27 Mar 2014
Through Transition I’ve been active in my community for years, trying to help people understand the importance of climate change and how it could impact on the lives of them and others in the future. I’ve seen all the hard data, digested all the scary graphs, seen all the heartbreaking photos from the Arctic. I’ve heard reports from other people across the world what impact climate change is having on their lives and there’s nothing that I haven’t believed. But up until this winter I hadn’t really felt the full effects myself. I was fairly confident that the weather patterns were changing and that this was directly linked to a warming global climate, but it was hard to pin point one event that solidifies those beliefs. This winter changed all that and one event in particular made me sit up and think very carefully about the future.
I grow organic vegetables on the Isles of Scilly. “That must be a great climate for growing” is usually the response I get from most people. “It can be” I say, “mild in winter, warm but not hot in summer, good light levels. But you wouldn’t want to be growing here during a storm.”
Some of my vegetable fields are literally just behind the beach. A great place to be in summer and the best ‘view from the office window’ you could hope for. But in a winter storm this position is something of a disadvantage! There is a decent sand dune between the fields and the beach in most places, but on one stretch there is not much more than a moderate hardy evergreen Pittosporum hedge between fields and beach.
1st February brought an extraordinarily large and deep low pressure across the UK. The barometer dropped to 965mb on Scilly, the wind reached 80-odd mph and, to make matters worse, it was one of the biggest spring tides of the year. At high water the sea was reaching places you couldn’t really imagine it ever getting to. The swell was ferocious, driving walls of water in to the coast.
As I looked on, the fragile coastline between my fields and the sea was getting eaten away before my eyes. The trees making up the hedge, the only windbreak I have, were just toppling over and ending up on the beach.
Three days later on 4th February another enormous low pressure steamed in from the Atlantic, this time bringing winds of over 90mph (and I think over 100mph in west Wales). The tides weren’t quite as high but the coast again took a pounding, and I feared what would happen to my fields.
After further storms, lasting in to late February, the upshot is that I have thought about the future use of my fields in a very different way up until now. One more storm like 1st February will destroy the hedgerow and some fields will be completely open to the wind – and therefore unsuitable for growing vegetables. This could happen in 20 years or next winter. How do I plan my business around such uncertainties?
I could plant hedges inland from the existing hedge line, but these could take easily 10 years to establish, by which time the coast may have eroded back to there anyway. The island I live on is getting smaller by the year and some of its resources are being threatened – farmland, fresh water and potentially even transport links.
You could say that such events were freak weather events, perhaps a ‘one in 50 year’ storm. That could be right, but all the evidence points to this becoming a more regular occurrence and that the winter we’ve just had could be a taster of what we have to come regularly. If that’s the case then I have to seriously look at what I grow and where, because the most vulnerable fields are simply going to be victims of climate change before long.
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26 Mar 2014
While the ecological and infrastructure impacts of climate change are becoming ever more self-evident, what about the social impacts? Do the impacts of climate change show that “we are all in this together”, or are its impacts unevenly felt across society? Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) recently published a report called Climate Change and Social Justice: an evidence review which looked at this in more depth (as did a recent Oxfam report). It coins the term “climate injustice” and offers some very useful insights on community resilience in the face of climate change, and what that means for different communities. We talked to Katherine Knox, Programme Manager at JRF, who co-ordinates the Foundation’s work on climate change issues.
From your research and from the recent floods, who can we argue will be most impacted and affected by climate change?
There are going to be impacts in many ways across the country. We’re looking at the UK in particular rather than internationally, and obviously there are different issues that might apply internationally from in the UK. What we’ve been thinking about is the multidimensional nature of vulnerability. If we think about flooding specifically, it’s easy just to focus on who lives in the floodplain areas, but not to think about the nature of how peoples’ wellbeing might be affected by the impacts. What JRF research has suggested is that there are particular factors that may make people more vulnerable and affect their wellbeing more.
