Koolzuurgas-ideologie: Het ontstaan

[Henk op xp]

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Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks schreef:
> REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>
> Ik heb me altijd afgevraagd waarom er uberhaupt een Koolzuurgas-ideologie
> *is*, waar het geloof vandaan komt (Vrijmetselaars, Scientology ?).

Voor een overzicht, zie:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.0016-7398.2004.00112.x

"
The Geographical Journal, Vol. 170 , No. 2, June 2004, pp. 105–115
Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Understanding and managing climate change: the UK experience

MIKE HULME AND JOHN TURNPENNY
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and School of Environmental 
Sciences,
University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ
E-mail: m.hulme at uea.ac.uk

This paper was accepted for publication in March 2004

Climate change has emerged over the last 25 years not just as a physical 
reality, affecting
global and regional climates, but also as a socio-cultural phenomenon – 
an icon of a
globalizing world which is increasingly altering the physical fabric of 
our planet and
at the same time demanding new forms of global governance. The UK, both 
through
its scientific research activity and through its development of climate 
change policy
initiatives, has been at the forefront of this emergence. This review 
traces some of this
history from a UK perspective, with an emphasis on the last 10 years. 
The relationship
between climate change science and policy has become increasingly 
reflexive, leading
to new forms of research and institutional structures. The academic 
discipline of
geography has been rather marginalized from this process.

KEY WORDS:
the UK, climate change, global warming, research, policy, institutions,
academic geography, post-normal science

Introduction

A 2001 UK survey of the public found climate change came eighth out of a 
list of 20
current local, regional and global environmental concerns (National 
Survey of Public
Attitudes to Quality of Life; DEFRA 2002). When asked what environmental 
concern will be most
worrying in 20 years’ time, however, climate change came second only to 
traffic (congestion,
fumes and noise). There are two interesting dimensions to this finding. 
First, climate change is the
‘global’ issue by far of most concern to the UK public and, second, 
people claim they are not yet
fully convinced by the immediacy of this worry, preferring to project 
their anxiety 20 years into
the future. Nevertheless, as this review article will show, climate 
change is now one of the major
determinants of national, regional and, often, local environmental 
policy in the UK.
Climate change has acquired this status over a period of about 16 years, 
since it first emerged in
the UK during the summer of 1988 from the confines of scientific 
research into the realms of public
media commentary and political speechmaking. This emergence is 
epitomized by the front page headline
in The Guardian newspaper on 25 June 1988 (see Figure 1) and by the 
speech made by the then
Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to the Royal Society in September 
1988. The strong performance
of the UK Green Party in the 1989 European elections was at least partly 
due to this prominence.
Worldwide, this 16-year period has witnessed major advances in our 
understanding of the planetary
climate system and of our ability to perturb it substantially, and maybe 
irrevocably. It has also seen
the emergence of new intergovernmental processes for assessing the state 
of climate change science and
for creating global climate policy regimes. These global developments 
are well illustrated by the
establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 
1988, by the signing of
the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in June 1992, and 
by the creation of
the Kyoto Protocol in December 1997.

Within the context of these international developments, concern in the 
UK about climate change
has elevated it to being a major driver of public environmental policy. 
For example, the experience
of widespread flooding in autumn 2000, boldly interpreted by the 
narrative of human-induced
climate change, has led to a full-scale review of the way coastal and 
inland flooding is managed in
the country. At the same time, in November 2000 the government published 
the first comprehensive
Climate Change Programme for the UK (DETR 2000), identifying both the 
risks associated with climate
change, and also a range of policy measures and initiatives which would 
contribute to its management.
More recently, climate change played a major role in shaping the 2003 
Energy White Paper (DTI 2003)
and Aviation White Paper.

Scientific research into climate change in the UK has evolved in 
parallel with these developments in
the policy arena, at times influencing the policy process and at other 
times responding to them.
New research institutions have been created, science policy itself has 
had to adjust, and new forms of
knowledge, created through interactive science–stakeholder dialogues, 
have emerged. In this sense,
climate change is archetypical of a research paradigm where the 
boundaries between knowledge
producers and knowledge consumers are increasingly blurred (Nowotny et 
al. 2001).
This paper reviews some of these developments in the UK, with an 
emphasis on the last few years.
Despite the traditional home for climatology within the academic 
discipline of geography, it is suggested
that geography – as opposed sometimes to geographers – has played a 
relatively minor role in
such developments. Some reasons for this are considered. What emerges 
from this review is not
only that the relationship between climate and society is now fully 
reflexive, but that climate change
research is in an increasingly reflexive relationship with climate 
policy. In this sense, at least, climate
change may be seen as a fully fledged post-normal science problem 
(Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993).


