Why you should read Bjorn Lomborg's new book (but not follow his advice)

At SciFoo this weekend, Bjorn Lomborg gave me a copy of his soon-to-be-published new book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. I just read it on the plane (it's a short book: you can finish it in two hours), and I think it's really worth paying attention to. He argues that although global warming is clearly happening and is human-caused, the debate over what to do about it has been polluted by way too much bad science, non-science, inflamed rhetoric and outright fibs.

When you look at the big picture, especially through an economic lens (which fully includes human costs and quality of life measures), he says that the usual approach of capping carbon output or putting high taxes on it costs too much for the benefits it offers. Instead, he thinks we should invest in research on renewable energy technology. Before I get to my own thoughts on that, let me list a few of the good points he makes about how much of the rhetoric over the effects of climate change doesn't stand up to scrutiny:

• Antarctic melting: The most likely effect of climate change would be to increase, not decrease, the amount of ice in Antarctica. That's because regardless of how warm the planet gets, the Antarctic will remain very cold (below freezing) for almost all the year. What determines the amount of ice in Antarctica is precipitation, not melting, and historically there's been very little of that--Antarctica is the planet's largest desert. Because the effect of climate change is to put more water vapor in the atmosphere, the effect will be more precipitation in Antarctica, deepening the ice layer that is already between a mile and two miles thick. The famous ice shelf that calved off the Antarctic peninsula a few years ago is on the northernmost (warmest) tip of the continent was sea ice, not on top of rock like the rest of Antarctica.
• Polar bears: Despite the heart-rending pictures of polar bears stranded on sea ice, global polar bear populations have increased dramatically over the past few decades. It turns out that the main threat to polar bears is hunting, not drowning. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are growing or stable. In one of the two population that are shrinking--the much-cited one on the West coast of the Hudson Bay--15 bears die each year due to drowning, while 49 are killed each year by hunting.   
• Mount Kilimanjaro: Its famously shrinking glaciers have nothing to do with warming. The top of the mountain where they are never rises above freezing. Instead, they are shrinking due to evaporation (sublimation), caused by the drier climate in that part of Africa, something that's been happening for nearly a century.
• Rainfall: Certain parts of Sub-Saharan Africa will get drier, causing droughts. But most of Africa will get wetter. Overall, there will be more fresh water in the world, not less (the fact that it doesn't get to the right people at the right time is a water management issue, not a climate issue).

And so on. Lomborg doesn't believe that climate change isn't real and dangerous, he just argues that our policy debates on what to do about it are remarkably ill-formed because of exaggerated claims, bad (or non-existent) economic analysis and attention-getting anecdotalism.

My own position on all of this is one that I've come around to after much study and is exhibited in Wired's editorial priorities: it's time to put the debate over whether human-driven climate change is happening behind us and instead focus on technologies to decarbonize the economy. But climate change is only one of three strong reasons to do this. The others are:

Economics: Both the direct costs of oil and other carbon-based fuels, and the indirect cost of their "negative externalities" (pollution, etc) are only going to rise. That increases the economic return for alternatives, and shifting to those alternatives will allow the economy to grow more quickly over time.

Geopolitics: Propping up bad governments with oil revenues has a destabilizing effect on the world. Renewable sources are more broadly distributed around the world and will lead to more energy autonomy for most nations and less distortion of local and global politics due to the corrupting influence of too many natural resources in the hand of too few. (See Fareed Zakaria's "The Future of Freedom" for more on this argument.)

This three-leg case for investing in renewable energy technologies is the foundation of Wired's editorial philosophy on renewables, and can be found in everything from our original Al Gore cover package (before the movie), to our hybrid car cover (back in 2005) and our case for the virtues of expensive oil.

Where I differ with Lomborg is simply this: he thinks that the right path is to go light on a carbon tax (no more than $2/ton) and go heavy on government R&D subsidies for renewable technologies. I think we should have a somewhat higher carbon tax on the hopes that it creates sufficient incentives for the private sector itself to invest heavily in renewable technologies. Rather than spending the government tax money on federal research (which is best reserved for cases of market failure, which is clearly not the case in this greentech boom), use it to reduce taxes elsewhere. That is, of course, the Silicon Valley Way.

Comments

[Rick Cecil]

Very interesting post. I think I'll have to read this book.

I like the idea of making carbon-based fuels more expensive. Instead of adding a carbon tax, though, why not increase the rarity of these fuels by decreasing the amount that we import? This prevents yet a another tax from further complicating an already over-complicated tax system. Plus, alleviates the issue of properly measuring the amount of carbon each person/family uses.

For example, if we were to stop importing oil from the middle east, demand for oil would far outweigh supply and would create an situation in which cheaper, alternative (and renewable, ideally) fuel sources would have a chance to grow and thrive--if we're paying $5 a gallon for gas, then $4 a gallon for an alternative fuel would be much more accepted and adopted that much more quickly.