There are some personal factors, so if you’re very old or very young you might struggle for particular reasons, ability and dependency on others might be an issue, if you’re in a care situation obviously you’re dependent on the care institution to support you in the context of a problem. But there are other factors. If we think about the environmental factors, it’s not just a case of whether you live in a floodplain, but also the nature of the built environment and natural environment around you.
If you’re in a basement flat you’re obviously going to be worse off than someone who’s in a highrise flat in terms of the impacts it might have upon you. Then there are questions about whether there are green spaces or “blue spaces” that might absorb water within your environmental surrounds which might make a big difference in terms of flood impacts.
Then if we think about the social factors which are perhaps the least well thought about at the moment, there are a range of things. We know for instance that people on low incomes are much less likely to take up flood insurance and so they might be particularly affected. Not only because they are affected in terms of the loss of their possessions, but also because they have less ability to then recover from those problems because they don’t have insurance and less of a safety net.
Other social concerns would be things like peoples’ social networks and if you’re isolated that you might be particularly at risk and more vulnerable, whereas if you’ve got social networks or people who can support you in the context of a crisis and help you recover from the event. We think vulnerability relates peoples’ ability to prepare for flooding and to respond and recover, as well as some of those other things that might be more familiar in terms of thinking about the impacts.
What does resilience to climate change look like, in particular for poorer communities?
It’s something that’s not really very well understood at the moment, and actually it’s the focus of work that we’ll be taking forward more in the next phase of our research here, but we do think that there’s a question of understanding how the social context and social fabric works in an area, so social links might be really important in terms of people’s ability to then get support from each other as well as thinking about some of the other provisions in place.
We’ve been doing some work in York in an area called New Earswick, initially first developed by Rowntree to provide housing for some of the workers in his factory. Over the years it’s an area that has grown and new housing has come on stream, but it remains a predominantly low income social housing area and we’ve been trying to work with people about some of the issues. What we found was that to awaken peoples’ interest in terms of what might be going on, in an area where there’s not a context of a threat from flooding or anything particular that’s happening at this point in time, people need to be connected through their local interests, rather than wider questions about sustainability and climate change.
The issue there was about tapping into local interests in nature and the natural environment, so there are lots of fruit trees that have been put in peoples’ gardens in these areas, which were not actually really well used, so one of the activities was done with the community was to support fruit picking and getting people working together in a natural environment.
There were some big initiatives to support tree planting and other activities in the environment that brought people together who didn’t necessarily know each other previously. The people we worked with were also very actively working in the schools in the area to support schoolchildren to start thinking about these issues. Those things that connected into peoples’ wider activities were really important in terms of getting people to start making links. So we think that might be a really important part of resilience to climate change, but again it’s not something that necessarily might be a focus, and it might need to take different forms in different places in terms of what you can actually do to engage people.
It sounds like research that very much supports and validates the approach that Transition groups have been taking for the past few years…
Yes indeed. In a context where there wasn’t a Transition group in that area. We were trying to support similar ideas I think.
Your recent report talked about the ‘Triple Injustice’, where people on low incomes pay more and benefit less from certain policy responses, especially energy bills, and are those responsible for the least emissions. In the context of that observation, was the government right recently to cut back on what it called ‘green taxes’, claiming that they were socially regressive?
That raises lots of questions actually. The general position here at JRF is that we recognise that we need to have a transition to deal with the consequences of climate change, and therefore we do need to provide funding to enable that change to happen. What’s happened is that some of the monies that are being raised to make that transition to a low carbon economy are being applied through peoples’ energy bills, rather than perhaps through general taxation. So, as a general principle, it’s more regressive to putting costs onto energy bills than paying things through taxation because lower income households pay a higher proportion of their income towards energy bills than people on higher incomes.
But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to take the steps to make the transition happen, and indeed fund them. There are questions about how you pay for things, and that can be done in different ways. What is also interesting is what are different measures that have been put on peoples’ energy bills, and there are a range of different things that are being applied, and actually some of the levies that are being put through are actually being applied to fund measures that many people will benefit from, and others are being applied and will only benefit a smaller number of people, people on higher incomes.
