Sir David King Interview: Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Climatic change and global warming has been one of the big focuses of your tenure, and I want to spend some time talking about it because I think we'll be able to draw on a number of things that we've talked about. In line with what you just said, this is a problem where it's not a catastrophe tomorrow but down the road, and so we have to bring a future orientation in order to make a compelling case.
I want to talk a little about this, and I want to recommend to the audience your Zuckerman lecture, which I found to be the clearest statement of the problem that a general audience can understand.
Let me ask you first, what does science tell us about global warming now? This is a science that, as you point out, has a long history; where the scientists have been working in the way that you just describe to grapple with this problem. Talk a little about that.
That's the first point I want to make, that the science of climate change is a mature subject. It goes back to the great French mathematician, Fourier. Fourier's the one who sits there thinking, "What determines the surface temperature of the earth that we live on? Why is the average temperature about 18 degrees centigrade?" And he considers, "It must be because energy comes in from the sun. The earth would keep heating up if that was all, but it's going out through heat radiation as the earth gets warm. And we get a net balance, and so the temperature sits at an average of 18 degrees centigrade."
But then he asked himself a very simple question: "What happens at night?" At night, effectively I switch off the solar energy coming into that portion of the earth, but it's still radiating energy out. So, the temperature should drop precipitately, as it does on the moon, and therefore we should see a temperature drop of around 30 degrees centigrade at night. He concluded there's something else operating here. The atmosphere is absorbing energy and maintaining the warmth in the earth.
I'm elaborating on this precisely because once you've understood that, [it's simple]. It's like putting a blanket or a duvet cover on your bed at night, and if somebody comes along and adds another duvet cover on, you're going to get a lot warmer. If we now add to the greenhouse gases -- and we know which gases those are, they're the minority gases, carbon dioxide and water vapor -- if we now add to those greenhouse gases, and that's what we're doing by burning fossil fuels, we've got to anticipate a rise in global temperatures. It's really as simple as that. There are a lot of other factors, and the modern computer programs that are running predictions on what the climate will look like in a hundred years' time are probably the most complex computer programs in the world, taking many different factors into account. But nevertheless, it does boil down to adding to the greenhouse gases and therefore adding to the blanketing effect.
With what consequences? What does it matter, to be the devil's advocate here?
Right. Wouldn't it be pleasant in England if we could just grow our own grapes and make beautiful wines as they do today in France? We could grown our own wheat, we will simply see our farming being transformed to a warmer climate farming. And for the UK that is the big plus, and our beaches would be very heavily populated with sun bathers.
The problems are that the impacts of climate change are going to be very severe for most nations. The most obvious is rising sea levels. Between an ice age and a warm period the sea level difference, we know, over the last million years, each time, has been about 120 meters. What happens during an ice age is that water from the oceans percolates onto land masses as ice, and then as you go out of an ice age it melts back into the oceans. So, the ocean level goes up and down around 100 meters through a warm period and an ice age.
Now we're entering what might be described as the first hot period, because the carbon dioxide level has been oscillating, in an ice age from 200 parts per million, and in a warm period, 260-270 parts per million, in line with the greenhouse effect. But we've now, by burning fossil fuels, increased the level to 379 parts per million, and we must anticipate, with rising temperatures, further loss of ice on earth. If the Greenland ice sheet alone should all melt, sea levels will rise by 6 to 7 meters. That's not going to happen overnight. That's certainly not the day after tomorrow. It's going to take quite a while. But nevertheless, we could reach a point where we begin irreversibly to lose all of the ice on Greenland.
We're already seeing a very significant loss of the Arctic, and for the first time, a few years ago, a ship was actually able to go over the North Pole because of the loss of Arctic ice. That ice is not land based, so it doesn't cause a significant change in the sea level of the oceans, but any land-based ice will raise sea levels. Sea levels are also rising because hot water occupies a bigger volume, so there's two reasons for sea levels to rise. That's just one set of impacts.
If I could just comment on another one, we're very heavily dependent in our living conditions on the particular weather conditions that each of our countries is used to. If we have a rapid change, and by rapid I mean 50 to 100 years in weather conditions, it's going to be very difficult for us to adapt to these rapid changing conditions. The one example I would take is the Indian monsoon. In India, if the monsoon is 10 percent less intense one year, then the agricultural food crop can be so severely low that they face starvation. If the monsoon is 10 percent higher one year, they have massive floods and fatalities arising from that. So, the Indian population has set up a system of living that is very sensitive to a particular, narrow band of monsoon activity. But if we change the climate, we've got to anticipate massive changes in monsoon behavior. That is just one example.
Examples exist all around the earth. If we move up into the north from here, into Canada and Alaska, we all know that the permafrost is melting, and yet the oil pipelines are built onto the permafrost and in places are dangerously sinking. Many people's houses are sinking into the melting permafrost. So, although you may say, "Well, I'd rather not have the permafrost, it'd be much nicer to have wheat fields here," nevertheless, the existing cities and lifestyle are built around the permafrost.
What is the problem in some countries -- the United States would be an example -- in getting these points across? Why is there such resistance to the evidence?
That is a very good question. It goes slightly outside the science, but nevertheless it's important to tackle it. I have to try and understand that. If I look at the question, I think there are uncomfortable conclusions that politicians see in the kind of action that is required to be taken. It may be that you consider dealing with climate change, switching from fossil fuel dependence to renewable energies and developing other renewable energies through new technology. It may be that you feel that's an expensive process and we can't afford to do it, or it may be that changing from our existing dependence on fossil fuels to a new system is going to affect our GDP growth.
