| Title | : | False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1541647467 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781541647466 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 320 |
| Publication | : | First published June 23, 2020 |
Enough, argues bestselling author Bjorn Lomborg. Climate change is real, but it's not the apocalyptic threat that we've been told it is. Projections of Earth's imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive but largely ineffective policies that hamper growth and crowd out more pressing investments in human capital, from immunization to education.
False Alarm will convince you that everything you think about climate change is wrong -- and points the way toward making the world a vastly better, if slightly warmer, place for us all.
False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet Reviews
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You're not going to find more intellectually dishonest reading, which is an especially dangerous venture especially for a such a hugely important issue such as man-made climate change - a threat that is agreed upon by 97% of climate scientists or more.
Of course the defence will inevitably be "we agree climate change is happening, we just don't believe the all the hype from the media". Actually, the media are devoting much less attention to climate change than it deserves (when you compare with attention given to less existential threats). And the projections for how bad man-made climate change will be for the world, the more extreme scenarios are the most likely. So the "alarmism" argument falls down, when the threat is actually alarming.
So how is climate change denier Bjorn Lomberg able to write a book where he is able to use facts to support the objectively wrong conclusion? Well, he cherry-picks particular facts and statistics, often taken out of context. One example is the "sea levels have remained stable or have been going down for the last 2 years", which is an out-of-context statistic when we have been measuring sea level for so long (you see sea levels have been rising for the past 50 years, when you zoom out in a graph). -
At this point it's obvious that climate change is as much a political issue as it is an environmental one. If that doesn't sound right, here's some proof. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize in Economics winner wrote a review of False Alarm for the New York Times. He's a smart guy who has written a bunch of books himself. Despite this, his review is dishonest and factually incorrect from beginning to end.
Here's Stiglitz's review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/bo...
Here's Lomborg's response:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-yo...
This isn't petty bickering over decimals between well-intentioned writers with different priorities. It's also not legitimately divergent interpretations of the same data. I get that using an author's own rebuttal to a bad review to show how bad the review is is, by definition, biased. But read them both. There's no way that Stiglitz didn't know what he was doing. He was preaching to the choir, his very specific choir. He knows that most people who read his review will use it to justify not reading False Alarm and write Lomborg off as a climate denier or a quack or worse. Charitably, I suppose you could say that Stiglitz wanted to dismiss Lomborg's book because it could cause people who are already less inclined to worry about climate change to become even more complacent and, as a result, to do less to address the issue. In any case, it's a dishonest and politicized review by a respected economist and it's perfectly illustrative of how the discussion around climate change has devolved into something a non-expert can't possibly be expected to make sense of.
I'm only focusing on Stiglitz's review because of how well it shows why counterpoints like False Alarm are needed. Lomborg's premise is that "global warming is now being used, often explicitly, to advance broader causes in a partisan political environment that shapes the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and much of the world.” Stiglitz is the perfect example of that.
If you've gotten most of what you know about climate change from newspaper and magazine articles, you should read this book. Maybe even read it alongside a more alarmist take on climate change like The Uninhabited Earth. One thing will become clear--while there is a consensus on the reality of climate change and the need to address it, there is nothing even close to a consensus on the scope of the problem or the best way to solve it. False Alarm, if nothing else, puts that fact into perspective. -
The way the data and research is presented is very articulate but not as much as Michael Shellenberger’s book, in my opinion. At times Lomborg might have contradicted himself by presenting research that shows that wildfires aren’t increasing and later saying that climate change will affect wildfires. That aside, this was a joy to read. All the political noise has made it difficult to talk about real solutions to mitigate climate change and Lomborg presents actual solutions that have been extensively studied. A debate between Lomborg and Noami Klein would be something I would pay for.
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If this book was your only source of information regarding ongoing anthropogenic climate change – consequences, policy options etc. – you'd be forgiven for thinking that the following claims are true:
- The key message of the 2018 IPCC special report on 1.5 C warming is that it will be exceedingly difficult to keep warming close to 1.5 or even just below 2 C – AND, by implication, that this is not a desirable target (p. 24-25).
- Renewable energy sources (wind and solar) are hopelessly expensive and unable to compete with fossil fuels, now and in the foreseeable future (p. 101-110).
- It makes sense to assess the climate impact of the Paris Agreement based on the assumption that countries will resume carbon pollution for the rest of the century when the Agreement's immediate deadline is reached in 2030 (p. 117-123).
- Political actors calling for urgent climate action demand that we eradicate global CO2 emissions by 2030 (p. 103-104, 158-159).
- The optimal climate policy target, all costs and benefits objectively considered, is to aim to keep warming to 3.75 C by 2100 (app. double the target built into the Paris agreement) (p. 160-165).
Trouble is, all of these claims are not just misleading – they are blatant falsehoods.
Lomborg is a skilled and intelligent writer (and manipulator) – but what good is that if he puts his undoubted abilities to such destructive use?
Why does he try so hard to deceive us? Two reasons: First, because that's what his secret sponsors pay him to do (no doubt handsomely). Second, he is, I think, a deeply immature Peter Pan character who instinctively rebels against grown-ups telling him there are things he shouldn't do.
In my view, Lomborg's activities since 1998 border on criminality. In the future, he and his kind will be judged very, very harshly.
Bill McKibben has said it well: “Poisoning the well of public debate is the ultimate act of cynicism.”
For a well-sourced and wonderfully ruthless debunking of Lomborg's BS, see
this page.
NB: If you want to get solid, yet still accessible knowledge of the science of climate change - i.e. not Lomborg style half-truths, lies and deception - you should consider reading
Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency. It contains more than 70 pages of end notes, almost exclusively references to recent research published in the world’s best journals. All the deeply worrying stuff that Lomborg ignores (or distorts beyond recognition). Lynas’ overview of our scientific knowledge of how three or four degrees of global warming are likely to play out is sobering to say the least. -
Another prioritization book from Lomborg that does not take into account the risks of climate change. The book's sources are not relevant when speaking of the climate because of their underestimation of the (in this case, economic) effects of climate change. It is the same mistake as is so prevalent in other works like it. Lomborg's thoughts are a danger to the world by downplaying the impacts of global warming and trusting in markets that have crashed about every 15 years.
Joseph Stiglitz' NY Times review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/bo... -
I appreciated this book’s honest, common-sense, non-agenda examination of climate change. The author shows how panicking about it doesn’t solve anything. He offers common-sense, low-cost solutions that everyone ought to agree on, whether climate skeptic or climate doomsayer. He comes from the position that carbon dioxide is the biggest cause of warming and that climate policies must benefit people as well as the environment. The writing is clear and engaging and easy to understand. There are 80 pages of endnotes. If you want to skim, you can read the last paragraph of each chapter and the concluding chapter.
Some highlights:
• Media and politicians use scaremongering tactics to attract viewers and/or votes.
• Agreements like the Paris Accord are useless.
• Global warming, like everything else, has benefits as well as harms. Cold kills more people that heat, and crops thrive in warmer, CO2-rich environments.
• Humanity is highly adaptable and innovative, as history has shown over and over again.
• Wind and solar are weak and inefficient. Natural gas and nuclear energy do not produce CO2.
• Forcing people into starvation and poverty to reduce CO2 emissions is immoral as well as useless.
• Floods and fires are not more frequent. More people are building homes in flood and fire zones. While natural disaster damages have increased, deaths have decreased.
