A rationalist crusader does the math on global warming

A Lomborg update

Bjorn Lomborg is a political scientist by training, but the charismatic, golden-haired Dane is offering me a history lesson. Two hundred years ago, he explains, sitting forward in his chair in this newspaper's Manhattan offices, the left was an "incredibly rational movement." It believed in "encyclopedias," in hard facts, and in the idea that mastery of these basics would help "make a better society." Since then, the world's do-gooders have succumbed to "romanticism; they've become more dreamy." This is a problem in his view, and so this "self-avowed slight lefty" is determined to nudge the whole world back toward "rationalism."

Well, if not the whole world, at least the people who matter. In Mr. Lomborg's universe that means the lawmakers and bureaucrats who are charged with solving the world's most pressing problems--HIV/AIDS, malaria, malnutrition, dirty water, trade barriers. This once-obscure Dane has in recent years risen to the status of international celebrity as the chief advocate of getting leaders to realize the world has limited resources to fix its problems, and that it therefore needs to prioritize.

Prioritization, cost-effectiveness, efficiency--these are the ultimate in rational thinking. (It strikes me they are the ultimate in "free markets," though Mr. Lomborg studiously avoids that term.) They are also nearly unheard-of concepts among the governments, international bodies and aid groups that oversee good works.

Mr. Lomborg's approach has been to organize events around the globe in which leaders are forced to think in new ways. His task is certainly timely, with groups like the U.N. engaged in debate over "reform," and philanthropists such as Warren Buffett throwing billions at charitable foundations. But, I ask, can the world really become more rational? "It's no use just talking about all the great things you'd like to accomplish--we've got to get there," says Mr. Lomborg.

Bjorn Lomborg busted--and that is the only word for it--onto the world scene in 2001 with the publication of his book "The Skeptical Environmentalist." A one-time Greenpeace enthusiast, he'd originally planned to disprove those who said the environment was getting better. He failed. And to his credit, his book said so, supplying a damning critique of today's environmental pessimism. Carefully researched, it offered endless statistics--from official sources such as the U.N.--showing that from biodiversity to global warming, there simply were no apocalypses in the offing. "Our history shows that we solve more problems than we create," he tells me. For his efforts, Mr. Lomborg was labeled a heretic by environmental groups--whose fundraising depends on scaring the jeepers out of the public--and became more hated by these alarmists than even (if possible) President Bush.

Yet the experience left Mr. Lomborg with a taste for challenging conventional wisdom. In 2004, he invited eight of the world's top economists--including four Nobel Laureates--to Copenhagen, where they were asked to evaluate the world's problems, think of the costs and efficiencies attached to solving each, and then produce a prioritized list of those most deserving of money. The well-publicized results (and let it be said here that Mr. Lomborg is no slouch when it comes to promoting himself and his work) were stunning. While the economists were from varying political stripes, they largely agreed. The numbers were just so compelling: $1 spent preventing HIV/AIDS would result in about $40 of social benefits, so the economists put it at the top of the list (followed by malnutrition, free trade and malaria). In contrast, $1 spent to abate global warming would result in only about two cents to 25 cents worth of good; so that project dropped to the bottom.

"Most people, average people, when faced with these clear choices, would pick the $40-of-good project over others--that's rational," says Mr. Lomborg. "The problem is that most people are simply presented with a menu of projects, with no prices and no quantities. What the Copenhagen Consensus was trying to do was put the slices and prices on a menu. And then require people to make choices."

Easier said than done. As Mr. Lomborg explains, "It's fine to ask economists to prioritize, but economists don't run the world." (This sounds unfortunate to me, although Mr. Lomborg, the "slight lefty," quickly adds "Thank God.") "We now need to get the policy makers on board, the ones who are dealing with the world's problems." And therein lies the rub. Political figures don't like to make choices; they don't like to reward some groups and not others; they don't like to admit that they can't do it all. They are political. Not rational.

So all the more credit to Mr. Lomborg, who several weeks ago got his first big shot at reprogramming world leaders. His organization, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, held a new version of the exercise in Georgetown. In attendance were eight U.N. ambassadors, including John Bolton. (China and India signed on, though no Europeans.) They were presented with global projects, the merits of each of which were passionately argued by experts in those fields. Then they were asked: If you had an extra $50 billion, how would you prioritize your spending?

