Climate Change

The "Global Warming Debate" is now more vigorous than ever, following the publication of Bjorn Lomborg's best-seller

(The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0 521 01068 3, paperback, £17.95)

This is the title of a book  which has  seriously got up the nose of the 'green' movement. The author is an Associate Professor of  Statistics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark and its theme is the 'litany' of environmental disasters predicted by such organisations as the Worldwatch Institute, World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. His approach is to trawl painstakingly through the statistics gathered by the United Nations, International Labour Organisation, World Health Organisation, World Bank and others and see whether the predicted disasters, in terms of population explosion, acid rain, depletion of resources, global warming and others are actually happening or are likely to happen.

Lomborg's use of the word 'litany' is carefully chosen and is normally used in a religious context to denote the recitation of list of beliefs, a sort of mantra that is chanted by believers to reinforce a set of doctrines, or holy writ, which must all be accepted by all. . The Scientific American, a popular science journal, brought in four scientists to criticise the book. Lomborg was heckled and booed at a book signing in Oxford and was hit in the face with a cream pie by an environmentalist.

All of which make people want to read the book and in fact it has become No 1. best-seller in America in the Environment category. Maybe  Lomborg is just querying the possibility that the Emperor has no clothes. Incidentally, the scientist invited by Scientific American to cover the Global Warming part of the book  was one Stephen Schneider, who famously said in an article (Discover Magazine October 1989):

"Scientists should consider stretching the truth to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention about any doubts we may have.... Each of us has to decide what is the right balance between being effective and being honest."

With people like Schneider against him Lomborg deserves a hearing. He does have a lot to say about global warming, and a bit about windfarms (he is a Dane after all). He is actually somewhat uncritical about the science underlying the stance of the Intercontinental Panel on Climate Change, leaving it to the IPCC itself to point out that they had found no new science since 1990, and that 75% of the science of climate change is poorly understood. His main attack is on the climate models that are used, and particularly on the choice of 'scenarios' which get picked up by spin doctors so that, for example, a  worst-case  scenario of an increase in global temperature of 5.8 degrees C by the end of this century comes out of Tony Blair's mouth as "scientists tell us that the temperature is likely to rise by as much as 6 degrees C by the end of the century". In fact they said it is most unlikely.

However, the key point that Lomborg makes is that, whatever you think is going to happen, much of it will be beneficial,  some of will be bad for some groups of people. If you decide to try to reverse all the change, by cutting CO2 emissions back to some fixed level, it will cost a vast amount, which has been calculated by the IPCC at about 5 trillion dollars ($5,000,000,000,000). This is five times the US Annual Budget. For that sort of money you could supply all the third world poor with clean drinking water, or primary education, or health services, or clear their debts and provide flood defences, agricultural assistance etc to mitigate unwanted side-effects.

The fundamental point is that no-one is actually making that decision; because of the "scary scenarios, simplified, dramatic scenarios" there is a stampede in one direction - cutting emissions.

In a review of the book in New Scientist (22 Sept 2001) David Pearce, professor of environmental economics at University College London, points out ".. Lomborg has identified a basic truth of economics that moralists often ignore: you can't spend money twice. Money is not just money, it is hospitals and schools, water and clean air. Just as compelling is the fact that the Kyoto Protocol, even if the US had signed it, will postpone reaching the predicted warming levels for 2100 by only 6 years if we spend the estimated $5 trillion now. Lomborg's view is that it's far better to invest in adaptation than pretend we can hold back global warming"

On windfarms Lomborg is a bit uncritical, in fact the development of renewable energy is part of his argument that 'things are getting better anyway'. He does say they are likely to be unacceptable in the open countryside, but seems poorly informed of the severe limits to growth related to electricity distribution, unreliability, and the problems which have hit his native Denmark. However his second edition will no doubt remedy this.

The book consists of 505 pages, of which 352 are main text and 153 are references (3930 notes and a bibliography of 75 pages). The first chapter is available on Lomborg's website www.lomborg.org.

What this book has done is to create a focus or rallying point for those sceptics who might well agree that we need to take more care with the environment (who doesn't?) but   are not prepared to accept the philosophy exemplified by Stephen Schneider.

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Climate Science and Policy - Making the Connection

The European Science and Environment Forum - £5 from ESEF, 4 Church Lane, Barton, Cambridge, tel. 01223 264 643

If you don't feel like ploughing through Lomborg's book try the 42 pages of this book. It might be worth starting with the biographies of the people who compiled the book(p41). It is a very compact assessment of the state of the science, the processes and procedures adopted by the IPCC, and in particular the implications for policy of the poorly understood science. The following is the summary of the scientific points that it makes, which might come in useful when faced with windfarm proponents who tell you that there is some sort of scientific consensus about global warming

• While there is general agreement that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations may contribute to warming, there is no agreement that they have been or are the dominant factor;
• The relative rates of temperature rise at the surface and in the lower-to-mid troposphere are inconsistent with the greenhouse warming theory;
• Our current climate models fail lamentably to cope with the behaviour of water vapour (the most important greenhouse gas of all), clouds, aerosols (atmospheric particles), ocean currents, and many other key factors, thus creating significant uncertainties;
• Models which strive to incorporate everything from dust to vegetation may look comprehensive, but the error range associated with each new additional factor results in near total uncertainty;
• The overarching assumption claiming that the models accurately simulate 'natural' variability, including volcanic eruptions, solar cycles and irradiance, is questionable because the range of 'natural' variability is a major unknown;
• When all the known information is taken into account, the IPCC simulation of surface temperature appears to be little more than a fortuitous bit of curve fitting rather than any genuine demonstration of human influence on global climate and climate change; 
• The idea that feedbacks generated by warming will always be positive - thus leading to more warming - is likely to be false; recent work on clouds and moisture clearly indicates the precise opposite, namely a negative feedback. Verification of this finding by further research would make any temperature rise associated with increased concentrations of green house gases much smatter than currently predicted.

The projections of temperature rise to 2100 are uncertain because they depend on model simulations and are subject to the acknowledged limitations on those models. In addition, projections depend on estimates of greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions to 2100, which in turn depend on assumptions about changes in global population, income, energy efficiency and sources of energy in the 21^st century. The levels of these parameters in 2100 are not only unknown, but unknowable within ranges that are relevant for policy making.