• Increasing prosperity will help the planet more than decreasing it.
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The science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem. Yet, we now live in a world where almost half the population believes climate change will extinguish humanity. This had profoundly altered the political reality. It makes us double down on poor climate policies. It makes us increasingly ignore all other challenges, from pandemics and food shortages to political strife and conflicts, or subsume them under the banner of climate change.
The elite use only a small portion of their large incomes on energy, so even dramatic price increases matter much less to them. This is why it is easier for the rich to argue for high energy taxes. In fact, financial benefits from climate policies (like subsidies given to a homeowner for erecting a solar panel or insulating a house, or driving a Tesla) overwhelmingly go to the richest.
We need to be aware than when we insist, as part of foreign aid packages, that the developing world align with our climate priorities, we are enacting a kind of imperialism. We are not listening to what the citizens of these countries want. We are jeopardizing their opportunity to lift their populations out of poverty for the sake of our own concerns. This isn’t just bad policy. It’s grossly unethical.
Currently we have promised to spend $1-$2 trillion every year, and we won’t be able to tell the difference in temperature even in a hundred years. Indeed, it turns out that if we measure all the benefits of reduced climate damage in monetary terms, every dollar the Paris Agreement costs will avoid just 11¢ worth of long-term climate damage. That isn’t sensible.
For the world’s poor, climate policies are often worse than ineffective. They are destructive. Take nutrition. Climate activists often point out that higher temperatures will make more people hungry, so drastic carbon cuts are needed. But a comprehensive study published in 2018 in Nature Climate Change shows that strong global action to reduce climate change would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.
The truth is that climate change plays a relatively small role in determining future well-being. It is clear that if we’re motivated only by trying to reduce the impact of rising temperatures, we’re literally ignoring the most important factors—such as education, health, technology, and access to plentiful energy—in Africa’s future well-being.
The amount of crops needed to fill an SUV’s fuel tank with biofuel would feed a child for an entire year, and every gallon of biofuel wiped out forty meals. The huge growth in biofuel inevitably contributed to a reduction in food and an increase in food prices: a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian found that biofuels had forced global food prices up by 75 percent. The results of the price hike were devastating. After food prices first spiked in 2008, the UN special envoy for the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, declared that a “silent tsunami” had pushed a hundred million people into poverty and thirty million into hunger. The World Bank subsequently estimated that between June and December 2010 an additional forty-four million people fell below the extreme poverty line because of food price hikes. ... Strong climate campaigner George Monbiot called the subsidies driving the biofuel industry’s growth “a crime against humanity.” Yet, by the point of the backtrack, vested agricultural interests had made the bad policies almost impossible to overturn.
Climate alarmism too often leads us to policies that while well intentioned, crowd out much more effective ways of helping people. It comes down to this: when we see a malnourished child or a town hit by a hurricane and seriously suggest that we should make lives better by cutting a ton of carbon dioxide, we are not actually trying to do good, but rather imposing our own priorities on people who have little power to assert their own.
Constant scaremongering and green energy industry lobbying lead to scarce resources instead being poured into rolling out more and more of today’s inefficient solar panel and wind turbine technology.
The activists would rather we cut carbon dioxide emissions at any cost than invest in a solution that could allow factories to continue belching carbon dioxide into the air. The campaigners are less concerned with reducing the rise in temperature than they are with reducing the use of fossil fuels.
The reason we pursue any climate change policy is to make the world better than it would otherwise be. Our goal is to make sure that both people and the world’s environment are better off than they would have been had we done nothing.
We have reduced the scale of other challenges, and we need to continue that work for the future. We also need to solve global warming. But we need to do so with the knowledge that climate change is not the only problem facing the world, nor is it the largest.
The apocalyptic rhetoric [of the 60s and 70s] did significant damage. ... Population control came to be seen as “the only possible salvation of the underdeveloped world,” as Ehrlich put it. Some researchers started considering adding chemicals to water supplies or staple foods to make the world’s poor temporarily sterile. It gave urgency and legitimacy to end horrific abuses committed by governments, including forced sterilization campaigns and coerced abortions. In just one year, in 1976, the Indian government force-sterilized 6.2 million men. ... Ehrlic advocated that humanity’s most hopeful scenario was to cut off food aid to Vietnam, Thailand, Egypt, and India—and sit back and watch while famine and food riots killed half a billion people.
Fixating on scary stories about climate change leads us to make poor decisions. ... Overspending on bad climate policies doesn’t just waste money. It means underspending on effective climate policies and underspending on the opportunities we have to improve life for billions of people, now and into the future. That’s not just inefficient. It’s morally wrong. -
2.5
Its always good to hear different views and this book tries to swim against the almost universal opinion that the Climate Change is our #1 challenge of our times. And the author have made some excellent points viz.
1. Not succumb to doomsday-ish panic
2. Investing more on innovation
3. Assessing our plans in terms of Cost vs Benefit
But (a big one), I cant help but notice that either he downplays the real threat or overestimate our capability in address a complex problem like this
- He argues that we (Homo Sapiens) are more adaptive to environmental changes than we think. But we are talking about the most complex thing among us which is the Environmental Eco System. We still dont fully understand it (proof: predict weather a year from now) and any complex system will function in exponential manner i.e. chagning any factor will affect the whole system on a logarithmic scale (not linear) and our lack of complete understanding warrants much more action and genuine concern. For example if climate change is likened to bacteria that doubles every minute and it takes 100 years to fill half the bottle, we cant think that we still have 100 years to deal with it before the bottle becomes full.
- Most of his analysis are until 2100. Lets say we stick to 8 F increase by 2100 and people are wealthier then than now, but what about 2200? One key thing is that once we reach a tipping point there is no coming back, even if we try to. So thinking and making plans for next century is far sighthed but still not enough when we talk about climate change. Even if we argue that we are more innovative than today, we are dealing with a system that stayed stable for past millions of years and we manage to disturb one of its components (temperature) in a span of few decades.
I'd still argue that Climate Change is still the Big problem that we need to deal with because in all other aspects like Poverty, Health, Education... we are getting better and as the author argues we shouldn't bankrupt our progress with bad investment(s).
Having said that, its always good to have an opposing view so that we dont make biased decisions, but unfortunately this book despite making few (very) good points, falls back on key details. Definitely recommend for those having time to get some different perspective and please leave it at that. -
False Alarm : How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (2020) by Bjørn Lomborg is Lomborg's latest book. The gay vegetarian Dane who accepts the IPCC consensus and proposes a carbon tax sets off some environmentalists like few others. His latest book is his second about Climate Change after 2007's Cool It. Lomborg's main points are that the impact of Climate Change is often exaggerated and that the current mitigation strategies are unwise.
It's worth noting that there are clearly already people who have written or given a rating to the book without having read it on Goodreads merely to slander Lomborg. It might be better to look at Amazon where reviewers are more likely to have actually read the book.
In False Alarm Lomborg extensively uses official data, IPCC results and other quality predictions about how much Climate Change has and is going to cost. This includes the work of William Nordhaus who won the Economics Prize in honour of Alfred Nobel for his work on Climate Change Economics.
