Environmentalism and the Skeptical Mind, Part 3

When Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, contemporary reports said that it ejected more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than all of man had in his entire existence. Given such a statement, how can we take seriously the claims of certain environmentalists that every industrial activity is destroying the planet? It would seem that Mother Nature herself is doing a bang-up job destroying the planet--yet the planet's still here.

Enter Bjorn Lomborg. Mr. Lomborg is a self-described Danish liberal, vegetarian, and former member of Greenpeace. He set out to determine statistically just how much damage man is doing to the planet, and when the facts didn't support his expectations, he had enough integrity to report what he'd found. He published his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in 2001.

What's the book say? Well, Lomborg looked at data from several reliable sources--including the UN, the World Bank, the OECD, etc--and found that things aren't as bad as you'd think. It took him 350-540 pages (depending on the edition), 2930 footnotes, 1800 bibliographical references, 173 graphs and figures, and 9 tables to discuss pollution, biodiversity, fear of chemicals, and the greenhouse effect. Here are just a few things he found:
1. There is more food today, and fewer people are starving.
2. Life expectancy world-wide has risen from 30 to 67 years in the last century.
3. Poverty has been reduced more in the past 50 years than it was in the preceeding 500.
4. Air pollution in the industrialized world has declined--in London the air hasn't been cleaner since medieval times.
5. We're not losing forests. (That doesn't mean Brazilians should clear-cut the Amazon.)
6. Oil won't run out.
7. "The world is not without problems, but on almost all accounts, things are going better and they are likely to continue to do so into the future."

Lomborg doesn't say or even imply that man should perform any activity he wants and ignore the environment. Instead, he presents information that allows us to make informed choices about courses of action rather than reacting to rhetoric, emotion, and anecdote. He believes in using cost-benefit analysis when making these decisions and shows that many so-called "green initiatives" are misguided and more likely to do serious harm than good. He criticizes the way many environmental organizations make selective and misleading use of scientific data--just as Patrick Moore did--about the allocation of limited resources.

What is the world's biggest environmental threat? Poverty. Agreeing with Lomborg on that count is Jack Hollander, an emeritus professor at Berkeley who in 2003 published The Real Environmental Crisis: How Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment's Number One Enemy. Anyone who's been to a third world country will readily see the truth of such an assertion. Yet, the major environmental groups target developed countries, the ones who already demonstrate far more stewardship for the environment than any nation ever has.

Like Moore, Lomborg has his detractors. The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty denounced Lomborg's book as one that fell "within the concept of scientific dishonesty." But why? And of course, environmental groups attacked his work and views, just as they attack anyone who doesn't subscribe to their orthodoxy. Where does the skeptical mind find the truth?

I myself don't find it amongst the pieces of sky that have fallen.

Bjorn Lomborg on Global Warming

I've written a few times about Bjorn Lomborg; here's an opinion piece he recently wrote.

Man-made climate change is, of course, real, and constitutes a serious problem. Yet the current cut-emissions-now-before-it-is-too-late mindset neglects the fact that the world has no sensible short-term solutions.

Bjorn and I are going to have to agree to disagree on the first statement above, but the rest of the article still has some interesting information. Global warming adherents, Lomborg apparently agrees with you! But look what else he says:

This seems to be why we focus on feel-good approaches like the Kyoto Protocol...

Some countries, like the United States and Australia, chose to opt out of its stringent demands; others, like Canada, Japan, and a raft of European states, pay lip service to its requirements, but will essentially miss its targets. Yet, even if everyone had participated and continued to stick to Kyoto's ever more stringent commitments, it would have had virtually no environmental effect: The treaty's effect on temperature would not have been measurable by mid-century and would only have postponed warming by five years in the 21st century. Nonetheless, the cost would have been anything but trivial - an estimated $180 billion per year...

But nobody sees fit to reveal the agreement's dirty little secret: It will do next to no good - and again at very high cost. According to one well-established and peer-reviewed model, the effect of the EU cutting emissions by 20 percent will postpone warming in the 21st century by just two years, yet the cost will be about $90 billion annually. It will be costly, because Europe is a costly place to cut carbon-dioxide, and it will be inconsequential, because the EU will account for only about 6 percent of all emissions in the 21st century. So the new treaty will be an even less efficient use of our resources than the old Kyoto Protocol.

