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Hello, everybody. My name's Stuart Corbridge. I'm the head of the Development Studies Institute here at the lse. And it's my great pleasure to welcome you to today's public lecture by Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, or Nick, as he's generally known in the school. Nick's going to speak for about 45 minutes. We'll then take groups of questions, probably about three at a time. Now is the time, please also to turn off any beepers or mobile phones that you haven't already turned off. Nick Stern barely needs an introduction to any audience these days, and of course, that's especially true here at the lse. Nick has become one of the most important and prominent of our public intellectuals, and I would like to say also one of the nicest. Nick was Chief Economist at the World bank from 2002, 2003, and then occupied very senior positions here with the British government in the treasury, including as the head of the Government Economic Service. Nick, as many of you will know, was a prominent contributor to the Blair Government's Commission for Africa. And he was the lead author, of course, of the UK Government appointed Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, a report that was released towards the end of 2006. Happily for LSE, Nick is now back at the school as the Ig Patel professor of Economics and Government. Nick is also a driving force in the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and in the ESRC center for Climate Change Economics and Policy, which is the sponsor of today's lecture. Professor Stern is a Fellow of the British Academy. He was knighted for services to economics in 2004 and he was made a life peer in 2007. None of that eminence, however, means that Nick doesn't get his fair share, probably more than your fair share of combative letters and emails from people, how shall I quite put this, who don't necessarily share his views about the possible causes and likely consequences of climate change and global warming. I gather that Nick's email box bulged last year when outraged meat eaters on either side of the Atlantic, particularly from the middle part of the United States, objected strongly to his perfectly reasonable observation in the Times here in London that the wider adoption of vegetarian diets might indeed help in the battle to slow down global warming. Now, I'm going to trust Nick not to share some of the worst of these emails with us this lunchtime. This is a family show, after all. But he will be speaking about the political debates that rage around climate change. We especially look forward to hearing From Nick about what happened and what did not happen at the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009 and what beckons beyond Copenhagen.
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Thanks. Is this working? Can you hear me in the back row up there? Very good. Thanks very much. That's a very kind introduction. The. The reference to my being a nice person reminds me of how Michael Palin has to react to all his introductions. And, you know, there are lots of people around and lots of people are nice, and it doesn't seem to me. Anyway, let me back off for that. And the second, including the chairman, I should say the second thing is that what I did actually indicate to the Times newspaper was that a reduction in meat would go along with a reduction in emissions, like greater use of public transport, buying the right kind of electricity and so on. It's part of the information that any thoughtful person tried to think through actions for themselves or how to contribute to policy for government. It's the kind of information that. That they would need. So when you point to the advantages of public transport, you're not saying that nobody should use a private car. When you're pointing to different kinds of electricity, you're not insisting that everybody uses wind electricity, but you're pointing to the possibility. And similarly with food and any other thing that we look at, this kind of information is absolutely fundamental for rational public discussion. And that, I think, is a crucial point because we're here at a social science. How many people here knew they were at a festival? There's one, two. Well, you are at a social science festival. So I hope that, you know, I know that jazz festivals sound more exciting, and they probably are, but it's very important, and I wanted to pick up on that kind of remark about diet and so on, that people need information presented in a careful, thoughtful way, in a context about policy and about individual action. And as social scientists, that's what our job is, to gather information, to gather arguments, to put arguments together in a way that relate directly to policy. And what I want to argue here, and I'll do it by focusing particularly on the policy, is that the social sciences as a whole have a tremendous amount to bring to the table. And it's our responsibility to train and teach and use our social science in a way that really does contribute to what is arguably, and I will argue, most fundamental problem of our time. But I want to do that in the context of the two defining challenges of our century. Unless we put them together, we will fail on both. The two defining challenges of our century are managing climate change and overcoming world poverty. If we don't manage climate change, the environment will become so destructive that all the advances, and there have been major advances that the world has made on development would be undermined and reversed. I will explain, but I think you can see the argument already. But I will explain. On the other hand, if in trying to manage climate change, we appear to put obstacles in the path of development, then we will not put together the coalition and we won't deserve to put together the coalition which is fundamental to managing climate change. So those two defining challenges of our century are inextricably interlinked and we succeed or fail on the two together. Now, in order to understand the risks that we run, let me just remind you of the processes at work here. Through our production and consumption activities, we as people emit greenhouse gases. Together, we currently emit far more than, than the planet can absorb. So that flow of emissions builds up to a stock. We think of the carbon cycle to describe the process of absorption and so on. That does lead to some absorption, but we're emitting so much that the stock of greenhouse gases is rising. It's the stock of greenhouse gases that traps the infrared energy. It's an old piece of physics. It's a basic piece of physics, is that certain gases with molecules with certain structures prevent or inhibit, impede the passage of long wave radiation. Shorter wave radiation comes in from space, it's reflected back. As it's reflected back, some of it becomes infrared. And the more greenhouse gases there are, the more that that trapping takes place. It has to do with the vibration of the molecules at a rate which interferes with the passage of the longer wave radiation. This is basic physics. It's been understood really more or less since the end of the 19th century. And all the evidence since then has built up very powerfully. You may not like the rules of thermodynamics, or you may not like the laws of gravitation, but because you dislike the laws of gravitation doesn't mean you can levitate. And ignoring these kinds of basic principles of the greenhouse effect will lead us into deep, deep trouble. Well, it's not just the warming, because I haven't finished that. It's not just the warming because what happens here is, is global temperatures go up, local temperatures go up. Quite complicated interactions around the world and the whole meteorological system. But what happens is the climate changes. And that means mostly impacts through water, storms, floods and inundations, droughts and desertification, sea level rise, and that of course, has very direct impact on people. Now, how big would that be what are the risks associated with that process? Now, each of the five links that I gave along that chain, you were counting. I know. Each of the five links in the chain of that process I've just described has uncertainty in it. There's uncertainty about how much emissions will be. There's uncertainty about the carbon cycle and how much will be absorbed and therefore how much the concentrations will rise. There's uncertainty about the climate sensitivity and thus how much heat would be trapped. There's uncertainty about the effect of the warming and the interactions globally and locally on overall climate. And there's uncertainty about those climatic changes, their effects on people. This is about risk management, and that is what social science ought to be telling us about policy on risk management, how to manage risk in an effective, efficient, equitable manner. That's the challenge of all this, and we have to see it as a challenge of risk management. How big might those risks be? Well, if we go on under business as usual, we are around 435 parts per million. That's the concentrations at the moment of CO2 equivalent, we're adding about two and a half parts per million a year. That two and a half is rising. 