For some reason I can’t understand, Mr. Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg keeps getting space in places like the Wall Street Journal and Time to peddle his drivel. The Journal has given Lomborg a weekly op-ed for about 6 weeks to talk about how we shouldn’t really tackle climate change.
Here’s how each of these weekly missives work. Lomborg picks out one person in a country to talk to and asks them how much they care about climate change. Yesterday, he told us that a very poor person living near Mt. Kilimanjaro doesn’t care so much about melting glaciers, but cares more about education about HIV. Last week we learned that a very poor person living near Himalayan glaciers that are melting, which will create vast water and food shortages, also cares more about pressing daily issues of local poverty. Earlier, a very poor person living in Africa told Lomborg we should tackle malaria directly rather than take on climate change. Wow, these are real surprises.
Lomborg’s sole purpose in life seems to be creating false arguments that nobody is really making and then knocking them down. In the malaria article, he makes it sound like all the government, NGO, and business work to battle climate change is intended solely to stop the spread of malaria (which may become more prevalent as warmer weather makes things more hospitable to mosquitoes at higher latitudes). So, he says, the potential investment of trillions of dollars to create cleaner, more efficient economies is an expensive solution for malaria. Treated bed-nets are much cheaper.
Well, yeah, no kidding, Bjorn.
As if anyone is saying that reducing carbon is just about malaria, or water supplies in Asia, or only any one of the many specific issues Lomborg splits up into little targets and compares to the whole (inflated) price tag. And, by the way, who said that tackling climate change is separate from helping the poorest among us? The issues are all integrally related and the poorest are being hit hardest by climate changes already. Lomborg always seems to be arguing against some phantom Birkenstock-wearing Greenpeace activist chained to the bulldozer of progress…in the 1970s.
The logic and arguments for decoupling our economies from carbon have evolved tremendously and include national competitiveness and job creation, healthier air, eliminating reliance on fuels from parts of the world that fund terror, and reducing dependence on volatilely-priced, and declining, resources that will raise the cost of doing business over time. This is why many important capitalists such as Jeff Immelt at GE (but not the US Chamber of Commerce of course) are making the business case for climate action.
You’ll notice that none of these other reasons actually depend on believing fully in the science. And they make for more prosperous economies, which can help the poor the most. And guess what, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time — we have to think holistically and tackle issues in a synchronized way.
But overall, what I really love is Bjorn Lomborg taking his argument for helping the poor to the skeptics of the world and going through the Wall Street Journal — as if this is the crowd lining up to send development money to countries for food, water, and bed nets. Who is he speaking to?
Perhaps the real question here is this: What the heck is wrong with the Wall Street Journal? Today, they pick up Lomborg’s arguments hook-line-and-sinker and offer an assemblage of greatest hits on not taking action. But yesterday was really hilarious.
They printed one op-ed — in a series of daily, relentless lamenting about climate science — laying out how climate skeptic bloggers (who almost all have no climatology or geology or any -ology background) have dismantled the idea that the actual measured data show an increase in GHG gases (the famous “hockey stick” chart) or any warming at all. Yet, in the same issue of the paper, the WSJ printed a truly helpful, excellent article looking at the main arguments/myths from the skeptics and comparing them to what the scientific community is really saying. The very first comparison is this one…
WHAT THE SKEPTICS SAY: The Earth isn’t warming — at least not to any extent that could actually be called a “crisis.” And some data even suggest that the Earth is getting colder. The planet may have grown warmer over the course of the 20th century. But that warming stopped more than 10 years ago, and since 1998 the trend shows less warming or even cooling…
THE RESPONSE: It’s true: By most measures, average temperatures this decade seem to have plateaued. But this isn’t evidence of a cooling planet. Partly, it’s a result of picking an exceptionally hot year — 1998 — as a starting point..the long-term trend since the mid-1970s shows warming per decade of about 0.18 degree Celsius (about 0.32 degree Fahrenheit)…The ’00s still have been exceptionally warm: The 12 years from 1997 through 2008 were among the 15 warmest on record, and the decade itself was hotter than any previous 10-year period. While 2008 was the coolest year since 2000 — a result of the cooling counterpart of El Niño — it was still the 11th-warmest year on record. And 2009 is on track to be among the five warmest.
The Journal is as schizophrenic as the population I suppose, but the op-ed pages are totally out to lunch. We need good reporting now about what we know, and what we don’t — not ideological blustering. And we need to stop creating false tradeoffs between helping the poor and helping the planet, as if the poor — and all of us — don’t live and breathe on that planet.
This first appeared on Huffington Post.
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