Letters to the Editor
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Man that guy has a big nose
I wonder how much CO2 it emits?
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I think this guy is right, in principle.
In that we *should* apply a cost-benefit analysis to global warming.
This is challenging, because you must take into account future costs and benefits in the model.
However, doing so would put us quite far ahead of where we are now, which is nowhere.
Imagine, if you will, if we had applied this type of analysis to the "War on Terror".
On the one hand, we have the enormous monetary costs, hundreds of billions of dollars. Cost of lives lost, a country in ruins.
Now, add up the benefits, and prepare to be depressed.
Now, think where we'd be if we applied that effort to alternative energy sources.
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"Infamous"?
This marks the first time that I have ever heard anyone describe Bjorn Lomborg as "infamous."
Was this a liberty taken by one of Salon's ideologue headline writers? Does Kevin Berger agree with the characterization?
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Lomborg is a dick
If he were American, he would be laughed off the stage. Since he is Danish, the "if it is foreign, we must give it credence" crowd listens to him.
He is a liar for ignoring all scientific evidence. He allows himself to be used by the worst people in the world to continue the death spiral that fossil fuels send us into.
Again, Salon is pissing off those who theoretically are on their side. Shame on you, again and again.
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Al Gore is an alarmist!
I saw his movie, it was one of the most important movies I've seen.
But it was alarmist, it exaggerated some things and also made extrapolations and projections but did not identify them as such.
So what.
That does not mean that global warming is not perhaps the most important problem we face as a civilization.
Focusing on Gore's heating bill is a neocon distraction. God only knows why people fall for it.
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we have ideas, we have beliefs - but all i see is self-interest
he's a gay vegetarian dane. he thinks (therefore) it is very much more "cost-effective" (cost effective!...about the future?) to worry (and spend) more on AIDS, which might affect him than global warming which, at most, would change denmark from hay and cattle country to a vegetable growing one.
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Because of the elitism. . .
"Focusing on Gore's heating bill is a neocon distraction. God only knows why people fall for it.
I fall for it because it seems to me that a lot of this global warming lecture involves telling the "little people" (like most of us) that we need to start living like third worlders in order to save the earth.
Meanwhile we are noticing that the intelligentsia are jetting around the globe, drinking bottled water, eating imported fish, and using up vast amounts of resources.
It smacks of elitism, and makes me suspect global warming is a device to control the common man while the elite live on our backs.
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Not a scientist
Bjørn Lomborg is not a scientist. He has a political science background and is a professor at a business school. This makes him a layman, whose predictions about climate are as relevant to policy as the bagger at your grocery store. I'm sure he's smart, but it really doesn't matter what he thinks might happen or what he thinks is exaggerated. He entirely lacks the expertise and the background to make an informed assessment.
And that's not blustering, that's the hard truth. He's not a climate scientist. He hasn't studied or researched the subject beyond what anyone armed with Google can do, and he can't possibly know more about it than others who have devoted their lives to it and are working in the field. Clearly, he's welcome to his opinions, but there's no reason to give them any more or less weight than interviewing any random person on the street.
Further, his economic analysis is faulty. It's based around the assumption that global warming will have no impact on any other global problem. It ignores what would happen to cropland and oceans and displaced populations. Already there are island nations in the Pacific looking to relocate their entire population. But by Lomborg's logic, one dollar would be better spent on a charity to buy them a blanket to keep warm at their new refugee camp than to prevent their displacement in the first place. Ridiculous.
Unless Salon intentionally interviewed him as a strawman, publishing this interview only dignifies a viewpoint that's long been discredited. On the other hand, maybe the editors can find a flat earth skeptic who could argue that while the earth is probably round, it's not as round as we think, so every dollar we spend on globes for classrooms is one fewer dollar we donate to Africa. Therefore, the round earth theory kills babies.
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Present and future
An excellent interview.
Berger asks: "How can you compare [malaria, AIDS, etc.] to climate change, which will be at its most severe in the future?" One of the responses was telling "It's just not in the nature of the political process to say we're going to do something now to solve a problem later on." No, that's not in the nature of political processes, but it needs to be, which is what Lomborg appears to be missing. Democracies, whatever their virtue, have a handicap insofar as the horizon line of a given government is 3 to 5 years. We need a horizon line of 3 to 5 centuries on this. That civilization will end is indeed alarmist but the suggestion, tacit throughout Lomborg's answers, that we're just not sure how bad it's going to be is dreadfully ostrich-like.
Forget 2100 and consider the year 3000 with this from the IPCC policymaker summary in mind: "Both past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium, due to the timescales required for removal of this gas from the atmosphere." Yes, I'm worried about malaria, but I'm worried about a thousand years of sea level rise a little bit more. Indeed, we can invert Lomborg: malaria is never going to render us extinct, but there is teeny tiny chance that anthropogenic emissions might do so. What's the cost-benefit take on things once that's admitted?
Also, a defence of the world's largest bear. In response to "Are you saying that polar bears will be OK, that the species will survive if they evolve backward?" Lomborg suggests "Yes, that's certainly how I read it." Was he smirking when he said this? Surely anyone with even a basic grasp of Darwinism understands that evolving backwards is not something species do, particularly large mammals with low fecundity that are relatively specialized (the Polar Bear, as you can imagine, has an incredibly fragile prey base). A far more likely scenario is that the Polar Bear populations will shrink and that the Brown Bear will colonize its range and eventually eliminate its cousin through hybridization. But hey, we've been eliminating megafauna for 10 thousand years and it has yet to cost me buck.