Cool it - The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide To Global Warming
Lomborg on Lomborg:
"A groundbreaking book that transforms the debate about global warming by offering a fresh perspective based on human needs as well as environmental concerns.
Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered to stop global warming will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world's temperature for hundreds of years. Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and assuring and maintaining a safe, fresh water supply-which can be addressed at a fraction of the cost and save millions of lives within our lifetime. He asks why the debate over climate change has stifled rational dialogue and killed meaningful dissent.
Lomborg presents us with a second generation of thinking on global warming that believes panic is neither warranted nor a constructive place from which to deal with any of humanity's problems, not just global warming. Cool It promises to be one of the most talked about and influential books of our time." (
Source: http://www.lomborg.com/cool_it/?PHPSESSID=b06438c6e23593bec2695a2adf528547)
"Climate change is not the only challenge of the 21st century, and for many other global problems we have low-cost, durable solutions. I formed the Copenhagen Consensus in 2004 so some of the world's top economists could come together to ask not only where we can do good but at what cost, and to rank the best things for the world to do first. The top priorities are dealing with infectious diseases, malnutrition, agricultural research, and first-world access to third-word agriculture. For less than a fifth of Kyoto's price tag, we could tackle all these issues."
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/17/comment.climatechange
An inconvenient Danish pasting
One man who was not rooting for Al Gore to win the Nobel Prize was Bjorn Lomborg. The smiling Dane is the anti-Gore. Unimpressed with An Inconvenient Truth , his new book challenges many of that film's alarming statements about global warming. Mr Gore and his admirers are paying no attention, needless to say, and that is a pity.
Lomborg's capacity to anger his opponents is limitless. Of course, he disagrees with them, an outrageous affront in itself. He says that the state of the environment is not dire. He also argues that cutting greenhouse gas emissions should not be the world's top priority, another scandalous provocation. He makes it worse by being pleasant and reasonable (not to mention Danish), turning up in T- shirt and jeans all the time, supporting his arguments with too many footnotes and acting in other ways designed to offend.
A disinterested review of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming is hard to find. I am predisposed to like the book because I have known Lomborg since he published The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001 and find him unfailingly courteous, open-minded and keen to engage in discussion. Most reviewers are prejudiced in the opposite direction. Lomborg's arguments receive scant attention. The man is the target. E.O. Wilson, the biologist, once described him as "part of the parasite load that science must bear". Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told a newspaper: "If you should follow the thinking of Lomborg, then possibly what Hitler did was right." Such remarks sink ad hominem criticism to new lows.
As in his previous books, Lomborg does not challenge the scientific consensus, such as it is. For the most part, he merely describes it dispassionately and thinks through the policy implications. On global warming, he cites IPCC projections for rising temperatures and their effects as his baseline. He is no "climate change denier", nor does he quarrel with the view that man- made influences are the principal cause. He proposes, among other things, a moderate carbon tax to encourage abatement. But he questions the need for more radical measures to cut carbon, arguing that the costs would be great and the benefits limited. He says that the Kyoto protocol was expensive and ineffective: the resources that aggressive carbon cutting absorbs can be better used. He favours not death camps and a trans-European slave state, as Mr Pachauri may suppose, but a big expansion of aid to combat HIV and malaria in Africa. Admittedly, that could be just a front. The book's discussion of rising sea levels is typical of the Lomborg approach. The latest IPCC projections talk of a rise of a foot by the end of the century, he notes. Mr Gore talks of a rise of 20 feet. The present science suggests that even under extreme assumptions about the rapid melting of Greenland's ice, such a rise would take 1,000 years. If the IPCC's projections are correct, the rise in sea level this century does not pose a catastrophic threat. Lomborg concludes that adaptation where necessary, such as the building of coastal defences, is a better investment than an immediate and costly assault on carbon emissions.
