Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: N/A
Date: 30/06/2015
Event: Lord Deben: "we know that what we say is absolutely true"
Credit: BBC Radio 4
People:
John Humphrys: The climate is changing and the world is getting hotter and that's going to cause problems. But what problems? And what - if anything - should we be doing about it now? The Committee on Climate Change has just published a report and says this country must take urgent action. Its chairman is Lord Deben - good morning to you.
Lord Deben: Good morning.
John Humphrys: What action?
Lord Deben: Well, the government has a whole series of programmes in play, but they all come to a conclusion, an end, in 2020. The trouble is, people need to know what's going to happen after 2020 if they're going to put the investment in new arrangements for generation, low-carbon generation, for example, new arrangements for better heating for homes, doing something about our infrastructure and also doing something about the serious matter of the decline in the fertility of our soil. Those are the four major things, and the government has to act very quickly, otherwise we will lose the investment and all that we've done up to now will come to a stop.
John Humphrys: Can't we wait and see?
Lord Deben: If we wait and see, it'll be much more expensive and of course the climate will then become much more difficult to live in, even in this country, with much short - with much greater numbers of heatwaves one end and flooding at the other, and some parts of the country, like the east of England, with very little water and other parts with huge amounts of water. And we will be better off there than many of the countries of the world, and one of the most remarkable things, if you take the country you've just talked about - Bangladesh - Bangladesh will practically be unable to be lived in, if we do not halt the march of climate change, and we'll have 170 million displaced people wandering around the world, looking for somewhere to live. We can't wait for that - we have to put it right, now.
John Humphrys: And your critics will say: everything you've just said, pretty much, is based on computer modelling, and computer modelling is often wrong.
Lord Deben: No critic is taken seriously any longer. The science is not based on computer modelling - it's based upon a whole range of intricate, very careful measuring of the situation, over 30 years, and we know that what we say is absolutely true. The only people who oppose it are people who have a very vested interest from the fossil fuel industry, who are spending billions of pounds, trying to get people like you to say that, in order to confuse people. The science is now stronger than the connection between smoking and health, so if you want to take the risk, you can smoke as much as you like but that would be your health - if you take the risk with the climate, it's everyone else's health.
John Humphrys: And of course you may be absolutely right about all of that - the problem is when you use the sort of language that you've just used, people will say "He makes it sound more like a religion than a science. You're not allowed not to believe".
Lord Deben: Well, I'm not saying that you're not allowed not to believe - what you're not allowed to do is to believe that there's no risk. You don't need to believe in climate change - what you have to say is: as every learned society in the world warns you of the risk, you'd be a very bad father of a family that said "I know best". If even the Pope comes out and says "This is a serious risk", you wouldn't be a very sensible person to say "I know better than everyone else". Even if you were right, you would have to take into account this very serious risk. It's not a religion, it's a fact of saying: this is what the science says, these are what the facts are, you can ignore them but if you do so, you take a very large risk, one which most people wouldn't want to take.
John Humphrys: Lord Deben, many thanks.