The Lomborg Deception: About Yesterday's Front-Page Story in the Guardian

Howard Friel's most recent book is The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straigh about Global Warming (Yale University Press, 2010)

Yesterday, London's Guardian
newspaper, an important paper with some of the West's best journalists,
including Johann Hari, Suzanne Goldenberg, George Monbiot, and Chris
McGreal, printed a front-page feature article about a new book on
climate change edited by Bjorn Lomborg, which mistakenly depicted him as
a converted climate change activist.

The
article began: "The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is
to declare that global warming is 'undoubtedly one of the chief
concerns facing the world today' and 'a challenge humanity must
confront,' in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the
embattled environmental lobby."

The
article then quoted Lomborg as follows: "Investing $100 billion
annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change
problem by the end of this century." In an accompanying interview, the Guardian described Lomborg as "the dissenting climate change voice who changed his tune."

Has
Lomborg really changed his tune? To answer this question, one would
have to know the original tune, and listen to this new one with a more
finely tuned ear. Unfortunately, the Guardian appears to have been misled by what Lomborg says in his soon-to-be published edited volume, Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Costs and Benefits.

In
the Introduction to this new book, Lomborg wrote "it is vital to
emphasize the consensus on the most important scientific questions"
about global warming, and "we have long moved on from any mainstream
disagreements about the science of climate change." This indeed is a
departure from Lomborg's previous characterizations of consensus climate
science, when in 2001 in The Skeptical Environmentalist he
mocked the "dire" assessments by scientists and environmentalists about
the threat of global warming, and in 2007 advised the world to "chill
out" about climate change, and to "Cool It"-the title of his book that
year-wherein he argued that man-made warming was "no catastrophe," and
there was little need to reduce CO2 emissions.

Three
years later, and six months after the publication of a book that
exposed his serial misrepresentations of climate science, Lomborg writes
that we should no longer argue about climate science. That concession
is thus more convenience than conversion. And Lomborg's climate
endgame-his opposition to reducing CO2 emissions-remains intact.

In
his Conclusion to this new book, Lomborg writes: "Drastic carbon cuts
would be the poorest way to respond to global warming"; "It is
unfortunate that so many policy makers and [climate] campaigners have
become fixated on cutting carbon in the near term as the chief response
to global warming"; "It is easier to understand why a single-minded
focus on drastic carbon emissions reductions has failed to work"; and
"Kyoto has shown the futility of betting everything on rapid cuts in
carbon emissions to very specific targets and timetables." Thus, the Guardian
did not serve its readers well by reporting that Lomborg is a newly
minted climate activist who wants to spend $100 billion annually to
"tackle climate change," without making it clear that he is still
opposed to reducing CO2 emissions.

Contrary
to what Lomborg says, reducing CO2 emissions is essential as a policy
response to climate change because it is the most dangerous and
pernicious greenhouse gas. And there is abundant evidence that ignoring
CO2 reductions as a response to climate change would be catastrophic

In
February 2009, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
reported that warming due to CO2 atmospheric concentrations is likely
"irreversible" for a thousand years after emissions stop, that CO2
increases this century will "lock in" sea level rise for the next
thousand years, and that a peak in CO2 atmospheric concentrations of 450
parts per million to 600 ppm would likely lead to "dust bowl" droughts
in southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern United States, and
western Australia. (Solomon, et al., "Irreversible Climate Change Due to
Carbon Dioxide Emissions," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 106, no. 6, February 10, 2009.)

We
are currently at a CO2 concentration of about 390 ppm. In January 2009,
the M.I.T. Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change
projected a median CO2 concentration "without policy"-which essentially
means without effective CO2 emissions reductions-of 860 ppm by year
2100. (Sokolov, et al., "Probabilistic Forecast for 21^st
Century climate Based on Uncertainties in Emissions [without policy] and
Climate Parameters," M.I.T. Joint Program, report no. 169, January
2009.)

An
atmospheric concentration of 860 ppm by year 2100 without doubt would
be a catastrophic outcome. Note in comparison, however, that Lomborg
claims in his new book that his approach, which rejects a focus on CO2
reductions, "could essentially solve the climate change problem by the
end of this century."

In
November 2009, the Copenhagen Diagnosis, which consists of more than
two dozen IPCC scientists, most lead authors, reported that the 2008 CO2
atmospheric concentration of 385 ppm-not 860 ppm but 385 ppm-was higher
than any time in the last 800,000 years, potentially higher than the
last 3 to 20 million years, and that CO2 emissions were tracking
worst-case emissions scenarios. It also reported that summer melting of
Arctic sea ice has exceeded the worst-case projections of the 2007 IPCC
assessment report, that global ocean surface temperatures were the
warmest ever recorded for each of June, July, and August 2009, and that
the Greenland ice sheet "may be nearing a tipping point where it is
committed to shrink" with low reversibility. About the Amazon
Rainforest, it reported: "If anthropogenic-forced [man-made] lengthening
of the dry season continues, and droughts increase in frequency or
severity, the system could reach a tipping point resulting in dieback of
up to about 80% of the rainforest." ("The Copenhagen Diagnosis:
Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science," Climate Change
Research Center, The University of New South Wales, November 2009.)

In
April 2008, a team of climate scientists led by James Hansen reported
that to "preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization
developed and to which life on Earth is adapted ... CO2 will need to be
reduced from its current 385 ppm [per 2008] to at most 350 ppm," and
that "if the present overshoot of this CO2 target is not brief, there is
a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects." (Hansen,
et al., "Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?" Open Atmospheric Science Journal, April 7, 2008 )

Despite
all this and more not mentioned here about the certain catastrophic
impacts of neglecting to reduce CO2 emissions, and despite his claims to
have no further quarrels with climate science, Lomborg still argues, as
he has over the past decade, that it is bad policy to focus on reducing
CO2 emissions. While doing much over the last decade to assist the
right-wing and industry-backed campaigns against global warming and CO2
reductions, Lomborg argues today that reducing CO2 is bad policy because
it has not worked in the past. This goes beyond mere cynicism.

While
spanning the globe for "smart solutions" to climate change and to
improve the human condition, Lomborg ignores an obvious major source of
human suffering, economic deprivation, human rights violations, and vast
amounts of wasted money-that is, perpetual war and global military
spending-which now totals approximately $1.5 trillion per year. While
Lomborg argues on cost-benefit grounds, by citing a select group of
climate economists, that it is too expensive for the world's economies
to reduce CO2 emissions, he voices no opposition to the state of
perpetual global war and sky-high military expenditures.

Lomborg
is not a responsible climate commentator, and it would be good if
responsible news organizations finally figured that out.