Leading scientist tells MPs that climate change policies are 'dangerously optimistic'
Tue 23 June 2009
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Professor Kevin Anderson, a leading climate scientist, has warned MPs on the Environmental Audit Committee that the Government's climate change policies are 'dangerously optimistic'. He said that if they were followed internationally the Government's planned carbon cuts would only have a 50 per cent chance of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees C, the point at which the EU defines as leading to dangerous climate change.
Professor Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said (reported by The Guardian) that the two government departments most directly involved with climate change policy - Decc and Defra - were like "small dogs yapping at the heels" of more powerful departments such as Lord Mandelson's BIS. He said that the Department of Energy and Climate Change should be given more power.
Professor Anderson who recently gave the opening presentation at the LowCVP's annual conference, was speaking to Commitee MPs as part of an inquiry into the UK's carbon budgets, now legally binding limits on emissions set by the Committee on Climate Change under the new Climate Change Act.
Anderson also said that without more ambitious action he feared that a significant deal at the upcoming Copenhagen climate change conference would not be achieved. "We are going to come out and recover the deck-chairs in preparation for moving them as the Titanic sinks. We're not even at the stage of rearranging them," he said.
Anderson praised politicians for taking on the science of climate change but said they were letting policy be driven by political expediency rather than science.
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