 1.5 metres of rain a year, below that the system tends to ‘flip’ to savannah.

"Indeed, some leading models of future climate change impacts show a die-off of more than 40% Amazon forests, due to projected decreases in rainfall.

"The most extreme die-back model predicted that a new type of drought should begin to impact Amazonia, and in 2005 it happened for the first time: a drought associated with Atlantic, not Pacific sea surface temperatures.

"The effect on the forest was massive tree mortality, and the remaining Amazon forests changed from absorbing nearly two billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere a year, to being a massive source of over three billion tonnes."

So, it appears that, unlike in the case of "Glaciergate", the IPCC’s science may be right but its referencing wrong.

Dr Lewis’s Science paper came too late for the Fourth Assessment Report’s deadline.

But, he said: "They should have cited the papers by Peter Cox and colleagues on the modelling side, and a paper by Dan Nepstad on a massive drought exclusion experiment."

I have tried to contact the lead author of Working Group II to ask why his team cited WWF not the journals – but without success so far.

My guess is that NGO reports often offer an easy synthesis of already-published evidence.

In my experience, NGO papers are often both accessible and accurate – though clearly written from a point of view.

But it is obvious that the next IPCC report will have to be much more meticulous about flagging up the provenance of its sources.

There will need to be more clarification of what is known as "grey" literature (not peer-reviewed) and IPCC panel participation.

It all points to the need for much greater transparency, though that will throw up issues of its own for a body striving to offer a coherent view to policymakers of an issue dominated by risk, uncertainty and values, rather that unambiguous science.

Just this week, for instance, there were two pieces of published research in Science and Nature suggesting that the very worse effects of climate change may have been overestimated.

The researchers of both papers say they are still concerned about man-made climate change, though.

The unfinished science of climate change goes on.

January 31st, 2010 in Science

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Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin looks at how the world’s leading authority on climate science has been rocked by allegations of serious faults in its key report.

A BLEAK FORECAST?


RK Pachauri (AFP)

Dr Pachauri has declined offers to resign

Environmentalists are facing a bleak year ahead in the battle over climate change.

In the latest of a series of setbacks, the Chinese government is reported to be demanding that the climate change "Bible" – the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – should in future contain comments by climate sceptics, too.

It follows two severe political setbacks in the US and three allegations of serious faults in climate science itself.

In the US, the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat almost certainly puts the nail in the coffin of Democrat hopes for a full climate bill this year.

The coffin lid was screwed shut by a controversial ruling by the Supreme Court last week that corporations should be afforded the same rights as individuals – and therefore should be able to spend as much as they want on advertising to attack politicians’ plans. The fossil fuel industry is poised with banknotes at the ready.

It’s just as rocky on the road of science.

Before Christmas came the first of a series of shocks: "Climategate", in which stolen emails purported to show scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA) conspiring against their rivals.

It’s normal behaviour in the laboratories of the world, several scientists told me. But many didn’t read it that way. And the investigation into the affair will surely have serious consequences for the university and the process of climate science.

Wrong date

Then, as reported by BBC News website , came an inexplicable blunder by the world’s leading authority, the IPCC.

Its warning that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 was a huge mistake – but the IPCC said it was human error and should not undermine confidence in the rest of its 3,000-page report.

Himalaya (SPL)

The report was mistaken in its warning about the Himalayan glaciers

Now there have been new allegations over the weekend that the IPCC overstated the certainties of the link between rising temperatures and the costs of natural disasters – allegations the organisation strongly rebuts.

An eminent – and distressed – Oxbridge professor of natural sciences asked me at the weekend: "What’s happening – how is science losing support of the public?"

Part of the answer lies with the media – particularly right-wing newspapers – which have been fuelling cynicism over government "green" taxes for some time.

So what happens now?

Xie Zhenhua, vice-chairman of China’s influential National Development and Reform Commission, is reported by India’s Business Standard to have demanded that the IPCC’s next report should include contrarian views.

Some critics go further, calling for the IPCC chairman, Dr RK Pachauri, to resign (an offer he has declined) or even for the body to be disbanded altogether.

But governments will be loath to kill off the IPCC, which comprises hundreds of experts reviewing the work of thousands of experts, all supervised by government representatives.

‘Major threat’

With the IPCC’s shortcomings laid bare, reform looks inevitable. But the body remains the guide to the complex and contested uncertainties of climate change – a phenomenon most scientists still consider a major threat to humanity.

The Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: "I think that the academic evidence as a whole leads to one conclusion – that we’ve got to take action against climate change. And, I don’t think there was any disagreement amongst the major countries at Copenhagen that (if we) allowed temperature rise above two degrees centigrade by 2050 – it would be… very serious indeed."

But even as he spoke, Mr Brown faced criticism from a different quarter on the same subject.

The World Development Movement says it has learned that the whole of the $1.5bn emergency finance promised by the government to help poor countries adapt to climate change will be stripped from the general overseas aid budget.

The Conservatives’ David Cameron will not take succour from this latest problem for Mr Brown. Mr Cameron has re-branded his party as "vote-blue-get-green", but many of his back-benchers rank climate change as a very low priority. A couple of his Cabinet members are likely to be outright climate sceptics, and more may be driven that way if right wing newspapers continue chasing stories about the IPCC’s failings.

All this is deeply baffling to mainstream climate scientists. With all the uncertainties about how much the climate will change in future, it is very widely accepted that humans have changed the climate and will change it more.

January 26th, 2010 in Science

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Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin looks at how the global climate debate could be affected by a US Supreme Court ruling that lifts a cap how much companies can spend on political advertising.

UNLEASHING THE BUSINESS CASH


US Supreme Court (PA)

The Supreme Court decision could obstruct environmental reform

The chances of a global climate deal this year have taken the second major blow in a week in the US.

In the latest development, the US Supreme Court has ruled that corporations can spend as much money as they like to influence elections.

The decision is likely to unleash a flood of business cash attempting to drown plans for a climate and energy bill in the Senate.

It follows close on the Republican victory in the race for the vacant Massachusetts Senate seat – an election that tilted the balance of power and made it even more difficult than before for Democrats to muster enough votes to get climate laws through the upper house.

Both events underline the overwhelming influence that US domestic politics has on the planet, as the rest of the world waits for the nation to confirm its offer to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

If the US does not pass a climate law, the EU might refuse to increase its own conditional emissions targets to 30%.

Together these outcomes would leave plans for a low-carbon economy in the western world in tatters, and would see the world considerably overshoot the limits recommended by scientists.

Already, the US Chambers of Commerce, which says climate legislation threatens profits, is reported to be planning a massive campaign of advertising before the mid-term elections in the autumn.

It has already said it will support candidates who oppose the climate laws. Until now, expenditure on political advertising was limited by a cap imposed in 1990.

Now the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations must be allowed exactly the same freedom of speech as private citizens – including the right to spend unlimited amounts at elections.

Senators and congressmen need to secure millions of dollars for re-election, and critics say this comes at a serious price, with US coal and oil firms among the major donors.

On the White House website, President Obama said: "The Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics.

"It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans."

Cash stampede

The Supreme Court decision could prove a landmark in US environment politics, as some US environmentalists view corporate lobbying and campaign financing as the single biggest obstacle to environmental reform.

Just one oil firm – Exxon Mobil – was recently reported by the London-based New Energy Finance to have spent $14.9m lobbying in six months, 23% more than all the clean energy firms put together.

The report added that oil and gas companies spent a total of $82.2m on Washington-based lobbyists.

The developments in the US come as emerging world powers – the BASIC bloc of Brazil, South Africa, India and China – meet this weekend in India to discuss how they will move climate policy forwards following the weak outcome at the Copenhagen summit.

