Bjorn Again
Tim Cavanaugh | February 4, 2005, 8:02pm
The San Francisco Examiner gives a two-page Q&A to Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Sample:
Q: There are advantages to global warming?
A: Absolutely. I come from Denmark, and there it's pretty cold. The environmental assessment of the impact of global warming in Denmark is that overall it will be slightly positive. We'll have better agricultural production. We'll probably have better forestry. We will, however, also have more flash rain. That will be a negative.
One of the most typical examples we're told is that people will die from heat waves from global warming. That's true. People will die from heat waves. What you really seem to forget is in most advanced countries, the cold deaths outweigh heat deaths two-to-one.
And of course while you will get more heat deaths, you will also get many fewer cold deaths, and actually a research team looking at the cold and heat deaths around Europe estimated that for Britain global warming will mean 18,000 fewer deaths.
Ron Bailey gave a thumbs-up review to The Skeptical Environmentalist, and took a look at the attacks on Lomborg that followed. When Denmark's "Committees on Scientific Dishonesty" pronounced anathema on Lomborg, Chuck Freund was there with his bell, book, and candle. And of course, that Lomborg is getting a forum right in the City of Saint Francis suggests my own vision of a conservative San Francisco may already be coming true.
Jim S | February 4, 2005, 10:23pm | #
The issue of Science magazine that jawbreaker quotes is 7 years old. The level of knowledge changes. In addition it is a selective quote to make the nay-sayers feel good, completely ignoring many other negative consequences that the author considers to be fairly likely. Allow me to point out some other items in the article.
Virtually Certain "Facts"
These key aspects of our knowledge of the climate system do not depend directly on the skill of climate model simulations and projections:
Atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases are increasing because of human activities.
Greenhouse gases absorb and re-radiate infrared radiation efficiently. This property acts directly to heat the planet.
Altered amounts of greenhouse gases affect the climate for many centuries. The major greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for periods ranging from a decade to centuries. Also, the climate itself has considerable inertia, mainly because of the high heat capacity of the world ocean.
Changes in other radiatively active substances offset somewhat the warming effect of increased greenhouse gases. Observed decreases in lower stratospheric ozone and increases in sulfate particles both produce cooling effects. The cooling effect of sulfate particles remains insufficiently quantified.
Human-caused CO2 increases and ozone decreases in the stratosphere have already produced more than a 1oC global average cooling there. This stratospheric cooling is generally consistent with model predictions.
Over the past century, Earth's surface has warmed by about 0.5oC (±0.2oC).
Virtually Certain Projections
These projections have a greater than 99 out of 100 chance of being true within the predicted range (6):
The stratosphere will continue to cool significantly as CO2 increases. If ozone continues to decrease, the cooling will be magnified. There is no known mechanism to prevent the global mean cooling of the stratosphere under these scenarios.
Global mean amounts of water vapor will increase in the lower troposphere (0 to 3 km) in approximately exponential proportion (roughly 6% per 1oC of warming) to the global mean temperature change. The typical relative humidities would probably change substantially less, in percentage terms, than would water vapor concentrations.
Very Probable Projections
These projections have a greater than 9 out of 10 chance of being true within the predicted range:
The global warming observed over the past century is generally consistent with a posteriori model projections of expected greenhouse warming, if a reasonable sulfate particle offset is included. It is difficult, but not impossible, to construct conceivable alternate hypotheses to explain this observed warming. Using variations in solar output or in natural climate to explain the observed warming can be appealing, but both have serious logical inconsistencies.
A doubling of atmospheric CO2 over preindustrial levels is projected to lead to an equilibrium global warming in the range of 1.5o to 4.5oC. These generous uncertainty brackets reflect remaining limitations in modeling the radiative feedbacks of clouds, details of the changed amounts of water vapor in the upper troposphere (5 to 10 km), and responses of sea ice. In effect, this means that there is roughly a 10% chance that the actual equilibrium warming caused by doubled atmospheric CO2 levels could be lower than 1.5oC or higher than 4.5oC. For the answer to lie outside these bounds, we would have to discover a substantial surprise beyond our current understanding.
...
Probable Projections
The following have a greater than two out of three chance of being true:
Model studies project eventual marked decreases in soil moisture in response to increases in summer temperatures over northern mid-latitude continents. This result remains somewhat sensitive to the details of predicted spring and summer precipitation, as well as to model assumptions about land surface processes and the offsetting effects of airborne sulfate particles in those regions.
