Lomborg criticizes medical journals for alarm about climate change
He exposes a huge but stupid fraud
Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg has reacted sharply on the claim of over 200 medical journals, earlier this month, that there are significant health risks to any temperature rise. He concludes that there are very basic mistakes underlying the alarmist claims and send the following letter to the editor of The Lancet, one of the journals involved. Lomborg posted his letter on twitter. Below the full letter.
Dear Dr. Horton,
I read with interest your co-authored editorial “Call for emergency action to limit global temperature increases, restore biodiversity, and protect health” published in BMJ (2021;374:n1734) and many other international journals. As a core argument you write that there are significant health risks to any temperature rise and document it with “In the past 20 years, heat related mortality among people aged over 65 has increased by more than 50%.”
However, this mortality increase [i] is a simple count, not a rate. The overwhelming part of the increase is due to the fact that the global population of people aged over 65 increased more than 40% in the same time period. Indeed, the increase in heat mortality rate is a much lower 9.4%. I am sure you agree that making a causal claim without adjusting for a dramatically changed population is fundamentally unsound.
In fact, I am positive that you and your journal would demand a rewrite of any paper making such an argument. It is analogously flawed to claiming that Brexit led to better health for the European Union because total deaths overnight dropped 600,000 per year when the UK left. Given the enormous attention that your paper received, I therefore reach out to you to hear what action you will take to ensure that this unsound argument is rectified.
Below, the left box illustrates your editorial’s claim that temperature rises have increased the number of heat deaths of people aged 65+ by 53.7% while disregarding a 40% increase in the relevant population. The middle box shows the rate of heat deaths for the same population group, which takes into account the rapid increase in the population. I hope you will also find the right box interesting: it compares the heat deaths (which are slowly rising) with the much greater risk from cold deaths (declining much faster) from the Global Burden of Disease study. It highlights the problem with only looking at more heat death but neglecting the much greater fall in cold deaths.
This result is comparable with a new Lancet study that shows global warming increased heat deaths of all deaths by 0.21% (from 0.83% in 2000-03 to 1.04% in 2016-19) and decreased cold deaths by 0.51% (from 8.70% to 8.19%).[ii]
https://clintel.org/lomborg-criticizes-medical-journals-for-alarm-about-climate-change/
*********************************************CLINTEL goes to court
Earlier this week, CLINTEL submitted a petition to the European Court of Human Rights to be allowed to participate in a climate law suit initiated by climate activists against 33 countries. The case is known as the DUARTE case.
We previously filed a similar request, which the court denied without providing any reason. Important new information has become available, however, so we have gone back with a new request.
CLINTEL believes that the European Court of Human Rights should make decisions based on the best available science and the best policy analysis. The record currently before the court is incorrect and misleading. We intend to submit scientific information to the court to correct the record. For instance, the court believes that the so-called “climate emergency” is a scientific concept, which it is not.
In short, our submission will help the court to prevent the same kinds of errors that the Dutch Supreme Court made in the Urgenda case, on which the DUARTE case relies.
Our request to court can be found here.
Urgenda v. The Netherlands
In 2014, on behalf of all Dutch citizens, a climate action group called Urgenda started a lawsuit against the Dutch government to force it to adopt stricter emission-reduction (mitigation) policy. This lawsuit finally came to an end in December 2019. The Supreme Court in The Hague ruled that the Dutch government must indeed comply with Urgenda’s demands. The state was ordered to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by the end of 2020. According to the court, climate change threatens the right to life laid down in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The court order has resulted in the government taking many of the additional mitigation measures required by Urgenda. These measures have imposed substantial additional expenses on Dutch citizens and produced a negligible effect on the global climate.
DUARTE et al. v 33 countries
Inspired by the Urgenda judgment, another climate case (the Duarte case) has now found its way to the European Court of Human Rights. Six young Portuguese, aged eight to 21, have petitioned the European Court in Strasbourg to protect their human rights against the dangers of climate change. The Court has the authority to hear complaints about violations of the ECHR. This treaty grants European residents fundamental freedoms and human rights, such as freedom of speech and the prohibition of torture. It also grants the right to life invoked in the Urgenda climate case.
The Portuguese plaintiffs are now demanding that no fewer than 33 countries, including the 27 member states of the European Union, Norway, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine, take all necessary steps to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 °C. This would be necessary, they claim, to guarantee their right to life, which would require a safe climate. In particular, they complain about the heatwaves, drought, and forest fires in Portugal in recent years, and suggest that these phenomena are causally linked to the “inadequate climate policies” of the 33 states concerned.
An extensive article about this case was published by Lucas Bergkamp and Katinka Brouwer earlier this year on the CLINTEL website. Bergkamp and Brouwer also worked on a very detailed report (summary already online) about this case that will soon be published by the ECR Group in the European Parliament. An interview with Lucas Bergkamp is available here.
