Lord Lilley
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Mr Yeo
Of course, that distinction is absolutely accurate, but it is also the case that China has said that it will see a peak in its carbon emissions, and it is suggested that that will happen in 2030. My observation of China and of the culture there is that if a target of that sort is set publicly and becomes the official policy, it is done in the Chinese Government’s absolutely certain knowledge that they will achieve that target and probably improve on it by several years. I would guess that we will reach a period within the next 15 years when China’s emissions stop going up and start to come down.
As Sir David King, the former Government chief scientific adviser and now adviser to the Foreign Secretary, said, the announcement by the US and China makes the possibility of an international carbon emissions pact “very likely”. I agree with that assessment, particularly when we see the progress—I will come back to this later —on emissions trading systems, investment in renewables and so on, and not just in China.
Last month, equally importantly in my view, the EU agreed a 40% target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels for 2030. That was, of course, exactly the outcome that the British Government were working towards and they deserve great credit for securing that outcome. They have got the target for overall carbon emissions to be reduced without having that overlain with what in my view are less rational targets for specific progress on renewables. It leaves countries free to decide how they are going to decarbonise their economies. That was exactly the right approach, and it is the approach that the British Government had taken a lead in fighting for. As the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change said:
“This is a historic moment. Europe has sent a clear and firm message to the world that ambitious climate action is needed now.”
The Prime Minister spoke at the UN climate summit in New York on 23 September and pointed out that the British Government are keeping their promise to be the greenest Government ever. I know that some critics say that that is not actually being achieved, but the truth is that the decision alone to confirm the fourth carbon budget from 2023 to 2027 was of great significance. Although there are lots of areas where we would like the UK to be going further and faster, that commitment alone—again, I will come back to carbon budgeting—strongly supports the claim to be the greenest Government ever.
The UK has more than doubled the capacity of the renewable energy industry in generating electricity in the last four years. That is a substantial achievement and a vindicator of the kind of incentives that have been put in place for investment in renewables. As we know, the UK has also played an important role internationally with its carbon finance commitments. However, we need the whole world to step up if we are going to deliver a deal that keeps the target of a maximum rise in average temperatures of 2° centigrade within reach. That is a big part of the agenda as we move towards the Paris COP—the conference of the parties to the UN framework convention on climate change—at the end of next year. Above all, we need to make sure that policies are in place that give business the certainty that it needs to make investments in low-carbon technology. As the Prime Minister said,
“we need a framework built on green growth not green tape.”
We will need a good outcome from Paris next year, and a lot of work remains to be done to achieve that.
It is worth looking now at what the IPCC has done. It was set up in 1988 to provide assessments of the latest peer-reviewed climate science for policy makers. The fifth assessment report, which has come out in various stages for more than a year now, is the most recent output—in fact, the very most recent was the synthesis report published at the start of this month.
Overall, the fifth assessment report was the culmination of seven years of academic research—literally thousands of scientific papers and reports. There were three working group reports, and, of course, a lot of inter-Government negotiation as well. The most recent synthesis report concluded:
“Human influence on the climate system is clear”.
It also stated:
“Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.”
Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
How can my hon. Friend suggest that recent climate changes have anything to do with global warming if there has not been any global warming since 1997, as all the measures of surface temperature indicate?
Mr Yeo
Of course, with statistics, if we pick the year to suit our argument, we can produce all sorts of short-term pointers. Unfortunately, it remains true that the first decade of the 21st century—2000 to 2010—was the warmest recorded in modern times, so that does not seem to me to be convincing evidence of my right hon. Friend’s claim that the climate has stopped warming. In any event, I believe that it is still clear that there are impacts, as I have said, on human and natural systems that result from recent climate changes—when I say “recent” climate changes, I mean “in the last 100 years or so”.
Decarbonising electricity generation is a critical component of what we need to do if we are to mitigate the worst effects of climate change and, as the synthesis report points out, it is economically affordable. Effective implementation depends on policies and co-operation at all levels. That can be enhanced by the integrated responses that may come out of an agreement in Paris—responses that should link mitigation with adaptation and with other, broader objectives.