Lomborg has updated his work from Cool It to include the latest results on how the impact of weather related disasters has reduced as a percentage of GDP over the past 40 years and also how the fatalities as a result of extreme weather have collapsed since the 1920s, going from 500K then to 25K today while global populations have increased from ~2B To 7.8B today. There is also fascinating data on how much US fire there has been from 1920 when records started being kept to today. Lomborg also points out that getting richer and adapting better to changes in sea level and extreme weather events works. For poor countries especially an extra thousand or two dollars of income per year enables much better climate resistance.
Climate Change has been seen as a problem now for over 30 years and so the strategies that have been employed since 1990 can now be examined. Here Lomborg looks at the how the various treaties have gone. The Rio, then Kyoto treaties promises and then the failed attempt at Copenhagen and now the raft of promises made in Paris are examined. Lomborg points out that carbon intensity hasn't even fallen. Germany's Energiewende is pointed out to be staggeringly expensive at hundreds of billions of Euros and due to a recent drive against nuclear is no longer even reducing emissions much. Lomborg makes the point that subsidies renewables has not gone well.
Lomborg proposes that a low carbon tax should be levied. He also proposes that far more money should be spent on energy research. He suggests spending on better energy storage, improved nuclear technology and as a last resort on climate engineering. Here Lomborg has changed his views on when climate engineering should be engaged in.
False Alarm is a very interesting read for anyone who wants a different take on Climate Change to that espoused by some environmentalists. Lomborg believes that Climate Change is happening and the recent changes are driven by human C02 emissions but the severity of the crisis has been exaggerated and humanity's ability to respond has been severely underestimated. He also points out that the current response to Climate Change is unwise and isn't working. -
This book makes such a good factual case for thinking about climate change (let's call it emissions) in ways seldom mentioned, including the point that climate change/emissions isn't the world's biggest problem, that there are far more effective ways to address emissions other than the current favorite of shutting down the western world (industry, reproduction, transport, etc.), and that the history of technology encourages us that green-focused technologies not yet discovered may find ways to reduce large-scale emissions cheaply.
It's important that Lomborg says what few others will--more prosperity for more people in more countries is one of the best ways to effect beneficial emissions reductions.
Impressively, Lomborg is not afraid to quote the trillion-dollar scenarios (sometimes for very little emissions benefit) from models that extend a century out into the future.
For those interested in energy and emissions policy, as I am, this book is worth reading two or three times. (A side note that I read it on Kindle and the last 35-40% is end notes, which one may or may not want to browse.)
Highly recommended. -
Pants on fire over climate change? Sure the world is going to end by 2030? Take a breath and read this book. Fear not! This is not a book that denies the existence of climate change. Nor does the author direct you to vote for any particular party or individual. What this book is about is efficient, ethical strategies to make our world better for everyone. You will learn about things like global greening. Yes, extra carbon dioxide is beneficial to green things. Then there is the bullseye effect. If a hurricane hits Miami today, there will be many more dollars worth of damage that a century ago due to the increased population and property values. There is a wealth of accessible information in this book broken down into five sections: 1. Climate of Fear 2. The Truth About Climate Change 3. How Not To Fix Climate Change 4. How To Fix Climate Change 5. Tackling Climate Change And All the World's Other Challenges. So, arm yourself with the information in this book. When we are all better informed we can be better neighbors.
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I read this book because I like to take in different ideas about issues that are important to me, like climate change. What's that, you say? The sky is falling but not at as fast a clip as we think it is? Great. Bring on the learning.
The book was a frustrating read though. Most frustrating is the false dichotomy that we can either invest in research or in lessening our dependence on fossil fuels. Lomborg argues that diminishing fossil fuel usage will disadvantage people living in poverty, and that the best way to alleviate climate change is to lift people out of poverty. Cheap energy makes people richer, so they'll care more about the environment and be able to afford to cut their carbon emissions. This feels like circular logic to me. If cheap energy and reliance on fossil fuels lifted people out of poverty, wouldn't it have been doing that for generations? And yet basic economic analysis points to an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, so what Lomborg argues hasn't been working so far. He also says cutting off fossil fuels will most hurt poor countries, but as far as I know, no one is talking about cutting them off whole cloth, all at once.
Furthermore, we can invest in research AND we can lessen our dependence on fossil fuels. It's not an either/or, and Lomborg doesn't really successfully argue that it is.
I also noticed that Lomborg's bio leans heavily on what the media - specifically the Guardian - has to say about him, when he devotes a fair amount of air time to saying that the media - specifically the Guardian - is making everyone hysterical and not reporting on the nuance of the issue.
Another central argument in the book is that humans are great at adapting, so things will probably be fine. Heat waves won't result in mass deaths, he says, because people will just buy air conditioners. (Because I guess everyone will be able to afford one because we're keeping fossil fuels?) He also says agriculture won't suffer too much because carbon dioxide acts as fertilizer.
The book is also weirdly species centric for someone who's a vegetarian. The central point seems to be that we'll all be fine - as long as you're a human! His solution to forest fires: cut down mass amounts of trees to create a forest-free buffer around towns. It's OK to lose the coral reefs - they are not major drivers of tourism. Which is fine because it's not like ecology is interconnected or anything.
I know I'm simplifying his arguments somewhat, but they fall apart at the slightest tug. I finished feeling like I'd read a book full of information that had been cherry picked from more fulsome information - the exact thing Lomborg accuses the media of doing - and at a couple of points, thought "Who is paying this guy?"
There is a blurb on the back from climate czar Jordan Peterson though, so there's that.
In short, if you're interested in dissenting voices in the way we handle climate change, there are probably better places to look. -
Notes from the book:
Pretty much all of the "the world is ending because of climate change" predictions are based on 1 - bad information, which the actual science doesn't support and 2 - the assumption that humans won't adapt (eg. purchase more air conditioning units to accommodate the moderately higher temperatures or won't build flood protection dikes to handle a sea level that's a foot or two higher). Climate change is a problem, but not nearly as big a problem as it's often portrayed. There are many other more pressing problems that are doing more damage to humanity right now, that need to be addressed. If we hyper-focus on climate change, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. This host of problems requires more wisdom than freaking out and throwing all of our resources at it.
Who gains from climate change alarmism? The media (frightening news makes them money) and politicians ("Vote for me and I'll save you from catastrophe"). And the businesses that are able to make money off of it (wind and solar companies are obvious beneficiaries, but energy companies generally have been able to make quite a lot of money off of poorly-implemented climate policies).
Demanding zero emissions by 2030 is like demanding a 3 mph speed limit everywhere. Yes, it would save some lives, but at a tremendous cost. We can mitigate a large portion of climate change by picking the low hanging fruit with careful long-term decisions.
Extreme cold kills way more people each year than extreme heat does. It didn't make the news, though, because 1 - it takes weeks for the cold to kill people (whereas heat does in days), so it's not as dramatic and 2 - it doesn't fit the climate change narrative. This means that global warming will likely save lives, when comparing deaths due to heat vs deaths due to cold.
The Paris Agreement resulted in a lot of countries making promises to spend a lot of money on policies that will actually do very little to lower temperatures. This is partly because the policies are based largely on inefficient technologies (see next paragraph), and also because the likelihood of the policies being implemented well is very low.
Wind and solar, the green technologies that get the most financing and attention, are just too inefficient to practically solve climate change. We've put a ton of money into them, and they're just not getting where they need to be in order to be reliable. That, and they are too intermittent to be reliable. The sad irony of climate alarmism is that all of the money goes into financing the inefficient solutions, because it's what we have available now, which prevents that money from going to research. We need to invest in research to develop better green technology. Lomborg suggests emphasizing R&D in the following areas to make the current technologies more cost effective: energy storage, nuclear energy, and carbon capture (sucking CO2 out of the air).
