An interview with Sir David King, Britain's top scientist and climate crusader
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has earned a rep as a global leader in the fight against climate change, and, at least in part, he has Sir David King to thank for it.
King, the U.K. government's chief scientific adviser and an outspoken advocate of aggressive action to forestall global warming, has pushed the climate crisis up the PM's priority list. He was instrumental in making the U.K. the first nation to commit to greenhouse-gas reductions that go beyond Kyoto, and in positioning climate as one of two top issues at last year's G8 summit, hosted by Blair.
King's headline-grabbing rhetoric has put climate change in the spotlight, and King himself in the hot seat. He's become a target of the American right and been publicly heckled by U.S. climate skeptics during lectures. He has also raised the ire of some in the environmental community for arguing that nuclear power, gasified coal, and carbon sequestration are necessary weapons in the battle against global warming.
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I've been chased around by several people funded by the Competitive Enterprise Institute who make these kind of statements that simply fly in the face of all the evidence. To say that climate science is in its infancy is quite simply puerile. The greenhouse effect was established by [Joseph] Fourier back in 1827. By 1896, [Svante] Arrhenius had calculated that we would see global warming by five degrees centigrade if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doubled. That's pretty close to what current scientists are saying. So the state of knowledge is 100 years old plus.
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What I'm not going to be able to do is criticize any other government. I can say that in Britain our economy since 1990 has grown by about 40 percent, and our emissions have decreased by 14 percent. So to argue that you destroy your economy by reducing emissions is blatantly incorrect.
Furthermore, we feel we have a competitive advantage in getting into the Kyoto CO2-trading program early; we believe it is an incredibly important new commodity exercise that will spur crucial technology development and soon begin to pay dividends for our country.
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