Have No Fear, Lomborg's Here - With A New Book In Which He Tells Us Everything's Just Fine!

[hatrack]

:puke: :puke: :puke: :puke: :puke:

THE ENVIRONMENT
Is It Hot in Here?
A statistician argues that global warming isn't worth all the fuss.

As Reviewed by Tim Flannery
Sunday, September 9, 2007; Page BW06

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish statistician and darling of those who believe that markets should not be regulated and that concerns about the environment are overblown. He is articulate, certain in his opinions and well informed on the statistical minutiae of the topics he investigates. Indeed, so compelling and entertaining are the grains of truth that adorn his latest book, Cool It, that you are certain to hear them soon in dinner table conversation. But is this book, as its subtitle proclaims, really an acceptable "guide to global warming"?

In his opening paragraph Lomborg establishes a revealing dichotomy: "In the face of . . . unmitigated despair" about global warming, he intends to write a book that is optimistic about humanity's prospects. It's seductive rhetoric. But is climate change really about unmitigated despair? And can Lomborg's optimistic solutions actually work? It all depends on how well he's read the science. Cool It commences with a look at polar bears. Despite what you might have heard, they're doing fine, according to Lomborg. If we want to protect them better, we should forget about melting ice and just ban hunting. For every bear the Kyoto Protocol saves, a hunting ban would save 800 bears, he conjectures.

Lomborg then moves on to the consequences of the warming itself. He does not doubt that it is occurring, nor that it is caused by humans, but almost alone among commentators he finds reason to welcome it. In Europe, 200,000 people die from excess heat each year while 1.5 million die from cold, he asserts. His message is simple: more warming, less death. In this and many other projections, Lomborg is astonishingly certain about how things will be in the future. In a sentence italicized for emphasis, he writes that in 2200 -- nearly 200 years from now -- more people will still die from cold than from heat.

Glib, misleading associations mark Lomborg's style. In his chapter on glaciers, he states that since "we're leaving the Little Ice Age" (which, in fact, we left long ago) it's not surprising that glaciers are dwindling. Remarkably, he believes that is more good news, because "with glacial melting, rivers actually increase their water contents, especially in the summer, providing more water to many of the poorest people in the world." "It boils down to a stark choice," he lectures us. "Would we rather have more water available or less?"

Lomborg's flawed grasp of climate science is most evident when he discusses sea levels. He makes much of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) projection that sea level will rise by "about a foot," misleadingly noting that this is lower than previous projections. He does not tell us that the IPCC figures do not account for collapsing ice sheets, which may result in far larger rises, due to the difficulty of predicting how glacial ice will react to warming. While Lomborg waves vaguely in the direction of ice melt and collapse, he assures us it's not a problem. We'll just put up dikes. Indeed, with dikes, he asserts, some nations might end up with more land than they have today. And so the arguments go on, from rising seas to extreme weather events to malaria and other tropical diseases, the collapse of the Gulf Stream, food shortages and water shortages. In one case after another, Lomborg asserts, it's cheaper and better to do nothing immediately to combat climate change, but instead to invest in other things.

EDIT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/06/AR2007090601979.html

[GliderGuider]

1. I'm so embarrassed I ever gave that asshat the time of day.

:grr:

[mcscajun]

2. John Tierney, Libertarian and the NYT's resident Science columnist, gives him cover here...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/science/earth/11tiern.html?em&ex=1189742400&en=2b6b1443bf5021ee&ei=5087%0A

You'll puke all over again, I assure you.

"the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners."

Tierney never mentions, as you and many of the comments in "TierneyLab" do, that Lomborg is an economist, not a scientist, much less an environmental or natural scientist. Nary a whisper of the controversy on "scientific dishonesty" that swirled around his first book.

Nah, we don't need that in the article. We'll just talk about money and what it can do for the planet and its people. :sarcasm:

When everyone is as wealthy as New York, and everyone is running air conditioners, everything will be FINE.:sarcasm:

:wtf:

[depakid]

3. Tierney is just unreadable

I saw that buffoon on some talk show about a year ago. He kept on making outlandish (and nonsensical) statements about the price of oil- you couldn't even follow whatever train of logic he might have had.

The guy wouldn't stop rambling and the camera panned to the other participants (the usual crowd) and they were looking at each other with WTF looks in their eyes.

It was embarrassing.

[phantom power]

4. And there he is, getting paid by the NYT.