All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group Is a Cross-Party ...

Conservatives on the development of specific policies. 5 These events, far from undermining
the present inquiry, make it all the more important that the evidence and arguments that we
present here are debated widely, both within and outside Parliament.
1.2 Approach
13. The officers of the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group (APPCCG) decided that
an inquiry into cross-party parliamentary working should involve external assessment of the
evidence. We, the three assessors, were invited to consider both written and oral evidence
and are grateful to everyone who contributed. The evidence was submitted on a self-selecting
basis; its value is qualitative. The range of views is presented in this report, but we are not in
a position to say how fully representative it is of wider UK opinion. We have seen our role as
one of using the range of views expressed in both the evidence and in additional material not
submitted to the inquiry, but which we have judged to be relevant, to make a series of
recommendations.
14. The evidence considered by us also includes the input from the many individuals who were
attracted by The Independent’s coverage when the inquiry was launched. That coverage was
welcome, and the volume of correspondence showed the considerable depth of interest and
concern felt by The Independent’s readership. 6 Most of this evidence, however, addressed
specific ideas about mitigating climate change rather than the desirability or possibility of
political consensus.
15. The oral evidence witnesses were invited to reflect scientific and environmentalist
perspectives (no business representative was available at short notice) and the views from
across the main political spectrum in Westminster. Resource and time limitations precluded
further such sessions.
16. A copy of all the written evidence received will become available when the APPCCG’s
website is constructed, the transcript of the oral evidence session appears at Annex 3. Annex
4 lists the written submissions received.
17. In the call for evidence several questions were posed under three headings (see Annex 2). We
present our analysis of the responses under the two central questions of the ‘desirability’ and
the ‘possibility’ of a cross-party consensus, preceded by a brief overview of the current
science of climate change, and followed by a section on possible points of consensus.
18. Our conclusions and recommendations are listed at the end of the report.
1.3 The Consensus on the Science of Climate Change
19. Throughout the inquiry it was stressed in evidence that an important driver for political
consensus is the level of agreement which now exists amongst scientists worldwide: that
global climate is changing, that this is largely the result of current and past actions of people,
and that the long-term impacts of this are likely to be profound for the UK, as well as for
other nations and populations around the globe.
20. Anthropogenic climate change is caused primarily by increases in the concentration of
‘greenhouse gases’ in the atmosphere, which include CO 2 (the most prevalent other than
water vapour), methane and nitrous oxide. Professor Hulme of the University of East Anglia
5 See The Independent 14 th June 2006.
6 See The Independent 29 th March 2006.
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