Reuters report a Brazilian proposal for BASIC to create their own fund to help the poorest countries adapt to climate change.

This is way beyond their obligations under the current UN climate protocol, but it is a response to accusations from G77 poor nations in Copenhagen that the emerging rich were enriching themselves by putting the climate at risk.

January 23rd, 2010 in Science

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Harrabin’s Notes

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In his regular column, the BBC’s environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, offers an insight of life inside the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

THROUGH THE CONFERENCE LOOKING GLASS


Climate protester dressed as an alien (Getty Images)

Everyone can have their say at the climate summit in Copenhagen

The Bella Centre is a vast conference village on the outskirts of Copenhagen.

But it’s not big enough for this conference so the halls sprawl out into temporary buildings each with its warren of offices for delegations.

Getting through security is a morning nightmare. Ask the Chinese climate minister, He’s been turned away three times by the guards.

It’s caused a lot of upset – the concept of face in China is deep-rooted, and China’s feeling pricked in many ways here; bludgeoned by America and betrayed by some of its traditional friends. More on this shortly.

If you manage to get through the barrier, you’re into halls with firms hawking some new clean technology, or giant globes and indoor trees, as well as wide corridors thronging with earnest suited UN types marching in step.

There are also businesspeople, and teenagers chanting for climate justice when you’re trying to eat the slabs of grey meat they call lunch here. You’ll also encounter aliens with green faces intoning "take me to your leader".

George Soros speaking at the Copenhagen summit (Getty Images)
George Soros was in town to launch a $150bn climate proposal
Soros unveils $150bn climate plan

Almost none of them know what’s actually going on.

These climate meetings are the most complicated meetings in the world trying to solve the most complicated problem in the world.

So, apart from all the side events with millionaire financiers launching ideas for getting money to poor countries, and ocean scientists warning that the oceans are turning more acidic because of CO2, and forestry experts explaining all the different and often conflicting ways of funding the protection of the forests, you have the main negotiations themselves.

Everywhere there are TVs with split screens showing the two tracks of negotiations: one track for everyone, and the other for those who signed up to the Kyoto Protocol 12 years ago.

If that’s not complicated enough, as I write the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu has brought a halt to negotiations for the second day running with its demand for a third track of negotiations.

I heard this from an Indian journalist I bumped into after stopping for a cup of tea with a man who knows what’s happening on climate change in the US Senate.

Just before seeing him, I met a British journalist who told me he was getting most of his information from overheard conversations in the gents’ loo.

Now tracks one and two of the conference are discussing trying to stabilise emissions at a level projected to have a fair chance of avoiding a 2C (3.6F) temperature rise. That’s the threshold considered dangerous by the official climate science.

Yet Tuvalu is likely to lose its entire territory if there’s severe sea level rise, so it considers that 2C could be fatal for the nation. This prospect tends to focus the mind.

So now Tuvalu is demanding a 1.5C degree target, which the UK Met Office has said in another side event here was virtually impossible given its projections based on the current level of emissions.

No matter, this is the UN; everyone has a say, and this is a very challenging say because a 1.5C target implies huge emissions cuts from rich nations and – this is significant – very forceful action from countries like China India and Brazil as well.

Which brings us back to the Chinese environment minister. He’s not happy. His old allies at the poor end of the G77 bloc are turning against his country.

The fissure between the rich and poor of G77 may be one of the legacies of this conference.

I wasn’t able to make the Chinese press conference which was held in Chinese in Hall C6, that’s the one at the end past the Karen Blixen plenary hall.

And because I was trying to follow up a document I’d been leaked on the African position but I couldn’t find the man from Lesotho who’d written it.

And this is just week one. This time next week the world’s leaders will starting their session of 24-hour climate poker in these towering halls – it’s one of the most extraordinary meetings the world has ever seen.

Are you feeling dizzy from that blizzard of information? Try being here.

December 11th, 2009 in Science

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Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, the BBC’s environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, looks at the questions which could be asked by an inquiry into stolen climate e-mails from the University of East Anglia.

CLIMATE E-MAILS: INQUIRY QUESTIONS

Keyboard (EyeWire)

UEA is set to announce details of its inquiry into the stolen e-mails


What will be the purpose or purposes of the University of East Anglia (UEA) inquiry into the stolen e-mails from its Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and who will be its chair?

We should know in the next couple of days. But how much detail will we know? And how far has the university considered the significance of the e-mail affair on climate science in general as well as public and political opinion of that science?

I’ve tried to speak to the people at UEA who are making the key decisions on the inquiry, but haven’t managed to.

So I’ve jotted down a few questions they might be likely to face when they announce their decisions.

Mainstream scientists may feel that many of these questions hand far too much power to climate sceptics, some of whom have tried to discredit them and their work – by fair means or foul.

But the inquiry will need to be supported by the global public in a wired world. So it will need to strive as far as possible to avoid reproach in the blogosphere. Here are some questions:

1 – What is the purpose of the inquiry? Is it to reach a judgment on the ethical conduct of the scientists involved, or on whether their activities affected the science on which the Copenhagen deal is being forged. Or both?

Professor Phil Jones, the researcher at the heart of the e-mail affair, insists that his science is clean. And most scientists I have spoken to say that if any potential anomalies in the CRU data were to be uncovered they probably wouldn’t prove significant because that data set is almost identical to other ones.

But the public will want to see both issues – science and ethics – fully addressed.

2 – How will UEA ensure that its chairperson is acceptable to commentators and the public, as well as to the mainstream scientists convinced of the risks posed by climate change and angry that media attention is being diverted by an apparent sabotage campaign?

Will the university find a way of seeking the opinion of key sceptics like Lord Lawson before they name the chair? My guess is that if key players like Lord Lawson don’t support the chair’s independence, the inquiry will be compromised.

How will the inquiry command international respect? Will there be an international element – perhaps from the US?

3 – Can UEA allow the chair to determine (with the university’s agreement) the remit of the inquiry and to nominate other members of the inquiry panel? If UEA tries to control the remit, sceptics won’t accept it.

4 – Will the university ask for the inquiry to report in a specific time period?

5 – Will the inquiry have to consider all aspects at once, or report in stages? Under the two-stage scenario, stage one might examine the key scientific question. This is important because politicians preparing to ratify any Copenhagen deal will be asked by their publics to ensure that the assessment of the risks of climate change doesn’t need to be re-visited because of the CRU affair.

Stage two of the inquiry might ask broader questions about the peer review process and about procedures for dealing with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This has been discussed in my earlier column. Stage two is very important, but in my view it’s not as urgent as stage one.

6 – How will the inquiry be run? They are expensive and need staff. Who will pay and will the funders be trusted by the public? Some bloggers appear not to trust anyone with anything, but they do not form the full court of public opinion.

7 – How will the inquiry team communicate with the public? This is a key issue. Any chair who turns up in a UEA hall for his/her press conferences will be described by sceptics as a patsy. But if communications are not to be arranged through the university, then who will do it?

This is a scary time for the people running UEA. There are big risks for them in floating the inquiry into total independence. But in my view, the risks of not doing it are far greater for the world of science and climate policy.

The timetable here is important. For the US climate bill to pass in its current form, it arguably needs to get through the Senate by June.

Republican climate sceptics in the Senate will demand conclusions from any inquiry before they agree to sign off any bill. They will in all likelihood attempt to block the bill anyway – but it will be embarrassing for UEA if the e-mails are cited as a cause for delay.

Some senators are unlikely to accept any findings if they don’t agree with their pre-determined view. But unless the UEA inquiry is demonstrably impartial it will fail, and a new fully independent enquiry will almost certainly have to be formed. That process will take us beyond June. That’s why the details of UEA’s announcement this week is so crucial.

