In the first part of this post, I suggested that the global banking crisis, and an economic downturn that may lead to years of recession, will bring about a change in the general public’s attitude to global warming.
Concerns about climate change are hardly likely to compete for our attention with real day-to-day fears about employment, the cost of living, pensions, and even the security of our savings and our homes. Exhortations to have blind faith in a ‘scientific consensus’ are likely to fall on deaf ears, and appeals for self-sacrificing compliance with costly schemes to save the planet will prompt question about what these measures are likely to deliver.
Of course, this applies mainly to the domestic sector of the economy, but what will be the reaction in the commercial world and in the public sector? Will the currently fashionable acceptance of the doctrine of climate alarmism continue to be the norm, or will there be a growing scepticism here too?
When a recession bites, plans for long-term capital expenditure come under scrutiny; uncertainties are likely to be reassessed and particularly the credibility of predictions that underlie plans for the future. Here are some examples of how predictions about the future climate influence decision makers who need sound guidance if they are to avoid making very expensive mistakes.
In the wake of the West Country floods last summer, the Environment Agency launched a campaign to publicise the need for a new Thames Barrier to protect London from flooding.
The BBC reported the story in these apocalyptic terms:
New Thames barrier could be built
A £20bn new Thames barrier could be built to prevent potentially disastrous flooding in London, it has emerged.
Environment Minister Phil Woolas told the Sunday Telegraph that a feasibility study into a second barrier for the city would report within weeks.
He said the probability London could flood had “doubled” from a one-in-2,000 to one-in-1,000 chance since the Woolwich barrier was built in 1983.
Experts fear that by 2030 the current barrier could be unable to cope.
Mr Woolas told the Sunday newspaper that ministers would have to decide whether to go ahead with building the new barrier “some time next year”.
Extreme weather
“This is no longer an academic debate. We have seen the floods in England and the extreme weather across the world,” he said.
“People accept that it is a real threat but they don’t realise the imminence of it. Hopefully if there is any good that comes out of the floods it will be that recognition.”
Now even proposing such a vast scheme is a very expensive business. It requires need-assessments, feasibility studies, surveys, reports from engineers and costing, before even approaching the decision making stage. But with climate scientists predicting that sea levels would rise dramatically during this century, and that the kind of extreme weather events that cause tidal surges in the North Sea would become more frequent and severe, one can hardly blame the Environment Agency for making preparations.
But a press release put out by the Met Office in September makes it clear that, in little more than a year, the science has changed radically. The estimates of maximum sea level rise as a result of climate change have been halved, and it is no longer thought that an increase in storm surges is likely to take place. The science that inspired plans for a new flood defence barrier has been discredited almost as soon as it was published.
We will probably never know how much time and money was expended on just planning for what would have been one of the biggest civil engineering projects ever carried out in the UK. The Environment Agency, and the ministers responsible for its funding, are likely to become rather more cautious about climate scientist’s advice in the future, and this will call into question the credibility of the research on which climate predictions are based.
Back in May, I posted (here) about a climate modeller’s summit that had taken place at Reading University. The main purpose of this seemed to be a coordinated demand for computers a thousand times more powerful than the biggest super-computers available today, so that climate scientists can produce more detailed predictions about future climate, although it was by no means clear that they would be any more accurate. This came at a time when climate modelling was under some considerable pressure. People had just begun to notice that global average temperatures have fallen during the last decade; something that no climate model has predicted.
One of the cheerleaders at the conference was the CEO of Anglian Water, who explained in a BBC interview that he is convinced that climate change is really happening and he needs the help of more sophisticated predictions of future climate so he can ensure that one of the driest areas of the UK will have a reliable and unrestricted supply of water in the future. Apparently his company is prepared to plan its infrastructure, and invest vast sums of money, on the basis of what climate models say.
