Climate Change

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, regardless of greenhouse gases, human beings would be discussing climate change today. We are in a warm interglacial period. These warm periods last about 10,000 years and the last ice age ended 12,000 years ago. It is a reasonable hypothesis that one of the reasons the ice age was prevented from coming again was that hunter-gatherers started settling and becoming farmers. That was the initial start of the check and the hot climate change we are experiencing today.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, said, one of the consequences of climate change that we are now suffering is that sea levels are rising. During our lifetime, the north of Scotland has been steadily rising out of the sea. This is called post-glacial rebound uplift. Dynamic Coast at Glasgow University confirmed to me yesterday that its latest evidence shows that sea levels are outpacing the uplift, so the north of Scotland is now suffering from higher sea levels. Today, we have been told that the Barents Sea is at a tipping point from a climate change point of view. It is changing from an Arctic to an Atlantic climate. That will have quite major effects. This has been described as the first modern example of a rapid climate change shift event.

It is the melting of not just glacial ice but sea ice that has caused problems and has contributed to the moving of magnetic north. Recent research on the movement of magnetic north, which has suddenly accelerated, has shown that it is human abstraction of water, particularly in Eurasia and India, that has helped to shift magnetic north. What does my noble friend on the Front Bench anticipate being the effect of this on climate change? Does he think it is now increasingly likely, as some scientists are predicting, that we will get a global shift again? These happen every 400,000 years or so. The last one was 780,000 years ago, so perhaps we are due for a global shift. That will complicate matters not a little, I suggest.

Let me move from magnetic north to the magnetic field around the Earth. What does my noble friend think of the latest research in Sweden by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, which claims that cosmic rays have a major effect on our weather? Its research underpins research done about 10 years ago, also in Sweden, which says it is the high sun activity, particularly at the moment, which is the greatest it has been for at least 1,000 years, that is causing climate change. As a result, we have overestimated the amount that carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases are contributing to our climate change. If we have done that, all our models—the models the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, relies on—are wrong. If we are to tackle climate change, whether it is getting colder or warmer, we need to have a factual scientific base. If some scientists are now saying that the reasons are different from what we thought, undermining much of what has been said in the debate, we need to take that into account.

I move quickly on to mitigation and follow up what the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, said. Sea erosion is caused not just by the waves but the sediment in them and their force at sea level. Latest reports say that more than 1 million houses are at threat from coastal erosion in the next 60 years. We ought to start to get a planning policy that forbids any development, not just on flood plains, but in any of those areas that will be subject to coastal erosion. We need to identify areas that we are not going to do anything with, where we are going to let nature take over and where we will make protection. Could my noble friend tell us what is being done on that?

I conclude by challenging us in the West. We are terribly good at thinking we are doing good things with climate change, and it does our ego the power of good to drive electric vehicles, but it does climate change no good at all if we drive an electric vehicle that is made in the Far East, and the power to make it is generated by burning coal. That is far worse for the world than using our old diesel cars.