We will not be able to solve global warming over the next decades, but only over the next half or full century. We need to find a viable, long-term strategy that is smart, equitable, and doesn't require inordinate sacrifice for trivial benefits. Fortunately, there is such a strategy: research and development. Investing in the research and development of non-carbon-emitting energy technologies would leave future generations able to make serious and yet economically feasible and advantageous cuts. A new global warming treaty should mandate spending 0.05 percent of GDP on research and development in the future. It would be much cheaper, yet do much more good in the long run.

He makes sense.

Update, 3/22/07: Lomborg spoke to the same Senate hearing that was previously drooling all over Al Gore. Ker-Plunk updates us:

Bjorn Lomborg is a rare creature, a leftie and environmentalist that seems to be able to deal with reality and prioritise issues with some semblance of common sense...In Lomborg's testimony he agrees that man is the cause of recent global warming and then indicates that it's no big deal. I encourage you to spend 20 minutes of your life reading his submission.

I encourage you to do so as well. Seriously. Just click on Ker-plunk's link.

Bjorn Lomborg on Hugh Hewitt

I've written about Lomborg before (just do a search at the top or bottom of this blog for "Lomborg"), and hearing him on the drive home today on Hugh Hewitt's show was very informative. He's what I'd call a straight shooter--no ideologue, he. He tackles global warming/climate change/global climate disruption as an economist, and his views are most interesting. His new movie is "Cool It", an alternative way to look at the hyperbole from Al Gore's movie, and it's web site is linked at the above.

As of the time I write this, no transcript of Hewitt's interview with Lomborg is posted. I'd really like to show how even-handed he is on this topic, even when I disagree with him.

There Goes Bjorn Lomborg, Making Sense Again

It's been awhile since I've done a post on Bjorn Lomborg (type his name into the search engine on this page to find other such posts), so here goes.

While I don't agree with Lomborg that man is having an appreciable affect on worldwide climate, I cannot help but admire the logic and reason he brings to the issue:

The equivalent cost for the US and the EU would be more than $5 trillion. Each and every year. That is more than the entire US federal budget, or more than the EU governments spend across all budgets for education, recreation, housing, environment, economic affairs, police, courts, defense and health.

Tellingly, the European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans recently admitted that climate policies would be so costly, it would be a “matter of survival for our industry” without huge, protective border taxes.

Climate change is a real, manmade problem. But its impacts are much lower than breathless climate reporting would suggest. The UN Climate Panel finds that if we do nothing, the total impact of climate in the 2070s will be equivalent to reducing incomes by 0.2-2 percent. Given that by then, each person is expected to be 363 percent as rich as today, climate change means we will “only” be 356 percent as rich. Not the end of the world.

He's long written that we should adapt to so-called climate change, not try to stop it (if such is even possible).

Most voters aren’t willing to pay for these extravagant climate policies. While Biden proposes spending the equivalent of $1,500 per American per year, a recent Washington Post survey showed that more than half the population was unwilling to pay even $24.

And for what? If all the rich countries in the world were to cut their carbon emissions to zero tomorrow and for the rest of the century, the effort would make an almost unnoticeable reduction in temperatures by 2100.

This is because more than three-quarters of the global emissions in the rest of this century will come from Asia, Africa and Latin America. These nations are determined to lift their populations out of poverty and ensure broad development using plentiful energy, mostly from cheap fossil fuels.

An example:

Take the terrible air pollution in Los Angeles in the 1950s. It wasn’t fixed by naïvely asking people to stop driving cars. Instead, it was fixed through innovation — the catalytic converter allowed people to drive further yet pollute little. We need to invest in research to make green energy much cheaper: from better solar, wind and batteries to cheaper fission, fusion and carbon capture.

We should spend tens of billions to innovate the price of green energy below fossil fuels. Spending trillions on enormous and premature emissions cuts is an unsustainable and ineffective First World approach.

Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist is a must-read. And I've just downloaded this audiobook, written in 2019.

Math For Social Justice, Part II

Here's Part 1.

Rethinking Mathematics is nothing more than an attempt to politicize the teaching of math. In this I hope it fails, because too much of our curriculum has become politicized already.

Let's take some snips from the web site and comment on them, shall we?

In a "rethought" math class, teachers make mathematics more lively, accessible, and personally meaningful for students, who in turn learn in more depth.

