Post Carbon's most far-flung staffer is Andi Hazelwood, who manages PC's Global Public Media site from her home in Australia. Yesterday she caught up with Dr. Tim Flannery, Australian author of The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change , and got his latest take on the reception of Lomborg's Cool It. Here's a transcript of the exchange--you can listen to the whole interview on Global Public Media.
Hazelwood:"Even with issues we're already facing due to climate change, Bjorn Lomborg's very popular new book tells us that it's not all that bad. Will this damage your efforts at all?"
Flannery: "It could, because Bjorn Lomborg is telling very much a half truth there. He's taking, really, the lower end of the risk profile and saying, you know, that's what we're facing. In fact there is a broad band of probabilities and here in Australia we're seeing events, you know, at the very upper end of that band. So I'm not comfortable that we're not facing quite significant change in the future. And Lomborg's a statistician, he should know that. He should know how the numbers work and I think he's deliberately misleading us in his new book, Cool It."
Flannery also wrote a review of Lomborg's book for the Washington Post in September where he noted that:
"The deepest flaw in Cool It is its failure to take into account the full range of future climate possibilities. The computer models project outcomes ranging from mild, which he acknowledges, to truly catastrophic, which he ignores."