UK climate change research: a brief institutional history

One way to reflect on the emergence of climate change research in the UK 
is by tracing the historical
development of the institutional arrangements that have sponsored and 
facilitated this research, and
how this research in turn has influenced the policy process. Whilst this 
approach may not allow a detailed
analysis of the research outcomes, it allows a broader and perhaps more 
understandable picture
to be painted of how climate change research in the UK now relates to 
the society that sponsors it. In
the process of painting this picture, we will also see how research and 
policy have become increasingly
entwined, to the extent that distinctions between these two realms of 
activity in relation to climate
change are often difficult to draw.


An emerging scientific issue: pre-1990

A notable starting point for such a history in the UK is the creation in 
1971 of the Climatic
Research Unit (CRU) in the School of Environmental Sciences at the 
University of East Anglia.
Although by no means an ‘institution’ when created, CRU now claims the 
record of the longest continuous
research group in Europe, and maybe the world, focused on understanding 
climate variability and
change and its relationship with society. Founded by the late Hubert 
Lamb, a trained meteorologist
with a historical bent, CRU began to make its mark on climate research 
during the 1970s and
early 1980s, well before the idea of humaninduced global climate change 
(henceforth shorthanded
as ‘global warming’) was embedded in the public mind. This was, at least 
initially, in opposition
to the prevailing orthodoxy of the time (and espoused by the UK Met 
Office which Lamb had
left in disillusionment) that climate change on the timescale of human 
lifetimes was too trivial to be
of much significance for decision-making.

But under the leadership of Lamb and, after 1978, Tom Wigley, CRU made a 
number of seminal
contributions to the worldwide understanding of the reality and 
processes of climate change which
have established it today as a research ‘institution’ of world class 
status. Three of these contributions were
the development of one of the earliest methods for the construction of 
climate change scenarios
(Wigley et al . 1980), the publication of the first truly global 
reconstruction of surface air temperature
during the instrumental period (Jones et al . 1986), and the creation of 
a simple and versatile global
climate model which allowed numerous simulations of the planetary 
climate system to be performed,
exploring its sensitivity to a range of different forcing factors 
(Wigley and Raper 1987).

Although hosted in a department of environmental science, CRU was 
nurtured during its early years by
a geographer dean – Keith Clayton – and the Unit’s staff has always 
included at least a small number of
researchers trained as geographers. Nevertheless, CRU has never really 
been part of the mainstream
academic geography establishment in the UK and the discipline has been 
the weaker for it. Conversely,
the establishment in 1990 of the Environmental Change Unit (ECU) at the 
University of Oxford owed
rather more to geography. Its founding Director, Martin Parry, was a 
geographer from the University of
Birmingham who had developed a research career in the area of climate 
change impacts. A corollary
of the work of Lamb and CRU was that climate change did matter for human 
societies and for strategic
planning, and one of the main thrusts of the ECU in the early–mid 1990s 
was on modelling and assessing
what these future impacts might be (e.g. Carter et al . 1991). 
Strategies for adapting to climate change were also
considered at that time, but in a rather mechanistic way without much 
consideration of the dynamics
of social development and human behaviour.

The establishment of the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the 
Global Environment
(CSERGE) in 1990, however, did create a focus for UK research on the 
economics of, among other things,
climate change. Funded by the ESRC and housed jointly at the University 
of East Anglia and UCL,
CSERGE began to apply formal economic analyses both to the impacts of 
climate change and also
to the effectiveness of climate policy. Its links with established 
academic geography were relatively weak.
The Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research was another 
research institution which
came into existence in 1990. Housed within the UK Met Office, the Hadley 
Centre was very much
a creation of Prime Minister Thatcher and her latter-day appreciation of 
the realities of global
warming. A large proportion of the Hadley Centre’s budget came direct 
from government via the then
Department of Environment, as it still does today, and the Centre’s 
mandate was to develop the
UK’s climate modelling and prediction capability.

Over its 14-year history, this has been achieved with spectacular 
success and the Hadley Centre
is currently regarded by many climate scientists as the leading climate 
modelling centre in the world.
Academic geography, however, has again played a minimal role in this 
development – the successive
cohorts of Hadley researchers having been recruited largely from the 
mathematical and physical sciences.
1990 also saw the first assessment report published by the IPCC, a 
panoramic survey by the
world’s leading climate scientists, steered by representatives of the 
world’s governments, of the state
of knowledge of climate change (Working Group 1), climate change impacts 
(Working Group 2) and
climate change responses (Working Group 3). This landmark publication 
clearly established climate
change both as an environmental reality and as an international policy 
issue, and it led within two
years to the signing of the UNFCCC, at the Earth Summit in Rio, in June 
1992.


