Further considerations: climate science and policy beyond 2013 - Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects - page 546

Some may say that additional metrics will make life too complex. This is a specious
counter argument. We are already used to multiple metrics for many commonly
reported dimensions to modern life. For example, we are all used to multiple metrics
to assess a nation's economy, such as its GDP, trade deficit, rate of currency exchange
and employment level.
There is currently some discussion over the need for additional emissions metrics.
Indeed, as this topic goes to press (2012), the UK's all-party House of Commons Select
Committee on Energy and Climate Change is holding an enquiry into Consumption-
Based Emissions Reporting, with the Select Committee's conclusions due out at the
end of the year. The good news is that the country's Parliamentary Select Committees
sometimes produce incisive reports. The bad news is that many Select Committees'
conclusions can be bland when it comes to a politically controversial topic such as this
one, and sometimes they miss the point, especially where enquiries are on a technical
topic, again as is this one. Furthermore, even if the Select Committee produces a
bold report, the UK government is not obliged to adopt its conclusions (though it is
obliged to respond to the points the committee makes) and, of course, other nations
need not take any notice at all.
Nonetheless, proper accounting is vital if decisions are to be evidence-based: the
null position being that the decision-making process is ill informed. Does anyone
need reminding that the 2008-9 global financial crash was due to lack of accounting
with due diligence, when sub-prime mortgages were incorrectly valued? Or that the
Eurozone crisis that began in 2011 was caused by at least one nation's 'creative'
accounting of its national debt?
The importance of proper accounting for emissions is not just because accounting
provides the evidence and the evidence needs to be sound (and this should be reason
enough), but because the aforementioned financial crises were based on notional
resources, not genuinely physical ones. In both these cases it was notional value (based
on currency) at the root of the problems and not a real resource: it was not the failure of
an agricultural region, or collapse of a mine, that caused the problem: crops carried on
growing regardless of stock market performance. Conversely, climate change does
affect agriculture (ask the farmers in Australia's Murray-Darling basin), extreme
precipitation does affect the physicality of homes (ask the residents of England's
Boscastle), sea-level rise does reduce land area (talk to people from Tuvalu) and
the intensity of hurricanes is changing (a concern to those in the Caribbean and
south-east USA), to take just a few examples. This puts the difficulties of the 2008-
9 and 2011-12 financial crises into perspective when compared with the real-world
pressures on society that are arising out of climate change. Yet if we fall foul of purely
human constructs of notional value, what will happen when real physical resources
are diminished?
The second point that I feel is worthy of consideration is one that will be extremely
challenging for my ecologist colleagues: the need to consider species and ecosystem
translocation as part of global conservation and climate mitigation. Not only are
some species threatened by climate change, and so arguably could do with a helping
hand to colonise new areas, but ecosystems are one of the key ways the Earth
system (or biosphere) is regulated. Past major carbon isotope excursions (CIEs) see
carbon cascade (often - at least in part, if not in the main - biologically mediated)