Is it possible to suggest whether the current austerity programme is helping or hindering communities’ ability to build resilience to climate change?
I think in general, JRF’s work is indicating lots of problems with the emerging picture on that side. We are concerned about how peoples’ incomes are being reduced in general, in such a way that will also affect their ability to deal with things like their fuel bills. There is a wider problem really. We perhaps haven’t looked at the detail of how those things connect, in terms of austerity and the links to climate change. In general, peoples’ ability to deal with a wide range of challenges they face is being affected, economic and social questions as well as environmental questions.
What’s your sense of the balance between adaptation and mitigation?
Clearly there is a question about the need to mitigate as a first priority to reduce emissions. What’s concerning is that the scientists are basically suggesting we need to peak our emissions within the next 10+ years, so there’s not a huge window of opportunity to peak global emissions now. There are really big questions around what international agreements can deliver, and then how those play out down at different national scales and within countries.
The question then becomes how are we going to adapt as well, because we know already that there are so many emissions in the atmosphere that we are going to have the consequences of those emissions in terms of climate change already happening. We’ve already seen the devastating floods that we’ve had recently here, even though the attribution is difficult in terms of climate change we can expect to see more frequent flooding, so we are going to have to adapt.
There are really big questions about how we are going to protect different communities, who has a voice in decisions that are going to be made, which resourcing is going to be put in, which are getting more focused now than perhaps they have been in the past, but are really important questions nationally. There are real issues there about smaller and more rural communities and how they will be protected in the future.
Our theme this month is ‘living with climate change’. Can you give us a sense of what living with climate change will look like for the poorest communities in the UK? What would it look like if we responded adequately, and what would it look like if we didn’t?
Some of our work already indicates that the poorest and lowest income households, the most disadvantaged groups, are already likely to be among those worst hit, both from climate impacts themselves but also the consequences of policy responses as indicated in our energy work. There are potentially very negative outcomes unless action is taken.
The alternative is to try and engage people now and use processes that we have, whether that’s Neighbourhood Planning, or community action through Transition groups and other opportunities to try and galvanise people to understand what the implications might be, and try to engage them in developing responses. However, I think that’s not just an issue for disadvantaged communities, that’s a national issue that really need attention from central government and from different stakeholders and from local government and others too, rather than just being an issue for disadvantaged groups.
In Transition, one of our conclusions is that local economies are key to building community resilience. That localisation is a powerful part of that. To what extent do you think that appropriate localisation could have a role to play in building community resilience?
I think it’s a really valid question and I’d be really interested to see how the learning from the Transition movement can help us in that. There is a wider debate at the moment about the need for more sustainable prosperity, the question of how growth creates prosperity, or what the limits are to the current economic model nationally, and so it relates to some of those questions. There are opportunities to have more of an asset-based approach locally, where we think about what skills and opportunities exist within an area and how those can support local economic development. That’s a really interesting area.
If you had the ear of the current government, what would be two or three things that you would recommend them to do in terms of helping low income communities to build more resilience to climate change?
There’s something about looking at what the impacts are more effectively. Our work has highlighted where think some of the most disadvantaged communities might be across the UK in relation to both flood and heat, but I’m not aware of this kind of thinking being taken up nationally in terms of thinking about preparedness and how we respond and how we prioritise responses. There’s not enough fine grain thinking about which people and places we need to support most effectively, there’s more of a general approach being taken.
So I would suggest that first we need to have a better understanding of vulnerability, and how that might inform what we do. That’s the vulnerability to the direct effects of climate change. Secondly we need to look at the current policy position, and try to create a more fair policy approach. What tends to happen is that policies aren’t really considered in terms of their distributional impacts very effectively. So if you look at energy policies, what should be happening when they’re being put in place is that there’s a proper understanding of how those policies will impact on different types of households, and where we know there are going to be negative impacts on particular groups there should be steps take to prevent that, or remediate it in some way or to design policy differently so that those things aren’t so regressive.