December 3rd, 2009 in Science

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Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, the BBC’s environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, looks at how the affair of the stolen climate e-mails has sparked debate among some scientists about the body which peer reviews climate science.

STOLEN E-MAILS AND THE IPCC

Antarctic coast (AFP/Getty)

The affair of the stolen e-mails continues to divide opinion


The content of stolen e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia has prompted much discussion about the way peer-reviewed science is conducted.

But it is also raising questions among some scientists about the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC, steered by governments and drawing on the work of thousands of scientists and other experts, is the world’s biggest peer-review body. It was formed because politicians needed definitive advice about the effects of greenhouse gases.

Most policymakers rely in large part on the IPCC’s summary reports – so the summaries involve a battle of wills and opinions in the distillation of thousands of studies into climate change.

The last IPCC report, AR4, said the world’s average temperature was certainly rising, and that the majority of the warming was more than 90% likely to be caused by emissions from humankind.

The CRU holds one of the key global data sets on temperature, so its data has helped underpin the IPCC’s conclusions.

This report contributed to the current political consensus on the need for cuts in greenhouse gases (although not yet on the extent of the cuts).

A minority of sceptics who mistrust the evidence of recent warming are hoping their view will be corroborated by the inquiry into the stolen e-mails from CRU, in which some observers claim to see alleged signs of collusion among climate scientists.

Other scientists tell me they doubt the inquiry will affect the main course of scientific opinion, as the CRU temperature data set is very similar to the two other global sets, both in the US.

Demanding culture

A former IPCC lead author Mike Hulme says in an e-mail: "This (CRU) event might signal some re-structuring of scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralised.

"The IPCC, through its tendency to politicise climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalising and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive."

Some scientists regard Professor Hulme’s statements as naive. They say governments and media respond to simple black-and-white messages, not nuanced explanations of complexity and uncertainty.

And some are not confident about alternative methods of assessing complex climate science.

John Schellnhuber – who was formerly co-director of the UK government-funded Tyndall Centre for Climate Change with Professor Hulme, asks how the public could be confident of authoritative information in a scenario where the IPCC were to be downgraded or even disbanded.

"I cannot see how, in practical terms, the entire scientific process can be turned into an online open-access enterprise," he says. "When it comes to transparency, inclusiveness and accountability, the IPCC is going further than any other policy-relevant scientific assessment.

"It would be interesting to learn whether Mike has any concrete ideas about how to replace the present mode (with) something definitely better."

He adds: "Having said this, I can only state that such a debate (about the IPCC) should not be prompted by a criminal act, breaching the constitutional rights of individual scientists."

Many scientists are likely to share Professor Schellnhuber’s concern that Professor Hulme appears ready to share control over key scientific messages between government-appointed experts and self-appointed commentators on a world wide web.

‘One voice’

John Houghton, chair of the science panel for the first IPCC report, says the current process could be improved, but should certainly not be scrapped in favour of something else.

"The IPCC has involved large numbers of scientists from many countries and disciplines. As a result, the world climate science community can to a substantial extent speak with one voice about the most important elements of the story.

"In other areas of science that are as diverse and uncertain as the climate, this convergence of informed opinion has not occurred.

"The IPCC has (also) brought about ownership of its conclusions by governments. Without this, governments’ policies (with regards to) climate change would have been much more diverse and contradictory.

"I deny that this ownership has ‘politicised’ science. In fact, I believe that without it the science would have been much more politicised – by different groups of scientists serving groups with different and incompatible political agendas."

Professor Houghton said that in future it would be wise to offer the IPCC protection from harassment in its work. "IPCC meetings were open to all – including (representatives) from organisations such as the Global Climate Coalition whose clear agenda was to weaken our work and our conclusions.

"A particular way they continually did this was to publish selected provisional material from the IPCC process, for example draft chapters or contributions not meant for publication, and used this to discredit the IPCC and the process.

"For people being targeted, it is very difficult to be completely open when provisional material emerging during the process is being used as stick to beat the scientists with."

‘Dominant model’

But Professor Hulme’s comments have attracted some sympathy. The social scientist Dr Joe Smith, co-author of the Open University’s climate change textbook, thinks the way climate science is conducted should be reappraised.

"The dominant model of science is one of aggressive individual or lab-based competition to break new ground and get the most convincing arguments supported by evidence," he told me.

"I think that that can be an unproductive form of ‘knowledge generation’. One thing for sure is that it isn’t designed to produce consensus around such a complex topic as climate change.

"So the IPCC has serious weaknesses – but it remains the most ambitious peer review process modern science has undertaken.

"The problems arise at the science-policy-media interface where these headlines are translated into a shorthand that there is a ‘consensus’ that ‘the science is finished’.

"We should instead be continuing to engage (the wider public) in the idea that our best current understanding justifies very pacy and bold action on the basis of intelligent risk management."

Traditionally, peer review is the gold standard way to advance scientific knowledge. Though it has been described by some scientists as the "least worst" option.

Dr Smith’s Open University colleague, Bob Spicer, who is a professor of earth sciences, told BBC News that the IPCC had done a "magnificent" job ofdistilling complex data. However, he added that the IPCC was too reliant on climate computer models and sometimes unresponsive to new data.

"The IPCC either needs to be terminated or it needs to evolve into something that provides summary data more quickly and to cast its net wider regarding relevant information.

"From the geological record, we already know that the current greenhouse gas equivalent has not been seen for more than 20 million years and we know what the world was like back then. The only thing we are unsure about is how long it will take for the Earth system to display those atmospheric changes as climate change phenomena."

December 1st, 2009 in Science

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Harrabin’s notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, the BBC’s environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, assesses the arguments sparked by the leaking of information on climate change.

CLIMATE CHANGE: METHODOLOGY QUESTIONED

A dried-up reservoir

Hacked e-mails have raised questions on climate change data


Scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia are facing a fierce attack from climate sceptics following the hacking of the university’s computer.

The hacker stole thousands of e-mails and data. Much of it has been posted on the web. And some of the e-mails are causing acute embarrassment.

My contacts at the CRU tell me the e-mails are being taken out of context and insist they are part of the normal hurly-burly of conversations between scientists working on some of the most complicated questions of our times.

They ask how many of us would feel completely comfortable if our own inboxes were emptied out for the world to see. How much of what we had said to close colleagues in industry jargon would be liable to misinterpretation?

"If the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) can’t do closed e-mail, no-one with any expertise could do anything. I don’t know how you are supposed to work if you don’t have e-mail," my source said.

But the e-mail stash is proving a treasure trove for sceptics who have challenged every facet of climate science and policy.

Some of the e-mails reveal the frustration and annoyance among mainstream climate researchers about the probings they face from critics who relentlessly question their methodology.

And although my contact insists that the e-mails are about how data is presented and interpreted, sceptics say the e-mailers may have been discussing how the data could be manipulated.

The CRU has been repeatedly asked to publish the entire data set from which it compiled an important grid-based record of global temperatures.

It says it will publish full details when it has clearance from all the world’s meteorological offices whose permission is needed.

But speaking to my source at the CRU, it is also clear that the unit has been dragged down by what it considers to be nit-picking and unreasonable demands for data – and that there is personal animus against their intellectual rivals.

Now this sort of hostility is nothing new in academia – but the revelations come at a sensitive time as the world’s nations gather for the climate meeting in Copenhagen.

My CRU source points out that its unpublished full data set is almost identical to the ones at the National Climatic Data Center and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies.

Both of these are in the US, where there are no restrictions on publication. The CRU view is that when the sceptics see the full data in due course they will be very disappointed.

The scientific establishment is likely to support the CRU. Despite continuing uncertainties in some areas of climate science, they say officially that their overall confidence that humans are warming the climate is now more than 90%.

