The Rational Environmentalist

Bjorn Lomborg on the priorities that should come before global warming

Ronald Bailey from the October 2008 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

About half the proposals are kind of obvious. Yes, it's good to do malaria. Yes, it's good to do HIV/AIDS. But I think most of them are impressive because we don't usually think of them. One of the great examples from this session is heart medicine for the Third World. When we think about the Third World, we think about malnourished black children with incredibly distended bellies who we see with flies all over them. We think about malaria and AIDS, those kinds of problems. Those are important, but the death toll from malaria, TB, and HIV, even in the most stricken countries, is still less than the death toll from heart disease. And we have very cheap aspirins, statins, for dealing with heart disease that work very well. Spending $200 million a year could probably save about 300,000 people dying each year in the developing world, causing a benefit of $25 for every dollar spent.

Now, that's not a sexy proposal. It's not one that you usually hear, but isn't it something we ought to hear? The Copenhagen Consensus is not just about what's fashionable. It's not just about what looks good on TV. It's also about making sure we reveal lots of hidden, reclusive, not very publicized issues that we should also be listening to. Perhaps it's about being a little more rational.

One more thing that actually surprised me this time was air pollution. One environmental problem in the Third World that I've been harping on for some time is indoor air pollution. More than a million people die-maybe two and a half million each year. If we improve stoves, it will do some good; it'll probably get $3 back from the dollar. That's respectable, but it's a lot less than what I thought.

The essential thing is that this is a process that doesn't just make it easier for you to confirm your preconceived notions, but it gives you an opportunity to see what some of the best experts on all these issues come up with.

reason: Are there any things you've changed your mind about since you wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist?

Lomborg: I think the main point of that book was to challenge our notion that everything is going down the drain, and I don't see any reason to revise that. We are in general moving in the right direction, and it's important to say mankind solves a lot of problems. We also create new problems in the process of solving old problems, but typically they're smaller than the old ones we fix, which is why we move ahead on virtually all material indicators. My second point with the book was to say this means we need to start prioritizing; we need to be smart about the kinds of problems that we worry about.

People in the U.S. will worry about pesticides, which kill probably about 20 people a year, but care very little about particulate air pollution, which kills 110,000 people in the U.S. every year. We could probably do something dramatic about particulates at a much lower cost than the pesticides. It's much more about getting those orders of magnitude right, and that's, of course, what the Copenhagen Consensus is about.

I did, just like pretty much everyone else, predict that raw materials would go down in price pretty much indefinitely. They're clearly not right now. I think our long-run expectation is still that they will go down. But it was much easier to make that argument in the '90s than it is in the 2000s. So clearly we all become more knowledgeable, but I think the main point of the book was to say, in general, things are moving in the right direction. That message obviously still stands.

reason: You experienced some heartburn about that book when you were formally accused of scientific dishonesty. How did you react to that charge?

Lomborg: At first I was a little stunned, but I also thought it was going to be a fair process. I thought, yeah, it's a little ridiculous, but we'll take that to the committee and show that they are wrong. The lead guy who brought this in front of the committee explicitly said in his first paragraph of his first letter to the committee that he did this for political reasons. So there was never any doubt of what the motive was. I imagined that this was going to be somewhat of a walk in the park: He would come up with arguments, and I would counter them. The committee would go through all this in a fair and impartial way and find that you could have reasoned differences of opinion, but clearly this was nothing to do with scientific dishonesty. I certainly made very clear where I got my references from and what I based my arguments on.

Instead, the committee came out with what can only be described as an incredibly poorly argued, very obviously tainted point. The committee essentially summarized a critique that was commissioned by Scientific American, by four people, three of whom I criticized in my book. Not surprisingly, they were not particularly favorable towards my book. The committee summarized my answer to those critiques in one and a half lines of the document, about 10 words, and then went on to talk about how unreasonable it was that I was unwilling to accept all of their charges. To them that only underscored the point that I was probably being scientifically dishonest because I was unable to admit to my errors.