This is a common misperception in education today, one I want to dispel right here and now. By "personally meaningful" these authors mean that we should teach math using examples from the students' own lives. Isn't the purpose of education to expand their horizons, to teach them about what's beyond their noses? We need to teach them about what they don't know, not just reinforce what they already know. As for the remainder of their claims, I don't know why a "traditional" math classroom cannot be lively and accessible to students. Even though I stand in front of the class and teach most of the period, I'd like to think that my classes are nothing if not lively. These Rethinking Schools people (from here forward known as RS people) have set up a false dichotomy. Rapport and instructional delivery make a class lively and accessible, not necessarily the political applicability of the course.

The articles in this book provide examples of how to weave social justice issues throughout the mathematics curriculum and how to integrate mathematics into other curricular areas. This approach seeks to deepen students' understanding of society and to prepare them to be critical, active participants in a democracy.

What exactly is "social justice"? Is it the belief that people should work and earn their own money and not be mooches on society? Is it the belief that everyone is entitled to exactly what they earn, and nothing more? Is it the belief that despite our perhaps humble beginnings, we all have the same legal footing to pursue life, liberty, and happiness? Is it the belief that welfare payments should be limited in duration, thus providing impetus for a person to seek meaningful work? Or is it the belief that the rich are the cause of all troubles in society, and class warfare is the foundation of our society? If I were placing money on this, I know which of these options I'd bet the RS people would choose. The RS people wouldn't teach students to be critical thinkers; rather, they'd teach them to criticize. There's a big difference.

When teachers weave social justice into the math curriculum and promote social justice math "across the curriculum," students' understanding of important social matters deepens. When teachers use data on sweatshop wages to teach accounting to high school students or multi-digit multiplication to upper-elementary students, students can learn math, but they can also learn something about the lives of people in various parts of the world and the relationship between the things we consume and their living conditions. (See "Sweatshop Accounting," page 53, and "Sweatshop Math," page 160.)

I assert here that a math class is not the place for social science. Math is a "hard science"--that is, it's replicable and predictive. I know that every time I add 3 + 4 the answer is going to be 7, no matter what. Social science is a "soft science"--different people, in different conditions, will act in different ways. Three plus four will always be seven. This attempt to politicize the math classroom, and to politicize with an unambiguous leftward bias, is another in a long string of attempts to water down the math curriculum so that "every student can succeed." What it really does is ensure that no student succeeds because no one learns any real math! The left doesn't believe in absolutes, it doesn't believe in standards, it doesn't believe in individuality. No one is better than anyone else, no one is more capable, we're all one big mass. This is why the left preaches about "group" identities (racial, ethnic, sexual orientation) while the right preaches about individuals. The left thinks we're all equal--hence the union mentality--the right says we all have an equal opportunity to pursue our potential. This is yet another big difference.

Social science should not be injected into a math curriculum. Rather, math (as a hard science) should be injected into the social science curriculum (a soft science)--that would truly be teaching "across the curriculum". Don't bring your politics into math; rather, use math to justify (or disprove) your politics. A wonderful example of someone having done this is Bjorn Lomborg, the environmentalist I wrote about here. Somehow, though, I don't think the RS people would want to use math in quite the way Lomborg did, as his conclusions don't match their politics. For example, he found the following, which he published in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001:
1. There is more food today, and fewer people are starving.
2. Life expectancy world-wide has risen from 30 to 67 years in the last century.
3. Poverty has been reduced more in the past 50 years than it was in the preceeding 500.
4. Air pollution in the industrialized world has declined--in London the air hasn't been cleaner since medieval times.
5. We're not losing forests. (That doesn't mean Brazilians should clear-cut the Amazon.)
6. Oil won't run out.
7. "The world is not without problems, but on almost all accounts, things are going better and they are likely to continue to do so into the future."

I wrote this in that same post: "Lomborg doesn't say or even imply that man should perform any activity he wants and ignore the environment. Instead, he presents information that allows us to make informed choices about courses of action rather than reacting to rhetoric, emotion, and anecdote." This is the right way to do things. Gather the facts, use the math, and draw conclusions--don't draw conclusions first and then see how you can use math to justify your conclusions. I propose that we live by this quote attributed to Sherlock Holmes: When the facts contradict your expectations, believe the facts. Lomborg did; I doubt the RS people would.

