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Last week, Andy Burnham, the new Labor leader and UK Prime Minister, addressed the Labor Party conference in Liverpool:
‘All Together Now. That’s my rallying call to the country today. When we pull as one, there is nothing we can’t do.
‘Today we draw a line on a decade of division. We stop doomscrolling on posts running Britain down. And we put the country on a new path.’
Burnham continued:
‘Britain with belief again. People with hope again.’
It was notable that he used the word ‘hope’ 11 times in his speech. Burnham is likely well aware that significant numbers of voters have been turning away from Labor to the Green Party, with leader Zack Polanski regularly issuing skillful messages on social media about hope.
Burnham concluded his address to conference using short, declamatory sentences so beloved of political speechwriters:
‘It’s time to draw a line.
‘To move beyond a decade of drift and division.
‘To bring a spirit of unity and positivity back to our country.
‘To unlock the working-class aspiration that is still there in every postcode in this great land.
‘All Together Now.
‘We can do it.
‘We will believe again.
‘We will hope again.’
He received a rapturous reception in the hall.
There was a single passing mention of climate in his hour-long speech:
‘And we will be pragmatic in relation to the North Sea as we build a bridge to a clean energy future and face the climate crisis.’
As we noted in a recent media alert, Burnham has so far resisted calls to block plans to exploit the Rosebank oil field west of Shetland and the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. If approved, Jackdaw would emit the equivalent of over 35 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2). By contrast, burning the reserves of the huge Rosebank oil field, the UK’s largest undeveloped field, would release the equivalent of over 250 million tonnes of CO₂. That is 70% of the UK’s entire annual emissions in 2025.
Carbon Brief, an authoritative source on energy and climate, rebuts the ‘pragmatic’ argument that opening up these fields would help form a ‘transition bridge’ to ‘a clean energy future’. Instead, it would undermine the pathway to reducing carbon emissions to zero, an urgent and vital requirement to stop catastrophic global heating.
A report last year from University College London, ‘The Climate Implications of New Oil and Gas Fields in the UK – An overview of the evidence’, argued that:
‘Existing fossil fuel infrastructure causes “carbon lock-in”, as there are major economic, political and legal barriers to closing oil and gas fields once they start operating.’
Therefore, allowing additional fields such as Rosebank and Jackdaw would make it harder to achieve internationally agreed targets for limiting the rise in global average temperature. Rather than acting as a ‘bridge’, new fossil fuel development creates an economic and structural barrier to a clean energy transition.
On the other hand, the report argued:
‘…ending new UK licences and consents for oil and gas exploration and production would send a powerful signal to other countries at this important moment for international climate cooperation.’
Last month, almost 600 scientists and healthcare professionals issued an open letter calling on the UK government to reject Rosebank. The letter cited a recent report estimating that, if Rosebank went ahead, climate-related damages would run between £119 billion and £336 billion over the coming decades.
Their conclusion was stark:
‘Communities are already facing rising costs because of drought, excess deaths because of heatwaves, and loss of land due to wildfires. This is a matter of national security and approving Rosebank would be adding fuel to the fire. A Government’s first responsibility is to prioritise above all else the best interests of the people it serves and protects – approving Rosebank would be completely going against this principle, by knowingly triggering more devastation on the people of the UK.’
According to a recent report in The Times, government ministers were concerned about the ‘optics’ of approving Rosebank and Jackdaw during a summer in which much of the British public endured a series of intense heatwaves. The decision is likely to be announced later in the autumn, safely following the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on 8 October. The seat was formerly held by the now-departed Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and is under threat of being lost by Labor to the Greens, whose candidate is Zack Polanski, the Green leader. One can imagine a deluge of Green votes if Labor announces the opening of new oil and gas fields before the by-election.
Burnham’s long speech, with its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to the climate crisis, indicates that he has no idea of the serious risk of climate breakdown. Has he ever heard of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation?
Climate Running Amok
In a recent, crystal-clear video, renowned climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf explained the vital importance of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) to Europe’s relatively mild and stable climate. The Gulf Stream is the most well-known component of the AMOC. It brings heat north from the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, past Florida and along the US east coast, before crossing the North Atlantic and releasing its warmth to the atmosphere over Western Europe.
Professor Rahmstorf, co-Head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute in Germany, summarised worrying scientific observations that the AMOC is weakening. He also outlined the very real risk of a total shutdown of AMOC and its likely consequences.
First, he explained what the AMOC is:
‘The AMOC is a vertical overturning motion of the Atlantic Ocean. Relatively warm surface waters flow north along the entire length of the Atlantic, from the tip of South Africa across the Equator into the high latitudes south of Greenland and the Nordic Seas.
‘There, the water sinks down to between 2000 and 3000 metres depth after giving off a lot of heat to the atmosphere, and then at that depth, returns to the south.’
AMOC works like a central heating system for western Europe, Rahmstorf explained, because warm water flows toward us across the North Atlantic and cold water flows away from us. Europe therefore enjoys a relatively mild and stable climate. The heat provided by the AMOC corresponds to around 50 times humanity’s total energy consumption.
Paleoclimatic analysis of deep-sea sediments shows that the AMOC has been unstable at various times over the last 100,000 years. Rahmstorf observed:
‘What Earth’s history tells us is that these are really dramatic events with big impacts on ecosystems. Surely in the modern world with 8 billion people on this planet, they would be devastating for the stability of our society.’
Scientific reconstructions of the AMOC from paleoclimatic data show that after being stable for about the last millennium, the AMOC has weakened over the 20th and 21st centuries. It is now at its weakest in at least a thousand years.
