20140331_C4

Source: Channel 4 News

URL: N/A

Date: 31/03/2014

Event: Jon Snow: "climate change in Britain will mean more wet winters"

Attribution: Channel 4 News

People:

• Tom Clarke: Channel 4 Science Editor
• Ed Davey: Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the UK
• Andy Davies: Home Affairs Correspondent, Channel 4 News
• Professor Chris Field: Co Chair, IPCC Working Group II
• Jonathan Lane: Trading Manager, Gleadell Agriculture
• Bjorn Lomborg: Author, academic and environmental writer
• Joe Notaro: Builder
• Michael Price: Moorland resident
• Jon Snow: Presenter, Channel 4 News
• Professor Richard Tol: Professor of Economics, University of Sussex
• Baroness Bryony Worthington: British environmental campaigner and Labour life peer in the House of Lords

Jon Snow: Well, we can't say we hadn't been warned. And today a group of top scientists has confirmed that we are now into an era of man-made climate change. The Intergovernment [sic] Panel on Climate Change says it'll mean more droughts, more heatwaves, disruption of food and water supplies and increased risk of conflicts over declining resources. No-one, it warns, will be left untouched by the impact. Our first report tonight, from our Science Editor Tom Clarke.

Tom Clarke: This is maize from Ukraine, being offloaded in Immingham, this morning. It's a snapshot of a global market that keeps our food readily available and cheap. There's 25,000 tonnes of grain in this ship. And it's here because of this weather. Our harvest last year was so dismal we're having to import more of the stuff. But today's climate change report warns that, globally, crop yields could go down across the board, so there might be less of this stuff, regardless of where you're getting it from.

The impact on our food is one of the headline findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Today's report, signed off after a week of wrangling in Yokohama, Japan, is the most detailed ever produced, on the impacts of climate change. The conclusion: its effects could be catastrophic and already under way.

Chris Field: We're not in an era where climate change is some kind of a future hypothetical. We live in a world where impacts of climate changes that have already occurred are widespread and consequential. We see impacts from the Equators [sic] to the Poles, and from the coast to the mountains. There's no question that we live in a world that's already altered by climate change.

Tom Clarke: The report categorises future risks - those the authors believe are "highly likely" include flooding to low-lying coastal regions caused by sea-level rise, increased deaths due to extreme heat and food shortages linked to warming, drought and flooding.

And they also warn how risks multiply and overlap. Take the example of the Philippines typhoon. The poorest - living in fragile homes, dependent on threatened fish stocks - suffered the most from the storm.

Ed Davey: I think everyone should be worried about the impact of climate change. It's going to cost our country and the world a huge amount, if we don't act, in terms of human health, in terms of food security, higher food prices, in terms of the overall impact on the economy. So I think this is a wake-up call.

Tom Clarke: Not all scientists agree about the impacts. Take global food supply. Grain traders say there's plenty of slack in the system.

Jonathan Lane: If climate change results in more severe droughts in the main production areas of the world, there is the potential for food prices to remain high. But there is still significant potential to increase production in areas of the country - areas of the world that aren't currently maximising their output.

Tom Clarke: Even among climate change researchers, there's disagreement about the severity of its impacts. One of this report's authors withdrew his name from it, arguing some scenarios are overblown.

Richard Tol: The report emphasises the risks of climate change. It goes into all sorts of negative effects, often on very silly assumptions, that says that people can't observe the weather around them and don't respond to changes in the climate. I just don't think it's appropriate to tell scare stories.

Tom Clarke: But while we argue about the detail, simple physics suggests we might exceed 3 or 4 degrees of global warming by the end of this century. The rest of today's report focusses on the need to adapt - and adapt soon - to the warming that's already coming our way.

* * *

Jon Snow: Now, as we've heard, climate change in Britain will mean more wet winters, like the one we've just endured, and more flooding for low-lying areas. Today's report came as dredging finally began on the Somerset Levels, but with it a warning, that it may take more than dredging to protect the area from future floods and extreme weather. Our Home Affairs correspondent Andy Davies is at Burrowbridge in Somerset this evening - Andy.