Unfortunately, I could only appeal the legality of the decision. I did so to the ministry, and they took a year for their lawyers to go through it. Fortunately, one of the main points of the Danish administrative law is that a decision has to be well argued. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable requirement, but that was the main thing that the ministry struck it down on. They said that the committee actually had no argument whatsoever for making their judgment, and that was why the original decision was annulled.

I'm still surprised by the number of people who will reference the first part, that I was condemned for scientific dishonesty, and ignore the fact that it was later overturned on the fact that there was absolutely no evidence. If anything, it seems to indicate that there was a strong wish without any good arguments to indict me.

reason: When I interviewed you before The Skeptical Environmentalist came out, you were describing yourself as a man of the left.

Lomborg: I still am.

Comments

|10.1.08 @ 3:11PM|#

I myself am a skeptical environmentalist, yet I prefer to be referred to as "conspiracy theorist" when I'm being described by the media.

|10.1.08 @ 3:19PM|#

Someone told me that this month's issue of Reason has two articles featuring blonde swedes. I was sorely disappointed.

Johnny Nowhere|10.1.08 @ 3:46PM|#

Save the Caribbean Plate!
Stop Plate Tectonics!

|10.1.08 @ 4:05PM|#

Socialism scares me. does it work well in Denmark?

the message is good that global warming really isn't the existential threat that it has been portrayed as.

Earthquakes on the other hand, *shudder*.

|10.1.08 @ 4:16PM|#

For God's sake, when are we going to do something about the supervolcanoes?!? I demand that the Discovery Channel raise awareness of this important issue.

Also the possibility of something like in "The Happening", but with sharks.

Neu Mejican|10.1.08 @ 4:21PM|#

Lomborg: Most people who have no sort of preconceived notions about one thing or another think it's eminently sensible.

Is this most infants?

Translation: those that think it is eminently sensible have the same bias I do, so they seem to be unbiased?

|10.1.08 @ 4:26PM|#

Great article.

I disagree with Mr. Lomborg on lots of stuff. That said, I really like his humility and the approach he takes towards problem definition and solutions. It is no wonder that he pisses off lots of folks.

Neu Mejican|10.1.08 @ 4:36PM|#

JsubD,

I actually agree with you in your opinion about Lomborg. He does, however, dismiss his critics a little too easily. Some of the criticism of his work has been rooted in disagreements with his scientific methodology and the assumptions he used in his analysis of the environmental issues. Similar to the some of the criticisms that can be leveled at Freakonomics...for instance. Good statisticians will tell you that any analysis is only valid to the degree that your assumptions are valid. Validity doesn't come from the numbers...they support validity, but they don't create it.

Like many intellectuals, Lomborg's work is used inappropriately to back some pretty ridiculous positions. He gets some of the flak that comes off of the reaction. Lots of it is undeserved. His reaction to more nuanced criticism may be a result how it is mixed in with the undeserved flak.

Perhaps.

NM copy editor|10.1.08 @ 4:37PM|#

add an "of" as needed.

MAX HATS|10.1.08 @ 4:53PM|#

Global warming denial - Is that still happening, or have we moved on to "it's happening but there's nothing we can do to change it." Sorry, missed the memo.

|10.1.08 @ 5:06PM|#

Global warming denial - Is that still happening, or have we moved on to "it's happening but there's nothing we can do to change it." Sorry, missed the memo.

You've sorta got a little glimmer of the new meme.

It's happening but for rational people it is farther down the list of priorities than Al Gore would like.

|10.1.08 @ 5:08PM|#

I actually agree with you in your opinion about Lomborg. He does, however, dismiss his critics a little too easily.

Fortunately you and I are never guilty of that. ;-)

|10.1.08 @ 5:11PM|#

The tempature dropped 0.7 degrees C in 2007. Further sun spot activity is at an all time low. Odd coincidence isn't it? I will be curious to see the numbers for 2008.

Neu Mejican|10.1.08 @ 5:19PM|#

John,

That is indeed a coincidence.

