Articles by Joseph Romm

Desertification amplifies climate change, and vice versa

Here is yet another carbon-cycle amplifying feedback not in most climate models.

On the one hand, the United Nations' top climate official, Yvo de Boer, announced that:

Climate change has become the prime cause of an accelerating spread of deserts which threatens the world's drylands.

On the other hand, he pointed out that desertification would, in turn, accelerate climate change:

You'll see a sort of feedback mechanism ... quite a lot of carbon is captured in soil, so with more desertification (exposing the soil), you also get more CO2 emissions. They are two halves of the same coin.

Well, two sides of the same coin, anyway. But we get his point. He was interviewed at a U.N. desertification conference in Madrid. What's coming?

Debating Bjorn Lomborg on global warming

I taped a debate with Lomborg today on a Denver radio station. I'll post a link when it will be broadcast on the Internet. I'll be interested to hear your reactions.

I have long thought it is pretty much impossible to win a one-on-one debate on climate change with anybody who knows what they're doing -- who knows the literature and is willing to make statements that are not really true but can't be quickly disproved. After all, the audience is not in a position to adjudicate scientific and technological issues, so it just comes down to who sounds more persuasive. And Lomborg is quite good at sounding reasonable -- he doesn't deny the reality of climate change, only its seriousness.

Lomborg is more of what I term a delayer -- the clever person's denier. Lomborg is especially persuasive because he is so clearly concerned about reducing suffering and death in the Third World.

Harvard economist disses most climate cost-benefit analyses

Harvard economist Martin Weitzman has a new paper in which he points out that the vast majority of conventional economic analyses of climate change should carry the following label:

WARNING: to be used ONLY for cost-benefit analysis of non-extreme climate change possibilities. NOT INTENDED to cover welfare evaluation of extreme tail possibilities, for which a complete accounting might produce ARBITRARILY DIFFERENT welfare outcomes.

In short, if you don't factor in plausible worst-case scenarios -- and the vast majority of economic analyses don't (this means you, William Nordhaus, and you, too, Bjørn Lomborg) -- your analysis is useless. Pretty strong stuff for a Harvard economist!

Advice for political leaders on how to deal with climate change

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

I'd like to propose a few new rules our political leaders might keep in mind as they figure out their role in addressing global climate change.