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Climate Change

It has been an interesting afternoon. I thought that we were in for a run around the course and a discussion simply about adaptation; I had not realised that we were in for a ““sceptic fest””. Nevertheless, it is always good to test one’s own beliefs and to go through the arguments to make sure that they are robust. Certainly, nobody could accuse my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) of not having thoroughly researched his subject, although I am led to very different conclusions from those that he reaches. Despite the sceptical rhetoric that he couched his opening remarks in, we are not so very far apart in our views. He conceded that some global warming was happening and that—I think that I wrote this down verbatim—““man is probably responsible for part of it””. If we accept the principle of anthropogenic climate change, we are simply discussing the degree to which it is responsible for climate change as it is happening now. Climate change is happening now. I have been to the Arctic. I have seen the vast stretches of open Arctic sea water where there were frozen ice caps just a few years ago. In 2007, the Arctic summer ice reduction was 30 years ahead of the predicted melt rate of the most advanced climate models. If melting continues at that rate, before 2030 the Arctic ice shelf itself could completely disappear in the summer months.