Links tagged “lomborg”

Bjorn Lomborg: 'Sadly, accurate science doesn’t make for good television; predicting the end of times does.'

But even this report revealed: “Drought statistics over the entire contiguous US have declined,” the report finds, reminding us that “the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the benchmark drought and extreme heat event.”

Report also found: On flooding, the assessment accepts the IPCC’s finding, which “did not attribute changes in flooding to anthropogenic [human] influence nor report detectable changes in flooding magnitude, duration or frequency.”

CNN’s headline, screaming that “climate change will shrink [US] economy” by 10 percent, a figure also repeated on The New York Times front page. Actually, the UN’s climate scenarios envision US GDP per capita will more than triple by the end of this century, so this 10 percent reduction would come from an economy 300 percent larger than it is today....So, even a 5 percent reduction in the size of the American economy only follows from picking unlikely worst-case scenarios.

The well-reported idea that warming will shrink the economy by 10 percent disregards huge economic growth, assumes twice the damages of the worst-case temperatures the report itself expects and even then only finds such high costs stemming almost exclusively from easily preventable heat deaths.

Conjecturing that the temperature-mortality relationship in the US would remain constant over a century is ludicrous.

Climate change has been blamed for a dizzying array of absurd woes, from the dwindling number of customers at Bulgarian brothels to the death of the Loch Ness monster. Most of us can see through these silly headlines, but it’s far harder to parse the more serious claims when they’re repeated in good faith by well-meaning campaigners. 

Consider the recent assertion by Unicef’s Bangladesh head of mission that climate change leads to an increase in child marriages. Between 2011 and 2020 globally, more than 140 million girls under the age of 18 will become brides, leading to curtailed education and reduced lifetime earnings, more domestic violence, more deaths from complications due to pregnancy and increased mortality for the young brides’ children. By all accounts, child marriage must be taken seriously. In Bangladesh, nearly 75% of women between the ages of 20 and 49 reported that they were married before they turned 18, giving the country the second-highest rate of child marriage in the world. As the Unicef head tells it, climate change has been a major cause, as warmer weather has worsened the flooding, pushing people to the cities, leading to more child marriages. This entire string of logic is wrong. The frequency of extreme floods in Bangladesh has increased, it’s true, but studies show their magnitude and duration have in fact decreased. And Bangladesh is far better at adapting today than it was a generation ago. In 1974, a flood killed 29,000 people and cost 7.5% of the country’s gross domestic product. A slightly larger flood in 2004 killed 761 people and cost 3.3% of GDP.

Danish statistician Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, the President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center: 'We will spend at least one hundred trillion dollars in order to reduce the temperature by the end of the century by a grand total of three tenths of one degree...the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years...Again, that is using the UN's own climate prediction model.'

'If the U.S. delivers for the whole century on the President Obama's very ambitious rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century.'

'But here is the biggest problem: These miniscule benefits do not come free -- quite the contrary. The cost of the UN Paris climate pact is likely to run 1 to 2 trillion dollars every year.'

'Governments will now spend aid money on climate. That's depressing. What they are essentially saying is: 'Oh my God. Your're sick, you don't have enough food, you don't get your kids enough education. Here's a solar panel.'

'But air and water pollution kill 6 million people each year and harm billions worldwide. Wealthy countries largely solved these problems through economic development. Poor countries should have the same opportunity to develop — so they, too, can have clean drinking water and switch to cleaner energy sources, instead of using dung and twigs for fuel'

'The Germans are spending about $110 billion on subsidies for these solar panels,' said Lomborg. 'The net effect of all those investments will be to postpone global warming by 37 hours by the end of the century.'

'All those billions, for 37 hours delay?,' asked John Stossel.

'Yeah,' said Lomborg, 'so remember them in [the year] 2100 and say, 'Wow.''

'Bjorn Lomborg is Al Gore lite': 'Lomborg tried to walk in the middle of the road — i.e., manmade global warming is real but it's a low priority (early Lomborg) or we should paint roads white (late Lomborg) — but got run over by a driver in the left lane'

Romm: 'Lomborg has no natural audience because conservatives don't like the fact that he pretends to believe in global warming science and progressives don't like the fact that he doesn't actually want to do anything about global warming except diss the people who do'