It seems ridiculous today, with climate sensitivity models being tuned downwards, natural variability recognised as increasingly important, and climate institutions talking about a period of long-term cooling. Much of the urgency went out of the window after countries failed to agree on a successor to the Kyoto agreement at Copenhagen in 2009, and the costs and taxes of “low carbon” strategies are political poison.

But back in the mid-noughties, it was very different. The idea that the climate was reaching a “tipping point”, and that global temperature would runaway uncontrollably, was rife. It created a sense of urgency that helped pass legislation such as the UK’s Climate Change Act in 2008.

This story emerges from the FOIA2011 archive – the so-called Climategate 2.0 emails released last week. Although it hasn’t had the immediate and dramatic impact of the first leak two years ago, the breadth of social networks uncovered in these emails will keep historians busy for years – and whets the appetite for the 95 per cent of UEA emails still under wraps.

How ideas divide science and us

The idea of climatic tipping points is fascinating for several reasons.

The question of whether ecosystems are inherently stable – or unstable – preoccupied biologists for much of the last century – and was the subject of Adam Curtis’s film The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts, in a BBC series for which I was assistant producer, and which Curtis summarised here. Fashions change, and so do myths. Arthur Tansley, who invented the word “ecosystem”, believed in “the great universal law of equilibrium”, and this was pursued for decades. Today, the idea that ecosystems are delicate and unstable instead dominates.

The idea also divides scientists. Geologists, for example, point to evidence of long-term cycles, and stress continuity and predictability. For example, we roughly know how long interglacial periods last – we’re in one now, which is due to end fairly soon. And the idea also divides us. If you are of the view that mankind is a disturbance to a natural order, you’re much more likely to believe in runaway effects. If you’re of the view that nature is here to be tamed for our benefit – an idea born out of the Enlightenment – you’re more likely not to panic.

In 2000, New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell published a mish-mash of ideas that nevertheless spawned a buzzword. Gladwell found a common metaphor that could describe – but importantly, not quite convincingly explain – things as different as the spread of diseases, social behaviour (crime waves) and best-selling products. The phrase “tipping point” was everywhere.

Both Gladwell and Tansley were really making grand, metaphorical generalisations. Gladwell borrowed his idea from epidemiology, Tansley from the idea of the human brain as an electrical circuit. Both became universal “theories of everything”.

Into our story comes the magnificent Hans Joachim “John” Schellnhuber CBE, a German physicist and social networker, whose stratospherically high opinion of himself is not, it seems, shared by the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia. Today Schellnhuber is climate change advisor to the president of the EU Commission, and boasts of regular chats with Chancellor Merkel. He was a climate advisor to Tony Blair.

By the late 1990s Schellnhuber was a powerful and influential figure. Having founded the Potsdam climate research institute he was able to influence the establishment of a UK equivalent, the Tyndall Centre, and UEA was bidding to host it.

On his blog, Andrew Montford relates the tale of how Schellnhuber helped hand the Tyndall award to UEA, then took a post as its research director. This was a full-time job, but Schellnhuber concurrently held a full-time job at Potsdam – leading to incredulity from his new colleagues at UEA. “Even a very competent person could not possibly hold down two responsible, full-time jobs like this,” writes former CRU director Tom Wigley, in amazement.

Schellnhuber had become fascinated by complex systems and non-linearity, particularly the work coming out of the New Age-y Santa Fe Institute. (He formally joined the Institute last year.) This was deeply influential. What he saw terrified him: a world out of control. Let this hagiographic profile of Schellnhuber pick up the tale.

Schellnhuber

“In a conversation with a BBC journalist, I said ‘these are, more or less, tipping points’ [in climate change]. He immediately understood,” Schellnhuber told his profiler.

Schellnhuber capitalised on this with a paper, Tipping Elements in the Earth’s Climate System, co-authored with several others. Despite its speculative nature – “subsystems indicated could exhibit threshold-type behavior in response to anthropogenic climate forcing”, we learn. It has been cited over 500 times.

