Nigel Lawson (ex-Chancellor) Fuzzy Thinking

Yesterday was not a good day for climate change news. After the Dr James Hansen of NASA indicated that even the current EU emission reduction targets are not nearly aggressive enough to stave off devastating climate change (maybe more on this later) we had the ex UK Chancellor, Nigel Lawson promoting his book in the Financial Times in which he claims that we are all "foolishly over reacting to climate change"

His main points are that:

1. While human activity does contribute to climate change it is not the only or the most important factor - he says that natural variation is more significant
2. The Earth did warm up in the last half of the the last century but there has been no significant warming in this century - true
3. That the economic costs of slowing change (in terms of investment and reduced economic development) far outweigh the projected costs of adapting to change and the IPCC projections of the impact of climate change on world GDP (reduced by 1-5%).
4. That by attempting to make change the EU will put itself at an economic disadvantage to the fast developing countries which he says will not agree to switching to a low carbon economy.

So his message is stop this folly of trying to halt climate change and just get on with finding technology and other ways to help us adapt.

Oh boy, not only is this view profoundly defeatist but it will likely be taken up by all the deniers as evidence that we should do nothing to try to stop things getting worse.

Luckily I then saw the discussion on BBC Newsnight last night between Jeremy Paxman, Nigel Lawson and the head of the Science Museum who was previously head of the British Antarctic Survey. The Science guy had little time for Lawson's arguments and petty well rubbished them since he argued that Lawson was just cherry picking on the science. He agreed that there had been no further warming this century but that can be expected with a complicated natural system like the Earth when you can get little apparent change and then dramatic effects. We cannot therefore be complacent.

The Science guy also argued that we cannot just wait to see what happens and try to fix it, as it could well be too late. It did make me question the IPCC figures on the projected effect of climate change on World GDP. A reduction of 1-5% seems widely optimistic. If sea levels rise by many metres and we lose the world's main financial and trade centres then the disruption would be far greater than this.

In the end Lawson's arguments seemed pretty thin. His point about whether we can get global agreement that all the main economies should do something is very relevant but that cannot mean that we should stop trying. It seems to be our only hope.