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Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic
DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."
I'm sure everybody here will be interested in reading Lomborg's response before forming an opinion.
However, it has not been shown that humans are the primary cause of this warming.
Incorrect, it has: Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming
You'd have done much better to link to Lomborg's response, than going off on your speculative aura.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
So now we have a celebrity science pissing-match on our hands. This is simple, IPCC was married with politics, like much of the entire debate. Everyone back to the lab, the field, the research. Stop pandering to politicians and environmentalists, and come up with some science! Until then, no I'm not taking you seriously.
That's absurd. Your sweeping generalization ignores the decades of research poured into the topic by research groups from all over the world. There is ongoing research continually improving upon current models with updated and refined data. You can go take a look at the thousands upon thousands of journal articles written by these scientists, assuming you can even understand the jargon.
One of the things that REALLY bugs me about climate research is seeing LEGITIMATE scientists use the word "SKEPTIC" as a SMEAR.
Scientists are SUPPOSED to be skeptic, and I understand that this is not what the phrase is meant to convey, but the mere idea of labeling a scientists "skeptic" to smear him shows how political scientists in general have become. Remember when they were all about the pursuit of truth and knowledge?
I guess it sounds better than "denier", (which sounds like some McCarthy-era witch-hunt-ism), but why can't scientists keep their professionalism in situations which become politicized?
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That's not what he says:
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Does it really matter if we are warming the planet or not?
Even if we are how are we going to fix it? Limit CO2 emissions by something like cap and trade? Great concept but India, China etc are not going to play in a game that is detrimental to their growing manufacturing industries. Or perhaps we create green energy solutions, problem is none of those solutions are cost effective to be self sustaining. If we are warming the planet who is to say it is not actually a positive thing?
I see this argument rather often, and I think it fails to see the point. The US has the largest GDP in the world BY FAR. It has the biggest and most robust economy by an order of magnitude, and nearly all gigantic leaps in technological innovation occur here because of the vast consumer market and potential profits (at least when Republicans aren't stymying innovation by giving away money to the rich). If the US creates a cap and trade system that rewards innovators and penalizes fossil fuel users, there is no doubt an explosion of innovation will arrive in the field. Companies like nanosolar would be only the tip of the iceberg.
Most European and Asian countries already have gas prices more than twice as high as ours. Just imagine the massive shift in capital to innovative startups that would have occurred over the last two decades had the US taxed gasoline appropriately. Imagine the massive private expenditures into developing consumer-grade alternative energy products. It's just mind-boggling to think what the US could do if it were as forward thinking as some other countries are.
Reading that very lengthy rebuttal, one thing becomes clear. Howard Friel does not deserve our time or thought. If you are going to criticize someone's work, you need to be doubly careful that the things you take issue with are valid. Here it appears that the criticism is far less solid than the material it critisizes. This does not make the original material correct as a result, but truely; there is nothing to see here, move along.
I haven't read his books, but I live in Denmark so Lomborg gets quite a bit of press here, especially under the climate change conference in December. In interviews he's always come across as a pragmatist more than a skeptic.
He has two main arguments:
1) Think about the return on investment.
Let's say we can cool the earth one degree by spending a trillion dollars. Is it worth the investment? What do we really get out of it? How many other problems could have been fixed with that money?
2) The current approach to fighting climate change is wrong.
UN treaties and money aren't going to stop the developing world from using fossil fuels. The only surefire way to get off of coal is to develop something that is cheaper. Instead of giving money to developing countries to bribe them not to pollute, we should invest the money in new technology, so that in 10, 20, 30 years we can say "here, this is cheaper than coal and doesn't pollute".
I think both of his points are important to consider, though I don't agree with him completely. There are risks to his solution - what if our investments don't bear fruit, and coal is still the cheapest energy source in 30 years? What if climate change causes political destabilization so we don't have enough time to get finished?
I don't think anybody has a perfect solution, but I do think that Lomborg contributes positively to the debate.