100 years of that, instead of being 100 times 2.5, that 2.5 is rising, it'd be 100 times 3 or 4. On average, we'll be adding 300 or 400 to the 435 that we are now. Business as usual would take us to at least 750 or so parts per million by the end of the century, possibly more. Now, we don't know these probabilities exactly, but roughly a 5050 chance or thereabouts of being above 4 and a half or 5 degrees centigrade. As a result of that, we haven't been there as a planet for 30 million years. We as humans have been around, well, Homo sapiens anyway, have been around for about 200,000, 200,000. That's us versus 30 million years. We haven't seen that kind of temperature. We don't know what it would look like. But we can surely suggest with some strength that the risks involved in those kind of changes would be immense. Very recently we were about 5 degrees less 10, 12,000 years ago, at the last ice age that transformed the planet. We were all living closer to the equator than Watford. In other countries, I say London. But here you understand the geography a bit better. This kind of change moves people. It moves people on a massive scale. If you think about the likelihood that much of southern Europe would be a desert that the Sahara Desert would probably be significantly expanded, that much of bulk Bangladesh would be underwater and more of it coming underwater. That the North Indian monsoon would likely to change rapidly, that the whole pattern of flows off the Himalayas would likely to change rapidly. In other words, the changing patterns of the great rivers of the world that feed populations of 1 or 2 billion people. You have to regard there being a very big risk of hundreds of millions of people moving. And if we've learned anything from the history of the last couple hundred years, if people move on a massive scale, and we haven't seen that scale of movement in the past, you're likely to get severe, extended and global conflict. This is the scale of the story that we're talking about now. We're in a middle class institution and we're taught by middle class people we're brought up to, not all of them, of course, but on average. And we're taught to use language carefully and not to exaggerate. And that's very important here. This is just a description of where this basic process is likely to take us with all the notions of risk management and probability that we have to bring to bear. But these are massive risks by anybody's standards. So what do we do? Well, many scientists have argued, and I think there's a powerful case that we should have as a target 2 degrees centigrade, a maximum of 2 degrees centigrade. Now, because of what I've already said about the stochastic nature, the random nature of some of these processes, the uncertainties about the magnitudes of the effects, we have to speak about targets in a probabilistic sense. So we have to talk about a 50, 50 chance of 2 degrees centigrade. Why is that kind of number of temperature increase indicated? Well, the reason for that is that we risk as you go much above quite powerful feedback effects. It's possible that the Amazon would start to dry out and die back. It's possible that in fact, indeed it's probably probable that the permafrost would start to warm up and melt and thaw in a way that would release massive amounts of, of methane. The disappearance of ice sheets, which would start to get bigger and bigger, reduces the albedo effect. So it means that less of the ultraviolet is reflected back into space. These are positive feedback effects which would start to run the risk of dynamically unstable processes where things would get worse and worse. Because if the Amazon dies back, then the that sink starts to go away. If the methane is released, then you've got a very potent greenhouse gas. In very large quantities and so on. So these are the kinds of risks we run and the kinds of reasons why targets around 2 degrees centigrade were suggested. And I think it's a very powerful scientific case for that. So if we take that as a target, what do we have to do? Well, again, the story from the science, with all the qualifications about probabilities gives us quite strong guidance. What's the best guess we can make at the kinds of emissions program for the world as a whole, which could generate a 50, 50 chance of 2 degrees centigrade? Very good work by the Hadley center here, by my colleagues here at the Grantham Institute and at the ESR Sea Center, Nicola Ranger, Alex Bowen and others who've been working in this area. And roughly speaking, the kind of target path that we need would look like this, going from around 47. You've got to remember all these numbers because the numbers count. 47 billion tons per annum, roughly now, would have been about 50 had it not been for the world recession, down to around 44 billion tons in 2020, down to good deal less than 35 billion tonnes in 2030 and a good deal less than 20 billion tons in 2050. Now, you can do a bit more now and a bit less later, or a little less now and a bit more later. But roughly speaking, those paths look like that clearly. If we're at 44 in 2020 and we're 47 now, we must have peaked between now and then. So you clearly have to peak before 2020. That's roughly speaking what the paths look like. And they involve clearly very radical change. If we got below, and we'd have to be well below 20 billion tons in 2050, given that the 7 billion people now is likely to grow to 9 billion by 2050 or thereabouts, that means around 2 tons per capita in 2050. We are in Europe, 10, 11, 12 tons per capita now. United States, Australia, Canada, well over 20 tons per capita. CO2 equivalent. China about 6, a little more. India, a bit less than 2. Much of sub Saharan Africa a good deal less than one ton per capita. So you see first the overall magnitude of the change that we have to make to come down from close to 50 to well below 20 in the next 40 years at a time where population is growing, at a time where we hope incomes will grow. So you see the scale of the problem, but you also see the inequity, because about 60% or more of the concentrations that are there now come from past emissions from rich countries. And it's the poor countries that are hit earliest and hardest. It's the poor countries who are waking up to a future now where we have to find low carbon growth. We all have to find low carbon growth. But they note with some anger that the rich countries got rich through high carbon growth. So you can see the sense of injustice and inequity, and it's a very real part of the politics of this whole story. But we can see where we might go if we don't act sensibly. We can give a definition of what acting sensibly means in terms of 2 degrees centigrade, and we can see what that means in terms of emissions reductions, and we can see what that means in terms of reductions in emissions per unit of output. If world output grows at 2 or 3 or so percent for the next 40 years, suppose then it might go up by a factor of two and a half or three over 40 years. If we're cutting by a factor of two and a half and we're going up by a factor of three in terms of output, then we have to cut emissions per unit of output by three times two and a half. So we have to cut emissions per unit of output as a world by a factor of seven or eight. A factor of seven or eight. There'll be some areas where it won't be so easy to do that. So it means that where we can. We have to go essentially to zero carbon emissions, for example, zero carbon electricity. If we can find zero carbon electricity and we can describe how to do that, then we can get zero carbon road transport. Now, there'll be some areas like agriculture, where there's a lot that can be done, but it's difficult to get it down to zero. Some areas, like aviation, where we're going to have to find new fuels, if we have any chance of getting that down to anything like zero. But you can see that the basic logic of the kind I've described tells us what we have to do now. Is it burdensome? Is it frightening? Is it possible? Well, if we do it well, it will be extremely attractive. The transition to low carbon growth was already, and we can see the signs of it already. The transition to low carbon growth should be more dynamic, or at least as probably more dynamic than the changes brought about by steam engines and the railways, electricity, motor car, information technology and so on. This is going to have to be a radical energy and industrial revolution. But we can see the signs of it already. We can already see what zero carbon electricity looks like. We know about winds, we know about Solar, we know about nuclear. We can see carbon capture and storage for generation of electricity from hydrocarbons. There's geothermal. There are all kinds of ways in which this might come about. We can see the third and fourth generation of biofuels, very big concentration in some places on algae. It's very hard to give a lecture on this to an audience with industrialists without going away with your pocket full of cards of people who have got brilliant ideas all the way from no till agriculture to insulation of houses and new materials to algae and all that. Before you talk about the generation of electricity. If only 10 or 15% of the ideas that are out there now are sane and 80 to 85% are insane, we would still have the kind of technological