Thirdly I think there’s something about a process of engagement and trying to bring peoples’ voice into this discussion. I don’t think at the moment there’s enough communication from centre to communities themselves to actually understand peoples’ views and to try and bring people on a journey of understanding collectively as to what climate change might mean for them and then what the opportunities are for action.
Some of that action needs to be driven from communities themselves and needs to more of a kind of dialogue really, from central government and down through local government and other organisations, and the voluntary sector to make those links and start saying “what do we do”, “what are we going to where the impacts may be really acute?”
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26 Mar 2014
To situate this blog post, we’re in Kitchener-Waterloo, two cities that act as one, but can never quite become one because of decades or maybe even centuries of bickering. We are in southwestern Ontario, or west of Toronto for those who don’t really know Canadian geography. We like to call ourselves KW. What does this new climate look like in KW? More intense rain events, less rain overall, and more hot days. This past year is a pretty good example of what we can expect going forward in this area.
All year we’ve been whomped with very wacky weather in Southern Ontario, cold and miserable and snowy. (not that we’ve been the only ones!) Unfortunately this weather killed a bunch of the tree cover across the area, which won’t be nice once the mid-summer heat is upon us.
We lost a large number of trees during a huge downpour with heavy winds at the end of June. It rained intensely for a few hours, at one point convincing me that it was the end of the world. All I could see from my apartment window was water and cloud. KW flooded briefly in a few different places.
In those few hours of intense rain, 500 trees were damaged in Waterloo region. Our neighbours in the big city of Toronto fared much worse. They had heavier rains (exceeding the 100-year rainfall amounts at Toronto international airport), and had to cope with old inadequate infrastructure beneath very busy areas. The main transit hub, Union Station, was flooded! Social media had fun with it, though, using the flooding photos to mock the internationally infamous Mayor Rob Ford (see right).
The next tree-destroying event was a major ice storm a few days before Christmas. The region was pelted with 25 mm of freezing rain and 37,000 people lost power. When this hit us, we were planning on having a Christmas dinner with friends. But our hosts were without power, as were many of the guests who planned on cooking dishes for the dinner. As friends do though, we banded together, and decided to relocate the Christmas dinner to a house that did have power, and have people over earlier so they can help cook. We almost didn’t have our communal Christmas dinner, so many of us were without power. Luckily, power finally came on in some places and we managed to get everything cooked in the end. We were lucky. A lot of suburbanites weren’t, as many across southern Ontario were without power for days or weeks.
What did TransitionKW learn from this and other experiences while we were creating our Climate Change Adaptation Toolkit? We should make friends with our neighbours. It’s much more fun, and easier, too, if you work on transition projects with your neighbourhood – and besides, they’re the ones you will turn to in an emergency. You can floodproof your basement on your own, but it’s more fun when done with friends. You can make an emergency preparedness kit for your home, but when your power goes out, you should know people in your neighbourhood, because they will be your only source of entertainment, and maybe heat and good food, too. And, thinking about others now, when the power goes out in the dead of winter, who in your community needs your help to get food, water, or to a place where they can keep warm, so why not get to know them and their needs now?
Speaking of cold – did we ever get blasted with that here this winter. We also experienced the “polar vortex”, as did many parts of the United States that don’t usually get cold winters. We should be accustomed to cold winters in Canada, but southern Ontario has been spared from truly cold winters in the past decade, and it seems like we lost our ability to cope with -20C days for weeks on end, given the whinging that was heard everywhere (weather is a constant topic of conversation among Canadians, good or bad. Especially bad). The polar vortex is an example of the changes we can expect thanks to climate change. The wackiness was due to weather the weather pattern came from, and not the weather itself.
But those days will soon be behind us (though -10 is pretty cold for a first day of spring), and we’ll be back into the hot, humid days of summer before we know it. That is another impact expected in this region – more hot days than usual, longer periods of extended heat waves, and increased risk of drought. This affects our agricultural industry, so important in our area, as well as our human health. And shows yet another way where neighbours working together can help each other out. For example, a community garden in Kitchener has installed large holding tanks which capture rainwater from the roof of an equipment storage building nearby. The community is securing water for itself during drought, conserving water overall, and helping to ensure some food security for that neighbourhood.