One leading figure told me unofficially that confidence was now at 99%.

But the e-mail controversy may prove an uncomfortable moment in the careers of some of researchers in the spotlight and will undoubtedly provoke demands for renewed scrutiny of the CRU’s influential work.

These demands are likely to surface in the US Senate, where climate change sceptics and their supporters are holding up the energy and climate bill which President Barack Obama needs before he can sign a legally binding agreement over cutting emissions.

November 21st, 2009 in Science

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Harrabin’s notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, the BBC’s environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, considers the claim that carbon trading is failing to curb emissions and could actually harm the economy.

COULD CARBON TRADING SPARK A CRISIS?
Campaigners in Copenhagen (AFP)

Campaigners say atmospheric carbon must not pass 350 parts per million


Carbon trading could trigger a financial collapse like the sub-prime loans crisis, according to a new report from the green group Friends of the Earth (FoE).

It’s the latest in a series of assaults against carbon trading as the Copenhagen climate conference looms.

The carbon trade allows industries in developed countries to offset their emissions targets by paying for clean projects in developing countries. London’s a major centre for the trade, which could reach trillions of dollars in the next few decades.

But today, FoE says its research shows that most trades are done not by polluting industries, but by traders packaging carbon credits into complex financial products similar to those which triggered the sub-prime mortgage crash.

They warn that this could lead to a future crisis of sub-prime carbon.

The report’s author, Sarah Jayne-Clifton says: "Carbon trading is failing dismally at reducing emissions, yet allows speculators to grow rich from the climate crisis and hands politicians and industry a get-out clause for polluting business as usual."

I wrote recently in this column about the American Breakthrough Institute studies of carbon trading which concluded that a straight carbon tax (if ever it could be politically achieved) would be much more effective.

The UK government agrees that wealthy nations must make big emissions cuts – but insists that emissions trading still has a cost-effective part to play. Indeed, the EU’s promise of 30% emissions cuts if other nations agree tough targets is based on carbon trading.

Now the EU is flying the flag for trading, and assuming that it will provide much of the funding needed for adaptation and clean energy in developing countries.

Having just returned from China it’s eminently clear that in theory it is much, much more efficient to provide clean infrastructure in a fast-emerging economy than in wealthy countries with so much of their energy infrastructure, factories and homes already set in concrete.

But it won’t work if people can’t trust the trade. On a previous visit to China I went to a wood-waste power station funded under the carbon trading scheme known as the CDM. It was obviously working well. But when I asked the owners if they had really needed the CDM cash to make the economics work they repeatedly refused to answer.

This touches on the principle known as additionality – i.e. will a clean development project slow emissions growth in a way that would not have happened without it? This will have to be bolted down very firmly if agreement is to be reached on it in Copenhagen.

When I ponder the cost of making my inherently leaky Victorian home in London properly energy-efficient, I can’t help thinking how much better it would be to spend that money insulating some of the Chinese buildings that are being hurled skywards as a breathtaking rate.

But could you trust that the investment would happen in the right way? Friends of the Earth are by no means alone in their scepticism.

November 5th, 2009 in Science

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About Science-Nature – Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

Roger Harrabin examines the difficulties faced by China as it puts together a negotiating position for the Copenhagen climate conference.

HOW CHINA IS GRAPPLING WITH ITS CLIMATE CONUNDRUMS

Many scientists consider China to be the most vulnerable of all the major nations to climate change.

If that’s so, it doesn’t bode well for Liu Xuedu and her family.

We find Liu by following the plaintive sound of a woman’s unaccompanied song at Fengnan village in the Pearl River delta in China’s deep south.


Liu Xuedu (BBC)

Copenhagen may seem a long, long way away for Liu Xuedu

She sits in her one-roomed house intoning a song of mourning for her son, killed in a car crash whilst working in the local town four years ago.

There are gaps in the stone walls, and a bare concrete floor. The house is almost empty except for a couple of bits of primitive farm machinery against the wall and painted wooden flowers that adorn the shrine to her son on a table in the corner.

Her daughter-in-law tends to the small family farm, though it’s a drought-stricken area and income is very low.

Liu is left looking after her young grandchildren who squall as we try to speak to her. She has diabetes but can’t afford the medicine. Like hundreds of millions of Chinese she’s locked into poverty by dependency on the climate.

"Last year, we had no rains at all," she tells me. "This year we’ve just had rain but the way things have been looking these past few years, we don’t expect any more in the Spring.

"We can barely get by on what we earn."

The Pearl River delta is earmarked as one of China’s most vulnerable areas to a changing climate. Parts of it regularly face both droughts and typhoons in the same year.

The delta – home to tens of millions of people – is very low-lying, so it’s also vulnerable to sea level rise – especially as ground water has been over-extracted in a way that’s made the land sink further.

Farmers are making the problem even worse by drilling more than 100m for precious sweet water. That in turn is sucking salty water from the sea bed, and starting a slow destruction of the farmland.

"Climate change is a big worry for China’s politicians," says Zhou Yong Zhang, environment professor at Sun-Yat Sen University in nearby Guangzhou. "In south China, we worry about sea level rise because it will have a big impact on us. We also worry about the extreme weather.

"The west of China is a problem because the weather patterns there are already very complicated and it looks like they are getting more difficult. They also have the melting glaciers. But maybe the north of China will benefit from more rain. There is a lot of uncertainty still.

"Some geologists in China say we are only seeing natural swings in weather patterns. But many climate scientists think China is suffering the effects of (human-induced) climate change already."

Talking targets

China’s President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have both spoken forcefully on the need to curb global emissions of greenhouse gases.

But they are in a bind. They need to increase the economy to help lift people like Liu out of poverty – and there are hundreds of millions of people like her on less than $2 a day.

Downtown Shenzhen, China (BBC)

Downtown Shenzhen looks much like any large US city

China, like other emerging nations, demands that rich countries cut 40% of their emissions (based on 1990 levels) by 2020 in line with recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

As China’s emissions are still relatively low per capita, and as China is the workshop for developed nations, the rest of the world accepts that China’s own emissions will continue to grow for a time… but the rest of the world would like to know exactly when China will stop growing.

The Chinese government has so far only promised to peak emissions by 2050 – that’s catastrophically late from the point of view of climate modellers. But other dates are now on the table.

Prof Hu Angang, one of many academics who advises the government on energy, is quoted as saying that China’s emissions could peak as early as 2020. But his controversial remarks have handed ammunition to China’s rivals in the forthcoming Copenhagen climate talks.

Green push

The 2020 peak appears not to have wide support among academics in China but a modelling exercise published recently by three respected organisations – the Energy Research Institute (ERI), Qinghua University, and the State Council Development Research Centre – concludes that emissions could peak between 2030 and 2040.

The founder of the ERI, Yang Fuqiang – now a global technology expert for WWF – warns that it might be counter-productive for China to strive to cut emissions from 2020. The country will need maybe a decade with stable emissions and rising profits so it can develop the technologies for a truly low-carbon future, he told me.

"I think 2030 is ambitious, but we can do it. We have to take more action. It’s very urgent – 2030 is only 20 years away, so hard decisions need to be taken now," he said. "The government needs to work harder – issue more policies, have more investment in clean technology, and ask the public to be more aware of climate change."

The Chinese government is already beginning to edge towards the low-carbon direction with a dual-purpose strategy that conveniently improves the competitiveness of the economy as well as cutting emissions. In fact, it is almost impossible to tell industrial policy and environment policy apart.

The central government has spent more fiscal stimulus money on green technology than any other nation – US$221bn, according to HSBC.

Patent pain

Another energy efficiency target will be announced in the next five-year plan. There is a renewable energy target of 15% by 2020, which the well-connected Yang Fuqiang expects to be increased to 16% or 17% before the Copenhagen meeting. These odd percentages have huge impact.