Mr. Lomborg grins and says that before the event he briefed the ambassadors: "Several of them looked down the list and said 'Wait, I want to put a No. 1 by each of these projects, they are all so important.' And I had to say, 'Yeah, uh, that's exactly the point of this exercise--to make you not do that.'" So rank they did. And perhaps no surprise, their final list looked very similar to that of the wise economists. At the top were better health care, cleaner water, more schools and improved nutrition. At the bottom was . . . global warming.

Wondering how all this might go over with Al Gore, I ask Mr. Lomborg if he'd seen the former vice president's new film that warns of a climate-change disaster. He's planning to, but notes he wasn't impressed by the trailers: "It appears to be so overblown that it isn't helpful to the discussion." Not that Mr. Lomborg doesn't think global warming is a problem--he does. But he lays out the facts. "The proposed way of fixing this--to drastically reduce carbon emissions now and to solve a 100-year problem in a 10-year time frame, is just a bad idea. You do fairly little good at a fairly high price. It makes more sense to solve the 100-year problem in a 50-year time frame, and solve the 10-year problems, like HIV-AIDS, in a five-year time frame. That makes sense, and is the smart way to spend money."

Slipping into his environmentalist's shoes, he also says people need to get some perspective. "The U.N. tells us global warming will result in a sea-level change of one to two feet. It is not going to be the 30 feet Al Gore is scaring us with. Is this one to two feet going to be a problem? Sure," he says. "But remember that this past century sea levels rose between one-third and a full foot. And if you ask old people today what the most important things were that happened in the 20th century, do you think they are going to say: 'Two world wars, the internal combustion engine, the IT revolution . . . and sea levels rose'? It's not to say it isn't a problem. But we fix these problems."

Perhaps Mr. Lomborg's greatest coup at the recent Copenhagen Consensus event was getting the attention of John Bolton, a foe of U.N. inefficiency and bureaucratic wheel-turning. "I called Bolton's secretary and we finally got them to agree and she said 'Okay, you can have him for one hour.' And I said 'No, we need him for two days.' And she laughed her heart out and said 'That's never going to happen.'" But happen it did, and Mr. Bolton was an enthusiastic supporter, appearing with Mr. Lomborg to announce the results of the exercise and lamenting that too often at the U.N. "everything is a priority." There is already talk of a bigger U.N. event in the fall.

Still, it strikes me that simply getting the top folks to prioritize (which itself would be a minor miracle) is only a start. How does Mr. Lomborg intend to deal with a compartmentalized bureaucracy, where every unit claims it is sacred and each one is petrified of losing funding? Here, Mr. Lomborg himself turns a little less rational and a little more political. It's no accident that the consensus organizers tell its participants to consider what they'd do with an "extra" $50 billion. "Most of these guys, the day-to-day guys at the U.N., went into their business to 'do good.' And we need to appeal to that bigger sense of virtue. The best way to do that is talk about 'extra' money, so that they aren't worried about losing their own job."

Mr. Lomborg hopes that prioritization up top will inspire "competition" down below. "Most people work in their own circles--malaria guys talk to malaria guys, malnutrition guys to malnutrition guys. But if they understand that there are other projects out there, and that they also have price tags, and that the ones with the best performance are the ones that will get the extra money--you start to have an Olympics for best projects. And that means smarter ideas for how to solve problems." In fact, Mr. Lomborg wishes there were more Al Gores. "It's good we have someone educating about global warming. But we need Al Gores for HIV/AIDS, Al Gores for malnutrition, Al Gores for free trade, Al Gores for clean drinking water. We need all these Al Gores passionately roaming the earth with power-point presentations, making the case for their project. Because at that point, the real Al Gore would be slightly sidelined, since he's arguing for the most expensive cure that would do the least good."

Mr. Lomborg is smart enough to realize that what really bothers political leaders with this approach is that "it would be launching a ship and it's unknown where it will land. That makes people uncomfortable." A Copenhagen Consensus exercise for the Inter-American Development Bank in Latin America or for the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. (both of which Mr. Lomborg is working to organize) could result in findings that suggest the leaders of these organizations have been throwing good money after bad for years.

"Right now, politicians know that in public they have to say they support all things, and suggest there is an infinite amount of money to give to an infinite amount of good causes. Semiprivately, they know that if they have 10 good causes, the easiest thing is to give one-tenth of the funds to each--so there are no complaints. But privately they know there isn't enough money for everything and that they probably should have given most of it to the one or two groups that would do the most good."