Most currently popular climate policies are touted as helping the poor, but actually will harm the poor more than it will help them. This is because the policies enacted now drive energy costs up (because none of the technologies are currently cheaper than fossil fuels), which disproportionately impact the poor, making them more likely unable to afford the cost of heating or cooling their homes, which results in deaths. It also makes them less able to afford other life-saving help that they need.
Poor communities don't care as much about climate change, because it's not an immediate problem for them. They are concerned with surviving today. Communities care more about the environment as they grow wealthier, because they can afford to care about it at that point. So allowing third-world countries to go through the process of using fossil fuels to enrich their economies, rather than forcing them into inefficient greener solutions now, will be more effective at really tackling climate change. And, more importantly, it will help save their lives today.
In addition to R&D, Lomborg also recommends a global carbon tax, which gradually increases over the next 100 years. He also recommends funding geoengineering research, as a backup plan.
My criticism:
I'm largely convinced by Lomborg's arguments - they're well reasoned and pragmatic. One shortcoming that I see, however, is the way in which he translates everything into dollars. One aspect of climate change that he doesn't address is the possibility that allowing the earth to warm as much and as quickly as it is may do irreversible damage to our home. We don't know which species won't survive his forecast of 7 deg F over the next 100 years, or won't survive the oceans becoming more acidic as they absorb more CO2. And whichever species do disappear, we don't know what impact that will have on the rest of the Earth, and ultimately on humanity's well-being. It's hard to forecast a dollar amount on that sort of risk, and he doesn't try to, so it's lost in the analysis. -
Bjorn Lomborg is the most famous dissenting voice on climate change. He doesn't dispute man made warming exists, but believes the seriousness of the issue is way overstated. He makes his long case for it in this book, which is partly a rehash of various earlier books, articles and op-eds.
Let's start with the good stuff from the book.
-He highlights that focusing our efforts on climate change mitigation involves some trade-offs. The money spent on it could have been spent on some other urgent priorities, which may have higher benefits over long-term horizon. This approach is often missing in the prevailing climate change discourse ("we need all hands on deck").
- Some believe that climate change is likely to make the planet inhabitable for most humans. The book slams many such misconceptions which are often based on exaggerated headlines, misrepresentation of research findings or unscientific doomsayer narratives.
-The book is framed around the theme of "The World Is Getting Better, but Good News Doesn't Make Headlines". You may recognize it from other books on tangentially related topics by Hans Rosling, Stephen Pinker, Charles Kenny, Andrew McAfee. There is lots of truth to such framing and this kind of optimism may also cheer you up a bit.
The more troubling stuff:
- Although I am no expert on climate change, it seems pretty clear that the book misrepresents where the scientific consensus is and what the major debates are on various sub-topics. It is clearly selective in which paper it chooses to describe and how. For example, on the economic impacts of climate change (the part I know best), it discusses work by Nordhaus and Tol but not their criticism, nor the work by Burke, Hsiang or Weitzman which arrives to starkly different conclusions.
- Many of Lomborg's more basic arguments are weak and one sided. He highlights rebound effects when a climate continuous person switches to cheaper alternative (the extra emission from using that saving on something else), but conveniently forgets about it when consumers switches to a more expensive greener alternative. Bashes renewable subsidies, but ignores fossil subsidies.
- He jumps around between taking down a strawman agenda, where all climate policies are totally enforced ("kills the economy") and one where not much is happening anyway ("pointless attempts" ). He doesn't seem to acknowledge the messy reality of climate politics, where any agenda is ever only partly implemented.
- Lomborg doesn't tell you why he believes his views are at odds with much of the mainstream scientific community. Surely he is aware of his reputation as a contrarian / dissenting voice. What is his own judgment on why he is right and so many others are wrong. Does he believe he is more knowledgeable or smarter? Less biased or political? Un-corruptible?
-While the book (rightly so) describes mitigating climate change as a complicated and expensive venture, there is not much nuance to the difficulties in alleviating poverty. His repeated calls to redirect money from climate change to other programs make it sound like any money not spent on electric car subsidies in the US could instead be effectively deployed to pull people out of poverty in Bangladesh. If only it were that easy.
Read it if you like contrarian books, but make sure you read something more balanced also. -
Even though I do not agree with the author's opinion, this was an interesting book. The author's argument was laid out in a manner that made the reader understand their passion for the subject. I try to read books with different points of view from myself and this one was a really interesting one.
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"Today, such is our single-minded focus on climate change that many global, regional, and even personal challenges are almost entirely subsumed by climate change. Your house is at risk of flooding—climate change! Your community is at risk of being devastated by a hurricane—climate change! People are starving in the developing world—climate change! With almost all problems identified as caused by climate, the apparent solution is to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions in order to ameliorate climate change. But is this really the best way to help?"
False Alarm was an excellent book. It is a balanced and nuanced look into a topic that has become extremeley politicized.
This book should be required reading for anyone who has earmarked climate change an exsistential threat, and who may be losing sleep over the issue...
Author
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish writer and president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen.
Bjørn Lomborg:
Lomborg gets the writing here off on a good foot, with a well-written intro. He lays out the scope of the book, as well as touches on the fear-mongering and hysteria propagated by many in the media and academia.
Before we go any further, I'll say up front that the book is a measured examination of the issue(s), without the hyperbole and hysteria that inevitably accompany this discussion.
Lomborg did a great job of presenting the topic here in an apolitical, objective manner.
He drops this quote early on:"We are being told that we must do everything right away. Conventional wisdom, repeated ad nauseam in the media, is that we have only until 2030 to solve the problem of climate change. This is what science tells us!
But this is not what science tells us. It’s what politics tells us. This deadline came from politicians asking scientists a very specific and hypothetical question: basically, what will it take to keep climate change below an almost impossible target? Not surprisingly, the scientists responded that doing so would be almost impossible, and getting anywhere close would require enormous changes to all parts of society by 2030.
Imagine a similar discussion on traffic deaths. In the United States, forty thousand people die each year in car crashes. If politicians asked scientists how to limit the number of deaths to an almost impossible target of zero, one good answer would be to set the national speed limit to three miles per hour. Nobody would die. But science is not telling us that we must have a speed limit of three miles per hour—it only informs us that if we want zero dead, one simple way to achieve that is through a nationwide, heavily enforced three-mile-per-hour speed limit. Yet, it is a political decision for all of us to make the trade-offs between low speed limits and a connected society."
He also mentions that the very topic of climate change is very near the bottom of the list of concerns among people who reside in developing countries:
Also, interestingly enough, (and not mentioned by any of the climate alarmists), carbon dioxide actually makes the planet greener. He says:"WHAT IS CLIMATE CHANGE doing to nature? Based on what we hear every day, it’s turning green pastures and forests into dust bowls. The reality is the opposite. Global warming is causing an unprecedented greening of the world, which scientists have been slow to recognize. But global greening has now been thoroughly corroborated in a number of global studies. The biggest satellite study to date, published in 2016, confirmed that over the past three decades upward of half the world’s vegetated area is getting greener, whereas only 4 percent is browning.
The overwhelming cause of global greening is carbon dioxide fertilization. That’s right: carbon dioxide, which causes global warming, also helps plants grow—and more carbon dioxide makes them grow more...