The death of the planet has been greatly exaggerated

Amongst the subsystems discussed are the Arctic sea ice, which could take 10 years to disappear, the collapse of the Gulf Stream (10 years), and the greening of the Sahara Desert (10 years). None look likely today, with global temperatures fairly static (or falling slightly – depending on how you fit the curve) for 15 years.

It was a deeply pessimistic point of view. But Schellnhuber welcomed the climate apocalypse, because he saw human beings as the planet’s enemy – and the planet must come before human life.

“In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilised something – namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people,” Schellnhuber told a conference in March 2009. Such a neo-Malthusian vision could only be turned into reality with unprecedented coercion and repression.

Earlier I referred to two competing views of the relationship between man and nature: the enlightenment view of optimism, of taming nature (and looking after it responsibly), and man as a destroyer. Schellnhuber’s pessimism belong firmly in the latter school, and that’s the view that’s dominated policy-making for 40 years. There’s a problem, in that it isn’t one shared that’s by the public; few parents or grandparents pray for their offspring to be worse off, or more less free.

There is little doubting Schellnhuber’s success both as a social networker and an influencer. At the height of the climate panic a few years ago, the sense of urgency became all encompassing, and convinced politicians and the media that these were extraordinary times, requiring extraordinary measures.

He was able to do so because of the media’s familiarity with a book aimed at the marketing business – and some sweeping generalisations. The irony of the story is that by over-dramatising the climate change debate, Schellnhuber may have had the exact opposite that he intended.

Doug Keenan, the statistician whose work highlighted severe flaws in the work of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia, has welcomed the Sunshine order to open up the station records.

Scientists need the raw data to replicate temperature records, but CRU refused to release the data requested – a subset of weather station records from around the world – to a top UK Oxford physicist, despite having already shared the data with Georgia Tech in the United States.

The ICO comprehensively demolished the reasons CRU offered – including intellectual property and fear of jeopardising international relations. In doing so, it’s raised the standard for academics working across all UK sciences.

“The ICO’s Decision Notice is an extremely well-reasoned work, with rigorous logic,” Keenan said. “They did similarly with the Decision Notice for my FoI request for the Belfast tree-ring data.

“Of course I am glad about the decisions that the ICO reaches, but more than that, the logicality of the arguments is strongly impressive.”

It’s a surprisingly aggressive ruling, in that it acknowledges the IP rights of owner of a database – but says that there is a greater public duty to disclose the data.

“Some of UEA’s claims are absurd, for example, that the requested data was publicly available,” Keenan told us. “It is clear, then, that UEA is trying to find some excuse to prevent disclosure of the data.

“What, then, is their real reason for not wanting disclosure? If UEA is truly interested in advancing scientific understanding, why do they not want to make their data available to others?”

Reader comments on the story have produced some fascinating responses: lifelong anti-copyright zealots can be found explaining the benefits of copyright, and veteran “open data” crusaders advocating data be kept under wraps. Climate debates can do strange things, with cherished principles being jettisoned – the means apparently justifying the ends.

Keenan says he wasn’t impressed by the support for the CRU academics from the new warmist president of the Royal Society, Paul Nurse. At a recent meeting, Keenan took issue with Paul Nurse’s claim that CRU academics felt “bombarded” with FoI requests.

“I stated that the claim was false, and gave a summary history of what had actually happened. Nurse replied that if scientists felt that they were being bombarded, then the scientists were being bombarded.

“Nurse is plainly being illogical. He seems to believe that scientists always have honorable motivations – including when refusing to disclose data. The ICO Decision Notice provides further evidence that such a belief is unrealistic.”

It’s not the finest hour for the Royal Society which advanced the scientific method from its foundation in 1660.

On a more positive note, Keenan welcomes the BEST Project in Berkeley, California, an exercise to produce a reliable temperature record with more complete data than the world’s largest data set, the GHCN (Global Historical Climatology Network) record maintained by the US National Climatic Data Center.

A large number of station records outside the United States were removed between 1988 and 1992, resulting in more interpolation. Critics say this cooled the 20th Century temperature record.