Coincidence-noun
1. a striking occurrence of two or more events at one time apparently by mere chance.

|10.1.08 @ 5:21PM|#

Heh Bailey,..HEH BAILEYYYYY
I got Reason yesterday and there is no man made global warming. It is solar activity.
Your wrong.
When are you going to admit it?
Are you still a member of the ACLU?

Chad|10.1.08 @ 5:59PM|#

Lombborg is a smart guy, but I disagree with him on several points

1: Even in his own Copenhagen Consensus, combating climate change was found to provide a positive cost-benefit in almost every scenario. He does not often point this out.

2: The methodology used by the Consensus, like all other cost-benefits, uses a process called discounting - essentially, lowering the value of future benefits by a set percent for every year they exist in the future. Therefore, any cost-benefit analysis involving the deep future winds up being more of a debate around the appropriate discount rate rather than the facts about the system. 3% vs 4% compounded a hundred times makes a wild change in your conclusions. Not surprisingly, Lomborg's team chose a high discount rate, making future payoffs very small.

3: The Consensus did not account for far too many effects of global warming. The essentially focused on weather events (floods, droughts), sea level rise, and effects on crops. Losing 1/3 of the species on earth, for example, didn't factor into their equations at all.

4: Lomborg just doesn't understand one major difference between climate change and everything else on the list - climate change is not charity. While a dollar donated towards providing malaria nets in Africa might be a great way for me to spend my charitable dollars, by no means is this anything but charity. However, I have a responsibility to clean up the pollution that I dump into the public commons. This makes a world of difference politically.

|10.1.08 @ 5:59PM|#

NM, I have to say I have a hard time believing that changes in the activity of the sun and changes in the Earth's temperature are completely unrelated.

|10.1.08 @ 6:10PM|#

Guys, guys, guys (gals too).
This is not a global warming thread. It's a risk assessment and bang for the buck thread.

I'm stockpiling data for the next time an AGW thread appears. ;-)

|10.1.08 @ 7:16PM|#

Lomborg and Bailey are obviously in the pocket of Big Peroxide.

|10.1.08 @ 8:28PM|#

I got Reason yesterday and there is no man made global warming. It is solar activity.
Your wrong.
When are you going to admit it?
Are you still a member of the ACLU?

That's great news, Terry! Just submit your data to the appropriate journals so we can all stop caring about it.

|10.1.08 @ 9:06PM|#

NM -- Are you seriously implying that the strong correlation over long periods of time between sunspot activity and global temperature is complete coincidence?

Are you a sunspot cooling denier?

MAX HATS|10.1.08 @ 9:15PM|#

Who needs science? I have a messageboard. And blogs! I can find stuff that I already agree with there. And there are LOLcats!!!!

|10.1.08 @ 9:27PM|#

That was a great article Ron, kudos.

I liked the fact that there was actually some disagreement, but along with it was rational debate. So often when it comes to discussions on environmental issues, reason and rational thought just go out the window. I really must get around to reading some of Mr Lomborg's books.

I also really like the idea of the Copenhagen Consensus and actual risk assessment and cost/benefit analysis. There is only a finite amount of resources to go around for these issues and at some point we really have to prioritise their allocation.

Chad|10.1.08 @ 10:39PM|#

prolefeed | October 1, 2008, 9:06pm | #

NM -- Are you seriously implying that the strong correlation over long periods of time between sunspot activity and global temperature is complete coincidence?

Are you a sunspot cooling denier?

Ummm....solar output and sunspot cycles are included in the IPCC calculations. Their effect is minor. And btw, the current sunspot minimum is one of the several "natural" effects that is currently blunting global warming. Of course, the sunspot cycle should be reversing any time now...

Adam S | October 1, 2008, 9:27pm | #

That was a great article Ron, kudos.

I also really like the idea of the Copenhagen Consensus and actual risk assessment and cost/benefit analysis. There is only a finite amount of resources to go around for these issues and at some point we really have to prioritise their allocation.

