Water Wars
April 29, 2007
While the 20th century mostly saw wars being fought around energy sources, especially oil, there are already indications that the focus of conflicts in the coming century would be water. Contrary to popular belief, water is a finite resource, and increasing population coupled with Climate Change will ensure that demand goes higher even as resources keep depleting. We are already into the fourth year of the 21st century’s first Climate Change war — Darfur — and Julian Borger of the Guardian deserves credit for highlighting this fact. (More on the Darfur)
Less than a generation ago, Arabs and Africans coexisted peacefully and productively in Darfur, Sudan’s arid western province which is more than twice the size of the United Kingdom. African farmers had allowed Arab herders to graze their camels and goats on the land, and the livestock had fertilised the soil.
The coexistence was so natural, in fact, the tribes of Darfur did not even think of themselves as Arab or African…Only a few years ago, it was just nomads and farmers…
Something fundamental has changed in this part of Africa, and it happened within a generation. From a state of sectarian innocence in which the dividing line between Arab and African was meaningless, something made people pick sides, and hardened their new sense of identity into ethnic hatred, all in the past two decades. What changed, the evidence suggests, was the climate.
The current conflict began in 2003. It was triggered when Darfurians launched a revolt against the central government, which fought back by unleashing the Janjaweed.
But the real roots of the disaster stretch back to the mid-1980s when a ferocious drought and famine transformed Sudan and the whole Horn of Africa. It killed more than a million people and laid waste livestock herds. Whether they maintained their way of life or tried to take up settled cultivation, the pastoralists of Darfur clashed repeatedly with its farmers. A string of conflicts broke out as both sides armed themselves, and those conflicts created the template for today’s disaster.
Alex de Waal, a researcher and writer on Darfur, tells the story of meeting a nomadic leader, Sheikh Hilal Musa, in 1985, at the height of the drought. The desert was visibly advancing as the Saharan winds blew sand into the more fertile hills where the sheikh’s clan, the Jalul, were grazing their camels. He tried hard to keep up appearances but it was clear his world was falling apart. Many Jalul who had lost their camels and goats tried their hands at farming, but as latecomers with no ancestral land rights, they had to make do with rocky semi-barren terrain, and could only look with envy towards the rich alluvial soil belonging to the long-established African tribe, an offshoot of the Fur people. Darfur means literally the Land of the Fur…
But Khartoum would never have found willing partners in Darfur if the conflict over land had not been made so acute by the drought. Tellingly, those Arab tribes who had land ownership rights - mostly in the south of Darfur - chose not to join the government’s counter-insurgency. Those who were prepared to kill, rape and pillage were drawn from the ranks of the desperate, ripped from their traditional way of life by a catastrophic change in the weather. Global warming created the dry tinder. Khartoum supplied the match.
Back in the 1980s, the failure of the rains was widely blamed on the people who lived in the region. Their over-grazing, it had been thought, had led to soil erosion, replaced green cover with bare rock and sand, reflecting more heat into the atmosphere and diminishing the chance of rain.
More recent computer modelling has suggested that rain patterns over Africa are influenced rather by ocean temperatures, and those in turn reflect global warming, and the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, droughts in Africa may be caused less by its hapless inhabitants and more by oversize cars and cheap flights in Europe and the US…
There is endless potential for more climate-driven conflicts all across the broad Sahel region that stretches from Sudan to Senegal, where the competition between herder and farmer is often reinforced by more entrenched tribal differences, as well as the fault line between Muslim and Christian. In decades to come, Darfur may be seen as one of the first true climate-change wars, and those wars to come may be every bit as vicious because the adversaries will be fighting for their lives in a suddenly unfamiliar world.
It is a doom-laden scenario but it is not inevitable. Most scientists agree that climate change, of one degree or another, will happen, and that it will diminish the amount of fertile arable land and pasture across vulnerable regions like the Sahel. What is not inevitable is the descent from competition to armed conflict. That is a political leap. It requires that national governments choose to exacerbate conflicts rather than resolve them, and it requires that the international community fails to act when national governments do not protect their own citizens.
“The real problem here is moral, it is not a question of climate,” Said Ibrahim Mustafa, the sultan of the Chadian border region of Dar Sila, says. “It’s not just a lack of water that makes a man kill his brother.”
At the moment, people such as Mustafa are losing the battle. After criticising the N’Djamena government for handing out guns rather than attempting to defuse border tensions with Sudan, he was obliged to hand over formal authority to his less outspoken son…
The rebels and the government came close to a deal last year but by the time a deadline for the negotiations expired, only one rebel faction had accepted the terms Khartoum was offering. The Darfur groups are in disarray, but if they were to reassemble around a common platform they may find Khartoum - facing mounting sanctions - willing to make a better deal…
There are ways that Darfur’s tragedy can be contained and mitigated before its neighbours are pulled into the downward spiral. The alternative could be a chain of conflicts across the continent and beyond, in the struggle for survival on a changing planet.
Warmer, Warmer
April 19, 2007
My response to John Lanchester’s plug for nuclear energy is in the London Review of Books.