BEST is documenting its methodology, and the algorithms it uses. So hopefully, no FOIA requests will be needed to replicate their work. ®

Is it time to decouple “Climate Change” from the Department of Energy and Climate Change? If it was the plain old “Department of Energy” again, it might spend more time researching new fuel sources. Two peers last week took aim at the department because its latest energy blueprints are ignoring the potential impact of shale gas.

The government is “re-consulting” (in its own words) on national energy blueprints, also known as the Revised Draft National Policy Statements, up to 2050. But one of the Lords expressed surprise during the gathering that the latest didn’t mention shale at all.

“There is the possibility that potentially abundant supplies of unconventional gas will result in considerably lower gas prices,” said Lord Reay, continuing:

“The Government apparently cannot find space in several hundred pages of their energy national policy statements to acknowledge the existence of this potentially game-changing development. Gas is now cheap, the price having decoupled from the oil price, and it is going to be accessible in many countries worldwide, not least in Europe. “It emits 50 per cent to 70 per cent less carbon than coal, with the result that when the previous ‘dash for gas’ took place in the 1990s and gas to some extent took over from coal, our power station carbon emissions fell overall by some 30 per cent.”

Indeed, and what’s not to like?

“What is the point of persisting with ever-rising subsidies for wind power in order to meet renewable energy targets when abundant, cheap and relatively CO²-clean gas is available?” asked the Scottish peer.

According to Lord Reay, the problem is that any substantial new gas power station now needs to demonstrate “readiness”. CCS will require a national grid of pipelines to take the carbon dioxide out to sea… or wherever else they decide to send it.

Lord Jenkin echoed Reay’s comments, and wondered why it was omitted from the 2050 blueprints when it was “mentioned in a briefing sent to a number of us last November by the department”. This stated, he pointed out that “Additional supplies in the US may now have a limited impact on international gas markets (since it [the US] is now largely self-sufficient), unless the US were able to export some of this gas”.

So the department knows it is there. It just doesn’t want to investigate it.

In response, Lord Jonathan Marland, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at DECC, said: “We welcome shale gas, of course; if it reduces the price of gas, that will be fantastic. There are no signs as yet that the Americans are going to supply it to the outside world, as they are intending at the moment to keep it within their own country, but anything that reduces the price of gas will be of great benefit.”

But the US does need not export gas for the UK to benefit, however, since we may be sitting on a substantial shale gas reservoir. Asset management giant The Carlyle Group is backing a planning application to explore shale in Blackpool. There’s more on that on the shale blog No Hot Air, here.

Today, pubicly-funded academics at the Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester called for a pre-emtive moratorium on shale fuel investment, citing unspecified health concerns and saying the new fuel sources will “increase the risk of entering a period of ‘dangerous climate change’”… as well as local issues such as “high levels of truck movements”.

Back to the Lords – where the debates’s fruitiest remarks came from Lord Deben, the peer formerly known as John Selwyn Gummer.

Deben began by acknowledging that he had fingers in several pies. His chairmanships include greenwashing outfit Sancroft; Veolia, which is big in recycling; offshore wind company Forewind; and Corlan Hafren, the Severn barrage company. There are more directorships.

Perhaps having so many bets on the table explained his position, which is an unusual one.

“The argument is over. There is no point in arguing,” he insisted. “If you do not believe in climate change, you must just accept the population argument and the changes that will be needed to reserve and conserve the resources that we have,” he said.

So heads he wins, tails you lose. He accepted that the consumer would pay the price, but said they’d be grateful in the long run.

“It would be foolish to tell people that because they do not like the rise in the cost of electricity we should not allow it happen. They will be much angrier if we allow the world to be endangered because we have not taken these steps.”

The Ex-Gummer is President of GLOBE International, the international club that flies eco-aware politicians around the world. ®

Related links

Consultation on revised draft National Policy Statements for energy infrastructure

Can Shale Gas transform UK energy policy? – No Hot Air

In a utopian report, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) says the UK needs £20bn additional spending on recycling infrastructure over the next decade. The recommendation is made in a report today that proposes “unlocking value locked up in the UK’s current waste” – which sounds great – but the report fails to tell us whether the value unlocked will exceed £20bn. Alas, no attempt at all is made to quantity the costs and benefits of the recommendations – which are grand indeed.