Prior CLINTEL to the European Court
Earlier this year CLINTEL filed a request for leave to intervene in this case. The request was rejected without any reason being provided. We later learned that eight environmental NGO’s and human rights organisations were allowed to intervene. These organisations are all sympathetic to the complainants in this case.
This week, following the publication of a very important paper by Ross McKitrick, indicating that IPCC’s attribution methodology is fundamentally flawed, CLINTEL sent a new request to be allowed to intervene. This time, the court will have to take into account the urgency and importance of our intervention, given the misleading case record and incorrect statements made by the court’s President and Vice-President about the perceived “climate emergency.” We hope to receive an answer soon.
Enormous consequences for the economy and democracy
In the DUARTE case, the climate activists have made four demands: (1) a further reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, (2) drastic restrictions on the export of fossil fuels, (3) drastic measures to compensate for emissions associated with the import of products and (4) measures to force internationally operating companies to limit the emissions of their entire production chain.
In all these areas, emissions must be reduced to zero within a short period of time to meet the “climate emergency”. On the basis of a favourable judgement from the ECtHR, the climate movement will be able to litigate further at national level against countries that do not try hard enough to achieve these goals. The countries complained against will have no choice but to comply with the Court’s ruling, as no appeal is possible.
So the earning capacity of the entire economic system is at stake, as the costs for companies and countries to meet the requirements will be sky-high. Such a ruling would bring the economy in many countries to its knees, with all the consequences that that entails.
In addition to the economic impact, which is difficult to overestimate, the implications for democracy and the rule of law are also enormous. By ruling in favour of the plaintiffs, climate policy will be permanently removed from the regular process of political decision-making, where elected representatives and administrators can weigh up the various interests against each other, assess policy and make the relevant corrections and adjustments as needed.
From CLINTEL’s perspective, the most troubling aspect of this prospect is that judicial climate policy making tends to be based on a misunderstanding of climate science and the effects of climate policy making. That is why we want to intervene in the DUARTE case and correct such misunderstandings.
Human rights as a pretext
The DUARTE case illustrates how climate activists have found an ally in partisan judges with whom they share an ideological affinity. Under the guise of human rights, climate policy is being reduced to an irreversible judicial dictate based on flawed pseudo-science, over which no democratic control is possible. Judicial authorities that dictate policy to democratically elected governments are not applying laws but, rather, making them themselves. The judges concerned do not even bother to hide their bias; they distort the science and enact ineffective policies.
CLINTEL goes to court
For CLINTEL enough is enough. If activists use our judicial system to make climate policy, that leaves us no other choice then to also use all possible judicial means to repair this unfortunate development in society.
Accordingly, CLINTEL will be actively looking for opportunities to initiate or participate in climate change litigation. As always, we will promote the best available science and policy analysis in such law suits.
https://clintel.org/clintel-goes-to-court/
***************************************Climate Policy Should Pay More Attention to Climate Economics
Climate policy is ultimately an economic question. How much does climate change hurt? How much do various policy ideas actually help, and what do they cost? You don’t have to argue with one line of the IPCC scientific reports to disagree with climate policy that doesn’t make economic sense.
Climate policy is usually framed in terms of economic costs and benefits. We should spend some money now, or accept reduced incomes by holding back on carbon emissions, in order to mitigate climate change and provide a better future economy.
But the best guesses of the economic impact of climate change are surprisingly small. The U.N.’s IPCC finds that a (large) temperature rise of 3.66°C by 2100 means a loss of 2.6 percent of global GDP. Even extreme assumptions about climate and lack of mitigation or adaptation strain to find a cost greater than 5 percent of GDP by the year 2100.
Now, 5 percent of GDP is a lot of money — $1 trillion of our $20 trillion GDP today. But 5 percent of GDP in 80 years is couch change in the annals of economics. Even our sclerotic post-2000 real GDP grows at a 2 percent annual rate. At that rate, in 2100, the U.S. will have real GDP 400 percent greater than now, as even the IPCC readily admits. At 3 percent compound growth, the U.S. will produce, and people will earn, 1,000 percent more GDP than now. Yes, that can happen. From 1940 to 2000, U.S. GDP grew from $1,331 billion to $13,138 billion in 2012 dollars, a factor of ten in just 60 years, and a 3.8 percent compound annual growth rate.
Five percent of GDP is only two to three years of lost growth. Climate change means that in 2100, absent climate policy or much adaptation, we will live at what 2097 levels would be if climate change were to magically disappear. We will be only 380 percent better off. Or maybe only 950 percent better off.
Northern Europe has per capita GDP about 40 percent lower than that of the U.S., eight times or more the potential damage of climate change. Europe is a nice place to live. Many Europeans argue that their more extensive welfare states and greater economic regulation are worth the cost. But it is a cost, which makes climate change look rather less apocalyptic.
