Inconvenient truth that can change everything

Inconvenient truth that can change everything
By Philip Stephens
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: October 5 2006 19:03 | Last updated: October 5 2006 19:03

They still do not get it. Tune in to the politicians and you could be forgiven for thinking they are finally grasping the significance of climate change. Sustainable growth is the political cliche of our times. Smart politicians have learned there are votes to be had from planting trees. Listen carefully and the rhetoric is mostly empty.

Climate change has become another box to be ticked, another discrete set of policy issues to be slotted in alongside the fight against terrorism, health and transport, crime and pensions. Clean power, carbon capture, biofuels and the rest merge into the vast blur of pledges and promises covering everything from shiny new hospitals to lower taxes. The trouble is, global warming is different. It should change everything.

This week I found myself listening to Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, talk about the internet. For reasons I never quite fathomed Mr Schmidt was speaking at the annual conference of Britain’s Conservative party. Afterwards he met the Financial Times.

If I am honest I was a little star struck. I do not often have lunch with billionaires, particularly ones who run companies that my 13-year-old son thinks of as “cool”. Mr Schmidt also pulls off what I suspect is a rare feat: he is at once inordinately rich, genuinely interesting and rather nice.

Enough diversion. Mr Schmidt’s theme was the slowness of politicians to grasp the significance of the web. Most by now, he said, had recognised the power of the internet; many had seen the role it could play in political funding. What they had missed was the sheer ubiquity of its impact.

The web was not just another high- tech advance, an, albeit important, adjunct to earlier manifestations of human ingenuity. The internet had rewritten the rules of production and distribution, vastly expanded the freedom to create and communicate and to organise and influence, and, increasingly, would alter the basic dynamics of democracy. Within a few years it could well give voters the power to test almost instantly the veracity of their political leaders.

Mr Schmidt is right. The internet is different because it touches our lives in almost every dimension – for good and ill. It has democratised access to human knowledge and torn down national frontiers to create entirely new communities of interest. It has empowered jihadis and pornographers.

Some of this may be a bit gushing and, in so far as it comes from the chief executive of Google, a bit self-serving. But it is also essentially true. For good and ill, the web has fundamentally altered the frameworks, economic, social and political, of modern societies. Politicians have been slower than their citizens to understand the connections.

Much the same can be said of the baleful response of political leaders to climate change, a potentially existential threat that dwarfs the dangers posed by international terrorism or rogue states.

Save for the flat-earthers in George W. Bush’s White House and their friends in the Exxon Mobil oil corporation, the science of the greenhouse effect is incontrovertible. The facts are spelt out in Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. I can claim no special knowledge as to whether Mr Gore intends to run again for the Democratic nomination for the US presidency. But it hard to imagine a more compelling manifesto.

We do not have to take Mr Gore’s word. Only the other day, the scientists at America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration reported that the world’s temperature is now reaching a level not seen in thousands of years. The Arctic ice cap is disappearing, all sorts of animal and insect species are migrating towards the poles. As the earth warms and snow and ice melt, darker surfaces absorb more sunlight – a process, known as positive feedback, which promotes still further warming.

The temperature rises seen in the past three decades, the Nasa study says, mean that the planet is now passing through the warmest period in the current interglacial period, which has lasted something like 12,000 years. Today’s temperatures are only about 1 degree celsius lower than the maximum seen for a million years.

The increase during the past 30 years is also strikingly close to the predictions made by the scientists who first modelled the effect of greenhouse gases during the 1980s. To continue to deny the link between global warming and carbon emissions is akin to arguing that we have still to prove conclusively that smoking tobacco causes cancer.

The effects – rising sea levels, unpredictable and violent weather patterns, increasing desertification – are equally visible and predictable. If there is an outstanding scientific question, it is just how close are we to the tipping point when the damage to the planet becomes irreversible?

The politicians’ response has been to fiddle as the planet begins to burn. Most display the timidity that comes with a failure to understand that climate change is more than just another policy headache. The rest are fearful of spelling out the consequences to voters. The best to be said of the Kyoto protocol is that the acceleration of global warming would have been still faster had it not been signed. Thus far negotiations about a successor agreement have scarcely been more encouraging.

Sure, plenty of politicians can talk the talk about carbon emissions, combined heat and power plants, wind farms, reforestation and the rest. Some will also tiptoe on to more dangerous ground by venturing that cheap air travel may not be an inviolable birthright.

All these things are important. They are also largely irrelevant for as long as climate change is treated as just another policy issue. If western governments, let alone China and India, are to forestall catastrophe, global harming has to become the political issue: generating a response that embraces and infuses every area of government and politics from economics to housing, scientific research to trade, foreign policy to human development.

It is not all gloom. An as yet unpublished report commissioned by the British government shows that the costs of action now are relatively modest – far smaller than those that would flow from delay. In the US, Mr Bush is looking increasingly isolated, and obsolete, as states and cities pledge to reduce carbon emissions.

The choice, in any event, is a simple one. We can leave our children to face the frightening consequences of global warming; or we can act to forestall it by rethinking radically the way we live and work. Either way, climate change, like the internet, changes everything.