No new public money is likely for waste infrastructure once the current PFI-funded projects are complete, which worries the engineering trade group. It has expressed concerns that current technologies are immature and unreliable, which can only deter investors. But, in a splendid bit of utopian speculation, the State of the Nation report proposes that by 2050, “the circular economy is a reality and the waste industry has fully converted into a materials supply sector”.

This is a lofty ambition: only 9 per cent of British waste comes from households to begin with. And, the ICE notes ominously, China may stop taking our recycling as it advances economically. The engineers also advocate new tiers of administration to co-ordinate waste management.

These are, specifically:

• a sub-national body taking the role of identifying sites for strategic facilities;
• an aggregation of local authorities determining the quantities of waste required to trigger the creation of new facilities – and then planning their delivery; and
• a national waste management council made up of representatives of national and local government creating a waste infrastructure plan by consensus.

The ICE added “sustainability” to its mission statement in 2003.

Recycling is rubbish

The engineers’ report caused controversy on its launch day with the observation – rarely acknowledged by environmentalists – that the discovery of recycling by the Volvo-driving classes in recent years has actually er … made recycling more costly and difficult. There were mature markets for recovering aluminium, paper and glass from waste long before eco-campaigners adopted it as a cause, and turned it into a moral issue (and personal obligation). To cut a long story short, since local councils’ targets stress quantity over quality, very little recycled waste is worth very much, and some of it is dangerous. A paper recycling mill has had to stop taking British paper because it contains too many glass shards.

The story of how recycling mania was born 20 years ago is sweetly told in this landmark New York Times magazine feature from 1996, which describes how Americans erroneously came to believe the country had run out of landfill sites. As with many superstitions, it spread like a contagion through the college-educated middle classes.

Localism met gesture politics, and authorities rushed through mandatory recycling targets, even though these offered only “short-term benefits to a few groups – politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organisations, waste-handling corporations” and imposed a serious opportunity cost, “diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems”. It was more important to be seen to be doing something.

“Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources,” concluded the New York Times‘ John Tierney.

The EU is blamed for the current situation, after it ordered the UK to cut the amount of municipal waste it throws into landfill from 85 per cent in 1999 to 35 per cent by 2020. The Governments reponse was huge tax rises in the cost of using landfill sites. But recycling isn’t the only alternative, of course. A report prepared for the London Assembly in 2009 called “Where there’s Muck there’s Brass” [pdf] estimated that if London’s landfill was burned, it could heat 625,000 households and provide light for 2m more homes. Side benefits would include more compost, and even a net CO₂ reduction.

So why aren’t we burning our waste, safely, and helping the old and the poor get through a freezing winter?

The most compelling reason I can find comes via a US study which estimated that incinerating 10,000 tons of waste took up one full-time job. Disposing of the same amount into of landfill needed six full-time employees. But recycling 10,000 tons of waste created “work” for 36 people.

Which gravy train do you think you’d choose?

One of the few surviving cows gives its opinion of the Climate Change Act

It’s full steam ahead for a low carbon Britain, the UK Committee on Climate Change says in its fourth report [1], published today.

The CCC is the Government’s primary advisory panel on cutting CO₂ and was established in the 2008 Climate Change Act. But there will be a price to pay for this utopia.

The CCC recommends a carbon tax on food, leading to higher beef and sheep prices – and “rebalancing diets” away from red meat. Meanwhile, household access to electricity will be restricted – thanks to smart grids – or taken away completely, with electricity rationed via a completely automated supply. You’ll do the laundry when you’re told to, not when you want to.

The CCC recommends a 46 per cent cut in CO₂ emissions in the UK by 2030, relative to 1990. This will mean “radical” reforms to electricity supply and 60 per cent of the UK car fleeting driving electric cars or vans.

Hydrogen could power half the buses, the committee suggests. Biomatter and biogas should provide 20 per cent of industrial heating by 2025. And 30 per cent of households should use ground heat pumps instead of conventional heaters.

To achieve these targets, the committee takes a grimly deterministic approach: there is simply no alternative.

“The decision for society is not whether to invest, but which forms of low-carbon generation to invest in,” it declares.