At the very least, the Copenhagen Consensus might make it harder for public figures to defend bad decisions. "If you have a rational list that tells you that you do a lot more good preventing HIV/AIDS, then those in favor of such projects have slightly better arguments. Those arguing for climate change have slightly worse arguments." And while this may not change the world, it could be a start. "The Consensus isn't about getting it perfectly right," says Mr. Lomborg. "It's about getting it slightly less wrong."

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Israel presses for oil from shale

Proposed energy plant could help vastly reduce oil imports

With oil prices hovering around $70 a barrel, Israel is looking for ways to reduce its near-total dependence on energy imports. It's pondering the use of the nation's huge reserves of oil shale - a dark, crumbly rock loaded with hydrocarbons - located in the central and southern parts of the country. Thanks to a technical breakthrough, it should be possible to extract fuel oil from the shale for less than $20 a barrel. That could allow Israel eventually to cut its crude imports by up to one-third.

Shale is already used as a fuel for power plants in Israel and Estonia, where the rock is burned like coal to drive steam turbines. Israel's small shale-fired power plant was built nearly 20 years ago. But past attempts to extract liquid oil from shale weren't economically feasible: The process cost upwards of $50 per barrel at a time when oil was selling for less than half that.

Now, the tables have turned. A Russian-born Israeli immigrant named Moshe Gvirtz developed a technique in the 1990s to squeeze oil from shale by mixing the rock with a residue from conventional oil refining and putting it through a catalytic process. The dramatically improved results, coupled with soaring crude prices, have inverted the economics of oil shale. That could help not just Israel but dozens of other countries, including the U.S., that are rich in shale reserves.

Some challenges

A Haifa-based engineering firm called A.F.S.K. Hom Tov, which owns the patented process, is now gearing up to exploit the opportunity. "The technology could reduce dependence on imports and substantially reduce Israel's overall energy bill," says Israel Feldman, the company's co-founder and managing director. A.F.S.K. Hom Tov has proposed building a plant that could produce up to 3 million tons of oil annually, or roughly 30 percent of Israel's current oil imports.

How does it work? Older technologies squeezed oil out of shale by putting the crushed rock under enormous pressure at high temperatures. But the process developed by Gvirtz costs far less. The shale is mixed and coated with bitumen, a remnant of normal oil refining, then put through a catalytic converter under relatively low pressure. The output is synthetic oil that can be refined into gasoline and other products.

The only problem for Israel is that its shale is relatively low quality, with a "caloric value" of only around 15 percent, compared with values of 20 percent or higher in other countries. That means A.F.S.K. Hom Tov has to use more shale for a given output of oil.

Dream revived

But in an interesting wrinkle, the company also has developed a way to burn the leftover shale - which still contains residual fuel - that could someday be used to drive a 100-megawatt power plant in southern Israel. The dream of exploiting shale's potential is far from new. Ten years ago, a study conducted for the Israeli Energy Ministry by a panel consisting of some of the country's leading technical experts found that a 3-million-ton-per-year shale plant could turn an annual profit of $20 million to $59 million if oil were priced at $18 a barrel. On that basis, the experts strongly backed shale-oil technology and recommended the Israeli government finance a pilot plant.

But "falling energy prices and Israel's decision to switch to natural gas led the Israeli government to put the homegrown technology on the back burner," says Moshe Shahal, a former energy minister and now a leading Tel Aviv corporate lawyer who represents A.F.S.K Hom Tov (Hebrew for "good heat"). Only when oil prices began skyrocketing again last fall did Shahal and the company resume serious efforts to market the process locally as well as abroad.

Desert plant

Not surprisingly, an updated feasibility study by local energy consulting firm Eco-Energy found that the shale plant would be even more profitable today. "The cost of producing a barrel of oil using the process would be around $17 a barrel," estimates Amit Mor, managing director of Eco-Energy. At that price, the proposed plant would be a veritable gold mine, with annual profits between $188 million to $317 million. Mor notes that the projections are based on the U.S. Energy Deptartment's forecasts of an average oil price of $45 to $50 a barrel in the coming 25 years.

So far, A.F.S.K.'s process has only been tested on a laboratory scale. The company is planning an industrial-scale plant to be built at Mishor Rotem in the Negev Desert. "We hope to be in full-scale production in 2010 or 2011 at the very latest," says Feldman. That will entail construction of a pipeline from the Ashdod refinery located 80 kilometers (48 miles) to the north that would be used for transferring the necessary bitumen needed for the production process. A parallel pipeline would transport the synthetic oil back to Ashdod for refining.

