September 20, 2007
No Sweat
Have our global warming “experts” run amok?
by Bruce Thornton
Private Papers

A review of Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It. The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (Knopf, 2007, pp. 272)

If you believe Al Gore and his shills in Hollywood and the media, science has definitively proven that within decades polar bears and penguins will become extinct, heat waves will slaughter millions, malaria will devastate North America, rising sea levels caused by melting ice caps will swallow up coastal communities, droughts will create killer famines, monster hurricanes will ravage the Gulf Coast, and the Gulf Stream will disappear and spawn a new Ice Age––all because George Bush wouldn’t sign the Kyoto treaty and do something, something about the CO₂ emissions that have caused global warming.

As Bjorn Lomborg argues in Cool It, these apocalyptic scenarios don’t have that much reliable science to back them up, and the alleged solution––radically reducing CO₂ emissions––wouldn’t help that much anyway. Lomborg is the Danish economist whose earlier book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, used Occam’s razor to slice and dice the neo-romantic nature-love that these days masquerades as environmental science. Cool It uses the same sort of calm, rational pragmatism and respect for empirical evidence to analyze global warming, its possible effects on people today and in the future, and the proper way to address this issue.

Lomborg starts with the hyped hysteria over polar bears to illustrate the way “vastly exaggerated and emotional claims that are simply not supported by data” obscure the facts. In reality, there are 20 subpopulations of polar bears, only one or two of which are declining. In addition, the polar bear population has increased from 5000 in the 1960s to 25,000 today. Nor is it clear that global warming accounts for the two declining subpopulations, since the two increasing subpopulations inhabit an environment that is growing warmer. Global warming may indeed impact future polar bear populations, but they will not become extinct. And if we’re worried about those bears that will be lost to global warming, we can easily offset those numbers––an estimated 15 a year around Hudson Bay––by banning the hunting of polar bears, which kills 49 a year.

From this example, Lomborg establishes the book’s argument and theme. First, human-created increase in temperature is happening: in the best estimate, that of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC), the global temperature will by 2100 have risen on average 4.7ºF. But wild exaggerations about the effects of this increase are unlikely to generate good policy. Rather, “simpler, smarter, and more efficient solutions” are preferable to “large and very expensive CO₂ cuts” which have “only a rather small and insignificant impact far into the future”––like the cuts targeted by the Kyoto treaty, which would have lowered the temperature 0.3ºF by 2100, if all countries ratified the treaty and if they lived up to its provisions for the next 100 years. Next, there are many other issues more important than global warming, such as hunger, poverty, and disease, which can be addressed much more cheaply than CO₂ cuts and help more people. Lomborg’s point is simple: “our ultimate goal is not to reduce greenhouse gases or global warming per se but to improve the quality of life and the environment.” Reducing greenhouse gases at the cost of trillions of dollars “is one of the least helpful ways of serving humanity or the environment.”

Debunking the nightmare scenarios sketched above is Lomborg’s first task. The 2003 heat wave that killed 35,000 people was according to Al Gore one of “the kind of heat waves that scientists say will become much more common if global warming is not addressed.” Yet given that low temperatures will increase more than high temperatures, deaths from cold weather will decrease as heat-related deaths increase, meaning that there will be a net decrease in temperature-related deaths. This is because many more people die every year from cold than those who die from heat: in Europe, 200,000 die annually from excess heat, but 1.5 million die from excess cold. And this calculation assumes humans simply do not adapt to the excess heat, which is unrealistic. Indeed, we already have adapted to the increased temperatures created by the “urban heat islands” of big cities, which on average raise temperatures around the same amount we are told we will experience in 2100 (e.g. over the past 100 years, the maximum temperature in Los Angeles has increased 4.5ºF). Finally, there are much cheaper things we can do now to alleviate the expected temperature increase — adding more trees and fountains, painting asphalt and buildings white, and providing better medical treatment in poorer countries. Full implementation of Kyoto, on the other hand, would merely postpone the increase for five years — at the cost of trillions.

Lomberg’s analysis of the Kyoto provisions is alone worth the price of the book. As he shows, Kyoto simply costs too much for the marginal benefits it would have provided. His analysis of the economic and climate models, which calculate the costs both of reducing emissions and of climate change, shows that full, honest, consistent implementation of Kyoto (assuming that would ever happen) costs $5 trillion to lower temperatures 0.3ºF, for a total benefit of $2 trillion. You don’t have to have an economics degree to see that the “Kyoto Protocol is a bad deal: for every dollar spent, it does the world only about thirty-four cents’ worth of good.”