Power generation presents the biggest obstacle.

“Our power sector decarbonisation scenarios would require early investment in nuclear and wind generation, with diversification to CCS and possibly marine and geothermal generation depending on what demonstration projects or increased deployment reveal about these technologies,” the CCC notes.

The committee acknowledges that the low carbon generation sources are much less flexible than fossil fuel power stations today – the wind can’t be guaranteed to be blowing when you need it to. As the report notes:

“The need for flexibility will increase as more intermittent wind generation is on the system – wind is variable, volatile and difficult to forecast.”

In addition, “nuclear and coal CCS are less economically and technically flexible than conventional plant, being both more capital-intensive (and therefore more sensitive to the load factors at which they are run) and less able to ramp their output up and down (eg they have higher minimum stable generation levels and longer on and off times).”

And there’s another problem.

“Decarbonisation will also increase the level and the variability of demand, through the electrification of heat and transport. In particular, demand for electricity from the heat sector could add significantly to the need for flexibility by increasing the variability, seasonality and peakiness of electricity demand.”

The answer? Several have been suggested. The UK could import more power via a European power grid, and trade electricity with “North West Europe” (presumably this means Norway – the Norwegians have hydro-generated electricity in abundance). Or the country could have more in reserve, thanks to pumped storage. Or the power companies could modulate demand.

This is presented as a consumer choice (“enabling consumers to shift non time-critical demand to non-peak times”), but really the key is taking choice away from the consumer – personalised power cuts, if you like. Or no control at all.

“An important element of a smart grid is a ‘smart meter’ which will allow display of energy usage data in real time and remote or automated control of energy usage by suppliers and consumers [our emphasis].

“Meters will allow supply to be controlled remotely,” the report stresses, as if we missed the point.

As for alternatives, ground source heat pumps cost between £10,000 and £17,000 and require a borehole to be drilled. No attempt has been made to count the number of suitable properties or the capital cost – the CCC does acknowledge that discomfort is a factor, and many users don’t know how to use them.

The Climate Change Committee reckons its computers models are “robust to a range of scenarios” (click to enlarge) [2]

Fill up your car at the plugpoint…

Driving will be all electric, the CCC suggests:

“100 per cent electric car penetration in the fleet is required by 2050 to meet the 2050 emissions reduction target. Given the delays caused by fleet rollover, early deployment of electric vehicles is required, even though this may initially cost more than the carbon price, to ensure that electric vehicles deliver the required amount of abatement in 2050.”

It’s required, but it’ll be tough given current technology.

Just 55 [3] electric cars were sold in the UK last year.

The CCC recommends road pricing, and a reduction of the speed limit to 60mph – which would be strictly enforced – but in a rare admission acknowledges that there’s a political risk to these.

By contrast, as with previous reports, there’s little acknowledgement that industries such as steel and coal will leave the UK if the measures are introduced, and other countries don’t reciprocate.

The answer? Everyone implements the UK policies.

“Full mitigation of competitiveness risks would require integration of regional carbon markets or similar carbon constraints across countries such that there is uniform global carbon price,” we learn.

The report acknowledges more people will be poorer. Fuel poverty is defined as a household spending 10 per cent of its income on energy bills – and a third of Scottish and Ulster households fall into the fuel-poor category.

“Gas and electricity prices to 2020 are expected to rise faster than in our 2008 report, and household income growth is likely to be lower than previously envisaged. Therefore the number of fuel poor at the end of the third budget period is likely to be significantly higher than we projected in 2008, although not as a consequence of meeting carbon budgets,” says the committee’s report.

Nevertheless, the CCC insists the impact will be “neutral”, if subsidies and income transfers are put in place.

Finally, the food suggestions are sure to draw some attention. Agriculture creates just 7.7 per cent of UK emissions, and this figure has already declined from 10 per cent, but it isn’t spared.

The CCC proposes “demand-side abatement” and a “rebalancing of diets”, with the population urged to eat more vegetables and white meat. To achieve this, “information provision” and taxes are encouraged.

“Carbon taxes on food could be an effective lever to curb emissions from agriculture in the long term” the CCC advises – although this will mean more expensive beef and lamb.