Reviewing the book for Nature, the economist Partha Dasgupta disdainfully highlighted what he saw as a critical flaw. "The earth system's deep non-linearities" make it impossible to forecast what will happen if concentrations of greenhouse gases rise to the level Lomborg envisages, Mr Dasgupta says. There might be a sudden catastrophe or there might not be. This type of radical uncertainty undermines orthodox cost-benefit analysis. Hence, "Lomborg's thesis is built on a deep misconception". It is an important point - though it seems harsh of Mr Dasgupta to say "these truths escape Lomborg" as if they do not also escape the IPCC, Sir Nick Stern and anybody else who bases policy proposals on conventionally estimated projections of climate.
For the moment, after all, those projections are all we have. It may be true that carbon abatement should be approached as a question of insuring against an improbable catastrophe (rather than of avoiding lesser harms that are confidently expected to occur), but this insight sheds no light on the practical question of how much mitigation is enough. It points to a research agenda - one worth pursuing, to be sure - not a policy. If it skewers Lomborg, it skewers everybody else as well.
In the vast popular literature on climate change, Lomborg's short book stands apart for its calm, civil, even-handed analysis. It is suffused with concern for socially beneficial priorities and for practical steps to do good. Almost uniquely in its genre, it understands the idea of opportunity cost. It provides some badly needed balance. You can see why so many people find it completely infuriating.
The writer is a US-based FT columnist
http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/10/12/review-of-chill-out-the-skeptical-environmentalist-s-guide-t.html
Friday, October 12, 2007
Review of "Cool it: The skeptical environmentalist's guide to global warming" by Bjorn Lomborg
The New York Times report on Vice President Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chanel winning the Nobel Peace Prize makes Bjorn Lomborg's book, Cool It, all the more timely. Dr. Lomborg is a founder of the "Copenhagen Consensus," a scientific approach that provides specific steps to making the world a better place.
Cool It is based on costs and benefits. While Lomborg's book does not use the term, Bjorn is clearly annoyed by global warming religionists who see climate change as an issue of good and evil, rather than pluses and negatives. For instance, consider the (accurate) claim that if temperatures warm, more people will do from heat in the summer. Now consider the (equally accurate) claim that as temperatures warm, many more people will not die from cold in winter. Lomborg compares these two facts, and shows that over all, climate change saves more people than it kills via temperature. So he advices the reader to "cool it" when it comes to climate change hysteria.
Don't panic
Other incidents of global warming hysteria are addressed at as well. Some polar bear populations are declining. However, polar bear populations over all are increasing, and those that witness declining populations are in places that are getting colder. Similarly, a carbon tax would slow down warming, saving a percentage of land on island nations that may be lost to global temperatures. But the growth from not having any carbon tax would allow those same countries to be much richer, allowing them to afford to protect more of their land from the ocean.
For topic after topic, area after area, Lomborg applies policy science to the anti-climate change debate and finds the alarmists to be doing much more harm than good. Because Bjorn believes that global warming is caused by human beings, he proposes a modest carbon tax as part of a much wider effort. Bjorn Lomborg concludes with a call for a generational mission, but one that (unlike various CO2-centric ideas) actually might de a lot of good: eradicating malaria, greenery in cities, and economic development.
Tom Barnett, whose recommendation is the reason I bought this book, things it's "cool" that Gore won the Nobel Price. After reading Cool It, I can't agree. Gore's alarmism is counterproductive, harming both science as an enterprise and humanity as a species. The very best that can be said about Al Gore's work is that, hopefully, it will mostly be ignored.
Online, Frontier Channel has Lomborg's presentation, The Real State of the World. And Catholicgauze reviews Lomborg's companion op-ed, "Chill out.
20:55 Posted by Dan tdaxp in Bookosphere | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: cool it, bjorn lomborg, skeptical environmentalist, copenhagen consensus
http://www.fcpp.org/main/media_file_detail.php?StreamID=283 bjorn's speech 2005: Bjorn Lomborg: The Real State of the World
The "Skeptical Environmentalist" presents an optimistic view of our world's environment, CropLife Conference, Niagara Falls, Ontario, September 21, 2005
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Mr Lomborg is - in our view - an pseudo-scientific quack. From the Guardian blog (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/2007/10/cool_it_global_warmings_a_myth.html) we copied these comments.
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ecoglobe seit 1997