progress that would generate the kind of changes I'm talking about. So this is a very exciting prospect. It's very important to be clear about the risks, but it's also very important to be clear about the real possibilities of this change. We could be in for a very dynamic period of growth in the transition to low carbon economy. And the low carbon economy itself will be cleaner, quieter, safer, more energy secure, more biodiverse. So it's not simply seeing the big risk, which we must, but it is also seeing the attractiveness and the feasibility of the different ways doing things. Now, that's where we have to set ourselves off. Now, that's the whole basis for the story in Copenhagen. Unless we share an understanding of the risks, unless we share an understanding of the possibilities, we will not come to the kind of collective action which will be fundamental. So let me spend the rest of my time on Copenhagen itself and on where we go from there. But the foundations in those two stories I've told of management of risk and recognizing the risk is very big, and the attractiveness of the story of the transition to low carbon growth and then low carbon growth itself are absolutely fundamental. Unless we win the argument through analysis, through demonstration about low carbon growth, the politics of getting there is going to be extremely difficult. Now, I believe that we can win that argument, and we're already seeing the power of the example, but it needs to get a lot stronger and very quickly. Now, what about Copenhagen? Well, it was pretty chaotic. It was pretty disappointing. There are a few of you here, not many, but there are just a few of you here who remember student politics of the 1960s. The chaos of the discussions reminded me very much of points of order being made at students union meetings and the insistence on total unanimity, and that the president of the union had no margin of negotiation whatsoever. If he gave an inch to the university authorities, they would have to come back to the students union meeting and renegotiate the deal. That's the kind of atmospherics that you can think about in Copenhagen. It was wearing and it was tiring and it was disappointing. But on the road to Copenhagen, many people. Sorry, many countries articulated their own targets for the first time, including United States and China, targets for emissions reductions. More than 100 presidents and prime ministers came to Copenhagen as a demonstration of their concern with the seriousness of the issue and the willingness to try to grapple with the difficulties of getting an agreement. When I was writing the report for Commission for Africa in 2004, 2005, we went to Gleneagles for the G8 summit. There were two subjects there in Gleneagles, Scotland, there were two subjects, Africa and climate change. I was there because I'd done the report, the Commission for Africa, but I listened in on some of the discussions on climate change. There was eye rolling, boredom, yawning. There are two or three of the G8, generously speaking, now, who took this subject seriously. This was a transformation in terms of the world politics of this in a period of four or five years. So the fact that emissions reductions targets came in before Copenhagen, the fact that there were so many people there and the fact that you got a Copenhagen accord which said 2 degrees centigrade as the target. It said $100 billion per annum of finance, rich to poor countries by 2020. It argued for a high level panel to generate suggestions on new sources of money. It made significant progress on forestry and on stopping deforestation and so on. Those are basic. Gave us a basic platform for moving forward. Has that basic platform, as it seemed then, has it started to turn into a real platform? Yes, it has. Because in Copenhagen there were two annexes. This is the stuff of international negotiations. You've got to have annexes. There are annexes, one for the rich countries and one for the poor countries. By January 31st to fill in their emissions ambitions or emissions reductions ambitions, over 70 countries covering more than 80% of the emissions have submitted. Covering more than 80% of the emissions have submitted by that. Well, at or close to that January 31st deadline, the high level panel chaired by Melis Sanawe, Prime Minister of Ethiopia, who proposed the target on finance and proposed the panel. That panel has been set up co chaired by Melas Sinawe and by Gordon Brown, currently the Prime Minister of the uk. Those two will be co chairs. There's a panel of some very strong People. Montek Singh Aliwali, the head of the planning commission in India. President of Jagdeo of Guyana, Prime Minister of Norway, Trevor Manuel, one of the longest serving outstanding finance ministers in the world, from South Africa now working on the planning story in South Africa. These are the kind of people who are on this. It should be a serious panel, for better or worse. I'm a member of this panel and I. That panel is starting to work. There's a meeting at the end of this month, 31st of March in London last week. That story of the deforestation and combating deforestation, so called Paris, Oslo process to take that forward. It's a constructive meeting on March 11 in Paris now $4.5 billion pledged to support deforestation. Great welcoming by Brazil and other rainforest nations for the progress that's been made there. This is now with the submissions by January 31st with the work starting on the high level panel on finance, with the progress on deforestation. This isn't some abstract panel. This is not clinging at straws. This is serious work that is going on. And we're going to need serious, strong analytical work on finance, on deforestation and reforestation, on technology and technology sharing, which is going less slowly than many of us would wish, and on monitoring and reporting and verification, understanding what other countries are doing those two areas, technology and so called mrv, monitoring, reporting, verification. I think we're going too slowly on the analysis of finance and the work on deforestation. We're starting to move at a sensible pace and we're having the discussions about the scale of emissions reductions. Now, what does that discussion look like on the scale of emissions reductions? I mentioned that submissions have come in now covering more than 80% of world emissions. Emissions ambition statements have come in in response to the Copenhagen Accord. What do they look like? Well, if you add them up, if you put them together, it looks as if. If everybody delivers, of course, a big if. But if everybody delivers, it looks as if it would give us around 48 or 49 billion tons in 2020, not so far away from where we are now. Now, I argued that we should be around 44 now. I also said you can do a bit more earlier and a bit less later or a bit less earlier and a bit more later. There's no unique path that gets you there. And I think a more sensible path would look around 44, as I argued earlier in this lecture, 44 billion tons by 2020, but current statements look to be around 48 or 49. That's compared with business as usual. Difficult concept to define, but that probably would have been around 55, 56, 57 in 2020. So if you go, say, from 56 to 48, that's eight, and you'd need another four to get down to 44. So from that perspective, current articulations of ambitions take us 2/3 of the way in 2020 from business as usual to where we need to be. Now, that's substantial progress. Is it less than we wanted? Of course it is. Is it negligible? No, it's substantial. It's two thirds of the way from business as usual to where we need to be by 2020. If, of course, everybody delivers according to the ambitions that they have set out. So this is a story of real progress, but progress that is way too short of what we need. And it's only if we think of it in this way that we'll see what we have to do in the nine months or so between now and the conference in Cancun. Now, where would that take us? If you look country by country, I haven't got time to go into all the countries in detail, but there are a few countries that are absolutely crucial here. China, of course, is fundamental. U.S. and China are of the order of eight or nine. China a bit more than the U.S. now, billion tons, roughly speaking, according to China's plans, if you assume growth rate something similar to the past decade, China's overall emissions would rise from 8 or 9 now to somewhere between 11 or 12 in 2020. And if China went on in a similar way, so adding another two and a half or three, it would start to look like 14 or 15 by 2030. Now, remember, I asked you to remember these numbers and you did all remember them. We have to be well below 35 billion tons as a world by 2030, probably 30 or 32, something around there. If China, taking current plans to 2020 and extrapolating a little bit, moved to 14 or 15, out of China being 17 or 18% of the world population by then, out of an overall budget of 30 or 32, it obviously would be extremely difficult to get to that overall budget. You know, if China's nearly half of it, it would be very difficult to get to that overall story if you run the numbers, because growth in China is a benefit to China and benefit to the world. If you run the numbers and ask the