Climate Change: Do As They Do

One of the, uh, curious characteristics displayed by some of the more prominent climate evangelists is their failure to behave as if they believe that disaster is truly on the way: think of Al Gore’s purchase of expensive beachfront property in 2010, a remarkable decision in the light of what he had said just four years before.

Here’s CBS reporting in 2006:

[P]oliticians and corporations have been ignoring the issue [of climate change] for decades, to the point that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said.

He sees the situation as “a true planetary emergency.”

Rush Limbaugh has had fun with that prediction for a while.

And this sort of thing is also true on the legislative/executive side too. Thus New York City mayor Bloomberg was continually warning of the dangers of climate change, but failed to toughen Gotham’s flood defenses. That would have been a questionable approach to take with respect to the management of any low-lying coastal city, but it was appallingly negligent if Bloomberg really was convinced that the climate was changing in the way he claimed. In any event, the city paid a heavy price for Bloomberg’s neglect when Hurricane Sandy hit.

Meanwhile I’ve just returned from spending Christmas in the UK. The news there was dominated by widespread flooding in the north of England.

The Spectator:

…Only a month ago, David Cameron was at the Paris climate summit lending his weight to apocalyptic warnings of flood and tempest unless the world acted quickly to reduce carbon emissions. Yet with tracts of northern cities underwater, his government continues with a make-do-and-mend flood-defence policy which, never mind climate change, is incapable of dealing with the climate we already have.

While lecturing us on the threat of greater rainfall and rising sea levels, the government has reduced spending on flood defence. Every time we have floods, the Chancellor announces a few extra million, only to quietly slash funding once we have had a few dry months and the issue has disappeared from the political radar. This year, spending on river and sea defences — including capital expenditure and maintenance — will come to £695 million, a 4 per cent reduction in real terms over the past four years.

To put that into context, this year the government and consumers between them will spend £4.3 billion subsidising green energy. We keep being told that we cannot afford more money for flood walls and diversion channels, yet we are being forced to spend a far greater sum in an attempt to control the climate…

A strategy to manage global temperatures through the control of carbon emissions — even if the shaky science behind it is correct — would only work if every country on Earth played ball and agreed to legally binding reductions on carbon emissions. As we found in Paris, few other countries will agree to this because they can see that it is economic growth which will save them from flooding and other climate-related disasters — voluntarily denying themselves sources of cheap energy will harm that growth…

In any case, we need enhanced flood defences, climate change or no climate change. The weather over the past month has been exceptional but — apart from the 12 inches of rain in 24 hours in one part of Cumbria, which set a record — it has not been unprecedented. You don’t have to look far around the walls of Carlisle or York to find notched lines marking the levels of previous floods which were nearly or just as high. Flooding has always been a part of life in many British towns; what has changed is the expectation of keeping dry.

The wealthier we become as a country, the better we ought to be at meeting that expectation. Transfer even a fraction of spending from the subsidy of renewables to flood defence and we could have a flood policy like that of the Netherlands, which in spite of having a quarter of the population of Britain has managed to find £1.9 billion to enhance its river defences. Diversion channels have been dug; areas of agricultural land are being used to create temporary reservoirs where floodwaters can be held back to prevent flooding of towns downstream; roads and houses are being raised or rebuilt off the floodplain…

…For years, grim prophecies on climate change were used as an excuse to jack up fuel taxes. The danger now is that they are used to excuse the failure to deliver a proper flood-defence policy. The deputy chief executive of the Environment Agency, David Rooke, claimed today that thanks to climate change we are entering an age of ‘unknown extremes’. No we are not. The risks are well known; it is just that they have not been acted on thanks to penny-pinching and incompetence.

And, I think, thanks also to the almost pathological carelessness that is such a characteristic of David Cameron’s management style.

But the question remains. Cameron’s governments have imposed a very heavy burden on Britain’s economy in the name of fighting climate change, so why have they been so negligent over flood defense?

Any thoughts, prime minister?