The Secretary of State said of the fifth assessment report:
“This is the most comprehensive and robust assessment ever produced. It sends a clear message: we must act on climate change now.”
That was also the view of our Committee.
We focused particularly on the contribution of working group I to the IPCC report. There were, of course, three working groups. One was on the physical science basis; the second was on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and the third was on mitigation. The conclusion of working group I was that it was now more confident than ever that greenhouse gas released as a result of deforestation and from fossil fuels has caused much of the warming seen in the latter half of the 20th century and, if unabated, those greenhouse gases will continue to drive climate change in the future.
The IPCC was criticised for being political and lacking transparency, so my Committee looked particularly into the process and the robustness of the IPCC’s conclusions. Our conclusion was that the IPCC report provides the best summary of prevailing scientific opinion on climate change currently available to policy makers. It is the most exhaustive and heavily scrutinised report so far. We also consider that there is a high level of statistical confidence in the report and that the overall thrust and conclusions of the report are widely supported in the scientific community.
Of course, as in all areas of science that involve highly complex and dynamic systems, there are uncertainties, but those uncertainties do not cast into doubt the overwhelmingly clear picture of a climate system changing as a result of human activity.
Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
I apologise to you, Mr Betts, and to my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo) for arriving a few minutes late and missing some of his opening speech. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer), who made an important contribution to this debate, as he does to the Committee’s deliberations. The report, of course, was not unanimous. Both he and I voted against it. I think we were able to secure the inclusion of only one of his amendments, but that is not because either of us denies the basic science of the greenhouse effect. He can speak for himself, but we are both scientists by training, which is a characteristic that is not shared by most members of the Committee. We do not dispute the greenhouse effect, nor did any of our witnesses. However, great uncertainties remain about how much warming a given increase in greenhouse gases will cause, how much damage any temperature increase will cause and the best balance between adaptation and mitigation in response to, or in pre-emption of, global warming.
The main bulk of the IPCC technical report recognises those uncertainties, and the report is simply a useful compilation of research in the field. My criticisms are about the summary for policy makers, which is far less balanced than the report it purports to summarise. The hon. Gentleman explained the process by which the summary was produced, which may be why it is so less balanced. The summary is essentially a document of advocacy, and it achieves its objective of influencing policy makers, as its title indicates, by the selective use of facts and the omission of quite a lot of the stuff in the main report, including some of the most significant changes, which are simply not drawn to the attention of policy makers. I am not the first to criticise the IPCC process.
Ian Lavery
This is a general point. Would the right hon. Gentleman describe himself as a climate change sceptic?
Mr Lilley
Yes. I normally call myself a lukewarmist. I believe that the climate will warm a bit, which will probably be quite beneficial to parts of our country, although it could pose problems elsewhere. I do not deny that double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase the temperature by 1° and a bit, plus or minus any effect due to positive or negative feedbacks. However, I do not think that the evidence shows that the change will be very large. I will come to that.
It is not just climate sceptics and I who have been critical of the IPCC’s tendency to exaggerate. Following the discovery of inaccuracies, use of grey data and so on in AR4, the fourth assessment report, which forecast that all the glaciers in the Himalayas would melt in 35 years rather than 350 years, the InterAcademy Council—the council of all the main scientific academies in the world, including our Royal Society, the US scientific bodies and so on—carried out an investigation of how the IPCC worked. The IAC was critical, particularly of authors who
“reported high confidence in statements for which there is little evidence”.
It is not just fellow sceptics and I saying it; all the scientific academies of the world, which by and large have signed up under some political pressure to rather unscientific statements about global warming, have considered the IPCC report and concluded that some scientists, although not all, tend to report high confidence in statements for which there is little evidence. The IAC therefore recommends:
“Quantitative probabilities (as in the likelihood scale) should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence. Authors should indicate the basis for assigning a probability to an outcome or event (e.g., based on measurement, expert judgment, and/or model runs).”
No such basis for assigning enhanced probability was given when the most recent IPCC report came out. Its headline conclusion was that the evidence for human influence has grown since the fourth assessment report, and it went on to attach increased likelihood—categorised on the scale as “extremely likely”, rather than the previous “very likely”—to the possibility that human influence has been the dominant cause of the warming observed since the mid-20th century. That was the overall headline assessment to which the IPCC wanted policy makers to respond. However, it is hard to back up that conclusion from the substance of that report. Since the last report, we know what has happened.
