Was Mrs. Thatcher responsible for the Kyoto climate protocol?
A few weeks ago I sat on a plane next to the meteorologist
Oliver Ashford and we got into conversation.
I was pleased to learn that he was broadly a Kyoto sceptic but unprepared
for his suggestion that Mrs. Thatcher was to blame for the nonsense that
threatens such damage to our economy.
She was the first major politician to take global warming seriously at a
time when her influence was at its height and thus, he argues, indirectly led the world
towards adopting the Kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse gases.
His argument was published in Weather, Jan 2002.
In the 1970s a group of scientists had produced a report
"Inadvertent Climate Modification" which had suggested that there were serious
gaps in our knowledge of man’s influence on climate, and had called for further
research. Then as now the scientists had
little clear understanding about climate change, but since the world surface temperature had fallen by about 0.3o C
over the preceding 20 years, their first effort was to whip up a scare about
global cooling. Ashford has
some good quotations. This from a
statement adopted unanimously under the auspices of the International federation
of Institutes for Advanced Studies (IFAS).
“The facts of present climate change [they mean
cooling] are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty
to major crop failure within a decade… .
What we face is not a temporary aberration in a normally benign climate
but a new norm.”
The statement was widely circulated but, perhaps fortunately
for IFAS, not formally published. The
usual Chicken Little’s, ran around the farmyard proclaiming that the sky was
going to fall in. The BBC, for
example, ran a panicky documentary based on Nigel Calder’s book The Weather
Machine and the Threat of Ice, and called for something to be done.
Irving Kaplan of the International Institute for Integrative Technology
argued that we should increase atmospheric CO2 by burning more fossil fuel.
Newsweek’s story at the time (click here) is already familiar to iGreens.
Such nonsense went largely, but unfortunately not
completely, unheeded by politicians. The
mass environmentalist movement hardly existed, so there was no need to actually
do anything. Instead the
cheap solution was to fund more climate research. Soon the recipients of this largesse had decided that
warming, not cooling, was the new problem.
In 1979 they were saying “… it appears plausible that … increased
CO2 in the atmosphere can contribute to a gradual warming of the
atmosphere…” (WMO 1979). By
the mid 1980s the same authorities were saying “it is now believed that that
in the first half of the next century a rise of global mean temperature could
occur which is greater than any in human history” (WMO 1986).
The second statement is no different but is clearly designed to
convince politicians of the need for action.
Why did it succeed?
Ashford believes that three forces came together.
Firstly, Sir Crispin Tickell, British ambassador to the UN, and guru to
Mrs. Thatcher, had spent a sabbatical year at Harvard in 1975 studying the
relationship between climate change, politics and economics, and had decided to
pursue his interest.
Secondly, Mrs. Thatcher, as the first scientist prime minister, was
inclined to take scientific advice more seriously than her predecessors.
These two influences were necessary but not sufficient to
make Maggie act. Arthur
Scargill and the national union of mineworkers (NUM) provided the third factor,
the political imperative. The
bitter coal miners strike in 1984 had led her to believe that she must reduce
the country’s dependence on coal. Gas
and nuclear power produced much less CO2 than coal, so environmentalism allowed
her to kill two birds with one stone – reduce both CO2 emissions and
the power of the NUM. It became
“green” to cut down coal consumption. Soon
she was a convert and by 1991 was saying “For the first time ever, rich and
poor nations alike set out together to save our planet from a serious danger.”
(Address to the 2nd World Climate Conference in Rio)
The story is plausible, and I do not doubt that
Thatcher’s conversion had considerable influence on other statesmen, who might
otherwise have gone on calling for more research.
However, I doubt if she would have stayed with the theory had she
remained in power when the time came to sign the Kyoto protocol.
She was enough of a scientist and economist to have soon realised that the reductions in greenhouse gases
required to make any real difference to global warming were economically
disastrous. No serious developed
country politician would sign up to the reduction in living standards implied.
Nor would developing countries accept the developmental delay that they
would suffer. She would
have quickly exposed the vested interests that her predecessors
funding of research into climate change had unleashed.
I think she would have backed off before signing Kyoto and aligned
herself with the more realistic American politicians like Clinton and the
younger Bush.
Jim Thornton, Nottingham 5 May 2003
Reference
Ashford OM. Change of political climate. Weather Jan
2002; 57: 19-24.
