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Clarity of thought for climate change

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What to we want to achieve in the next 40 years? Bjorn Lomborg applies considerable clarity & rigour of thought in answering this question on the subject of climate change. This work is unlikely to do more than dent the religious fervour surrounding the reduction in CO2 emissions in the short term, but will provide the intellectual base for reviewing the problem when the cost of Kyoto start to bite - when people realise that Kyoto is a hugely expensive and ineffective answer to the issue of global warming. In a nutshell: - Climate is always changing (most probably drive by solar activity) - CO2 is probably a lagging indicator overall - In the last 50 yearts, CO2 levels have been significantly affected by human economic activity, and this probably contributes to the warming effect. - The science of climate change contains huge uncertainty. - Public coverage & reporting has focused on unrealistic worst case scenarios. - Climate change will have both positive and negatives effects. It is not all one way. - More practical of doing something would be to work out what we are trying to achieve (e.g. saving lives, prevent flooding,etc) and then assess cost-effective ways of doing this - Kyoto is a way of pretending to do something about climate change; it is hugely expensive, ineffective, and the bill will come later, and mostly to emerging markets. Lomborg draws a very illuminating parallel with road traffic deaths. We can fix this problem by imposing a global 5mph speed limit. This has huge, unquantifiable costs; and in practice will not be a solution, because it will not be acceptable to people. It also ignores the benefits of ameliorating the problem by exploiting advances in seat belts, etc etc. A hugely influential and reasoned book.

Very good

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First things first, Lomborg accepts Global warming is happening. This book is not some psuedo scientific "there is no global warming" poppycock. It is an attempt to cut through the hysteria and look at climate change objectively and rationally. What exactly is the problem? What is the best solution? These are the questions Lomborg tries to deal with in this book. He puts various aspects of climate change under cost - benefit analysis; putting a price on this policy and that policy as he attempts to deduce what is the most effective and feasable approach to deal with the climate change. Throughout his analysis Lomborg's covers a wide range of climate change issues. For example: 1. Currently more people are dieing from cold related dates than heat related dates. Therefore, the direct and immediate impact on human life is actually positive with global warming. 2. Many natural disasters, for example hurricanes have little to nothing to do with global warming. 3. Kyoto for all its publicity will not really make that much difference to climate change. Even in its full implementation, it will slow down climate change by only 5 years over a 100 year period. For far less money, we could actually achieve much more. And just in case you need something quirky while you work you wear through a plethora of hard hitting arguments, there's the idea that painting the roads white would reduce tempature in cities - not sure about the aesthics after a few tyre marks though! A very pertinent point Lomborg makes is that if our ultimate aim is to do good for humanity we must consider all humanities' problems and not just global warming. He references the Copenhagen consensus and clearly shows that many other problems for example malaria, malnutrition and several others, all of which we could do much more about, with a lot less money, than ineffective climate change policies like Kyoto. Yes, it would be nice to fix every problem, but we never fix every problem. So how do we prioritise? Again, Lomborg argues the cost - benefit anaylsis approach becoming effectively utilitarian in his philosophy. Which approach helps the most amount of people? This is the angle Lomborg is profering. I agree with the overall hypotheisis that too much hysteria can mean we miss the big picture but the devil is always in the detail and with climate change, which afterall is an immensely complicated problem, it really is no different. Even though his points are well substantiated, with a voluminous amout of references (over 1,000 in about 200 pages), it's impossible to critically review this analysis unless one is at PhD level in the field or is working at a very senior level in it. I mean, if I was to spend one hour checking each reference out, I'd possibly be unemployed! Heck I wouldn't even had time to write this review. Now that's not to say that that invalidates anything in the book, but it reminds me how complicated climate change is and as the book constantly points out, simple answers aren't always in Al Gore movies. Thank you Mr. Lomborg I enjoyed this book.