John Lanchester endorses James Lovelock’s enthusiasm for nuclear power (LRB, 22 March). I presume he feels, as Lovelock does, that nuclear waste is so safe he would be willing to store it in his garden shed. Perhaps he also finds ‘persuasive’ Lovelock’s claims that the death rates from cancer of Hiroshima survivors were lower than in comparable populations, and that Chernobyl killed only 45 people. Lanchester appears to have fallen for the PR campaign conducted by the nuclear industry and the Blair government over the past year. He overlooks the environmental costs of uranium mining, which will only increase as reserves are depleted and the industry is forced to rely on progressively lower-grade ore. He doesn’t tell us how we will dispose of nuclear waste, says very little about the risks associated with running nuclear power plants, and ignores the costs of decommissioning. Nor does he take into account the amount of money the industry has already taken from taxpayers in the form of state subsidies, money which could have been spent on developing less risky alternatives.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Glasgow
Monbiot on Climate Change
April 11, 2007
The following exchange highlights the reason why I feel the primary qualification for making it in the mainstream media is for one’s head to be safely plugged up one’s rear.
Letter from George Monbiot to Hamish Mykura, 16th March 2007
Dear Hamish,
I deeply regret your attempt on the Today programme on Wednesday to use my programme for Dispatches as your justification for broadcasting Martin Durkin’s film The Great Global Warming Swindle.
I do so for three reasons.
1. You claimed that both programmes were commissioned as part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”. This is untrue, as I am sure you know. The films were commissioned quite separately, by different departments. The Great Global Warming Swindle must have been commissioned long before my programme. Neither I nor anyone else on the production team has ever been told that my programme was part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”, or that it would be in any way linked to The Great Global Warming Swindle. If I had been aware of this, I would have withdrawn my cooperation. If this claim reflects your general standards of honesty, it might explain how The Great Global Warming Swindle came to be broadcast.
2. I am also resentful of the association between my film and Martin Durkin’s. My film was subjected to a rigorous process of fact-checking. Any claim which would not stand up to rigorous academic scrutiny was dropped. The production team was determined to ensure that every part of the film was robust and unchallengeable, and were supported in this by Channel 4’s current affairs department. Somehow the same standards do not seem to have been applied by your department. Durkin’s film contained a number of fundamental errors, some of which, it seems, could only have been made deliberately. Some of the graphs had plainly been “modified” by the production team. He suggested that the cooling after the Second World War was unexplained by climate scientists, while in truth climate scientists know that it was caused by global dimming as a result of sulphate pollution. As one of the contributers to the programme, Professor Carl Wunsch, has pointed out, the film was “as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two”, while the way it used his remarks “comes close to fraud”. How dare you associate me with this?
3. You suggested that my film in some way “balances” Durkin’s. But my film was not about the science of climate change. It was about the policies arising from it. I was not asked to demonstrate that manmade climate change was taking place. Neither was Mark Dowd, whose film you also cited. I am sure you can tell the difference between a film about science and a film about policy.
I would like to ask you three questions:
A. Could you please give me a list of the programmes about climate change your department has broadcast over the past 10 years.
B. In your letter to the Guardian you state that “we are presenting a range of programmes on the environment, many of which have as their premise the influence of CO2 as a driver of climate change”. Could you please let me know what these programmes are, and whether any of them are devoted to explaining the science of climate change, as understood by the great majority of the world’s scientists?
C. Could you please tell me whether you or any other commissioner in your department possesses a science degree?
Yours Sincerely,
George Monbiot
Letter from Hamish Mykura to George Monbiot, 20th March 2007.
Dear George,
Thank you for this. I’m happy to respond to the points you raise.
Firstly on your general points, ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ was indeed commissioned as part of a season of polemical films about climate change. The others were your film and Mark Dowd’s ‘God is Green’. I discussed these films at an early stage with Dorothy Byrne and other colleagues. It is usual for Channel 4’s seasons to originate from different departments, for example our Adoption Season and Bloody Foreigners Season comprised programmes from the News and Current Affairs and Documentaries departments.
‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ was subject to the same legal and editorial scrutiny as your film, which you agree is rigorous.
Carl Wunsch was not misrepresented or misled about the programme and our correpondence with him clearly establishes this.
On your specific questions
1. I do not have a list of climate change programmes covering ten years. However in the last two years Channel 4 transmitted ‘A World Without Water’ on the global scarcity of water supply, ‘The Year the Earth Went Wild’ on increasing climate and geological volatitlity, ‘The End of the World as we Know It’ which was Marcel Theroux’s essay on global warming, ‘Seven Days that Shook the Weathermen’ on the effects of climate change, ‘Britain’s Tornado’ on the increase in volatile weather in the UK, and ‘What would Jesus Drive’ on the debate over US fuel consumption.
2. Channel 4 announced to the press in January that the environment would form the focus of a range of different programmes and series in 2007. As well as the three polemics which deal with climate change, we announced the series ‘Dumped’ – in which participants see how well they can live on the household waste that we throw away every day; the series ‘River Cottage Market’ which addresses the concept of ‘food miles’ and offers practical solutions to using local produce. There was also the series ‘Animal Farm’, which is an investigation of the pros and cons of genetic modification.
3. My own PhD devises mathematical predictive equations to assess soil erosion and environmental impacts of rainforest clearance in the tropics. Regards
Hamish Mykura
Head of History, Science & Religion
Letter from George Monbiot to Hamish Mykura, 22nd March 2007.
Dear Hamish,
thank you for your reply.
On the first point, as this is news to those of us who made my film, I would be grateful if you could provide me with some evidence: some memos or publicity material, for example, which show that it was commissioned as part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”.
