LOMBORG VERSUS THE GREEN POPE

There was a recent debate between Bjorn Lomborg and Carl Pope (head of the Sierra Club) about the state of the environment in Foreign Policy magazine. Below are the last two posts (out of 8) in the exchange, followed by my comment on the debate

Don't Treat the Earth Like Enron

Carl Pope responds

If you look back to the beginning of this exchange, I did not say that mercury was a higher priority than particulates. I did not focus on U.S. power plant emissions alone. You did. I cited the oceanic mercury problem as a symbol of our failure of leadership and the resulting problems that failure creates.

You keep posing artificial choices such as the one between cookers and wind turbines. Both are more desirable and more economical than backyard coal furnaces. It is simply not the case that the world-or the United States-does only one thing at a time. Leadership doesn't mean picking the lowest-hanging fruit, one at a time. It means acting on our wiser, not our greedier, instincts.

Where do we get the money? Let those who take from the global commons foot the bill. If the companies that emit mercury were to pay damages, they would be forced to clean up, and the world would be healthier and more prosperous. Current U.S. carbon emissions now top 1.5 billion tons per year-about 25 percent of total global carbon emissions. Scientists' mid-range estimates are that planetary sinks-plants, trees, and other elements that absorb carbon-can handle about 5.5 billion tons without an unacceptable increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. With 5 percent of the world's population, a fair U.S. share of global carbon emissions is 275 million tons a year. At a modest value of $50 per ton, U.S. carbon emitters owe the world's poor nations at least $66 billion for this year alone.

So, Bjorn, if U.S. carbon emitters and those in Saudi Arabia, Europe, and Japan pay for what they pollute, we could fund clean drinking water, clean village stoves, wind turbines, and solar cells in India. Of course, if we started making carbon wasters in the United States pay, Economics 101 suggests they will emit much less. Instead of a massive transfer of wealth, charging fairly for carbon emissions would reduce pollution in the United States, generate cash for development in China, Africa, and other developing regions, and reduce climactic instability. This system won't increase poverty. It may hurt the oil companies. So what? Henry Ford was bad for buggy makers.

You ask for my priorities. We should stop cooking the books, make those who take from the global commons pay, and invest that revenue as wisely as we can. The result of these steps will not be Dr. Pangloss's "best of all possible worlds." But I am shocked that anyone believes we will get better results by continuing to treat the Earth as if it were Enron.

Less Charming, but Honest

Bjorn Lomborg responds

We agree that wise investments will make the world better. But what proposals does that actually include? The question was answered last year by the Copenhagen Consensus project. Thirty specialists from a broad range of fields joined forces with eight top economists, including three Nobel laureates, to make a global priority list. Their top goals were to prevent HIV/AIDS, end agricultural subsidies, and fight malnutrition and malaria. That is where we can do the most good per dollar. The Copenhagen Consensus concluded that substantial responses to climate change (your favorite) would do little good at high cost.

You say we should make polluters pay. That's an excellent idea. But you get a bit too excited. Most analyses show that the carbon damage cost is less than $10 per ton, suggesting a much lower tax and revenue stream. Moreover, just as money is a scarce resource, so too is political will. Given the world's immense reluctance to enforce carbon taxes and trade liberalization, we should focus on getting the best one-trade-done first. Your Economics 101 suggests that carbon taxes would have a big impact on emissions and climate change, but real economic models show the exact opposite. Carbon taxes would have little impact on emissions or climate change.

No matter how much money we raise, we should still spend it wisely. If investing in cookers is more cost effective than windmills, we should do the cookers first. It really isn't more complicated. Advocacy groups understandably want to focus on headline-grabbing issues, such as mercury, mangroves, and global warming. But when we emphasize some problems, we get less focus on others. It has been hard to get you to say what the world should not do first. Such a strategy is, naturally, less charming. But if we really want to do good in the long run, it is more honest to put those terms on paper.

You end by repeating your claim that we are cooking the environmental books. No. We know there are environmental problems. But we face other challenges, too. Let's tackle the ones where we can do the most good first. The rich world is dealing with many of its environmental problems because it can afford to. If the poor world became wealthier, they would follow suit. Tackling pressing issues such as disease, hunger, and polluted water will do obvious good and give the poor the chance to improve the state of their world.

