We’re deluding ourselves – note my words

6 4 April 2016

f you’re looking for a chirpy, upbeat assessment of

how humanity will, in the nick of time, get its clappy

act together to tackle dangerous climate change,

then Kevin Anderson is probably not the person you

need to talk to.

Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the Uni-

versity of Manchester and deputy Director of the Tyndall

Centre for Climate Change Research, Anderson is one

of the world’s best known and most inﬂuential – and

outspoken – climate

specialists.

On a recent working visit

to Ireland, he ripped into

any complacent notion that

the Paris Agreement signed

up to by almost 200

nations, including Ireland,

last December meant that

we could all relax a little in

the knowledge that our pol-

iticians, guided by the best

scientiﬁc advice, are ﬁnally

getting on top of this crisis.

Some of his most devastating critique is reserved for

the IPCC itself or, more speciﬁcally, the wishful think-

ing that underpins many of its model projections. He

ﬂeshed this out late last year in a commentary piece

published in Nature Geoscience, where he took apart

some egregiously fanciful assumptions.

“The complete set of 400 IPCC scenarios for a 50% or

better chance of 2°C assume either an ability to travel

back in time or the successful and large-scale uptake

of speculative negative emission technologies. A sig-

niﬁcant proportion of the scenarios are dependent on

both time travel and geo-engineering”, wrote

Anderson.

He repeated this point forcefully during his presenta-

tion at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, to the obvious

discomfort of the representative of Ireland’s Environ-

ment Protection Agency, who found himself trying to

explain how completely untested technologies could,

somehow, be massively

deployed to remove

upwards of ten billion

tonnes of carbon dioxide

(CO2) from the air every

year, liquefy it and pipe it

into vast underground

storage where it would

have to remain securely

for at least the next 1,000

years.

Village sat down with

Professor Anderson for an

in-depth interview in

Dublin.

First question: what about our recent steps, such as

the new Climate Act – does Anderson think Ireland is

grasping the nettle of climate change?

“I think certainly not; what Ireland has signed up to

in the recent Paris Agreement, and particularly when

you think that Ireland is one of the wealthier countries

in the world, isn’t anywhere near what is necessary to

meet its (Paris) commitments”.

We’re deluding

ourselves – note my

words

Kevin Anderson says climate predictions

are foolishly optimistic

John Gibbons

ENVIRONMENT

April 2016 6 5

Kevin Anderson

While the same can be said for the UK and

much of Europe, Anderson stresses that “Ire-

land is a particularly wealthy nation, and it has

wonderful renewable (energy) potential; it also

has a very educated workforce. It has all that is

necessary to make the rapid transition to a low-

carbon energy system and indeed a

much-lower-carbon agriculture system – at the

moment, it is choosing to do very little in that

direction”.

So what about the view propounded by Irish

politicians from Enda Kenny to Simon Coveney,

that climate action is something we can kick

down the road for another ﬁve or ten years,

while concentrating on economic development

instead?

“That view completely, and I would say, delib-

erately misunderstands the science”, he

retorts. “It’s the emissions that we put into the

atmosphere now that really matters…these

build up every single day in the atmosphere”.

As for the oft-quoted argument that Ireland’s

emissions are a small fraction of the global

total, Anderson replies that every sector, from

aviation and shipping to countries large and

small, makes the argument that it only contrib-

utes a small share of the global total, but every

percent is equally important.

He is scathing of Ireland’s major expansion

of its ruminant-based agriculture sector, believ-

ing the argument that if we don’t produce vast

amount of beef and dairy products here,

someone elsewhere will do it less efﬁciently, is

bogus. “The climate does not care about (emis-

sions) efﬁciency, it only cares about absolute

levels of emissions, so if you are going to look

at Ireland you have to look at these absolute

levels”.

Measuring ‘efﬁciency’ of CO2 per kilo of beef

or ton of dairy produce is not, he argues, the

right way to think about it. “If you are really con-

cerned about feeding the world, then you

measure it in terms of the CO2 per useful calorie

you produce – that will almost certainly mean

you will have to move away from the types of

agriculture that have innately very high green-

house-gas emissions”.

Anderson describes the types of measure-

ments being deployed to promote the ‘Origin

Green’ image of Irish agriculture as “inappropri

ate and misleading”. A staunch public defender

of agricultural emissions is retired UCD meteor-

ologist, Professor Ray Bates, who has

repeatedly argued against an ‘over-alarmist’

response to climate change that might, in some

way, curtail our beef and diary sectors.

Bates’ principal argument is that ‘climate

sensitivity’ to CO2 may be on the lower end of

the scale. Anderson is unimpressed.

“I think it would be a foolish mistake to go

down the ‘let’s keep our ﬁngers crossed that

climate sensitivity is on the low end’ dead-end,

despite the fact that by far and away the major-

ity of scientists think it’s likely to be on the

middle to the upper end of the (sensitivity)

spectrum”. What’s at stake, after all, is the hab-

itability of the entire planet, and who would

want to leave that to the toss of a coin?”.