On the issue of editorial scrutiny, you are plain wrong. Every fact in my programme stood up to examination, and remains standing today. The film you commissioned, by contrast, was a concatenation of mistakes so evident that some of them could only have been made on purpose. Let me give you some examples:
1. “Volcanoes produce more CO2 each year than all the factories and cars and planes and other sources of man-made carbon dioxide put together.”
This is simply wrong, as the most basic fact-check would have established.
2. The closing statement was as follows: “There will still be people who believe that this is the end of the world. Particularly when you have, for example, uh, the chief scientist of the UK telling people that by the end of the century, the only inhabitable place on the Earth, will be the Antarctic and it may, humanity may survive, thanks to some breeding couples, who moved to the Antarctic, I mean this is hilarious, it would be hilarious actually, if, if, if it weren’t so sad.”
These are not the views of the chief scientist, Sir David King. They are the views of James Lovelock. Singer appears to have confused them. Again, even a cursory fact check would have established this.
3. Almost every graph in the film was manipulated. In some cases, the time-line was extended beyond the available data, in others the curve had been smoothed to the extent that it became misleading. It looks as if these instances were deliberate attempts to fit the data to the argument.
4. The credentials of several of the scientists in the film were inflated. The worst example is Tim Ball, who is described as “Professor Tim Ball, Department of Climatology, University of Winnipeg”. As far as I can discover, there is no Department of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg. In fact he was a Professor of Geography at that university from 1988 until he retired in 1996. He has not since held an official position there or at any other university. Nor has he been granted an emeritus professorship.
Then there are the distortions by omission:
5. There is the suggestion, for example, that the standard climate model cannot explain the relative cooling between the 1940s and the 1970s. Any reputable climate scientist could have pointed out that the mechanism – global dimming – is well known and consistent with the models.
6. There is the claim that as rising temperatures, as shown in the Antarctic ice cores, pre-date rises in CO2, CO2 cannot be a driver of climate change. Again, as I suspect both you and Durkin knew perfectly well, this too is explained by the models.
7. There is the deliberate evasion of the question of funding. The film asks the contributers who have NOT received funding from the oil industry whether or not they have, and they reply in the negative. It does not ask Fred Singer, who HAS received such funding. It claims that Pat Michaels came “under attack from climate campaigners” for “conduct[ing] research which was part funded by the coal industry”. In fact, as the most cursory check would have shown, he came under attack for acting as a paid advocate for the coal industry, without declaring his interests. If you want documentary evidence for this, I can send it to you. But, again, your fact checkers – if there were any – should have found it.
Who was the scientific adviser on this film? Who were the fact-checkers? What qualifications did they have?
As for Carl Wunsch, surely he is better placed to decide whether or not he has been misrepresented than you are? Anyone watching the film would have concluded – as I did when I first saw it – that Wunsch subscribed to its thesis that CO2 was not a driver of climate change. Can you tell me that this is not the impression it creates? In other words, what depths of intellectual dishonesty are you prepared to plumb in defending this film?
But the most shocking information in your email is contained in the last line. When I asked whether anyone in your department had a degree in science, I confidently expected that the answer would be no – this might have explained quite a lot. Some of the errors in the film might even have been understandable. But discovering that you have a PhD in maths/environmental science, I realise that you must have gone into this with your eyes open. You know what the scientific process involves. You know what science looks like. You must also know what scientific fraud looks like. You appear to have chosen fraud.
Yours Sincerely, George Monbiot.
Letter from Hamish Mykura to George Monbiot, 26th March 2007.
Dear George,
Thank you for this.
With regard to the points you raise about the content of the programme ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, this film was subject to the same degree of editorial scrutiny as your programme ‘Greenwash’, which you yourself describe as ‘rigorous’. The film was indeed commissioned as one of several polemical films dealing with global warming issues in our season of films on the environment.
You question my decision to commission this film. However ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ represented the views of the significant minority of scientists and commentators who don’t subscribe to the view that anthropogenic CO2 is driving climate change. The very significant debate which the film has started is to be welcomed.
Regards, Hamish Mykura
Letter from George Monbiot to Hamish Mykura, 1st April 2007.
Dear Hamish,
Thank you for your message. I note with regret that you have not answered my questions; indeed that you have simply repeated the assertions made in your previous email, which I have already shown to be incorrect.
I listed seven evident and substantial “mistakes” made by The Great Global Warming Swindle. I could have listed several more. Your claim that it was “subject to the same degree of editorial scrutiny” as my programme, Greenwash, could be substantiated in one of only two ways. The first would be to show that Greenwash was also riddled with wildly misleading claims. I challenge you to name one respect – let alone seven – in which its assertions have been proved wrong.
The second would be to accept that the editorial scrutiny offered by your department is deficient. If it were true that The Great Global Warming Swindle was subject to rigorous scrutiny, then the people responsible for that scrutiny are in the wrong job. As you are ultimately responsible for ensuring that the programme was ready for transmission, that surely includes yourself. How many “mistakes” does a film have to make before you consider that it has NOT been subject to rigorous scrutiny?
I asked you in my last letter to justify your claim that both my film and Martin Durkin’s were commissioned as part of “a season of opinionated polemical films about global warming”. You have failed to do so. Why? If your claim were true, the evidence would surely not be hard to come by. Nor would it constitute a state secret. There is surely only one explanation for your failure to support this claim: you are unable to do so because it is untrue. If that is the case, then not only did the film you commissioned mislead its viewers on several substantial points of science, but you misled the listeners to the Today programme about the commissioning process. I will be forwarding our correspondence to the Today programme and asking that a correction be made.
