Lawrence Solomon

September 8, 2009

Bjorn Lomborg, the skeptical environmentalist, has yet to apply his thinking to premises of climate change.

First assume that, on behalf of the global community, you must spend $250-billion a year on something that, while not entirely worthless, promises to give you almost no bang for the buck. Something that came 10th in a list of 10 global challenges.

Next, take on the task of finding the least-worst ways to spend that $250-billion.

Then, unveil your list of least bads, as well as the very baddest bads to government leaders, knowing that they think you have it all upside down — they view your lowest priorities as their highest, and your baddest bads as the bestest goods.

The “you” in this tale of masochism is Denmark’s Bjorn Lomborg, a.k.a. The Skeptical Environmentalist, and the “something” that came dead last in his list of 10 global challenges was climate change. In 2004, Lomborg and his Copenhagen Consensus Center asked a distinguished panel of economists to weigh the usefulness of stepping up action on 10 global challenges: civil conflicts; climate change; communicable diseases; education; financial stability; governance; hunger and malnutrition; migration; trade reform; and water and sanitation. He then asked his panel to answer the following question: “What would be the best ways of advancing global welfare, and particularly the welfare of developing countries, supposing that an additional $50-billion of resources were at governments’ disposal?”

The panel decided that the money could be best spent on new measures to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, where $27-billion could avert nearly 30 million new infections by 2010. A close second on the list of priorities was hunger and malnutrition, where a mere $12-billion spent on food supplements would work wonders reducing iron-deficiency anaemia.

Dead last on the panel’s list was climate change: No matter how the panel looked at the proposals on the table, it found no way to spend money intelligently to solve climate change, even though it accepted as given that climate change was a bona fide concern.

Government leaders, unimpressed, decided to press on with their plans to spend billions on their climate change priorities. So, Lomborg, in an attempt to minimize the damage they could do, decided to make the best of a bad bargain. He would again assemble a panel, this time accepting as given that $250-billion a year must be spent on climate change.

Yesterday, his new panel came out with recommendations for how governments can minimize the harm they’re planning to inflict on the globe in pursuit of alleviating harm from climate change. The least bad thing governments can do involves geo-engineering the planet, possibly by spraying salt water over the oceans at a cost of a mere $9-billion, in the process creating cloud cover that will help cool the Earth. To guard against the potential for inadvertently damaging the planet in the process, and to see if the spraying technology could actually work, it would be preceded by 10 years of research. The panel’s next least bad recommendation is R&D into carbon-free energy technologies that are immature, such as nuclear, fusion and geothermal.

Just about the worstest of the baddest ideas of all, the panel found, are exactly what attract many governments – carbon taxes. The very worstest of all — cap and trade schemes of the kind Europe has in place and the U.S. is planning – were too terrible to even consider seriously.

Lomborg deserves his reputation as The Skeptical Environmentalist – his books poke holes in many dogmas society holds dear, often through the use of statistics. But I find he’s not skeptical enough. While he has expended great effort over many years questioning proposed solutions to climate change, he has yet to apply skeptical thinking to the very premise that manmade climate change even belongs on his list of global challenges. He claims, without an iota of skepticism, that “almost all researchers are telling us this is manmade.” This statistician should test this belief, which is at the core of his work, in the same way that he tests the dogmas of those he takes on. A truly skeptical environmentalist would.

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud. Photo: Bjorn Lomborg (National Post)

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