IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Yeo]

Of course, with statistics, if we pick the year to suit our argument, we can produce all sorts of short-term pointers. Unfortunately, it remains true that the first decade of the 21st century—2000 to 2010—was the warmest recorded in modern times, so that does not seem to me to be convincing evidence of my right hon. Friend’s claim that the climate has stopped warming. In any event, I believe that it is still clear that there are impacts, as I have said, on human and natural systems that result from recent climate changes—when I say “recent” climate changes, I mean “in the last 100 years or so”.

Decarbonising electricity generation is a critical component of what we need to do if we are to mitigate the worst effects of climate change and, as the synthesis report points out, it is economically affordable. Effective implementation depends on policies and co-operation at all levels. That can be enhanced by the integrated responses that may come out of an agreement in Paris—responses that should link mitigation with adaptation and with other, broader objectives.

The Secretary of State said of the fifth assessment report:

“This is the most comprehensive and robust assessment ever produced. It sends a clear message: we must act on climate change now.”

That was also the view of our Committee.

We focused particularly on the contribution of working group I to the IPCC report. There were, of course, three working groups. One was on the physical science basis; the second was on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and the third was on mitigation. The conclusion of working group I was that it was now more confident than ever that greenhouse gas released as a result of deforestation and from fossil fuels has caused much of the warming seen in the latter half of the 20th century and, if unabated, those greenhouse gases will continue to drive climate change in the future.

The IPCC was criticised for being political and lacking transparency, so my Committee looked particularly into the process and the robustness of the IPCC’s conclusions. Our conclusion was that the IPCC report provides the best summary of prevailing scientific opinion on climate change currently available to policy makers. It is the most exhaustive and heavily scrutinised report so far. We also consider that there is a high level of statistical confidence in the report and that the overall thrust and conclusions of the report are widely supported in the scientific community.

Of course, as in all areas of science that involve highly complex and dynamic systems, there are uncertainties, but those uncertainties do not cast into doubt the overwhelmingly clear picture of a climate system changing as a result of human activity.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

With regard to the criticisms of the IPCC, Professor Lindzen, Nicholas Lewis and Drs Curry and Wyatt, among many others, attended the sittings of the ECC Committee or gave evidence. Would the hon. Gentleman care to explain why he thinks such people were so critical of the IPCC in expressing their thoughts on climate change?

[Mr Yeo]

One would have to look at what they have actually said and written about the IPCC. They can probably justify their views better than I can. I recognise that there remains a group of people—I think that it is relatively small—who do not accept particularly the pace at which the climate may be changing.

I am not sure that it is quite a crowd mentality, but there is a very large number of academics and scientists who broadly accept the thrust of what the IPCC has been saying. Whether some people feel that that produces a peer group pressure to conform, I do not know. I have puzzled a bit over some of the comments and responses that we received when carrying out this inquiry. As I said, we recognised that in all areas of science, there are some doubts—some uncertainties—but the overwhelming consensus is right.

In particular, the credibility of the conclusions derives from the evidence, just as I hope the work of my Committee is driven by the evidence that it receives. The IPCC received and reviewed thousands of academic papers, which had themselves been peer reviewed, and the conclusion was that there was a clear, unambiguous picture of a climate that is being dangerously destabilised. I thought that the report of working group I was very honest about the levels of certainty and uncertainty, and the “Summary for Policymakers”, which of course is of a readable length—it is a synthesis document—is published alongside the full document, which contains all the technical information on which the conclusions were based.

My Committee has recommended that in future a small team of non-climate scientists should observe the review process for IPCC reports. We also recommended a review of UK modelling facilities. I do not know whether the Minister will be able to give us any information about, for example, what the new Met Office supercomputer may be able to do.

By way of conclusion, what does the report mean for UK and international policy? First, it clearly reaffirms the scientific basis of the Climate Change Act 2008. Secondly, it has put forward the notion of a global cumulative carbon budget—a maximum level of greenhouse gas emissions for the world to emit safely. We must stay within that level if we are to have a chance of staying within the 2° C average temperature rise that is thought to be safe. Those two conclusions in the report underline the great merit of the UK’s carbon budgeting process. I believe that we can quite accurately claim to be leading the world in that and I think that other countries are getting interested in the way in which we are setting and implementing carbon budgets. That is absolutely in tune with the IPCC conclusions.

There is also now an overwhelming need for a carbon price. Whether that is derived from carbon taxation, emissions trading or a combination of the two does not necessarily matter. I personally hope that we can make cap-and-trade systems work, because I believe that market instruments are usually the best way to drive investment where it will be most cost-effectively deployed.