Finally, you state that “the very significant debate which the film has started is to be welcomed”. You give yourself too much credit: the debate about whether or not anthropogenic global warming is happening was not started by the Great Global Warming Swindle. It has been taking place for over 20 years. Your film has indeed started a debate: about whether or not it was fit to be broadcast. I think your failure to provide credible responses to my questions answers that point.
Yours Sincerely,
George Monbiot
Global Warming and the Channel 4 Swindle
March 13, 2007
Sensationalism and controversy boosts ratings. No one knows this better than the folks at Channel 4. Having already milked the Big Brother controversy for all it was worth, they seek a rerun; this time by giving platform to the Climate Change Denial Industry to recycle discredited propaganda. A “documentary”, called The Great Global Warming Swindle, was given a prime time slot by the channel even though its Director has a history of misrepresentation and falsehoods. This film was no exception. One of the oceanographers appearing in the film has already protested that he was “seriously misrepresented”. George Monbiot unravels the rest of the nonsense peddled by Channel 4 in his column, “Don’t let truth stand in the way of a red-hot debunking of climate change“, in today’s Guardian.
Were it not for dissent, science, like politics, would have stayed in the Dark Ages. All the great heroes of the discipline – Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein – took tremendous risks in confronting mainstream opinion. Today’s crank has often proved to be tomorrow’s visionary.
But the syllogism does not apply. Being a crank does not automatically make you a visionary. There is little prospect, for example, that Dr Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang, the South African health minister who has claimed that AIDS can be treated with garlic, lemon and beetroot, will one day be hailed as a genius. But the point is often confused. Professor David Bellamy, for example, while making the incorrect claim that wind farms do not have “any measurable effect” on total emissions of carbon dioxide, has compared himself to Galileo(1).
The problem with “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, which caused a sensation when it was broadcast on Channel 4 last week, is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Just as the British government launches its climate change bill and Gordon Brown and David Cameron start jostling to establish their green credentials, thousands of people have been misled into believing that there is no problem to address.
The film’s main contention is that the current increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the Sun. It is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on earth are in “strikingly good agreement” with the length of the cycle of sunspots(2).
Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the “agreement” was the result of “incorrect handling of the physical data”(3). The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has in fact declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, Friis-Christensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results(4). But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes they had made – in this case in their arithmetic(5).
So Friis-Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating that the Sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the Sun and global cloud cover(6). This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming. But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data which did not in fact measure global cloud cover. A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that when the right data are used, a correlation is not found(7).
So the hypothesis changed again. Without acknowledging that his previous paper was wrong, Friis-Christensen’s co-author, Henrik Svensmark, declared that there was in fact a correlation – not with total cloud cover but with “low cloud cover”(8). This too turned out to be incorrect(9). Then, last year, Svensmark published a paper purporting to show that cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere(10). Accompanying it was a press release which went way beyond the findings reported in the paper, claiming it showed that both past and current climate events are the result of cosmic rays(11).
As Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA has shown on www.realclimate.org, five missing steps would have to be taken to justify the wild claims in the press release. “We’ve often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work”, Schmidt says, “but this example is by far the most blatant extrapolation-beyond-reasonableness that we’ve seen.”(12) None of this seems to have troubled the programme makers, who report the cosmic ray theory as if it trounces all competing explanations.
The film also maintains that manmade global warming is disproved by conflicting temperature data. Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he discovered between temperatures at the earth’s surface and temperatures in the troposphere (or lower atmosphere). But the programme fails to mention that in 2005 his data were proved wrong, by three papers in Science magazine(13,14,15).
Christy himself admitted last year that he was mistaken. He was one of the lead authors of a paper which states the opposite of what he says in the film. “Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected.”(16)
Until recently, when found to be wrong, scientists went quietly back to their labs to start again. Now, emboldened by the global denial industry, some of them, like the film makers, shriek “censorship!” This is the best example of manufactured victimhood I have ever come across. If you demonstrate that someone is wrong, you are now deemed to be silencing him.
But there is one scientist in the film whose work has not been debunked: the oceanographer Carl Wunsch. He appears to support the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for rising global temperatures. Professor Wunsch says that he was “completely misrepresented” by the programme, and “totally misled” by the people who made it(17).
This is a familiar story to those who have followed the career of the director, Martin Durkin. In 1998 the Independent Television Commission found that, when making a similar series, he had “misled” his interviewees about “the content and purpose of the programmes”. Their views had been “distorted through selective editing”(18). Channel 4 had to make a prime-time apology…
But for the people who commissioned this film, all that counts is the sensation. Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed scientific paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail. It keeps commissioning people whose claims have been discredited – like Martin Durkin and a certain nutritionist of our acquaintance. But its failure to understand the scientific process just makes the job of whipping up a storm that much easier. The less true a programme is, the greater the controversy.
References:
1. David Bellamy, 14th August 2004. An ill wind blows for turbines. Letter to the Guardian.
2. Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, 1991. Length of the solar cycle: an indicator of solar activity closely associated with climate. Science, Vol 254, 698-700.
3. Paul Damon and Peter Laut, 2004. Pattern of Strange Errors Plagues Solar Activity and Terrestrial Climate Data. Eos, Vol. 85, No. 39.