...Researchers find that global greening over the past thirty-five years has increased leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States. It is equivalent to greening the entire continent of Australia with plants or trees, two times over. It is quite remarkable that over a few decades we got the equivalent of two entire new continents of green because of carbon dioxide—and virtually nobody has heard about it.
As we emit more carbon dioxide over the century, the world will keep getting greener, although there is still a significant debate over how much greener...
...Indeed, if we follow a standard worst-case scenario for carbon dioxide emissions to the end of the century, we could end up with almost 50 percent more green mass in the world by 2100. By one estimate, we would be above the amount of green the world had in 1500, before we started the widespread reduction in global vegetation."
The scope of the book is quite broad. Lomborg covers many climate-change related issues here, including:
• Scientific modeling.
• The media's role in the hysteria.
• Polar bears.
• Deaths from the cold vs deaths from the heat.
• The Greenland Ice sheet.
• Electric Cars.
• Airplanes.
• Renewable energy; "new" and "old" renewables.
• The Paris Agreement.
• How climate policies hurt the poor.
• Carbon taxes.
• Innovation; new technologies. Energy storage,
Air capture.
• Rising sea levels.
Much of the alarmism around climate change has been partially ushered in out of a misguided sense of empathy for people in developing nations. Paradoxically, imposing greener energy policies on these people will actually be deleterious to those people. Lomborg says:"Unfortunately, as we have seen, aggressive action to reduce climate change is not costless. One of the biggest impacts is on energy prices, which hurt the poor the most. Indeed, the climate policy costs hitting not just households but also agricultural producers, food manufacturers, and the transport sector mean that food prices are predicted to climb by 110 percent by 2050. And that would have the total effect of forcing seventy-eight million people into starvation.
Which is to say that by insisting on cutting carbon through climate policies that push up food prices, instead of taking a broader view of how to best help people and the planet, we will have consigned fifty-four million more people to starvation. This is unconscionable...
...THE TRUTH IS that climate policies hurt the poor everywhere, even in countries like the United States, because higher energy prices have a disproportionate negative impact on the poor. Universally, poor people in well-off countries use much more of their limited resources paying for electricity and heating. One 2019 study showed that US low-income consumers spend 85 percent more on electricity as a percentage of total expenditure than high-income consumers. When climate policies lead to higher electricity prices, this harms the poor much more than the rich.20
This is one of the reasons why rich elites have no problem saying we should increase gas prices to $20 a gallon—they can easily afford it. Wealth also tends to be clustered in cities, where people drive much less. Of course, the struggling single mom in Huntington, West Virginia, has a very different experience..."
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As briefly stated at the start of this review, I enjoyed this one. Lomborg did a great job of the research, writing, editing, and presentation of the material.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in getting a nuanced and objective look into the topic, without the almost inevitable partisan talking points that accompany this discussion.
5 stars. -
Warnings on global warming have been rife since the beginning of the 1990s. Environmentalists have implored the world to switch to renewable energy alternatives. The issue has received widespread support from liberal western governments in the form of subsidies and tax breaks for renewable energy solutions. The environmental movement has supported it through sustained attacks on nuclear power, fossil fuels, and natural gas. The mainstream media have highlighted the urgency of implementing solar and wind energy solutions. Liberal-minded billionaires have promised financial backing through charitable trusts. Yet, after thirty years of activism, if we take stock of the role of solar and wind energy deployment around the world today, we find that they hardly deliver 1.1% of global energy needs. Even by 2040, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects less than 5% of global energy for solar and wind. So, how come the world did not adopt renewable energy more widely, given such a favorable environment? Is it because of a conspiracy by fossil fuel giants in preventing renewable alternatives from being implemented? Or is it because people do not understand the impending catastrophe, looming in the form of CO2 in the atmosphere? Or is it because the solar and wind energy solutions do not provide an alternative at an acceptable price? Author Bjorn Lomborg digs deep down into these questions and shows what is wrong with the entire climate change narrative.
The book argues its case in five sections. The first two sections examine the climate change orthodoxy, its pronouncements, the fear complex it creates, and what is wrong with it. Section 3 is on the fallacies of the approach in ‘fixing’ climate change. It shows why Green energy is a damp squib, why the Rio, Kyoto, and Paris accords fail, and how the Climate Policy hurts the poor. Section 4 is on the author’s prescriptions on how to ‘fix’ climate change, through innovation, carbon taxes, and traditional human adaptation. The last section is on making the world a better place by tackling other challenges equally important as climate change.
Bjorn Lomborg is not a climate change denier, even though many environmentalists slam him so. He accepts that the world is warming. But he does not buy into the alarmist predictions of the future. He says that we need not resort to extreme measures of opting for zero GDP growth, not eating meat, abandoning coastal areas to live, or installing solar panels and wind turbines at an exponential rate to deal with it. Nor do we have to abandon the Earth and move to Mars. There are simpler and more rational methods to secure our future.
Lomborg says the way forward is not through individual actions that reduce emissions because it will make little impact on the ground. This is because of the ‘rebound effect’ which offsets our emission gains. What is the rebound effect? When we do something like forgoing meat and becoming vegetarian to reduce carbon emissions, we save some cash by doing so. But we end up spending the savings in ways that lead to more emissions because we have the tendency to ‘reward’ ourselves for doing a good deed. This is the rebound effect. The author shows the fallacy of many common notions of such “good acts”.
We can reduce food waste by buying less food, which will reduce the demand for food and produce less food, leading to less agricultural emissions. However, in a 2018 study in Norway, researchers found that people spend the money saved on goods, whose production emits much CO2 which more than offsets the original emissions. Similarly, walking instead of taking the trains in Europe emits more CO2! European trains aren’t big emitters whereas we spend the money saved by walking in products which emit CO2. However, car-pooling loses only 32% in the rebound effect. Research shows that overall, we lose 59% of emission savings from “virtuous” behavior to rebound effect. More interestingly, the book shows that ‘flight shaming’ achieves nothing substantial. Even if every single one of the 4.5 billion people flying in a year stayed on the ground and continued to do so till 2100, it will reduce global temperature rise only by 0.05ºF in 2100. Since “flight shaming” saves a lot of money, the rebound effect will be significant. The sensible thing is to focus on the carbon efficiency of airplanes.
Similarly, the Environmental push to combat climate change via lower growth in advanced nations is short-sighted. Some even advise zero growth for rich nations. This will only mean slower growth for its trading partners in poor countries in Asia, Africa, and South/Central America. It will cause them to linger longer in poverty. Poverty makes them endure preventable diseases like malaria, diarrhea, and tuberculosis that much longer. The author says it is dumb to choose a ‘no growth pathway’ for the future as advocated by some groups. Instead, we must opt for a ‘high growth path’ by investing massively in education, health, and technology, especially for the world’s poorest. This will reduce poverty and increase human and social capital, which results in the push for a healthier and cleaner environment.
Lomborg rightly believes in the power of Innovation and Human adaptation as two important ways of ‘fixing’ climate change. In 1967, Stanford scientists predicted that hundreds of millions will die in India in the 1970s because of over-population causing starvation. Norman Borlaug’s innovations in high-yielding grain varieties not only disproved it, but India is a food surplus nation now, despite the population multiplying 2.2 times. California did not solve the massive air pollution of the 1960s in Los Angeles by banning the use of cars. Instead, scientists invented catalytic converters which make today’s air much cleaner in LA despite the number of cars increasing many folds. Similarly, the Club of Rome report predicted the world’s supply of fossil fuel running out by the 1990s, but the shale revolution has given us a glut. The author shows many areas where innovation can deal with climate change without going to extreme measures.
