Environmentalist campaigners tell us that the world is on the brink of destruction. Industrial society, they say, has led to a climate emergency.
Governments have added their voices to this fevered cry, committing trillions of pounds to prevent the coming disaster. But are we really doomed?
Bjorn Lomborg is a climate economist. His latest book is False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.
He joined spiked editor Brendan O’Neill for the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.
Brendan O’Neill: One of the starting points of your book is the language of the apocalypse that swirls around the issue of climate change. You speak about the idea that we are facing an imminent, extinction-level event – that billions of people will die and it’s all doom, gloom, and horror. Why did you think it was important to write a book that challenges that narrative right now?
Bjorn Lomborg: It’s only now that this kind of thinking has become mainstream. A YouGov survey in 2019 asked people in 28 countries if they thought it was likely that global warming would lead to the extinction of the human race. I thought we would never have to ask that question. But 49 percent of respondents answered yes.
There are two problems with this. Firstly, it’s not what the UN climate panel or any of the climate science is telling us. But also, if we really believe the end of the world is waiting around the corner, everything else pales into insignificance.
The only thing that matters is that we do everything to tackle global warming. If there was an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, about to kill us all, then yes, we should spend everything on sending Bruce Willis up there to stop it. But there isn’t – and that matters a lot for how we tackle the problem.
Right now, we are spending money as if we are scared witless by climate change. That fear leads to a lot of bad decisions. If we could get a more realistic account of global warming – saying it is a problem but not the end of the world – we could also get smarter policy.
O’Neill: You just said global warming is real but it’s not the end of the world. Could you just outline how you see the science of global warming?
Lomborg: I use the science from the UN climate panel, which tries to understand what all these tens of thousands of researchers are telling us. Clearly, there is an issue – as we emit more CO2, mostly from fossil fuels, we heat up the planet. And that’s going to be bad for the world: let’s say three or four degrees of warming by the end of the century. [Satellite observations show warming at 0.14°C per decade. –CCD Ed.]
The real issue, though, is how that actually impacts us. The problem is that we have built all our infrastructure to fit an existing climate. That climate is changing and we have to pay to fix it.
Many people believe that when sea levels rise, there is going to be an Old Testament-style deluge. But the reality, of course, is that we know how to deal with these issues.
The best example is the Dutch: in the Netherlands, there is a large airport that is three meters below sea level. There was once a sea battle where that airport now is. That just shows you that rising sea levels are something we can cope with.
It must be terrible for kids who are growing up believing that they might not be alive when they become adults, because of climate change. If I were one of those kids, I would be out there screaming on the streets as well, saying we have to bulldoze all the power plants. Fortunately, it turns out that’s untrue.
O’Neill: I can’t remember the last time I heard a political figure or environmental campaigner describe global warming in cool-headed terms as a manageable issue. What do you think tipped us over the edge into seeing climate change as something more akin to the asteroid heading towards Earth?
Lomborg: Firstly, it’s important to emphasize why this is a manageable problem. Let’s think about sea levels some more. Sea levels will, in the worst-case scenario, rise by close to a meter by the end of the century. One model says that 187 million people are going to get flooded.
The reality, of course, is that they will have to move – this is not going to happen overnight. But people have assumed that we are going to do nothing over the next 80 years, and mass drowning will be the consequence.
We have to think about reasonable adaptation. Adaptation improves as you get richer. We will have higher dikes simply because we will have more money. If you assume that, what the models find is that instead of 187 million people being flooded, it will be 15,000 people, which is actually orders of magnitude less than the three million people who already get flooded every year around the world. How is that possible? Because we know how to use protective measures incredibly cheaply.
To give you a sense of the cost, we will actually have to triple our costs on dikes from $11 billion dollars to about $36 billion. And we will also see more damage. That’s mostly because there’ll be much more stuff to damage.
But because our economy is also going to be much, much bigger, we will actually go from a situation where we lose 0.05 percent of our GDP globally to flooding, to losing 0.008 percent. Nobody tells you that: based on realistic assumptions about adaptation, there will be fewer people suffering from flooding.
In fact, the total cost of global warming by the end of the century will probably be in the order of three to four percent of global GDP. That’s what I mean by a manageable number. It’s not zero, but it is certainly not 100.
And by then, the UN estimates, we will be drastically richer than we are today, so the proportionate impact will be reduced substantially.
Read rest at Spiked Online
Hey Bjorn… I have a question for you.