Factory site in Shenzhen, China (BBC)

On the outskirts of Shenzhen, the “old China” is still very evident

China is already a major global market for renewables. Wind power capacity has been doubling yearly for the past five years and China looks likely to become the world’s biggest wind market – above the US. China complains, still, that the patents for key technologies like gear-boxes are held in the West so it can’t develop its wind industry as far as it would like to.

China looks likely to become the world’s biggest maker of solar photovoltaic cells, and it is already the biggest player in solar water heaters, which are mandatory on new homes in the Shanghai area.

China plans to double its nuclear power capacity, too, in a strategy that sounds ambitious overall. Indeed it is… but it can’t disguise the bigger truth that China will still remain about 70% dependent on coal as its economy booms, and carbon capture and storage is advancing at a snail’s pace.

What’s more, questions remain about whether all of China’s targets can be met.

Coal question

The central government has mandated a 20% improvement in energy efficiency by 2010. But that may founder because provincial governments and state-owned enterprises often see more political and financial advantage in diverting the river of investment money flowing into China towards polluting heavy industries.

Regional politicians compete with each other to attract the cash. They have been warned that they will damage their promotion prospects if they miss their efficiency targets, but many owe more loyalty to local profits and jobs.

Ailun Yang of Greenpeace sympathises with China’s top leaders, but says they have to do more.

"I believe that Hu and Wen are both serious about the need to reduce emissions. But they have to carry the rest of the political system with them and that’s not always easy – especially when provinces are competing with each other to attract jobs and inward investment.

"The government has changed the tax system, putting more tax on energy-intensive products since 2007. It is also increasing environmental standards. It also made a good decision to bring in targets for carbon intensity (a measure of CO2 per unit of economic growth).

"But its downfall is coal. The industries around coal are massively powerful and coal still does not remotely pay back the costs it imposes on society through pollution and safety."

China’s intensity target will be a major bargaining chip at Copenhagen. It’s a measure that George Bush originally proposed for the US because it steers an economy in a low-carbon direction without actually guaranteeing any emissions reductions at all.

It’s worth mentioning that there are two ways of improving carbon intensity: either by reducing CO2 with the same product, or keeping CO2 levels the same or higher but switching to a higher-value product.

There will be pressure on China to make a grand statement at Copenhagen to impress the US public that its own economy has to shift direction. But in truth, there’s an overwhelming feeling among negotiators in the climate talks that it’s the US, not China, which has to move most.

In Tuesday’s Harrabin’s Notes, I’ll have my hands on the Chinese car that might – just might – create an electric revolution on the roads.

Later in the week, I’ll be visiting what’s claimed to be the world’s most energy-efficient tower block; seeing how one city has banned the petrol motorbike; and taking a cycle ride along country tracks to witness the beggar-thy-neighbour boom in ostentatious rural housing.

October 19th, 2009 in Science

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About Science-Nature – Harrabin’s notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, the BBC’s environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, draws on his experience of a quarter of a century reporting the environment to assess the impact of last week’s G20 meeting on the ongoing UN climate negotiations.

CLEAN ENERGY – SHOULD RICH NATIONS SUBSIDISE THE POOR?
solar panels

North African countries have much to gain from solar power


The trouble with being an environment minister is that many of the levers of environment policy rest in the hands of politicians in other departments.

And what was top priority for climate negotiators seeking political support from world leaders meeting at the G20 last week was not necessarily top priority for the leaders themselves.

So it is that decisions left un-taken in Pittsburgh have resounded to rattle the UN climate talks starting this week in Bangkok.

The issue in question is how much cash will be given to help developing countries obtain clean energy supplies.

Previous major climate negotiations have focused on emissions cuts by rich nations. But the need to tie developing countries into a climate deal means that the issue of financing is much more important than before.

The International Energy Agency says more than 90% of the new energy infrastructure over the next few decades will be in the developing world.

Gordon Brown says $100 billion dollars a year is needed to tackle poverty through clean energy by 2020 and the EU more or less agrees. Some developing countries think the figure should be half as much again.

But at the G20 meeting President Obama skirted the issue. His climate policies face potentially insuperable opposition in the US Senate. So now energy funding will be referred back to the G20 finance ministers meeting in November.

This is getting very late – and compounds the difficulties of the climate negotiators who are desperate to start trimming some of the hundreds of brackets from the text of the Copenhagen deal.

It’s another example of politics lagging behind the science. A new projection from the UK’s Met Office suggests that unless emissions are cut urgently, global temperatures could rise 4C by the middle of the century, maybe 15C in the Arctic.

Whether you have faith in climate models or not, it’s clear that politics as we know it can’t yet respond to the urgency of the defined risk.

If Gordon Brown can get President Obama to share a glass of mulled wine in Copenhagen this December, things might look a look more optimistic. But Todd Stern, the chief US climate negotiator who helped negotiate the Kyoto Protocol under President Clinton, told me that the US would not repeat the mistake of signing a climate deal that wouldn’t get through Congress.

The President has been widely condemned by developing countries for his failure to commit funds. But the timing is dreadfully difficult. The Waxman-Markey Bill which passed through the House of Representatives allowed for trading of emissions permits. That would supply cash for developing countries – billions a year, Stern told me – but how many billions we can’t say until the final deal is agreed. Even then the numbers will depend on the carbon price.

President Obama did adopt one initiative in Pittsburgh that will help the environment. He called for an end to subsidies to fossil fuels. As the Oxford academic Norman Myers pointed out in his 2001 book, the world is spending trillions a year subsidising the very pollution it is theoretically trying to expunge.

In many countries the subsidies to the fossil fuel industry – though tax breaks, incentives and failure to pay for "externalities" like polluting the atmosphere – add up to way more than subsidies for the clean energy systems which political leaders prefer to talk about.

The trouble is that it’s easy to give a subsidy to a big polluting industry – but very hard to take it away without facing a barrage of lobbying. In the US this is compounded by donations by big firms to underpin the election campaigns of Senators and Representatives.

That’s why the president said the subsidies should be phased out in the "medium term". China will be looking closely at this initiative. Coal is still subsidised there.

It might help if more people knew about the "block tariff" policy invented by Bangladesh. Low users of electricity can buy power very cheaply in order to encourage parents to install light bulbs to educate their children. But the price per kWh increases in blocks, so the rich in mansions on the edge of Dhaka end up paying high prices for their air conditioning and fridge freezers. This is the sort of social innovation politicians need more of if they want to tackle the problems of climate change and development.

September 28th, 2009 in Science

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About Science-Nature – Harrabin’s notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin takes a tour of the world’s biggest container ship to get a taste of the measures the shipping industry could take if it were serious about reducing its CO2 emissions.

IS SHIPPING SERIOUS ABOUT CUTTING EMISSIONS?

Global shipping contributes about a billion tonnes of CO2. That’s more than the entire economies of Germany or the UK.

Aviation lobbyists have gleefully highlighted the figures. They are a useful distraction from green assaults on the rise in aircraft emissions.

But the shipping industry indignantly rejects the comparison with aviation. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) says moving goods by ship is 80-100 times more efficient than by air.


Exhaust from a container ship

Environmental groupshave voiced concern about emissions from shipping

Arguably, the shipping industry has been complacent because it’s demonstrably more efficient than its competitors already.

Furthermore, it doesn’t have such effective cheerleaders as aviation.

The Scandinavians are taking ships’ emissions seriously, as you might expect with their traditions of seamanship and environmentalism. They took me on a tour of the Estelle Maersk, the world’s biggest container ship, which its owners claim is the most efficient in the world.

She is truly immense – 397m long, 56m wide, 21 storeys high. It was impossible to get the TV camera to capture its scale.

