Putting the Heat on Lomborg

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."

There’s a new entrant into the long and twisted struggle to prevent the people of the world from fully appreciating and acting on the threat of global warming: a book by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg called Cool It: A Skeptical Environmentalist Looks at Global Warming.

On this webpage, we seek your help in building a thorough archive of the book’s factual distortions, misquotations, and misleading arguments. The book is already a big seller in the U.S., so there is every reason to push back hard against the insidious and distorting impact it will have on the prospects for taking strong, immediate steps to stop global warming.

We also will use this book and its coverage in mainstream media to better understand how political struggles over science-based issues play out in today’s world, a case-study unrolling in real time.

We welcome your participation! Join in the conversation, share your ideas, and use the links to other organizations and resources wherever you are working to stop global warming, at home, school, church, workplace, or community.

Bill McKibben takes Cool It apart in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. (The article was online earlier by special permission of the NYR on Grist. Thank the editor of the NYR for letting Grist rush this article into print. Also note that you can leave questions until September 28th for McKibben to answer on the NYR site here.)

McKibben, who debated Lomborg last May, does not think much of Lomborg's work, from The Skeptical Environmentalist on. Lomborg's arguments are:

"...tendentious and partisan in particularly narrow ways....Lomborg's actual arguments turn out to be weak, a farrago of straw men and carefully selected, shopworn data that holds up poorly in light of the most recent research, both scientific and economic."

McKibben notes Lomborg's frequent appearances on right-wing radio and TV programs, and his appearance before Congress as a rebuttal to Al Gore earlier this year, an appearance arranged by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), best known for his claim that "global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

McKibben is especially good at showing how the most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "eviscerates Lomborg's argument " that there's not much we can do about global warming and doing anything would cost too much.

I love McKibben's use of language. "Eviscerate" doesn't leave much to the imagination, does it?

Kudos to Amanda Witherell at the San Francisco Bay Guardian for her long article on Lomborg and Cool It. She raises a question that always comes up around discussing a politician or a position with whom you disagree. Are we giving unnecessary publicity to this person by taking on his/her arguments in public forums like this website, or should we spending our time instead on positive alternatives. In the final sentence of the piece, Witherell concludes that:

"... Cool It becomes more of a distraction than a contribution at a time when environmentalists
should be busy promoting solutions, not debunking the carefully crafted fables of Lomborg's dollar-driven theses." 

It's a good question, especially for this site! If only ignoring the arguments of fabulists like Lomborg were sufficient to make them go away, to prevent them from getting their message in front of people. As a matter of grand strategy, it would be a mistake to assume that every attack has to be met with a massive counterattack. There are times when it's better to let sleeping dogs lie, or least to wait a bit and see if the dogs bother to get up off the porch and start heading for the yard.

But in a 24/7 media world, the waiting-to-respond strategy has a nasty way of turning around and biting you. False claims move as quickly as true ones: to quote an old adage attributed to Churchill (and he didn't have the Internet!):

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." 

How can you tell when a lie is gaining traction? It was harder in Churchill's day. Now you can just pull up Amazon and see exactly how well a book like Cool It is doing. At 1:04 PM EDT today, Lomborg's book was at #108 overall on Amazon, and continued to lead Amazon's rankings for books on Public Policy, Climate Changes, and Conservation.

As to Witherell's point about solutions, you can do both. Just because you're raising questions about what Steven Colbert so aptly calls the "truthiness" of a book like Cool It doesn't mean you can't promote solid information and real solutions--see the Climate Change Resources section for an expanding list of books, DVDs, and websites that treat climate change as a very serious problem that we can solve if we get started quickly. (BTW, "truthiness" was Merriam-Webster's 2006 "Word of the Year.")

Australian environmentalist Xavier Forrest (aka Harry Shortz) takes a spirited whack at the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) on his blog, Typing is Not Activism. Forrest goes after one of the fundamental goals of writers like Lomborg, the creation of doubt, and the complicity of mainstream media in not rejecting, or at least clearly identifying, the distortions Lomborg presents.