question, if growth averages over the next 20 years in China around 7%, it's an easy number to deal with because 7% doubles each decade. So two decades of 7% growth is multiplying by a factor of four to get back to something like the eight or nine where China is now, something would be close to somewhere in 25 or 30% of the total budget available. Then China, to get back to eight or nine, would have to have emissions per unit of output divided by a factor of four. Output's gone up by a factor of four. You want to come back to where you were in terms of absolute emissions. You've got to divide emissions by a factor of emissions per unit of output by a factor of four. Now that can be done. That can be done. It would mean a 20% reduction in energy per unit of output and about a 10% reduction of emissions per unit of energy every five year plan. The 11th five year plan, just finishing China looks like it will have met the target of 20% reductions in energy per unit of output. What I'm describing is absolutely not impossible. The United States, if you look at the numbers and think of the numbers in rich countries and poor countries across the world, should be dividing emissions per unit of output by a factor of four. Also over the next 20 years, if you look at the articulated intentions, China and the US are planning on dividing emissions per unit output by a factor of two and a half or three. That factor of 2.5 or three has got to be raised to something like four. Now, again, I'm expressing it in a way that tells us we're planning to go a long way, but not far enough. But what we should be aiming for is not so far away from what we're planning as to be regarded as impossible or a pipe dream. It's absolutely not. So we've got to approach this with a sense of urgency, a sense of clarity on the magnitude of the numbers, but also a recognition that these issues are being engaged with and they are being engaged with on something like the right kind of scale. Now, there's delivery and there's plans. One of the big difference between Chinese planning and other people's planning is on the whole, China delivers on its plans. And because it takes that seriously, it thinks very hard before it gives commitments. Politicians in other countries think of targets and they have another language. They talk about aspiration. No, it's not a target, it's an aspiration. Now, we tend to take our planning in other countries of the world in a rather more airy way than does China. China likes to work out whether the target that it's discussing can actually be achieved. And China did say to some people towards the end of Copenhagen that, you know, I think we could deliver a bit more than our targets. That was greeted well. It was very late in the day, but it wasn't picked up. That was an example of the ways in which, had we approached all this in a more collaborative spirit, had we been listening better to each other all around the world, we could have done so much better at Copenhagen than we in fact did. There's still an element of the G8 atmospherics there, with rich countries thinking that they work it all out and then explain to other people what they do. There was the inability to listen closely. There was the thought that everybody else doesn't understand my politics. Then you don't think about other people's politics. The politics of the twelfth Five Year Plan in China is playing itself out now. It will be published in about six months time. It's absolutely fundamental to this whole story. It's being discussed very intensively. We should be seeing what we can do to help, not giving lectures about what other people have to do and how they have to report back to other people. Question is, plans are being put together around the world. How can we help each other? Had we approached Copenhagen in this kind of way, we'd have done much better than we did. Now you can study international relations and many people at the Splendid School, London School of Economics, do exactly that. There's also a bit of common sense there. If you want to collaborate with people, you've got to think hard about where they are, what their structure, their society is like, how they come to decisions in order to be collaborative and constructive. So I've described Copenhagen itself. I've described key aspects of the last three months on the road to Copenhagen. And I've also, in terms of China's plans, United States plans, plans of other parts of the world described where we should be going. What we're going to need is a raising of our game, not only delivery of the targets that I've been describing, which are already there in the Copenhagen Accord submissions. We're going to need to raise our game. We're going to ask ourselves, can we do better than that? How can we do better than that? We've got another fight. We're going to find another 4 billion tonnes. Roughly speaking, I believe we can do that. We probably won one and a half from the developing world, won one and a half from the rich world. Some scope on deforestation and peat, some scope on international aviation and maritime. We really can practically put that extra 4 billion tons together if we really put our minds to it. But in order to see how we do that, In a collaborative way. We're going to have to have real progress first analytically and then in negotiations, not only on the overall emissions numbers, but on finance, as I've described it. Many sources of finance that we could bring to the table. Carbon tax revenues as they're coming in in different countries, auctioning of carbon permits as we should be proceeding to, certainly in Europe and then other parts of the world. We can have a tax on international aviation and maritime. We can have a financial transactions tax. We can. And the IMF is already working on staff, is working on a paper on how to use special drawing rights and the depositing of special drawing rights by countries of the world into a new fund, which then uses those in a bit of a Keynes World bank kind of way, to leave a borrowing to bring forward some of the expenditure. There's lots of ideas here on the finance, on the high level panel on finance. We'll be looking at them and sifting through them and weighing them up against public finance criteria and asking ourselves the question which is the best combination or which is the least bad combination relative to the standard criteria of revenue reliability of revenue incidence and equity, efficiency, administration and so on. Those are the kind of questions we'll be asking. Similarly, that intense questioning and analysis is going on in the Paris Oslo process for deforestation. We're still short of that discussion on technical sharing and technology sharing. There's a tremendous amount of ideas out there, some of them building on the kind of techniques that were involved in developing and disseminating new varieties of seed and technology in the green revolution. You've got challenge funds and cornerstone funds and funds being proposed to fund feed in tariffs. There's a whole range of stories on technological sharing. No shortage of ideas. But what we need is the sifting, the analysis of those ideas in a way that's internationally acceptable. That can feed into negotiations. Similarly, on monitoring, reporting and verification, we don't need, at least I don't think we need people to go scurrying around other people's countries measuring in each place. That would be seen as a violation of sovereignty and very difficult to put into place. What we need is transparency. You need to understand how measurements and forecasts have been put together. But current measurements need to understand of emissions, you need to understand how they've been put together. You need to understand the data source, they need to be shared. That's transparency. That's the kind of thing which is the bread and butter of life in academic institutions. That's the kind of progress we can make on Monitoring, reporting and verification. If we put a bit into technology, it's possible that some of this we could get from satellite observation. This is the kind of work, the technical work that scientists, social scientists, particularly social scientists need to be very active in over these coming year and months. But also of course none of these problems stop in Mexico and COP16 going on after that as well. So I believe very strongly that the role of serious social science. Of course I don't serious social scientist science, I mean hard social science, I don't mean as opposed to comical social science, but serious social science lies behind the analysis of risk management of effective on the scale we need efficient keeping costs down and equitable sharing of the activities and responsibilities. Serious social science is right there. That's the kind of thing we should be doing every day. It's the kind of clarity of foundations we ought to be bringing. The kind of hard work on the numbers, the kind of relating of our results to real policy decisions and real policy making. That's what we should be doing, that's what we should be teaching our students about, what we should be publishing our papers on, but also what we ourselves should be doing in terms of our own participation in discussions which are clearly vital for the future of our planet. Thank you very much.