4. Knud Lassen and Eigil Friis-Christensen, 2000. Reply to “Solar cycle lengths and climate: A reference revisited” by P. Laut and J.Gundermann. Journal of Geophysical Research Vol 105, No 27, 493-495.
5. Paul Damon and Peter Laut, ibid.
6. Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, 1997. Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverage: A missing link in solar-climate relationships. The Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Vol 59, 1225-1232.
7. Peter Laut, 2003. Solar activity and terrestrial climate: an analysis of some purported correlations. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics Vol 65, 801-812.
8. Nigel Marsh and Henrik Svensmark, 2000. Low cloud properties influenced by cosmic rays. Physical Review Letters Vol 85, no 23. 5004-5007.
9. Paul Damon and Peter Laut, ibid.
10. Henrik Svensmark et al, 2007. Experimental evidence for the role of ions in particle nucleation under atmospheric conditions. Proceedings of the Royal Society Volume 463, Number 2078, 1364-5021.
11. Danish National Space centre, October 2006. Getting closer to the cosmic connection to climate.
http://spacecenter.dk/publications/press-releases/getting-closer-to-the-cosmic-connection-to-climate
12. Gavin Schmidt, 16th October 2006. Taking Cosmic Rays for a spin. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/taking-cosmic-rays-for-a-spin/
13. Carl A. Mears and Frank J. Wentz, 2nd September 2005. The Effect of Diurnal Correction on Satellite-Derived Lower Tropospheric Temperature. Science. Vol 309, pp1548-1551.
14. B.D. Santer et al, 2nd September 2005. Amplification of Surface Temperature Trends and Variability in the Tropical Atmosphere. Science. Vol 309, pp1548-1551.
15. Steven J. Sherwood, John R. Lanzante and Cathryn L. Meyer, 2nd September 2005. Radiosonde Daytime Biases and Late-20th Century Warming. Science. Vol 309, pp1556-1559.
16. Tom Wigley et al, April 2006. Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere – Understanding and Reconciling Differences: Executive Summary. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program.
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-execsum.pdf
17. Geoffrey Lean, 11th March 2007. An inconvenient truth… for C4. Independent on Sunday.
18. Independent Television Commission, 1st April 1998. Channel 4 to apologise to four interviewees in “Against Nature” series. Press release.
The Friendly Atom
February 28, 2007
Variant, number 28, Spring 2007 (with Leigh French, for NuclearSpin)
On February 15, Tony Blair’s plan to introduce a new generation of nuclear power stations suffered a serious setback when the High Court ruled that the consultation carried out by the government earlier was “misleading” and “seriously flawed”. Justice Sullivan’s ruling enjoins the government to canvass public opinion again, causing a likely delay in the publication of the energy white paper scheduled for March. The judgement is a significant victory for Greenpeace which, describing it as a sham, had applied for a judicial review of the consultation process.
The landmark ruling closed a chapter that started on January 23, 2006 when the government officially launched the 12-week consultation exercise on the UK’s energy needs, entitled: ‘Our Energy Challenge: Securing Clean, Affordable Energy for the Long Term’. The review officially ended in April, and on July 11, Alistair Darling, the Trade and Industry Secretary, gave the green light to a new generation of nuclear power plants extolling that: “nuclear power would make a ‘significant contribution’ to cutting carbon emissions and to securing Britain’s energy future.”
It is obvious why the Energy Review should have been seen as a cynical PR exercise that gave the appearance of a public debate, since Blair had reportedly made up his mind in November 2005, when he was said to be “convinced” of the pro-nuclear argument; and the pro-nuclear bias of his Cabinet was equally well known.
Nuclear revival in the rest of the world is being led by the G8 countries, that intend to resurrect fast breed reactors – which were earlier scrapped in the UK, France and Germany due to their astronomical costs. To be sure, there is scepticism within the ranks of the G8; Italy and Germany would rather dispense with the option. In the rest of Europe, Sweden wants to phase out its nuclear power plants; Austria and Spain are equally keen to diversify.
Failing to take into account any lessons learned from past mistakes, The Energy Review seemed to have “abolished history” according to an editorial in the Sunday Herald. The same editorial quotes Colin Mitchell, a manager of nuclear policy at the Department of Trade and Industry, saying, “in-depth research into the past performance of nuclear industry is not required to carry out the review.” Supreme disdain for learning anything from the past is evident throughout the report.
Only days prior to the High Court decision, British Energy – a company with a disastrous record and 65% owned by the government – was calling for partners to help build a new generation of nuclear plants by 2016. The company had been rescued from bankruptcy earlier by a government bailout, even as it raked in £622 million profit in the first nine months of the financial year and reactors at four of its sites remain out of action due to a lack of maintenance. While most of the proposed sites for new nuclear plants are owned by British Energy, the private financing approach ensures that in the end, while most of the profits remain private, the costs will for the most part be public. The real price of nuclear energy has never been properly disclosed, partly because the public has been saddled with the massive costs of decommissioning. In the UK alone these costs stand at £50 billion, and since the opening of the first civil nuclear power station at Calder Hall in October 1956, the nuclear industry has received global subsidies of around $1 trillion.
But government is now pushing nuclear power on the grounds that it would be impossible for it to meet its carbon emissions targets otherwise, and, invoking the spectre of terror, on the grounds of ‘energy security’.