The biggest technical advance is above the gargantuan engine where internal funnels capture the waste heat and use it to drive two turbines which exert extra power on to the 130-tonnes propeller. Maersk say this innovation cuts fuel consumption by about 10%.

There are other technical advances: the engines are electronically-controlled; the giant hull shines with extra-slippery silicon paint; the refrigerated containers are partly cooled by water as well as electricity; automatic lighting controls are installed to make sure even small amounts of power aren’t wasted (it all has to be generated by the diesel engine).

The Estelle Maersk docked at Felixstowe (Image: BBC)

The Estelle Maersk uses a number of technologies to reduce its emissions

There are operating changes, too. The bulbous bow is a now common feature on modern boats to increase stability and efficiency. Maersk have monitored how the bulb performs in different sea conditions and the captain now adjusts the trim by altering the balance of the ballast tanks to change its position in the water.

A lot of work goes into optimising the course of the ship to save fuel. But the biggest saving is in reducing the speed of the vessel to around 10 knots where possible. This dramatically cuts fuel and therefore emissions. The engine designers warned that the engine might coke up it it was run too slowly, but this has not proved to be the case.

Maersk say that altogether they are managing to save about 25% of fuel/emissions against a comparable vessel. This is a massive benefit, bearing in mind that the annual fuel bill for the vessel runs to millions of pounds.

Estelle Maersk's engine room (Image: BBC)

Recycling heat from the Estelle’s engine cuts fuel use by about 10%

I am sceptical about whether all these savings could be maintained during an economic boom.

It’s hard to imagine stalwarts of the just-in-time economy twiddling their thumbs at the warehouse waiting for the Estelle to amble through the Bay of Biscay at less than the speed of the Cutty Sark, which did 16 knots on a good day. But some of the savings are clearly permanent.

Stig Neilsen, Maersk’s environment chief, believes that in time innovations in shipping might enable the industry to cut its emissions in half.

Container vessel with a kite sail

Energy efficient alternatives, such as huge kites, are being developed

The question is what will force the pace of change? It’ll be the main focus of conversation at World Maritime Day, the IMO’s jamboree on 24 September.

There are two proposals on the table for the IMO. One from Germany, Norway and France is for a cap-and-trade system designed to limit emissions by making ship owners pay a price for their pollution – like the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.

The backers say this would have to apply to all international shipping or rich country ship owners might just change flags to avoid the system.

This is meeting objections from emerging nations who say it runs counter to the UN Kyoto principle of "common but differentiated responsibility", ie that developing countries get an easier ride whilst they are still developing.

The second proposal – from Denmark – is for a levy on shipping with proceeds going to poor nations to upgrade their fleets and also to adapt to the consequences of climate change.

This has the advantage of ensuring that some of the proceeds from shipping are ring-fenced for the industry itself. It was designed to appeal to poorer countries and to be simple to implement.

But after complaints that it would not result in a cap on shipping emissions, this proposal has been complicated with provision for a cap which would see an element of carbon trading.

The UK will announce its position soon. Bangladesh and vulnerable island states are pressing for a speedy decision that would cut emissions which threaten their lands.

But neither proposal has a consensus and when I met the Chinese delegate a few months ago having a quick cigarette break outside the IMO, he told me there was no urgency.

The conversation was very different from the urgent and positive tone I’ve heard from Chinese negotiators at the overall UNFCCC negotiations on climate change.

Is this a case of a traditional response from an economic ministry trying to avoid extra costs on its economy or a reflection of Chinese frustration that the West has not played its full part in meeting Kyoto targets?

Talks at the IMO are coded, but I sense that emerging economies won’t sign up to a shipping deal until they can see the results from the Copenhagen climate talks in December.

September 18th, 2009 in Science

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About Science-Nature – Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin draws on his experience of a quarter of a century reporting the environment to assess the thesis of two veteran environmentalists who believe the Copenhagen climate meeting will not deliver results.

HOW BEST TO TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE


Wind-powered yacht (J. McNeill)

Stephen Salter suggests a fleet of wind-powered yachts to inject sea salt into the clouds

While nations tussle over the size of the pot to combat climate change at their international gathering in Copenhagen in December, a panel of leading economists has drawn up priorities for how the contents of any pot should be spent.

The panel, convened by the controversial Danish author Bjorn Lomborg, concludes that best value for money lies in geo-engineering, energy research and adaptation. Worst value for money are taxes on carbon.

In a further swipe at conventional thinking, the panel concludes that the only intervention on its list deemed less efficient than carbon taxes is the emissions trading system employed by the EU and proposed by the US.

The panel said that while a well-designed gradual policy of carbon cuts could substantially reduce emissions at low cost, poorly designed or over-ambitious policies could be orders of magnitude more expensive.

The two-day panel’s findings was instantly dismissed by some critics as "junk economics."

Planet engineering

One particularly controversial priority of the panel is is research into "cloud whitening", which involves spaying tiny droplets of water into ocean clouds in order to increase their reflectivity.

The UK Met Office says this could disturb regional weather systems. And a 10-month Royal Society report on geo-engineering this week said although cloud whitening had advantages, there were many questions to be answered.

Bjorn Lomborg

Down the years the “Skeptical Environmentalist” has ruffled feathers

Marine scientists complained that cloud whitening fails to combat ocean acidification – the "other" CO2 problem, and could even make it worse.

The panel is the latest to be convened by Dr Lomborg, author of 1998 book The Skeptical Environmentalist, whose work was previously strongly supported by The Economist magazine.

His panels are known as the "Copenhagen Consensus" and have concluded in the past that if governments wanted to improve human welfare, tackling climate change was a poor option.

This year, five economists, including three Nobel prize winners, were asked to decide how best to spend up to $250bn a year to deal with climate change. They rated ideas in this order:

September 5th, 2009 in Science

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About Science-Nature – Harrabin’s notes

About Science-Nature –

In his regular column, the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin draws on his experience of a quarter of a century reporting the environment to assess the thesis of two veteran environmentalists who believe the Copenhagen climate meeting will not deliver results.

MAKING A BREAKTHROUGH


Best ways to spend $250bn tackling climate change
Traffic in Brussels (AP)

Shellenberger and Nordhaus aim to break a jam on climate and energy

The Kyoto process has failed to deliver meaningful reductions in emissions and the Copenhagen climate meeting is doomed to failure.

The only solution is to abandon the cap-and-trade approach, re-frame climate change as an energy issue rather than a "green" issue, and persuade governments to invest massively in clean technology to provide increasing energy in a way that protects the climate.

That is the thesis of Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, who founded the Breakthrough Institute in California to smash the jam on the climate and energy debate.

They brought their acerbic and sharp analysis to London a few days ago in a conference jointly organised by the left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think-tank and the centre-right Policy Exchange in a display of non-partisan resolve over climate change.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus’ figures suggest that when you take into account the differing economic growth rates between the US and Europe, the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS) has brought barely any emissions cuts.

Critics in the audience said the analysis did not take into account that the coming phase of the EU ETS would be much tougher.

The speakers countered that governments would continue to be unwilling to force genuine emissions reductions on their industries in the absence of a global agreement that would almost certainly not be forthcoming in a meaningful way.

Scathing view

They believe that cap-and-trade will never produce the desired results. Its energies are subverted by the sort of political manoeuvring which is hampering the Waxman-Markey Bill.

It is the best-established industries with the biggest voices inside government which benefit most, whilst investment in cutting-edge technologies which might provide our future clean energy continues to be starved.

It should be noted that cap-and-trade is itself an American invention, foisted on the world by the Clinton administration as a price for agreeing the Kyoto Protocol which President George W Bush then abandoned.