A clear fingerprint of the AMOC’s weakening is a ‘cold blob’ seen in ocean temperature maps of the North Atlantic. In his video, Rahmstorf pointed to the map and explained:
‘Look at this blue patch in the North Atlantic to the west of the British Isles and to the south of Greenland and Iceland. That is the famous “cold blob”: the only part of the world that is cooling and has been cooling while the entire rest of the planet has warmed.’
The ‘cold blob’ exists because the weakened AMOC has carried less heat there. Why is the AMOC weakening and why has it shut down several times over the past 100,000 years? The reason is the input of fresh surface water at high latitudes in the North Atlantic. The AMOC requires the sinking of dense water at high latitudes – in particular, in the subpolar and Nordic regions of the North Atlantic – in order to drive the vertical overturning of the AMOC. This process creates North Atlantic Deep Water, which fills the deep ocean and flows back south toward the equator, completing the AMOC ‘conveyor belt’.
Ocean surface water becomes colder and therefore denser when it releases its transported heat to the atmosphere. Water with relatively high salinity is also denser than diluted seawater. Dense water sinks, keeping the AMOC flowing.
However, global heating is melting the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic sea ice. This releases freshwater into the North Atlantic and also increases rainfall. Both effects make surface water less salty and less dense. As a result, less surface water sinks to ocean depths, weakening the AMOC. This is the same process that shut down the AMOC at various times in the past.
Rahmstorf summed up:
‘In short: we have the AMOC because the water in the Northern Atlantic is salty, and it is salty because we have the AMOC. If you dilute it with fresh water, the AMOC weakens, bringing less salt, which weakens the AMOC even further. Once that feedback crosses a certain threshold, there is no stopping a total breakdown.’
This is one of many potential ‘tipping points’ in the Earth system which, if breached, would plunge the world into rapidly accelerating global heating and ecosystem collapse.
He added another serious cause for concern:
‘If the AMOC breaks down, it will take less carbon dioxide down into the deep ocean, leaving more in the atmosphere and making global warming worse.’
Moreover, marine ecosystems would face disastrous direct impacts. Because the AMOC acts as a massive pump of nutrients that are vital for phytoplankton – the base of the marine food web – there would be huge repercussions for ocean species. This would also mean socioeconomic shocks to human communities. Not least, global food security dependent on North Atlantic fisheries would face severe disruptions.
A collapsed AMOC could recover. But it typically only occurs on a timescale of one thousand years. That is scant comfort for humanity.
3°C Warming Is Beyond Catastrophic
So, what is the current best estimate of the risk of the AMOC shutting down? Rahmstorf noted that he has been investigating the AMOC and its possible shutdown over the past thirty years:
‘For decades we in the scientific community used to discuss this as what is called a low-probability, high-impact risk: say, a nuclear power plant blowing up. This is a low probability but can have a high impact, at least locally.
‘With the Earth system, of course, we’re talking about high-impact global changes and global risks. But we considered the probability of that as being less than 10 per cent. That would still be high for the massive consequences that this would have. But recently, latest studies suggest that if we continue on a high-emission path we may run around a 70 per cent risk of the AMOC shutting down.’
Although Rahmstorf delivered this assessment in an understated, calm manner, the fact that there is such a high probability of AMOC collapse – no less than 70 percent – is terrifying. On a sane planet, political leaders would be responding urgently and comprehensively to this impending emergency with even greater fervor than any ‘terrorist threat’.
He continued:
‘Even with low emissions [aligned with] the [2015] Paris Agreement, if we rapidly lower our emissions, we might still run at 25 percent risk. This is [still] a really serious risk.’
Sadly, the Paris Agreement to limit the global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius and, ideally, 1.5 degrees, has been crushed by rising fossil fuel combustion and greenhouse gas emissions. We are already breaching 1.5°C.
James Hansen is the NASA scientist who sounded the climate alarm to the U.S. Congress in 1988. In the immediate wake of the Paris Agreement, he declared:
‘It’s a fraud really, a fake.’
He continued:
‘It’s just bullshit for them to say: “We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.” It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.’
Ten years later, in 2025, Hansen said that:
‘The 2°C target is dead, because the global energy use is rising, and it will continue to rise.’
Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, put Burnham’s pro-corporate tactics into perspective:
‘While we continue to dither about the rights and wrongs of reopening the North Sea to further drilling, global heating shows no such tendency. The worst possible news was revealed in a [Geophysical Research Letters] paper published just a week after the bombing of Iran started, which is that the rate of global heating has been supercharged since 2015, and is now almost double what it was in the 1970s. The current rate – of close to 0.35C a decade – means that without drastic action on emissions, we will see the 2C limit shattered as soon as the late 2030s, and no end in sight.’
Global heating may well reach 3°C by 2050 according to some scientists, including the German Physical and Meteorological Societies. As we noted in a recent media alert, 3°C is beyond catastrophic. Last year, a team of experts from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter published a report, ‘Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature’.
These sober experts believed that it was worth including the ‘extreme’ scenario of 3°C warming into their matrix of risk assessments. This is what they concluded would happen:
· Multiple climate tipping points triggered.
· Breakdown of several critical ecosystem services and Earth systems.
· High level of extinction of higher order life on Earth.
· Significant socio-political fragmentation worldwide and/or state failure with rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital and systems identity.
· Frequent large scale mortality events.
· There would be at least 4 billion deaths.
Read that last line again: at least 4 billion deaths. The climate crisis is surely the most pressing issue facing humanity.
What does it say about the new Prime Minister that climate barely merited a mention in an hour-long speech about his vision of the future? And what does it say about the ‘mainstream’ media that he was not lambasted for ignoring the severity of the threat hanging over all of us?