"Cool It" -- Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist comes to the big screen | Hacker News Reader

"Cool It" -- Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist comes to the big screen

coolit-themovie.com

31 pointscpr45 comments

His TED talk gives an interesting perspective on Global Warming, and how we should be thinking about it. ~17mins, worth the time.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_prioritie...

I watched it awhile ago. The argument I remember is something along these lines. The worst case scenario of global warming is that sea levels rise some level by 2100. The most pessimistic financial projections for the people living in the affected areas in 2100 is that they will be equivalent to middle-class Americans once the sea levels rise. Thus, we should consider the fact that global warming efforts right now are essentially going toward helping middle class Americans, whereas there are other far more pressing issues facing the poorest of the poor in the world right now. Since we have limited resources in the world and we aren't going to work on every issue, we need to set priorities on what we will work on. Long story short, global warming doesn't make the cut.

Which is crap. Most of Bangladesh is only a few metres above sea level, ditto for some of India and Pakistan, the South Pacific islands, etc. Most human settlement is either near a river or the ocean.

I think you failed to grasp the argument. Most of Bangladesh may be only a few meters above sea level, but by the time that Bangladesh faces serious problems from rising sea levels they will almost assuredly be a first world nation in terms of affluence. What level of economic misery should we impose on the entire world both rich and poor, including Bangladesh, today to save affluent future Bangladeshis from dealing with a problem which the Dutch have already solved today?

I'm familiar with the argument.

If Bangladesh and India have levels of affluence comparable to western nations, then the increased CO2 emissions will make sea levels rise faster, surely? And that's assuming that a) they'll have that level of affluence and b) that sea levels aren't going to rise more quickly. I don't think either of these things are assured at this point.

Another point to note is that he's an economist, not a climate scientist. Most of the criticism directed towards him and the Copenhagen Consensus is that they underplay the level of potential global warming while overplaying the part that economics has to play. In other words, his risk to reward ratio is well out of whack.

ps. "Economic misery" is a loaded term. IIRC, mitigating CO2 was estimated to be at most a couple of percent of GDP.

You say "couple percent of GDP" as if that's a trifling thing. Economic growth is typically only a few percent of GDP, so if you allot that elsewhere perhaps you cause an economic plateau or regression.

Anywho, the key point is that nobody has put as much effort into a thorough and serious analysis as is warranted.

Well, at this point it's possible, and not "Economic misery". What happens when the problem is ignored for another 10 years and becomes 5% of GDP?

This isn't just a 10 year problem, it's a 100 year problem. And at 100 years exponentials swamp everything else.

Your point being? CO2 emissions have been growing exponentially too:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/co2_vs_emissions.gif

and the longer it gets put off, the more expensive it will be to fix.

That looks rather linear.

Per capita Carbon emissions in developed countries have actually leveled off over the past several decades, though per capita GDP continues to rise.

Assume for the moment that putting off addressing global warming will make the consequences more costly to address. How much more costly do they have to be to justify the sort of spending and sacrifices it would take today to curb Carbon emissions sharply? In 100 years Bangladeshis and Indonesians will likely be richer than Americans today. What problems could they face which would justify sacrifices today in order to save such comparatively more wealthy and technologically advanced folks from them?

Looks exponential to me. Particularly from 1999 on, where there's a sharp upturn. The developed countries emissions are flattening because a large proportion of their production is being outsourced to China: http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=en_atm_co...

The main issue is that we may not have 100 years - that's just a figure that Lomborg has come up with, and his figures are doubted by a lot of climate scientists. Somewhere around 2degC (over 1999 levels) is about the point where we might start to see positive feedback and serious effects from warming. At our current rate, we'll hit that in about 2040-2050. 5degC is certainly possible by 2100, which means no glaciers/fresh water in India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, desertification, food shortages and a couple of metres of sea level rise.

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The issue is not with the science that he's quoting - the bulk of the criticism comes from what he's quoting, ie. it's pretty selective, and that in some cases he's been found to be quoting the lower edge of a range, rather than giving an accurate indication of the science.

"a) they'll have that level of affluence and b) that sea levels aren't going to rise more quickly. I don't think either of these things are assured at this point."

Look again. Even the most pessimistic predictions shows that Lomborg is probably correct. Lomborg's significant body of research trumps your 'I don't think' unless you can show us some real evidence.

A lot of climate scientists have serious misgivings about Lomborg's body of research, including selective quoting - it's hardly cut and dried. Also, if you're going to try and tar me with the 'real evidence' brush, you should probably include a link to the predictions that you're talking about.