The emergence of UK climate change policy: the 1990s

Following the IPCC’s first assessment report in 1990, the UK Government, 
through its Department of the
Environment, published its first national assessment of the possible 
impacts of climate change for the
UK – the so-called Climate Change Impacts Review Group (CCIRG 1991) 
report. Three of the 14 expert
authors were working in geography departments, a recognition that a 
consideration of climate impacts
required at least some geographical knowledge.

The review considered the emerging research needs for adequately 
understanding and addressing
climate change, but also identified issues of policy that should be 
addressed by government departments.
A number of specific policy recommendations were made, the first steps 
towards a coherent
government climate change policy programme that had emerged by the end 
of the decade.

The second CCIRG report was published in 1996 (CCIRG 1996), timed to 
coincide closely with the
release of the second assessment report of the IPCC. This IPCC report 
had indicated that the ‘balance
of evidence’ suggested a discernible human influence on global climate, 
a view reflected in the CCIRG.
Of the 18 expert authors of the second CCRIG report, only two were 
working in geography departments,
although a further four were academics with career origins in mainstream 
geography. Climate change
was appropriating geography and geographers for its agenda rather than 
the other way round. CCIRG
again made policy recommendations for government, this time with an 
explicit treatment of options and
actions that would enhance the UK’s ability to adapt to climate change. 
It was not the role of the
CCIRG to assess or comment on the challenges of climate change mitigation.

The mid-1990s also saw NERC coordinate the largest UK scientific 
programme researching the
natural science elements of global environmental change – the 
Terrestrial Initiative into Global
Environmental Change (TIGER) – of which climate change was probably the 
single most significant
component. A series of thematic sub-programmes provided funding for many 
UK environmental
scientists, including numerous physical geographers. The programme, 
however, had relatively weak links
to policy and the outcome of the programme as a whole made an impact 
that was less than the sum
of its parts.

The period from the late 1980s through to the mid-1990s witnessed a 
series of major climatic anomalies
in the UK, each of which stimulated specific research agendas and policy 
initiatives related to
climate change. The very mild winters of 1988/89 and 1989/90, the 
prolonged hydrological drought
of 1988–92, and the hot, dry summers of 1990 and 1995 were three of the 
more notable ones. Studies
were compiled of the impacts of each of these anomalies in the UK 
(respectively, Cannell and
Pitcairn 1993; Marsh et al . 1994; Palutikof et al . 1997).

Growing confidence that international scientists had detected human 
influence on the global
climate system provided the necessary conditions for many to claim that, 
within the limited territory
of the UK, we were also witnessing signs of human influence. The 1995 
drought in particular had an
important outcome for policy, water companies henceforth being 
statutorily required to consider
climate change projections in any long-term strategic planning and 
investment.
Two new initiatives from the Department of the Environment followed in 
1996 and 1997: the
establishment of the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) and the 
commissioning of a report on
climate indicators in the UK. Between them, these have contributed 
greatly in the UK to overturning
the aforementioned orthodoxy of the 1970s to a new orthodoxy for the new 
millennium: not only is
human-induced global climate change now manifest in our national climate 
and environment, but the
prospect of continuing, if not accelerating, climate change requires all 
sectors of society and the
economy to adjust their environmental and business strategies to 
accommodate it.

UKCIP was based in the Environmental Change Institute (previously Unit) 
at the University of Oxford
and was established in the summer of 1997. UKCIP took a different 
approach to assessing climate change
impacts and adaptation options. Rather than creating a formal 
science-driven research agenda, the Programme
was established to entrain organizations across society – so-called 
stakeholders – in jointly defining
and part-sponsoring regional or sectoral studies of climate impacts 
(McKenzie-Hedger et al . 2000).
UKCIP has been enormously influential in the UK in raising awareness of 
climate change in sections
and sectors of society which would not normally be reached by 
conventional scientific research programmes
(Figure 2). The intellectual shaping of UKCIP, however, owes more to the 
ideas of participatory
integrated assessment (e.g. Rotmans and Dowlatabadi 1998) and the 
campaigning vigour of environmental
organizations than it does to academic geography.

