The Day After Tomorrow, the global warming blockbuster that opened in cinemas yesterday, rightly presents climate change as a modern apocalypse. There is indeed a chance that man's emission of greenhouse gases will unleash a living Hell. Sensitive souls will believe every frame of director Roland Emmerich's film, which is based on the more sensible bits of a bizarre book, The Coming Global Superstorm that, in 2000, took a theory about North Atlantic currents and over-egged it. The movie portrays the attempts of a climate scientist to avert disaster, not least for his own family. Against the tide of humanity running southward from a flooded and then frozen New York, he heads north to the city, where his son is trapped.
Scientists have queued up to say that the film is hardly an accurate depiction of likely scenarios. They don't buy the "day after tomorrow" immediacy, the suddenness of any likely disaster, or the "new ice age" assumption. Still, in February, the US Department of Defense released a report it had commissioned which did, controversially, plump for the sudden big-chill possibility. After a screening of the movie, Geoff Jenkins, head of the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre for Prediction and Research, welcomed the attention it would bring to climate change.
One merit of the movie is that it will get climatologists to dampen down at least some gloomy prognostications. Theirs is a trade that has recently shown a preference for extremes. It will also get people arguing about the risk that climate change poses. My guess is that they will divide into Cavaliers and Puritans on this, as on the older Hells. There will be devil-may-care types who cannot bear to give up present pleasure for (uncertain) future bliss. And there will be ardent reformers insisting that we radically change our ways.
The most likely immediate outcome will be token activity to try to head off the apocalypse. There is a fair chance it won't work. Later on, our species may get much more serious about the issue. And that may not work either.
What's the evidence that we should worry? During the last ice age, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were (put in Cavalierly rounded terms) about 170 parts per million (ppm). For the majority of the years of man's civilisation - from when the planet was first a pleasant place for people - they were about 270ppm. Since industrialisation, they have risen to about 370ppm, with effects that are hotly disputed.
If we go on as we are, they may rise to about 1,000ppm this century and reproduce a sudden, disruptive (but evolutionarily exciting), warming seen about 55 million years ago. If we work quite hard, we might make them plateau at about 550ppm by 2100. This is the achievable minimum centred on by fans of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sponsored by the UN World Meteorological Organisation.
This all matters, says the IPCC, because the world is facing a temperature rise of between 1.4_C and 5.8_C by 2100. At the low end, one might say, so what? At the high end, The Day After Tomorrow might have just about got the tone right. More problematic even than guessing which of these outcomes will happen is wondering how long we can delay action, and at what price.
There is plenty of debate about how accurate any of these predictions are. Some sceptics (I am one - let's say a conflicted Cavalier) are labelled contrarians by the greens. We suggest that it's wiser to assume that the IPCC knows its gloomy science, nod towards a precautionary view, and then be realistic about our responses. This is the position of the young iconoclast, the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, who upset green verities badly when his 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, promoted what was actually a widespread view. He said the IPCC did not properly emphasise that its own "consensus" suggested that most of what we could do would only marginally delay whatever (very uncertain) outcome was ahead. He followed a quite common line of argument that the developing world would suffer the most from climate change, and that it would be best to help it to be rich (and more able to respond to its fate) than hope to arrange for it to have nice weather. The outcry he caused is one of many signs that much green thinking is nearly religious: that renunciation is a goal in itself, and that truths, having been revealed, are not improved by debate.
It is important to note that the IPCC consensus with its proposed target for emissions is no guarantee that we will have a safe planet in 2100, or for centuries thereafter. Margaret Thatcher was nearly right when she said, in 1988: "It is possible. we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself." Actually, we certainly have, and there is no putting it back in its box.
Puritans and Cavaliers may be able to agree that we should at least aim to hold the risk at some achievable but still dangerous point. Doing less will seem so lazy - even if doing more is really a stretch. The difficulty is that even aiming for 550ppm is a tough political sell. The UK's official position is to endorse the IPCC consensus, while the government does not dare make the country seriously address its greenhouse-gas emissions. So far its policies have proved unpopular, or ineffective, or both.
Some, such as wind turbines and recycling of household waste, are likely to prove both expensive and ineffective. Some, such as taxing energy-intensive manufacturing, would probably just send the smokestacks abroad, where they would face slacker rules.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific advisor, says that some current events (increased flooding threats to London, for instance) are partly the result of man-made climate change. He has strongly endorsed the government's Foresight group's recent report that says the UK must address climate change in order to avoid worsening inundation. Yet UK action alone can have virtually no effect on sea levels or any other climate effects, and the report itself supposes that 75 per cent of the flooding risk we face wouldn't be touched by even a virtuous worldwide global-warming policy.
Sir David (a moderate Puritan) has planted his colours on the "550ppm" target, and suggests - with what must be heroic guesswork - that it might avert 80-90 per cent of the risk for some countries such as Bangladesh, which will be vulnerable to flooding. To go much beyond this mildly ambitious strategy with its considerable risk, the world would have to at least halve its emissions of carbon dioxide (or, rather, of a basket of gases with similar effects). This will one day be fairly easy for rich countries to do, partly because we are so extravagant now, partly because we are so rich, and partly because we have enormous technical potential. But the developing world would need a lot of help to grow economically as fast as it wants to while not hugely increasing its emissions, and swamping our efforts at restraint.
In short, if the world finds holding emissions at 550ppm quite daunting how much more so is an attempt to return to anything like pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide? Rich country strategies would have to include big nuclear power programmes; we'd need lots of conservation and, worse, to travel less. Such policies - some "ungreen" and some anti-consumerist - will be required at least until brilliant new solar technologies can be developed to uncouple energy extravagance from emissions.
To do more, we would have to divert a small percentage of our economic growth into an energy-conserving Marshall Plan for the developing world. Indeed, there is a powerful argument that saving emissions in the developing world is so cheap that we should go that route rather than fret about expensively reducing our own.
This "not now, not here" approach will appal Puritans, who believe we should feel the pain. The question is, are they anywhere near persuading the rest of us to take up any of these burdens? Earlier this year Sir David said, "In my view, climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism."
He said President Bush was being very remiss about it, especially in not endorsing the Kyoto Protocol. This 1997 accord would reduce emissions by a trifling 5 or 10 per cent (from 1990 levels) by 2012. That's if it were to be fairly well-observed, which it probably won't be, and is no more than a stepping stone toward the 550ppm target.
Worldwide emissions have in fact risen by 10 per cent in the past decade, and the World Resources Institute believes they will rise by a Kyoto-busting further 50 per cent by 2020. Following a preview of The Day After Tomorrow, Sir David commented that he liked its take on White House recalcitrance about global warming. Actually, President Bush has endorsed the aims of Kyoto, and only rejected its methods, which he claims are too tough on the US and too soft on the developing world. He knows that the US has a difficult political job in addressing carbon emissions. American voters love cheap petrol even more than British ones, and prove it by burning about twice as much energy per head as we do. The UK can hardly claim the high ground - we burn nearly 10 times as much as an average Indian.
Showing people The Day After Tomorrow may, like showing them other images of Hell, make them dramatically change their ways. More likely, it will get us to weigh up the odds of salvation. And the likelihood is we will make the odd penitential gesture rather than give up worldly pleasure altogether.
rdn@richarddnorth.com
Richard D. North is media fellow, Institute of Economic Affairs
