Climate Change Bill [HL]

My Lords, surely the point is that that report and others have provided the evidence that the Government have now considered and which has informed our decision to go for the 80 per cent target. I refer the noble Lord to the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Turner, which, as he will know, reported a few weeks ago. It said that we know more about how rising temperatures will reduce the effectiveness of carbon sinks. It says that, unlike the authors of the report by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, we have the benefit of models that include the warming effect of gases other than CO2. It says that the reduction in summer Arctic Sea ice in recent years has been greater than predicted by any of the models, and that the summer melt of the Greenland ice sheet has accelerated. It says that it is now realised that atmospheric pollution has probably masked some of the greenhouse gas warming that would have occurred, so that as air quality improvements continue to be achieved even more warming can be expected. It says that there is now a greater understanding of the range of potential climate change impacts. Finally, the latest global emission trends are higher than anticipated in most IPCC scenarios, largely because of higher economic growth and a shift towards more carbon-intensive sources of energy. It is not unreasonable for the Government to have taken that seriously.