Blog: Climate Communiqué
It was refreshing to see the content of the Climate Communiqué issued by 24 Professional and Learned Societies in the UK. After the tempestuous last few months when we have seen worrying signs of a loss of focus on tackling climate change this single page of A4 clearly sets out why we do what we do at EMEC.
In one part it says:
‘Responding to the challenge [of climate change] will require deploying the full breadth of human talent and invention. Creative policy interventions and novel technological solutions need to be fostered and applied. This will require a sustained commitment to research, development, entrepreneurship, education, public engagement, training and skills.’
After reading it several times I keep coming back the fact that this describes EMEC on practically a daily basis. The vision of assorted parts of Government to set us up 12 years ago and the sustained push to help us help inventors of machines get into the water is clearly captured in this paragraph.
And no sooner had I decided to write about this than the Obama announcement regarding America’s Clean Power Plan was made and then the Bill Gates blog post came through announcing his plans to use innovation to harvest the energy we need.
Hurrah!
Grappling with the issues that are enmeshed with marine energy on a daily basis can be tiring and frequently frustrating. Dealing with unnecessary regulation and with an unyielding environment day in day out could suck the drive out of anybody. However I feel I am lucky to be working with a group of people who have shown remarkable resilience in the face of these and other apparently intractable problems.
From the designers of machines who see the energy in the water around us; the politicians who grasp the scale of the jobs that are about to be created; the students who realise that this is where they want to make their career – we are blessed by meeting so many people who seem ready to respond to the challenge. As one visitor to Orkney put it ‘If I really do want a challenge in my life there can be nothing more exciting than fixing the planet that supports life itself.’
We are fortunate to live in a time when the UK has also begun to equip itself for the technical innovation challenges it says it wants to meet. The creation of the Catapults across the leading edge of technology was really welcome. As was the creation of Wave Energy Scotland to champion wave energy and the welcome renaissance in our ability to engineer our way out of a corner. All these approaches will be needed to deal with the threat we are beginning to see.
And let’s face it; the challenge is huge. We are presently showing a CO2 concentration of 402.8ppm. This is well above the safe limit of 350ppm and we are adding 2 ppm per year… and accelerating. To corroborate the link to temperature we have seen the IPPC’s figures published showing a rise in temperature of 0.116C per decade, which is up from 0.113C last century. We are in uncharted climatic territory since the CO2 is higher than it has ever been since man arrived on the planet.
When 97% of climate scientists see the correlation between CO2 and climate change is as strong as the link between smoking and lung cancer it does feel as though the tipping point about being willing to commit is being reached.
So the fact that the 24 most trusted Societies in the UK are calling for us to transition to a zero-carbon world by early in the 2nd half of the century should give us confidence that this may indeed be the moment that civilisation wakes up.
Very early in my career an old and wise civil engineer in the drawing office had a sign above his desk that read:
‘When you are up to your backside in alligators, it is sometimes hard to remind yourself you came here to drain the swamp.’
Maybe the communique and this week’s news is just the reminder we need.
Neil Kermode
Managing Director