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Thanks Nick. That was actually a very upbeat talk and very informative. Of course we're going to take questions now. I think there's microphones. We'll start downstairs, then I'll come upstairs and we'll take them in groups of three. So lady at the front. Yeah, if you could just sort of say you're not name please and where you're from that would be helpful.
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B
Okay. Eve Middleton Kelly, London School of economics complexity group LordStern. I agree with you with everything you said. However, as social scientists we work quite closely with policymakers and I think some of that clarity in some of the work is there. There is another part of the story which is how do we involve the individuals and the communities? How do we actually put forward these arguments so that they are sufficiently convincing to warrant a change in behavior? You talked about taxes. They are the stick. Where is the carrot? I think without the carrot, without that wish to actually be part of, to change one's individual behaviour. I don't think we will achieve it just top down it has to be done at multiple levels at the same time.
- [43:29]
A
A couple here please and then the gentleman to your right.
- [43:35]
B
Yeah, thank you very much. My name is Jani Ruta, I'm at Grantham Institute. At the beginning you hinted at the demand side of things by looking at choice between transport methods or diet styles. Currently, however, negotiations seem to be focusing on how much emissions are produced within the country's boundaries. So with the sort of neglect of that demand, the demand for emissions. So how do we make that transition? Well, first, does it make sense to make that transition, to think in terms of demands and how do we make the transition? Gentleman right there, Gideon Hoffman, these days for Forestry for Life. And we have a professional interest in raising serious private finance to put into developing countries, both to protect trees and plant new ones. And I know you are very sympathetic to that, but I wondered where you saw the policy instruments that would best Support that post 2012 going and briefly, because I assume it was a deliberate admission. I'm surely not the only person that's been bored at a dinner party recently by this Super Freakonomics book where they.
- [44:42]
A
Say we're wasting our time with this.
- [44:44]
B
And what we should do is global calling. And they misquote your earlier report spectacularly. But I wondered, do you see sort of some investment in sort of geoengineering or speculative approaches as part of the big picture? Thank you. We all have to be communicators, whether we're teachers or researchers who write or members of the public, which we are also. I do think communication is fundamental. I think that scientists and social scientists are not trained to generally in communication and policy, particularly about the management of risk, which is about the most difficult thing to communicate on that there is. And we have to get better at it, and we have to think about how to get better at it. We're dependent on media and responsible, thoughtful reporting of the issues, reflection and analysis in newspapers and TV and on the net and wherever you look is very important too. So I think our own relationships as academics, policymakers, policy advisors to policy makers, and our relationship with media, because mostly it will be through media that we communicate. I mean, we can't do everything in our village. I mean, we talk in our village and I talk in the pub, but there's a limit to what any individual can do with that kind of circle. So I think that asking ourselves the question, are we communicating well? Are we behaving responsibly? Are we transparent in what we do? Are we helping people from the media? I say, whichever sort of media it is, are we helping them with the kind of arguments that we think are necessary to put? And I think that second question is just as important as the first one. We have to do what we do better, but we also have to help media do what it does better. And that is, I think, quite a hard thing to do, because the pressures now are on shock, horror and speed. And this is one about reflection, about best methods of risk management. You know, you've got to get people to think quietly and wonder, and that's quite difficult to do, but it's not impossible. I don't think we do it terribly well as academics on the whole. Should we be looking at emissions from a country or should we be looking at emissions from our own consumption? I think we need to look at both. The international division of labour has changed radically over the last 20 or 30 years, with much more production now taking place in developing countries. That, I think is something which the world has generally gained from. And we go back to David Ricardo and it should be obvious that when we change the division of labour, it's usually because both parties benefit. So India and China earn higher incomes by selling manufacturers to us, and we get lower prices for our manufacturers by buying from them. So I think we're jointly responsible. Now. There's an asymmetry there now, I think, in which we look mostly or almost entirely actually, at the production side of the story about where stuff is produced and the emissions associated with that stuff. And I do think if we're thinking about allocations of responsibility, that we have to bring in some element and significant element of the sharing of responsibility, both consumption and production. The last question was from Gideon Hoffman, who was indeed. Hello, Gideon, member of the Stern Review team in treasury days. Two parts to the question. One was the deforestation story and how we actually support the reduction of deforestation. Deforestation and reforestation will have to be associated with development. A lot of it's about, for example, in many ways, but a lot of it's, for example, about pressure on land. A lot of it's about pressure on land which comes from techniques of production which use a lot of land. I mean, slash and I've been in some agricultural areas in Sumatra and in Indonesia where something close to slash and burn was going on. There's, roughly speaking, one head of cattle in Brazil per hectare. Per hectare must be a pretty lonely beast. But these are very land intensive, using a lot of land methods of production. In many parts of Africa, the forest is a source of fuel, and so alternative sources of fuel would be very valuable. So this is about a story of development in which deforestation is intimately linked. So it has to be about agricultural intensification outside the forest, using the land much more efficiently. It has to be about alternative sources of living, you know, Diversification away from agriculture, as well as the property rights of the people who depend on for their living, on the forest. In a very direct way, it has to be about governance. In some parts of the world, you see the army fighting for the police for who's going to do the deforestation. Now, in our charming language in the social sciences, we talk about better governance to make those systems work better. So the story has to be one of supporting the countries where the tree stands in their development and doing it in a way so that it's more attractive to keep the trees standing to all those involved, including the communities, including the loggers, including the ranchers and so on. Has to be more attractive keeping the trees standing than not. So that's the kind of thing we have to do. Now, what about geoengineering? Well, freakonomics is cute stuff and make nice Christmas presents, but we're talking about serious risk management here, not throwaway lines. And that's just throwaway stuff. Geoengineering is something we should study. You can try and stop the energy getting in with mirrors in space or muck in space. You can try and stop. Stop the energy getting in, that's one way. Or you can try to pull the carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases, out of the air. You can do it with mucking about or trying to muck about with the oceans to pull it out of the air. And there are other things which actually might be more productive. I mean, if we could pull the carbon dioxide out there and turn it into material for road building, as some of our friends are trying to do, then that kind of thing could work. But there was a good study by the Royal Society last year on various methods of geoengineering and we should be researching in this area. But would we be wise to stake the future of the planet on the results of that kind of research? It would seem to me to be very poor risk management and of course carries with it all kinds of other problems. Because if we start monkeying around with putting muck up in the air or mirrors to reflect stuff back or churning around the oceans, we don't know what kinds of effects that itself may happen. And of course they're real problems of democracy. Because if people decide to put muck up in the air, I mean, excuse my summary language for that, who would decide to do that? Individual countries or smaller parts of the world could decide to do that. So raises real governance issues. So the first is that we can't have the confidence that we'll get answers out of all this in Anything like the time scale that we need, even if things go well. Secondly, that there are probably all kinds of associated risks which we barely understand. And thirdly, in connection with those risks, there are real problems with decision making and governance and who takes those decisions. So let's research on them, but let's not flip over and pretend that there's a magic solution there that's irresponsible.