Just looking at Google Maps, Bangladesh and India have a couple of hundred kilometers of low lying coastline - a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than Holland's problem. Given the issues that the US has with it's sea wall, how much do you think they'll need to spend to keep the sea out?

According to Lomborg's research it will be cheaper to fix it later. Why spend $1 today if you can wait and spend <$1 tomorrow?

Really? What about his call for $100bn per year to be spent on climate change?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/30/bjorn-lomb...

His solution is much cheaper than the proposals from others. For example this panel: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05... wanted 100$ for a tonne of CO2 emitted, that's way more that 100billion per year.

Yep, it's about 2.9 trillion per year globally, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio... and my calculator.

That's for the most aggressive option though, which they estimate will stabilise CO2 by 2030. There's a $20 and $50 option, but sadly no link to the actual paper, so no idea what those options would get you. Lomborg's proposal apparently takes until 2100, but it doesn't say how he arrived at that date, or how he knows that'll be either safe or enough to halt emissions.

Yea so Lomborg is basically arguing that we don't need to be quite that aggressive and that it would be cheaper to stabilize slowly in 90 years rather than doing it for a high cost in 20. Sure it will cause more problems for people to do it slowly but if we want to HELP PEOPLE it's better to put that money towards other programs which will help people much more on a 'per dollar spent' basis.

Right - so once we get down to brass tacks, we're arguing for pretty much the same thing - some sort of action on CO2. What happened to the "spend < $1" earlier?

I suspect that CO2 will start having a lot more impact in the next 10-20 years, at which point people will get a lot more serious about it and the 90 year programme becomes unlikely.

What happened to the "spend < $1" earlier?

What do you mean? He's saying that instead of spending about 60 trillion by 2030 we can instead spend only 9 trillion by 2100.

Yes - with a lot of assumptions, ie. that climate change is not going to be that bad. That's far from assured.

2 deg C is considered the danger point (ie. you'll see more drastic effects, possible positive feedback, etc.) by most climate scientists, and it looks like we'll hit that at around 2040-50 at the rate that we're going. But at the point that we hit 2degC and see bad effects, how long do you think it'll take to turn it around?

The pessimistic side of me says that this will be yet another excuse not to do anything... until 2050 when 2C hits, at which point it'll cost a packet to try and fix the climate as quickly as possible, and the only way to fix things will be the drastic geoengineering, like pumping SO2 into the stratosphere, massive sea walls and solar shades in orbit.

I am sure Mr. Lomborg was aware of the elevation of Bangladesh when he did his studies. It's generally considered polite to read/listen to someone's argument before you criticize it.

The worst case scenario according to James Hansen is a permanent phase change in the Earth's atmospheric composition to something more like that of Venus. A prospect which ought to worry even the most prosperous middle-class American.

Could someone who speaks Danish elaborate on the findings referenced on Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg#DCSD_investi...

Though he was exonerated on technicalities, it doesn't look good. However, as I don't read Danish, I can't check any of the actual source material.

Lomborg's basic position is "Global warming is real - it is man-made and it is an important problem. But it is not the end of the world."

It's disturbing to me how much logic, reason, and science have been bypassed in the race to global warming panic. The idea that it's necessary for human civilization to take drastic steps in order to forestall global warming is based on an entire chain of reasoning: that global warming exists, that it is unnatural and anthropogenic, that massively devastating consequences to mankind and the environment will result if AGW is allowed to continue along current trends, and that curtailing CO2 emissions will prevent those consequences and is the best way of dealing with their possibility. Of these at best only the first and perhaps the 2nd could be considered "proven" (though there is still significant debate), but the rest are just assumed, nothing even approaching a robust analysis has been done (sadly Lomborg's work is perhaps the best analysis so far).

Remember risk management. It doesn't have to be proven "that massively devastating consequences to mankind and the environment will result if AGW is allowed to continue along current trends", it only has to be probable. Likewise for "curtailing CO2 emissions will prevent those consequences and is the best way of dealing with their possibility".

It's perfectly rational to curtail CO2 emissions for fear of the consequences of AGW if curtailing CO2 emissions has a high enough EV, calculating this with, of course, the EV of catastrophic consequences to AGW. It doesn't have to be proven if catastrophic enough consequences are probable enough to dominate the EV, even if that probability is less than "certainty".

