The mighty mighty Bjorn Lomborg double feature

[phantom power]

The Contrarian Extraordinaire has been reduced to apologetics. "Hey, how bad can 4.7F be anyway!"

In "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," that Copenhagen Business School professor, Bjøn Lomborg, is at it again, preaching the gospel of benefit-cost analysis. His message: Don't take any serious action to stop global warming pollution because doing so will slow down economic growth that poor people need, and anyway, it's really not going to rain that hard.
http://salon.com/books/review/2007/08/29/cool_it/

Interview with Bjorn Lomborg
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/29/bjorn_lomborg/

[GliderGuider]

1. Go Bjorn!

I describe my previous incarnation as "A Summa Cum Laude graduate of the Bjorn Lomborg School of Don't-Worry-Be-Happy". Then about four years ago I woke up and wondered what the hell was in that Kool-Aid.

[greenman3610]

2. way too much talk about costs of changing our energy supply

Lomborg and other skeptics rely on the misperception that moving
to a high efficiency, alternative energy economy is a cost, rather than
a driver of prosperity - yet this is truly the case.
He also ignores the external costs of a fossil fuel economy, like, for one,
100 billion a year to fight oil wars in the mideast.

And there is way, way too much talk about polar bears.
I like bears, I want more of them, but
if polar bears were the only problem, I wouldn't be devoting
a significant portion of my life to speaking and writing about this.
I'd just give more money to the Sierra Club.

What we're talking about here is a tipping point,
sometime in our lifetimes, that will set this planet on an irreversible
course to becoming something totally other than what we
have evolved on, hostile to both human and animal life
as we know it, maybe for hundreds of thousands of years.

May I suggest another book to review?
Peter Ward, a paleo biologist at the University of Washington,
consultant to NASA, and contributor to Scientific American,
has written a new book that may be the most important contribution to the
debate since "An Inconvenient Truth".

It's called "Under a Green Sky", and it descibes the emerging paradigm
shift in the way paleoclimatologists are looking at the mass extinctions
of the past. While the model of asteroid strike has been famously
demonstrated for the cretaceous, "Dinosaur" extinction,
that model does not work for many of the other half dozen or
so we know about, including the mother of all extinctions, the
Permian, which nearly extinguished life on this planet
251 million years ago.
The new theory, painstakingly documented in the book, is that these were greenhouse based events,
brought on by periods of sustained volcanism, where
CO2 increased markedly, but not more quickly than it
its current rate of increase.

http://www.amazon.com/Under-Green-Sky-Warming-Extinctions/dp/006113791X

[GliderGuider]

3. We've discussed Ward's book here a bit.

Most of us agree it's to frightening to talk about in polite company. If he's right, the cost of compact fluorescent lights and new batteries for the Tesla will be way down on our list of worries. THC shutdown, Canfield oceans, H2S-producing bacteria and a desert (and deserted) planet could be in our future. The frightening part is how plausible he makes it seem. I don't think there's a Lomborgian cost-benefit analysis that could spin that one.