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Lilley
I will make this point, and then I will give way.
Since the last report, the earth’s surface temperature has not warmed further; indeed, it has not warmed during the entire period of the IPCC’s existence, since 1997 or 1998. There has been a hiatus in warming, yet during that period since 1997, one third of all the carbon dioxide ever emitted by mankind has been pumped into the atmosphere. We have had 17 years to test the effect of a third of all the CO2 we have ever emitted, and there has been no increase in temperature. That does not mean that the global warming thesis is dead or wrong—I believe in it—but it does mean that it is not the dominant factor. It means that during that period, other factors were masking any warming due to the increase in CO2.
Dr Whitehead
I would like to get something clear. Is the right hon. Gentleman suggesting that the issue relates to the difference between “extremely likely” in the fifth assessment report and “very likely” in the fourth assessment report? That is, does he stand by the idea that anthropogenic global warming is very likely, although he might not stand by the idea that it is extremely likely, or is he saying that it was not very likely in the first place?
Mr Lilley
I never made that statement. I think that it is uncertain how much of the heating that has occurred since 1950 is due to CO2. Some of it is; perhaps half of it. I do not know.
It is the word “dominant” of which I am most critical, and the idea that human influence is the dominant factor. During that period, the whole lifetime of the IPCC, there has been no warming, yet a third of the CO2 ever emitted by man has been put into the atmosphere. That does not seem to be evidence for being more certain; it seems to be evidence for being a little more qualified in stating that CO2 may be the dominant factor. It clearly was not dominant during that period. By definition, a period with record emissions but no warming cannot provide further evidence that emissions are the dominant cause of warming.
A number of other, quite important factors have simply been omitted from the summary for policy makers. Although the IPCC says that there is increased certainty, it does not tell us, except obliquely in a footnote, that for the first time, the authors of the IPCC report are unable to agree on a best estimate of how sensitive the climate is to increases in CO2. In previous reports, they have always been able to agree a best estimate, but this time, there has been so much disagreement among them that they have been unable to reach one. When I was a Secretary of State being advised by experts, if there was disagreement among them, I wanted to know about it; I did not want it hidden from me. If the disagreement was new and had not been present in their previous advice, I doubly wanted to know about it. However, that was not mentioned in the summary for policy makers, which is not a good way to ensure that policy makers are well-informed.
Nor does the summary mention that in the body of the report, the IPCC’s medium-term forecast for temperature increases to 2035 is below that given by the climate models. In other words, the experts used their judgment to say that in their opinion, the climate models are wrong. They came up with a forecast below the models, and they explain that the reason is that the models have been overheating. Their forecasts have not conformed to the facts. I would have liked to have that pointed out to me in the summary for policy makers, but it was not. I would also have liked some explanation why, after 2035, the IPCC assumes that the models will be right and will no longer overheat. If they have overheated in the past and are expected to overheat until 2035, why are they expected to be right thereafter?
The overheating is serious, and it is not just during the period of the hiatus. Over the past 35 years, the models studied by the IPCC have collectively run an average of 15% too high. They are significantly in error. That, too, is something that I would have liked pointed out in the summary for policy makers, so that one would know, when talking about model estimates, that they have been consistently and significantly wrong for 35 years. But that was not pointed out.
According to one of our witnesses, the most significant fact in the whole AR5 was the new evidence about the impact of aerosols. We now have evidence from satellite observations that provides more certain estimates of the prevalence of aerosols in the atmosphere and their impact and suggests that they produce less cooling than was previously assumed. However, there was not time to use that information to rerun the model—sometimes the models take months to run—so none of the models takes into account the latest information on aerosols. Had they done so, they would have produced an even higher forecast for future warming, because the future warming forecast involves the warming created by CO2 less the cooling created by aerosols. If there is less cooling by aerosols, the forecasts would be higher—that is, more wrong—in the past, and probably even more wrong in future.
