Believing CO2 is harmless is a bit like believing you are not getting older each year. Nice but untrue.

Believing CO2 is harmless is a bit like believing you are not getting older each year. Nice but untrue.

Here’s why. I’m 50 years old. I want to tell you a story - my life story - coupled to background CO2 levels.

Long before I was born (and for all the preceding 800,000 years!) CO2 never once went outside the range 180 to 300ppm. See Figure 1. The red line (just the last 450,000 years) Over that whole period, CO2 and temperature have followed each other very closely. Where one went, so followed the other. Always. The link is not simple ‘cause and effect’. It is known as a ‘close-coupled system’ – and the two are fundamentally interconnected. For all 800,000 years, CO2 rose and fell, but never once went above 300ppm. Until 80 years ago. Around the time my parents were born, it started to rise. I blame the parents!

Before the Industrial Revolution, nothing humans ever did had any effect. But in 1850 we seriously started burning the 100s of million years’ worth of ancient, safely buried fossil fuel, at an alarming and exponential rate. Accordingly, as the ‘invisible smoke’ CO2 accumulated, background levels in the atmosphere rose as ‘fresh’ CO2 from burning fossil fuel added to the natural system – a life system that was hitherto in perfect balance. Around this time (1850) a scientist mooted that this would one day affect the climate. He was ridiculed of course.

So anyway, by 1930, CO2 levels had risen to 300ppm for the first time in 800,000 years. The rest is history, a bit like we will be if we don’t wake up. From then on CO2 has predictably risen: onwards and upwards. Up, up and away. Sky’s the limit.

If CO2 were visible we would have seen our sky change colour in our lifetime.

In 1930 scientists thought warming was being caused by CO2.

I was born 50 years ago, in 1959. In that year CO2 was just 315ppm. By 1970, just as I stopped wearing short trousers to school, quite a few brave, outspoken, prescient scientists were warning that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuel were causing dangerous global warming. By then CO2 was 325 ppm and rising.

Since that time, progressively more and more respected, visionary ecologists and climate scientists started to raise the alarm, and a serious consensus was starting to develop.

By 1980, when I graduated from Cambridge, and came of age, it was already common belief that CO2 might be causing the planet some real problems, but governments all over the world DENIED there was any proven link between CO2 and temperature. (The same governments now accused of exaggerating the link.) In 1980 I got my first job, in energy efficiency research. CO2 was 340ppm and rising.

It was in 1988 that PM Margaret Thatcher first raised the issue in her famous speech. Those who try to tell us CO2 is a hoax started by communists seem to forget this. CO2 was 355ppm by then, and rising. Two years later my first son Thomas (he is 19 now) would be born with CO2 at 355ppm.

Around this time Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth campaign groups classified CO2 as pollution, 20 or so years before US Environment Protection Agency did the same.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, was formed in 1988.

World governments set the IPCC the task of summarising the sound science, but it has been politicians who have made the final decisions regarding the wording of the report summary. There is strong evidence that they have played down the scientific implications - for the public at home. So as not to ‘scare the horses’ - or upset the oil companies who bankroll governments.

The IPCC has produced several summary reports since then, and in each one, the certainty (with which they conclude that CO2 is a big problem) has only ever increased. In each revision they upgrade their assessment of the severity and urgency: UPWARDS.

In plain English, each successive report, every five years or so, announces, again and again: “It’s worse than we previously thought!”

As we approach the end of 2009 there is full certainty that CO2 is a very serious problem. CO2 is now almost 390ppm.

Astonishingly, there is no downside to curbing CO2 emissions. It’s just a case of will power - in place of fossil fuel power – and getting on with the switch to regulation renewables and restraint.

What CO2 level is safe?

Early science recommended that 1000ppm might be a safe upper limit. But soon they admitted that 800ppm was a better cap, then they admitted this might be risking things a bit. So they revised it down to 550-650ppm adding that this, too, might be risky.

Ten years ago they thought 450ppm was as high as we dared push it. But now most concerned independent scientists think 350ppm is as high as it is wise to go… …And of of course we’ve already overshot 350!!!.

We are at 388ppm. We have overshot the safe target by some way, and CO2 is still rising.

So my conclusion is that we have wasted 50 years.

When we could have been profiting from innovating and decarbonising the global economy. We were instead sitting on our hands waiting for proof we had to act!

Each year we delay, the cost of sorting it all out goes up.

The risk that we have left it too late increases each year we dither.

The legacy damage we have created builds up another 25 billion tons of CO2 each year.

The damage to the global economy – measured over the long term – goes up too.

I so wish governments had been honest and bold back in 1959, when I was born. CO2 was only 315ppm then. So much progress could have been made.

What do the public think?

Over the 50 years of my life, public opinion has been relatively equivocal.

Over the same 50 years the science has gone from probable to highly certain.

Clearly something is lost in translation between scientist and public.

Enter a complacent media: stage right.

Time Lags Changes in the Earth’s climate take a while to happen. It’s widely believed that there is a time lag of around 50 years involved. So the 0.7 deg C warming that we experience now is the result of previous CO2 build-up until about 1960. So we have much, much worse to come. It’s in the pipeline. It would be so nice to deny all this and hope it goes away.

Keeping the lie alive – CO2 is harmless Apologists for the oil and fossil fuel industry have done an amazing job (!) keeping the lie alive: that CO2 is harmless, so it’s OK to keep on burning fossil, despite the vast amassing scientific certainty. Every few years they resuscitate the lie that CO2 is harmless. They have kept this lie alive for a staggeringly long time, against all odds.

But in the month before the summit in Copenhagen they gave ‘public doubt’ a strong concerted final push, so that the lie can have one last big gasp - before it dies forever.

The public is unlikely to let these lobbyists and their smoke screen and mirrors keep us from seeing the truth much longer. In our hearts we all know we have to act, to preserve the remaining fossil, and cut the carbon, together.