- [53:59]
A
Lots and lots of people want to ask questions, myself included. We're going to go upstairs and then downstairs. We do have about half an hour left. Persistent eye catching pays off. So the lady at the back first.
- [54:13]
B
Thank you. Marie. Beige Standard. And pause. Thank you very much for a very informative lecture. And my question is, how would you describe the Copenhagen outcome on the prospects for the US climate change legislation going forward?
- [54:27]
A
Gentlemen, about five rows in front and then we'll come over this side, over here.
- [54:34]
B
Yes. Neil Stockley, Bell Pottinger Public Affairs. I'd just like to ask a question, a further question about the process for getting to a global treaty. The European Union was sort of left out of the room in the final stages of Copenhagen. What do you see as the role of the EU going forward? How do they reinvigorate their role in the process?
- [54:59]
A
If you keep them short and sharp, you can both ask questions.
- [55:02]
B
Thank you very much. My name is Alim Abubakri, just completed my mba. I'm a Director of Strategy with TIC and the founder and director of these young minds. The question I was asked is related to more business. How will you propose or how will you advise businesses to manage strategically in the green economy, considering the uncertain political terrain now, there's a possibility that there will be a change in government and it's very possible that the policy of the incoming government may not be pro climate change. And I consider you to be a very to be an expert in this area because you have. You are a professor of economics and government. So it cuts across strategy and politics. Thank you.
- [55:50]
A
Just quickly to your left.
- [55:51]
B
Thank you. My name is Kirsty and In the year 2050, I will be 66 years old. Nick, you've helped us understand that the figures are very important in this issue. But what happens if, say, by 2020 we only hit 46 billion tonnes? By 2030 we only hit 41 billion tonnes. That's going to leave my generation with an awful lot of work to do to reduce emissions by 2050. So my question is this. How will you integrate an understanding and analysis of intergenerational equity and intergenerational implementation in your work, especially your collaborative work on, say, the panel. Thank you. Question from a friend from Standard and Poor's on prospects for the US I keep in close touch touch with my friends in the US But I don't want to pretend to be an expert on the politics of the U.S. although we all watch it closely because we have to. The United States did submit its targets for 2020 and it articulated its targets. That's a 17% reduction 2005 to 2020, and it submitted its targets as a 42% reduction 2005 to 2020 by 2030 on a 2.5% growth rate. That would mean emissions per unit of output over the next 20 years would be cut by a factor of three, roughly in the United States. So in this formal international arena, they have articulated those intentions, they have said, and it's understandable that this depends on getting legislation through Congress. And I guess we all, at least, I hope we realize that this is somewhat difficult thing to do, but that ambition has been stated and it's been stated by the US Authorities. I hope that they've got Plan B. If Plan A of the current legislation doesn't work and talking to the people involved, they do have a Plan B. I mean, it means a stronger role for states and cities and private sector in taking the lead. And it means a very significant role for the Environment Protection Agency. But I think action itself doesn't depend on, in a very narrow sense, this particular bill or this particular set of bills in Congress at this moment. I hope they get through. And I think, I mean, many of us are working to try to help them get through in ways where you have an outsider, you have to be invited to help. You can't go and give lectures. But I do think that the commitment amongst this administration is very clear. And the appointment of John Holdren, one of the world's great climate scientists, to be chief scientific adviser in the White House, the appointment of Steve Chu to the Department of Energy, Carol Browner and so on. These are the kind of appointments made by somebody who's very serious about the subject. And on the night of November 4th in Grant park, he spoke of a planet in peril and asked what the planet would look like if his daughters grew to the age of. I think it's Alice Nixon Cooper, I can't remember her name exactly, who was then 106. So he was actually President Obama, taking the right kind of perspective and appointing the right kind of people. What will happen in the politics of the the US over these next few Months, I simply don't know. And we can discuss. But I do think that it's not simply a question of whether this particular set of bills manages to get through. At least I hope not. It will of course depend importantly on what other countries do. And that's why I think Europe's so important and China's so important. And it may be that the United States is going to follow on after Europe and China. And if that's the consequence of action in Europe and China, then good. It would be better if the United States was more of a leader. But they are talking about the right kind of things now. What about the EU and Copenhagen? I don't blame our friends from the EU for what happened in terms of their actions in Copenhagen. I don't think there's much more they could have done given how the EU arrived in Copenhagen and the EU arrived with a number of prime ministers and presidents very keen to be leaders, acting as their own country's leaders. They wanted to be leaders. There wasn't a clear, flexible negotiating platform for the EU and there wasn't a clear person to negotiate for the eu. There were able people there, very able people there from the eu. They neither had negotiating mandate nor the identification of those individuals. So who is President Obama supposed to invite into that room? He couldn't have invited all the prime ministers and presidents of Europe who felt they were significant. There just would have been too many. There were only Brazil and South Africa and India and China, the United States in the room. So I think the problem at Copenhagen with Europe wasn't the behavior of the European people who were there. It was Europe hadn't done the necessary work ahead of time to work out a flexible negotiating position and to identify who was going to put that flexible negotiating position. Strong contrast here with the African Union. The presidents of the African prime ministers of the African Union asked Melisanawe in the spring of last year to speak to the African American Union at Copenhagen. He did exactly that. And he had the mandate to negotiate and he did exactly that. And he has now been asked by the African Union again at its meeting about a month ago to go on speaking to the African Union up until COP17 in South Africa at the end of next year. So I think we who take Europe very seriously, and I do take Europe very seriously and I'm an advisor to President Barroso as an allegedly high level group on energy and climate change, which I'm a member of, there's no shortage of good people. It's a question of Europe actually working out in this crucial area, how it's going to speak as Europe in a way that it has worked out, how it's going to speak on trade, that it does know what to do. So you argue like mad that you give somebody the authority to speak for