Adam, cost-benefit analysis just don't work well when talking about long time frames, because it inevitably breaks down into philosophical arguments about the discount rate rather than a debate about the situation being considered. Since the discount rate is compounded hundreds of times in any climate change discussion, it wildly affects the conclusions. If you pick 5% and I argue for 2%, we are going to reach entirely different conclusions even if we agree on everything else.

|10.2.08 @ 1:22AM|#

Chad, sure, but so often these things have *no* cost/benefit analysis done at *all*. I agree that the discount rate is important.

|10.2.08 @ 2:40AM|#

Neu Mejican | October 1, 2008, 4:21pm | #

Lomborg: Most people who have no sort of preconceived notions about one thing or another think it's eminently sensible.

Is this most infants?

Translation: those that think it is eminently sensible have the same bias I do, so they seem to be unbiased?

Nuevo: Perhaps you need to reconsider your committment to rationality. I can recall many times in my life, as my beliefs evolved based on new (to me) evidence, that an eminently sensible idea altered my biases ;-}

|10.2.08 @ 2:52AM|#

Agreed Kant. I have often changed my view on something when presented with incontrovertible evidence.

Neu Mejican|10.2.08 @ 10:07AM|#

Re: Coincidence discussion above.

Chad covers the questions regarding solar activity.

It was a poor attempt at a dig at John.

The "it's the sun" argument is fueled on straw rather than fusion.

|10.3.08 @ 9:54PM|#

The problem with the priorities presented is that they all decrease the overall human mortality rate. The sheer number of human alive right now is one of the major causes of the environmental damage being done. We could all live like the Amish, but as long as the global population continues to rise, we will still destroy the habitable world we now live in. Make priority one global birth control, and maybe I can get behind those measure which aim to improve the quality of human existence. And before everyone gets all upset at my "trampling on other people's freedom" let me say that my freedom to responsibly have even one child has first been trampled by those who have already bred excessively. No one can honestly claim to both desire a sustainable human treatment of the Earth and allow for unending population growth. Everyone who breeds beyond the mortality rate is adding a permanent increase in humanity's load on the Biosphere. Everyone who lowers the mortality rate is doing damage on that line as well.

Chad|10.4.08 @ 4:03PM|#

City Bear: Go ahead and have all the kids you want. The entire developed world has fertility rates well below replacement levels. So does most of the developing world. Birth-rates are generally falling in most of the least-developed areas as well.

The problem is rapidly becoming one of too FEW people, not too many. Population will peak in the second half of this century, according to the UN, and then begin to decline. The problem of low birth rates is already becoming a severe issue in some European and Asian nations, particularly Japan, Korea and Singapore. The problem will spread to the US in another generation or so.

If you really feel guilty about increasing the population, for each child you have, simply donate $1000 to one of many good charities that deal with family planning in poor nations. You will get the children that you want while simultaneously preventing the birth of tens of unwanted children whose parents cannot support them. Everyone wins.

Sarah Palin|10.5.08 @ 4:16AM|#

"We could all live like the Amish"

Thanks but no thanks.

|10.5.08 @ 4:16AM|#

Thanks but no thanks.

|10.7.08 @ 10:13AM|#

Ron, it's a puzzle why you didn't challenge (1) the obvious inapplicability of the "Copenhagen Consensus" effort to prioritize government spending on development aid to climate mitigation policy or (2) the disconnect between Lomborg's desire for strong government leadership on clean energy investments - in the form of "a lot of cheap researchers having smart ideas rather than big projects that make the politicians feel comfortable" - and his very tepid support for carbon pricing that economists have long favored as the best way of eliciting increased investment.

As for point (1), the CC economists were measuring how a fixed purse of money might be best spent; in doing so, they simply ignored the possibility that climate mitigation policy might take the form of carbon taxes or auctioned permits - which would RAISE MONEY (not use it), which revenues could in fact be used to increase the pool of money to be spent on the rest of the government aid priorities weighed by the CC.

In other words, as I have argued on Pielke's thread concerning the Lomborg and Yohe spat, the CC structure just doesn't make sense in the context of climate change policy alternatives and so tells us almost nothing about climate change policy.
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/09/04/lomborg-misapplies-the-quot-copenhagen-consensus-quot-to-ignore-carbon-pricing-and-yet-argue-for-massive-government-investments-in-clean-energy.aspx