Two events last week led me to muse on the links between the man who is now our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, and the extinction of the woolly mammoth. A team of scientists suggest in Nature Geoscience that the sudden extinction of the mammoths some 12,000 years ago, as the world emerged from the last ice age, may have had a dramatic effect on the Earth’s climate. They argue that the emission by these giant herbivores of nine million tons a year of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than CO2, was so significant that their disappearance led to a sharp drop in global temperatures, and the world temporarily froze over again in the re-glaciation known as the Younger Dryas. This is a theory so batty one scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry. If that comparatively tiny amount of methane was so powerful, how did the world manage to remain so cold during the million years of ice ages when eructating megafauna were abundant? Clearly those scientists were so carried away by the obsession with climate change that they hadn’t the slightest idea what they were talking about. But even more is this true, it seems, of the man now in charge of Britain’s energy policy. Last week Mr Huhne was virtually the only politician in Europe imploring Brussels to stick to its latest proposal, that the EU should raise its target for cutting CO2 emissions in the next 10 years from 20 per cent to 30 per cent. As the EU faces its worst ever economic crisis, other countries, led by France and Germany, are horrified. They cannot imagine how they could afford even a 20 per cent cut. But Britain already stands alone as the only country in the world committed by law – the 2008 Climate Change Act – to cutting its emissions in the next 40 years by a staggering 80 per cent, at a cost estimated by Mr Huhne’s energy department at £18 billion every year until 2050. (The ministry claims that this would amount to £404 billion, but it can’t do its sums properly: 40 times 18 is not 404 – the total is £734 billion.) The fact is that there is no one in the world, least of all Mr Huhne, who can explain how we could cut our emissions by four fifths without shutting down virtually all our existing economy. What carries this even further into the higher realms of lunacy is that such a Quixotic gesture would do nothing to halt the world’s fast-rising CO2 emissions, already up 40 per cent since 1990. This point is made very forcefully in a new book, Climate: The Great Delusion (Stacey International), by a much-respected French engineer, Christian Gerondeau. As this convert from global warming orthodoxy to hard-headed scepticism explains, it is now more obvious than ever that the developing countries, led by India and China (the world’s largest CO2 emitter), haven’t the slightest intention of cutting back their emissions. China plans to build a new coal-fired power station every week until 2030. Each year it now adds more to global CO2 emissions than the entire contribution made by Britain (which is responsible for less than 2 per cent of the world total). There is no way, Gerondeau argues, for us to prevent the world’s CO2 emissions from doubling by 2100. Fortunately, he goes on to explain why this will have remarkably little effect on climate: he has come to agree with all those eminent scientists who believe that this is largely shaped by natural factors beyond our control, such as the sun and ocean currents. Whatever little Britain chooses to do is thus quite irrelevant. We can choose to commit economic suicide if we wish (and as our politicians, who voted all but unanimously for the Climate Change Act, seem agreed we should). But the fast-growing economies of China and India will sail on regardless, their added emissions making our own contribution look wholly insignificant. No one is more committed to all these delusions than the man Mr Cameron has made responsible for our energy policy. Mr Huhne’s opinions on climate change, wind turbines and the rest are as remote from any practical reality as those of the scientists who came up with that fatuous little theory about mammoths. Global warming may have played a part in the extinction of the mammoths. We might hope it will soon also be responsible for the political extinction of our woolly-minded energy minister - before he closes down our economy for no sane reason at all.The woolly world of Chris Huhne
No one can explain how we cut emissions by four fifths without closing down
virtually all of our economy, writes Christopher Booker.
Sunday, 30 May 2010
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