[Dan]

Stopping or limiting the import of oil from the Middle-East is practically and politically next to impossible. Fortunately, a properly designed revenue-neutral carbon tax would not create the problems that concern Rick.

As set forth on the Carbon Tax Center's web site, a carbon tax should be imposed as far up the distribution supply chain as possible. The tax should be imposed at the mine or the wellhead, with the costs presumably then passed through to ultimate consumers. The result would be a powerful price signal to use less carbon-intensive energy and to substitute less carbon-intensive energy (wind, solar and biomass) for more carbon-intensive alternatives (coal and petroleum products). The carbon tax proceeds should be returned to all Americans via offsetting tax reductions (e.g. payroll or sales taxes) or monthly rebates. The revenues returned would be on a per capita basis as opposed to being based upon how much tax was paid for two important reasons: 1) if money returned simply equaled money paid, there would be no effective price signal; by returning money on a per capita basis consumers will effectively receive a fund that will be more or less than they actually pay in carbon taxes based upon how much energy they consume (or is consumed in making products that they buy); and 2) there is no reason to track the amount of carbon each family or business uses.

It's important not to simply rely on letting market prices drive up the cost of energy, since that would open the door to carbon-intensive fuels like "coal-to-liquid" and ethanol produced using coal-fired generation.

[Lou Grinzo]

The issue of carbon taxes really comes down to a matter of urgency. If you think we've already waited too long to begin making serious strides in reducing CO2 emissions, then we need a high carbon tax. If you think we have the luxury of time, and we can encourage renewables and let the market shift us away from carbon, then we don't need a high carbon tax.

Based on my study of these issues, I'm not willing to bet many millions of human lives plus economic chaos on the second scenario. Nearly all of the climate science discoveries have been bad news--faster melting in Greenland, greater coral die-off, etc. We can't honestly say that we know how bad the current situation is, but it's highly likely that it's worse than we know with any certainty.

And I'm not at all convinced by Lomborg's argument for why Antarctica will be gaining, not losing, ice. This is the first time I've heard this particular reasoning, and I wonder how well it stacks up against actual measurements and the ongoing calving of glaciers.

[Phil]

I'm somewhat confused by the non-sequitur. Why attack what he believes to be bad rhetoric, if he believes "that [...] global warming is clearly happening and is human-caused" - did he just have pages to fill or does it strengthen his later argument for light taxation/more R&D funding?

[Mentor Muniz Neto]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f8v5du5_ag&mode=related&search=

[Frank Randall]

Also: note that melting ice in the Arctic, not the Antarctic, is what often draws much media attention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/09/science/10cnd-arctic.html

It seems that Lomborg is picking and choosing his arguments to quibble with, as a rhetorical device, without really contradicting the fundemental facts that global warming is 1) happening 2) human created and 3) doing very bad things to the planet.

Seems to me that his "provacatively counter-intuitive" argument that really just about picking at the margins. Oh - and I've read the book, too, so I'm going on his argument, not your summary.

[Alex Tolley]

Lomborg is wrong about Antarctic ice.

Firstly, we already know from data that sea levels have risen to much higher levels in the Eocene. We also know that the Antarctic ice is not so old that it hasn't melted previously when the climate was warmer.

Secondly, as to mechanism, Greenland's ice melt is raising sea levels, so that will expose more Antarctic ice to warmer ocean water, fostering melting.

Thus there is a race between increased snowfall due to a more humid climate and faster melting. It is my understanding that the melting is teh stronger of the two processes.

[Jim Rait]

I haven't read the book but my senses made me think your summary of the Antarctic Ice Shelf was an incomplete consideration of a component of a very Complex Adaptive System; I realised I had read this -Huge sea level rises are coming – unless we act now
25 July 2007
NewScientist.com news service
James Hansen
[snipurl not working so search at New Scientist's website].

It includes these paragraphs relevant to your blog:
"Another negative feedback is increasing snowfall on ice sheet interiors, because of the higher moisture content of the warming atmosphere. Some models predict that ice sheets will grow overall with global warming, but those models do not include realistic processes of ice sheet disintegration. Palaeoclimate data confirms the common-sense expectation that the net effect is for ice sheets to shrink as the world warms, as the GRACE satellites show is happening already.

The findings in the Antarctic are the most disconcerting. Warming there has been limited in recent decades, in part due to the effects of ozone depletion. The fact that West Antarctica is losing mass at a significant rate suggests that the thinning ice shelves are already beginning to affect ice discharge rates.

So far, warming of the ocean surface around Antarctica has been small compared with the rest of the world, as models predict, but that limited warming is expected to increase. The detection of recent, increasing summer surface melt on West Antarctica raises the danger that feedbacks among these processes could lead to non-linear growth of ice discharge from Antarctica.

This problem is urgent. The non-linear response could easily run out of control, both because of the positive feedbacks and because of inertias in the system."

Please read.. its very important, especially to the people who live on the coast!