It’s a magnificently ambitious programme, all in all.

Just to put things in perspective, in other news today, we learn that France is slashing the subsidies it pays out for solar power generators, and capping the number of installations, calling it a “speculative bubble [4]“. The feed-in tariff is 10 times the market rate, and the consumer faces paying €54bn more than they would have otherwise by 2020 for solar energy. ®

Links

1. http://www.theccc.org.uk/reports/fourth-carbon-budget
2. http://andreworlowski.com/wp-content/uploads/power_sector_decarb_large.png
3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8181585/The-Nissan-Leaf-that-could-be-heading-for-an-expensive-fall.html
4. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-30/france-must-triple-power-tax-to-pay-edf-s-solar-costs-update1-.html

Each year UK record labels send out 25,000 promo CDs. In new research released today it is estimated that the manufacturing, packaging and transportation of these deadly items creates 1,686 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s 10 times as much CO₂ as is generated by distributing the music electronically. But only a quarter of promo music is distributed electronically, today, and music groups the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and the Association for Independent Music (AIM) have called for that proportion to be increased – for all our sakes.

(The research estimates a digital file “emits” 62g of CO₂.)

Former EMI chief executive and current BPI chairman Tony Wadsworth said today that the new research “provides clear evidence for a responsible way forward for all labels big and small. We will be encouraging everyone involved in promotion – labels and media alike – to reflect on these findings and consider how they can speed up the move towards digital distribution.”

Switching all promos to digital delivery would save 240 tonnes.

Just to put that in perspective, underground wildfires in China produce up to 450 million tonnes of CO₂ a year. The amount of CO₂ produced by new build coal power stations around the world, which help millions of people out of poverty, is around 500 megatonnes a year. Total CO₂ emissions from coal are 5,814 billion tonnes of CO₂ , rising to 6,820 in 2035. In other words, we could turn all the world’s coal power stations off for about twelve milliseconds.

Every little helps, though.

The research was carried out by Alison Tickell for her music business environmentalist group Julie’s Bicycle. Tickell is a member of a global warming dynasty. Her brother Oliver earns royalties from carbon offsetting, while her father, the former diplomat Sir Crispin Charles Cervantes Tickell, is credited with convincing British PM Margaret Thatcher of the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming in the late 1980s. By 2003, Thatcher appears to have recanted – and in her memoir Statecraft doubted the warnings of politically-motivated “doomsters” and described their anti-industrialisation policies as “costly and futile”.

Tickell Snr is a patron of the Optimal Population Trust and made an ominous prediction to an interviewer last year: “It’s one animal species out of control,” he said – meaning us, “and the awful thing is that if we don’t control it then Mother Nature will do it for us.”

Bootnote

The music business has done its bit already. Sales of physical CDs have fallen by 20 per cent from the 162m units shifted in 2004 – more than cancelling out the entire promo effect. Or, another few milliseconds of coal-fired power carbon emissions.

A study correlating economic and political changes in China’s Middle Kingdom has found that warmer climate benefited society. By contrast, a fall of temperature of 2C was correlated with conflict and famine.

“The collapses of the agricultural dynasties of the Han (25-220), Tang (618-907), Northern Song (960-1125), Southern Song (1127-1279) and Ming (1368-1644) are closely associated with low temperature or the rapid decline in temperature,” say the academics led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Historical studies are problematic in two ways, and you have to be careful not to fall into one of two obvious elephant traps. One is that politics very much determines whether a society gets out of a pickle or goes into a decline. So deterministic views such as Jared Diamond’s in Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse tend to underestimate this capacity for change.

The other (not entirely unrelated) trap is that we’re no longer at the mercy of nature, and thanks to technology have tamed it to a significant degree. We don’t have a “peak wood” or a “peak whaleblubber” crisis today. Even the IPCC grudgingly admits as much. “The marginal increase in the number of people at risk from hunger due to climate change must be viewed within the overall large reductions due to socio-economic development.”

Well, obviously. Although slight increases in temperature (and CO2) result in higher productivity, wealth remains a much bigger factor. It’s poverty that makes people miserable, not the climate. And lifting a couple of billion people from messing about in the mud, and into a modern, largely urban, technological society effectively removes them from the risks our great-great-grandparents used to worry about.

