Global warming: a heretic's view

Globe and Mail (Toronto) ^ | May 23, 2002 | Margaret Wente

[Clive]

On Victoria Day, as snowflakes settled on my freshly planted asters, a traitorous thought crossed my mind. Maybe global warming won't be such a bad thing after all.

I didn't share this thought. Some things you just can't say in public. People will think you don't care about the environment. Worse, they'll think you're in bed with Ralph Klein, George W. Bush, Big Oil, and other deviants.

In Canada, the Kyoto accord has bogged down because Alberta has walked away. (Trust us to turn global climate change into another fight over federal-provincial relations.) Even so, nearly all the leaders say they're for it. They just have to iron out the details. No one can accuse them of being against the planet.

"All we need is a simple change in personal values," said the guest commentator on the CBC, who was delivering yesterday's sermon on Kyoto. Which struck me as a whole lot easier than trying to get my head around the ins and outs of carbon sinks, emissions trading, and megatons of CO2. As she spoke about the path to virtue, it occurred to me that Kyoto isn't about politics or economics. It's about morality. It isn't about reason. It's about faith.

Just ask Bjorn Lomborg, who has become notorious as the Heretic of Kyoto.

Last fall Mr. Lomborg, a Danish statistician, published a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist. In it, he examined the research that underpins global warming and other environmental worries. His conclusion: Human activity is definitely heating up the planet but it's not the catastrophic threat people think it is. He views Kyoto as a waste of money: "Despite our intuition that we need to do something drastic about global warming, we are in danger of implementing a cure that is more costly than the original affliction."

Mr. Lomborg has become Public Enemy No. 1 among environmental groups. Even in the science world, which is supposed to operate on facts and logic, he has been reviled. Scientific American devoted a large part of an issue to rebutting him. Science trashed him. Nature likened him to a Holocaust denier.

"A lot of people really hate me," he says resignedly. Perhaps Mr. Lomborg is perceived as particularly dangerous because he has no axe to grind. He's not an oil baron or a Republican, or beholden to them. He's a boyish 37-year-old professor who used to write cheques to Greenpeace. He describes himself as "your typical suburban environmentalist."

His book began as an effort to debunk the environmental skeptics. By the time he'd finished, he was one himself. "I felt cheated because I had spent my life believing something that turned out to be at least partially untrue," he told the Sunday Times. "I can understand why people feel personally offended by me." Unlike his attackers, Mr. Lomborg's tone is mild and moderate. So are his conclusions. The world will heat up by 2 C to 3 C by the end of the century, he believes. There will be disruptions. But predictions of widespread crop failures, water shortages, disease, flooding, landslides and other disasters are "hysterical." On the other side of the equation, even a massive investment in curbing greenhouse gases will have only a minimal effect on temperature.

"The cure is worse than the ailment," he says. "Let's not focus on phantom problems at the expense of real problems." For a fraction of the cost of Kyoto, he points out, we could give everyone in the world clean drinking water.

Mr. Lomborg uses the same data as the Kyoto scientists. Even they admit the Kyoto accord won't reduce global warming very much. They predict that if we do nothing, temperatures will rise by between 1.4 C and 5.8 C. Mr. Lomborg's numbers are in the middle. "Obviously, the figure that gets quoted is the most extreme," he says.

So, how does it feel to be an apologist for Big Capital?

"It's one of the slightly unpleasant parts of all this," he admitted recently. "As a scientist I simply have to call it the way I see it. It's very dangerous for a scientist to start thinking, 'If I say that, Bush will be stronger.' Then you're suddenly not a scientist any more, but trying to be a small politician."

The heretic of Kyoto is not universally reviled. The Economist called his book "one of the most valuable books on public policy" in the last decade, and many leading scientists defend it. So does Patrick Moore, the Canadian who helped found Greenpeace and then became an environmental moderate. "It is very clear that extreme environmentalists are deeply threatened by the breath of fresh air Lomborg brings to the debate," he says on his Web site, which contains Mr. Lomborg's response to the Scientific American attacks. (The magazine refused to print it.)

Even so, I don't advise you to go around in public suggesting that global warming might not be so bad after all. People will be chilly. Global warming is at the heart of our cultural belief system. And it's never prudent to attack the faith.