Peak Uranium
The claims for carbon-free nuclear energy are undermined by the fact that the industry’s advocates want us to overlook the carbon emissions that are an inevitable part of the uranium extraction process. This is only going to get worse as the higher demand for uranium (both nationally and internationally) makes it necessary for it to be extracted in less refined forms, adding to the emissions. In reporting on energy security and uranium reserves, Jan Willem and Storm van Leeuwen, independent nuclear analysts at Ceedata Consulting, state:
A new generation of nuclear reactors will increase demand for uranium ore to produce reactor fuel. In 2005 the world nuclear fleet consumed about 68,000 tonnes of natural uranium, mostly from mined sources. At the end of 2005 the world known recoverable uranium resources amounted to about 3.6 million tonnes. These resources show a wide variation in ore grade and accessibility. … Uranium ore is not an energy resource unless the ore grade is high enough. Below grade 0.02% (U3O8 Uranium Oxide) more energy is required to produce and exploit the uranium fuel than can be generated from it. Falling ore grade leads to rapidly rising CO2 emissions from the nuclear energy cycle. Assuming world nuclear generating capacity remains at 2005 levels, after about 2016 the mean grade of uranium ore will fall significantly from today’s levels, and even more so after 2034. After about 60 years the world nuclear power system will fall off the ‘Energy Cliff’ – meaning that the nuclear system will consume as much energy as can be generated from the uranium fuel. Whether large and rich new uranium ore deposits will be found or not is unknown.
Even according to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee’s sixth report, “the history of nuclear industry gives little confidence about the timescales and costs of new build’; that “nuclear can do nothing to fill the need for…new generating capacity… by 2016, as it simply could not be built in time”; that “uranium mines can only supply just over half the current demand for uranium, and the situation is likely to become more acute”; whilst “nuclear power can justifiably be regarded as a low-carbon source of electricity….the level of emissions associated with nuclear might increase significantly as lower grades of ore are used”; and that “no country in the world has yet solved the problems of long-term disposal of high-level waste. The current work being conducted by CoRWM [Committee on Radioactive Waste Management] will not be sufficient of address the issue”.
If media saturation has been dominated by a crisis of reaching the peak point in oil production – that less oil is left to find than we have already used – the proponents of nuclear power are silent about the nuclear industry’s equally fragile dependency on uranium and the associated insecurities.
As Jan Willem and Storm van Leeuwen state:
“It is inevitable that replacements for uranium fuel will be sought within the lifetime of any new nuclear build in the UK. It is also inevitable that as high grade uranium supplies decrease, the cost of nuclear power will increase along with nuclear CO2 emissions.” And that: “Once high-grade uranium ores are no-longer available, the nuclear industry will rely on uranium and plutonium from military and civil stockpiles. These will last only a few years, and questions remain about the net energy gain from reprocessing these materials. In the future, it is likely that the nuclear industry and governments will look to MOXfuel – a mixture of uranium and plutonium dioxides. In time, the nuclear industry hopes to develop fast breeder reactors fuelled by weapons useable plutonium. The widespread use and production of either fuel has serious implications for nuclear weapons proliferation and the risk of nuclear terrorism.”
Toxic Freedom
While it strives to sell itself as the environment friendly energy option, the nuclear industry seems curiously keen on escaping government regulation. It already caused concern when it started lobbying to lift regulatory constrains through the creation of a new energy agency, independent of government influence, to oversee its operation if a new generation of nuclear plants is to be built. The creation of such a body would free the industry from any kind of enforceable responsibility and enable artificial price hikes. The industry is also shaken by the example of the plant in Olkiluoto, Finland – the first reactor to be built in Western Europe in the past two decades – causing financial losses to its builder Areva by running wildly over budget. The reactor caused losses of £180 million in the first half of the year alone, despite the government expediting its construction through a “streamlined” process that kept public consultation to a minimum.
More alarmingly for the UK, the idea of self regulation has been supported by Dieter Helm, of the Oxera consultancy, an advisor to the Blair government.
In most debate on the nuclear question, the toxic issue of radioactive waste is overlooked. The environmentalist turned industry shill, James Lovelock, has claimed that nuclear waste is so safe that he is willing to store it in his garden shed. (He also claims Chernobyl killed only 45 people, whereas 500,000 people are reported to have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims. Moreover, there were some 50,000 abortion cases in Europe because mothers feared the effects of the radiation.) Serious scientists, on the other hand, remain far less sanguine about storing nuclear waste in back gardens. While all of it is dangerous, some remains toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. Further undermining the rush for nuclear expansion, The Guardian reported in January this year that scientists developing ways to dump Britain’s nuclear waste underground have discovered that ceramic materials proposed to seal high-level waste break down much faster than expected when exposed to the radiation.
Although Westminster and the Scottish Executive have recognised that the 470,000 cubic meters of toxic waste from nuclear plants and weapons needs deep disposal, planning for a new generation of plants when the mess from the last one hasn’t been taken care of seems ill advised at best. Around the world, except for one, all nuclear waste dumps are expected to open only after 2020. The opening of the Yucca Mountain project in the US, originally scheduled for 1998, has been pushed back to 2012. While John Ritch, director of the World Nuclear Association, claims the world needs a 20-fold expansion in nuclear energy, even a tripling of global nuclear capacity, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), this would require a “new Yucca-sized dump to be opened somewhere every three or four years”. Sweden, a country that leads the world in research and development into deep disposal facilities, finds it unlikely that such facilities will be available for at least 20 more years – one of the reason why it has decided to phase out nuclear power.