The idea that tiny changes in climate (either way) cause catastrophic effects, against which we’re powerless, is really the last in a line of medieval superstitions.

As Roddy Campbell writes here, if you’d asked people in 1900 what would happen if temperatures rose by one degree, you’d have got the same prognosis you hear from the “bedwetters” today: “hunger, war, migration, desertification and water shortages in 2010… Pretty grim, wouldn’t you think?” Yet here we are, and life expectancy is higher than ever. The fear of science and technological innovation runs so deep with some people, that self-flagellation is always preferred.

Even significant long-term falls in temperature – such as the ones we can expect quite soon – can be made tolerable by adaptation and technological innovation. Nigel Calder this week revisited the study of Milankovitch cycles he published while editor of Nature in 1974.

The extrapolation suggests that the next ice age began five thousand years ago and it’ll get quite chilly in the next 120,000 years.

“This ice age looks like a relatively slow starter,” Nature reported. “The theory, though, is of widespread snow that fails to melt in the vicinity of 50°N in summer, so that large areas of North America, northern Europe and the USSR will have to be encrusted with ice sheets during the next few thousand years.”

On the other hand, the Sahara would return to being warm and wet, as it was during the last ice age, and would be fertile again.

Even life above the 50° line (which includes the whole of the UK) need not be grim. I suggest a row of nuclear power stations at Hadrian’s Wall, discharging warm water around the coastline and inland via a heating/irrigation network. That should keep things toasty.

 A hundred years ago, the socialist utopians had a vision of what they called “a world without want”. The Zero Carbon Trust published its vision of Britain in 2030 earlier this month, and it’s one where people’s “wants” will substantially increase. Particularly anyone wanting, say, a lamb chop with rosemary and garlic, or a Shepherd’s Pie.

The Trust wants British livestock be reduced to 20 per cent of current levels, and since shipping in frozen meat is carbon intensive, and verboten, you’ll have to do without. Or be a Lord to afford one.

This one example is just one of the random miseries to be inflicted on the population as part of the Trust’s proposed “New Energy Policy”, a collection of ideas assembled with the scattergun enthusiasm of the Taliban.

Let me give you another example of how what was once an idealistic progressive impulse can turned into what we might justifiably call an “austerity jihad”. After 1917, Trotsky had grand plans for mass transit – this would no longer be the preserve of an elite. The proletariat would travel far and wide, at low cost, and in great comfort. Not only that, but he envisaged room in Soviet train carriages for a string quartet. And a lectern. Travel would broaden the mind, Trotsky believed, in so many ways.

But back to the Zero Carbon Britain of 2030, we see that all domestic air travel will be banned, and all travel they deem unnecessary will also be impossible. This is not a group that thinks of Maglev Trains, speeding between London and Glasgow at over 300mph are a good idea. Mobility will pretty much return to C17 standards, where you had to hitch a lift from a passing horse.

Here’s the odd thing.

Both the utopians then, and the carbon cult now, both think of themselves as bright progressives, essentially doing the world a favour. But one had a vision of the world as a fascinating place waiting to be explored and graced by the human touch, and of humans as curious creatures, and where imprisoning the mind was as much of a crime as imprisoning the body. The other merely sees us as quite nasty carbon-emitting units, where the mind is entirely absent.

The goal of the Zero Carbon Trust, as you would expect, is not an increase in human curiosity or fun, but that we all collectively… er, “emit” nothing. The policies then naturally fall into place – for to emit nothing, we must do nothing.

Let’s look at a few examples.

To get to a Zero Carbon Britain means reducing electricity consumption … by half. In turn, this means the end of modern industrial society – production of tangible goods would largely disappear. With nothing to sell, so would sales, marketing and support jobs. With nobody working nobody would have to move about. It all fits together. Hopefully you now see the genius of the plan. The minor issue of how the UK would then create any wealth (to pay for the feed-in tarriffs, for example) is completely ignored – in fact, there’s no indication of what people would do, other than mend broken windmills.