Indeed, given that we know what the actual amount of warming has been, if that warming—0.8° C since the industrial revolution—is the result of carbon dioxide, the model suggests that if it had been down to CO2 alone, the warming would have been something like 1.2%. However, because of the old estimates of aerosols, an offset of 0.4% is assumed, which is why we observe the 0.8° C figure. We know the 0.8 figure is true. If we now have better estimates, so that instead of 0.4% the offset is 0.2%, that means that the CO2 effect should have been forecast as being 1° C rather than 1.2° C or 1.4° C. That is a significant change—new evidence—that should have been brought to the attention of policy makers but was not.
Nor was the fact that most recent empirically based studies of the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 have come out with lower figures. Indeed, since the report came out, a study of all the estimates of the sensitivity of climate over time has been made—in the form of a chart—and it shows that the estimates are progressively coming down. In other words, the likely feedbacks must be less and less, as estimates become more accurate and indeed the period with no warming extends. Again, I would have liked to know that in the SPM, rather than it being hidden away in a 1,000-page report, which by definition the policy makers are not expected to read.
We know that there has been a pause in global warming since 1997. My hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk says that is somehow a statistical fabrication. If I want to know how long this table is, having climbed up the steps to get to it, when I get to the level bit, I measure that to see how long the table is; I do not include the rise before and I do not exclude some of the flat bit. The length of a plateau is the length of a plateau, and it is 17 years. That is quite simple.
If over that 17 years, the effect of CO2 has been offset by other natural factors—I am not denying the effect of CO2; I am saying it must have been offset by other factors. [Interruption.] Presumably, the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) agrees with me; if he would like to intervene to disagree, he is welcome to.
Dr Whitehead
I merely pointed out—unfortunately, from a sedentary position—that it is a little dangerous to start talking about plateaux in the context of what has been probably several hundred years of anthropogenic effects. Indeed, at any particular stage, it would have been possible during that period to select particular years to make particular points. However, that is not the greater point that needs to be taken into account; that is about looking at the overall effects over a period. The right hon. Gentleman persists in talking about plateaux when, in overall terms, that is what happens on occasions in a much longer period, and it can be easily demonstrated over the period.
Mr Lilley
I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. There are periods when temperature has been rising and periods when it has been falling, for example from about 1945 to the early 1970s. Then there was a period of about 25 years when it was rising and everyone said, “That 25 years is very good evidence.” They did not say, “25 years is far too short a period.” They said, “Oh, that’s it. That’s going to go on.” The Met Office gave us forecasts for a single decade of how much things were going to change; it was confident that this was a continually rising trend.
However, there is a period when it has been flat. But if the underlying greenhouse effect has been rising, that means that natural factors are of the same magnitude, and those natural factors—over the long term—will cancel out other factors. Therefore, the upswing in natural factors may have been contributing to the warming in the 25 years of warming, and that should have been brought to the attention of policy makers but was not.
The hon. Gentleman says that I go on about flat periods. However, far worse than the SPM is the press release issued by the IPCC itself, which says:
“Warming in the climate system is unequivocal and since 1950 many changes have been observed throughout the climate system that are unprecedented over decades to millennia.”
It goes on to say that the period of
“the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface.”
So it is talking about warming.
The fact is that the warming since 1950 has not been unprecedented; it is almost exactly the same, over exactly the same period, as the warming that occurred from the end of the first world war up to the second world war. How can we explain the fact that there was a similar amount of warming when there was very little emission of CO2 to a period with an identical amount of warming when there was a lot of CO2? It must mean that other factors are relevant, and those other factors are of the same order of magnitude in their impact on the climate as CO2.
All I am saying is that these things should be drawn to the attention of policy makers. Policy makers should not be treated as children; they should not be fed a line; they should not be given a document that purports to be a scientific document, but is actually an act of advocacy, achieving its end by selective use of facts and omission of a lot of the evidence that the experts who produced it took a great deal of time and a thousand pages to assemble. Sadly, that is why the report from our Committee sounded more like cheerleading than holding to account a body that must be held to the highest standards, and not excused if it happens to agree with our own opinions.