One of the new postdocs in my lab is from the Czech Republic. He says that everything's more advanced in America, including the idiots.
The problem is not, nor has it ever been that lunatics with their hand out the window yelling, "it feels fine!" are shouted down or ignored. The problem is that over the past 20 years the understanding has evolved that there is a "correct" result, and anyone working to disprove that result is an enemy to be scrutinized, tied to suspicious parties and ostracized.
By contrast, there are respected scientists in every other field attempting to disprove established theories, and should their work pan out, they would publish without fear of immediate rejection by their peers.
It is the nature of scientific theory that it is tested and attacked. That is why we value a theory limke evolution, which has survived these constat attempts to disprove or reduce its scope for a very long time.
Of what value is a body of theory that can only be confirmed, but which brooks no attempt to disprove?
There you go again. Conflating "climate change" with whether man is the most likely cause. Its really rather rich. The prime highlight of the IPCCs AR3 was to "forget" the existence of climate change prior to the 19th century. Natural variation over the past thousand years was reduced to quiet gradual downtrend with an abrupt surge upward in the 1800s. In so doing they discarded thousands of studies and work of thousands who previously carefully documented periods of great warming and cooling throughout the history of man.
This can be seen clearly by comparing the IPCC-1990 report, which concisely shows the consensus of an old guard (now largely dead). A very warm, much warmer period during the middle ages (shown in read). The IPCC AR3 and AR4 replaced this with the blue curve. Shown a flat-changeless temperature history with a slight downtrend, suddenly accelerating upward.
But their claim was bespectacled from the start by way of special pleading they had explained away each interruption in warming that occurred during the 20th century, but then after the report was published, yet another unexpected cooling period emerged.
Suddenly the meme switched from being about "Global Warming" to being "Climate Change". The focus shifted from temperatures to sea-levels and hurricanes. Yet this turned out to be an even more tenuous footing. Its already no longer considered reputable among intellectual circles to discuss such extravagances. Eventually the talking point was settled upon: weather is not climate. The recent cooling is just weather.
Indeed, weather is not climate. Climate is the expectation of weather--and so yes, it surely does matter when year after year goes by somewhat cooler than had been predicted by the IPCCs latest report.
Meanwhile, the very people who had steadfastly refused to deny climate-change are now labeled the climate change deniers. This stemmed from an Orwellian campaign to redefine terminology. Suddenly believing in climate-change meant believing in anthropogenic climate change. The language literally twisted to be an embodiment of the "one true belief"--no need for that pesky modifier anthropogenic, and all the better to co-opt what everyone knows: climate changes.
Several very cogent critiques of the AR3 temperature series have been published which eviscerated that graph as a product of flawed statistical methods and bad data. Yet a loud cadre continues to deny any problem exists, and banks on the lack of specialized knowledge among the public and other scientists to trade on their word alone.
And, no, we're saying that there is no contribution from Man. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but its effect on temperature depends on poorly understood feedback effects. These effects are in part also responsible for the long history of natural temperature variation that the IPCC otherwise ignores. Ultimately, what it comes down to is this: The IPCC claims a temperature rise of 2C/century. To arrive at this number they assume almost all strong feedbacks are amplifying rather moderating the C02 driven warming. Why does this matter? Much of the impetus for "ACTION NOW!" stems from the notion of a climate tipping point, but if the feedback effects are more moderating than the IPCC claims, this is highly unlikely.
>Most European and Asian countries already have gas
>prices more than twice as high as ours. Just
>imagine the massive shift in capital to innovative
>startups that would have occurred over the last
>two decades had the US taxed gasoline appropriately.
I see this argument frequently, but it ignores the simple reality that unlike in Europe and Asia, the American economy is based on a highly mobile workforce able to commute great distances by automobile. The middle class, in particular, is enabled by and enriched by the automobile and cheap gasoline--the wealthier can live in expensive neighborhoods close to work, and the poor live wherever they can while commuting as little as possible; but, the middle class often work in areas where they could either not afford nearby housing which caters to the more affluent, or where nearby housing caters to the poor.