Climate models imply that the circum-Antarctic ocean region is substantially resistant to warming, and thus little change in sea-ice cover is predicted to occur there, at least over the next century or two.
The projected precipitation increases at higher latitudes act to reduce the ocean's salinity and thus its density. This effect inhibits the tendency of the water to sink, thus suppressing the overturning circulation.
Very recent research (7) suggests that tropical storms, once formed, might tend to become more intense in the warmer ocean, at least in circumstances where weather and geographical (for example, no landfall) conditions permit.
titus | February 5, 2005, 5:47pm | #
And joe,
Can you promise me the earth won't take a turn for the colder, making us wish we had driven our SUVs more frequently?
Global warming is a prediction. What are the odds for these possibilities:
1. We do not implement your solutions (kyoto, etc) and the world gets hot as hell, mass disaster ensues
2. We do not implement your solutions, and nothing drastic happens (same shit, different day)
3. We do not implement your solutions, and the world has another ice age (to which we would say, "damn! good thing we didn't sign the kyoto thing - it's cold enough!)
4. We DO implement your solutions, but it gets hot as hell anyway and disaster ensues
5. We DO implement your solutions, and we maintain a static, harmonic relationship with gaia and, to paraphrase Tenacious D, "no more pollution - we'll all travel in TUBES! (tube technology)"
6. We DO implement your solutions, and the tempurature plummets and disaster ensues
7. While putting all of our resources into efforts to control the weather, we all die from AIDS/Malaria/starvation/???
If you could get back to me with those odds, and the odds of other possibilities I surely missed, I'd appreciate it.
drf | February 5, 2005, 11:14pm | #
this lost me at the first fucking sentence:
the dude claims it's "cold" in denmark. i lived there. for five long years. i've lived in philadelphia (one year), cleveland, and am in chicago. copenhagen, odensee, aarhus, toender - those cities are new york/ philly/ dc cold no big deal. not cold at all. a few chilly mornings, but not at all cold. not like montreal or something.... not chicago or cleveland or milwaukee cold even, not to mention minneapolis or anything.
summers are like at the soo: try being in the northern adirondacks or in maine or in the cascades or in norhtern mi or mn or wi. sorry. he can fuck himself with those comments.
hint #1: if you want to be credible in an argument, stick to the facts. i lived there. what he says about it being "cold" there is utter bullshit.
hint two: remember the rules:
"First rule is: The laws of Germany
Second rule is: Be nice to mommy
Third rule is: Don't talk to commies
Fourth rule is: Eat kosher salamis. "
i don't think bh is a problematic figure, but his claim, furthering the myth that denmark is "cold" is bullshit. if his research is anything like that claim, i'd say you could throw his research along with that old "skiderik" bjorn out the window.
huskermet | February 6, 2005, 3:20am | #
Several things strike me...
Weren't all of the greenies who are now predicting doom the same ones bitching about the expansion of nuclear power generation in the late 70s and 80s?
Also, whether or not man-made contributions to CO2 are going to cause global warming, they are certainly not a positive thing. Having said that, unless someone comes up with an alternative to petroleum-based power and transportation, it's not going to improve.
Kyoto was bad news not only because it would have hamstrung the U.S. economy. What Kyoto puts in place will hamstring emerging economies well into the future. When the good and noble Americans and Europeans eventually move to hydrogen, there will still be lots of little, poor countries (not to mention biggies like China and India) left on the petroleum teat.
Given the choice between breaking Kyoto and continuing to expand (thereby heading off starvation and civil unrest) or being good global citizens, the choice will be to go for the growth. That in turn will put the good and noble Americans and Europeans in the position of enforcing Kyoto. War for oil in another context.
Finally, in between naps as an undergrad, I seem to recall being told that the earth used to be a lot warmer, and during that period carried as many or more species as today. And so natural selection marches on.
Be it asteroid, super germs, or global warming, something will eventually get us. So until there is conclusive evidence of global warming, why not spend all that money on problems we know we have, rather than ones we think we will have?
thoreau | February 6, 2005, 12:36pm | #
I think that Huskermet hits the nail on the head when he says that new energy sources are the only solution. And while regulation might be able to speed up the transition
somewhat (
not saying that it should, just that it could), regulation would be pointless until a clean and cost effective alternative emerges. At which point regulation will be nothing more than a very slight accelerant on a trend created by innovation.
