Bjørn Again
October 11th, 2007The Washington Post has at least had the decency to run a rebuttal to the absurd Bjørn Lomborg piece they ran on Sunday (also debunked here and here).
They chose one of the top climate scientists in the country — Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I count her a friend, having interviewed her for my book and having spent a couple of days in Florida with her giving joint talks — she on hurricanes and climate (with her colleague Peter Webster), and me on climate solutions.
I recommend anything she writes (here is a great piece on the science and politics of the hurricanes & global warming debate). You can read the whole piece debunking Lomborg, “Cooler Heads and Climate Change,” here. One point in particular bears repeating:
Lomborg’s attitude toward risk is also troubling. He focuses only on the middle range of the panel’s projections, dismissing the risk from the higher end of the range. But if the risk is great, then it may be worth acting against even if its probability is small. Think of risk as the product of consequences and likelihood: what can happen and the odds of it happening. A 10-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100 is not likely; the panel gives it a 3 percent probability. Such low-probability, high-impact risks are routinely factored into any analysis and management strategy, whether on Wall Street or at the Pentagon.
The rationale for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide is to reduce the risk of the possibility of catastrophic outcomes.
Indeed, and many of us feel the odds of a 10°F total warming by 2100 — which would be a historically unprecedented catastrophe — far exceeds 3%, because of the dangerous carbon cycle amplifying feedbacks that current models typically ignore.
Curry is right and Lomborg is wrong — the time to act is now.
October 11th, 2007 at 11:18 am
I’d like to see the economic risks honestly considered as well.
October 11th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Why is this not on the front page of the Sunday Outlook section - as was the Lomborg piece. I still think the Post needs to also publish a list of corrections - if there is any quality control at all over opinion pieces.
October 11th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Lomborg had a 2002 book where he misused statistics in analyzing environmental problems. You can get a sense of his methods from the collection of essays in Scientific American by experts who debunked his claims. The first one being Prof Stephen Schneider on climate.
Misleading math about the Earth
http://www.sciam.com/ article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC5880000
October 11th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
A much appreciated rebuttal, but I wish in her paragraph about all the technology that exists now that she would have included a sentence about needing policies from governments at all levels to drive their deployment.
October 13th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
To Ron: I think when economic risks are factored in, the case for doing something about global warming is yet again stronger than it already is. I believe the economic downside from action is minimal, but the economic downside from inaction is large. Delayers and Denyers like to pretend that the economic downside is all in the “solve the problem” side of the choice before us, but if you factor in wars, famines, mass people movements, and so forth, I believe there is a chance of massive economic dislocation.
Here is further reading on just one small part of the risk:
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/ Wiss/ FB/ 15/ Sustainability/ annex6.pdf
Look at the 2130 line of Figure 5 (in red). The $30 billion in annual cost to protect coastlines from flooding would nearly fund the solutions to global warming all by itself. But if the world waits, it needs to do both: solve the CO2 and protect coasts. And this is just one of the economic risk factors.
October 16th, 2007 at 12:35 am
Curry’s article is very good but I hope she didn’t choose the title. Paring “cooler heads” with “climate change” is usually something you see in a denier article or something written by Lomberg himself. I suspect the Post editors, who really seem to be in the denier camp.