News & Views item - November 2005

 

 

Robert May's Last Address to the Royal Society as President. (November 29, 2005)

    Lord May of Oxford will be delivering his presidential valedictory address to the Royal Society at the end of the month, but to coincide with the opening today in Montreal of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Society has released some of his key points.

We need countries [at the Montreal meeting] to initiate a study into the consequences of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at, below, or above twice pre-industrial levels, so that the international community can assess the potential costs of their actions or lack of them. Such an analysis could focus the minds of political leaders, currently worried more about the costs to them of acting now than they are by the consequences for the planet of acting too little, too late.

 

[Note also] the increasing incidence of 'extreme events' - floods, droughts, and hurricanes - the serious consequences of which are rising to levels which invite comparison with 'weapons of mass destruction'. In particular, recent studies, made before Katrina, suggest that increasing ocean surface temperature (the source of a hurricane's energy) will have little effect on the frequency of hurricanes, but strong effects on their severity. The estimated damage inflicted by Katrina is equivalent to 1.7% of US GDP this year, and it is conceivable that the Gulf Coast of the US could be effectively uninhabitable by the end of the century.

 

[C]ountries must recognise the need to sever the link between economic growth and increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. No country, including the UK and US, has yet managed to achieve this, mainly because growth currently means increased use of energy generated from fossil fuels. Appropriately constructed economic instruments, such as a carbon tax, could help motivate a reappraisal of this perverse message.

 

The UK already seems likely to miss its target for the Kyoto Protocol, because emissions have risen for the past two years, owing to the UK not getting to grips with the difficult questions of meeting demand for electricity and transport without burning more and more fossil fuels. By the same token, emissions of greenhouse gases by the US are currently 20% higher than in 1990, compared with the target assigned to it in Kyoto of a cut of 7%. President George W. Bush's failure to follow through on the commitments his father made on behalf of the US is underlined by his failure even to mention climate change, global warming or greenhouse gases in his 2,700-word speech when welcoming the new US Energy Act in August 2005, just weeks after signing the Gleneagles G8 communiqué.

 

In short, we have here a classic example of the problem or paradox of co-operation (also known as the Prisoner's Dilemma or occasionally the Tragedy of the Commons) referred to at the outset: the science tells us clearly that we need to act now to reduce inputs of greenhouse gases; but unless all countries act (in equitable proportions), the virtuous will be economically disadvantaged whilst all suffer the consequences of the sinners' inaction.