The “Skeptical Environmentalist” Recants ‘Just Kidding! Climate Change is Real’, he says....
Do you remember Bjorn Lomborg, the peroxide mop-topped Danish business lecturer who won fame and fortune back in 2001 with a tendentious yet readable book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which told us that doing anything about climate change was a waste of our time and money? Now, just on ten years later, he tells us he’s changed his mind. Not only was he flat wrong, he says, and we must act immediately but we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year for the better part of a century to fix things. Well, thanks a lot Bjorn. Maybe you should have stuck to business and left the environment alone.
With a little over one month to go until the next major UN Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to be held in Cancún, Mexico, expectations for any meaningful action to reduce carbon emissions through verifiable cuts is seen as a hopeless cause by almost everyone following last year’s débacle at the Copenhagen conference, where China torpedoed all chance of agreement. That leaves barely two years and one more meeting in Toronto, December 2011, for the world to get its act together before the Kyoto Protocol expires and all bets are off. The faint hope is, that in the little time remaining world leaders will somehow manage to establish, via a piecemeal approach, sufficient agreement allowing the world to commit to a Kyoto successor treaty, whereby global warming is kept to 2?C. by 2050.
Eco-Gabfests, Fast Tracks & Road Maps
At the UNFCCC meeting of 2007 here in Bali, judged a failure at the time because of its inability to agree a new Kyoto formula, at least two seemingly positive developments occurred. First, the IPCC, the scientific body charged by the UN to report on climate change, delivered itself of its 15-year findings that climate change was real and was caused by human agency. And second, the UNFCCC agreed to a ‘road map’ to fast track negotiations leading to legally binding commitments by all parties to reduce carbon emissions two years later at Copenhagen in 2009. It appeared that finally world leaders and public opinion were united as to the problem and in agreement about what had to be done. Alas, if it were so, it took but two short years for the consensus to unravel. No agreement at Copenhagen in 2009 was reached. The road-map was utterly road-blocked, the developed and developing worlds couldn’t agree on anything and, compounding the problem, opinion polls now showed that the majority of people no longer felt global warming was something they needed to worry about.
And who could blame them? Despite the continuing evidence and preponderance of scientific opinion showing not only was global warming real but was accelerating, most people had had enough of dire prophecies and the prospect of having to pay astronomic sums for hypothetical fixes that might not work, while eco-spivs laughed all the way to the bank. Scientific evidence was complex, badly presented and, on occasion - flawed, allowing climate change deniers to gain undue credence.
It was all just too awful to contemplate, much too difficult to understand and, one way or the other it would all just go away, or ‘someone’ would find a solution. And if not…, we are all doomed anyway.
Born-Again Bjorn
As noted, one of the most effective of popular climate change deniers was Bjorn Lomborg, who in The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) stated that most of the claims and forecasts on environmental issues were wrong. In particular, he cast doubt on the seriousness of global warming, claiming it was grossly exaggerated. Although self-styling himself ‘the Skeptical Environmentalist’ Lomborg taught business studies and is a political not an environmental scientist. His claims nevertheless gave climate change deniers the patina of credibility most of lacked. He won celebrity status bashing climate scientists, environmental campaigners, the media and anyone else who, in his view, were hyping the rate of global warming. He disputed the effect of climate change on humans and said the enormous cost of proposed remedies was simply throwing money down the drain. The accusations in his book caused such offense that Prof. Rajendra Pachauri, the Chief UN Scientist heading up the UN’s IPCC Report on Climate Change, compared him to Adolf Hitler, predictably adding immeasurably to his contrarian charisma.
Now, almost a decade on, he has changed his mind. In a U-turn as remarkable as any since George H. Bush famously adjured the American electorate to, “read my lips - no new taxes”, Lomborg has written a new book “Smart Solutions to Climate Change”. In it he now calls global warming “a challenge humanity must confront” and, “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today”. Naturally such a volte face from a notorious climate change denier did not go without comment in the blogospere, where the green websit TreeHugger stuck the knife in and twisted it, announcing gleefully “Lomborg: Just Kidding! We do need Climate Action, Now!”.
In fact, in fairness to Lomborg he was never actually a denier. Where he differed from radical climate change sceptics was that he never denied human action was heating up the planet. In fact he agreed it was. What he said was, that it made economic sense to adapt to higher temperatures rather than resist them. What he relished and struck a chord with the legions of the confused and eco-fatigued was in attacking what he saw as hysterical over-reaction and telling the treehuggers and eco-zealots to get lost.
$$$s & 15 Ways to Save the Planet
Now he has seen the error of his ways. In a Damascene conversion worthy of St. Paul, rather than pooh poohing climate change - he now wants to fix it. Lomborg wants world leaders to invest heavily in clean energy solutions. “Investing $100 billion annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century”, he tells us.
Part of Lomborg’s success with his first book was the lucid prose in which he laid into the complex findings of the scientists, which made for such dull and dismal reading. In this new book he asks an expert panel to assess fifteen policy options including carbon storage, forest expansion and a global carbon tax and invites us to form our own view as to the best and worst ways we can respond to global warming. Alas, unlike his first book, it is all very heavy going. Smart Solutions reads more like a technical dossier than a work intended to have popular appeal.
In addition to ending our reliance on fossil fuel, other solutions put forward by his panel include “planning adaptation” from Indian economist Jagdish Bhagwati, which is as fuzzy as it sounds; a call for carbon storage research (not action, just research) from Nobel Prize winner Finn Kydland; an intriguing concept called marine “cloud whitening research”, which means increasing the whiteness of clouds so they reflect sunlight back into space from another Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith. Note once again we are talking about research. Also a scheme from US-based research body Silver Lining part-funded by Bill Gates, which involves developing machines to convert seawater into microscopic particles to be sprayed into clouds.
Pity About the Prose…
Now, ten years on, Lomborg warns us “we have no time to dither”, but this book poses more questions than it answers and any clarion call summons us to further thinking, not action. At least it serves to underline our growing suspicion that as the world warms, nobody knows what to do about it - except talk. It’s really a shame then that Lomborg wasted a precious decade minimizing the danger and fuelling scepticism and complacency. But better late than never…., at least, so one hopes.
The only really positive aspect of this book and Mr Lomborg’s belated change of heart may be that with any luck, the defection of such a highly visible climate change denier will start to swing the majority back toward insisting our leaders do something about climate change. Given the hottest year in recorded history, coupled with the fact that 98% of scientists, according to British scientist Simon Singh, accept climate change is all too real, it’s about time you might think for action now, rather than more talks and road maps. It’s just a shame that having seen the light Born-again Environmentalist Bjorn cannot atone for his error by writing a book as readable as his first.
