Climate Climate & Energy

Lomborg misrepresents possible sea-level rise

Lomborg is a champion cherry-picker when he isn’t just getting his facts wrong, as I argued in Part I. He has a deceptively misleading — and outright erroneous — discussion of sea-level-rise projections in Cool It. Let’s start with a few all-too-typical howlers: Antarctica is generally soaking up more water than Greenland is shedding, as […]

Freelance writer embarks on biodiesel tour of sporting events

Freelance sports writer Joe Connor is embarking this fall on a four-month-long Green Power Sports Tour (holy neon website!), visiting more than 100 football, hockey, and basketball venues — in a biodiesel car, natch. Hey ladies … he’s self-described “very, very single” …

Rates of black lung disease double in a decade

Rates of black lung disease have doubled in the last decade, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The disease, which is caused by inhaling coal dust, now occurs in almost 10 percent of coal miners who work 25 or more years underground, as opposed to about 4 percent a decade ago. […]

A must-read article from Science on the underestimation of climate change impacts

The new issue of Science has a terrific article that underscores many of the points I have been making here. Its central argument is that the scientific consensus most likely underestimates future climate change impacts, especially in the crucial area of sea-level rise and carbon-cycle feedbacks.

The authors are highly credible, led by Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer, one of the most widely published climate experts. I will excerpt the article here at length ($ub. req'd):

Tar sands are the enemy of the planet

Our civilization's addiction to oil is being displayed in all its nefarious glory in the tar sands of Canada. According to Chris Nelder:

What we have here is arguably the most environmentally destructive activity man has ever attempted, with a compliant government, insatiable demand, and an endless supply of capital turning it into "a speeding car with a gas pedal and no brakes." It sucks down critical and rapidly diminishing amounts of both natural gas and water, paying neither for its consumption of natural capital nor its environmental destruction, to the utter detriment of its host. And all to eke out maybe a 10% profit, if it turns out that the books haven't been cooked, and if the taxation structure remains a flat-out giveaway.

Greenpeace recently announced a new campaign against the tar sands, pointing out that "Tar sands produce five times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil, because they are energy-intensive, requiring huge amounts of natural gas to separate and process the bitumen."

As I recently posted, processing tar sands leads to more pollution in the United States. Tar-sand oil production leads to more global warming, is being pursued because of peak oil, and continues the wholesale destruction of ecosystems, as Nelder enumerates:

Lenders believe energy-efficient homeowners are less likely to default on mortgage payments

With all the bad news about mortgages, it is time for some good news: Mortgages that promote energy efficiency are on the rise.

The basic idea is simple. If you make your home more energy efficient, you reduce your monthly energy bill. And that means you have more money to pay your mortgage, and are less likely to default, so lenders are wisely encouraging this:

The Wall Street Journal has a very good article on this:

Global warming brings Greenlanders potatoes, destroys their heritage

It gets lost in all the gloom and doom, but global warming does have its upside. In the sub-Arctic south of Greenland, rising temperatures over the last five to 10 years have brought residents more potatoes, broccoli, and flowers, and have made officials optimistic about economically beneficial opportunities for drilling and mining as sea ice […]

The great polar bear irony

For debunkers, Lomborg's work is a target-rich environment. There is even a Lomborg-errors website, where a Danish biologist catalogs Lomborg's mistakes and "attempts to document his dishonesty." Lomborg's latest work of disinformation, Cool It, isn't out yet in Europe to be debunked, so I'll fill the gap for now.

I will start with polar bears for two reasons. First, the nonironic reason: Lomborg starts his book with a chapter on polar bears, presumably because he thinks it's one of his strongest arguments -- it isn't.

Second, the ironic reason. "Bjorn" means "bear"! Yes, "Bear" Lomborg is misinformed about his namesake. Lomborg himself notes (p. 4):

Paddling across the ice, polar bears are beautiful animals. To Greenland -- part of my own nation, Denmark -- They are a symbol of pride. The loss of this animal would be a tragedy. But the real story of the polar bear is instructive. In many ways, this tale encapsulates the broader problem with the climate-change concern: once you look closely at the supporting data, the narrative falls apart.

Doubly ironic, then, that the polar bear is doomed thanks to people like Bear Lomborg, who urge inaction. Lomborg says (p. 7) polar bears "may eventually decline, though dramatic declines seem unlikely." Uh, no. Even the Bush Administration's own USGS says we'll lose two-thirds of the world's current polar bear population by 2050 in a best-case scenario for Arctic ice.

How will the bears survive the loss of their habitat? No problem, says Lomborg, they will evolve backwards (p. 6):

Human-powered irrigation can increase harvests for farmers

Recently, I wrote about treadle pumps that let human power replace diesel power for irrigation. As a one-to-one replacement it sounded pretty oppressive. But it turns out that it is not a one-to-one replacement.

Poor farmers who only earn a dollar or so, per person per day, can afford to do a lot more irrigation with treadles than they can renting diesel pumps from rich farmers and buying diesel fuel to run it. So they multiply the size of their harvests by two or three, their incomes by even more. Even in a formal efficiency analysis, you are probably increasing rather than decreasing the output per unit of labor. In human terms, you are increasing the amount of fresh vegetables the family can eat, and paying for things like school fees in areas where education is not necessarily completely tax-paid. So you are making life better for the farmers, and even slightly increasing their autonomy from richer neighbors.

Climate change will cause agricultural output to decline significantly, says study

Attention, people who eat: Climate change could cause global agriculture output to decline by up to 16 percent by 2080, according to a new study from the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Like life itself, the allocation won’t be fair: productivity is likely to generally decline in developing countries […]