A Calm Voice in a Heated Debate

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

BOOKS

A Calm Voice in a Heated Debate
By KIMBERLEY STRASSEL
September 13, 2007; Page D7

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Standing in the practical middle is Bjorn Lomborg, the free-thinking Dane who, in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (2001), challenged the belief that the environment is going to pieces. Mr. Lomborg is now back with "Cool It," a book brimming with useful facts and common sense. Mr. Lomborg -- "liberal, vegetarian, a former member of Greenpeace," as he describes himself -- is hard to fit into any pigeonhole. He believes that global warming is happening, that man has caused it, and that national governments need to act. Yet he also believes that Al Gore is bordering on hysteria, that some global-warming science has been distorted and hyped, and that the Kyoto Protocol and other carbon-reduction schemes are a terrible waste of money. The world needs to think more rationally, he says, about how to tackle this challenge.

Mr. Lomborg starts by doing what he does best: presenting a calm analysis of what today's best science tells us about global warming and its risks. Relying primarily on official statistics, he ticks through the many supposed calamities that will result from a hotter planet -- extreme hurricanes, flooding rivers, malaria, heat deaths, starvation, water shortages. It turns out that, when these problems are looked at from all sides and stripped of the spin, they aren't as worrisome as global-warming alarmists would suggest. In some cases, they even have an upside.

Take flooding. After the 2002 floods of Prague and Dresden, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder all argued that the floods proved the need for Western governments to commit themselves to Kyoto. Mr. Lomborg agrees that global warming increases precipitation. Yet to the extent that more precipitation has already increased river flows, it has done so largely in the fall, when rivers are at low levels and there is little risk of flood. Truly bad floods have historically accompanied colder climates, since plentiful snow and a late thaw produce ice jams that block rivers and produce high water levels. These sorts of floods have in fact decreased in the 20th century, at least in part because of global warming.

The picture is the same for other "disasters." Yes, sea levels will rise -- probably about a foot over this century. But they have already risen a foot since 1860, and the world has coped. Yes, more people will die from heat; but significantly more people will not die from cold. Yes, glaciers will melt, but they'd be melting to some degree in any event, and in the meantime this melting provides extra water for some of the world's poorest people. (The Himalayan glaciers on the Tibetan plateau -- the biggest ice mass outside the Antarctic and Greenland -- are the source of rivers that reach 40% of the world's population.) Such a nuanced look at the good and bad of global warming gives Mr. Lomborg a chance to pursue his bigger theme: Anti-warming policies (like those of the Kyoto Protocol) that require energy taxes or other checks on economic dynamism are inefficient and even harmful. They serve as short-term ways of dealing with what is a complex and long-term problem. They cost a lot now and yet do little to reduce global temperatures in 100 years' time.


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As for the long term, Mr. Lomborg argues that governments do have a role to play. But he presents a real inconvenient truth: The world has been dependent on fossil fuels for generations, and it is ludicrous to believe that it will end that dependency in a few decades. Yet only a drastic reduction in fossil-fuel use will cut carbon-dioxide emissions enough to stop or significantly slow climate change. Rather than governments imposing costly energy taxes to little benefit, Mr. Lomborg argues, they should fund research programs aimed at finding breakthrough technologies.

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URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118963642410225658.html (subscription)

[XemaSab]

1. The only upside to climate change:

lower population. :hide:

[Dead_Parrot]

2. So long as that includes Lomborg.

:mad:

[losthills]

3. Humans can cope with climate change.

But many plants and animals will not. The world is going to be far less richer, in terms of biodiversity, and that has huge portents for future evolution. And the real bad news is that if we stopped all carbon dioxide emissions today, it would not halt global warming. Because the carbon that is already in the atmosphere will remain there for at least a century.

But if we did stop spewing carbon, and we could if we had the resolve, it would be the single most important gift we could give to future generations. All though we would not see the results for ourselves....

[XemaSab]

4. I think humans will be totally screwed.

Dare I say, deservedly? :shrug: :hide:

All our agriculture (not to mention culture culture) is based on having the right temperatures and rainfall in the right areas at the right times. This goes even a little sideways and we're going to be standing there like total tools going "Dude, WTF?"

[IrateCitizen]

5. Glaring disconnect here...

Humans can cope with climate change... But many plants and animals will not.

This statement presupposes that humans are divorced from the rest of the ecosystem, and that pulling out scores of lower "blocks" from the pyramid on which humankind finds itself at the top will not cause a good part of that pyramid to come crashing down.

We're currently in the midst of a mass extinction the likes of which has not been seen since the dinosaurs. Given that we have only discovered about 10% or so of the different species that make up life here on earth, we have no way of knowing how we are tearing the web of life asunder.

If any species will be OK in the future, it will be those that do not have large food demands (and can eat just about anything) as well as rapid reproduction rates. Think along the lines of rats and cockroaches. Humans do not fall into that category.

The world is going to be far less richer, in terms of biodiversity, and that has huge portents for future evolution.

This has huge portents for future generations of humankind. Take, for example, corn. There used to be thousands of different strains in the Americas. Most have been wiped out through industrialized agribusiness. What happens to us, considering how dependent our food system is on that one crop, if a blight manages to wipe out several of the strains currently grown? We're screwed -- that's what.

[losthills]

6. I don't disagree with you,

but so far humans have used their intellect to outwit every obstacle they have faced-- for instance, surviving the last ice age.

I just feel more pain for the polar bear and the red-legged frog who never had a choice and don't stand a chance...