But there could be a problem here. According to climate models, we can expect to have warmer, wetter winters and hotter, much drier, summers in future. But in fact, until the wet summers of the last two years began to refill the reservoirs, much of the area that his company supplies had been afflicted by a severe drought, requiring restrictions on water use, that was caused by a succession of very dry winters. During this period, summer rainfall was about the average.
If utility companies are planning investment on the basis of continuing changes in the climate caused by human CO2 emissions, and these changes fail to materialise, there is a very real risk that they will be creating an infrastructure that is inappropriate, and wasting money in the process. At the moment, temperatures are falling when they are supposed to be rising and rainfall is not following the pattern that the modellers predict. With growing pressure on companies to tighten their belts as the recession bites, it is not unreasonable to suspect that there will be some unease in boardrooms. Hardheaded businessmen will be asking questions about climate science too.
A few years ago, I travelled up to London by train during a short-lived summer heatwave. The next day I was due to go on to Harwich, and I had heard that high temperatures had caused problems with overhead cables on that line. When a couple of friendly Railtrack executives boarded the train and sat opposite me, I took the opportunity to ask them about this. They assured me that all infrastructure planning was now being undertaken with climate change, and higher temperatures, in mind. Such problems would not occur in the future. They spoke enthusiastically about the quality of the models that were now available to them. Whether their plans included abandoning provisions for very cold and snowy winters – regular events that has always come as a surprise to the British rail network – I dared not ask.
The rail system has suffered from chronic underinvestment for many decades now. What will be the consequences if what little capital expenditure is available is misdirected to address predicted problems that may never happen, while ignoring ones that will? We know that being prepared for the wrong kind of snow can paralyse the network, but what about planning for the wrong kind of climate altogether? If the conditions that the models warn us to prepare for do not materialise, and it looks as though temperatures are falling rather than rising at the moment, then climate scientists are likely to face some awkward questions. And a time of financial stringency, when everyone is trying to cut expenditure, is likely to concentrate the minds of decision makers wonderfully.
In mid- October, just when the initial shock of the banking crisis was beginning to give way to discussion of what had caused the financial world to collapse round our ears, the Met Office put a press release entitled, ‘Clearer view of the future for fund managers’. Needless to say this did not concern itself with the sub-prime mortgage market or the unwillingness of banks to lend to each other. Here is the first paragraph, but the whole thing is well worth reading:
As the financial markets continue to face an uncertain future, the Met Office has announced an agreement with HSBC to provide weather and climate-change information to fund managers through the creation of a Climate Change Research Facilitation Programme.
What follows is a sales pitch aimed at persuading other financial institutions to take up their offer of help.
Perhaps more than anything else that I have seen on the Met Office website, and I have posted about some pretty strange thing that they have posted there in the past, this seems to illustrate the extent to which one of the world’s premier research institutes is now out of touch with reality. Fund managers who are facing the prospect of financial dissolution are hardly likely to be thinking about climate change at the moment, but that is, perhaps, the least absurd aspect of this Met Office press release.
One of the causes of the banking collapse seems to have been the use of mathematical models to estimate risk. Furthermore, when Gillian Tett of the Financial times was asked on Newsnight recently what she thought had caused the crisis, this was her opinion: bankers had been trading financial instruments so complex that they did not fully understand them and therefor had to rely on advice from experts who had a vested interest.
It would seem likely that, for quite some time to come, there will be a large measure of scepticism about the reliability of financial mathematical models, and climate predictions rely on mathematical models too. As for experts with a vested interest who provide advice to decision makers on immensely complex matters that they have neither the time nor the inclination to understand fully, the parallel with climate science is inescapable.
It is probably a coincidence that the financial crisis has come just at a time when rhetoric about climate change is beginning to have an impact on day-to-day events. If climate alarmism is a hypochondriacal symptom of a self-indulgent, secure and prosperous society, then the circumstance that allowed that condition to develop are disappearing fast.
Can you provide an updated link for the September Met Office press release. Current one no longer seems to work.
Thanks
Many thanks Mike – Fixed!