That’s why we created the Climate Change Adaptation toolkit – we wanted to showcase ideas and actions that are relevant to our community when dealing with climate change. We know lots of people in our community are taking action on climate mitigation, and we fully support them in that work (see here for more on that!), but we wanted to focus on what wasn’t yet being addressed but is affecting us already.
It ended up being more than adaptation, because actions that help us adapt to climate change can also help us mitigate it, and help the environment and the community in lots of other ways. Check it out after March 29 here: toolkit.transitionkw.com. The toolkit website will officially launch March 29, and the link won’t work before that. If any Transition initiatives want more more information on the how & why of the toolkit, please get in touch with us: transitiontoolkit@gmail.com.
Written by Sylvie Spraakman, Facilitator at TransitionKW (see www.transitionkw.com for more!). We will be hearing more about the Toolkit next month when our theme will be “what is the impact of Transition, and how do we know?”.
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25 Mar 2014
Today we talk with Prof. Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford’s Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department. He is a prominent and widely published climate scientist. He also wrote a recent article in the Mail on Sunday called Why I think we’re wasting billions on global warming, by top British climate scientist. It began “we have campaigned tirelessly against the folly of Britain’s eco-obsessed energy policy. Now comes a game-changing intervention… from an expert respected by the green fanatics themselves”. What’s going on?
We will come on to that interview later in this piece, but the first thing I wanted to discuss with him was the recent floods the UK has experienced. Allen was recently involved in publishing a paper which looked at the extent to which climate change could be responsible for the 2000 floods.
He told me:
“The 2000 floods were really the first major event that got people talking about the possible role of climate change in these events. But of course it’s always a difficult question to answer because floods have always happened. The UK has always had high rainfall variability and so in some seasons we get more rain than others and as a result we occasionally get floods.
So the question is whether what we’re seeing now is just the normal run of bad luck in British weather, or whether climate change might be playing a role in it. That was the sort of question we set out to answer in the study we published a couple of years ago.
The key point is you can’t say, as a lawyer might put it, that but for climate change this event would not have happened. Because these are all events that might have happened anyway in a hypothetical climate in which we hadn’t increased greenhouse gas levels.
But what we can say is to “what extent has climate change or human influence on the climate made this event more likely to occur, or probable”, and that was what we looked at in that study. We came to the conclusion that on average human influence on the climate through rising greenhouse gas levels had more or less doubled the risk of an event such as occurred in the autumn of 2000.
But there was a big range of uncertainty on that. It might have been more than double, it might have been a good deal less than double. But we were fairly confident that the risk had at least gone up and that was the conclusion we drew. As you can see, it’s a fairly complicated message! A lot of people like us to answer the question “was climate change to blame or not?” The bottom line is it doesn’t make sense, for a random event like a flood, to say climate change was entirely to blame or entirely not to blame. We have to look at how the probabilities may have been changed through our changing climate.
If, with the floods of 2000, climate change doubled the probability of those events happening, and we’re now 14 years further into the warming process, would one therefore be able to infer that the floods we’ve just had were made even more probable by climate change?
Just because one kind of flood has been made more likely by human influence on the climate, it doesn’t mean all kinds of floods have been made more likely. That said, the circumstances we’ve seen this winter are not dissimilar to what we saw in the autumn of 2000, so perhaps human influence has played a role, but we are actually running experiments at the moment to find out, and I don’t know what the outcome of those experiments will be. It’s reasonable to suspect that human influence might have played a role, but until we’ve got the numbers in we shouldn’t really say either way.
Do you still think that staying below 2° is possible and/or feasible?
You’re talking about 2°C, the internationally agreed goal of 2°C above pre-industrial temperature. To remind people that that means really not much more than 1° above today’s climate.
