I simply just love this guy, Bjorn Lomborg, the economist whose analysis is simply crushing the Al Gore fire and damnation “science” of global warming.
Lomborg’s latest piece appears in The Guardian:
Much of the global warming debate is perhaps best described as a constant outbidding by frantic campaigners, producing a barrage of ever-more scary scenarios in an attempt to get the public to accept their civilisation-changing proposals. Unfortunately, the general public – while concerned about the environment – is distinctly unwilling to support questionable solutions with costs running into tens of trillions of pounds. Predictably, this makes the campaigners reach for even more outlandish scares.
These alarmist predictions are becoming quite bizarre, and could be dismissed as sociological oddities, if it weren’t for the fact that they get such big play in the media. Oliver Tickell, for instance, writes that a global warming causing a 4C temperature increase by the end of the century would be a “catastrophe” and the beginning of the “extinction” of the human race. This is simply silly.
You simply have to read his whole piece and enjoy the intellectual smack down of environmental extremism.
There’s a fundamental difference here between an “intellectual smackdown of environmental extremism” and either a denial that global warming exists or a suggestion that nothing should be done about it. I’d agree that this Tickell (torture?) business is alarmist, but Lomborg is still calling for massive investment in both R&D and mitigation… investments which would not exactly have been championed if “environmental extremists” didn’t note the problem to begin with, and are not always championed by conservatives.
Björn Lomborg’s article would be more of an “intellectual smack down” if he didn’t cherry pick his facts. Here is the first “fact” he cites:
It took me about 5 minutes to find the report where he got these numbers. It can be found on this page and is titled ‘Climate Change and Water’. He decided to ignore most of the rest of the information provided by the report. The following are from the same paragraph (Section 2.3.3) that contained the 18-59cm claim:
and
It is easy to prove what you want when you use the facts that support your argument and ignore all the rest. Unfortunately, you seem to follow Lomborg’s style by latching on to anything that furthers your point of view without bothering to do even the slightest fact checking.
@1) Demo Kid, it is interesting to note that Lomborg accepts the premise of man-made global warming by C02. But he thinks the IPCC is politically motivated and its reports are written by hacks. As an economist he argues that mankind’s resources during this generation and next need to be directed in helping the third world develop and researching alternative energy solutions as opposed to “capping” C02 or adopting any of the draconian solutions proposed by Kyoto. In the long run, he argues, his approach would be more effective and more humanitarian. That’s the gist of his “Copenhagen Consensus.”
@2)”It is easy to prove what you want when you use the facts that support your argument and ignore all the rest.”
I’d suggest you practice what you preach.
Besides, the point of Lomborg’s article was not to argue the amount of future sea level change, but to point out the foolishness of extremists who need to shout fire and brimstone in an attempt to win popular opinion.
@3: Lomborg may cast dispersions on the motivations of the IPCC, but two points come out of that. First, there is just as strong as (if not a stronger) financial motivation to stall action on climate change… so many global warming deniers cannot be considered unbiased sources either. Second, the guy uses IPCC data to prove his point… which tends to suggest that he doesn’t think the IPCC is completely full of crap.
In addition, it is interesting to note that while the Copenhagen Consensus calculates global benefits for climate change, there is no acknowledgment of these effects at a local level. If you’re talking about radical changes in local agricultural productivity, water resources, pest infestations, and so forth, these will undoubtedly result in winners and losers.
So I would agree that the thought of swimming through the streets of New York is very alarmist, while probably only representing a low-probability (but high-impact) risk. However, it is disingenuous for many conservatives to poo-poo the more unlikely risks involved to slip out of dealing with the far more likely ones.
I should also add that the argument that you outline has great parallels in US security and military policy…
@3 Mark, I think you missed my point here. I’m not arguing the issue of global warming one way or the other, I’m trying to show that everyone involved (Tickell, Lomborg and yourself) is guilty of using facts pretty loosely and then making unjustified statements based on them.
This is the chain of events as I see it:
1) Tickell writes an extremest, chicken little, the sky is falling (or is that just an illusion caused by the sea rising 70+ meters?) argument that uses every worst case scenario and has little if any scientific backing.
2) Lomborg decides to point out the flaws in Tickell’s article and the first statistic he grabs happens to be a very low prediction of sea level rise and is taken completely out of context (as I tried to point out above). Now Lomberg can go extreme himself and say “Tickell is simply exaggerating by a factor of up to 400″.
3) You take a look at Lomborg’s article and claim that it “is simply crushing the Al Gore fire and damnation ’science’ of global warming”, even though Tickell is way over the top compared to Gore and neither article even mentions him. If you want to attack Gore’s ideas, then attack Gore’s ideas, don’t build a straw man type argument by claiming that if Tickell is wrong, then Gore must be wrong.
All three articles use faulty logic and/or cherry picked facts to come to biased conclusions. Sorry if I’m ranting a bit here, but I think I have been exposed to too many political advertisements this week, from just about every candidate, that are guilty of the exact same thing.
Queegmire, I agree that arguments on this subject get oversimplified by both sides.
As for Gore, I have taken Gore to task many times on this site. My reference here to him has to do more to the “if you don’t agree with us, you’re a heretic” argument that Gore and his disciples use.