My comment on the debate:

Lomborg has done such a first-rate job of opposing level-headed rationality to the Green Pope's hysteria and disregard for what is possible that he has in my view left little for anyone to say. I do however have two points to make that I think supply context to this debate: About psychology and history.

From Malthus to Paul Ehrlich, Greenies have been enormous false prophets. They are always prophesying imminent doom and always getting it completely wrong. Explanations of why Malthus was wrong used to appear in basic economics textbooks in my student days so I will not insult people's knowledge by saying anything about him and if anybody does not know about the hilarious false prophecies made by Paul Ehrich, here would be a good place to start reading. So anybody who knows anything about the history of Greenie prophecies would take the Green Pope and his cohorts with a large grain of salt.

Some recent history is relevant too. The 1987 Montreal treaty was one of the great Greenie triumphs of the 80s. It banned the best refrigerant we have (freon) to "save" the ozone layer. Yet the great bellwether of the state of upper-atmosphere ozone -- the Antarctic "hole" -- continues to fluctuate between large and small just as it always did -- with some of the largest holes observed in recent years. As is reported here, the hole was at its biggest in 2000 -- well after CFCs had been banned. Even more interesting, however was that in 2002 the hole shrank so much that it disappeared -- being replaced by two much smaller holes. Then in 2003 it was back at its second largest size ever. So that was a false prophecy too -- albeit one that nobody bothers about now.

And the no. 1 Greenie cause of today -- that wicked carbon dioxide which is supposed to be causing global warming -- now seems to have passed its tipping point too -- with even that great booster of global warming -- Tony Blair -- having just declared himself to be a climate "heretic". In retrospect, however, historians will probably see the breaking of Michael Mann's "hockey stick" by McKitrick and McIntyre as the crucial event that killed off the global warming scare.

So why do Greenies constantly bother us with one nonsensical scare after another? Any mother would understand it. It is just attention-seeking behaviour. "Mommy, look at me!" is something most kids say from time to time. One suspects that Greenies had mothers who did not look.





THE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE: A REVIEW OF THE STATE OF SCIENCE

Another academic journal excerpt. Madhav Khandekar (mkhandekar@rogers.com), and co-authors T. S. Murty & P. Chittibabu both from Ottawa, Canada, have concluded that the dissenting view of the Global Warming science appears much more credible than the IPCC view of the cause and impact of global warming. They have also concluded that there is no link between global warming and world-wide extreme weather events. Article published in "Pure and Applied Geophysics", Volume 162, Numbers 8-9 Date: August 2005 Pages: 1557 - 1586

The Global Warming Debate: A Review of the State of Science

By: M. L. Khandekar [1] , T. S. Murty [2] and P. Chittibabu [3]. (1) Consulting Meteorologist, Unionville, Ontario, Canada (2) Department of civil engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada (3) W.F. Baird & Associates Coastal Engineers Ltd, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Abstract

A review of the present status of the global warming science is presented in this paper. The term global warming is now popularly used to refer to the recent reported increase in the mean surface temperature of the earth; this increase being attributed to increasing human activity and in particular to the increased concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) in the atmosphere. Since the mid to late 1980s there has been an intense and often emotional debate on this topic. The various climate change reports (1996, 2001) prepared by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), have provided the scientific framework that ultimately led to the Kyoto protocol on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (particularly carbon dioxide) due to the burning of fossil fuels. Numerous peer-reviewed studies reported in recent literature have attempted to verify several of the projections on climate change that have been detailed by the IPCC reports. The global warming debate as presented by the media usually focuses on the increasing mean temperature of the earth, associated extreme weather events and future climate projections of increasing frequency of extreme weather events worldwide. In reality, the climate change issue is considerably more complex than an increase in the earth's mean temperature and in extreme weather events. Several recent studies have questioned many of the projections of climate change made by the IPCC reports and at present there is an emerging dissenting view of the global warming science which is at odds with the IPCC view of the cause and consequence of global warming. Our review suggests that the dissenting view offered by the skeptics or opponents of global warming appears substantially more credible than the supporting view put forth by the proponents of global warming. Further, the projections of future climate change over the next fifty to one hundred years is based on insufficiently verified climate models and are therefore not considered reliable at this point in time.

Doi (permanent) address for the paper here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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