Picking the right questions

While the Spectator's Coffee House blog enthuses over the exquisite decorations at the Conservatives' Black and White Ball and its readers debate the merits of tielessness there, back in the real world Philip Stott offers a useful summary of his recent speech on Global Warming Politics.

We have been wrong about climate change in the past, he says, so how certain are we that our politicians have got it right now?

He distinguishes between ‘Global Warming’ - "a politico-scientific construct in which the human emission of ‘greenhouse gases’ is unquestioningly taken as the main driver of a new and dramatic type of climate change that will inexorably result in a significant warming during the next 100 years" - and the science of climate change. This is "concerned with the most complex, coupled, non-linear, chaotic system known", and it is "unlikely that climate change can be predicated on a single variable, or factor, however politically convenient".

So, he asks, will cutting carbon dioxide emissions at the margin produce a linear, predictable change in climate? No, he says. Climate is so complex and chaotic that we cannot manage it predictably by "fiddling at the margins".

We can’t stop climate change, or even aim to produce a predictable outcome for climate.

We need political realism -

The UK currently represents only 2 per cent of world electricity demand (1 per cent of world energy demand). These figures will fall to around 1.4 per cent and 0.8 per cent by 2020. Whatever we do in the UK will have no predictable effect whatsoever on climate. Indeed, if one accepts the ‘global warming’ construct, it is clear that the future of climate resides, above all, in China, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and the rest of the developing world, not in the US and Europe. By 2020, China and India will produce more ‘greenhouse gases’ than the whole of North America.

As we can't affect climate change, we need to concentrate on adapting to it -

Perhaps of far more significance are population growth, the looming energy crisis, the continued success of farming in enhancing yields, the attack on poverty, and the world management of water.

Farming in the UK needs the scope and flexibility to produce more if necessary. And -

In the UK alone we are facing an energy gap of up to 50 per cent which no amount of wind, wave, and waffle will fill. Coal is going to have a great renaissance world wide, despite environmental concerns; nuclear will have another generation of plant; yet, ‘renewables’ will toil to achieve even 15 per cent.

In reading Stott's comments you realise just how ludicrous our politicians will seem with their vainglory that they can affect the climate. Canute, anyone?

As Stott says, we cannot stop climate change. "It is the great hubris of our Age to think that we can. We cannot even manage climate change predictably. But we can constantly adapt to inexorable change".

On the energy front, to take one example, slowly and in full view, the Russians are tightening the noose of gas supply around Europe, in a long game of naked "power" politics. More on this here from Helen. Putin has not decided to head Gazprom on a whim. He knows where the levers of power will be.

Down among the little people, Robber Conway is still an MP.