International appeal

A.F.S.K. has already made a formal request to Israel's National Infrastructure Ministry for mining rights at Mishor Rotem. It has also asked the Industry, Trade, and Labor Ministry for government backing for the ambitious project. "The technology is extremely interesting and, with oil prices at these levels, there is a lot of interest on our part to develop shale," says Yaakov Mimran, Petroleum Commissioner at Israel's National Infrastructure Ministry. The two ministries are expected to give the green light in the next few weeks for a pilot plant to test the process. The company hopes to have the necessary licenses and government financial support in hand by the end of this year.

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CARBON DIOXIDE SHORTAGE!

We have had crippling heat, torrential rainstorms, a heart-wrenching World Cup defeat and the traditional early exit from Wimbledon. Now, in a final blow to the British summer, the fizz is set to go out of our drinks. Drinks manufacturers have revealed that the UK is suffering from a shortage of carbon dioxide - the gas dissolved in drinks such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi to create the refreshing bubbles.

The demand for carbonated drinks is at its highest during the summer months and they have been particularly popular as Britain sweltered under the recent heatwave. But with local supplies of CO2 running low, manufacturers are being forced to ship it in from Eastern European countries. The C&C Group - the Irish drinks company behind Magners cider, recently launched as an upmarket drink in the UK with a high-profile advertising campaign - is one of the firms worst hit. Since last month, it has been bringing in emergency supplies of CO2 gas from Poland because of the shortage in the UK.

The crisis was caused by an explosion at one of the UK's biggest CO2-producing plants, based in Billingham, Teesside, which meant production had to be shut down when demand from the soft drinks industry was at its highest. The factory's parent company, Terra Nitrogen, is still repairing the damage caused by the incident on June 1. Production was also cut back over the winter because of the high prices of natural gas, a main raw ingredient for the manufacture of ammonia for fertiliser, of which CO2 is a by-product. Last night, a spokesman for Terra Nitrogen said: 'Following an incident on June 1, our ammonia plant in Billingham has been out of action. 'That won't be back on-line until about the end of July. It is one of the largest plants in the country. 'We have another plant down in Bristol but unfortunately that has also been having a couple of problems so production has been on and off. 'Over the winter we took our ammonia plant off-line at Billingham because of the gas prices.' There were other manufacturers in the same situation.'

To make fizzy drinks, carbon dioxide is injected into the liquid under high pressure so that large amounts are dissolved. When the bottle or can is opened, the pressure is released and the carbon dioxide comes out of the solution, forming bubbles. The carbonated drinks were inspired by mineral water from natural springs, which was said to have healing properties and was found to contain dissolved carbon dioxide. The first artificial fizzy drink was made in 1772 by English clergyman and chemist Dr Joseph Priestley, who published a paper called Directions For Impregnating Water With Fixed Air and offered the resulting soda water to friends. It was first made commercially by Jean Jacob Schweppe, who set up the Schweppes company in 1783.

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MORE GORELIES

Former Vice President Al Gore has long argued that human activities - primarily the burning of fossil fuels - are causing the Earth to warm significantly, with potentially catastrophic results. His most recent attempt to persuade the general public of his view is a movie and companion book entitled An Inconvenient Truth.

Most of the material in the movie is not new. It is largely based on a slide show Gore has given more than a thousand times to audiences around the world. Gore has persistently erred in his presentation of climate science for years; unfortunately, he has not taken this opportunity to correct his errors. The movie is filled with misstatements, half-truths and verbal sleights of hand concerning what we can and can't say with some level of certainty regarding the causes and consequences of climate change.

Is Tennessee Warmer? Gore says that since he was a child, he has seen the effects of global warming on his family farm. Inconveniently for Gore, however, any changes on his farm could not have been caused by global warming. According to National Climatic Data Center records, Tennessee has cooled by more than a half degree since Gore was born. Indeed, monthly temperature records show the state's warmest 30-year period since 1895 was 1925 to 1954.

