Dr David King was until 2007 H. M. Gov's spokesperson on climate change, and is the author of The Hot Topic, the subject of Thursday's Edinburgh International Science Festival event. Would he be a bearer of better, or at least more encouraging news on the international frying and freezing front?
Well, it's a curate's egg of a world, and Dr King wasn't able to offer a great deal of solid comfort. Pointing out the rapid growth of population since 1900 - 1 billion new souls every 12 years over the years since - Dr King gave clear indication of how climate change has been principally if not solely human-driven.
Increasing population makes increasing demand on increasingly scarce resources, the most vital of which is water. Dr King indicated that developments to produce more 'crop per drop' were encouraging, but that GM crops would almost certainly have to become the normative mainstream in agriculture if production were to keep pace with population and with the increasingly discriminating palates of increasingly developing nations.
Desalination alone would be unlikely to keep pace with water demand and energy so consumed and carbon produced outpaced the benefits of desalination. Carbon production in quantity remains, however, the outcome of industrial and transport emission. The case still needed to be made in terms of people's future security, and Dr King cited the incidence of smog in Britain in the 1950's, largely the result of coal fires. Smokeless fuel and education solved the problem of smog in our cities. Dr King, however, did not elucidate how a public wedded to relatively cheap transport costs and buying avocados out of season for little more than their growing costs would react to governments telling them how much of a problem such behaviours cause.
Instead, he made a strong case for the creation of genuine carbon trading markets, in which investment would be seen as sound and good business rather than mere social responsibility. There may well be an opportunity to involve business more directly in the issues of climate change, in ways which do make business sense, but again some of the harder questions around this remained hanging in the air.
Clearly in the space of a well-packed hour's talk, much detail had to be sacrificed to constraints of time and difficulty of exposition. Nonetheless, any contribution to the debate on climate change as informed and considered as Dr King's remains valuable. If some of the questions he raised remain open and some of his potential solutions appear over-simplified, the largest question must be how many of his acute observations stayed with his audience after they had left the lecture theatre.
Published on EdinburghGuide.com March 2008
Copyright Bill Dunlop, March 2008