Links tagged “lomborg”

Inflation Reduction Act will have 'very little' effect on climate change: Bjorn Lomborg - Copenhagen Consensus President Bjorn Lomborg ran the numbers and reveals what impact the president's new spending bill will have on climate change on 'Varney & Co.'

Lomborg: "They've said, we're going to reduce emissions by 40%. But remember, even if we had done nothing, it would still have been reduced by about 30% because of the fracking revolution switching from coal to gas. So they're talking about a 10 percentage points reduction. Now that's not insubstantial. But if you plug that into the UN climate model, it turns out that it will have virtually no impact even by the end of the century. In a pessimistic scenario, it will reduce temperatures by less than 1 thousandth of a degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century. In a very optimistic, I would say much too optimistic. It will reduce temperatures by less than three one hundredth of a degree Fahrenheit." ... It will actually do almost nothing for the global temperature, because the vast majority of emissions are not going to come from the U.S. or the rich well, meaning Westerners. It's gonna come from China, India, and Africa."

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Also see: Analysis: Biden’s 50% emissions reduction target for 2030 (if achieved) would have a ‘nearly unmeasurable’ impact on overall global CO2 emissions

Lomborg: In other words, up to 12 percent of the entire area of the state — had its modern boundaries existed in the 18th century — burned every year. Old newspapers across the country were filled with descriptions of terrible fires. Back then, “skies were likely smoky much of the summer and fall in California,” as one academic paper noted. Elsewhere in the country in 1781, “the smoke was so dense that many persons thought the day of judgment had come,” The New York Times reported a century later. This all changed after 1900, when fire suppression became the norm, and fire declined precipitously. In the last half of the 20th century, only about 250,000 acres burned annually. Clearly, then, we used to have much more fire before global warming. Even this year’s record-breaking 2.3 million burnt acres is about half the lower end of a typical year in earlier times...

Californian fires are slowly coming back to their prehistoric state because of the enormous excess fuel load. Putting up solar panels and using biofuels will be costly but do virtually nothing to fix this problem. Prescribed burns will. What we choose depends on the information we get.

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.