India’s $2,000 per-capita GDP is one-thirtieth of the U.S.’s $60,000. The cost of climate change to India is trivial compared with the benefits India could obtain by adopting economic institutions more like those of the U.S. — which themselves are far from perfect.
Growth is not an inexorable force. Each step of growth is hard won and fragile. Growth could be 3 percent or more. Growth could be 0 percent or less. We have seen countries move backwards for decades. Growth risk is an order of magnitude larger than climate risk.
If the question is, “What steps can we take, perhaps costly today, to improve GDP in the year 2100?” hurried decarbonization is not the answer. If the question is, “What steps can we take to improve the well-being of the world’s poor?” climate policy is not the answer, with many zeros before you get to the decimal point. Sturdy pro-growth policies, however unpopular to so many in today’s political class and incumbent businesses and labor organizations, are the answer.
Even 2–5 percent of GDP in economic cost estimates are wildly uncertain — more uncertain even than the meteorological parts of climate models. Imagine yourself in 1921, asked to estimate the impact of carbon emissions on GDP in the year 2000. Well, you would have taken out your slide rule, and looked at how much gas a Ford Model T consumes, how many people will want to travel on coal-fired steam railways, and so on. You would have looked at the statistical association between heat and output. The estimates might have looked pretty bad in an economy dependent on low-tech agriculture and without air conditioning.
And you would have been drastically wrong. Our economy looks nothing like anyone could have guessed in 1921. Your guess of how much our economy would be hurt by (or benefited from?) 20th-century carbon emissions would have been less likely to be even vaguely correct.
Most of all, you would have missed the main story: The 20th century produced the greatest gain in human well-being of all time, by orders of magnitude, despite warming, and despite its upheavals. You would have had no clue of the move to a service economy, far less dependent on weather, or adaptations including air conditioning, transport, high-tech agriculture, and how much cleaner and healthier the 2000 economy would be. If you had ordered a return to horses and buggies, you would have doomed billions to short lives of squalid poverty.
That is the unenviable task of today’s economists who measure the effects of climate change on the economy 80 or more years from now.
Looking under the hood of big models, it is not even obvious that climate change hurts the economy at all. People and companies are moving in droves from the cold Rust Belt and cool, coastal California to Texas, even though Texas is a lot hotter than anything climate change will bring to the former.
In technical terms, estimates of the economic cost of climate change rely in large part on the statistical association between weather and productivity in today’s economy. But all statistical associations offer questions. Yes, on average hotter countries are not as productive as colder ones. But sometimes they are productive — Singapore, for example. So you have to somehow take out the immense effects of government, culture, past investments, and so on. Then you have somehow to deal with the fact that the economy 100 years from now will be nothing like today’s. People will invent new technologies that will help them to adapt. Yes, recent heat waves in Oregon have been damaging. But similar heat in Texas is considered a cool day. How many people will buy air conditioners in Oregon in the next 80 years?
The central uncomfortable fact is that the output of an advanced industrial economy like the U.S., moving headlong into services, is just not that sensitive to climate or weather. The worst heat waves, floods, and storms just do not move national GDP.
GDP is not everything, of course. GDP measures income, how much people earn and how much they produce. It leaves out a lot — the tremendous value of free or nearly free goods, the value of clean air and water, good health, long life, a free and egalitarian society, and so forth. But all of these things are better when GDP is better, and far worse where GDP is worse. Only a productive people can afford them. The U.S. today is immeasurably better off than in 1940, or 1840 on all these measures too. Our air and water are cleaner than just about everywhere else in the world. Our welfare state is much more generous than those of poor countries or what it was in 1940. GDP is imperfect, but if anything it understates the benefits of economic progress.
What about floods and droughts, wildfires, heat waves, all the events you see on the news along with another scolding about climate change? Whether carbon emissions are leading to more weather extremes is actually scientifically contentious. Fortunately, once again, we do not need to get into this debate. Even if these claims are correct, they do not justify draconian climate policy.
I live among wildfires in California, which are very unpleasant. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the increase in wildfires is entirely due to carbon-caused climate change. But even if the U.S. adopts all the recommendations of the IPCC, or the Green New Deal itself, we will only contain the further rise of temperature. The pre-industrial climate will still not return in our great-great-great-grandchildren’s lifetime.
Even if rising greenhouse-gas emissions are the ultimate cause of more frequent and severe wildfires, the only path to actually doing something about wildfires is to spend money on fire prevention and forest management — clearing out the accumulated brush. (Reforming zoning and planning laws so it’s easier to build in cities will help, too.) It will cost money, perhaps a lot of money compared with historical budgets, but a tiny amount of money compared with GDP or government stimulus programs, or, say, high-speed trains. CalFire’s budget is $2.9 billion, 1 percent of the state of California’s budget, and 0.1 percent of California’s GDP. The supposedly carbon-saving high-speed train is budgeted at $80 billion.