Dr Whitehead
It is better that a report produced for policy purposes is a synthesis of what scientists and others are saying and concluding. Indeed, that is exactly what our report concluded.
Beyond that, we then come not to the question of what concerns there might be about some of the detail of the fifth assessment report and its policy summary, but to one important element of scientific method. I should say that I am a social scientist, not a scientist scientist, but I certainly would always have regard to scientific method in my researches and thoughts on a matter, and would be pretty much guided by scientific method and principles of probability and various other things such as those. The important element is that there are always outliers in any scientific discussion. How could it be otherwise? That is what science is about. Science is never unanimous. Indeed, the whole of scientific method is to take something that looks unanimous and test it to destruction and see whether a new consensus emerges from that—and that in turn is tested. There are always outliers and always people who are testing science, and always people who will disagree with a conclusion.
In terms of what science does in informing policy makers, the question is how to best get to the best science that there is, currently, to inform something that will not have 100% certainty behind it but which is, as I have described in terms of what people do about their house, an imperative that they may have to act on, without 100% certainty, but with a high degree of probability behind their actions. That is essentially what the IPCC fifth assessment report is about.
Mr Lilley
I intervene to offer the hon. Gentleman some advice on surveyors. If a surveyor is asked to do a report, the probability is that he will find some damp, some rot and something to do, because that is his job; he is a professional alarmist. I have a surveyor coming in a week’s time and I am paying him a fee just for the survey, so that he has not got an incentive to create work. In a sense, the IPCC is a bit like that. It is in the job of producing things that show that CO2 is an alarming proposition.
Dr Whitehead
The right hon. Gentleman is exactly right, but I think that perhaps he slightly misunderstood the process that follows that. If people get a surveyor in, it is quite possible that they will find some things wrong with their house. The probability, in terms of that surveyor’s professional background, is that even if the surveyor finds a few things wrong with their house that they do not think are particularly wrong, he is probably right. The question is to what extent they take action following what the surveyor says. The right hon. Gentleman appears to suggest—I would not put words into his mouth—that people can safely say, “This surveyor is just after his own interests in surveying my house, so I can confidently put this in the bin and purchase the house down the road that the surveyor told me is a complete turkey, safe in the knowledge that he is trying to make money. Therefore I can completely disregard what he said. And then, when my house falls down, I will be sorry about it, but I am safe in the knowledge that I wasn’t taken in by that beastly surveyor, who was trying to make some money.” I am not sure that the argument really follows in its fullness. I want to concentrate on that for a few moments in respect of the IPCC report.
One concern about picking small holes in a report and bringing outliers on board in emphasising the size of those holes is that, eventually, people might say, “Perhaps those holes need to be looked at”—indeed, the Committee in its report identified a number of areas in the procedures of the fifth assessment report and the summary following it that did need looking at and action for the future—and they fairly soon elide into talking about conspiracy theories and asking, why would people have falsified data and put things into this report? Or why would scientists from across the world have congregated together to overthrow their own scientific method and start putting bogus material into reports and trying to smuggle such material into summary reports, to falsify those and affect the gravity of action that may be required for policy makers?
The problem then arises of people moving away from citing holes and difficulties to saying that the whole thing is therefore a bunch of falsified bunkum. I have to say that hon. Members contributing to this debate in a contrary position from that of the fifth assessment report and the Committee’s conclusions seem to be sailing rather close to the wind on that. As soon as people get into the area of conspiracy theories, that is the complete overthrow of science. Conspiracy theories and science are mutually self-destructive.
We have to accept, surely, that this IPCC fifth assessment report was carried out by honest scientists from around the world, who honestly put forward what they did because they had found it to be so in their view, and that the collocation of those various views—a difficult process in its own right—was also undertaken by honest people coming to particular conclusions. Unless we think otherwise, we will eventually be in the position of saying, as I have mentioned, not necessarily that it is extremely likely that anthropogenic action on the climate is the cause of global warming, but that it could be “Very likely”, “Maybe”, “Extremely likely”, “Maybe not”, “A bit between the two”, or “Very likely that it is very likely”, and then we are in no man’s land. At that point, people may start saying, “If they are all fabricating these things and the evidence really is a tissue of misrepresentation and lies, then we have no guide at all for policy in future,” which is, after all, what we ought to be discussing in this Chamber.