Predictable Fallout
Two already well known consequences come hand-in-hand with the return of nuclear energy; the potential for nuclear proliferation and catastrophic accidents. According to MIT, if the global nuclear capacity triples, it would take the theft of just 0.00025% of the MOX manufactured every year to provide the plutonium for a nuclear bomb. Last year, the G8 leaders had announced their intention to resurrect fast breed reactors, causing controversy since they produce plutonium which is easily weaponised. The same uranium enrichment process used in civilian reactors, increasing the proportion of the U-235 Isotope by a few percent, can be used to reach 90% enrichment, required for weapons grade uranium, making the task of non-proliferation all the more difficult.
While the G8 pay lip service to non-proliferation, they intend to expand the nuclear energy option while keeping “the more sensitive nuclear facilities that can be easily diverted for making bombs within the G8.” Richard Dixon of WWF Scotland responded with dismay that:
“this rich boys’ club seems on course to peddle reactors to the Earth’s poorer nations, at the same time as they are warning us how terribly dangerous the world is.”
According to MIT, traditional risk assessment suggests that there would be four core damage accidents by 2055. The fallout from many past disasters has yet to be taken care of. Only last month, the NDA was reporting delays in the clean up of the defunct nuclear complex at Dounreay in Caithness due to a lack of funds available for decommissioning. This has postponed a series of projects crucial for making Dounreay safe, including the emptying of the radioactive waste shaft on the shoreline which exploded in 1977 and was supposed to have been cleaned up by 2003. In 2005, a cementation plant at Dounreay was closed and an investigation started after the spillage of hazardous, dissolved spent fuel. According to The Times, “the discovery of nuclear particles on neighbouring beaches has led to calls for a full public inquiry into the scale of pollution at the site, while the [United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), responsible for the site] has been accused of a cover-up”. The prototype fast reactor at Dounreay was already shut down in 1994. This was the second scare in less than a year to hit the plant. According to the Daily Mail, a Dounreay spokesman “confirmed that eight workers were being tested for suspected plutonium intake”. The lab was already shut down the previous year “following a similar alarm involving 15 workers… In August, UKAEA started refresher courses following a number of radiation scares, during which contamination was detected on five workers in a week.” In February this year, the waste reprocessing complex was fined all of £140,000 for illegally releasing radioactive waste into the sea for more than 20 years. Radioactive particles from the plant will pollute beaches for decades to come and the environment will never be completely cleaned up, according to one expert study.
In Sellafield, in Cumbria, according to the Sunday Herald, a reprocessing plant has been closed because of a leak, and a plutonium fuel plant and ageing reactors are performing badly. Sellafield has been the site of numerous nuclear leaks, most recently at the Thorpe plant. According to The Guardian, workers ignored more than 100 warnings over six weeks that it had sprung a leak. On February 15, 2006, Sellafield was warned by the European Commission that it was in breach of EU rules. It was urged to tighten controls to ensure that nuclear materials “are not diverted from the peaceful uses for which they have been declared.” The warning followed European Commission inspections of Sellafield, which lead inspectors to conclude that “accounting and reporting procedures presently in place do not fully meet Euratom (EU) standards”. One of the most notable incidents came in 1999, when British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) admitted falsifying documents relating to uranium and plutonium mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel destined for Japan. The scandal was a major embarrassment for BNFL. Japan refused to accept a shipment of the fuel that was already en-route, which meant it had to be returned to Sellafield. The government’s Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment has consistently denied any link between Sellafield and a nearby cluster of childhood leukaemia.
And last summer, the laundry at Hunterston nuclear power plant in North Ayrshire sprung a leak with radioactive water escaping from a tank, causing it to be shut down…
Not-So-Public Relations
When the results of Labour’s long awaited energy review were published in July, the nuclear industry was enthusiastic about the outcome. Keith Parker, CEO of the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA), that represents 40,000 nuclear workers “warmly welcomed” the review’s findings that nuclear would make a “significant contribution” to securing Britain’s energy future.
“Nuclear power offers reliable, secure and affordable low carbon electricity for the benefit both of consumers and environment,” said Parker. The choice of words here is deliberate, and part of a carefully crafted PR campaign to repackage nuclear from its traditional image – dirty, dangerous and expensive – to one that is “secure”, “affordable” and “green” (“low carbon”). The industry’s PR strategy has centred around capitalising on the growing concerns with climate change by appropriating environmental rhetoric to sell its re-entry into the energy market.
The PR Company Weber Shandwick wrote a briefing paper called “The Case for Nuclear Energy” for British Nuclear Fuel (BNFL), the state-owned company that runs the controversial Sellafield site, arguing that nuclear power has become “essential” in combating CO2 emissions, the main cause of climate change.
Climate change features in a series of “Racecards” or key messages that the PR company, Strategic Awareness, developed for BNFL to promote nuclear. One is “CO2 Emissions = Climate Change = Irreversible damage to our environment.” The racecards, whose task is to make the issue of energy “personal” and “real”, also use another key selling point: energy security. “Without nuclear we will be reliant on other countries for our energy supplies”. (Despite this being the explicit outcome of policy to deregulate and globalise the energy market.) An October 2005 Strategic Awareness document notes that “without nuclear newbuild, renewables will not make a difference. Nuclear provides ‘always on’ electricity”. The paper also covers the safety angle by suggesting that “everyday emissions into the air are safe”. There is more radiation “in a bottle of mineral water”.
