Holyrood 350 — H35O

Pro­fes­sor Jacque­line McGlade’s lec­ture (at FoE’s ‘Build­ing a low car­bon econ­omy’ 30th anniver­sary event at the McE­wan Hall, Edin­burgh on Mon­day Feb­ru­ary 9th 2009) was an exce­lent sum­mary of the sit­u­a­tion, but Lord Adair Turner’s rec­om­mended solu­tion seemed to lag way behind McGlade’s sci­en­tific diagnosis. 

It was excel­lent that the event hap­pened, that 80% is the tar­get (and ris­ing), and that global equity (C&C) is seen as an inescapable part of achiev­ing stabilisation. 

What was less impres­sive was Adair Turner’s tar­get: giv­ing our­selves a 50/50 chance of keep­ing within 2.3C is not a tar­get it is (as Andy Ross remarked) like hand­ing a 6 car­tridge revolver to your child with 3 bul­lets in it, and say­ing ‘pull the trig­ger’. His story is that the UK will only have 2% lower GDP if it seeks to achieve an 80% cut by 2050 (being our part in achiev­ing a 50% cut glob­ally by 2050) and that this will give the world this 50/50 chance of keep­ing within 2.3C.

I had a very robust but friendly exchange with Turner after­wards con­trast­ing his story with Jacque­line McGlade’s. Her story being that where busi­ness as usual will lead to 900ppm (and 5C+ of warm­ing), if we suc­ceed with all these cur­rent UK/EU/Global plans, we will still hit 600-650ppm (and 4.5C warming).

The point being that if his plans would only cost 2% GDP, then why not do much more, and sooner? If she is right that the actual empir­i­cal evi­dence is at the worst end of the mod­el­ling pre­dic­tions, then his notion that we can con­tain warm­ing at 2.3C (rather than such warm­ing being part of a process which kicks in run­away cli­mate change) seems implausible.

He heard the argu­ment, responded with assur­ances that in 2 or 3 years time they will revisit the sci­ence and make rec­om­men­da­tions on the basis of chang­ing evi­dence. But his was a story to reas­sure busi­ness and teh UK gov­ern­ment that cli­mate change is a busi­ness oppor­tu­nity, some­thing he didn’t dis­agree with. But, how, I wanted to know, could he change his story so that it included the enor­mity of what Pro­fes­sor Jacque­line McGlade was elo­quently and ter­ri­fy­ingly telling us … 

… it was time for the recep­tion and John Swinney’s gra­cious wel­com­ing remarks, so I guess we will have to await an answer in the form of — what we all hope will be — more robust action than was man­aged by the FSA in rela­tion to reg­u­lat­ing finan­cial services.