Carbon Emissions Call

Wednesday December 11 2013

The Church of Scotland has joined more than 100 businesses, faith groups, investors and non-governmental organisations in calling on the Government to stick to its current emission reduction objectives under the Fourth Carbon Budget.

This budget covers the emission reduction that the UK needs to deliver over the years 2023 to 2027 to stay on track for reducing its emissions by at least 80% by 2050 under its Climate Change Act.

In a statement which coincided with the publication today of the Committee on Climate Change’s updated recommendations on the Fourth Carbon Budget, the group called on the Government to ‘stick to ambitious emission reduction objectives for the 2020s to give business the certainty it needs to commit significant investments to the UK’s promising low-carbon economy’ and maintain the UK’s energy security.

The Fourth Carbon Budget, which was proposed by the Committee on Climate Change in December 2010, sets out the required reduction in the UK’s emissions of greenhouse gases between 2023 and 2027 to stay on a cost-effective pathway to meeting the UK’s legally binding obligation of reducing its emissions by at least 80% by 2050 compared to 1990 levels.  The Coalition Government accepted the Committee’s recommendations in 2011, subject to a review in 2014.

Following a decision by the Coalition Government in 2011 to review the Fourth Carbon Budget in spring 2014, the Committee on Climate Change provided its revised advice today in which it stated that as the circumstances had not materially changed since the budget was originally set, the UK should maintain its emission reduction ambition for the period of the Fourth Carbon Budget, as recommended back in 2010.

Comments

Dr John Cameron - Friday, March 28th, 2014

“The recently published Fifth Assessment report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change accepts that the best observational evidence now shows our climate is considerably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than climate models estimate. In recent years it has become possible to make good empirical estimates of climate sensitivity from observational data such as temperature and ocean heat records. These estimates, published in leading scientific journals, point to climate sensitivity per doubling of CO2 most likely being under 2°C for long-term warming, with a best estimate of only 1.3°C for warming over a seventy year period. Observational evidence strongly suggests that climate models display too much sensitivity to carbon dioxide concentrations and in almost all cases exaggerate the likely path of global warming. These lower, observationally-based estimates for both long-term climate sensitivity and the seventy-year response suggest that considerably less global warming and sea level rise is to be expected in the 21st century than most climate model have implied. ”

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