Cap-and-trade was devised to tackle a single pollutant – sulphur dioxide (SO2) – in the closed market of American industry. Its adoption as a device to control multiple pollutants across the world – including CO2, which underpins the activity in modern societies to which most aspire – has caused more problems than predicted at the time.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus were also scathing about carbon offsetting. They argue that a straight carbon tax would send the correct market signals and would be less vulnerable to lobbying than cap-and-trade, whilst also raising the finance necessary for technological investment.

Here, there was more resistance from the audience, which seemed to me to be largely ready to accept the diagnosis of Shellenberger and Nordhaus, but to be sceptical of the cure.

Oxford University economist Dieter Helm said a carbon tax would over-reward some people, whilst failing to reward some key technologies in their infancy.

Carbon offset entrepreneur Mike Mason said offsets were clearly not a long-term solution, as shortly the whole world would need to start contracting emissions.

From my post-meeting soundings there did not appear to be widespread audience confidence that governments, having underfunded energy for decades despite repeated energy warnings, would suddenly do the "right" thing now.

It was thought more likely that governments would pocket carbon taxes and use them for economic recovery, especially if the moral imperative of an equitable solution for climate change were to be replaced by a more expedient policy based solely on energy security.

August 5th, 2009 in Science

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About Science-Nature – Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In a new column, the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin draws on his experience of a quarter of a century reporting the environment to ask if the government’s transport taxes are unfairly penalising those people who use public transport.

CARS BECOME THE CHEAPER WAY TO TRAVEL


Trafffic

Will poorer people lose out to “green” road tax?

Contrary to popular opinion, driving is getting cheaper compared with other forms of transport, according to a report from the Commons Transport Committee.

The MPs say if the government is to hit its targets for reducing emissions, it has to prevent car use becoming even cheaper than using the bus or train.

But they say ministers have to be more open and honest about the purpose of road taxes.

They admit that there’s such understandable distrust among drivers of the government’s so-called green taxes on motoring that it is easy to miss some of the underlying truths.

One is that taxes on British motorists aren’t very different from taxes on drivers in other European countries; that’s when you look beyond petrol costs and take all road user charges, like road tolls, into account.

The other is that relative to the cost of using the bus or train. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper to use the car. In fact, figures from the RAC Foundation show that in 2008 it was 18% cheaper to own and run a car than 10 years before (that’s partly because cars are becoming more reliable).

In the meantime, bus and train prices have soared. The growing disparity creates a vicious spiral in which travellers reject buses because they’re expensive; that reduces passenger numbers which forces bus firms to put up prices and reduce services, resulting in even more people using their cars.

The MPs say this trend has to be reversed if the government hopes to meet its environmental targets unveiled with a fanfare last week. Yet the government has a policy to increase rail fares 1% above inflation year-on-year and has no policy on bus fares at all, preferring – in Treasury-speak – to "leave it to the market".

In other words, policies on pricing (or non-policies) are running directly contradictory to the overall low-carbon strategy.

Green group Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) echoes the committee’s recommendations on the cost of public transport and point out that government policies will also put poorer drivers living in rural areas at a disadvantage.

In future, wealthy urban drivers will be able to buy electric cars and use them almost tax-free, while poor people in the countryside who can only afford old bangers will find themselves paying 8% more because of increasing "green" taxes on fuel.

It’s another reminder that the challenge of creating a low-carbon economy are even deeper than suggested in last week’s documents.

Another report on fuel poverty raises similar issues – for all its apparent joined-up thinking, transport and home insulation are two areas that clearly need fresh ideas.

More on green taxes in coming weeks.

July 24th, 2009 in Science

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About Science-Nature – Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In a new column, the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin draws on his experience of a quarter of a century reporting the environment to ask where the "green fairness" can be found in the UK government’s low-carbon transport strategy.

THE LOW EMISSIONS WINNERS AND LOSERS


Traffic (Getty Images)

Electrification of the Swansea-London line will come as a relief to anyone who has chewed the air at Paddington Station.

It will also cut CO2 emissions on the line by about 30%. But what about transport’s general contribution to the UK’s carbon-reduction targets?

A new analysis by the respected journal Environmental Data Services (ENDS) examines how transport has got away lightly in the far-reaching cross-government drive to cut emissions announced last week.

Transport will have to reduce emissions 14% from current levels by 2022 – less than the overall government total of an 18% cut two years earlier.

ENDS will point out that the projected transport emissions cuts will come almost entirely from promoting controversial bio-fuels, and by improving the performance of new vehicles under EU rules whose results can’t be guaranteed. EU rules for vans don’t even yet exist.

What’s more if the measures do succeed, there will be an unfortunate side-effect. According to the government’s own projections, there will be more traffic, noise, air pollution, accidents and congestion as people drive further in their more efficient cars.

The editor of ENDS, Nicholas Schoon, says the government should do much more to jolt people out of cars on to walking, cycling and public transport – and reverse the trend in which driving is getting cheaper compared with public transport.

The Department for Transport says it does want to coax people out of their cars but couldn’t bank on its measures succeeding so it hasn’t relied on any emissions savings that way in its document.

Ministers are nervous of doing anything that could be construed as an infringement of people’s mobility – even if it means that other sectors of the economy will have to work much harder to cut emissions as a result

Meanwhile, the Transport Select Committee is also calling for the government to reverse the growing gap between rising public transport fares and driving – and for the introduction of a pay-per-mile charge for lorries.

Calculations by the Campaign for Rural England of the Low Carbon Transport paper shows the cost of driving by 2015 for those who can afford the latest energy-efficient cars will fall by at least 10%. For those who cannot afford an efficient new car, it will increase by 8%.

Drivers in cities who buy electric cars will pay only a few pence a mile to drive. CPRE fears the plans will disadvantage people in rural areas, and poor people who can’t afford new cars.

The Association of British Drivers says it opposes any attempt to put up the cost of driving as motorists already pay more than their share for the amount of carbon they produce.

The issue of equity amongst transport users – including between drivers of different income – is a serious barrier to progressive transport policies. I first mentioned it to ministers at the end of the Conservative administration, but there’s been a dearth of imaginative solutions. I don’t claim any great ideas myself…

And as the boom in car ownership continues, according to recent figures, it becomes harder and harder to run public transport without ever-increasing subsidy to combat dwindling revenue from fares.

July 23rd, 2009 in Science

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About Science-Nature – Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In a new column, the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin draws on his experience of a quarter of a century reporting the environment to ask if Europe’s power consumers are indirectly subsidising firms hit hardest by the downturn.

A EUROPEAN CARBON SUBSIDY?
Industrial chimneys

Europe’s power companies are keen to buy surplus permits from other firms


Research suggests that Europe’s main system for tackling climate change is cushioning the effects of the recession on major industries.

The research, from the pressure group Sandbag, shows that firms which have cut production because of the downturn have been left with surplus pollution credits they can sell on the European carbon market.

Europe’s power firms are still short of CO2 permits and are keen to buy surplus allowances from cement and steel makers.

In effect, through their power bills, Europe’s power consumers may indirectly be subsidising those firms worst hit by the downturn.

"This is a subsidy for not producing … it wasn’t quite how the EU ETS was supposed to operate," Henrik Hasselknippe from analysts Point Carbon told me. He estimates the surplus is worth about £10bn to struggling industries between now and 2012.

It is not the first windfall on the EU ETS. Power firms enjoyed their own multi-billion pound bonus in previous years by raising power prices to consumers as if they’d had to buy their pollution permits when in fact they’d be given plenty of permits free of charge.

But the current revelations may offer a salutary tale about the lobbying stance of business. Over the years I have seen industries lobby against pollution legislation, claiming it would cost jobs. The same firms have often managed to pull an entirely new clean product off the production shelf when legislation was introduced.