First of all, it would be a very good idea, very desirable for us to do that, primarily because as a climate modeller, I don’t really know what a climate 3 or 4 or 5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial would be like. That might not be the thing you would expect from a climate modeller, but as you will appreciate, the further we go from the kind of conditions which we can test our models on, the more concerned we are about trusting what they tell us. I would be very worried about relying on anybody’s projection of what a world 4° warmer than pre-industrial would be like in detail, and for that reason alone I think limiting warming to 2° would be a very good idea.
So I fully support the goal. You asked whether we think we’ll manage it. I think we could manage it. There’s no question we still could do it. The reality is it’s not too late. But that’s not to say we don’t have a problem or a very substantial challenge in meeting that 2° goal. Just to put it into simple terms for people, global temperatures are largely determined, in the long term, by the total amount of fossil carbon we’ve dumped into the atmosphere.
Back at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we had around 3-4 trillion tonnes, that’s 3-4 thousand billion tonnes of fossil carbon sitting underground waiting to be dug up and burned to power the Industrial Revolution. Over the past 250 years, we’ve dug up and burned about half a trillion tonnes. Over the next 35 years, at the current rate, the way things are going, we’ll burn the next half trillion tonnes and the next half trillion tonnes after that will take us over 2°.
That puts the challenge into perspective. We have to somehow work out what we’re going to do with all that fossil carbon underground that would be immensely profitable to dig up and burn if we’re not going to dump it all in the atmosphere very substantially greater than 2°C. That’s the challenge we have to face, we have to bear that in mind when talking about whether we’re going to meet the 2° goal. I think we could do it, but I’m not convinced that the current policy, that the majority of current policies are actually particularly helping towards that goal.
James Hansen has been arrested for trying to stop coal trucks in the US and Kevin Anderson has been quoted as saying that he feels that civil disobedience is one of the only routes to actually dealing with climate change. What’s your take on the balance, as a climate scientist, between stepping across into doing something about it or just documenting the process and gathering the science?
I’m pretty conservative on this one. I think it is our job to do the science as you described. I don’t think where we get our funding from or what our political views are really make much difference to the science we do, and we should always take very careful steps to make sure it doesn’t make much difference to the science we do. When I’m doing climate science I’m working in a community which is working together to understand the system as best we can and that’s very different. I don’t think my political views really come into it at that point.
Just going back to Kevin Anderson for a minute, he was published recently about arguing that his sense is that economic growth and adequate response to climate change are incompatible with each other. What’s your sense of that – is it possible that you can still have a growing economy that is capable of staying below 2°C?
I absolutely do, yes. I respect Kevin’s views on this, but I don’t think there’s any hard evidence that economic growth and climate mitigation are incompatible. I feel as a matter of policy it’s very unhelpful to suggest that there are alternatives, because all of the countries in the world feel that economic growth is their imperative and understandably so, because they have a lot of poor people, a lot of mouths to feed, and if people tell them that doing something about climate change is an alternative to economic growth then many of these countries would, entirely reasonably, say “well let’s concentrate on economic growth first then”. So no, I don’t think there’s any incompatibility between a growing economy and addressing the problem of climate change.
You wrote a recent piece in the Daily Mail, in which you argued that the only route forward to talking climate change was carbon capture and storage but it’s still an experimental technology. Is there a danger with putting all our eggs in one basket in terms of risks, do you think?
In a sense we’ve only got one basket to put the eggs in, if you think about the problem from a perspective of the overall carbon in the ground. We started off with three and a half trillion tonnes of fossil carbon under the ground. We’ve burnt half a trillion tonnes, we’ve got three trillion to go, more or less, and we’re cracking through the remainder. If we want to limit warming to 2°C, we have to limit overall carbon emissions in the atmosphere to less than a trillion tonnes, possibly one and a half trillion but not more than that. That still leaves a couple of trillion tonnes of fossil carbon in the ground, available to be converted into useful energy.
That just really leaves us with three options:
- We burn that carbon, dump the CO2 in the atmosphere and suffer the consequences in terms of climate change
- We introduce a global climate mitigation regime that’s so stringent, so draconian that no-one ever in the world is allowed to dig up that fossil carbon and burn it.
