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Green Energy (Definition and Promotion) Bill

Of course, with my new responsibility for fuel poverty, I have learned a great deal more about excess winter deaths—the increased number of people who die in the winter months because of the cold—yet recently we had a summer when there were excess summer deaths because of a heat wave that was outside the norm. I agree that the evidence before our very eyes is quickly catching up with what the scientists have warned us about for many years. It must be increasingly difficult for the few deniers of climate change and its causes to maintain their opposition. We must not be lured into excuses or slacken the pace at this crucial point. DEFRA recently released the UK climate projections, which give climate information for the UK up to the end of the century. The projections are based on a new Met Office methodology. It allows a measure of the uncertainty in future climate projections to be included in the information, but that element of uncertainty only covers a range of negative scenarios, not the possibility that climate change is not happening at all, a point reinforced by the hon. Gentleman. Almost all climate scientists agree that the climate is changing and that that is due to man-made climate change, caused mainly by an increase in emissions of human-made greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from burning coal and oil. I am informed that the Met Office has graphically described it as heading into a change of temperature equivalent to""the opposite of an Ice Age"." Changes of this magnitude normally take thousands of years to develop, but in this case have taken just over 100 years. I hope hon. Members will agree that this is no time to downgrade climate change from being the leading challenge facing humanity today. Everyone who contributed to the debate had that as their unspoken text and motivation for their support for the Bill.