Bjorn Lomborg
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The Obama's climate dream team, new sea-level rise, less arctic ice volume, and more
What events, actions, and findings had the most positive or negative impact on the likelihood that the nation and the world will act in time to avoid catastrophic warming?
Since the No. 1 story is way too obvious to generate any drama, I will start there and then go back and count down from No. 10 to No. 2.
1. Team without rivals. A year ago, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, desperately warned, "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." That means the next president and his cabinet, more than any other group, will determine my future and your future and our children's future, and perhaps the future of the next 50 generations to walk the earth. Fortunately, the American people rejected the old greenwasher and new denier nominated by the Drill, baby, Drill crowd -- and now we will be led by the greenest, most scientifically informed, radical pragmatists in the history of the Republic:
- Obama: "The science is beyond dispute ... Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response."
- Why Biden is such an important pick for those who care about the climate
- SOS trumps NSA (Hillary Clinton trumps Gen. Jones)
- Carol Browner to oversee energy and climate at the White House
- Top Five reasons Chu is a great energy pick -- No. 1: "It's not guaranteed we have a solution for coal"
- Obama picks a green jobs leader for labor secretary: Hilda Solis
- The first green secretary of commerce
- For NOAA head, Obama appoints yet another scientist who gets climate
- Obama's strongest message on climate yet: John Holdren to be named science adviser
Back to the countdown:
10. Gas pains. As NOAA reported, levels of methane rose sharply in 2007 for the first time since 1998. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, especially over the near term. And the tundra has as much carbon locked away in it as the atmosphere contains today. Scientific analysis suggests the rise in 2007 methane levels came from Arctic wetlands. The tundra melting is probably the most worrisome of all the climate-carbon-cycle amplifying feedbacks -- and it could easily take us to the unmitigated catastrophe of 1,000 ppm. Though you should also worry that the methane might be coming from the underwater permafrost, which is also thawing and releasing methane. Or from the drying of the Northern peatlands (bogs, moors, and mires). If methane rises again in 2008 -- and NASA reported another brutally hot year for the Siberian tundra -- then that will probably be among the top three global warming stories of 2008.
9. The thrilla in vanilla. OK, it wasn't Ali-Frazier, but Henry Waxman's smackdown of John Dingell for chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was high drama with high consequences. Finally, we have a champion of serious action and strong regulation, someone who gets the dire nature of global warming, in charge of the crucial committee for climate and energy.
8. Ice, ice maybe not. Everywhere scientists look, ice is disappearing:
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Finally, Roger Pielke Jr. admits he supports policies that will take us to 5-7°C warming
Roger Pielke, Jr. is usually very hard to pin down. But at least it is now plain for everyone to see that his climate policies are no different from Bjorn Lomborg’s, or George Bush’s for that matter (see Bush climate speech follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah”). Following Pielke’s “specific policies” would inevitably […]
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Pielke, Tierney, Lomborg, and CEI diss Obama science adviser
[Please post your response to Tierney’s column here.] Science advisor pick John Holdren gets global warming. Although he is wildly overqualified for the job compared to anybody a GOP President has named in recent memory — heck, Holdren was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science — the deniers and delayers have […]
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The AP’s climate conference footprint fetish
“The AP writer couldn’t see the forest for the trees.” — Terry Tamminen “The fact is, we live in a glass house today, folks, and sometimes we become part of the story whether we want to be or not.” — Lex Alexander What a difference vision makes. Last week, CJR Observatory’s Cristine Russell wrote about […]
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Review of climate change impact economics
Paul Krugman has a blog post about one of my favorite economists, Marty Weitzman. He has the central point right, which is that “on any sort of expected-welfare calculation, the small probability of catastrophe dominates the expected loss.” But Krugman’s general lack of understanding of global warming — and his willingness to believe anything Bjørn […]
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His argument is still bogus
The Washington Post embarrasses itself today by publishing the usual delayer drivel in an op-ed by Bjorn Lomborg.
The fundamental problem with Lomborg's argument (which he also makes in his recent book Cool It!) is that it is based on the assumption that the worst-case, climate-change scenario cannot happen.
The IPCC's predictions for climate change over the next hundred years range from about 2°C to 5°C. If you assume that the warming will be closer to 2° than 5°, which Lomborg does, then it certainly does reduce the pressure to act immediately on climate change. No doubt about that.
However, there is no scientific basis for that assumption. Future warming certainly could be closer to 2°, but it could equally likely be close to 5°. We just don't know.
Why does he make this assumption? Because there is a conclusion he wants to reach: We should not be taking action on climate change. The only way you can reach that conclusion is by assuming that future climate change will be mild.
This argument is bogus. Don't believe it.
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Lomborg does his shtick
God knows why, but they invited Bjorn Lomborg for a short one-on-one interview. Somewhat embarrassingly for Fortune, they got about a third of the crowd that’s come to most other sessions. Apparently people are tired of his shtick. For some reason, Adam Lashinsky from Fortune is kissing Lomborg’s ass, asking him to “challenge our cozy […]
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We’ve run out of time to wait for an unknown techno-fix to save us
Andy Revkin wrote in The New York Times last weekend about what I believe is the climate debate of the decade.
This post will serve as an introduction to this crucial topic for readers new and old. I will devote many posts this week to laying out the "solution" to global warming, and a few to debunking the "technology breakthrough" crowd.
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Please stop calling them ‘skeptics’
What name can we possibly use for the people who are working feverishly to convince the public to ignore the broad scientific understanding of global warming and delay taking serious action, action needed to avert a very grim fate for our children, their children, and so on?
I suspect future generations will call them "climate destroyers" or worse, since if we actually (continue to) listen to them, that pretty much ensures carbon-dioxide concentrations will hit catastrophic levels -- 700 to 1000 -- this century, as explained in part two. But what should we call these people in the meantime, while we still have time to ignore them and save the climate?
In this post I will explain why "skeptics" is certainly the wrong term, discuss why the current favorite among advocates (including me) -- "deniers" -- doesn't work (except maybe in headlines), and offer a new alternative. (Tomorrow I'll give you the reaction of a genuine skeptic to the new alternative.) For now let's call them "delayers," since that is their primary, unifying goal -- delaying action. As the NYT's Revkin explained about the recent skeptic denier-delayer conference in New York, "The one thing all the attendees seem to share is a deep dislike for mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gases." What unites these people is their desire to delay or stop action to cut GHGs, not any one particular view on the climate.