"What all lobbyists for unpopular causes aim to do is to create doubt- if not actual doubt, the appearance of doubt will do just fine. Confusion is a beneficial side effect, as are hesitation, anxiety, ridicule, resentment, resistance, conflict - ooh, conflict. Conflict is gold. [Emphasis in original]....

"Lomborg, like any lobbyist for a thoroughly erroneous position, must argue that a cowpat is in fact a lump of chocolate. In our self-defeating state of confusion as to the purpose of tolerance and plurality, we accept this as a viewpoint to be aired, one which by its very existence indicates the need for a reasonable delay before committing to a course of action.

"But it’s not chocolate. It never will be chocolate. The time for considering that it may be a lump of chocolate is long gone. All that Lomborg and his ilk really offer is more bullshit and the fact that they call it anything else is the context in which his efforts should be presented by his host - in this case SMH."

I love Dilbert. But after reading Dilbert creator Scott Adams' recent blog entry on Lomborg, I can see that Adams doesn't necessarily share Dilbert's wonderful skepticism when it comes to evaluating a salesman like Lomborg.

Adams saw Lomborg on Bill Maher's show, where Lomborg was appearing via satellite (Maher show transcript here). As per usual, Lomborg ran through his grossly misleading arguments about polar bears, and the like, all the while insisting that he brought "a sense of proportion" to the debate over climate change:

"And I'm saying climate change has good and bad things happening. Overall, there'll be more bad things than good things. But we both need to get a sense of proportion." [Click here for more on the fallacy of the Mythical Middle.]

Writing on the Dilbert blog, Adams finds Lomborg entirely reasonable, swallowing the Mythical Middle argument hook, line, and sinker:

"The Danish economist's argument doesn't fall into the established views about global warming. He wasn't denying it is happening, or denying humans are a major cause. But he also wasn't saying we should drive hybrid cars, since he thinks it won't be enough to help."

Notice how easily Adams slips into equating climate change deniers with people who promote driving hybrid cars, as if both groups were equally extreme, while Lomborg's analysis places him above this ignorant clash of armies in the night.

Since Dilbert the comic character usually keeps his wits about him, I can only conclude that, in one of those obscure signs of the true glory of human creativity, it's possible for a comic character to sometimes be smarter than his own creator.

In an act of editorial irresponsibility, the Washington Post gave over the better portion of the front page of its Sunday "Outlook" editorial section to an article by Bjorn Lomborg, under the title "Chill Out. Stop fighting over global warming--here's the smart way to attack it." The paper featured a giant photo of two of Lomborg's totem animal, the polar bear. The article was Lomborg's usual misleading fare, without even a scintilla of response to the devastating criticism of his work over the last two months (see the reviews on this site for examples.)

Looking at Lomborg's article and its display, you would think that no one at the Post has access to Google. The article is an insult to all of the scientists and journalists who have taken the trouble to expose the misleading arguments in Lomborg's work. How, for example, could anyone authorize using polar bears to illustrate such a spread after reading Kevin Burger's devastating interview with Lomborg in Salon, an interview that ran on August 29, more than a month ago? Burger had done his own peer review of the literature on polar bears, which enabled Burger to show that Lomborg had ignored findings that did not fit his rosy picture of the polar bears' future, and that Lomborg had doctored a key quote by eliminating a phrase that would have weakened Lomborg's case.

In light of his admissions to Burger on this point, Lomborg's unaltered repetition of his polar bear argument in the Post is an act of shamelessness. Real scientists correct their work when their peers demonstrate mistakes, errors, or omissions. Lomborg does not. Publicly correcting his errors on polar bears would destroy the first chapter of his book, which would in turm cast doubt on the rest of the work.

Representative Ed Markey (D-MA), the head of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, got off a reply press release Sunday afternoon taking Lomborg to task for offering what Markey called "false choices" and ignoring the high costs of inaction. Here is Markey's release in full:

Markey: False Choices on World's Challenges Solves Nothing: Lomborg Op-ed ignores Steep Cost of Inaction

WASHINGTON (October 7, 2007) –
Chairman Edward J. Markey of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming criticized Bjorn Lomborg’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post as pushing false choices in the fight to solve our world’s greatest challenges.

