There are many speaking out about global warming, scientists, journalists and academics, from all sides of the political spectrum, but Lomborg presents one of the most balanced arguments regarding global warming and how to respond to it.
Chill Out
Bjorn Lomborg provides a calm voice in the heated debate over global warming.
BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Thursday, September 13, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
In this world of Republicans and Democrats, meat-eaters and vegetarians, dog lovers and cat lovers, we have a new divide. On one side are global-warming believers. They've heard Al Gore's inconvenient truths and, along with the staff of Time magazine, feel "worried, very worried." Humanity faces no greater threat than a warming Earth, they say, and government must drastically curb carbon-dioxide emissions. On the other side are those who don't think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, they don't think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn't clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good.
Standing in the practical middle is Bjorn Lomborg, the free-thinking Dane who, in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (2001), challenged the belief that the environment is going to pieces. Mr. Lomborg is now back with "Cool It," a book brimming with useful facts and common sense.
Mr. Lomborg--"liberal, vegetarian, a former member of Greenpeace," as he describes himself--is hard to fit into any pigeonhole. He believes that global warming is happening, that man has caused it, and that national governments need to act. Yet he also believes that Al Gore is bordering on hysteria, that some global-warming science has been distorted and hyped, and that the Kyoto Protocol and other carbon-reduction schemes are a terrible waste of money. The world needs to think more rationally, he says, about how to tackle this challenge.
Mr. Lomborg starts by doing what he does best: presenting a calm analysis of what today's best science tells us about global warming and its risks. Relying primarily on official statistics, he ticks through the many supposed calamities that will result from a hotter planet--extreme hurricanes, flooding rivers, malaria, heat deaths, starvation, water shortages. It turns out that, when these problems are looked at from all sides and stripped of the spin, they aren't as worrisome as global-warming alarmists would suggest. In some cases, they even have an upside.
Take flooding. After the 2002 floods of Prague and Dresden, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder all argued that the floods proved the need for Western governments to commit themselves to Kyoto. Mr. Lomborg agrees that global warming increases precipitation. Yet to the extent that more precipitation has already increased river flows, it has done so largely in the fall, when rivers are at low levels and there is little risk of flood. Truly bad floods have historically accompanied colder climates, since plentiful snow and a late thaw produce ice jams that block rivers and produce high water levels. These sorts of floods have in fact decreased in the 20th century, at least in part because of global warming.
The picture is the same for other "disasters." Yes, sea levels will rise--probably about a foot over this century. But they have already risen a foot since 1860, and the world has coped. Yes, more people will die from heat; but significantly more people will not die from cold. Yes, glaciers will melt, but they'd be melting to some degree in any event, and in the meantime this melting provides extra water for some of the world's poorest people. (The Himalayan glaciers on the Tibetan plateau--the biggest ice mass outside the Antarctic and Greenland--are the source of rivers that reach 40% of the world's population.)
Such a nuanced look at the good and bad of global warming gives Mr. Lomborg a chance to pursue his bigger theme: Anti-warming policies (like those of the Kyoto Protocol) that require energy taxes or other checks on economic dynamism are inefficient and even harmful. They serve as short-term ways of dealing with what is a complex and long-term problem. They cost a lot now and yet do little to reduce global temperatures in 100 years' time.