Europe and you give them a flexible negotiating position. I don't see any other way. Now, having said that about preparation, I do think that if Europe went to 30% reductions and made it very clear that it was very ready to go to 30% reductions 1990 to 2020, that could make a very big difference. That would be real leadership in terms of action leaders, leadership in terms of diplomatic involvement. It's really got to think through in a much clearer way how it's going to do that on strategy for business. Well, there are lots of risks. I mean, life's full of risk. And when you make investments, you take risks and you try to assess those risks as best you can. And I think investing in the greener areas looks a bit more risky with this outcome of Copenhagen than it might have been with a better outcome at Copenhagen. But if you look at investing in carbon intensive areas, that seems to me to be getting more risky all the time. Would you really build a coal fired power station now in the UK or try to that was not going to be fitted with carbon capture and storage? That would be an incredibly risky thing to do. You've got to anticipate what policy looks like 20 or 30 year down the track on those things. Would you now, if you're a car company, be putting a great deal into a new kind of gas guzzler that goes even faster and with bigger acceleration than the previous rounds? A gas guzzler, that'd be a very risky thing to do to put a lot of money behind that. So I think as people start to focus as they see the way we're going to have to go, even though we stutter in our steps from time to time, as people see the way we have to go, I think more and more the dirty approach, the high carbon approach, is being seen as a very risky approach and I think it is a very risky approach. So as ever with risk management, you've got to compare different kind of risky activities. And I think over time the whole green area is getting less risky relative to the dirty area. And I think that's the way in which wise business is looking. They're looking not only at government policy and where that might go, they're also looking at what their consumers want. About 18 months ago, Lee Scott at Walmart called about 1,000 of his suppliers together in China. Walmart takes about 10% of Chinese exports to the US and said, Our customers sometimes are worrying about how green we are. You're our supply chain. We know who you are, we know what you do, and this is what we want you to do if you want to sell through us. So I think you're going to find not simply people worrying about the risk of government policy, which they should do. They're also going to be worrying about risks associated with consumers and indeed trade barriers. Now, Kirsty will be 66 in 2050. I will be 103. And I'll be watching you, trusting that you made the most of your LSE education to really be helpful. Is there deep inequity between our generation and yours? Yes. Should that inequity be recognized? Yes. Should we act on that? Yes, we should. And I think it's a very powerful part of the argument. There's also an argument here, interestingly, that says for those of you who like your economics, and there are a few, this is the London School of Economics. Why don't we talk a bit of economics? This is an inefficiency, a market failure, because I am not faced without policy. I'm not faced by the price of the price costs of my actions in terms of their effect on other people. It's a market failure. Where there's a market failure, we can find a Pareto improvement. In other words, that means that we can find a way of making everybody better off. In this case it's future generations. So if we did it this way, I think my generation should do better than this. But if it did only this, if it said that, look, we will leave you less of buildings and roads, perhaps more of debt, but we will leave you a better environment. Now, because of the inefficiency of the kind I've described, there ought to be a way of constructing that so we're all better off. So we're at least no worse off than you're better off. Because, you know, debt you can pay off, buildings you can build, but a destroyed environment is very hard to get yourself out from. So the simple economics of all this, seeing as this as an intergenerational relationship game, if you like, should be able to identify this kind of improvement in a way that by restructuring our inheritance in the way I described, we make ourselves no worse off than you. Better off. But as I said, I think we should do better than that. And I think by investing more in the future, we would be of the environment as opposed to things which are not so attractive. We would be doing much better for future generations. And I hope many of my generation regard making future generations better off as a good thing and not just a trade off between us and you. On the whole, your being more cheerful and able to cope with your environment makes me feel better off.
- [68:52]
A
Okay, we've certainly got time for another round of questions. We'll come to the back. Gentleman very wisely wearing Aston Villa colours.
- [69:02]
B
Accidentally, I should point out, when you're Sorry. Matt Hope, University of Bristol Department of Politics Speaking about the international process, a bit earlier you were talking about the need for understanding and cooperation. You don't have to be an international racist scholar to know that that is an arguably optimistic outlook. So my question is, given Copenhagen and what's gone before and possibly after, are the UNFCCC structures and processes really the best way of going about solving this problem, or is there another level we could look at? Is it perhaps time for the UK or the US or whatever country to perhaps look in their own backyard and sort that out first?
- [69:40]
A
Right in the middle, there's a gentleman that's had his pen up for some time. If we could pass it along. Just behind you.
- [69:51]
B
Thank you. Ralph Land, former student it's all right for the skeptics and for the believers to accept the insurance principle and the security and risk management, but for the flat deniers and there are deniers, and the deniers, I suspect, are getting more traction, well financed, there's no need for that. How do we deal with that? And you know, you're nice, the chairman said so, but some of these other people are not. I think it's a big problem.
- [70:35]
A
That was the question I was going to ask you. Is this the London school to be coming? Simplification. Political science, obviously, Nick as well. So the politics of the opposition that's grown in the last five years. There was a lady. Yes. With glasses back. And then maybe, if we've got time, the lady in purple behind.
- [70:49]
B
Hello. My question is, I mean, it was discussed here about inequality of carbon emissions across the world and equitable share of responsibilities. And my question is in principle is how can you prevent from this point on the export of carbon emissions into the countries who are less powerful and, as we know, economically deprived. And you also mentioned about the IMF funds to go towards those countries to help in reducing those emissions. So how those funds can, by exporting the emissions, giving the funds to these countries who the emissions have been exporting, increasing their debts and putting them into Even more poverty in the future. Thank you.
- [71:39]
A
The last one for now.
- [71:41]
B
My name is Alice Cummings from DVC Panorama.
- [71:43]
A
I can't hear it very well, can you?