The economist Sir Nicholas Stern has found that every dollar invested now to curb global warming will avoid a cost of five to twenty times more than if global warming pollution is left unchecked.

Below is the statement of Chairman Markey:

“Mr. Lomborg would have us treat symptoms--more malaria--instead of the disease--heat-trapping carbon pollution--because he views it as cheaper in the short run. The most thorough economic analysis to date of the cost of capping carbon emissions versus the cost of not doing so says this ratio is 1 to 5. For every dollar invested now, we are preventing 5 being spent later to head off this disaster. Mr. Lomborg’s answers are penny-wise, pound foolish, and a prescription for widespread calamity in areas of the world least responsible for the problem and least able to avoid it.

“Mr. Lomborg seems to think there are limits to ingenuity, compassion, and action. These are renewable resources that only increase with the size and importance of the challenges we face. We can fight malaria while cutting the emissions that cause more infectious diseases. We can save low-lying countries while stopping the sea-level rise that threaten their very existence.

“Lomborg's fog of false choices can obscure real solutions, solutions we know are available today. It's time to make a positive choice toward a cleaner, safer, more prosperous world.”

After his opening shot at Lomborg's op-ed in Sunday's Washington-Post, Rep. Markey has had the staff of his Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming prepare a detailed refutation of the claims Lomborg makes in this article, many of which even a high school intern at the Post's fact-checking department could have found.

Here's one example from the Committee's analysis:

Lomborg: "according to a wealth of scientific literature," damage from a ton of carbon is $2.

Rather than a wealth of scientific, this $2 figure appears to come from Lomborg pressing one economist as related on page 31 of his book Cool It. In reality the academic literature shows a wide range of estimated costs of the damage from a ton of carbon ($16 - $62 per ton), with the cost increasing over time and as heat-trapping gases accumulate in the atmosphere. 

Markey has been a crusader in Congress for more than 3 decades for better energy policies, and has been the most devastating critic in both Houses of Congress of the fiscal, environmental, and nonproliferation threats of investing in nuclear power. The Select Committee's website is new, but is already a site for anyone interested in stopping climate change.

Great news from Norway this morning: the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 would be split "... between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

The Nobel Committee left no doubt that this award was intended as a spur action:

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

Here's Al Gore's statement from his blog:

I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--the world's pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis--a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.

My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

One of Lomborg's more disarming claims is his assertion that global warming will save human lives because the number of people killed by higher temperatures will be more than offset by the number of people who live through less severe winters.

Evaluating such claims depends on having access to the best available data. But the Bush administration has just been caught blatantly censoring the testimony of the testimony written by Dr. Julie Gerberding, Director of the Centers for Disease Control for an Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on the impacts of global warming on public health.

For example, Gerberding wrote that the "CDC considers climate change a serious public concern," a concern which disappeared in the White House version.

As you can see in the graphic from the Washington Post, Bush's operatives deleted half of the pages of the testimony which Dr. Gerberding submitted. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, was not pleased:

“The White House continues to say that science should guide us on global warming legislation. The Director of the Centers for Disease Control is one of the country’s leading voices on public health. The Administration should immediately release Dr. Gerberding’s full, uncut statement, because the public has a right to know all the facts about the serious threats posed by global warming.”

As a loyal Bush foot soldier, Gerberding claimed that the editing had not affected her major points, but Boxer (and other scientists who are familiar with some of the claims that were excised) was not satisfied. Boxer has sent a letter to President Bush asking for all of the documents involved in the censoring of Gerberding's testimony, setting up yet another collision between Congressional demands for transparency and the Bush administration's reliance on extreme secrecy.

We've all been warned not to believe everything we find on the Internet, but how careful are you?

For example, take a look at the Journal of Geoclimatic Studies, published by The Institute of Geoclimatic Studies at Okinawa University. There are the usual elaborate set of requirements for submitting scientific papers, and all the other scholarly apparatus, including the table of contents of the current issue with a live link to the lead article, "Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory?"

Only one small problem.

There is no Okinawa Unversity.

And none of the authors of the "Death of Global Warming" paper are listed at their respective universities. In fact, the whole site is one delicious hoax!

For more, including news on sites which swallowed this hoax whole, see DeSmogblog.com.

