Skewed Priorities? Another AGW Perspective
Bjorn Lomborg is a thorn in the side of many a climate change warrior. As a self-described environmentalist (onetime Greenpeace member), he’s been accused of global warming heresy, largely on account of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (1998, English editon 2001). In that book, Lomborg accused climate alarmists of making mountains out of climate molehills, forecasting doom when we had much more urgent needs to address. Fast forward to 2011, and he was taking a more modest tack, admitting that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) had progressed further, and its impacts were likely to be more severe, than he had previously forecast. Nevertheless, he maintained the future progression, and potential harm, were far less urgent than claimed by climate hawks, when compared with other threats.
Fast forward to 2019, and he has come to admit that climate change is a problem of daunting dimensions. Where he parts ways with most environmentalists and climate scientists is how he ranks climate change against other threats to the well-being of most people and natural systems: e.g. malnutrition, disease, air and water pollution, war, subsistence agriculture, habitat destruction, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, and failing infrastructure. The last is most glaring in the Third World, where the state of roads, bridges, power delivery systems, flood containment, and the resistance of buildings to earthquakes, high winds, flood, and fire, are all woefully inadequate by the standards of the developed world. He disagrees with climate warriors who overwhelmingly prioritize the elimination of fossil fuel use as soon as possible, regardless of the consequences to other economic activities.*
Central to Lomborg’s approach is what we coldly term cost-benefit analysis, or with more nuance, the necessity of balancing the degrees of hazard against the practicality and affordability of solutions to multiple problems.
For an engaging example of Lomborg’s method of prioritization, merging risk analysis with cost estimates, check out the video below, “Can You Fix the World with $75 billion?” which is 38 minutes long.
In the video we see a warm, personable, funny, good-natured Bjorn Lomborg, disarmingly at odds with the picture, painted by the left wing, of a front man for the fossil fuel industry who cooks the numbers to downplay the climate change threat.
So, Bjorn Lomborg is warm, personable, funny, and good-natured, as well as very smart and articulate . . . but an expert con-man can carry off this act while harboring corrupt intent. He’s a good salesman, but what is he selling? Is he a con man?
Before you get your climate hackles up, consider the set of concepts upon which Lomborg bases his defense of continuing use of fossil fuels, as follows (as best as I can articulate them in brief):
Lomborg’s downrating of global warming as an urgent challenge rests on five key pillars:
(1) The impacts of global warming are potentially catastrophic in the long run, but in the short run—the next two decades—we need to address more pressing problems, with malnutrition being at or near the top. Stabilizing climate does not directly resolve these problems.
(2) The developing world must rely on fossil fuels to power their economies, because fossil fuels are energy dense, highly portable, and can be used with relatively low, cheap, thoroughly tested, and readily available technology. Without them, progress toward the kind of comfort and reliability we are accustomed to is impossible.
(3) In relation to GDP (which Lomborg uses as a rough measure of standard of living*), the damage from climate change is negligible, both currently and over the next few decades. His ranking of climate change against other evils on the cost-benefit scale is key to his argument, and the ranking rests on the numbers that he and his associates have worked up.
For the kind of cost-benefit calculations that Lomborg is making, see Weighing risks of climate change: some big numbers
If Lomborg’s calculations are right (a big if), then we need to take a second look at our priorities.
(4) Adaptation, rather than mitigation (mitigation consisting of drastically cutting fossil fuel use), is the most effective, least disruptive, quick, and affordable way to cope with climate change.
(5) (Derived from the first four), “Panicking” about global warming and throwing massive time and resources into mitigation will hurt more than help humanity.
I refer you first to Lomborg’s website to see how he applies his key concepts to issues of the day (e.g. The Green New Deal). There, you will find a recent post where he contends the amount of resources thrown into mitigation have done little to lower carbon emissions—a failure for humanity in cost-benefit terms. Also worth looking at is what Bill Gates and Lomborg had to say about “energy poverty,“ Lomborg’s term for the lack of access to the modern energy sources that currently power the developed economies.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Bjorn Lomborg is a very serious, conscientious, and compassionate crusader for ameliorating the problems of the poor of the Earth. His message does dovetail with what cheerleaders for fossil fuels claim for the moral high ground—that they care more about the developing world than do liberal climate alarmists who wish to impose expensive, unwieldy, unreliable energy technologies on those who can least afford them. That does not make him a shill for the fossil fuel industry. Nor is he simply a contrarian who swims against the current in order to get notoriety, such as the physicist-turned-clown William Happer whom Trump named to head a White House “climate probe” (for which read: another effort to discredit almost all climate scientists). After coming out pooh-poohing the dangers of global warming 20 years ago, Lomborg has by degrees come around to the view that—hey, we’ve got a serious problem. He just downplays the magnitude of the problem.
For a critique of Lomborg’s credentials, and his shifting stance on climate change, see this in DeSmogBlog.
Nonetheless, there are flaws—some very consequential—in Lomborg’s key concepts that bear examination. Let’s look at just two.
Flaw One: uncertainty at best
Lomborg minimizes the short-term (two decades out) damage to be expected from climate change. Lomborg does not have the climate science chops to predict just what will happen and when it will happen. Nor does any climate scientist, for that matter. Recently, most climate scientists have concluded that change is happening more rapidly than they had predicted even a few years ago. There’s no easy way to model the feedback effects from atmospheric water vapor increases (countered, paradoxically, by cloud formation), and reduction of albedo due to ice melting, and there’s uncertainty about how long oceans can absorb CO2 at the current rate.
