Cool it, on climate change: Lomborg
Bjorn Lomborg, of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” fame, is now promoting his new book “Cool it! The Sekptical Environmentalist’s guide to Global Warming”.
Despite what his critics claim Lomborg actually does belive that human induced climate change is taking place. The problem he has is that he doesn’t believe that spending billions of dollars a year to reduce carbon emissions is the best use of all this money. Especially when that money being spent is at the expense of projects to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria or the funding of health and education projects in the third world.
He believes that we have to accept that some of the damage is already done and we have to prepare the world for the outcomes, especially the poorer countries. He believes rather than spending money now on CO2 reduction a better strategy would be to greatly increase R&D spending on alternative energy, increase the wealth of poorer countries and invest in civil projects to mitigate the effects of global warming.
His theory is that future technologies will be cheaper to implement than current solutions. This will allow us to roll out technology faster and cheaper than we now can and in the meantime we won’t have ignored the many other problems facing people all around the world.
Essentially Lomborg is taking a risk management approach to climate change. He’s not questioning the need to attack the problem just the timing. The question for all of us is what strategy is best?
While there is now almost unanimous concensus that Man kind is indeed causing global warming. We don’t have the same concensus on the timing of various tipping points. Do we have the time to wait for technology to catch up? If we did start now would the damage we prevent be worth the cost of not starting later? How extreme are the effects of global warming going to be?
I agree with Lomborg that the heightened concern, and indeed panic, in some quarters with regard to climate change is not conducive to rational thought. But at the same time I’m not entirely sure that panic is not warranted. So I’m not clear where I stand on his arguments.
So I’m going to turn all the lights out and have a think about it.
Lomborg recently outlined some of his views during an interview on the PBS NewsHour show.