And don't forget, as I've mentioned elsewhere about Lomborg's use of selective quotations, even when you see a reference to a website or publication that you know exists doesn't mean that what you're looking at is an accurate representation of what the original author said or meant.

Studying global warming can get a bit grim at times, so thanks to whoever did all this work for putting a little fun into the day!

The recently released report (formally known as the AR4 Synthesis Report) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a clear message, and "cool it" is not it. (This is the same IPCC that just shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.) In his book Cool It, Lomborg repeatedly emphasizes his reliance on the IPCC. But if he wants to continue to cite the IPCC, he will have to make some serious changes in his conclusions after reading the final report, which was released in Valencia, Spain on November 17th.

At a press conference on November 17th, IPCC panel chair Dr. R.K.Pachauri did not mince words. Here are a few quotes: 

“Climate change is a serious threat to development everywhere” 

"Today, the time for doubt has passed. The IPCC has unequivocally affirmed the warming of our climate system, and linked it directly to human activity”

"Slowing or even reversing the existing trends of global warming is the defining challenge of our age”[my italics]

Just look at the contrast between the IPCC's "defining challenge of our age" and Lomborg's repeated suggestions of other issues that we should be paying attention to instead of global warming.

You can get the Summary for Policymakers as a pdf file, as well as the three Working Group reports on which the Synthesis is based.

The Bush administration appears to be succeeding in its efforts at the world climate change meeting in Bali to block any meaningful action. And back in Washington, the House and Senate, despite being in the hands of a party that claims to take climate change seriously, are throwing section after section of the once highly touted energy bill over the side, in a thus far desperate attempt to whittle the bill down far enough to at least get 6o votes in the Senate, if not survive a threatened Bush veto.

These non-actions are exactly what the latest generation of global warming delayers like Bjorn Lomborg have been calling for. How could such a small handful of naysayers have such an enormous effect on policy?

If you want to see one of the best answers around, check out The Denial Machine, a recently updated show on the Canadian Broadcasting Company's "the fifth estate." In a 40-minute show, host Bob McKeown does an outstanding job of going back in time to show us a detailed history of the birth and rise of the oil-industry funded group of global deniers.

Early on in the show, I thought something had gone wrong. Instead of talking about oil and energy, McKeown went off into the history of how the tobacco industry fought back for decades against claims that cigarettes caused cancer. Very nice Bob, ,but what did a panel of tobacco industry CEOs lying to a Congressional committee have to do with global warming deniers.

Everything. McKeown makes a solid case that the oil industry adopted the tobacco industry's denial model, lock, stock, and barrel. APCO, the international public relations agency, worked for the tobacco industry. Then the oil industry hired APCO to manage the global denying fight. Some of the same men who appeared as scientific experts for the tobacco industry pop up years later, only now they are testifying that global warming is a hoax. One of the best known of these labile scientists is S. Fred Singer. McKeown also shows how the oil companies used a variety of foundations and front groups to wash their money, making it hard for the public to understand that it was the oil companies who were actually funding prominent denier scientists.

The other principal villain that McKeown pulls out of the mud is Republican pollster/strategist Frank Luntz. Luntz wrote a famous 16-page memo in which he explained to Republican candidates, on a word-by-word basis, how to confuse the voters about global warming. For example, Luntz said that Republicans should never use the term "global warming," that they should say "climate change" instead. As Luntz tells McKeown in an interview, warming sounds bad, while climate change sounds less threatening, like something that will happen over a long period of time. Never call yourself an environmentalist: too "radical." McKeown then showed a clip of President Bush talking about "climate change" in which Bush refers to himself as a "conservationist."

The Denial Machine is a great show, far and away the single best visual presentation I've seen of why the United States continues to be the world's biggest obstacle to dealing with global warming.(The show was first broadcast in 2006, and updated and rebroadcast on October 24, 2007.)