- We sequester the carbon before it enters the atmosphere
That second option is one which I would actually regard as pretty frightening in itself. I find it very hard to believe that we would set up some kind of global carbon governance regime that is that strict. If we can’t do that, then we just have to accept that some of that carbon which cannot be dumped in the atmosphere is going to be.
We’re talking about building an industry from scratch in effect today (carbon capture and storage), comparable to the fossil fuel industry itself, and we need to do that over the next two or three decades, which is why we need to be getting on with it. Without it, we will not solve the problem of climate change because we will continue to use these fossil energy sources.
We might use them slower if we are successful in improving our energy efficiency and so forth, but the key point is that it really doesn’t make any difference using carbon slower if you still burn it all in the end. In the end it’s the total amount of carbon you dump into the atmosphere that matters, not the rate you emit in any particular year.
You’ve been involved in publishing papers on climate change since 1999 and know as much about this as many people, I’m sure. How do you live with it in your daily life? How does knowing what you know about climate change impact on how you live and how you live with that information?
One thing’s for sure, the bulk of my carbon footprint is spent going to IPCC meetings, which is ironic but also highlights the difficulty of relying on personal behaviour to address the problem. Until the problem is addressed at the source, until we essentially engage the fossil fuel industry in solving its own waste disposal problem rather than asking individuals to tighten their belts and reduce their carbon budgets, we’re not really going to make a serious dent in it. While I think, obviously, there’s an excellent case for people diversifying their energy supplies and reducing their energy consumption, there’s an excellent economic case for doing that, an excellent energy security case and so forth. But we also need to be realistic. We need to recognise that we’re not going to solve the problem of climate change until we solve it at source, until the fossil fuel industry essentially is required to take responsibility for the waste products of the products themselves.
For the rest of us, what will characterise living with climate change over the next 20 years, do you think?
The consensus prediction is reasonably clear, that we should be expecting to see a higher frequency of warmer summers and wetter, warmer winters. But there’s obviously a lot of variability around that, and we’re still a long way from seeing, as I said at the beginning, weather events that simply wouldn’t have happened without climate change.
In the UK at least, because there’s a lot of weather variability in this part of the world, I think detecting the effects of climate change on the UK will take a while. In some respects it’s one of the hardest parts of the world to see the impacts of climate change coming through. I think it will be much more obvious, and already is, the impact of climate change on places with less year to year variability such as Africa and Australia for example”.
[Editor’s note] In the interest of balance, I’d like to close this piece with a link to Joe Romm’s fierce response to Allen’s Daily Mail article, and to Allen’s proposal that all other attempts to reduce carbon emissions through demand reduction, renewables and so on are a waste of time, with carbon capture and storage being the only solution. It is an essential companion piece to read alongside this article.
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25 Mar 2014
Transition Athelney links five villages on or bordering the Somerset Levels. At the February meeting of our organising group we were asking ourselves what contribution we could possibly make in response to the disruption and suffering caused by the prolonged flooding. An answer presented itself a few days later when a member of T.A. who is a local councillor with a lifetime’s knowledge and experience of land management in Somerset, gave me a draft document to read.
He was gathering local views on his detailed proposals for remedial action. He was also asking for T.A’s endorsement of this document, for submission to the County Council’s consultation process, ahead of its feedback to DEFRA. My friend’s document highlighted the complexity and interconnectedness of the issues affecting us. Weighing their relative importance is a demanding task, even before cost and funding sources, special interest and political factors enter the picture.
Upstream, midstream and downstream river catchment, land management and intensive farming, protecting homes vs food production, the growth of our County town (Taunton), dredging and drainage, the tidal range of the Bristol Channel, all have to be considered. The roles and perspectives of central and local government, the Environment Agency, Internal Drainage Board and environmental or wildlife organisations also feature prominently. One of the report’s aims was to address muddle and conflict between these agencies and the danger of local voices being drowned out by them.
