Nasty, brutish and short?

A pregnant relation recently asked me: what does global warming really mean? I replied something along these lines: it means that if your child has a child, then global warming may render that child's life nasty, brutish and short. I wondered afterwards whether I could really justify what I had said. Everything I have read recently suggests that I was right but I want to be prepared to set out in detail why.

In my last blog post, about Tim Jackson's Prosperity without growth?, I hinted that I would be trying to update some of Jackson's figures. In fact, I have a more general project to get a better handle on the figures relevant to global warming and related issues. This familiarisation is intended as a prelude to a wider project to do more campaigning on the issue of climate change.

For some years I have been alarmed at the disconnect between what the science tells us about global warming and what politicians and the public seem prepared to contemplate by way of action. There is, for instance, much talk among politicians about returning to economic growth and hardly any discussion about whether growth is compatible with serious action to mitigate the threat from global warming.
Apart from Prosperity without growth?, two other bits of reading have helped focus my mind. One was an article by Naomi Klein in which she discussed some work by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows at the Tyndall Centre. To quote from the article:-

To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbon pricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year "have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval", as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.

As part of my project to get a better handle on the figures, I was keen to see if my own back-of-envelope calculations would produce results similar to the 10% annual cuts in emissions referred to in the article. That is how I have spent the last couple of evenings and my figures come out in the same ballpark. I won't describe my workings here except to say that, using what I thought were reasonable assumptions about growth of emissions in the developing world, I found the figure of annual 10% emission cuts to be roughly consistent with the IPCC's carbon budget, as set out in the first instalment of the Fifth Assessment Report, published last September.

The other bit of reading was from the RSA, a recent report by Jonathan Rowson entitled A new agenda on climate change. This is the most thought-provoking piece I have ever read about the politics and economics of climate change. Rowson sees as the main obstacle to progress, not the outright deniers and well-funded misinformers, but a culture of silence and "stealth denial" affecting much of the population, our political life and media:-

This report makes a case for how Britain can take a leading role in addressing the global climate problem, based on a new agenda that faces up to pervasive 'stealth denial' and the need to focus on keeping fossil fuels in the ground. Our data indicates that about two thirds of the population intellectually accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change, but 'deny' some or all of the commensurate feelings, responsibility and agency that are necessary to deal with it. It is argued that this stealth denial may be what perpetuates the doublethink of trying to minimise carbon emissions while maximising fossil fuel production, and also what makes us expect far too much of energy efficiency gains in the face of a range of rebound effects that lead the energy to be used elsewhere.

For those of us concerned about climate change there is an important message: that we need to challenge our political class and our opinion formers to provide the leadership needed to tackle the threat from global warming. That message may help me direct my efforts over the coming year.