This brings us back to the exaggerated disasters attributed to global warming, for if they are true, then such economic calculations are pointless, if not immoral. But they aren’t true, as Lomborg shows. Deaths will decrease, not increase all the way to 2200. After all, some parts of the world will benefit from increased growing seasons and fewer deaths from cold and cardiovascular disease. The developing world indeed will be impacted more, but that’s mostly because it’s poor, with fewer resources to spend on mitigating those effects. But the trillions spent on marginally reducing future temperatures would be trillions not available for addressing the problems bedeviling the Third World — disease, malnutrition, sanitation, and economic development, “the real and pressing needs of current generations that we can solve so easily and cheaply before we try to tackle the long-term problem of climate change, which will be massively expensive and accomplish so little.”

Indeed, a closer look at the doomsday scenarios that presumably justify spending all those trillions reveal that they are wildly exaggerated. Worried about rising sea levels? Disturbed by the U.S. News & World Report claim that by mid-century, “the chic Art Deco hotels that now line Miami’s South Beach could stand waterlogged and abandoned”? In fact, according to the IPCC estimates, sea levels will rise one foot by 2100, five inches by 2050 — “no more than the change we have experienced since 1940 and less than the change those Art Deco hotels have already stood through.” Indeed, since 1860, sea levels have risen by about a foot, and civilization seems to have survived. But what about Al Gore’s twenty-foot rise in sea levels dramatized in his movie An Inconvenient Truth? This fantasy depends on projecting a melting Greenland, something that’s not going to happen: “In a recent overview of all the major models of sea-level increase, Greenland’s contribution over the coming century is at most two inches. Some even posit a tiny decrease in sea levels from increased snow [global warming will increase precipitation] outweighing the melting of Greenland’s glaciers.

So too with the other disaster scenarios. Hurricanes are more destructive today because there are more homes and businesses to destroy in coastal areas. Similarly, increased damage from floods reflects more development in flood plains and reckless levee-building. The Day After Tomorrow fantasy of a new Ice Age caused by the Gulf Stream shutting down is perhaps the most ridiculous projection, given that the latest data show no slowing down of the Gulf Stream. Malaria epidemics in the U.S. are implausible, given that we have the wealth and health-care to control the disease, which we’ve already eradicated in the U.S. once before. Mass starvation is unlikely, since “all models envision a large increase in agricultural output — more than doubling of cereal production over the coming century.” The most pessimistic models show a total reduction in agricultural output of 1.4 percent; production has grown 1.7 percent annually over the last 30 years, and there’s no reason to think such growth would suddenly stop. As for water, since higher temperatures mean more rain, even water-stressed regions like Africa will see “twenty-four million fewer … water stressed.”

Lomborg’s point is that the effects of global warming are manageable by spending money wisely — on alternative fuels, for example, and modest, cost-effective CO₂ reductions. But this in turn means not spending money on costly radical reductions of CO₂ that will provide scant benefits. As for the problems of the Third World, economic development will both improve lives today and provide the means to prepare for whatever effects of global warming that do occur.

Unfortunately, hysterical exaggerations of the effects of global warming serve too many interests. Some scientists go along with the hype because it leads to more funding for their research, while criticizing global warming can have deleterious effects on careers and research money, given that those who challenge the woollier projections of global-warming and its effects are likened to holocaust-deniers and flat-earthers. Politicians love to decry global warming because it makes them sound concerned at relatively little cost, since the bill for most of the proposed solutions will come due long after they’ve left office. And of course the media, addicted to drama, simplistic images, and dumbed-down science, have perpetuated what one critic calls “climate porn,” a discourse of “catastrophespeak” that titillates our morbid fascination with apocalypse. This “choreographed screaming,” as Lomborg calls it, drowns out any kind of sensible discussion of comparative risk, costs and benefits, and goals and priorities.

Cool It exemplifies the sort of fact-based, rational discussion we should be having today, one supported by over 80 pages of notes and bibliography (Lomborg is publishing in England another version with even more references and data). I wish he had addressed some of the cultural ideals that reinforce global warming hysteria. Much of the discussion, for example, reflects a Disneyfied idealization of nature and hypocritical demonization of modern civilization, both of which are luxuries for affluent people protected by technology from nature’s inhuman indifference. Additionally, decrying global warming is a convenient way for leftover leftists to attack capitalism and the bogey of “globalization,” given that socialism has been discredited by its manifest and repeated failure to improve people’s lives. And of course, “Kyoto” has become a mantra of Bush-haters both at home and abroad, brought up even by bin Laden in one of his addresses to the West.

Lomborg, though, spectacularly succeeds at accomplishing his main goal in this essential and important book: “cool our conversation, rein in the exaggerations, and start focusing on where we can do the most good. This does not mean doing nothing about climate change, but it does mean having an open dialogue about its effects and solutions, a conversation about what our priorities should be.”