The other point the author emphasizes is the underestimation of the Human capacity for adapting to the environment. Science shows that sea levels have risen about a foot in the past 150 years. But we have adapted to it without even realizing it. People in Nijmegen in Holland and Houston, Texas have shown how to adapt even as they live in floodplains. People in Bangladesh and the east coast of India have adapted to severe tropical cyclones with various measures such that we see much less loss of life today. Californians have adapted well to forest fires in the past century. So, the author says we can adapt to a warming climate as well through many cooling approaches.
I am largely in agreement with Bjorn Lomborg’s vision and prescriptions. I also do not believe that rational, factual arguments support climate change alarmism. However, I have also some differences with the author.
One problem I have with the book is that it puts too much store by computer models of the future. First, it does not seriously question the climate computer models. Even though there are nearly 40 models in use, none of them agree with one another. Most predictions made in the 1990s on the warming of the Earth in the next twenty years have been wrong. When we use the models to work backward in time to see if its temperature computations of the past agree with the observed ones, they fail there too. The actual observed global temperatures in the first two decades of the twenty-first century have been much lower than the models’ predictions. The same is true about sea-level rises, intensity and the number of hurricanes, etc. The author uses other computer models which suggest that strong global action to reduce climate change would cause far more hunger and food insecurity. These models may be just as wrong as the climate models. History has shown us that long-term predictions for human societies invariably bomb because they do not adequately factor in the immense adaptive genius of human beings.
Another issue I have is that the author does not seriously question the thesis of the CO2 as the principal actor in climate change. He accepts it as conclusive. So, he proposes ‘carbon taxes’ as one solution to “fix” climate change. As of today, over 40 countries worldwide have adopted some price on carbon. It is through direct taxes on fossil fuels or through a cap-and-trade program. These efforts have been in place since the early 1990s. However, most countries have found it difficult to implement them with prices that are high enough to induce deep reductions in carbon emissions. In Australia, they suspended efforts to increase carbon taxes after a backlash from voters. No one wanted rising energy prices. A similar backlash happened in France, too. As a result, carbon pricing has, so far, played only a subsidiary role in efforts to mitigate climate change. Not that the people are stupid. Rather, the arguments of the environmental movements on climate change have not convinced them.
Yet another issue I have with the author is his benevolent view of Geoengineering solutions to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. Environmentalists also regard this as a potential solution. I find this inconsistent and dishonest of the environment movement. Elsewhere, they oppose GMO products and cloning of animals because it is playing with Nature without understanding the consequences. How is Geoengineering any different? Throughout the book, author Lomborg says that we don’t understand well how the Earth’s climate works. Science has not conclusively established the “cause and effect” link between CO2 and global warming in the way alarmism projects it. Many scientists don’t agree with the UN panel’s orthodoxy on this question. In such a case, isn’t Geoengineering playing with Nature, if we suck vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere? Can’t it have drastic consequences for plant life on Earth? Won’t the earth get a lot colder without its beneficial greenhouse effect?
The salient characteristic of religions is that believers cannot question its dogmas. This is a difference between science and theology. If NASA says that they are sending a spacecraft to the Moon and that it will land at a certain point in Moon a few days later at a certain instant, it is a scientific statement for me because I have seen it happen repeatedly. But now, NASA says that they have a climate computer model and that it predicts the Earth’s average temperature could be 7.4ºF higher than today at the end of this century. I can only take it as a subjective opinion and not as a proven, hard fact. The environment movement, some scientists, and the liberal world insist that we must treat it as a proven fact. In pursuit of this, they attack anyone who disagrees as a ‘denier’. To me, this is getting close to being a dogma, pushing climate science closer to being a religion. We want it to remain Science. -
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FALSE ALARM: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet
by Bjørn Lomborg, pub. in 2020 and about 300 pages.
Overview:
Hurricanes batter our coasts. Wildfires rage across the American West. Glaciers collapse in the Artic. Politicians, activists, and the media espouse a common message: climate change is destroying the planet, and we must take drastic action immediately to stop it. Children panic about their future, and adults wonder if it is even ethical to bring new life into the world.
Enough, argues bestselling author Bjorn Lomborg. Climate change is real, but it's not the apocalyptic threat that we've been told it is. Projections of Earth's imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive but largely ineffective policies that hamper growth and crowd out more pressing investments in human capital, from immunization to education.
False Alarm will convince you that everything you think about climate change is wrong -- and points the way toward making the world a vastly better, if slightly warmer, place for us all.
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The author presents his facts and ideas laid out in five sections and in the introduction he makes the point we all need to calm down. Climate change / global warming is not an existential crisis, it is not an extinction event. All the tales of gloom and doom make the mainstream media more widely read and richer and politicians more popular and powerful, but it's needlessly scaring us and terrifying our children.
Section 1 climate of fear.
Section 2 truth about climate change.
(extreme exaggeration not extreme weather).
Section 3 how Not to fix climate change.
Section 4 fixing climate change
(a carbon tax, innovation, adapting, geoengineering & prosperity).
Section 5 climate change and other global challenges.
.
Some of the details, highlights and confusables:
The author presents climate change as a genuine problem, but one that is manageable and not apocalyptic - not even close.
Unfortunately the fear-mongering has nearly half the population believing in impending doom and it's a partisan issue. The Democrats and loony left are aggressively pushing the sky-is-falling fallacy, conservatives & Republicans seem more reasoned. Nearly everything is now blamed on climate change / global warming. However, the world and people are better off, safer, wealthier and healthier then at any time in history. The planet is getting healthier and the long-term outlook for 2100 (the end of the century) is for life, most likely, to continue getting better.
Climate change is a manageable problem, but the hyperfixation on it alone and the money wasted on useless fixes causes our much more urgent problems to remain unsolved.
Selling disaster (bad news) makes money and the media usually adds a date that's still some years away. The same thing occurred back in the 1970s. Back then it was the [scientific] claim of a coming ice age and running out of natural resources and fossil fuels that had people panicked.
The target temperature of no more than 2 degrees Celsius is politically imposed and is not determined by the scientific community.
The good and bad of climate change: the fake scenario of the starving polar bear has been debunked (propaganda by Al Gore) and their numbers have increased. The only threat to polar bears seems to be from poachers, not the environment.
Global greening: more CO2 in the atmosphere means more green plants and more rain. CO2 is a plant "fertilizer." The amount of "green" has increased phenomenally. Heat-related deaths are actually declining with more people still dying of cold weather. Severe storms are not increasing, global drought has decreased, forest fires and natural disasters are not increasing.
Severe weather and disasters have not increased, but many more people are now living in disaster-prone areas, they own more stuff and live in expensive homes, so the cost of disasters have increased not the frequency of disasters. The author calls it the "expanding bullseye effect."
The Greenland ice sheet shouldn't worry you. If it kept melting it would likely take a thousand years to disappear.
Everybody doing their part: personal sacrifices will not fix climate change and have virtually no effect on lowering CO2 levels. Vegans are not saving the planet, electric cars are not emission-free, it's okay to have kids and don't be shamed into avoiding air travel.