The document revealed an impressive grasp of all these issues. Its proposed remedies to soil erosion (one source of the silt problem) and rapid run-off into the upper reaches of our County’s rivers include reforestation and hedge renewal. They make good sense and draw on the example of Pontbren, as highlighted by George Monbiot and others. But despite the depth and breadth of this analysis, three linked factors concerned me. One was that I felt too much credence was being given to the scapegoating of the Environment Agency. The second was a dearth of reference to climate change and how it loads the dice towards extreme weather.
I asked him about his fleeting mention of climate change and reference to its impacts as a future prospect, rather than a current and escalating reality. He was agreeable to changing the latter point, but was wary of increasing the overall emphasis on climate change, for fear of putting people off, and not having the document taken seriously!
The Environment Agency is widely seen as having a confused agenda, with ecological considerations being given undue prominence, at the expense of human needs. I am not qualified to judge how well or badly the E.A. reconciles these criteria, but what I do pick up is a perception (fanned of course by elements in the media) that it’s an either/or matter, rather than a set of perspectives which must be integrated because, as Tony Juniper puts it, the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of planetary ecology.
The third thing which troubled me in the document was something which again reflected widely held views and feelings. This was that local people find the prospect of the Levels reverting to marshland “completely unacceptable”. This phrase reminded me of COIN’s illustrated report Moving Stories, which documents the plight of those caught up in climate related migration in places as far flung as the Arctic and Indonesia, China and the Sahel. How “acceptable” is the situation of all these people? Presumably, feelings of fear, anger and helplessness make it harder for people to look at their predicament from a global perspective, even when the data are readily available.
This may not matter all that much when we are discussing adaptation, but it gives few grounds for optimism to those of us who hope that weather disasters will serve as a wake up call to assist mitigation measures. This was illustrated in a BBC television programme on 4th February, when people from one of our flooded hamlets were interviewed, then shown a report explaining climate change, including the fact that several decades of further heating are now locked into the system. The extreme weather implications were spelt out clearly. This section was followed by further interviews, but I saw no evidence that climate change had entered people’s narratives, at least at a conscious level.
On a more positive note, T.A’s involvement in the report did increase its engagement with climate change in a way that spans mitigation and adaptation. The river Parrett (into which the Tone, which gives its name to Taunton, flows) is tidal, well into the Levels. I had not heard anyone locally talking much about sea level rise as a key factor. Dredging, whilst still an emotive issue, is now widely recognised to be no magic bullet. A sluice in Bridgwater bay has been mooted, but it is currently hard to see where the funding would come from and the benefits beyond Bridgwater itself would be limited. The report now advocates exploring the feasibility of a tidal lagoon (as is now proposed for Swansea bay). This could attract private funding, by virtue of projected revenue from electricity generation.
That BBC cross-referencing was good, even if it did not find immediately fertile ground here. On the same day, Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, spoke in London of the “merciless” process of climate change and the urgent need to remove fossil fuel subsidies and to price carbon emissions effectively. Our Chancellor clearly wasn’t listening, but hopefully others were. We should not wait for those in the merciless firing line to join the dots, but the number of people in the rich world who find themselves directly facing it, along with millions in places less well known to us, is growing. Perhaps it’s not too late for the cries of distress from within (and on) our own shores to coalesce with the warnings from climate science and help to concentrate the minds of our policy makers.
Somerset’s inland sea can seem beautiful, though not to those whose houses, land and roads have been inundated. As the water is pumped away and the fields begin to dry out, we begin to get wafts from the rotting vegetation, reminders of the stench which hit us after the flood of Summer 2012. There is an obvious parallel with the stink of political and economic business as usual. Somerset County Council’s report, which the T.A. contribution had a hand in shaping, makes frequent reference to “resilience”. Does this signal a promising shift in thinking along lines advocated by Transition, a helplessness in the face of future disasters, or is it merely empty language, a few vain drops of perfume, to mask the signs of social and environmental decay?
Adrian Tait, 20th March 2014
Adrian is Chairman of Transition Athelney and a founder member of the Climate Psychology Alliance.
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