[Christopher]

If you have any doubts about what's going to happen to ice (arctic, antarctic, greenland) and what that will do to sea levels in the next 100 years (try 5 meters higher than the present within a century) I suggest you peruse the latest thinking of James Hansen (who you may know as the NASA scientist whom the current administration attempted to silence) on the subject:

Huge sea level rises are coming – unless we act now
25 July 2007
NewScientist.com news service

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19526141.600-huge-sea-level-rises-are-coming--unless-we-act-now.html

[MPH]

Chris,

Another angle on the carbon tax idea, of course, is to phase it in. And perhaps to have the final target higher than otherwise as a result. So, perhaps target, say, $6 / ton, 11 years out; start at $0.50/ton NOW. On the "market" side, perhaps cap the tax at no higher than 50% more than the market price for sequestration (to a given high-quality standard), giving incentives for source sequestration to the extent possible.

Thanks,

Martin

[Oliver]

On Kilimanjaro, story is more complex (a little). Role of global warming not proven, but local drying (and thus decreased precipitation, and thus less snow) very likely to be human caused (local deforestation). The odd thing is that Bjorn says that there's nothing to be done. In fact, I wrote an op ed in the NYT publicising and to some extent advocating my friend Euan Nisbet's idea that we could preserve the remaining ice (which contains very interesting climate records) pretty well with tarpaulins. A little oddly, to my mind, the editorial board responded the following week in a leader saying that it would be better if we let the ice go as a monument to humanity's general waster crappiness. This struck me as pretty poor argument, in that the monument would be paid for by the victims of the crappiness (a quite poor third world country that would be losing its greatest or second greatest tourist draw). In a way it was my own little Lomborg moment, in that it brought home the degree to which global warming has to be seen as irredeemable. Which was why I was a little disappointed to read that he thought this problem was unsolvable, too. Preserving all the galaciers is indeed beyond us -- but preserving a few of specific value is not.

[Derek Tipp]

Climate is much too complex to say that we know how it is changing. Statistics tell us that the world has not warmed in the last decade. The hottest year on record was 1998. An excellent alternative cause of climate change is described in the book "The Chilling Stars".

I agree that developing alternative energy sources is important, as Bjorn Lomborg suggests. The most economic way to do this is gradually, as current plant needs replacement. The rapid option would be very costly for all of us.

[Scott]

Anthropogenic global warming is a load of crap.

Nasa's recently re-reduced data sets make that clear. And "Carbon Offsets" and "Carbon Taxes" are simply attempts to collect and redistribute revenues on the basis of some fictitious problem which a less-then-scientifically-literate population has embraced and uncritically accepted because Al Gore was out of work and decided to make a movie. Carbon neutrality is more about "Feel Good" politics than rational science.

Instead, let's concentrate on problems which really exist and which truly need our immediate attention, like preserving our ocean fisheries before they collapse from overfishing, protecting clean water supplies and reclaiming those already polluted, and, yes, we should decrease our dependence on oil through renewable energy. We should do the latter not because of Al Gore's Global Warming hoax, but because it makes rational economic and environmental sense to do so regardless.

On balance, we urgently need to find solutions to problems which actually exist and which have been extensively documented to exist and which we know are extremely time sensitive, not screw around debating ridiculous "carbon taxes" and offsets based upon incomplete computer modelling, i.e. wasting time and resources finding solutions for problems which don't exist.

[Steve Borncamp]

Why not go heavy on the carbon tax, have an across the board income tax cut - to put the money back in people's pockets, then increasing the per child tax credit? Thus, if you are a single person driving an SUV for status... you feel some pain. If you need a large car for your large family, you would have a larger offset.

Talking more about shifting the focus of taxation rather than increasing taxes should be acceptable to a broad range of non-oilmen.

[Peter]

I have read "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and have great respect for Mr. Lomborg. What amazes me is that he still buys in to the Global Warming myth. I agree that there are many good economic and political reasons to de-carbonize and democratise energy sources but "changing the weather" is not one of them.

[hipotecas & prestamos]

Climatic Change is Not a Problem of the Future

The diagnosis of the future of the planet cannot be gloomier. To the numerous elements that damage the environment, we must now add others, like the direct consequences of turning food into fuel, established as the economic policy guideline of the United States, designed and defended at all costs by the US president.

The issue has been presented on many occasions as a warning of the potential danger that, if continued, will affect the indispensable conditions for the life on the planet. Evidently at the service of the large transnationals, which produce 25 percent of the contaminating gas emissions, the White House has justified its position and has systematically refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

The inhabitants of the planet are required to act urgently. Maybe it's not too late.

Carlos Menéndez
http://www.creditomagazine.es

[Richards]

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[kabin]

thanks...
Kabin
Konteyner

[how to grow taller]

The authors base most of their analysis on one case study, a research project that they did for an undisclosed online auctions company that they call "auctions.com". Sellers paid, but buyers could use the service for free. The question was what these free buyers were worth.