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Writing about the climate crisis My slow awakening to climate change Climate sceptics answered: | European Editor, Tim Lloyd Wright, replies If it’s your point of view that there is no connection between CO2 emissions and global temperature increases then I can understand you reacting quite strongly to my July column. It was meant firstly to communicate the very grave situation I learned about this spring and, secondly, to explain my journey from a point where I felt I was sufficiently aware and informed of the climate change issue, to a point where I was actually shocked to discover how I had underestimated its importance. Perhaps you’re right to call it polemical. On the other hand, the view that says we are faced with a serious global crisis precipitated by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and associated warming is not an isolated one. Too many Academies of Science, OECD and UN organisations, governments, corporations, NGOs and entrepreneurs concur to list them here. You’re quite entitled to be critical of my writing, but I wonder if you really mean to cast aspersions so freely. Did you intend to include Lord Ron Oxburgh when you said I should stop ‘paraphrasing power-hungry politicians or a self-interested academics living off global warming stipends, and grants’? Am I on my own in finding the former Shell chairman intelligent and insightful, not to mention qualified to hold his views? Perhaps you refer instead to Tony Blair or Professor Tim Flannery? As a BBC radio reporter I interviewed the former and, for the July HP column, the latter. I found them both intelligent and incisive, but you’re entitled to your own view. I’m not sure why two out of three letters from business owners in your region, including yours, suggest that reading a novel by the author of Jurassic Park is the correct journalistic counterbalance to the years of work of hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. An ‘action-packed’ novel seems like a bit of a red herring to me, but I’m willing to put it on my reading list all the same. I’m in correspondence (no reply as yet) with Perry Fischer, as you suggest, but I couldn’t track down a Professor Lentzer of MIT (misspelling perhaps?). However, I did speak to a former Executive Vice President, Downstream of Exxon about your letter the other day and the fact that I was surprised at the readiness of some people to dismiss such a large body of science in this field. “In a number of fields,” he said, “reality is seen as a threat, and then people refuse to accept it. We should admit that we have made some major mistakes, and we should go back and start from scratch and make some changes, and I am predicting that we will make a better world with better lives.” Oystein Dahle, who left Exxon in Norway 13 years ago, and is now Chairman of the World Watch Institute, told me he’s in no doubt that we face the climate crisis I think Tim Flannery describes well in The Weather Makers. It’s a shame, he says, because equally he believes that there’s unparalleled competence within the oil industry to address this crisis. Finally, you seem to suggest that a column in a process engineering magazine should not concern itself with how I as the writer, and frankly as a father of two small children, feel when I learn that the world they will inherit is so fundamentally threatened. I think it’s been said once too often that people working in the oil industry don’t care about the impact their industry has. Without exception I find the engineers I meet are just as concerned as the next guy. Except, very often the engineers I meet are living, breathing, and working with these issues every day. In fact, that’s in no small degree why this issue of CO2 emissions and climate change was given centre stage at the IChemE conference that prompted my column in the first place. Tim Lloyd Wright, European Editor | ||||
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Wingo is the project we started here on the archipelago outside Gothenburg to create a model of winning sustainable local development. You can visit wingo's website here. The website of our wind park has only just been registered. | |||||
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