Mr Lilley
Normally, the hon. Gentleman is good, in that he follows the logic of my questions through, sometimes to points that I did not want him to reach, but here he is putting words into my mouth that are the exact opposite of what I said. I did not say anyone had falsified anything; I simply said they had excluded material that was in the main report from the summary for policy makers. I hope he will clarify that. I was not accusing anyone of inventing falsehoods.
Dr Whitehead
The right hon. Gentleman is right. He will recall that I said that it sounded to me a little bit like that was the direction in which some of the contributions might be moving. I do not personally accuse the right hon. Gentleman of taking that position. However, a number of other people—not he—have taken and do take that position and it seems to me that they are, as a result, hopelessly adrift in terms of what we might or might not do.
Dr Whitehead
My hon. Friend describes the sort of process at an international level that to some extent goes on in Her Majesty’s Government. The document that he refers to, which was referred to by the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden, is headed, guide for policy makers. It does not purport to be the scientific document. The scientific documents, as we have agreed, are elsewhere.
Dr Whitehead
It is a summary and a guide for policy makers. If the right hon. Gentleman looks at the document, he will see that that is exactly what it says in those documents. That is how it was announced and how it was reported to the United Nations. Indeed, it is how the United Nations Secretary-General described it. It was specifically set out on the back of the various documents and the detailed material that it was a further document over and above that work, forming a bridge between the scientific material and the guide for policy makers, and that is exactly how it should be seen.
As far as I am concerned as a policy maker, the fact that the IPCC report concluded that the anthropogenic effect on global warming is either “very likely” or “extremely likely” impels me to act, for all the reasons I have described. The Select Committee report was attempting to ascertain the overall veracity of what the IPCC’s fifth assessment report was about, how it translated into policy, possible difficulties and what needs to be done next. That is essentially what our report talks about, and that is good enough for me.
We need to take decisions on how we deal with the decarbonisation of our energy and on limiting as radically as possible the emissions that will add to anthropogenic global warming. Those are the direct policy implications that this House needs to look at closely, and we will unpack that further to say, “We may have disagreements about exactly how we limit the decarbonisation of our energy supply and the many different ways of doing it, but we will have a separate policy makers’ debate”—as my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) has alluded to—“on the best method of doing that.” Unless we have an overarching guide where we are clear about what we are doing, most of the rest of that conversation will not make a great deal of sense.
The best endeavours of pretty much all the scientists involved in this area around the world are to get to grips with finding out what is happening, why it is happening and what we should do about it, and we in this Chamber should commend that work and not seek to draw false conclusions from it or pick holes in it that are of no relevance to the overall policy making thrust. I commend what our report says to Government. I hope that they will be able to take on board what is said and ensure that they use it to guide their policy formation, whatever vicissitudes there may be about exactly how we will get there.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Amber Rudd)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo) on securing this debate and thank the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change for its report on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s working group I report on the fiscal science basis of climate change. The Government welcome the Committee’s finding that it provides the best summary and guide of the prevailing scientific opinion on climate change currently available to policy makers.
Amber Rudd
Whether in the title of the document or not, it is taken as a guide.
Amber Rudd
This interesting debate has considered the roles of scientists and politicians. Like the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott), I am not a scientist, but I agree with the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) that that does not—I hope—preclude us from making the right policy judgments as we go forward.
The IPCC’s fifth assessment report provides an unparalleled assessment of the latest climate science. There is no comparable process in terms of scope, rigour, transparency or level of Government engagement. The IPCC does not generate new climate science; it assesses peer-reviewed scientific work from thousands of practising expert scientists from around the world. The working group I report was produced by 809 authors, who assessed more than 9,000 scientific papers. The UK is fortunate to have world-leading expertise in many areas of climate science, and I am proud to say that some 100 of the authors were from the UK. The draft report underwent two rounds of review, overseen by a team of 50 review editors, whose role is described in the IPCC’s procedures.