From the beginning, the industry has relied on the “third party” approach – a PR technique where propaganda is presented through someone seemingly independent, with more credibility – to get independent researchers, academics, parliamentarians, the media and trade unions to make its case. Philip Dewhurst, Public Affairs Director of BNFL, chair of NIA and a nuclear spin doctor, let slip during an interview with PR Week that BNFL was spreading its message “via third-party opinion because the public would be suspicious if we started ramming pro-nuclear messages down their throat”. The NIA has been central to BNFL’s multimillion pound PR campaign. With British Nuclear Energy Society and other partners in the PR business, the NIA conducted a behind-the-scenes campaign to cultivate sympathetic journalists and politicians. Last summer NIA and BNFL approached key academics and independent researchers to attend a “Media Training Workshop”, run by PR company Weber Shandwick, along with their staff. (Dewhurst has now joined Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, perhaps in a bid to help it gain access to the British market.) A Corporate Watch investigation revealed that Weber Shandwick monitors all relevant parliamentary processes for BNFL, such as the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, whose sixth report, published in March 2006, thoroughly refuted the nuclear argument.
BNFL has also been using Nuklear 21, a trade union lobby group, as a “front” organisation to make a case for nuclear energy on the grounds that it would prevent nuclear workers losing jobs. It also underwrites Supporters of Nuclear Energy (SONE) a pro-nuclear front group headed by well known anti-green campaigner Sir Bernard Ingham. Through NIA, BNFL channelled at least £21,000 to SONE. According to Corporate Watch, Ingham, on BNFL’s behalf, lobbied Digby Jones, the head of the Confederation of British Industry, who in turn promised to approach Blair personally and enlist support of the Energy Intensive Users Group.
While SONE claims to be a proponent of “informed debate”, a different attitude prevails when it is working behind the scenes. David Fishlock, one of its members told the Lord’s Science and Technology Committee, “the public should not be expected to have an opinion. There are many things for which quite legitimately the pubic looks to government to make up the mind of 56 million people. Nuclear energy is a matter that is largely in government hands and is a matter for government decision.”
Conflicts of Interest
The new push for a return of nuclear energy plays out over a landscape marked by a dizzying array of conflicts of interest. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM), set up by the government to resolve the issue of nuclear waste and supposedly free from industry or government influence, is closely intertwined with AMEC NNC, a nuclear company with a vested interest in both new nuclear build as well as decommissioning. A NuclearSpin investigation found that besides acting as CoRWM’s programme manager, AMEC NNC managed the discussions at its plenary meetings, organised its public consultation and procurements procedures, along with its PR company, Luther Pendragon. In fact, Luther Pendragon was contracted to AMEC NNC instead of CoRWM. When NuclearSpin put in an Freedom of Information request for all correspondence between CoRWM and Luther Pendragon, after much foot dragging, it was the latter (rather than the government) that chose the information that was eventually released. A similar request by Corporate Watch into the PR activities of BNFL and its relations with Weber Shandwick was finally vetted by Philip Dewhurst, BNFL’s head of PR.
Not too long back, CoRWM itself was accusing a government body, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), of a conflict of interest when it was appointed to oversee the deep disposal of 470,000 cubic metres of waste from nuclear power stations and weapons in the UK. Contrary to CoRWM’s recommendations of establishing an independent body to oversee the disposal of the radioactive waste, the government appointed NDA, a state agency with an interest in promoting short-term efficiency and a dual role as waste creator and waste disposer.
In Scotland, the parliament’s Cross Party Group on the Civil Nuclear Industry, despite declaring five separate items of funding from electricity generator British Energy (BE) from May 2005 to January 2006, does not mention that secretarial support for the parliamentary group is provided by BE, which includes drafting agendas and taking minutes of meetings, none of which is made available to the public. In a meeting with Nuclear Spin, John Home Robertson MSP, chair of the CPG even went so far as to declare, “I work for the nuclear industry”, only hastening to add afterwards that he isn’t paid to do so.
Effective Solutions
Despite an amply resourced propaganda campaign and active collusion of the Blair government, it appears that the nuclear industry has failed to convince the public of the desirability of nuclear energy. In Europe, nuclear power remains the most unpopular source of energy. A whole year of relentless propaganda has failed to rally more than 20% to its cause. Solar and wind energy on the other hand, have 80% and 71% support respectively. In the UK 19% favour nuclear, whereas support for wind power stands at 63%.
On October 5, 2006, Greenpeace launched its court action challenging the validity of the government’s Energy Review, which it claimed was “legally flawed” as “the government did not carry out the full public consultation to which it had committed itself before making its decision”. According to Sarah North, who leads the organisation’s nuclear campaign, “given that there are much more sophisticated, effective and safer ways than nuclear power to meet our energy demands and cut our climate change emissions, Greenpeace feels compelled to challenge the government on its irrational and unsubstantiated pro-nuclear policy.” It is a “dangerous distraction from real solutions to climate change,” she added. Climate change is indeed a serious issue, therefore it is important that the available resources are spent on the most viable an effective solutions.
Greenpeace claims their landmark success will mean that the government will be forced to carry out a much more comprehensive consultation that takes into account the full range of issues related to the introduction of a new generation of nuclear power plants: radioactive waste, financial costs and the design of the reactors. However, while the judicial review has disrupted the process, Blair was quick to declare that “this won’t affect policy at all”.
All references are archived at:
www.spinwatch.org
www.nuclearspin.org
