Environment Forum

Bjorn Lomborg: skeptic or too much an optimist?

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from Mario Di Simine:

Copenhagen Climate Conference: Who is right?

Ask anyone about climate change and you likely will get the kind of emotional response not seen since George W Bush left office. People on both sides of the debate – from politicians and scientists to your regular Joe on the street – are often adamantly in one camp or the other, with little wriggle room in between.

The majority of the camp believes that Mother Nature is indeed terribly sick, and that humankind is the virus that caused the disease. The symptoms are a climate that is warming to such a degree we are faced with certain calamity if we don’t do something about it.

Sounds alarming, doesn’t it?

On the other side, are the folks who say the climate is not warming at all or that, if it is, it is a natural phenomenon that will correct itself. In other words, Mother Nature can heal herself, if she’s even sick. To spend billions trying to do what Earth can do itself is folly, pure and simple, and will lead to economic ruin for many developing nations.

Sounds alarming, doesn’t it?

Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth arguably raised the temperature on the debate by bringing a simple clear message to the masses. It sent shivers down spines on both sides – those on the “yay” side applauded it for setting out the data and evidence they claim are indisputable truths about global warming. NY Times reviewer David Edelstein called it “devastating in its implications”.  The naysayers derided it as a concoction that played fast and loose with the facts. (See National Geographic’s scorecard on the claims made in the film here )

Bjorn Lomborg , author of the “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and “Cool It” and one of the experts on the Reuters.com panel that will be answering our Question of the Day during the Copenhagen conference, doesn’t deny the climate is changing. He says that if saving people ultimately is the goal, then spend the money where it does the most good: eradicating poverty and bolstering economies in the developing world, which would have greater immediate impact than billions spent on big schemes that ultimately may do little.

Being on the Level About Sea Level

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content – the views are the author’s alone. 

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish political scientist who makes a semi-career (if not career) out of countering claims about global warming.  His brand of writing tends to throw major counter claims out there on quite big climate issues, in short pithy sound-bites, often without data, letting the reader try and figure it out.

A recent Lomborg editorial is an example and has many claims in it that one needs to take time to carefully analyze. Here I will just react to one of Lomborg’s deceptive suggestions that sea level has suddenly stopped rising:

Since 1992, we have had satellites measuring the rise in global sea levels and they have shown a stable increase of 3.2mm a year: spot on compared with the IPCC projection. Moreover, over the past two years, sea levels have not increased at all; actually, they show a slight drop. Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?

Without seeing the actual data, readers of this passage will think sea level rise from 1992-2006 was smoothly monotonic and then suddenly this stopped and is reversing. Here’s a graph of the data Lomborg is referring to (I thank Gavin Schmidt for this graphic):