One of the first products from UKCIP was a new, comprehensive set of 
climate change scenarios for
the UK, the so-called UKCIP98 scenarios (Hulme and Jenkins 1998; and 
subsequently the UKCIP02
scenarios, Hulme et al . 2002). Derived from climate modelling work at 
the Hadley Centre, these four
descriptions of alternative future UK climates over the twenty-first 
century were widely promoted by
UKCIP for use in impacts research and in adaptation planning by a large 
number of stakeholder organizations,
ranging from water companies to nature conservation bodies and tourism 
agencies. As a report commissioned
by government, these scenarios for the 2020s, 2050s and 2080s were 
scrutinized for
information that might inform the regulatory processes in the UK. Among 
others, the Environment
Agency, the Building Regulations Advisory Committee and the Flood and 
Coastal Management
Division of the Department of the Environment all began to use the 
scenarios in their re-evaluation
of statutory regulation. For example, a sea-level rise allowance of 
between 4 and 6 mm/year was
recommended by the Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions 
to be applied to any
coastal management scheme in the UK (DETR 2000). Formal, regulated 
adaptation to prospective
climate change was now becoming a conventional part of the UK policy 
landscape.

Following the success of the climate change scenarios, UKCIP produced 
further scenario tools
to complement these, including a set of socioeconomic scenarios (UKCIP 
2001). The aim of these
latter scenarios was to integrate socio-economic change with climate 
change in the assessment of
future adaptation options.
The first report on national environmental indicators of climate change, 
commissioned and published by
the DETR, followed shortly after (Cannell et al . 1999; now updated to 
2003 at http://www.nbu.ac.uk/iccuk/)
and gave further impetus to the development of climate policy. This 
report contained 34 quantified
indicators of climate change in the UK, ranging from climatic indicators 
such as air temperature to
ecological and economic indicators such as leaf emergence dates and 
property insurance claims. As
the ministerial foreword stated, the report ‘. . . will alert us to the 
impact of climate change . . . and
instill a sense of urgency in responding to it’.

By now, the late 1990s, the UNFCCC had spawned the first formal protocol 
for limiting emissions of
greenhouse gases, at least amongst developed nations (the Kyoto Protocol 
signed in December 1997), and
by the start of the new millennium in 2000 scientists were able to 
announce that, globally, the year
1998 and the decade of the 1990s had ‘probably’ been the warmest of the 
last thousand years (Mann
et al . 1999). The IPCC was shortly to release its third assessment 
report in which it was to claim
that ‘. . . most of the warming over the last 50 years is likely to have 
been due to human activities . . .’
(IPCC 2001, 158). In the UK there was a wealth of evidence to suggest 
that the parallel warming of
UK climate (Figure 3) was leaving its mark on the natural world. Birds, 
butterflies, trees, fish and
pathogens were all displaying behaviour and trends suggestive of a 
climatic fingerprint (e.g. Thomas
et al. 2001; Sparks and Menzel 2002) and the autumn of 2000 was the 
wettest on record in the UK. The
associated widespread and persistent flooding across the country 
prompted a receptive political and media
audience to announce the ‘wake-up call’ that global warming was 
happening here and now, not
there and then.

The increasing confidence through the 1990s in the science of climate 
change detection and
prediction, the experience of climate change in the UK over the previous 
10 years, and its quantifiable
impact on ecological and economic indicators, together with a set of 
national climate change
scenarios laying out the prospects for the coming century, had led to 
the point where formal government
action to try and limit climate change was acceptable, if not 
inevitable. The UK signed the
Kyoto Protocol in the spring of 1998 (its formal ratification by the UK 
was to follow in 2002)
and later that year the EU agreed a distribution of emissions reductions 
between the 15 member
nations. The UK’s share was a 12.5% reduction in 1990 greenhouse gas 
emissions by the period
2008–12. This commitment was therefore the final piece of the jigsaw 
that led to the development
of the UK’s first national Climate Change (policy) Programme, published 
in November 2000 (DETR
2000). The Climate Change Programme was predominantly setting out a 
range of possible and
actual measures and initiatives by which the UK Government proposed to 
meet its Kyoto obligations
(in fact, the Programme also made play of the voluntary domestic target 
of a 20% reduction in
carbon dioxide emissions by 2010). These included two new policy 
measures – a Climate Change Levy
(in effect, an energy tax on business users) and a UK emissions trading 
scheme (Wordsworth and
Grubb 2001).

The 2000 Climate Change Programme is very important for understanding 
subsequent developments
in the UK, both new investments in scientific research and development 
and new policy initiatives.
It provided a comprehensive statement about the UK’s position on the 
science of climate change,
the risks posed and the policy responses which would be necessary. As 
the previous material has
shown, the government was only able to reach this position by drawing 
upon a considerable history of
both fundamental and policy-relevant research, much of it international 
of course, but much of it
originating within the UK itself. It was also in a position to do so 
given the public mood in the
country at large that climate change was indeed an environmental 
challenge which national government,
among other organizations, was expected to tackle (Lorenzoni et al . 
2000). Research had led to policy.
Could policy now lead to action?


 From research and policy to action: post-1990s
...
(verder, zie link ...)
"

Maar hoe het ontstaan in ons land eruit ziet?

Henk Elegeert

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