States like California which run the tightest pollution regimes frequently benefit by developing clean industries which are able to take advantage as other states follow the lead in cleaning up.

Taking action

But the genuine fear over jobs makes it hard for governments anywhere to take firm action on pollution because it’s the firms, not the governments which really know what the effects will be. Take these two recent news items.

In the Independent on 14 December 2008, Phillipe Varin, chief executive of Corus, warned that European steel production would wither unless governments tackle the cost of carbon credits used to offset emissions. "If we are forced to buy CO2 credits on the market without a system to improve our production process, then we will not produce steel in Europe," said Mr Varin.

In EurActiv on the 25 June, Roland Verstappen, vice-president for international affairs at AcrelorMittal, said steel industries were considering relocating their European operations to other parts of the world because of climate legislation.

Today’s Sandbag report suggests that the Corus plant at Ijmuiden in Holland had 4,179,278 surplus credits in 2008. The ArcelorMittal plant in Gent had 4,362,231 surplus. The pollution league table in the report is based on official EU data published in April.

ArcelorMittal told BBC News that it was not selling any spare permits but were stockpiling them for the future and handing them to partner utilities to keep down power costs.

But Dr Hasselknippe from Point Carbon said: "This shows that the EU ETS itself is not a significant cost – in fact it’s clear some firms are making a profit from it at the moment – even though they would doubtless prefer to be making a profit from making more of their products."

"There is frequent talk of carbon leakage (polluting jobs going abroad) but little evidence that this is really happening. It’s usually labour costs that are the key."

The US government has suffered accusations in the past that it has driven jobs abroad through pollution rules, when government officials suspect that firms are using clean-up rules as an excuse to avoid the wrath of unions whilst cutting costs by shifting to developing countries.

The squeeze will really be on in Europe between 2012 and 2020, by which time all pollution permits for firms will need to be purchased at auction, thus ending industry windfalls.

It is then that firms really fear competition from countries with more relaxed regimes for controlling carbon. That’s why the EU is pressing so hard for a global deal on climate change in Copenhagen later in the year so export industries round the world compete on a level playing field when it comes to pollution.

July 22nd, 2009 in Science

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About Science-Nature – Harrabin’s Notes

About Science-Nature –

In a new column, the BBC’s Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin draws on his experience of a quarter of a century reporting the environment to ask if developing nations are failing to lead the way on the drive to cut emissions.

FAILING TO DELIVER ON CARBON PROMISES
Steel works (Getty Images)


A report to the British government confirms the massive gap between rich countries’ obligations on climate change and their achievement in cutting emissions.

According to the UN, rich countries need to reduce emissions between 25% and 40% by 2020 to prevent dangerous climate change (in so far as what we know constitutes dangerous climate change).

But so far wealthy nations have only committed between 7% and 9%, based on 1990 levels.

The failure is outlined in a report by the UK prime minister’s special representative on carbon trading, Mark Lazarowicz MP.

Striking the right balance

It says the international carbon market is vital if the world is to meet its climate targets in future, and predicts that by 2020, global carbon markets including the US could be worth between two and three trillion dollars a year.

Some of the cash would be given to developing countries to help them get clean technology.

The report confirms the EU position of calling for reform of the UN system known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

The CDM has inadvertently allowed some firms in developing countries to claim cash credits from rich nations for clean energy schemes they would have installed profitably without the incentives.

The EU wants to shift to a system decided on an industrial sectoral basis.

A separate report by the pressure group Sandbag, run by former Defra climate change official Bryony Worthington, calls for much tighter regulation of the EU Emissions Trading System.

The value of carbon credits has slumped because the recession has accidentally reduced pollution.

Sandbag says firms are now scooping up so many emissions credits at bargain prices that they won’t have to install clean technology until 2015.

Governments say this was expected as it is not fair to expect firms to invest in technology if profits are low. To green groups this is not reassuring, given the scale of the carbon cuts scientists say is needed.

It’s always been a Catch-22. It’s hard to cut emissions when the economy is booming, but it’s hard to cut in recession because there’s no investment cash available.

For cutting emissions you need just the right temperature of the economy – not too hot, not too cold. I wonder when that might be?

July 20th, 2009 in Science

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About Science-Nature – Harrabin’s notes

About Science-Nature –

In a new column, the BBC’s Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin draws on his experience of a quarter of a century reporting the environment to ask if the shipping industry will produce the cuts in greenhouse gases now being requesting.

THE GREEN OPPORTUNITIES TO BE HAD IN SHIPPING
Dog whelks (SPL)


Can gender-bent shellfish help us predict how the shipping industry will react to the challenge of climate change?

It was 24 years ago that I heard that an anti-fouling compound, Tributyltin, was causing female dog whelks to grow penises.

I went to Cornwall to hear scientists’ fears about the effects of TBT on the entire eco-system. It seemed screamingly obvious that TBT must be banned.

The International Maritime Organisation eventually took that view. But its new anti-fouling convention drifted in the Doldrums and was only ratified by a critical mass of states in 2008… that was 23 years after TBT hit the news.

It doesn’t fill you with confidence about the industry’s level of concern for the environment in which it makes its money. And it doesn’t particularly bode well for talks at the IMO this week on an agreement for shipping to cut its growing emissions of greenhouse gases.

Other portents are similarly unpropitious. When the US mandated the use of double-hulled tankers to stop oil spills, sections of the industry fired a salvo of scare stories warning that they would go out of business because of the extra cost.

The standards were later promoted globally and the coastlines of the world are safer for it. It appears not to have materially harmed shipping’s bottom line.

Invasive creatures

Alien species in ballast water are another huge problem. Larvae and eggs sucked up in ballast water can become invasive pests when they’re discharged thousands of miles away.

The zebra mussel from the Black Sea has invaded American waters, out-competing native mussels, fouling ships, clogging ditches and water intakes. In Europe, the Chinese mitten crab is a menace.


Ships at dock (AP)

Progressive companies see that tighter rules would help their business

The IMO’s ballast water convention addresses the problem – but scientists doubt it is a full solution, and there will be plenty of marine cowboys who defy it. Is this a case of closing the stable door after the zebra has bolted?

In ports, local air pollution is regularly way above legal limits, thanks to emissions from ships burning dirty bunker fuel. The IMO says pollution is improving – but progress isn’t fast enough for people with asthma living near ports.

Changing shipping’s polices on climate change has been like turning a super-tanker. Emissions from international shipping were left out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol after it proved too difficult to get an agreement but the problem was recognised, and responsibility handed to the IMO to work out a solution.

But since 1990 – the Kyoto baseline year – global shipping’s emissions have risen by 85% (Second IMO GHG Study 2009). International shipping now emits 870 million tonnes of CO2 each year – more than the UK’s entire economy.

Profit potential

Green groups want tough mandatory design efficiency-standards for new ships to reduce emissions by up to 50%; mandatory operational standards – such as reducing speeds and optimising routes; and an international levy on maritime fuel, with the funds used for adaptation to climate change in developing countries.

Some key nations are supporting the proposals – and progressive shipping firms and ship designers can see that tighter rules would help their business. But the idea of a levy which would put up shipping costs rather than reducing them has drawn a predictable level of opposition from the owners of older ships in poorer countries. And a decision on this will almost certainly be delayed until the IMO’s full meeting in the autumn, just before the Copenhagen climate conference.

This is utterly predictable – no industry wants extra costs imposed upon it. And every UN meeting with member countries at different stages of development finds it hard to agree.

In many ways, the IMO climate debate is a microcosm of the broad debate that will unfold at Copenhagen. Based on past experience of the pace of environmental action in the shipping industry it wouldn’t be wise to hold your breath for an outcome that scientists would deem sufficient.

July 14th, 2009 in Science

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