Andy Davies: Well Jon, nearly two months ago I stood by this river and told you about nearby villages which were waist-deep in water. And you heard the anger in the voices of those local residents who blame the Environment Agency for not having got more of the silt out of rivers like this, sooner. Well, that process of dredging finally began today but, given the warnings coming out of Japan on climate change and the future flood risks, the heightened flood risks, one really wonders just how big a task they face in the future, to protect an area as vulnerable as this.

Digging out the banks of the River Parrett - this is what Day One of the post-flood dredging looks like. It began a mile away, from the Somerset village of Moorland. And what a different scene there today, from that of early February. Its flood defences completely breached, save for one notable household, the home that the Notaros built. This is where they erected a 10,000 ton perimeter wall of clay and earth, desperate to keep the waters back. And so, remarkably, it appears they succeeded.

[To Joe Notaro.] Completely dry, Joe.

Joe Notaro: Yeah. Completely dry.

Andy Davies: Carpets pristine, tiles immaculate. But this local builder is reluctant to be drawn on just how much it cost him to fund such a mammoth flood defence system to protect his son's new home.

[To Joe Notaro.] And that was a huge effort, wasn't it.

Joe Notaro: Yeah, but our main object was to save the house. That's it, that's what we wanted to try to do.

Andy Davies: And you've done it.

Joe Notaro: We've done it. Yeah.

Andy Davies: For others in the village, it's a very different picture. Most of the homes lie vacant, driveways lined with skips, furniture abandoned. In February we met Buttons and Michael Price, holding out.

Michael Price: Our determination is to stay here. Let's make that abundantly clear. Yes.

Andy Davies: But it didn't last. Evacuated that night, Michael can only pop back now to check the progress of the dehumidifiers, dry out his 50 year-old wedding photos and give his view on the relevance, or otherwise, of the climate change debate.

[To Michael Price.] Do you think climate change was a factor, in what you experienced here?

Michael Price: It could have been a factor, but I don't rate it as being a key factor of it.

Andy Davies: You don't.

Michael Price: No.

Andy Davies: Are you a climate change sceptic?

Michael Price: Somewhat, yes.

Andy Davies: There may be differing views, on the ground in Somerset, as to what factors precisely led to scenes like this, earlier this year. But as the waters recede here, thousands of miles away, across the world, where climate change scientists gather, the talk is of more such extreme events to come, and of huge costs and difficult decisions ahead.

Difficult decisions over what sort of weather defences to build for the future, from dredging to tidal barrages, and with so many competing demands, for which communities. It will take more than six months to dredge just an 8-kilometre stretch of this river, and that alone will cost £5 million.

* * *

Jon Snow: I'm joined now by Baroness Worthington, Labour's climate change spokeswoman in the House of Lords - she was one of the architects of the Climate Change Bill - and from New York by Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. And I'm wondering how sceptical you are, tonight, of this particular report. It's certainly the most hard-hitting, Bjorn.

Bjorn Lomborg: Oh absolutely, and it's also very alarmist. If you read it and if you then read the background reports, it tells us some of the stories - you mentioned that it was going to give more loss of food production, and it is true that there is a risk of that happening towards the end of the century. But what they fail to tell us is that they didn't take into account either adaptation nor CO2 fertilisation, so in reality, they're telling a very one-sided view. And I think that's terrible, because it leads to the kind of policies that we have now had for 10 or 20 years, that fundamentally cost a lot and still don't fix the problem. And that's really the issue - we're scaring people silly but we're not actually fixing the problem with smart solutions.

Jon Snow: Is that a fair point, Bryony?

Bryony Worthington: Um no, not really. I mean, we've only really just begun to introduce policies to address climate change, and it's taking time to get them right, but I think we're starting to see the benefits of that, now.

Jon Snow: What about this "alarmism"?