The rebound effect: people go to great effort to reduce their CO2 emissions and some of these choices save money. As a result of cost-cutting measures people have more money, but as reward for their "good behavior" people have a tendency to reward themselves. The reward, like a vacation or a car, etc, will often end up producing far more CO2 emissions then they had previously saved.
Fickle power at a high cost: renewables like solar and wind amount to little more than a fantasy, they don't produce enough electricity, there's no way to reliably store it, so it can't be used on demand, like hydroelectric power, and solar panels and wind turbines often require a fossil fuel power station as a backup.
The author spends a great deal of time on cost benefit analysis, which gets tedious, as he discusses, in depth, trade-offs -- the best use of money to help the most people. And there's a long section on adopting a fossil fuel model, going forward, versus a green renewable model, with the former allowing a warmer environment, but greater GDP and a better lifestyle for people. [Dare I call it a dry-as-dust treatise on economics]?
We could be using the massive climate change funds (trillions are being squandered) to fund health, education, technology, improving lives and alleviating suffering, etc. Useless global warming policies always raise fuel costs, hurt the poor, even in our own country, and as heating and cooling costs increase it puts more people into poverty.
30 years of carbon reduction has achieved almost nothing. The Paris agreement only achieved minuscule results and costs a fortune - an obscene waste of money. Nuclear power, which provides plenty of emission free energy, has been mostly neglected even though it is the safest and cleanest form of power production.
We should not be trying to get to net zero or carbon neutrality, which causes panic solutions that only waste money and time and harms the impoverished. We should be spending our time on research and development, on innovation. People have always adapted...
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Lots of ideas about spending wisely and overcoming the panic and hype. The author mentions President Biden's proposed climate change spending and states that the prez is in the "existential threat" crowd.
If you're listening to the audio version you'll miss seeing all of the author's graphs and charts, but he does briefly mention them, referring to them in context.
Mostly liked it, but with the Democrats, along with their corporate media, in charge of the climate agenda, it seems unlikely they'll heed the author's call for calm, practical solutions and frugal spending.
..
. -
I've been a fan of Bjorn Lomborg since the Skeptical Environmentalist. His basic message has not changed - that we need to pay attention to climate change just not to the nut cases who make the extreme case of a one best way to solve the issues.
For me there were several issues he raises -
1) The extremists see one best way and fail to offer any assumptions about adaptation - that ignores the human propensity to fit their needs to their environments.
2) He does a good job of contrasting the techno-optimism of the 1950s (where we thought technology could solve everything) to the pessimistic apocalyptic visions of today. Everything can be managed if we think about what we need to do.
3) Many of the international joint treaties/goals are absurd. So some of the goals of the Paris Accords could be better implemented with less attention to reductions and more toward management of the issues including expanding education and reducing poverty - markets do work.
4) US, Mexico, China and the EU account for 80% of the carbon emissions.
5) He introduces the concept of the Expanding Bullseye. Storms are not increasing but their severity is because of an increasing concentration of housing in targeted areas. Between 1900 and now Florida's population has increased 67 fold - and much of that is concentrated in coastal areas.
6) Often the tradeoffs of "sustainable" solutions is to look the poorest in our world into poverty.
He makes a strong case for economic growth. There will be some tradeoff between responding to climate issues and economic growth. And for Lomborg we should err on the side of economic growth in part because the poorest then get a raft of benefits which ultimately help us manage climate issues.
7) Lomborg makes a strong case for a good bump in R&D on things like energy storage and alternative technologies in areas like nuclear. He is not a fan, and has some convincing data on the absurd ineffective nature of solutions like solar and wind power.
There are several areas where I think Lomborg relies too much on dodgy projections - but he is upfront about their potential use and abuse. But if you want to get out of the extreme discussions about climate change - this is a wonderful resource. -
Takes on the largely one-sided proposed solutions to climate change with many excellent analogies and a fair amount of facts. Makes excellent points that have yet to be refuted by those who believe elimination of fossil fuels is the ONLY way to solve this problem. Clear, concise, and recommended.
Lomborg tends to rile people up, and people who try to tear down his arguments mostly get things wrong. This book outlines a good approach to measuring and balancing costs vs benefits, and argues yet again that there are multiple solutions - we will end up using more than one. The facts he relies on (Nordhaus) have been questioned in the past, and this book doesn't answer those questions unfortunately. For that matter, the questions Lomborg has for the zero carbon emissions folks are not new either, and also haven't been answered.
The first book of his that I read (Cool It!) took Al Gore and others to task for knowingly exaggerating the problem - trying to scare people into a solution. This book continues to fight that trend, and thus the title. Everyone needs to stop telling people they'll be dead and the planet will be uninhabitable if we really want them to change. Seems obvious to me, but please read this book if that is somewhat less obvious for you. We aren't living the 1950s all over again - both science and economics are much improved. -
Must Read!
This book like Apocalypse Never uses a solid approach to assessing the impact of climate change, climate change policy and misreporting of climate change reality. It’s sometimes hard to work through the data, so the book would be significantly improved by aa summary showing exactly how little will be achieved by the Paris accord and similar massively expensive policy solutions. The bottom line is that climate change is being overblown by media looking for readers, by politicians looking for votes and by green organizations looking for subsidies and beneficial regulations. A more rational approach is needed, for sure. His proposals are interesting. His data are also interesting, but data rarely convinces religious followers of the climate gods. They are caught up by emotion and not susceptible to factual arguments. Good book, though. -
This is one of the most optimistic books I've read this year and it is rather astonishing that so many readers are seeing it as a book targeted against the eco-movement. The author is optimistic in the sense that he sees the solution to the issue of climate change and he is saying many times it is solvable. What is so wrong with this message?
Another important point that makes perfect sense is that to solve one of the biggest challenges of our generation is not to panic and not to spread doomsday messages everywhere, but to look for the existing solutions and research for new solutions that are the normal way to solve any issue around us really, not only global ones. Let's think about a cancer patient that just got informed about his lung cancer spreading to the liver and bone marrow. What is the right reaction to this info - 1) to panic and basically scream to all the relatives and people around about the incoming death or 2) to understand that the only right way to deal with this situation is to follow the existing treatment methods and read and find new ways, sometimes even to try them on. I am speaking from experience here and I have chosen the 2nd option and always will do that if the same situation will occur in the future.
The author is multiple times saying that climate change is man-made and it is a large issue, he never denies its existence or its importance, but disagrees with the methods used for its cure in today's politics and media.
The main message of the book is that we have the necessary technology and we can solve the issue without going into a lockdown and stopping human progress. What is wrong with the solutions proposed in the book? What is wrong with introducing an evolutionary carbon tax, not a revolutionary one; investing in research for a more efficient fight with climate change; adapting by using the technology we already have to alleviate the transition times; investing in geoengineering, and pulling poor countries out of poverty because prosperous countries are more capable in fighting climate change?
It seems the topic of climate change is more of a new religion and not a scientific debate anymore. for thousands of years, human civilizations were fascinated by the message of the End of the World, it seems we cannot live without it. Why not see this issue as a problem that can be solved and try to find the best possible solutions that we have right now and invest our time and money in finding even better ones?
So I recommend this book to anyone that really is looking for a solution and prefers to creatively analyze them instead of participating in eco rallies. -
Maybe 4.5 stars
This isn’t really a book about climate science. This is a book about the economic consequences of climate change and of the policies designed to slow the effects of climate change.
