Coping with Copenhagen

There has been a spectrum of opinion and a spectrum of people (if you can have such a thing) involved in the great environmental debates at the Copenhagen climate summit. At one end you have the devout climate-change believers, for whom everything is simple: this is the situation and this is what we must all do. Anything less is an affront. Everyone must suffer equally. Anybody who does not agree with this is evil.

At the other end are the so-called sceptics. Like their opposite numbers, they are beset with paranoia, in this case about a global plot to waste trillions of dollars on measures that undermine individual freedom, bringing state control into every aspect of human endeavour. Sceptical scientists are obviously right. Climate-change believers are evil.

Stuck in the middle are those who have looked as best they can at what is happening to our ice caps, to CO2 emissions and population growth and are extremely concerned at what they see. On the other hand they want scientists to be asked tough questions about their theories as to what is happening. They are not very interested in demonising minority opinions.

It is in the zone of constructive scepticism that good science is likely to flourish, since it is here that research will be tested free of preconception. In this zone there is no need to hide inconvenient truths of any description, whether they appear to support or detract from the general consensus about the extent to which climate change is man-made.

And it is in this zone that policies to combat (or more likely adapt to) climate change can be rationally assessed. Thus we avoid predictions about the likely efficiency of alternative energy technologies being based on anything other than what we know, not what we would like to be the case.

Many years ago I co-chaired a British Council for Offices conference where the keynote speaker was a former director of the UK Meteorological Office, Sir John Houghton. His lucid and unflashy analysis of what was happening to global temperatures was enough to convince me (and everyone in the room) that something disturbing was happening. Since that time I have been more interested in what we do about our new condition than about the undoubted fact that the earth has experienced extremely variable weather conditions over the millennia. We, after all, are dealing with today and tomorrow, not yesteryear.

In this sense, it wouldn’t matter whether climate change was the result of sunspots, the man in the moon, flatulent cows or, as seems likely, a surfeit of CO2. Our chances of doing anything other than mitigate are remote. That is not, of course, an argument for doing nothing, as the Dutch have shown for many centuries. Dam building rather than hand wringing has an awful lot to recommend it.

For architects, the key questions will continue to be how buildings are powered, and how excess heat can be used to good effect. This will be particularly true of existing building stock; much unglamorous work will need to be done, but it will be vital and a necessary part of a strategy too often presented as a battle over travelling by plane, or indeed travelling at all. As far as energy production is concerned, I remain convinced that nuclear power needs to be part (not all) of the solution for the foreseeable future. The UK gave up a world-leading position in this area, preferring to burn coal and North Sea gas. The irony of the UK now importing electricity generated by nuclear power in France, while we agonize about replacing redundant nuclear plant, would be funny if it were not so embarrassing.

Of course if all our energy were generated from ‘virtuous’ carbon-free sources, then we could presumably run the air-conditioning all day and every day without feeling too guilty. For many at Copenhagen, the question of climate guilt looms large. Those two ends of the spectrum are a Manichean version of everyday weather forecasters. For the rest of us, we are likely to depend on relatively old-fashioned engineering to keep us warm and dry, while scientists refine their propositions as to where we go from here, and how we should try to get there.