Theresa May's Government is just as bad as Donald Trump at burying the truth about climate change

Dictators have an old trick to assess the strength of their opposition: they say something patently untrue, and then look to see who mindlessly repeats it. Those who do, they recognise as their true supporters. Those who keep silent and shift uncomfortably in their place are the ones who can be bullied, intimidated and kept compliant, managed onside. Those who speak clearly and loudly to denounce the lie are the ones who must be crushed.

Last week the UK Government kept silent. It took Donald Trump just one day to wipe all mention of climate change from the White House website. Indeed, his new “America First” energy plan explicitly says: “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan.” Trump has “refocused” the Environmental Protection Agency so that CO2 will no longer be regarded as a pollutant.

So what did the UK Government do in response? Knowing that a man who had called climate change “a hoax invented by the Chinese to undermine the US economy” would become the occupier of the highest office in the free world, one might have expected the UK to shout the findings of its five year Climate Risk Assessment from the rooftops.

Instead they used the razzmatazz around the presidential inauguration was the perfect moment to bury its own bad news. No fanfare, no press release, not so much as a tweet. The UK Government instead opted to tone down the truth about the risks we face from climate change.

The meticulous Lord Krebs and his team at the independent Committee on Climate Change have spent five years examining the data and the best scientific research into the impacts of climate change on the UK. Lord Krebs does not do what the counsellor to the president called “alternative facts”; Lord Krebs does data and evidence. His team analysed the data and created models with predictive power. From those models, conclusions are drawn together with a note on the degree of confidence scientists have that they are correct.

Lord Krebs will not tell you: “Temperature in the UK is getting hotter because we are burning fossil fuels”. He will say: “The majority of UK warming has occurred since the 1970s. This recent warming is consistent with increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and is very unlikely to be due to natural climate variations (Karoly and Stott, 2006). All 10 of the warmest years in the UK annual average temperature record have occurred since 1990, with the eight warmest occurring since 2002 (Kendon et al, 2015).”

This mixture of facts (about the warmest years) alongside conclusions (that the warming is consistent with increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and very unlikely to be due to natural climate variation) is how a professional scientist says to the climate change denier-in-chief. “Climate Change is happening and we are causing it.”

Our Government says it has now accepted the report produced by Lord Krebs. This should mean that they accept its findings that there is a high risk to communities, business and infrastructure from flooding and coastal inundation, and accept the committee’s stark and capitalised statement: “MORE ACTION NEEDED”.

Yet the Government’s actual response is self-congratulatory and precisely fails to identify the further action that is required. It says: “Managing flood risk is already a key priority for the Government, and the report’s recommendations are broadly consistent with our policies to intervene and invest effectively to manage flood risk.”

Eh? No, actually.

What Lord Krebs report says is: “Current levels of adaptation are projected to be insufficient to avoid flood and coastal erosion risks and damages increasing with further warming. With 4°C of warming and high population growth, the number of households at a significant chance of flooding is projected to increase from 860,000 today to 1.9 million by the 2050s. Additional adaptation may be able to counter the increase in flood damages anticipated with 2°C of global warming, at least in some parts of the UK, but in others increasing flood risks appear inevitable especially with 4°C or more of global warming.”

What this shows is the Government’s cynical belief that as long as it publicly says it accepts the science then that is enough. But Government is about decision and action, not about promulgation and assertion. Accepting the science means acting upon it.

For five and a half years, this Government has sought to divorce its public acceptance of the science from any imperative to act upon it. In 2011 they set the fourth carbon budget which establishes the limit on UK emissions in the five year period from 2023-2027.

The Climate Change Act says that once Government has set a carbon budget it must publish a plan showing how it proposes to implement it “as soon as reasonably practicable”. Yet we are still waiting. In the meantime, it has accepted plaudits for setting a fifth carbon budget in line with the Committee on Climate Change’s recommendations last July. But this is a budget that we are currently 47 per cent off target from achieving and the Government has still failed to produce the statutorily-required implementation plan showing how we will achieve it.

There is something to be said for knowing your enemy. So when it comes to climate change I’m not sure which I like less – the brazen dishonesty of the White House or the sly subterfuge of Whitehall.

Barry Gardiner is Labour MP for Brent North and Shadow Minister for International Climate Change