20130410_C4

Source: Channel 4 News

URL: N/A

Date: 10/04/2013

Event: "But in a world of global warming, why does it feel like it's getting colder?"

Attribution: Channel 4 News

People:

• Professor Myles Allen: Physicist and head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford
  • Professor Nigel Arnell: Professor of Climate Change Science, Walker Institute
  • Tom Clarke: Channel 4 Science Editor
  • Bjorn Lomborg: Author, academic and environmental writer
  • Cathy Newman: Presenter, Channel 4 News
  • George Wainwright: Farmer

Cathy Newman: After months of freezing weather that's felt a bit like eternal winter in Narnia, spring is apparently on the way, this weekend. Temperatures are expected to reach a heady 20 Celsius in some areas. After such a long spell of cold wet weather, is it time for the scientists to admit that the drastic temperature rises they predicted have, at the moment, failed to materialise? Here's our Science Editor, Tom Clarke.

Tom Clarke: Spring may finally be on its way, but the snow is still clinging to the high hills of the Peak District, a sign of just how unprecedented the weather has been.

George Wainwright: Well, I've been here since '88, and it's the worst snow I've seen. And it never stopped blowing. And my sons were busy with me, and the wife, and it were just a nightmare.

Tom Clarke: The Wainwright family has a thousand sheep around the Snake Pass. They got most of their ewes in lamb under cover, but still have no idea how many animals they may have lost on the more remote hills.

George Wainwright: A few had to lamb outside, but not many, because we were frightened of the snow. But what few that we couldn't get in, because of snow drifts, we'd have at least 50% lost, of the lambs.

Tom Clarke: But in a world of global warming, why does it feel like it's getting colder? This was the second coldest March ever recorded, in England. Four of the last five winters have been colder than usual. And, while our local weather isn't necessarily linked to what's happening elsewhere in the world, of late, global temperatures haven't been going up much, either.

During the '80s and '90s, global temperatures were creeping steadily upwards, just as predicted. But then, 10 or 15 years ago, they levelled off, raising the intriguing question: has global warming stopped?

Myles Allen: One thing about warming - it's not that the past decade has been cold. The past decade has still been far warmer than decades in the mid-20th century. It's just that the decade before then was extremely warm, surprisingly warm. So we saw a few years of very warm temperatures, and now we're just back to where we would have expected to be.

Tom Clarke: But scientists admit the apparent absence of warming does have to be explained, if only because they stand accused of warning of extreme temperature increases based on certain climate models. So what's the reason? It's possible the 1990s were unusually warm because of phenomena like El Nino. As well as driving bad weather, El Nino releases vast amounts of heat from the ocean. Since the 1990s, EL Nino events have been rarer, so all that extra heat from greenhouse gas emissions could be locked up in the deep oceans. But it's also possible things in the atmosphere are affecting the speed of warming. To take a look, we decided to send up our very own weather balloon.

Okay Steve... Let it go. [Weather balloon is released, goes up into the sky.]

Clouds have always been a problem for climate scientists. Our balloon encounters them, a few thousand feet up. Here they warm the planet like a blanket. But viewed from above - our balloon is now around 15 miles high - you can see how clouds could cool things down, by reflecting heat back into space. Climate scientists admit they may be misunderstanding the role clouds play in warming and cooling our planet, and unknowns like this could also explain why it hasn't warmed as much as we might have expected.

So does all this uncertainty mean climate scientists misled us about how much the world is warming?

Myles Allen: I think that's what I'd really urge people to do, is look at what scientists actually say, rather than what people say they say.

Even five years ago, you didn't find many scientists going around saying the world's about to end. And we aren't saying the world's about to end, now. What we are saying is that large changes are happening, which we need to monitor, which we need to understand and which we need to prepare for, for the future.

Tom Clarke: That's because whatever happens to the weather, from decade to decade, we're still pumping carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. The laws of physics mean: that can only warm our planet. In the long run, temperatures won't be going down.

Cathy Newman: Tom Clarke reporting, with a little help from the weather balloon. Well, joining me now from Budapest is the academic and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Dr. Bjorn Lomborg. And here in the studio is Nigel Arnell, Professor of Climate Science at the University of Reading. Professor Nigel Arnell first. The extreme rise in temperatures that many of you predicted, hasn't happened. Will you accept that you over-egged the pudding?

Nigel Arnell: No, I don't accept that. The projections that are made by climate scientists have been really for the 21st century as a whole. And that - we know the climate system has got patterns of variability and rhythms of change and uncertainty within it. And the - um, the relatively constant temperatures of the last few years are not, in themselves, that surprising. We know there have been periods in the past where temperatures have stabilised for a bit, before going up, and climate model projections include that. And, for the reasons that Myles Allen talked about earlier on, in your clip, and the item just now, there are lots of reasons why the climate system doesn't change incrementally, year on year.