Another big Trust idea you’ll be glad to hear is to “decrease the thermostat/air temperature”. Another mandate is decreased living areas. So we’re going to have to live in even smaller houses. Which are a lot colder.

The extreme environmentalist’s conception of a human, then, is a strictly materialist one: it’s indistinguishable from their conception of an amoeba: humans have no autonomy, no free will, no curiosity, and they have an inability to feel pain. For their part, the Bolsheviks had a pretty brutal approach to property and dissent: for them, too, the ends justified the means. But the difference between the old utopians and the new, eco-driven ones, is striking. You couldn’t wish for two greater contrasts.



You’ll be happy for your daily electricity ration

And powering this exciting vision of Britain in 2030?

Well, over half of the energy will come from Offshore Wind, reckons the Trust. And for backup when the wind doesn’t blow? The answer is: “some biogas is used as additional dispatchable [sic] generation to back up the grid,” Not surprisingly, no numbers are attached. But Germany, which went big for wind, building around 20,000 bird-slicers, has set about building five new coal-fired stations as backup.

If you’re concerned about things environmental, biodiversity or future fuel supplies, it’s less than useless. Costs are glossed over, and consequences ignored. Although it’s the product of over a dozen universities and think tanks is little more than a list drawn up by a student, or some demented trainspotter in his shed, writing down a list of “Things I Hate”.

It’s been ignored by the press as cranky, which it obviously is. But future historians, sociologists and anthropologists will find a lot of material in the ZCT report.The idea of creating one great Unit of Measurement – of all human activity – and using it as a brutal political proxy, will astound people for decades to come.

The politics of climate change is really a Dead Duck now – the mitigation policies are unsellable to a democratic electorate at any price – and as the realisation sinks in, the movement behind them is fragmenting in lots of interesting ways. These aren’t being reported, so let this be a tentative first step.

On the extreme fringe are people who really like whittling sticks by candlelight – the DIY crowd, who in the 1970s spent every waking moment planning for a post-apocalypse. Or making TV dramas about it. These are people who quite happy bartering goods, while keeping an eye on their investment portfolios and PEPs. This sort of chap was satirised in the sitcom The Good Life: Self-sufficiency in potatoes then, “energy security” now.

Single males are overly represented in this group: they can DIY everything they need, why shouldn’t everybody else?

Then there are people who are quite happy to go along for the ride, so long as it there’s money behind it. This includes large chunks of academia (the ZCT is a good example – over a dozen institutions were involved in producing Zero Carbon Britain 2030), the bureaucracy (eg, recycling officers and sustinability quangos), and individuals with a canny eye for a hand-out. They can fit a solar panel to the roof, grab a subsidy, and hope to ride the gravy train as long as is feasible. Even George Monbiot has pointed out that feed-in tariffs are a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the middle-classes (the middles classes with solar panels, natch).

So the second group, the freeriders, are people who really aren’t deeply ideologically committed, but are perhaps able to persuade themselves that (say) manmade global warming or Peak Oil is really worrying, or that resources are finite, so long as the money keeps flowing.

There’s an important difference between the Jihadists and the Free-riders, though – and that’s the necessity or quantity of humans suffering necessary. I note that even the Malthusian chief scientific advisor to our Department of Energy and Climate Change, David MacKay (author of bloggers’ favourite Without Hot Air), doesn’t see misery as necessary.

Both groupings will have to face the same, fairly unpalatable realities quite soon, however.

The policies of carbon mitigation are now unsellable – they mean political suicide. In an election year it makes all the difference: Obama wisely won’t touch it, the only Republican behind climate change has turned turtle, and it helped cost the Australian PM his job. Politicians will still use it as an excuse for taxes – the Tories dropped anything to do with climate mitigation but still used it as justification for increasing air taxes. But the fact is, the more people realise that mitigation means misery and costs – there’s no way of disguising either – the less popular it becomes.

Did anyone really think it would work – one great unit of measurement, one (and only) one measure of how much things in life are worth? Or was it just a pose – a way of saying you’re more caring and compassionate and earthy than the chavvie chap next door, with his Plasma TV?

You can peruse the policy here (pdf).