If I have a tub of dry ice [about 100% CO2], and put my beverages in it at the family picnic.
The CO2 is like the atmosphere, and my beverage is like planet Earth.
Does the CO2 trap the heat from my beverage and back radiate it to make my beverage hotter?
NO… of course not. That is absurd.
Likewise it is absurd that CO2 in the atmosphere is going to “trap” heat and back radiate it causing global warming.
CO2 is a coolant.
It’s disappointing that Lomborg’s generally rational and well-founded perspective is contaminated with the unfounded belief that the increase in CO2 is causing warming and that there could be 3 or more degrees of warming in the next 80 years. Arguing that there is a problem seriously weakens his stance, even as he insists that it’s manageable. I’m saddened when I contemplate Lomborg’s views.
Bjorn Lomborg is wrong when he says “Climate Change Is A Manageable Problem.” The reality is climate change isn’t a problem at all. The climate model that most closely matches real world data, INMCM5 (The Russian Model) predicts warming of 1.4 degrees by 2100. Consider this in light that the UN goal is 1.5 degrees. Those numbers use a base line of early dates. The CCD editor noted that Satellite observations show warming at 0.14°C per decade. Starting from today 0.14°C per decade calculates to 1.11°C.
The climate model used to create the “climate emergency” is RCP 8.5. Is does not match real world data and is based on wild assumptions such as a five fold increase in coal usage. However, its predictions are very useful for promoting extreme political action.
Lomborg also assumed that sea level rise of a meter by 2100 was manageable. It doesn’t have to be managed because it won’t happen. An alarmist over estimation of sea level rise puts it a 10.3 inches by 2100. One third of that is more likely.
The entire climate change movement is based on the assumption that carbon dioxide causes warming. This has always been an unproven assumption contrary to real world data. One of the most compelling is that 40% of the warming blamed on man occurred between 1910 and 1941 when the carbon dioxide levels were relatively low and raising very slowly.
As I have said many times, the real threat we face is the climate change movement. It has cased deaths from fuel poverty, blackouts, job loss, and promises to harm the middle class and families and those of less means with higher energy costs. It also threatens to make owning a car something that only the upper classes and afford.
The climate is not a problem, irrational and unsceintific beliefs are being created to exploit people, includinng ignorant political con men. The observed cycle is at, or close to, a cyclic maximum. It should show a cooling trend soon – if El Ninos don’t extend the warm maximum. This is a clearly observed cycle that delivered the Minoan maximum at 2 deg warmer than now, Roman at 1 deg Warmer and even the warm maximum of the Viking/Mongol Empires decining to the LIA, to rise again to the industrialised era.
If the massive inertia of the Orbitally driven planetary system doesn’t repeat the natural short term planetary cycles of Millions of years it will have stopped for no apparent reason. Why would it?
This is lot less likely than the world becoming uninhabitable for people because the Earth achieves the temperatures we know the Minoans enjoyed, never mind the Hippos in Honiton of the warmer still LIG only 135,000 years ago. Why does nobody point out what we now know has happened in the recent human past of this short warm interglacial and is ipso facto normal.? (Ans. because it doesn’t fit the easy money making narrative that no one could prove or disprove when the bogus claim of climate change by people was invented for other purposes by the UN). We can prove this with evidence now. The AGW threat is simply not observed over what change is natural. WE should. This why Michael Mann is paid to prove cyclic change doesn’t happen, BTW, using the predictions of models he programms, not theory and observation. There is no evidence that support his and UN IPCC models, except the Russian, but rather denies them.
Evidence? Check out any polar ice core. 2 degrees up and down every few hundred years, as regular as clockwork, clearly superimposed on the ice age cycle. Never exceeding their narrow 2 deg range and under very strong natural control(from the oceans). Just a well recorded fact of climate life that activists hi jacked the warm phase of for other purposes. Fading now…….fading. Probably.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lp8zqtvs1fz7ulz/GISP2%20REality%20%282%7D.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h7qvbhowkniu9x3/NGRIP%2010Ka%20d18O.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6h22clkyzovgp8a/EDC%20IG%20Data.pdf?dl=0
Good grief. Climate change is only a problem for those who can’t or won’t adapt to change. Years ago, as the seas rose, the natives just picked up their huts and moved them inland. And then when the seas lowered again, they moved their huts closer to the receding shoreline. The big problem is letting dead people vote … https://newtube.app/user/RAOB/ive3VdA