Cathy Newman: Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, you accept then, do you, that climate change still has to be tackled, and with some urgency?

Bjorn Lomborg: Well, absolutely, Cathy. First of all, global warming is happening, and I think Nigel and I agree on that. The problem, though, is that we have had this campaign of almost - worrying with no end, which of course leads to panic and bad decisions. And that's really what I think has been the problem, that we've instituted policies that cost a fortune and do virtually no good.

Cathy Newman: Panic, with bad decisions. Would you accept that, Professor Nigel Arnell?

Nigel Arnell: No, I don't agree with that. I think if we're trying to curb the global - increase in global temperatures, trying to hit the 2-degree target, for example, that countries agreed at the Copenhagen climate conference a few years ago, then we do need to start reducing emissions. And because the climate system is slow, it responds slowly to changes, then we need to reduce emissions sooner rather than later.

Cathy Newman: Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, how long do you think we've got, then?

Bjorn Lomborg: The honest answer is we're not going to solve the problem as we're going along right now. The UK has signed up to the EU climate policy, which essentially means you're going to be spending £22 billion each and every year, for the rest of the century. And by the end of the century, you will have reduced temperatures by one 200th of a degree Centigrade. We won't be able to measure it, in a hundred years. I don't think that's what the British taxpayers signed up for doing, when they wanted a climate policy. So yes, we should cut carbon emissions, but we're never going to do it unless we find much more effective and, quite frankly, much cheaper policies.

Cathy Newman: Professor Nigel Arnell, those figures are pretty compelling. I mean, you must - we can ease up, surely, on these green subsidies that are costing us all a fortune on our electricity bills, can't we?

Nigel Arnell: Well I'd argue no, because we're not going to be acting alone. Even if the UK just reduces emissions, we may have the small reduction in temperature that Bjorn was talking about. But the UK is not going to be acting alone, so you can't just look at the UK's costs in complete isolation from everybody else's.

Cathy Newman: Well, what about wind farms? We've invested a lot in that, with very little benefit.

Nigel Arnell: Well, it's going to take a while for the benefits of reducing emissions to show through - that is true. But we know the sooner we reduce emissions, the better the benefits in the longer term. But we're not going to see the effects in the very near term, that is true.

Cathy Newman: Dr. Bjorn Lomborg?

Bjorn Lomborg: And this is - this is really the problem with the standard argument. Of course, the whole of the EU's going to cut its carbon emissions - that's going to cost about £200 billion each and every year for the rest of the century, and reduce temperatures by one 20th of a degree Centigrade. No, this is not the way forward. Essentially, what we're doing right now is simply subsidising rich people, buying inefficient green solar panels and wind turbines to feel good. If we want to do good, we need to dramatically reduce the cost of green energy through innovation, through research and development, through other scientists that are going to go through and find smarter solar panels, so that they become so cheap that also the Chinese and the Indians will buy them. We have failed because we have focussed on buying inefficient technology today instead of subsidising research and development, which is much cheaper and much more effective.

Nigel Arnell: Oh, I'll agree with that, absolutely. We're not going to solve the problem with today's technology applied tomorrow. We've got to invest in energy efficiency, in using energy more wisely, in a whole range of things. So what we've got now is not going to solve the problem, though I do disagree with the way Bjorn's expressing the problem - there's Europe just reducing temperatures by a little bit. We're not going to be acting in isolation, you can't separate out individual actions and say what the global consequences of one individual's action's going to be. It's the whole thing together.

Cathy Newman: Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, if not wind farms, then what?

Bjorn Lomborg: Sorry, say that again?

Cathy Newman: If not wind farms, then what, instead?

Bjorn Lomborg: Well, fundamentally, wind farms and solar panels are undoubtedly going to be part of the solution, but only when they're cheap enough. Remember, right now the West - and Nigel says: sure, we're not acting alone. Well, actually, the EU's pretty much the only entity that's cutting its carbon emissions, and we are going to pay a lot of money to do very little good. But if we could get wind turbines and solar panels and a lot of other technologies to become much cheaper, through research and development, of course then we can get the Chinese and the Indians and everybody else to buy them, and then we will solve global warming. If it's more expensive, we will never solve it, because we can't afford to subsidise these inefficient technologies so that everybody buys them.

Cathy Newman: Professor Nigel Arnell, you've - in this time of austerity, particularly - you've lost the public argument, or are losing it.

Nigel Arnell: Well, I don't agree with that. I think coping with climate change is not just about adding money onto bills to pay for renewable energy. It's about insulation, it's about energy efficiency, and that's going to save money. So it's part of it - the whole series of things we can do, some of which cost a bit of money up front, some which save money early on, for industry and for households. So it's not just a money thing, it's not just going to cost money.

Cathy Newman: Professor Nigel Arnell and Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, thank you very much for joining me.