Anderson knows only too well the appetite

among politicians, policy-makers and parts of

the media for people who are prepared to down-

play the risks and urgency, but believes that

only by acting now in line with the scientiﬁc

advice can potentially disastrous and irrevers-

ible damages be avoided.

Quite how close we already are to the point

of no return, no one can say for certain, but

there is growing consensus that +1.5C, rather

As for the argument that Ireland’s emissions are a

small fraction of the global total, Anderson replies

that every sector, from aviation to shipping to

countries large and small, makes the argument

that it only contributes a small share

6 6 April 2016

ENVIRONMENT

than +2C, should be the upper limit before

really dire consequences become locked in.

The ﬁndings emerging from climate science

pose “fundamental questions about how we

have framed modern society, the whole concept

of economic growth, of progress – all of the

things that have served us very well until now”.

Indeed the 1.5C ‘target’ was in the end included

in the Paris Agreement. Unfortunately, based

on current emissions, the total carbon budget

for this target will have been exceeded within

the next seven or eight years".

He believes the model of constant economic

growth is fundamentally at odds with efforts at

stabilising the global climate system.

“As scientists, it’s hard for us to say this, as

it sounds like we’re touting a political message,

but I think it’s just the political implications of

our science”. Truly accepting the science means

making hard choices, profoundly challenging

our own entitlement to lead high-emissions

lifestyles:

“Quite a few of us on the physics side have

run scared of questioning the economics side,

but we’ve had physics for over 13 billion years…

somehow we think this ephemeral growth para-

digm is more important than fundamental

physics”.

Anderson hasn’t ﬂown, in over a decade. He

thinks the symbolism is important. “Every facet

of aviation is playing against the agenda of

avoiding dangerous climate change”. He

believes that it’s incumbent on people like him

to be morally consistent on emissions if they

really take their work seriously.

The changes being wrought by climate change

this century are, he says, playing out almost as

rapidly as the fallout from previous meteor

strikes. “From a geological point of view, we are

hitting the planet that fast, that hard – and con-

sciously. We know we are doing it, and we know

we can do something to avert it”.

Anderson is sceptical about the efﬁcacy of

carbon taxes, but does see merit in the notion

of individual ‘carbon rations’ being allocated.

This could mean that poorer people could

receive net income transfers, while wealthier

people would be heavily penalised for persist-

ing in a carbon-intensive lifestyle. The

advantage he sees in this system, apart from

social equity, is that the wealthy in society typi-

cally drive innovation, but only when the price

signals are clear.

He sees ﬁnancial transfers from high-emit-

ting countries to the lower-emitters not as

charity but as reparations. “We have imposed

on other parts of the world huge levels of

damage and… we have constrained their ways

of resolving these problems”.

The proposed transfer of $100bn a year is, he

points out, less than one ﬁftieth of the annual

subsidies propping up fossil fuel usage.

“Despite what we on islands on the western

edge of Europe might think, we are not insu-

lated from the impacts of increased foods

costs, of migration and military tension. All of

those things will play out in the UK and across

Ireland”, he adds.

Anderson is deeply troubled by the plight of

other species. “We have removed ourselves

from the natural world, when we are really part

of it, and completely reliant upon it…seeing our

selves as separate (from nature) has been part

of the problem here”. Earth sciences are, he

says, giving us “as clear a warning as we should

ever need that we have to do something very

rapidly”.

A crucial motivation for Anderson, beyond

just the science, is his sense of wonder, mixed

with growing alarm, for the natural world.

“There is a beauty to our planet, not as a

static Victorian view of it…the dynamics, the

beauty of evolution on our planet, and what we

have done, consciously and knowingly, is we

have come in like the meteorite and we are

destroying that process overnight…and we’re

not prepared to make the changes to avoid

doing this. To destroy this place of absolute

beauty…we have the arrogance to think we can

destroy, not just ourselves, but take the rest of

it with us”.

Asked to gaze into the crystal ball of the

world between now and mid-century, he

responds:

“The chances are we are going to carry on

choosing to fail. We will make the right noises

and sometimes for the right reasons, but with

the wrong reasoning; the issue about all this is

time.

We are choosing not to take notice of our sci-

ence, and even those of us who work on science

are not being vociferous enough about the

misuse of our science by policy-makers and by

wider society". He concludes. “We’re all in this

collective delusion together. We are choosing

to fail – but we could also choose to succeed”.

A full video recording of the interview with

Kevin Anderson is available at

www.thinkorswim.ie

The climate does not care

about (emissions) efﬁciency,

it only cares about absolute

levels of emissions

Anderson is sceptical

about the efﬁcacy of

carbon taxes, but does

see merit in the notion of

individual ‘carbon rations’

being allocated