Source: BBC Radio 5 Live
URL: N/A
Date: 23/09/2013
Event: Andrew Montford on the IPCC's dilemma: "How do they explain the pause away?"
Credit: BBC Radio 5 Live
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Natalie Glanvill: Climate change will lead to a devastating impact on the health of millions of people because of rising food prices and the declining quality of crops, according to a report by Oxfam. The charity's study, called "Growing Disruption", is being released on the day government officials and scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meet in Stockholm. Their report on the latest evidence is due out later this week. Andrew Montford is a climate change sceptic and writes for the Bishop Hill blog.
Andrew Montford: At the moment, it looks as though any climate change that we get in the future is going to be considerably less than we'd previously been led to believe. So we should expect any warming to be much slower. It's fairly clear - economists have something of a consensus - that small amounts of warming are going to be beneficial to the world, overall, and that they will actually improve crop yields, rather than make them worse, for another degree or two. So I don't think we should expect any problems in the short term, no.
Natalie Glanvill: And the report by Oxfam points to the 2011 drought in East Africa. It claims that it was more likely to have occurred because of climate change. So, do you think that's evidence that we should be doing more to address climate change?
Andrew Montford: This is highly speculative science, I should say. The links between individual climate events and global warming are highly tenuous. And, in fact, when the IPCC brought out a report on the subject of weather extremes, a few years ago, they were quite clear that it was really virtually impossible to pin individual events to global warming. So no, we don't want to be worrying about things like that, at the moment.
Natalie Glanvill: There's a report being released as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meet in Stockholm. What do you expect the IPCC to say, in its report, later this week?
Andrew Montford: The drafts of the report have been heavily leaked, so we have a good idea of what's going to be in there. It looks as though the IPCC is going to admit that temperatures haven't gone up since the turn of the millennium. And the initial feeling is that they're going to say that they don't know why that's happening, although there is some more recent opinion that perhaps they're going to try and explain it away, in some way. The pause in temperatures gives them a very big problem, because the other important thing that they're going to try to say is that mankind is definitely to blame for the global warming at the end of the last century. Now the problem is the computer models they use to support that statement are the same computer models that couldn't predict the slowdown - or cessation, I should say - in temperature changes since the millennium. So they have a very big dilemma, there. How do they explain the pause away?
Natalie Glanvill: Mm. And Oxfam says world leaders must take urgent action, it says, to slash emissions and direct more resources to build a sustainable food system. Do you agree with that?
Andrew Montford: No, um, previously, when politicians have responded to calls for dramatic action on global warming, they've done things that have actually made the global food system less reliable. At the moment, something like 5% of the global grain crop is converted into fuels for burning in cars. This is complete nonsense, and it is making the world hunger situation worse, not better. If Oxfam, perhaps, concentrated more on trying to deal with that kind of problem than trying to promote alarm about global warming, then there would be fewer hungry people in the world.
Natalie Glanvill: That's climate change sceptic Andrew Montford. Tim Gore from Oxfam will be speaking to Five Live Breakfast, after 6.