I should point out that Lomborg is not a climate change denier. He seems to accept at face value the claims of the climate scientists that man-made global warming is occurring due to CO2 emissions. His focus is on the economic consequences of the solutions proposed to solve the climate crisis. He shows—I would say persuasively— that many of the proposed cures are actually worse than the disease.
We are expected to accept the climate scientists’ models that predict the future of the climate based on current and future human activity. If we trust these models, then perhaps we should also trust the economists’ models that show how various proposals to address the climate crisis will affect the world economy and our overall well-being.
Doing nothing to address CO2 would be bad. But instituting drastic measures that have enormous costs on GDP, but have negligible effects on global warming, would actually be worse. There is an optimal scenario that appropriately balances these extremes. I really don’t feel inspired to text out the details here, but the bottom line is that we would be best off overall if we adopted some appropriate global carbon taxes, spent substantially more money on R&D on alternative energy sources, and focused on things that are actually more important for overall well-being: reducing poverty, investing in education, and eliminating disease.
For the sake of balance, I think it’s important to read a critique of Lomborg’s book, such as this one by the liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz in the NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/bo...
But then be sure to read Lomborg’s devastating response here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-yo... -
Fuuuuuuuck, I think I’ve had it all wrong all along! I am absolutely the kind of person who thought that reducing consumption and removing dependance on fossil fuels was the answer. I guess I thought that we could save the planet by, you know, sort of wrestling comforts out of human hands. That just isn’t the answer.
Does this author have all the answers? No but he doesn’t pretend to. But he does point out the folly in the ways the government and the media tell us about climate change. They scare the shit out of us in ways that make us believe that we’re all doomed and then make arbitrary laws that won’t save the planet at all. In fact, the Paris Climate Accord will cost millions, accomplish very little and harm poor people more than ever. Anytime politicians shake hands over “solutions,” we should know better.
This author believes that climate change is real, 100%. He also does the math on all the piddly ways that we think we’re helping like recycling or buying electric cars and points out how those things won’t help. Innovation, adaptation and investment in new types of energy are the only things that will help. We can’t let the media scare us into thinking we’re fucked and keep us from the ways we can and will survive.
So many important things to learn in this book! My copy is full of highlights. Everyone should read this! -
In the Epilogue, Lomborg states "we need better, smarter, and more realistic climate policies." A lot of the book shows how CO2 reduction efforts are ineffective. Whether his suggested approaches would work is another matter.
He lists Adaption as one of the solutions and mentions human adapt. We haven't always. The Dorset and Thule Arctic Cultures didn't adapt; they went extinct. The Maya Civilization collapsed, abandoning their cities and moving away; i suppose that is a way of adapting.
Lomberg states the target CO2 reduction is a random number. I recall reading that average temperatures going above 3°C would be a tipping point. Nowhere in the book does he mention the fragile existence of the planet where periods of violent heat exited nor that we went through repeated ice ages. Based on ice age sessions we are over due for one; it may have been the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years (and then the Industrial Revolution) that put-off an ice age > perhaps to marshall in another type of disaster.
Lomberg mentions Air Conditioning as an Adaption, with statistics showing more people die from cold (7%) than heat (0.5%) P52. He doesn't note that summer electrical usage is higher than winter (to run those air conditioners) and more A/C will exacerbate the need for more energy.
He does accept that temperature rise is happening and sea levels will rise, and that shouldn't be such a big deal, as we can cope, and the money spent on CO2 reduction would be better spent on making peoples lives better.
Other things of note were:
P7 40,000 pauple die in car crashes each year (in the USA) and we don't take drastic action to reduce that
P23 People in the Netherlands, London and other places live below sea level because they adapted (built dikes) and adapted because they could afford to (whereas Bangladesh can't)
P27 if China implements all its green promises, renewables will only reach 18% in 2040, with 76% of Energy needs still coming from fossil fuels
P28 Turberculosis has killed a billion people in the last 200 years (and more effort addressing that would be more worthwhile than funding CO2 reduction)
P30 -36 flooding has killed more people and caused more damage recently because more people have settled in vunerable flood plains not because storms are more frequent or stronger
P50 polar bears survived the interglacial period 130,000-115,000 years ago, wen temperatures were warmer than today
P52 we need to change our behavior but not in ways that climate activists tell us.
P53 140,000 die from heat each year vs two million from cold; in the UK there are 33 cold deaths for every heat death
P54 reducing deathe from heat is easier than reducing death from cold
P55 China has seen its green area increase almost double in the last 17 years, partly because of a massive reforestation program
P56 in the last few decades we got the equivalent of two entire new continents of green because of CO2
P58 you can't blame droughts on global warming when there are other places receive more precipitation
P62 the Earth is not experiencing more flights
P63 could not find enough proof to even determine whether flooding was getting worse or better
P68 burned wildfire area has decreased in the last 100 years
P79 cereal production is more than three times what is was in 1961
P80 by 2080 wheat, rice, maize, barley, oats, sorghum and quinoa will only be 2.2% lower than it would without climate change
P84 even in the absence of climate policy 60-70% of Greenland ice sheet would still exist in a thousand years
P90 the last decade of climate policies has achieved a some tntal of nothing
P92 "rebound effect" (moral licensing) when we do something good (recycle) we allow ourselves to do something bad (take a vacation burning Carbon) as a reward
P93 84% of people who become vegetarians fail within a year
P95 when governments took away electric car subsidies away, sales plummeted. Electric car production is more energy intensive than gasoline-powered vehicles
P96 in Shanghai (coal fired) pollution from an additional million electric-powered vehicles would kill nearly three times as many people annually than an additional million gasoline-powered
P97 in India where 150 million live in poverty, only 2% of the population have ever boarded an aircraft. Even if every single one of the 4.5 billion people getting on a flight this year stayed on the ground and happened every year until 2100 the temp rise would be reduced just 0.05°F
P98 Cruise ships are more entjronmentally damaging than planes
P101 despite spending $140 billion every year subsidizing renewable sources (wind, solar) they only provide one per cent of global energy needs
P118 out of 157 countries promising to cut emissions only 17 passed laws: Algeria, Canada, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, PNG, Peru, Samoa and Tonga
P120 the biggest emitters (China, USA and India) are not among them
P121 New Zealand was the first country to promise to go carbon neutral; it is also the first to spectacularily fail
P166 Carbon tax will make an impact bit it is only a small part of the solution
P167 Whaling (for oil) employed 70,000 and was fifth largest industry in the US
P175 Energy Storage > today 96% is the old well known water storage (dams). Other possibilities include compressed air in salt caverns released to run a generator, electricity to split water to produce hydrogen, flywheel storage, tall crane stacking concrete cylinders
P178 research for machinery to suck out CO2 and stnre it safely (like plants do)
P179 maybe an algae that can convert sunlight and CO2 into oil
P192 Los Angeles started painting its dark asphalt with a cool, gray coating that can lower its temp by 10°F [i tried to get the City of Calgary to investigate this (and lighter, greener shingling) but was told it just a minor percentage of surface area]
P195 Geoengineering such as seeding atmosphere with salt particles deserves research to reflect sular energy
P206 making society richer means it can afford to stop deforestation [clear cutting still going on in Canada, guess we aren't rich yet]
One thing not mentioned, that we could do, is to do with less (consumption, short-life goods, fuel powered travel).