Uncertainty plagues global climate science because, first, climate is complicated, and secondly, despite all the data we have, there’s never enough—never will be enough—to eliminate all uncertainty.**
Lomborg is not any kind of natural science scientist, he’s a political scientist, economist, and data cruncher. He can only evaluate the scientific side of climate change second-hand. Whose projections do you trust? He mainly goes by the IPCC report—a pretty good bet, but still a bet. Many scientists believe the IPCC report, despite all the howls from climate change deniers, understates the risk. The point is, it’s a gamble. About as huge a gamble as you could make when we consider the consequences of runaway global warming.
Recent events have called into question Lomborg’s sanguine attitude toward near-time consequences of climate change: a spate of severe tornadoes in Alabama, massive flooding in the Midwest, the repeated pummeling of much of the U.S. by the Polar Vortex and its spinoffs, and worst of all the horrific flooding in Mozambique from Cyclone Idai, where as of this writing hundreds of thousands have been displaced, at least a thousand have already died and many more are certain to die from hunger and water-spread disease. Half of the victims are children.
Lomborg’s answer to our dismay at disasters at this scale is that our intense reactions to spectacularly bad events, are out of proportion to reality (such as widespread, devastating malnutrition in the developing world). He calls it the “CNN Effect”—where CNN brings massive reportorial forces to bear on a Big Bad News item, be it political, social, economic, or natural, to the neglect of reporting less conspicuous ills that don’t make such good stories.
The “CNN Effect” can be likened to the distorted perception of crime that brought about harsh anti-crime measures in the 1980s and 1990s—draconian measures that are now being undone, even by Republicans. Bad news sells, and to grab eyeballs news operations must run criminal atrocities. The result was a fear of crime far out of proportion to the actual incidence of crime. It’s possible that we are exaggerating the danger of climate change because these spectacular events keep grabbing our attention, and taking it away from the issues Lomborg ranks as more important than climate change for now.
Lomborg has already shifted his position in the past, becoming more and more convinced of the magnitude of climate change as time goes on and evidence continues to mount that warming continues and ever more rapidly. Will we hear him start hedging his bets in the coming years, as one weather catastrophe after another pokes holes in his complacency? Will there be a tipping point at which he will change his tune once again, into cries of climate catastrophe?
Flaw Two: the degree to which developing nations need fossil fuels to drive up standards of living
Few dispute the need of developing countries for fossil fuels to raise themselves out of poverty in the short run. This is not only a practical necessity, to forestall famine, war, and governmental collapse. It’s a moral necessity, since the developed societies have been plundering fossil fuels for two hundred years to raise our own standard of living—it is plainly unfair to deprive poor countries of these technologies while we are still using them. So far, developing countries have received promises of support from the developed world in return for cutting emissions, but even if those promises are kept, economic forces will keep driving up the use of fossil fuels in developing countries. Its inevitability is evident in China and India. China is moving aggressively into renewable electricity generation, but renewables alone fall far short of supporting the economic progress the government sees as necessary to head off political destabilization. So they continue to burn more coal.
The question is, when does that upward trajectory stop? Bjorn Lomborg sweeps under the rug the possibility that fossil fuel use in developing countries, as it becomes widespread and customary, could spiral up to per capita levels comparable to that in developed countries. We can expect fossil fuel propaganda to be effective at standing in the way of conversion to low-carbon technology as long as the price is kept down. If those per capita levels in the developing world rise to parity with what we in the developed world currently “enjoy,” it’s game over for slowing Global Warming. (That is, game over without geoengineering. I refer you to my post Geoengineering: Not If But When.)
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* It is an article of faith among climate hawks that mitigation will create enough new jobs and economic opportunities to more than offset losses from the collapse of the fossil fuel industry. I say “faith” because this reminds me a little of how right wing economic strategists claim that tax cuts will more than pay for themselves. Of course turning to clean energy, improved efficiency, and conservation will produce new jobs. Of course current growth in, for example, renewable energy, is on a steep upward trend. Whether that can really countervail the short-term economic losses consequent upon slashing the fossil fuels is a very iffy bet. (Without, as I’ve argued elsewhere, nuclear energy becomes the main solution to carbon-minimal generation of electricity at the scale commensurate with modern industrial economies.) Everywhere we look in large industrial economies, carbon emissions are now flat, increasing, or decreasing at a lamentably tiny rate. We can’t just blame fossil fuel propagandists for that. We can also blame our own hunger for energy. When’s the last time you traded your car for a bicycle?
** Example: we don’t know where the limit is at which oceans will stop absorbing CO2 at a net positive rate. (For oceans’ part in the carbon cycle see Pictorial representation of carbon cycle.) IF we had a complete record of how much CO2 the oceans have or have not absorbed throughout geological history, during which there were many warmer periods than now, we could make a better guess. So far the oceans have absorbed about thirty percent of the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere. A slowdown or even cessation of the oceans’ rate of absorption, could be a tipping point toward even more drastically accelerated global heating. We don’t have that data, which worries many climate scientists.