Now I happen to think that's poor economics, and I can demonstrate that. In the UK we have grown our economy since 1990 (which is not randomly chosen, it's the beginning of the Kyoto period) by about 38 percent. Over that period of time, our basket of greenhouse gases has been diminished by 12 percent. So, we've shown we can grow our economy and reduce emissions.
But that message turns out to be a very difficult one to get across, particularly -- and I understand at this point -- in economies such as yours here in the United States, where the energy-generating industries are heavily dependent on coal. Quite clearly, what we're arguing for is leaving the coal in the ground if we haven't got a safe method of capturing the carbon dioxide and storing it as we burn it up. The whole point about the greenhouse gas model and what is required is to avoid using fossil fuels. That was nature's way of sequestering carbon, and by finding it and burning it we're reversing on that process. I think that's part of the reason for the opposition.
Environmental lobbies in the past have tended to be associated with greens and lefts. Now for me, the message to get across is in Britain, 90 percent of our public now think global warming is one of the most severe problems we face. There is tri-partisan agreement in our political system, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the Labour government all agree that action is required. It's not a left/right political issue, it's simply hard common sense. But that that question of green, left wing is still a residual question that needs to be handled.
How did this consensus come about in Britain that you've just described? Is it that the scientific case was made and the leading political leaders in all parties embraced the message?
That was critically important. Obviously, the scientific community has quite a good standing in Britain, but not always the case, because in the BAC crisis the trust in the scientific community was lost very significantly. But nevertheless, the fact is that the prime minister has given a very strong lead on this, and I have been questioned by the leaders of the opposition in private on the issue and they have quite clearly accepted the argument. It's not to say that the public feels this an easy issue to deal with. It's a major challenge. But nevertheless, we've managed a consensus.
Now in the United States, it's interesting to see that today, compared with our 90 percent recognizing this is a problem, you have roughly 60 percent. It's more than half of the population in the United States. I think that is swinging very rapidly in the direction of people understanding that this is really a hard issue that needs to be tackled. With these various natural disasters that are happening, and the fact that science can help diminish risks to populations, the public is beginning to understand that we're not just here to make fearsome statements about the future. It's very hard-headed.
In your Zuckerman article you make some comparisons. You say the average Briton emits about nine tons per year of carbon dioxide, in the U.S. it's twenty-one, in India it's one ton. So these countries are very differently placed in the way in which they contribute to the problem. In some ways the politics and the interests thus far have not swung over, but they seem to be moving in that direction. What can government then do to cajole, move industry, move a whole society in the right direction? You have the consensus. Then I presume that your office and the scientific community have to help government define the policies that make sense.
What the British government decided was that we ought to take a leadership role on this issue, and in order to establish a leadership position in 2003, that we were going beyond Kyoto. That we in Britain would reduce our emissions by 60 percent by 2050, and we were not making it conditional on other countries joining us. We're simply saying this is such an important problem that we're going to announce that we'll do it, and we'll tell people how we're going to do it. We have set out our policies to achieve that.
In order to really achieve that change, what is absolutely clear is that we need fiscal drivers, we need an economic process, and the key process has got to be the phrase "to internalize the external costs" of producing the carbon dioxide, which means that we need to attach a value to not emitting carbon dioxide. We come, therefore, very easily into carbon dioxide emissions trading. We in Britain began emissions trading within the UK just as California is moving towards that now, and we've now moved from January this year into emissions trading across Europe.
Interestingly, when we started emissions trading, the bargaining on the beginning cost reached a level of 8 Euros per ton, about $8 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted, which in my view was too low to bring about the right behavior. But the market is now determining the price and the price is running between 20 and 30 Euros per ton now. So, the market has very rapidly pushed it up to a level that I consider is close to the desired level to produce the right behavior. In other words, at 30 Euros per ton, a utility driving a power station with coal will now find that it's doubling the cost of the fuel when you add in the cost of carbon dioxide emission. So, now you need to think very carefully about what alternative fuels you ought to use in order to optimize your own profit margin.
Has the European community partnership contributed substantially to creating a larger zone in which these scientific insights are being implemented into policy?
Yes. The European Union has now embraced this notion. We in Britain are going way beyond Kyoto with our 60 percent reduction commitment. The Germans have made a commitment to 50 percent reduction by 2050. Across the European Union there is now a consensus that we need action on this. But having said that, what we all recognize is that Europe can't tackle this problem on its own. The biggest single emitter of carbon dioxide in the world is, of course, the United States, with -- what are you? -- 4 percent of the population emitting 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide here in the United States. Clearly, we all believe that action is required from the United States to synchronize with what we're doing in Europe.
With the ratification of Kyoto, we're anticipating that the emissions trading that we've begun in Europe will extend to Japan, Canada and Russia, so it's going fully international. There's a new commodity on the market. That commodity is carbon dioxide, it's trading very briskly. London is the financial center for that trade at the moment. We'd be delighted if New York and Chicago would like to come in with us. And I would make a very simple prediction that in five or ten years' time, the new "gold standard" on the value of different currencies is going to be carbon dioxide. Once we reach international trading in carbon dioxide this would be the very natural replacement.
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