6 4 April 2016
I
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