Also, regardless of what one thinks about global warming, there are other very good reasons to transition away from petroleum in the long term.
So it all comes down to a need for innovation. To me, the green future will probably be a combination of:'
1) Solar and nuclear power for electricity (that's right, I said the n-word).
2) Biodiesel for vehicles.
3) Hydroelectric will no doubt continue to play an important role in the economy, and various other renewables like wind may play a role in locales suited to the task.
4) Some day, superconductivity may vastly improve the efficiency of the grid, reducing the power losses in transmission, but that day is far off.
The problem with hydrogen is that you need to get the energy to generate it from somewhere. And once you have it, you need a distribution infrastructure. Biodiesel (diesel made from plants) doesn't add any new CO2 to the atmosphere (the CO2 released upon burning was originally taken out of the atmosphere to grow the plants, so it's carbon-neutral). In terms of distribution networks, the networks used to distribute gasoline could be reconfigured to biodiesel with minimal adjustments, whereas hydrogen would be a drastic change.
Gary Gunnels | February 6, 2005, 8:56pm | #
Jim S.,
I can read, but you apparently can't comprehend the statements of others. I haven't written a word about you accusing me being on the take (if I have, do point it out). I have written comments where I responded to your accusations regarding character of others however.
Note that you claimed that members of the aforementioned organization weren't climatologists. When I responded with a question about their presence at ASU as climatologists you shut your trap about the issue.
If twenty years from now the average global temperature was still clearly increasing and the Arctic ice had melted by over 10% more while solar activity had declined and we were in an unprecedented period of low volcanic activity you still would choose to ignore any arguments in favor of anthropogenic contribution to global warming.
I haven't chosen to ignore any arguments. I wrote that I am a skeptic (indeed I've stated this many times over I believe). You on the other hand are a true believer, you can't be dissuaded from your opinions, whereas I can be.
Yes, existing power plants should have to install scrubbers.
Existing plants already have scrubbers on them for a variety of agents. Scrubbers for carbon eradication aren't a solution (any scrubbing system would be quickly overwhelmed by the volume of carbon involved - duh). That's why carbon sequestration is the optimal choice for coal-fired power plants.
The planting of trees or any plants that would help absorb carbon dioxide should be encouraged.
Trees and plants are relatively poor carbon sinks. However, such proposals do smack of the sorts of things one hears from the lefty environmentalist crowd.
More research on safe methods of nuclear fission including how to deal with the waste should be done.
Nuclear fission by itself is relatively safe. I'm curious how many more hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars you want to spend researching nuclear waste disposal issues? Is the $300-400 billion we've (meaning the U.S. alone) already spent on the issue not enough (in all honesty, how deep of a blackhole we have here is unknown due to rather slapshod accounting procedures)? IMHO, the nuclear power industry needs to carry its own weight and stop depending on the government teat.
Nuclear fusion research should get more funding.
Than the billions it already has? One thing nuclear fusion geeks always say is that they need more money. Its only ten years off they promise. :)
Wind power farms and other energy generation methods that don't get that much publicity should also be encouraged.
They get plenty of publicity, especially from the lefty environmental crowd. They are going to be minor parts of any energy portfolio.
How many have even heard of tidal power systems or ocean temperature power systems that use the temperature differential between surface water and deep water to help power turbines?
I have. Tidal power systems are used in a number of places around the world (indeed, the use of tidal power stretches back to at least medeival Europe).
I think the people who are dismissive of any environmental concerns...
Who would that be? Not I. You like to paint people as they are not I see. You like to lie in other words.
BTW, regarding you comments to Isaac, you do know that he was responding to joe's comments, right? Oh wait, you're the idiot who can't comprehend what others write. :) BTW, do you have any actual evidence that the climatologists in question have colored their views based on their affiliation? Or is it simply the fact that they came to their conclusions independently, and the organization in question hired them because of their views?
I also note that instead of discussing Isaac's points about the statements of members of the IPCC you chose to attack him personally and ignore these important cogent points.
thoreau,
In principle I have no problem with nuclear power. However, given the industry's dependence on government handouts, etc., I'm skeptical of its overall economic viability in the short run.