Sensible proposals for coping with the consequences of global warming

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Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, has written another well-researched book. As he writes, "Global warming is happening, the consequences are important and mostly negative." He notes that the 2007 International Panel on Climate Change has predicted rises of 1.50C by 2050 and 2.50C by 2100, which will raise sea levels and increase malaria, starvation and poverty. But, Lomborg argues, it does not follow that directly combating climate change through cutting CO2 will do most to maximise human welfare. Preventing disease, providing clean drinking water and feeding people could do more good more cheaply. What are the options? We could, for example, spend $3 billion a year on mosquito eradication, medicine and mosquito nets: this would halve malaria incidence (2 billion infections and one million deaths every year) by 2015. We could spend $4 billion a year on helping three billion people to access clean water and sanitation. Or, by contrast, we could do what the EU tells us and spend $84 trillion to cut CO2 emissions to 20% below 1990 levels, to ensure that the temperature rises by no more than 20C above pre-industrial times. Yet this hugely expensive effort would have only a tiny effect: it would be 2.480C hotter than now by 2100 instead of by 2098. And a 2.5% rise is only what the IPCC predicted would happen anyway! As a 2007 peer-reviewed study in the journal Energy Policy concluded, "the 20C target of the EU seems unfounded." Lomborg shows that the consequences of global warming will not be as bad as they have been painted. For example, the IPCC predicted that sea-levels would rise by 29 cm by 2100 (the same as the rise since 1860), as against the 20 feet that Al Gore publicises. We could cope with this by better use of floodplains, more wetlands, stricter building policies and fewer floodplain subsidies. Lomborg shows that global warming does not cause extreme weather events, which are anyway not curable by cutting CO2. The IPCC said of the Hollywood/Pentagon/Al Gore picture of a new ice age triggered by a shutdown of the Gulf Stream, "we can confidently exclude this scenario." Fossil fuels have grown the industries that produce the goods we need and give us low-cost light, heat, food, travel and trade. As Lomborg writes, "a world without fossil fuels ... is a lot like a world gone medieval." So he argues that we need to spend far more on researching renewable energy and energy efficiency. Directly cutting CO2 would be hugely expensive. Lomborg argues that we should do what is both cheaper and more effective - cope with the consequences of global warming rather than try to stop it at source. If he is right, we would maximise human welfare not by rolling back our civilisation's industrial advance, but by using our industrial ingenuity and know-how to prevent disease, provide people with food and water, and develop energy resources.

Get both sides of the argument

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I buy into a lot of what Lomberg has to say, however just because he produces copious footnotes and references doesn't mean that his view has to be taken as sacrosanct. Indeed whilst having read a few books, read many arguments on the net, and listened to numerous programmes and podcasts on this issue recently it seems to me that everyone is in danger of becoming entrenched in their views and rejecting any view that differs from their own. Fiddling whilst Rome burns indeed (pun intended) and of course it all becomes someone else's problem. Many of the "anti" environmentalist lobby (and large swathes of this book) complacently argue that there is nothing wrong in our western lifestyle and indeed that it is a force for "good", forgetting all the while the damaging effects on the rest of the world to feed our "wants" (most consumer goods are hardly "needs"). Eventually - and this is where the jury may well still be out - those effects may start to be felt in the West. I can't believe that Lomberg thinks that any capital gained through carbon tax or whatever would be pumped back into envornmentally friendly schemes. I can just see the city fat cats giving their multi-million pound bonuses to Oxfam for instance. Still it is good for the debate that not everyone goes along with the received wisdom that cutting carbon emmissions is the be all and end all. The whole climate change argument for me is summed up by the situation in Cumbria recently where "environmentalists" rejected plans for a wind farm "because it spoils the view" and a few birds might get whacked by the blades. Yep, renewable energy is alright when the windmill is built somewhere else - much like a nuclear power station really

At last a little balance

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This book is so incredibly well-researched that the bibliography and footnotes make up about a quarter of its total length. Sources look impeccable and a great deal of the data comes from the IPCC so it's hard to argue with much of Lomborg's data. The conlusions are extremely eye-opening. Are we doomed? Well no, we're not. And if we're not, is it possible there are some issues facing the world today that are even more important than global warming? The answer to that is that there are plenty, and that it would be a genuine crime to waste scarce resources on futile efforts like Kyoto when the same money could be used to save lives now. Lomborg doesn't argue that we should do nothing about global warming - he has some very sane suggestions. But he does argue that we should prioritise, and does a good job of showing that at the moment we're failing to do that effectively. The book is perhaps most effective in revealing the distortions and exaggerations to which we're subjected by the media. It's vital to have the kind of perspective this book offers, especially when it's so hard to come by anywhere else.