One of the most common attacks that Lomborg and his supporters make is to accuse people concerned about global warming of being “alarmists.” Take the case of global sea level rise, to which he devotes considerable space to in his book Cool It.
Lomborg writes he is relying on the findings of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Using the IPCC’s findings, Lomborg wrote that: “... sea-level increase by 2050 will be about five inches—no more than the change we have experienced since 1940….”[p.61]

Lomborg presents this finding as if it were rock-solid fact. What readers do not know is that Lomborg has omitted the IPCC’s own qualifications about this estimate. And when Lomborg attacks Al Gore and others for suggesting scenarios of much greater rises in sea level, Lomborg mentions Gore’s predictions are based on hypotheticals, but then goes on to condemn them nonetheless as “so dramatically removed from the best science.” (p.62)

Here’s how Lomborg’s critique gets refracted through the mainstream media, from a news story in the Vancouver Sun. The Sun reporter writes:

“Gore and others have been guilty of hyperbole, if not outright deception, in their attempts to raise red flags about climate change…A good local example was the set of alarmist maps created by the Sierra Club of B.C. last year that purported to show how Victoria and Vancouver would look after being flooded by a rise in sea level of six to 25 metres.”

What Lomborg (and this Sun report) does not tell his readers is that the IPPC acknowledged that there was an important uncertainty in this estimate. Here’s the IPCC’s disclaimer:

“An important uncertainty relates to whether discharge of ice from the ice sheets will continue to increase as a consequence of accelerated ice flow, as has been observed in recent years. This would add to the amount of sea level rise, but quantitative projections of how much it would add cannot be made with confidence, owing to limited understanding of the relevant processes.”

And what are scientists finding as they look closer at the flow of ice in Greenland and Antarctica? The emerging evidence points in the direction of ice melting at faster rates than were used in calculating the IPCC’S estimates, findings which only further highlight how misleading Lomborg’s omission of the IPCC’s qualifications can be.

A study published in January 2008 found that “recent warm summers have caused the most extreme Greenland ice melting in 50 years.”

Meanwhile down in Antarctica, another study published in January, 2008 found that record amounts of ice were melting into the sea. The leader of this study, Dr. Eric Ringot, told the New Zealand Herald:

"We have also established that most of this loss, if not its entirety, is caused by glacier acceleration. The IPCC focused on the surface mass balance component. We find this component is not indicative of the true mass balance."

The acceleration in ice loss over the past 10 years could increase in coming decades, he added.

"As some of these glaciers reach deeper beds, their speeds could double or triple, in which case the contribution to sea-level rise from Antarctica could increase quite significantly beyond what it is now."

The sound you hear is not just the sound of glaciers crumbling increasingly quickly into the sea: it is the sound of Lomborg’s fragile methodological apparatus falling apart under the pressure of these new findings.

Bjorn Lomborg continues to surface in newspapers around the globe. There is, he claims, "a tsunami of nonsense" out there about global warming, and he's here to set us all straight. As a phrase, "tsunami of nonsense" is attention-grabbing. Clever though it may be, I found that Lomborg was not the first to use the phrase. In November of 2003, the phrase popped up in a discussion of the game Halo. And in 2005, in an interview in Washingtonian magazine, CNN terror analyst Peter Bergen said that "A tsunami of nonsense has been written about [Osama] bin Laden." The title notwithstanding, Lomborg just repeats the same arguments from Cool It that you will find refuted elsewhere on this page.

What keeps Lomborg and the deniers of climate change going? The Canadian Broadcast Corporation program The Fifth Estate has produced a documentary, updated last fall, called "The Denial Machine" that gives an excellent introduction to the decades-long effort by the oil and coal industries to confound and confuse the public debate about the science behind global warming. I was especially struck by the direct links between the tobacco industry's denial campaign and the global warming deniers, including some of the very same scientists. Here's how The Fifth Estate describes this show:

"The Denial Machine investigates the roots of the campaign to negate
the science and the threat of global warming. It tracks the activities
of a group of scientists, some of whom previously consulted for Big
Tobacco, and who are now receiving donations from major coal and oil
companies.

Who is keeping the debate of global warming alive?

The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global
warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global
warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences. It
shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public
relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as
those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the
cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those
willing to question the science behind climate change, providing
funding for some of them, their organizations and their studies.

The Denial Machine also explores how the arguments supported by oil
companies were adopted by policymakers in both Canada and the US and
helped form government policy."