Sure. It's a numeric problem. The proper question isn't "should we build an asteroid shield around the earth?". If it's free, then yeah we should go for it. But if not, then we should first ask ourselves questions like "how much will it cost?", "how likely is it that an asteroid impact will occur?", "how much damage will an impact cause relative to the cost of prevention?", and "how does an asteroid shield relate to alternative preventative measures?".

Lomborg did the math and he decided that policy which focuses primarily on emissions reductions is unlikely to do more good than harm. Though with different assumptions of course you wind up with different conclusions.

But the question is whether the risk of catastrophic consequences due to AGW out weighs the certainty of the economic impact. Lomborg isn't asking for certainty on AGW (which would be impossible) he's simply arguing the equation has become weighted too much to one side because of fear.

I agree with you completely.

At the root level, though, even that isn't the real question. The real question is: given any particular measure which may impact AGW, what's the EV of that particular measure? For instance, building tons of nuclear power plants has an EV which is affected, but not necessarily dominated, by factors related to global warming. Likewise for measures targeted at reducing car usage.

It may be that the typical cap-and-trade or carbon tax schemes proposed to deal with global warming are -EV. That doesn't mean global warming shouldn't inform our decisions.

Yes, the precautionary principle, Pascal's wager. I take it from this that you are a devout Catholic, or perhaps a fundamentalist Muslim?

Whether or not EV holds valid with risks of infinitesimal probability and infinite cost is an interesting philosophical question, but it doesn't undermine the use of EV to deal with risks of finite cost and probability.

I don't think Pascal's wager applied universally across all religions results in a Catholic or Muslim. Maybe an atheist...

That’s what I love about Lomborg’s argument. The Global Warming alarmists get by with weak science by saying their preliminary findings appear to be right and there’s no time to debate any further because the world will end if we don’t act now.

Lomborg essentially bypasses the science part of that argument and attacks the real issue which is the urgency claim. In doing so he takes away the reasons for politicization of the issue and puts the focus back on scientific study of the problem.

The Global Warming alarmists get by with weak science

Meanwhile, the Climate Deniers get by with a jedi hand wave and a "everything's fine, no need to do anything at all"

</sarcasm>

Strawman much?

The eminent physicist Freeman Dyson shares this same sentiment: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html (with a few extra, weirder, ideas, of course).

This sounds disturbingly... reasonable.

It's unfortunate that the book this is based on seems to be so... wrong: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/02/21/book-review-the-lomborg-d...

That is a very week premise, which looks disguised as an attempt to sell one book by criticising another. You could equally apply that much scrutiny to any public profile book or movie (anything by Michael Moore, for instance).

I'm sure Lomborg's book contains exaggerations and selective presentation of the truth - after all, it's a popular literature, not a scientific work. But the very same standards applied to other 'popular' works of Global Warming media, like 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' and 'An Inconvenient Truth' have also showed up outright lies, fabrications and distortion of the truth.

In other words, it's unlikely that anyone can print or make something in this genre without someone else finding all sorts of facts that are wrong. But the whole thing is down to interpretation.

Ultimately we should be judging these books and movies for ourselves, and realising that much of the material contains a kernel of truth, probably much embellished for the narrative.

That seems like intellectual laziness.

Indeed. While it's true that most things will have errors, it depends on what those errors were, why they were made and who's pointing them out. For example, a lot of climate skeptics like to point out that models are wrong. But they tend to be wrong in both directions (eg. http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Arctic_models_obs.gif, where the sea ice loss is far more than worst-case prediction)

"I'm sure Lomborg's book contains exaggerations and selective presentation of the truth - after all, it's a popular literature, not a scientific work."

But that's all he publishes. Because he's not a scientist.

You might want to ask yourself why he publishes in such low-end venues, rather than in more rigorous ways.

That article referenced Lomborg's website, so I followed the link.

First in the FAQ was the answer to the book -- Bjorn Lomborg has written a detailed response debunking Howard Friel’s claims in "The Lomborg Deception.”.

http://www.lomborg.com/faq

Friel has also written a couple of books with Richard A. Falk, a 9/11 conspiracy "truther" etc...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Falk#9.2F11_and_the_...

(Sorry for coming in so late that everyone stopped following this.)

I'm interested in seeing this, because from what I have read Bjorn is somewhat middle of the road on this debate, something that is usually missing from any mention.

I haven't had time to get and/or read his book (no space in reading schedule for this type of thing) but I will be interested to see how this goes.

If it manages to thread between the polarized opposites on this debate, that will be quite an accomplishment.

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