Is Global Warming Causing the Snows of Kilimanjaro to Melt? Early in the film, Al Gore shows some powerful photographs of the diminishing snow-pack on Kenya's Mount Kilimanjaro, implying that human-induced warming is the cause. The snows of Kilimanjaro are retreating, but according to studies in the International Journal of Climatology and the Journal of Geophysical Research, the retreat began in the late 19th century - before most human greenhouse gases were emitted. It is largely due to the decline in precipitation (snowfall) on the mountain as a result of the clearing and burning of the rainforests at its base for agriculture. Precipitation is also declining in parts of the Amazon as the rainforests are cleared. Thus, while humans are to blame for the retreat of Kilimanjaro's glaciers, global warming is not.

Will Melting Polar Ice Sheets Cause Flooding of Coastal Cities? Gore uses stunning computer-generated images to show what would happen to the world's coastal areas if the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets melted. Sea levels would rise by as much as 40 feet, radically changing coastlines and creating many refugees. What Gore doesn't say about the threat to the ice sheets is as important as what he does say, however. Ice and snow is accumulating in the interior of Greenland and Antarctica, but decreasing around the edges. A 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology by a NASA scientist concludes that there is a net loss of ice that will result in higher sea levels. But the loss is occurring slowly: 0.05 millimeters on average per year. At that rate, it will take a millennium for the oceans to rise 5 centimeters (roughly 2 inches) and 20,000 years to rise a full meter. More recent research indicates that the pace of melting has increased. But even under the worst case it would take at least several centuries - 1,800 years by one calculation - for the scenario painted in the movie to play out, giving humans a considerable amount of time to adapt.

Do All Scientists Agree? Gore says "the debate is over," "the science is settled," and "scientists agree," humans are causing global warming. The most telling piece of evidence for Gore is a study in the journal Science by Naomi Oreskes, professor at University of California at San Diego. Oreskes searched the Institute for Scientific Information database for 1993 to 2003 studies dealing with global climate change. She analyzed 928 abstracts, 25 percent of which did not mention human influence. According to Oreskes, 100 percent of the studies that addressed human influence on current climate trends either explicitly or implicitly endorse the view that humans are to blame for the current warming. Researchers who tried to replicate Oreskes findings came up with quite different results. Searching the same database using the same keywords, Benny Peiser, of John Moores University, found 1,117 peer reviewed publications with abstracts. In contrast to Oreskes, he found that:

* Nearly three times as many studies (3 percent) either rejected or doubted that humans are a cause of the current warming as those that explicitly endorsed the "consensus view" that humans are causing warming (1 percent).

* Another 29 percent implicitly accepted the consensus view, but most focused on the projected impacts of climate change rather than its causes.

* Two-thirds of all of the studies either made no mention of human influence or dealt with methodological issues, possible responses to climate change or natural factors that contribute to it.

Scientists Hans von Storch and Dennis Bray - both of whom accept the consensus view - surveyed their fellow climate scientists worldwide in 2003. They asked, "To what extent do you agree or disagree that climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic [human] causes?" Of the 530 responses, a majority (55.8 percent) indicated moderate to strong support for the consensus view, while 30 percent indicated varying degrees of skepticism. The number of scientists who strongly disagreed with the consensus view (10 percent) outnumbered those who most strongly supported it (9 percent). Contrary to Gore's claims, 55.8 percent is hardly as strong a consensus as science ever produces about a theory.

No Inconvenient Solutions. Gore says global warming is the most serious threat ever to face human civilization. So what should we do about it? Surprisingly, Gore's list of remedies is so meek and mild they are unlikely to offend a single significant voter group. He does not call for a higher gasoline tax or any other tax on fossil fuel. He does not endorse gasoline rationing, mandatory no-drive days or banning SUVs and stockcar races. He does pay lip service to the idea that the United States should limit carbon emissions as called for by the Kyoto Protocol, but nowhere does he mention that doing so might lower anyone's (any voter's) wages or cause any inconvenience whatsoever.

Furthermore, according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, if all of the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol met their greenhouse-gas reduction targets, the Earth would at most be 0.07 degrees Celsius to 0.19 degrees Celsius cooler than without Kyoto. Most analysts argue that it would take multiple Kyotos to substantially reduce future warming. Yet on this "consensus" Gore is amazingly silent.

Conclusion. The Christian Science Monitor coined a new term to describe An Inconvenient Truth and films like it: the "docu-ganda." Docu-gandas differ from documentaries in that the goal of the filmmaker is to influence rather than inform. One media expert interviewed by the Monitor argued that marketing such films as documentaries could be "dangerous if viewers take everything they are saying as the whole truth." A second expert noted that "the danger of the advocacy documentary is that things might be being kept from you.."

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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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