That's not always the case, of course, but it often is and the middle class has thrived on the ability to live in cheaper yet comfortable neighborhoods further from job centers--i.e., living in the suburbs while commuting to the city, or living in the country and commuting to the burbs. There's also a greater mobility and variety of jobs available to the middle class thanks to cheap gas: where I live, many commute to Washington, D.C., many others to Richmond, and a few to Charlottesville--meaning the job markets of 2.5 major cities are effectively local. Tax gas at a high rate, and people will have less employment mobility, fewer competitive opportunities, and lower overall wages due to the lowered competition among employers in formerly-neighboring employment centers. Additionally, with permanently expensive gas making long commutes cost-prohibitive for the middle class, there would be a huge migration out of the burbs and into more urban areas--where are all the urban poor going to move when whole cities are gentrified almost overnight? Into deserted suburbs with few native local job opportunities?
Tax gas at a high rate, and the mobile workforce and all the competitive advantages it bestows evaporates; the middle class would be eviscerated, and the poor would be displaced. Like it or not, there is no viable public and/or mass transit in most of the U.S.--we haven't needed it thanks to cheap gas, nor has it been as practical as in Europe thanks to our sprawling landmass.
So, do we heavily invest in public/mass transit now in a crash program, to the tune of trillions of dollars almost all at once, so we can end our reliance on cheap gas? No, that's impractical, too expensive, and no one has either the political will or political capital. Do we just levy those high gas taxes, and see if the dire predictions are false? No, because even if it wouldn't destroy the middle class, it would destroy so many political careers that no one is dumb enough to try it--remember that when oil stayed above $100/barrel for a record number of weeks not long ago and U.S. gas prices stayed at record levels, populist anger boiled so hot that Congress was subpoenaing oil executives and threatening to tax their profits and repeal gas taxes and doing ANYTHING to keep a lid on popular sentiments that threatened to derail every incumbent in their wake.
So no, there will not be high gas taxes in this country, nor should there be. What there should be is a plan to phase out gasoline, not through punitive taxes aimed at the working classes but through taxes and legislative pressures on automakers to phase in certain percentages of electric or hybrid vehicles by target dates. We mandate automakers to include lots of once-expensive tech which has since come down in manufacturing cost; why not, in the name of national security as well as the environment, mandate targeted percentages of electric offerings? If prices of new cars do rise in the short term while early adopters bear the brunt, so be it--the more financially challenged can stick with their old cars for a few years more until costs come down. It may seem unrealistic to exp
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As someone who believes in man-made climate change I can assure both you and the GP that you are completely wrong about my beliefs.
I don't think we need to give up our modern lives and return to some kind of hippy-farming-commune existence. We just need to develop technology that doesn't pump CO2 into the atmosphere. Sure, that does cost money to develop, but so did drilling for oil or burning coal to generate electricity.
Even if you don't believe in climate change the benefits of not burning coal and oil should be pretty obvious. You can see pollution all around us in the form of the dust and dirt that accumulates on buildings and in my house (which is next to a main road).
Don't think I'm attacking you personally either. We need to change things at government and industrial levels. In the end though there comes a point where we are going to have to force the Chelsea Tractor / Hummer drivers into less polluting cars. I don't see a problem with that - we don't allow people to piss in swimming pools because the majority of people don't want to swim in that. You can't expect to go around spewing crap into the air when there are just as good alternatives that don't do that.
We are not there yet by a long way, but one day we will be and that's all I'm saying:
- We need to develop less polluting technology, if not because of climate change then because of pollution and the finite nature of the oil and coal supplies.
- Eventually technology will get there, but in the mean time I'm still flying long haul and you can still drive your tractor around town. I own a Colt with super-efficient engine, mainly because it's cheaper for me to run. If electric was cheaper I would buy one of these too. Totally selfish and nothing to do with the green lobby.
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