Bryony Worthington: Well, I mean, if I were a climate scientist, I'd be sounding an alarm right now. They've been saying this for over 20 years, and they feel no-one's been listening. And they've got a point, actually. We've been incredibly slow to take action, and it's partly been because of people like Bjorn Lomborg, who keep changing their arguments against not doing anything about it - now his latest one is "Oh well, we shouldn't spend the money, should spend it on something else." I mean, he keeps changing his view practically every time we see him speak. So that's part of the problem, is that we've got people like that.

Jon Snow: Bjorn, it's your fault.

Bjorn Lomborg [laughs]: Well, I could say the same of the Baroness. I mean, she has been inflicting both the UK, for tens of billions of pounds in costs, and hundreds of billions of pounds of costs to the European Union per year, to achieve virtually nothing. And I have actually made the same argument ever since Kyoto. Do you remember Kyoto? That was from '97, where we already made the first agreement, that we knew weren't going to work. But many people - I don't know if the Baroness was on there, back then, but certainly Al Gore and many, many others were on board for that. And we knew already, then, it was going to be phenomenally expensive and not work. So no, I'm sorry, Miss Baroness, you were the one who, with very poor policies, keep not fixing the problem. I wish we could have a smarter conversation, where we could do something about climate.

Bryony Worthington [starting to talk over him]: Absolutely not, I'm sorry, the policies that we've introduced are incredibly rational, they're very technology-neutral and they commit us to managing a carbon budget very sensibly. And that's what we're doing in the UK, it doesn't inflict costs of billions. And Bjorn often uses these numbers, I'm never quite sure where they come from. I work a lot on European policy, and one of the things that's really interesting is that tomorrow we're going to have emissions data come out for the whole of Europe, and that's going to show that Europe's decoupled its economic growth from emissions. So we are introducing policies to support alternative technologies - they're getting cheaper, more efficient all the time. We've created a market in carbon reduction, which has proved to be very successful. There are a lot of smart people out there now, including Elon Musk, Google, Sony, Apple, all saying this is a problem we're going to put all of our resources into solving it. I think it's a, it's a - we've started but we've started very late, and it's not helped by people who keep coming up with reasons not to do anything, because of course that's the easiest option.

Jon Snow: Bjorn, let's cut to the quick. Let's accept that surely what the report does say - and there's plenty of evidence to support it - that there is going to be warming of some 4 degrees over the next century. Now, if we accept that that's true, and you say we're wasting money doing anything about it, what should we be doing?

Bjorn Lomborg: We should be focussing on making better green technology. We should be investing in lots and lots of researchers. Unfortunately, we're not doing that, because what we need is to get green energy to be so cheap that both people in the rich countries can afford lots of it, but especially people in the poor countries - China and India and elsewhere - will actually buy that green energy. Right now, we are focussing on subsidies, and again I'm sorry to hear - actually, I debated the Baroness, what, a year ago on your channel, and she still says "I don't know where that number - where those numbers come from" - i actually sent you those numbers. it's peer-reviewed research. It's the very same research that the UN climate panel is now referring to. So you can't keep claiming innocence - sorry, not innocence, ignorance - on not knowing where those numbers come from - it's the GDP loss that policies that you have helped implement don't actually work. They do very little for climate but they cost more.

Jon Snow: He's saying invest in green research for green technologies.

Bryony Worthington: No, he's been saying this for a while, but how do you do that? You get a market going, in green technologies. And that's what we've done, we've introduced stimulus that people start trying to invent new ways of producing power. And what's been really interesting is that it's been the intervention of China, who's helped to bring down the unit costs of solar, which means that now it's available for the poor, and people in places like Africa are realising that rather than wait around for the really cumbersome infrastructure based on fossil fuels, they're moving to renewables and leapfrogging into a cleaner future, And that's really good news, and it wouldn't have happened if the EU and the UK hadn't led on this issue.

Jon Snow: Baroness Worthington and Bjorn Lomborg, thank you both very much indeed. The debate continues - I've no doubt we'll get you two together again, very soon.