There is work to be done to improve the EU emissions trading scheme, but the inquiry in which my Committee is currently engaged, on linking emissions trading systems, has given us a much clearer understanding of the extraordinary progress being made in China. It is a bit easier to do things when one does not have to consult among 28 countries. The possibility—well, not the possibility, but the extreme likelihood—of a national emissions trading system in China being rolled out as soon as 2016 is astonishing, given that the first pilots are barely two years old.

We have also had this year the publication of the New Climate Economy report. Again, that is evidence based, and again it underlines the fact that climate change mitigation does not have to inhibit economic growth; the two can go hand in hand. We look forward to our evidence session next week with Nick Stern and Jeremy Oppenheim on that subject.

We feel that there needs to be a focus on cities, land use and energy. If we can maximise the use of existing low-carbon technology and find new ways to organise and innovate in those three areas, we can address climate change at the same time as continuing with sustainable development.

Finally, our report calls for, as I have said, the introduction of a strong and predictable carbon price. Anything that the Government can say to reassure us about that and their commitment to it will be helpful. I hope that the Minister can also touch on the prospects for the conference of the parties in Lima next month and look ahead to the Paris COP next year.

We are, as I said at the start, potentially at a turning point in climate policy, and the Paris COP will be a particularly important stepping stone. If we are to achieve the transition to a global low-carbon economy, a sustained commitment will be required from the Governments represented at Paris from 2015 onwards. If we are to succeed in tackling climate change, the world will have to achieve something that it has never managed before: a consistent annual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Every year since the industrial revolution, we have had a consistent annual increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

I am confident that the science will continue to strengthen, and that the evidence of human activity leading to climate change will become stronger, not weaker. As a result, I expect that public concern, not only in this country but around the world, will intensify. The longer we leave the task of mitigation, the more expensive and disruptive it will be to accomplish. I hope, and indeed expect, that there will be a substantial carbon price in one form or another in the 2020s. The inevitable consequence of that will be that countries that have started to decarbonise their economies early will be more economically competitive, not less.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

It is worth understanding what is meant when we talk about the scientific basis for climate change. Essentially, if the climate is changing, it is because the energy budget of this planet is altering. We are taking in more energy than we are radiating as a planet. There is no direct way of measuring that process, so we have to look at indirect measurement, which leads us into a number of difficulties. One only has to think about the ice ages to realise that the climate has always changed. There is natural variation, and if the planet is taking in more energy than it is radiating, that will inevitably lead to climate change that is not a natural variation.

As Professor Trewavas has said, there is not a scientist on the planet who can measure and distinguish between natural climate variation and anthropogenic climate variation, so we are in serious difficulty when we talk about the scientific basis of climate change. That has become an area of great controversy and enthusiasm from certain parties. I am—or at least I was—a scientist. As I have debated science in this place and elsewhere, I have come to the conclusion that science and politics are a bad mix, and that one tends to contaminate the other. Science is about the search for truth. Good scientists, if they are proved wrong, will shout, “Alleluia!” because they are pleased that the boundaries of knowledge have been pushed further. Politics is about winning the argument; it is about my side beating the other side.

Unfortunately, in the debate around climate change, some politicians and so-called non-governmental organisations have distorted the science and pushed arguments in a non-scientific way. A current example of that—it is not immediately to do with climate change although it could be—is the case of Professor Anne Glover, the former scientific adviser to the President of the European Commission. She has just failed to get her contract renewed because she took a view on genetically modified foods that Greenpeace and other groups did not like, and those groups lobbied to remove scientific advice from the Commission.

I think we will see that various activist groups have behaved in a similar way in the discussion about climate change. Because of that, I proposed a number of amendments to the Energy and Climate Change Committee report, which fell into three categories. The first was about the political nature of the report that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced. The second was about what passes for science, given the problem I talked about before of direct measurement of the planet’s energy balance and climate change. The third was about the consequences for this country’s energy policy.

Donna Laframboise provided a lot of written and oral evidence to the Committee about the political nature of the IPCC. In drawing up the final report, representatives of 100 Governments met in secret for a four-day session. They changed the report, reducing it by 700 words and increasing the number of pages. Astonishingly, given that the report was supposed to be based on science, they reverse-engineered it to make it consistent with a summary that was a series of political compromises, where words were put up on whiteboards and crossed out according to the agreement or lack of agreement between the representatives of the different countries.

That leads me to two conclusions. Why should an intergovernmental process that produces policies that may lead to trillions of pounds of expenditure around the globe take place in private? It should not. Why should a summary of a scientific subject be produced by Governments rather than by scientists? The IPCC claims that it is a scientific body, but it is not. It is an intergovernmental body that reaches compromises, just as politicians reach compromises. I would scrap the IPCC and move to a science-based body that published summaries of current climate science more frequently.

