Lomborg's new book on climate change

Lomborg's Cool It! should be read by everyone who's stressing on global warming and fantasizing about Mad Max-like post-apocalypses where mating pairs roam Antarctica in a Hobbesian existence.

Sounds kinky/kool, doesn't it?

Some basic so far, and I'm not even to the sea levels part (why spoil your best suspense?):

--> Polar bears are not declining.

--> Glaciers are climate artifacts, not sacred treasures.

--> The average developing country's income will rise 12 fold by 2100, according to the UN, so the resources will be vast for adaptation.

--> Cold kills far more each year than heat, to which humans adapt--throughout history--far better, so global warming will save far more lives than it kills.

--> Finally, humans have always prospered when it's gotten warmer and suffered when it's gotten colder, and these rises are not unprecedented: worst-case rises have already been successfully managed in large "heat island" cities over the past century and even in these "labs," cold kills more each year than heat!

I'm not running any serious real-world numbers here, which Lomborg supplies in abundance, and his Copenhagen Consensus stuff of prioritizing many other ills over global warming remains powerful and brilliant stuff ... even if our NewRuleSets.Project beat him by a couple of years using exactly the same techniques and yielding exactly the same results!

You think he ever visited my Naval War College site?

Okay, I'm getting verklempft ... Talk amongst yourselves ....

Comments

[Bruce Sterling]

You mean Water World, not Mad Max, AKA: Field of Wet Dreams.

[Brent Grace]

Tom, I don't know if you've read Nicolas Wade's "Before the Dawn," but I started thinking a lot about climate change and global warning while I read it. "Dawn" could be considered a sort of prequel to "Gun Germs and Steel", telling the story of human evolution from the first migration out of Africa to just before the first permanent settlement. As the story of man's early migrations unfolds we see how humans have adapted to various warming and cooling cycles over the past million some odd years or so. Funny thing: humans without cars, computers, climate models, or Al Gore documentaries somehow managed first to survive and then thrive during climate upheavals far more drastic then what we're probably facing.

[dave]

Lomborg brings much-needed sanity to a debate which, too often, veers into apocalyptic terms. And I thought it was the crazy Repubs who believed in the end-times? :-)

Of course, for the ultra-enviros Lomborg's human-centered environmentalism is the problem, not the solution, since it's the human-centered perspective that they object to in the first place.

I do fear an overly aggressive and damaging response during the next decade (ie Clinton II). Unwise policy here could be very costly and keep hundreds of millions in poverty by needlessly slowing global gdp growth.

[Tom Barnett]

Human-centered is very apt, Dave.

[stuart abrams]

Jean Shepherd (a great Indianan) once commented that humans are innately attracted to end-of-the-world scenarios. It's like you're sitting watching a play, and somebody taps you on the shoulder and tells you that you have to leave in the middle of Act II. You really want to be there when the show ends. That's why "The World Without Us" is on the best-seller list - a sort of secular answer to the "Left Behind" books.

[Kurt Waltzer]

As an environmenalist, I've been apriciative of Lomborg's efforts to be a voice of dissent on climate change in the public square. However, he falls short by applying over select or overly simplistic anayses to an unbelievably complex issue (much like those at which he takes aim).

In general, the approach on the Copenhagen Consensus is flawed becasue it's suggests we should direct efforts toward addressing problems when the costs and the benefits are easy to calculate (like fine particlate polution and premature mortality) and away from complex ones where they're more difficult to assess (like global warming). Like it or not, it appears that we're headed toward a globale temperature threshold that hasn't been crossed in over 300,000 years. It might not be a problem, but I'm not sure the past 10,000 years of history is of much help in determining that (except maybe to note that homo spaiens civilzation took place during a relative climate sweet spot - possibly through of our own making through advent of agriculture).

Clearly we'll never be able to address meeting any serious reduction targets of climate forcing agents unless developing countires can manage their emissions while dealing with their conventional pollution problems and making thier economies grow (and in doing so further shrinking the gap).

I don't think playing Alfred E. Newman in response to sci-fi apocolyptic stories will help much in that regard. We need to focus on serious solutions like making our public and private sectors more flexiable, and being creative about accelerating technology comercializtion curves.

In the Netherlands, government and business address environmental issues by forming a "covenent" and make collaberative choices about goals, while allowing for enormous flexability in meeting those goals. Maybe we need an Amsterdam Convention.