- [71:47]
B
It's Alice Cummings from BBC Panorama. I'm actually piggybacking a little bit onto the chap in the middle who asked his question, but I want to throw a figure in there, which is that a poll last month month said that 25% of people in the UK did not believe in global warming. That's not. Didn't believe in the cause or didn't believe in what the solution should be, but did not believe, full stop. So I suppose my question is, A, how worrying do you find that? And B, how is that. I didn't get that sentence, Sorry. Firstly, how worrying do you find that? And secondly, how on earth did that figure get that high? A group of questions about much stronger focus on politics. I was talking about the economics and the analysis of economic policy. That's inevitably a political story. But the fact that something's a political story is surely an argument for tighter, clearer analysis of the numbers and the economics. Because it's politics doesn't mean it has to have sloppy foundations. So I do think that the analytical side of the story is absolutely fundamental to getting the political arguments straight. And that's not all there is to getting the political argument straight, but it's fundamental. Now, when I said that we have to understand each other better if we're to make progress in terms of the politics and difficulties of individual countries, if we're to make progress in coming to international agreement, that's not optimism, that's actually, I think, analytical realism. It's very difficult to come to agreement with people if you don't understand where they're coming from. It's conceivable if you're clueless about where they're coming from, you could still find an agreement. Agreement. But what I was trying to articulate was the idea that if you understand somebody else's politics, it's surely much easier. Now, if there'd been clearer understanding of the way Chinese decision making takes place and the role of plans and targets in China's economy and society and politics, we all would have done better at Copenhagen. Similarly, we all have to realize just how difficult it is to manage for this president, or any president, to manage Congress. And that, again, I think if we're trying to work with the United States, that's something which we have to understand. So I was making, I think, really, a council of realism and pragmatism and practicality. In terms of my reference to other people's societies and the need to understand them. And that's why you should come to the lse, the or, Bristol, that's fine, too. What kind of processes should we have? Well, the UNFCCC process is very, very frustrating. I mean, it's 192 countries and it goes for unanimity. It's extremely difficult to draft and discuss in that kind of environment. But it's the only UNFCCC we've got. It's a convention now that stood since 1992. If we start by trying to rip it up, we will absolutely get nowhere. We will destroy trust, which is already quite badly eroded. So how do we work within the unfccc? Well, I've tried to articulate that. I've tried to say, well, let's do some careful analysis, let's do some work, so that before people get into the detail of negotiation, they got some idea about what are good ideas and bad ideas, what might work, what might bring people together in the analytical sense of good economic policy. And I gave the four areas which I've described, but we also need smaller groups towards the end, in Copenhagen, the right at the end Wednesday or Thursday, the G77, and there was this great fear of an ambush by the rich countries, made a suggestion that a small group of them, they suggested around 10, should get together with a small group of rich countries, perhaps around 10, and see what they could produce working together. That was an initiative that came from the G77 in the middle. A great deal of acrimony and mistrust and difficulty. It was a good suggestion. It eventually got taken up and in the way of things, if you put groups together, they grow, they don't shrink. So it got to 28 or 30, as everybody wanted to be part of the group. But it was a group which did start to make progress. And it wasn't just the basic countries, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, together with the United States, which put the accord together. It was more than that. I mean, they were the ones who put their names on it, but it was more than that, and it was part of that process. And the Mexican government has put together a contact group now for COP 16 based on the group of 28 or 30 that arose at the end of Copenhagen. So that, I hope, will be a way to use the kind of output that these kind of study groups I'm talking about come up with and start to translate that into agreement in a group which has got more chance of working together and getting specific results. But it would have to be a story of construction of ideas and negotiation for the unfccc, not something separate from the unfccc. I don't see any progress other than through that route, given history, however frustrating we might find the structure of the UNFCCC to be. Now, what about skeptics and believers? You know, I tend to think of rational argument and rational analysis, not skeptics and believers. I was describing science and social science, not theology. And it's very important to stay rational and analytical. What's the alternative? Rational argument surely beats irrational argument, but you've got to try to understand where people are coming from and meet the arguments. And it's hardly difficult to meet the arguments of those who say that there is no greenhouse effect. You can draw their attention to the physics and try to explain it to them. If they don't want to hear, they don't have to hear. But I don't see any other way of doing it to them. In the same way as explaining to people about the laws of gravitation, you try to show them why it works. Now, in this case, you can drop apples on their head. But in case of global warming, it's much more difficult to do because you're anticipating an effect. But some of this is demonstrated in the laboratories in terms of the way in which different kind of radiation goes through different kinds of gases. So part of it is to assemble the evidence to get them to think about the ice age. And that was 4 or 5 degrees centigrade below where we are now. How people have to move to try to set out the evidence about how the world has been heating up. But if I could just pick up on this very. And I'll come back to the equity thing last, but to link with the question from a friend at Panorama, because it's the same kind of question, if you look at why it is that people are more skeptical about global warming and ask them, is it because they read all about the emails in University of East Anglia or the glaciers and their lifetime in the Himalayas? Some of them. Mostly it's been a cold winter. And if you look at, look at the same opinion polls and ask them why they think that they're skeptical about global warming. The bigger part of the argument, we've had a cold winter. Now, my friend Brian Hoskins, who's the head of Grantham Institute in Imperial, sent me a few days ago a graph of this winter relative to average winters in the last 20 or 25 years of the last century. There's only a little bit of the world where it's colder, it's Europe, some parts of the northeast, United States across to. Russia and so on. If you look at the temperatures elsewhere on the planet during this last four or five months, on average, they've been a good deal higher than the average of the last 20 years of the last century at this time. So I think laying out the evidence, if it's a bad winter that makes people skeptical about global warming, explain to people they live on a planet and different parts of the planet have had different kinds of experience, and here they are. This isn't so mysterious, right? So this is the kind of explanation we have to do. And you on Panorama ought to be doing exactly this kind of. You're there to promote responsible, serious discussion. Not to say I'm not accusing you directly. Let's talk about the media that, you know, if you find somebody who says the Earth is round and somebody who says the Earth is flat, do you give them equal air time? You know, if policy depends on this, giving them equal airtime is deeply irresponsible. And that's the kind of thing you've got to think through. If you find out that somebody may have been less than transparent about emails, may have been less than transparent in their academic work, may have been because there's a report coming in on what happened at uea, you ask yourself the question, if that person's work was deleted, what difference would it make? Now, I've never met the person in question, and it's quite likely that there's a lot of good work there. But let's just suppose that it's deleted. What difference would it make to a 200-year-old scientific argument? Joseph Fourier, the great French scientist, mathematics and physicist, who first worked out by looking at the heat stability and the heat equilibrium of the Earth, that something was trapping the greenhouse gases in 1820, was he part of a conspiracy? This must be a conspiracy with a time machine. This is absolutely incredible that the people in the media do not ask, what is the relevance of the news. I'm reporting for the big issue that we're trying to understand. That's where the responsibility lies, not in the reporting. Of course these things should be reported. Of course we have to have transparent discussion. That's absolutely fundamental. It's very important. The IPCC reports 1,000 pages. There must be 15 or 20 mistakes there. It would be incredibly low number of mistakes in a thousand pages. But we must open it up to scrutiny, ask ourselves where they are. Let's discuss them. Let's put them. Right. But also, what difference does it make to the basic policy argument about the risks we run from global warming? And you might also point out, if you look at some of the, indeed the majority of the publications of those who don't think that global warming is taking place, it's not 15 or 20 mistakes per thousand pages, it's several mistakes per page of real substance. So there's some very big questions of how the media have behaved in all this, which. Which I think they ought to reflect on and reflect on very carefully. It's the job of academics and those doing the work to try to help that process, not just you, it's all of us. But I found the nature of that discussion to be rather irresponsible.
- [83:35]
A
I think that warm round of applause. Applause indicates anyway, that we're coming up to 2 o', clock, but this is the most appropriate point at which to stop. I think Nick's outlined very clearly there the duties both of a social scientist and people within the media. I'd just like to end by asking us all in the usual way, to thank Nick for sharing his time and his thoughts with us today on the topic of beyond Copenhagen.