This example illustrates a larger point. If the question is how to blunt the economic impact of climate change, adaptation has to be a major part of the answer. There seems to be a great disdain for adaptation, clearing the brush, building dikes and dams, moving to higher land, installing air conditioners, moving or engineering crops and so forth. Spread over a hundred years, the costs of adaptation are not large. Perhaps climate-policy advocates dismiss talk of adaptation because, by reducing the damage that might be caused by greenhouse-gas emissions, it makes emissions less scary. Climate models are also short on adaptation and innovation, perhaps for the same reason.
Miami might be six feet underwater in 2100, but Amsterdam has been six feet underwater for centuries. They built dikes. By hand. Amsterdam is a very nice place, not a poster for dystopian end of civilization. Buildings decay and need to be rebuilt every 50 years or so. Just start building in drier places. At a minimum, the U.S. government could stop subsidizing construction and reconstruction in flood and fire zones!
What of “tipping points,” stories of unforeseen disasters that the IPCC charitably labels “low-probability low-confidence”? Isn’t it worth taking out insurance? The trouble is that if anvils might fall from the sky, pianos might fall from the sky, too. If this is not just an excuse to spend money on carbon, but instead an open-minded effort to identify all out-of-the-box dangers, we end up spending all of GDP on insurance. Insurance arguments must include some attention to the probability of events and the cost of those events.
Given how small and uncertain the economic costs are, climate-policy advocates really ought to give up the economic argument. Admit that economic losses are just not the issue. Make the standard environmental case, as they successfully did for clean water and clean air: This will cost money. It will reduce GDP, now and in the future. But, argue that it is a cost we must bear to save the environment.
But that argument too needs to be much clearer and better quantified. The media and too much of the scientific literature, such as IPCC reports, offer only hypotheticals and scare stories. For a small donation, pictures of cuddly animals might do. For trillion-dollar costs and regulations, they do not. To justify such costs, we need some dollar value on specific environmental damage of climate change. Yes, the numbers are uncertain. But those numbers are the only sensible framework to discuss spending trillions of dollars on climate now.
Naming costs and benefits is particularly useful to analyze whether some of those trillions are not better spent on other environmental issues. For example, species extinction is a real problem. We are in the middle of a mass extinction. But the elephants will die from lack of land and poaching long before they get too hot or dry. For a trillion dollars, how much land could we buy and turn over to complete wilderness? How many more species would we save that way, rather than spending similar amounts of money on high-speed trains and hurrying the adoption of electric cars? The oceans are in trouble. For a trillion dollars, how much over-fishing, chemical pollution, plastic garbage, or noise could we fix? Economics is about choice, and about budget constraints.
As much as media bleat that climate change is a current emergency with “disparate impact,” the world’s poor face much worse environmental problems: smoky air, chemicals, fetid water, easily preventable diseases. For a trillion dollars a year, we could radically improve their human environment.
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World’s Largest Carbon Capturing Plant Launches in Iceland
A Swiss company that developed technology to capture carbon dioxide from the air says it has launched the world’s largest plant to do so in Iceland.
The company is called Climeworks AG. It said the plant began operations on Wednesday. The plant is not far from Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik.
The system captures carbon dioxide, CO2, directly from the air and then deposits the gas underground. The company partnered with Icelandic carbon storage provider Carbfix on the project.
Climeworks says the plant is designed to capture up to 3,600 metric tons of CO2 per year. That is the same amount of CO2 produced by about 790 automobiles during a year, Reuters news agency reported.
The International Energy Agency, IEA, estimates that this year, CO2 emissions worldwide will rise 1.5 billion metric tons to a total of 33 billion metric tons.
Direct air capture is one of the few technologies that can remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. Many scientists see the process as critical to limiting harmful pollutant emissions.
Such emissions are caused mainly by human activities. They can trap heat in the atmosphere and create higher temperatures. Many scientists blame this warming for increased heatwaves, wildfires, floods and rising sea levels across the world.
The new plant is called Orca. Its name is based on the Icelandic word for energy, Orka. It uses eight large containers that look like those used in the shipping industry. A series of high-tech filters and blowers attached to the containers capture CO2.
The captured carbon is then mixed with water and pumped deep underground, where it slowly turns into rock. Both technologies are powered by renewable energy from a nearby geothermal plant.
Direct air capture is still a new and costly technology. But developers hope to bring down the price by increasing operations as more companies and individuals seek the technology.
Currently, there are 15 direct air capture plants operating worldwide. The IEA estimates the plants capture more than 9,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.
The American oil company Occidental is currently developing the largest direct-air-capture center. It aims to pull 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air around some of its Texas oilfields.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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