[Ian Lavery]

Is my hon. Friend suggesting that he has no confidence whatsoever in the IPCC’s recommendations?

[Graham Stringer]

I would answer my hon. Friend in two ways. First, I would not detract from the basic scientific papers that lie underneath the report. Those papers are produced, by and large, by reputable scientists who are doing their best in a difficult area. Secondly, I ask him to consider the fact that the most significant, headline conclusion was that we should have more confidence in the IPCC’s conclusions now than we did previously. However, its prediction about global temperature increasing over the past 13 or 14 years has been wrong; it did not predict a flattening of the temperature curve. It is strange to conclude, when it has got something so badly wrong, that we should have more confidence in its results, and I do not. To say that I had no confidence would be very strong if that was based on decent scientists doing decent work, but I argue that the process is seriously flawed. That is the IPCC.

Staying with the science for a moment, one of the amendments that I proposed to the Select Committee report was to say that we do not really have 97% consensus that we are heading towards catastrophic climate change. I base that, although there are other areas that we can look at, on Robin Guenier’s evidence to the Committee. He carried out a survey of all the reports that consider the views of climate scientists, and he concluded:

“In summary, the inadequacy of useful evidence means that the extent to which the SPM reflects climate scientists’ views is both unknown and likely to continue to be unknown.”

That is because there has not been a decent survey.

“Therefore it’s impossible to provide a reliable answer to the Committee’s question.”

That question was whether there was a consensus.

“However, such evidence as does exist indicates that the answer would probably be that AR5 reflects the range of views among climate scientists to only a very limited extent.”

That partly answers my hon. Friend’s question.

The regularly cited figure of 97% consensus comes from a report by Cook based on an old survey of about 12,000 pieces of scientific literature. Cook looked at the literature, and if a scientist stated that they believed carbon dioxide to be a greenhouse gas, he claimed the paper in support of the consensus that catastrophic global warming is happening, which is a non sequitur—it clearly is not the case. When we look at the other papers surveyed by Guenier, which I can list if necessary, there are various views from different scientists and groups of scientists. No survey can be absolutely categorical about the views of climate scientists, but when those views are assessed, they certainly do not come out anywhere near 97% consensus that catastrophic global warming or climate change is happening. We can put that to one side.

If we look at where we are left with the science, given the previous problems, we have to consider climate models, because we cannot directly measure the planet’s energy balance. Some of the evidence given to the Committee seriously criticises the climate models. At the time of the report, the Committee did not have the views of Steven Koonin, an adviser to President Obama’s Government who is a specialist in such computer programs. He goes through in great detail where the problems are in the computer models. He points out that the resolution of the computer models is 60 miles, and there can be many types of weather and weather changes in a grid 60 miles square. To work out what is happening, the models start with basic figures and then begin guessing, and it is no better than guessing because they have to work out the average cloud cover based on the humidity and changes in temperature over such large areas, which have huge variations. Basically, the situation can be fiddled within the grid. By and large, the temperature changes over the past 100 years or so vary in such models by factors of three. That does not prove that one of the models is right, because some 55 models are being used out there, but it does show that there is no consistent modelling.

Do the models allow us to predict or understand what is happening? They predict the reduction in the Arctic ice cover but not the increase in Antarctic ice, which probably outweighs the reduction in ice at the north pole. The models do not predict the completely even rise in sea levels over the past 100 years—the rise has consistently been about 1 foot a century for some time. The models predict that the surface temperature in the tropics should increase, but it has not. There are many serious problems with the models, and one has to realise that there are fiddle factors.

The Chairman and other members of the Committee are convinced that the models are the basis on which we should predicate the whole of our energy policy. Our energy policy is to put up the price of fuel for the people I represent, and they are some of the poorest people in this country. We are trying to hit emissions targets on carbon dioxide, and at the same time we are deindustrialising the country, so we are not putting less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; we are putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That policy—I do not want to overuse the word “catastrophe”—has perverse consequences. If people genuinely believe that carbon dioxide will lead to a global catastrophe, we should not be pursuing the policies that we are now pursuing. The drive for renewables, where there are indications that current research may lead to better renewables in future, is putting the security of our energy supply at risk. So the three key factors of the Government’s energy policy, based on many of the IPCC’s conclusions, are perverse.

I lost the votes on the amendments that I proposed to the Committee—I often lose votes, which I do not mind because that is the nature of politics—but I ask my hon. Friends and Government Members to address the points. There simply is not a 97% consensus. We are responsible for putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and there is a great deal that we do not know about what is happening in the atmosphere.