[daviddennis]

From the Scientific American rebuttal:

The cost projections Lomborg uses represent one set of estimates, but far more favorable ones exist, too. Given that the additional antiwarming steps that might be taken aren’t yet known—and so their net costs are impossible to state—it is premature to dismiss them as “phenomenally more expensive.”

So, tell us what those steps are, then, and how much they will cost

What would you think of this sales pitch: You really know you need a car, and the car salesperson comes up and says "We're not going to tell you how much this is until you sign on the dotted line and agree to pay us whatever we ask."

This appears to be what the Scientific American editor wants, and only a complete idiot would agree to it.

D

[Phantom Lord]

The environmental movement is the home of communists now that the Soviet Union has been defeated.

I call environmentalists "Watermelons." Green on the outside, Red on the inside.

[My Identity]

MODEL BUILDING:
Climate models are filled with assumptions, bad data, tweaks, simplifications, etc.
These parameters can be "tweaked" to force the model to show any desired result.

Projections of climate change are based on models and assumptions which
"are not only unknown, but unknowable within ranges relevant for policy-making"

Models fail to adequately handle clouds, water vapour, aerosols, precipitation,
ocean currents, solar effects, complex weather patterns, etc.

Model simulation of surface temperature appears to be little more than fortuitous
curve-fitting rather than a demonstration of human influence on global climate.

Temperature rise projections this century are "unknown and unknowable".

"Climate models [are] projections, story lines, [more aptly termed] fairy tales."
-- Hartwig Volz, geophysicist, RWE Research Laboratory, Germany

"Global warming projections [are] completely unrealistic...assuming extreme scenarios
of population growth and fossil fuel consumption"
-- S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist, University of Virginia, Environmental Policy Project

"The balance of evidence suggests that there has been no appreciable warming since 1940.
This would indicate that the human effects on climate must be quite small."
-- S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist, University of Virginia, Environmental Policy Project

PREDICTING THE PAST:
Climate models, which serve as the basis for long-term climate predictions,
have clearly failed when tested against observed climate data.

Models fail to reproduce the known difference in trends between the
lower troposphere and surface temperatures over the past 20 years.
They don't show the actual amount of temperature change at the Earth's surface
Models can't predict the recent past, let alone the long-term future.

Antarctica has been cooling since 1966, directly contradicting model results
that suggest that warming will be more pronounced in the Earth's polar regions.
-- Nature magazine

the Antarctic ice sheet is expanding rather than shrinking,
contrary to what global-warming enthusiasts would have us believe.
-- Science magazine

[Francohio]

I have been given to believe that Mt. Pinatubo and Mt. Rainier have recently put out more greenhouse gasses and more particulates than 300 hundred years of industrialization.

How can these science boffins factor this into their elaborate models of global warming? How do they explain el Niño, which may occur because of activity at volcanic undersea vents.

These 'science' lefties, who are all in the Al Gore camp, are obscuring the hunt for real answers to a real question. i.e. What exactly does human activity have to do with Global Warming? Something? Nothing? A little bit here and there? After all, the Earth warmed and cooled many times before we were here. It even warmed and cooled several times while we were here, but not industrialized.

[Pistias]

Nah, my bubble is made of obsidian. But in the realm of science, yes, provable truth is what makes things work...but some of those truths might not be things that should be known--say, the quick method of cooking up sarin gas, for instance.

[Pistias]

And then you say truth is more hurtful then lies

Please quote me more carefully. I said "on a case basis" and "there are times when..."

[metesky]

The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment, by Julian Simon

[metesky]

The Hoodwinking of a Nation

[FreedomPoster]

Julian Simon's Long Bets with Paul Ehrlich, the wacko Malthusian enviralmentalist, were truly inspired. If you aren't familiar with that story, there's a good summary here, courtesy of Wired magazine.

[another cricket]

You are correct in that I should have quoted you more carefully. I apologize.

I should probably refine my statement as well, In the field of non-military scientific research truth should be paramount. (In the field of military scientific research they should keep their mouths shut)

Glad to know your bubble remains un-popped. That can be quite painful.

Have a nice weekend!

a.cricket

[StopGlobalWhining]

Whenever you come across the name Steven Schneider, who Scientific American's John Rennie refers to as being targeted by Bjorn Lomborg because of his earlier predictions of impending global cooling, remember the following quote:

To capture the public imagination,we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.

-- Stanford climatologist Dr. Stephen Schneider, NCAR, in interview for Discover magazine, Oct 1989