9. Why Lomborg is wrong about Climate Change
Mark Lynas, writer and pie-man
Lomborg devotes a lot of space to climate change in his book, and there is a lot to object to. As Friends of the Earth have pointed out, his position is consistent with the changes in the arguments of climate skeptics over the last few years. Having moved from saying that climate change isn't happening at all, they now agree that it is happening, but argue that there are still too many uncertainties to do anything about it.
Lomborg's arguments are slightly more sophisticated in that he presents a cost-benefit analysis justification as to why we ought not to cut emissions significantly, but this presents more problems than it solves.
Firstly, the model he is using, developed by William Nordhaus of Yale University, has been criticised for exaggerating the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by ignoring the economic potential for conversion to cleaner energy sources - in the model, cuts are simply cuts. So rather than using a wind turbine, you have to switch the lights off.
Lomborg goes on to calculate, using this flawed model, that the cost of stabilising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is twice the cost of adapting to global warming. This is clearly absurd, because it assumes that the current state of scientific knowledge provides a certain enough base on which to judge these kinds of decisions. Yet the IPCC makes no such claims, pointing out over and over again the uncertainties. It also ignores the costs which can't be dollarized - such as effects on other ecosystems. So while it might be a 'benefit' if you can grow maize in interior Alaska, what is the 'cost' of polar bears becoming extinct because sea ice no longer exists in the summer?
Hence the precautionary principle, which has been agreed internationally, and is intended to deal with just such uncertainties. We don't know, for example, what magnitude of warming will trigger the release of methane hydrates from deep oceans, massively increasing global warming. We don't know either, how long it will be before Amazonia dies back and becomes desert (although one model by the Hadley Centre predicts that process begins around 2050) - although Lomborg probably counts this cost as relatively tiny because so few people live in Amazonia, even though it would play havoc with the world's weather and decimate biodiversity. So we should play it safe, and take measures to prevent these kinds of ocurrences, even if their likelihood initially appears quite small.
You shouldn't play Russian Roulette with the entire Earth's climate, whatever the superficial economic costs to this current generation of human beings.
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