Today’s Fin (subscription only) has a couple of letters responding to my review of Lomborg’s “Global Crises, Global Solutions
. One from Brent Howard takes the Copenhagen panel to task over their approach to discounting the future costs of global warming. I agree, and will maybe post more on this later. The other, from Rajat Sood, is odd. He doesn’t address the main review at all, focusing instead on my summary of The Sceptical Environmentalist. Sood denies my initial claim that Lomborg did not argue that the scientific evidence on global warming was wrong, focusing instead on the idea that it would be better to spend money on aid projects. (full letter over the fold) I expected the review to be attacked from various directions, but this one surprised me.
In response, I can’t do much better than quote Lomborg himself
Let us agree that human activity is changing our climate and that global warming will have serious, negative impacts. Nonetheless, all the information from the UN climate panel, the IPCC, tells us that it will not end civilisation … The end-of-civilisation argument is counterproductive to a serious public discourse on our actions. We do have a choice. We can make climate change our first priority, or choose to do other good first.
If we go ahead with Kyoto, the cost will be more than $150bn (£80bn) each year, yet the effect will first be in 2100, and will be only marginal. This should be compared with spending the $150bn each year on the most effective measures outlined in the Copenhagen Consensus, saving millions of lives. The UN estimates that for just half the cost of Kyoto we could give all third world inhabitants access to the basics like health, education and sanitation.
It’s true that Lomborg spends some time in his book discussing arguments that the threat of global warming may be overstated in scientific terms, but (wisely) he doesn’t rely on any of them.Here are a couple more sources, favourable and hostile, giving broadly similar summaries of Lomborg’s position.
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