It is true, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) pointed out, that the IPCC for the first time moved away from providing a best estimate as it was felt that it was misleading to have a single figure for an uncertain quantity. The IPCC scientists’ increased confidence in their findings is based on the conclusions of the large amount of wide-ranging literature published since the fourth assessment report. As a result, we can be assured that the latest IPCC assessment represents a true consensus of climate science expert opinion from around the world.
The hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) spoke of his concerns about the IPCC. I reassure him that the four-day synthesis meeting to which he referred was not held in secret and that the Government consider IPCC plenary meetings to be sufficiently transparent already through the presence of a number of observer organisations and detailed daily reports. There are 62 non-governmental organisations that are approved observers, as well as several inter- governmental and UN observer organisations.
The Government have considered the Committee’s findings and, as we set out in our official response, seek to take forward a number of recommendations. The Government also strongly support the Committee’s recommendations, which is why we published our vision for the new global deal to be agreed in Paris next year. Our Paris 2015 vision document highlights the strong business and NGO support for securing a global climate change agreement. My hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk highlights the importance of reaching an agreement at Paris 2015 and I share his dedication and increased optimism, to which the hon. Member for Sunderland Central also referred, following the recent European deal and the good signs from China in the recently announced US-China deal.
Following the IPCC’s report—this guide or summary—there is no doubt that we need to take action. I share the view of the hon. Member for Southampton, Test about Japanese knotweed that action is best taken early before the house collapses. He also wisely cautioned against conspiracy theories, which are sometimes prevalent in this area. In the UK, we are taking action, focusing on the long term and using the carbon budgets to ensure that we deliver on our commitments.
As I conclude, may I point out that it was 25 years ago that a scientist and politician, Margaret Thatcher, who appreciated the need, became the first leader of any major nation to call for a global treaty on climate change? There can be no doubting this Government’s commitment. In September, the UN Secretary-General engaged world leaders at a climate summit in New York, where the UK was represented by the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and me. We are leading from the front and we will hopefully be present next year at Paris 2015 to secure the international agreement that the vast majority of us want and that scientists support.
Mr Yeo
Thank you, Mr Walker, and welcome to the Chair. It will be a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I particularly wish to draw attention to the fact that I am correctly dressed.
To reflect on this helpful and revealing debate, I should say that I am sorry that we have not attracted the interest of anyone who is not, as it were, under duress to attend for one reason or another. Nevertheless, I dare say that a few dedicated outsiders will read our proceedings.
May I mention to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) that the IPCC was established in 1988, not in 1997 as he suggested? I find the notion of a giant conspiracy fascinating and in some ways rather hilarious. The idea that thousands of scientists and politicians are somehow colluding is difficult to regard as credible.
I think that my right hon. Friend bases his view on omissions from the “Summary for Policymakers” of some of the contents of the full report. It is, however, a strange form of conspiracy if a few policy makers get together and say, “Okay, we’re going to publish thousands of pages of documents, papers and the conclusions of an endless amount of work around the world in their entirety, so anyone can look at them. But then we’re going to get together and, because we don’t want all this work to be actually read, understood or communicated outside, we’re going to publish a summary that does not reflect accurately what is in the main document.” In my experience, that is not how most conspirators proceed.
Mr Lilley
May I make it absolutely clear that my hon. Friend has invented the idea of a conspiracy? Neither the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton nor I have mentioned any conspiracy. All we have said is that the summary is a work of advocacy and, in common with most such works, it leaves out factors and bits of evidence that do not reinforce the case that it wants to get over. That is all.
Mr Yeo
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his reassurance that he is not alleging that any conspiracy has taken place. I am sure that those people who mistakenly thought that that was what he said will now stand duly abashed.
I believe that the IPCC process is an extraordinarily open one. It could hardly go to greater lengths to ensure that every bit of evidence is available for public scrutiny and that every conclusion has been examined, re-examined and peer reviewed almost endlessly. For the avoidance of doubt, I should say that my conclusions about the IPCC process—and, I believe, my Committee’s conclusions about the fifth assessment report—are based on our careful consideration of the actual report in its entirety. We have not relied for any of our conclusions on a mere scrutiny of the “Summary for Policymakers”. That is all I need to say about that debate, so I will move seamlessly on to our second debate.