Global warming gets cold shoulde

Global warming gets cold shoulder

Bjorn Lomborg doesn't argue that our climate is changing. He just thinks we spend too much time, energy and money worrying about it. Michael Duffy writes.

Climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg ... author of Cool It and named one of Time magazine's 20 most influential scientists and thinkers.
Photo: AP/Christopher Patrick Grant

'We seem to be almost entirely focused on one way to deal with the problems of the world," Bjorn Lomborg says. "No matter what the problem is, people will say we need to cut carbon emissions."

The Danish academic has spent the past decade trying to reduce our growing obsession with climate change, in the process becoming the most famous global warming sceptic in the world. He has been savagely criticised by many scientists and activists. Judging from the response to his latest book, Cool It, its recent Australian release will not make him any new friends.

Lomborg is an unusual climate sceptic because he believes humans are contributing to global warming. In fact, he accepts most of the science behind the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But - and here is the twist - he does not believe that science justifies the degree of concern expressed by the panel and many others.

He thinks we should do a little about climate change but a lot more about other problems, such as hunger, that he regards as more important and urgent.

Asked about the international response to Cool It, Lomborg sounds disappointed. He says he has tried to make a "centrist point of view" in the climate change debate, but all he has done is upset those he calls alarmists while providing solace to the sceptics who do not think we should worry at all.

Lomborg first came to public attention with the 2001 publication of his book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The vegetarian and former Greenpeace supporter wrote that the facts often did not support the claims of environmental degradation made by many environmentalists. This has been a continuing theme, and re-emerges in Cool It.

Lomborg was often described as a statistician who was able to test the claims of scientists and activists through a sober analysis of the figures, although he is not a statistician; his university qualifications are in political science. While welcomed by many conservatives, The Skeptical Environmentalist was criticised by many scientists, and especially the magazine Scientific American and Denmark's Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. (The details of attack and counter-attack are complex. See box at right.)

The criticisms were wide-ranging but many included the claim of cherry-picking, often made by both sides in the global warming debate. It was said Lomborg had relied on those studies that supported his viewpoint while ignoring those that disagreed with it.

Aynsley Kellow, professor and head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania, believes "the attack on Lomborg came from a small circle of critics, mostly in the US and mostly closely associated with Paul Ehrlich [author of The Population Bomb]". This observation is included in Kellow's new book Science And Public Policy: The Virtuous Corruption Of Virtual Environmental Science.

Kellow writes: "For all the [highly critical] words written in the reviews in Nature, Scientific American, and Science, his critics barely landed a substantive blow on Lomborg." The disputes made Lomborg famous. He was named one of Time magazine's 20 most influential scientists and thinkers of 2004, and the 14th most influential public intellectual in the world in a readers' poll held in 2005 by the magazines Foreign Policy and Prospect.

In 2004 Lomborg founded a project called the Copenhagen Consensus, a serious attempt to rank the serious problems facing humanity in order of both their importance and how cheaply they might be dealt with. The ranking was done by several economists, including Nobel prize-winners, with the support of The Economist magazine, and presented in 2004 in the book Global Crises, Global Solutions.

One of those involved was Kym Anderson, professor of economics at the University of Adelaide. "It's a brilliant idea, to get economists to focus on the opportunities for solving the world's problems," he says. "Lomborg was the right person to do it because of his high profile."

The three most viable opportunities on the final list of 17 were: control of HIV/AIDS, providing micronutrients, and trade liberalisation. The least viable three were different ways of tackling climate change.

Cool It is essentially a more snappy and expanded version of the climate change material from the previous book. Lomborg writes in the preface that we need to debate "whether hysteria and headlong spending on extravagant" carbon-cutting programs at an "unprecedented price" are the only possible response to climate change. "Such a course is especially debatable in a world where billions of people live in poverty, where millions die of curable diseases, and where these lives could be saved, societies strengthened, and environments improved at a fraction of the cost." The most important things we should do about climate change at the moment, he argues, are to introduce a modest carbon tax and increase research and development into cleaner energy production and technology to $US25 billion a year.

The book was published in the US and Britain several months ago and received some positive reviews and responses, but none from scientists, even the sceptics. Again he faces the problem of falling between two stools.

"I differ from Lomborg," says Professor Ian Plimer of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide. "I don't accept that there is sufficiently validated evidence to show that there is human-induced global warming." Australia's other most prominent sceptic, Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, agrees. "Cool It is classic Lomborg," he says. "Well-written, beautifully crafted and tightly argued - and infuriatingly wrong on anthropogenic global warming."

The other side of the debate remains unpersuaded. John Quiggin, the Australian Research Council Federation Fellow at the University of Queensland, is sceptical about Lomborg's efforts to put climate change in a broader context. He sees a pattern that began with the Copenhagen Consensus continuing in Cool It. "Once again, the issues of poverty, malnutrition and health problems in the Third World, supposedly Lomborg's top priorities, appear only as stalking horses for his attacks on proposals to mitigate global warming."

Tim Flannery, of Macquarie University's Climate Risk team, and author of The Weather Makers, draws attention to Lomborg's focus on climate change when it comes to helping the deprived of the world. "If he wants to divert dollars to help the poor why take from the fight against climate change? There's a fair bit of money in defence spending," Flannery says.

On a more detailed level, Cool It has been the subject of criticisms over its use of sources. The first, powerful, chapter arguing that polar bear numbers are stable ignores the latest evidence. (Lomborg told the Herald that evidence, a 2006 report, was not available when he wrote the relevant chapter.) And the British businessman, environmentalist and author Chris Goodall says a random check of 30 of the book's footnotes found nine cases where a source did not provide support for what was said in the text. (Lomborg says he was unaware of Goodall's claims, which had been readily available on the internet for at least several weeks before this Herald interview.)

Asked if the criticism he cops sometimes gets to him, Lomborg admits: "There are lots of times when it'd be nice to sit down at a dinner party and not have to constantly defend and argue and challenge people."