Why
shouldn't Prince Charles speak out on climate change? The science is
clear
Climate
change is not a controversial subject – the facts are established,
whatever the Mail says. That’s why Charles helped write a Ladybird
book about it
Tony Juniper
Tuesday 24 January
2017 07.00 GMT
Ladybird books will
this week publish a new title on climate change. Co-authored by the
Prince of Wales, the polar scientist Emily Shuckburgh and myself, the
book is intended as a plain English guide to the subject for an adult
readership. Short, peer-reviewed text sits alongside beautiful new
paintings by Ruth Palmer to illustrate the basic briefing.
It has already been
greeted in some quarters as another controversial intervention by our
future king. But while it’s easy to fall behind that line of
thinking, it is an increasingly mistaken one. For despite the
impression created in some quarters, the truth is that climate change
is not controversial. The basic facts are established and
increasingly embedded in policy.
We know, for
instance, that the global average temperature has during recent
decades gone up. This is largely because of the accumulation of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the concentration of which is
rising because of human activity. In turn, the altered composition of
the atmosphere is leading to changes that range from more extreme
weather to reduced ice and snow cover and from unusual seasonal
patterns to rising sea levels. All that is now established fact
derived from careful observation and analysis.
These broad findings
are increasingly reflected in policy choices and the business
strategies of major companies. While there are those in elected
office in some countries who take a non-scientific view, and some
vested commercial interests that resist low carbon policies, there is
less political division than is sometimes suggested.
For example in 2015,
nearly every country on Earth (most of them some sort of democracy)
signed up to the Paris climate change agreement. That legally binding
treaty was not entered into lightly and revealed a level of political
consensus visible on very few other issues.
In the UK, and
despite several major media organisations continuing to pour doubt
and confusion into the public discourse, we have a strong political
foundation for action, as laid out in the form of the 2008 Climate
Change Act, for example.
I launched the
campaign for that act when I was the director at Friends of the Earth
and one reason why it was possible to gain cross-party political
backing for such a law was the work of Britain’s world-leading
scientific institutions, including the Met Office and the British
Antarctic Survey. Through supplying policy-makers with the findings
of their research, they helped to shape understanding to the point
where official foundations for action were laid.
With the science
clear and the politics (in this country) quite robust, it is
predictable that those with perspectives on climate change founded
more on ideology than data will go for the messenger rather than the
message. The Prince of Wales should keep “his mouth shut” was,
for example, the recommendation of the Daily Mail in the wake of an
article penned by the heir to the throne to mark the publication of
his new book.
While the Mail and
some other papers evidently won’t agree with his views on this
subject, they might wish to reflect for a moment on the role of our
monarchy. In the absence of a written constitution, perhaps the
closest we’ve got to an accepted view on what it is for and where
its right lie comes from the Victorian essayist and long-serving
editor of the Economist, Walter Bagehot.
He wrote in 1867 in
the English constitution that the monarchy has “the right to be
consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn”. I can think
of few issues where exercising those rights fits the bill more
closely than in relation to the ever less controversial matter of
climate change.
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