If you can't endure it, just read this transcript:
BJØRN LOMBORG: Hi, Mr. Vice President. I'm Bjørn Lomborg.
It seems to me that you are probably the most well-known person arguing that we should be spending a large sum of our money and we should be spending most of our concern on focusing on cutting carbon emissions, and cutting very, very soon. And I would argue that the Copenhagen Consensus [think tank] and certainly a lot of really well-esteemed Nobel awards tell us that both scientifically and economically, it's not a very good way to spend our money.
And so my point is to actually say, "Shouldn't we have that debate?" I know you've sort of dodged that bullet before, and I don't mean to corner you. Well, maybe I do mean to corner you. Do you want to have a debate on that? Would you be willing to have a debate with me on that point?
MR. GORE: Look, I think that I want to be polite to you. But the scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we as a civilization, let alone we as the United States of America, should pretend that this is an on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand kind of situation.
You know, the tobacco industry for many years after the surgeon general's report collected the epidemiological evidence that was already very, very damning. They had strategic exercises with the PR experts to try to divert people down into the details of this and that. And they delayed public-health action for 40 years. And millions and millions of people died as a result. The stakes this time are so high.
The issue, of course, is the way Gore moves from science to policy. Lomborg doesn't dispute that climate change might exist or even be humanly caused, though he insists that some responsibly do dispute that. He disputes that it's going to be doing humans any good to spend enormous sums to try to reverse that.
For further reference, see our remarks on Obama's disingenuous use of "science."
7 comments:
Lumberg is amazing. His book _The Skeptical Environmentalist_ should be required reading, and the book that inspired it (_The State of Humanity_) probably did more for helping my contextualize the news than anything I've read before or since.
For those not in the know, _Humanity_ is based around a simple premise: The world is getting better, not worse. This so offended Lumberg that he spent 2 years trying to debunk it only to eventually be convinced on all points.
Great find.
And I love the irony of Gore saying it's been gone through "chapter and verse."
It's not a scientific discussion, it's a religious one.
micah - thanks for the info - is this a biased book? When I looked to find a somewhat neutral text on both sides (so I could form an opinion) I found that everything written is extremely biased in one direction or another.
help!
Anon, as usual, you have on this blog everything you need at your fingertips. Follow this link to see our previous posts on the impressive Swede, follow links in those posts for the essence of Lomborg's social scientific approach to climate change, and then stand in awe.
If you're too busy for that, here's a digest of Lomborg on climate. Lomborg and his associates argue that
If climate change is happening
and
If it is caused or exacerbated by humans
and
If it's possible to reverse the trend
(three BIG ifs)
THEN
We have to decide whether it's cost effective to take the steps to reverse the trend.
Their analysis yields a big NO to the last step. Because climate change happens gradually, humans can adapt to it gradually as it unfolds (slowly abandoning some settlements to build others, shifting agricultural production to new sites, etc.). Those changes are big, but they're manageable over time, not the immiment collapse that Gore and others hype up--and about which they could be horribly wrong.
In the meantime, human well being is more efficiently served by investment in such prosaic matters as vitamin and mineral supplements and mosquito nets for children in the developing world. Such steps yield enormous benefits relative to investment.
Gore's comparison to the smoking issue is invalid. Even if climate change could be shown to be as injurious as smoking, which hasn't been proved, the response is completely different. Tobacco represents but a segment of the world economy. "Carbon" represents just about all of it. To discourage smoking, governments didn't need to revise the way commerce happens fundamentally. They did education and raised taxes on one product, to which people were addicted but which was not the foundation of global prosperity.
This is not surprising from a guy who thought that "count every vote" meant "count until I win."
Anon -
I'd say it's biased, insofar as I think everything has bias at some level. But the guy's a green who's really into understanding the data, so if anything his tendency is to be far more "pro environment" than "anti."
Here's what you should do. Jog to your local Borders and just read the introduction to his book, and see what you think. The book's quite large, so you don't want to commit to reading the entirety of it yet. But just read the intro and see what you think.
I think you'll be impressed.
thanks folks for the info - I leave you with a question - what is the IDEAL earth temperature?
PS - by jogging to the bookstore -is that an attempt to lower my carbon footprint? ;)
cheers
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