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

I apologise to you, Mr Betts, and to my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo) for arriving a few minutes late and missing some of his opening speech. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer), who made an important contribution to this debate, as he does to the Committee’s deliberations. The report, of course, was not unanimous. Both he and I voted against it. I think we were able to secure the inclusion of only one of his amendments, but that is not because either of us denies the basic science of the greenhouse effect. He can speak for himself, but we are both scientists by training, which is a characteristic that is not shared by most members of the Committee. We do not dispute the greenhouse effect, nor did any of our witnesses. However, great uncertainties remain about how much warming a given increase in greenhouse gases will cause, how much damage any temperature increase will cause and the best balance between adaptation and mitigation in response to, or in pre-emption of, global warming.

The main bulk of the IPCC technical report recognises those uncertainties, and the report is simply a useful compilation of research in the field. My criticisms are about the summary for policy makers, which is far less balanced than the report it purports to summarise. The hon. Gentleman explained the process by which the summary was produced, which may be why it is so less balanced. The summary is essentially a document of advocacy, and it achieves its objective of influencing policy makers, as its title indicates, by the selective use of facts and the omission of quite a lot of the stuff in the main report, including some of the most significant changes, which are simply not drawn to the attention of policy makers. I am not the first to criticise the IPCC process.

[Ian Lavery]

This is a general point. Would the right hon. Gentleman describe himself as a climate change sceptic?

[Mr Lilley]

Yes. I normally call myself a lukewarmist. I believe that the climate will warm a bit, which will probably be quite beneficial to parts of our country, although it could pose problems elsewhere. I do not deny that double the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere will increase the temperature by 1° and a bit, plus or minus any effect due to positive or negative feedbacks. However, I do not think that the evidence shows that the change will be very large. I will come to that.

It is not just climate sceptics and I who have been critical of the IPCC’s tendency to exaggerate. Following the discovery of inaccuracies, use of grey data and so on in AR4, the fourth assessment report, which forecast that all the glaciers in the Himalayas would melt in 35 years rather than 350 years, the InterAcademy Council—the council of all the main scientific academies in the world, including our Royal Society, the US scientific bodies and so on—carried out an investigation of how the IPCC worked. The IAC was critical, particularly of authors who

“reported high confidence in statements for which there is little evidence”.

It is not just fellow sceptics and I saying it; all the scientific academies of the world, which by and large have signed up under some political pressure to rather unscientific statements about global warming, have considered the IPCC report and concluded that some scientists, although not all, tend to report high confidence in statements for which there is little evidence. The IAC therefore recommends:

“Quantitative probabilities (as in the likelihood scale) should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence. Authors should indicate the basis for assigning a probability to an outcome or event (e.g., based on measurement, expert judgment, and/or model runs).”

No such basis for assigning enhanced probability was given when the most recent IPCC report came out. Its headline conclusion was that the evidence for human influence has grown since the fourth assessment report, and it went on to attach increased likelihood—categorised on the scale as “extremely likely”, rather than the previous “very likely”—to the possibility that human influence has been the dominant cause of the warming observed since the mid-20th century. That was the overall headline assessment to which the IPCC wanted policy makers to respond. However, it is hard to back up that conclusion from the substance of that report. Since the last report, we know what has happened.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Whitehead]

My hon. Friend sets out a process that seems remarkably similar to every single bit of policy work that ever takes place anywhere in the world on pretty much anything. There is a scientific process and if scientists wish to inform policy makers who are involved in that process, those policy makers will be involved in a process that is less than perfect in relation to what the science says. It is a combination of what is possible, what the policy is that is informed by the scientific process and, most importantly, whether the policy makers should wait for the science to be absolutely perfect before they do anything. My hon. Friend is coming close to saying that unless the science is perfect and scientists can have a sign-off on absolutely everything that goes on to the desk of the last policy maker, we should do nothing.

[Ian Lavery]

I am probably the only person here who is not a scientist. Politicians who, like me, are not scientists rely on evidence from scientists on both sides of the argument, because we, as politicians, make decisions based on what the scientists tell us. Where does that leave me?

[Dr Whitehead]

My hon. Friend is in exactly the position that I have just described. He is a policy maker who has to be advised by the best science. Given the full and informed contributions that he has always made to our Select Committee considerations, he is the complete embodiment of that process. Policy makers have to combine how they see the landscape with what the science is advising about the landscape and make judgments about what should be done in relation to those two facts in their role as policy makers. That is not and should not be a surprise to anybody. There is a real link between what the science is telling us and what we as policy makers have to do about it.