Rethinking Mathematics spotlights several examples of student activism. These include fifth-grade Milwaukee students writing letters to social studies textbook publishers based on their mathematical analysis of slave-holding presidents and textbooks' failure to address this issue (see "Write the Truth," page 140); New York City students who measured their school space, calculated inequities, and then spoke out against these inequities in public forums (see "‘With Math, It's Like You Have More Defense,'" page 81); and students who used math to convince their school administration to stop making so many obtrusive PA announcements (see the activity "Tracking PA Announcements," page 130).

I ask, does a 10-year-old truly have the capacity for independent, critical thought on the subject of slave-owning presidents? Do they truly have enough information, enough knowledge? Cognitive scientists tell us that algebra is difficult for younger students because most aren't able to think abstractly until around age 14. They can't figure out that x=5.5 if 2x+3=14, but at age 10 they can offer political opinions about slaveholding presidents? This is the type of political indoctrination I stand against, this is the dilution of math that I fight. Save that kind of fight for older students in a social science class--5th graders should be learning this material (at least in California) in math class. And there's a quote, the source of which I don't know, which is apropos of this discussion: "Context is often the first victim of activism."

Rethinking math also means using culturally relevant practices that build on the knowledge and experiences of students and their communities. Many of these approaches have been developed by teachers and then described and theorized by researchers of color, such as Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate. A guiding principle behind much of this work is that teachers should view students' home cultures and languages as strengths upon which to build, rather than as deficits for which to compensate. In "Race, Retrenchment, and the Reform of School Mathematics" (page 31), Tate offers the simple example of a teacher's failure to reach her students because she uses story problems that are not grounded in the students' culture; while Luis Ortiz-Franco ("Chicanos Have Math in Their Blood," page 70) encourages teachers to teach about the base-20 Mayan number system as a way to emphasize, to both Chicano students and others, that math has deep roots in indigenous cultures in the Americas.

This sounds much like so-called ethnomathematics, which I addressed in this post. There's no such thing as "culturally-relevant" math, not if you're trying to teach math in a way to prepare students for the rigors of college and to compete in a world economy. And teaching base-20 numbers? It may be "cultural", but how "relevant" is it? How will it help students learn more complicated math? I again quote from my Ethnomathematics post: Young people need to be shown that they need to accomplish something in their own lives and be proud of that, not to be proud by dubious association with a group hundreds of years and thousands of miles removed from them. Can it be more clear?

Engaging students in mathematics within social justice contexts increases students' interest in math and also helps them learn important mathematics. Once they are engaged in a project, like finding the concentration of liquor stores in their neighborhood and comparing it to the concentration of liquor stores in a different community, they recognize the necessity and value of understanding concepts of area, density, and ratio. These topics are often approached abstractly or, at best, in relation to trivial subjects. Social justice math implicitly tells students: These skills help you understand your own lives — and the broader world — more clearly.

Those sound like social science lessons to me--and that's where they belong.

It's unfortunate that some people are trying to impose their political views in the science classroom--creationism and intelligent design, bogus environmentalism, etc. Let science and math serve as tools, not weapons. Are nuclear weapons "wrong"? That's not a science question, that's a philosophical question. How many liquor stores there are per square mile in a certain area is a straight-forward computation using math; interpreting the meaning or impact of the resulting number is not a math problem, it's a social science problem. And it's probably not an elementary school issue, either.

I'm curious. What's next? Engineering For Social Justice? Of course not. No one wants the bridge to fall down. They want the hard science there, same as they want the rigorous training for the pilot of the airplane on which they're flying. There are absolutes there, and there's no way around them--the bridge either collapes or it doesn't, the plane either flies and lands safely or it doesn't. They can't go after these fields. But math education--it doesn't have a direct and immediate impact on life like the examples above do, so the lefties will try to dilute it.

Let's be blunt. The RS people openly stated that "Rethinking Schools emphasizes problems facing urban schools, particularly issues of race." This tells us immediately that they're looking at the achievement gap between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other. While that's good and important--it's what the No Child Left Behind Act does--the RS people take exactly the wrong approach. Instead of working to improve the math knowledge of blacks and Hispanics (the stereotypical urban school students), they want to feed into the culture of victimhood and self-esteem by making the students feel good about themselves without really learning the math that they'll need to move ahead in education. In other words, the RS people will be creating students who have "thought without learning" (referenced in Part I), which is in fact "perilous."

Certainly working in a school that has a conceptually strong foundational mathematics curriculum is helpful. Teachers cannot easily do social justice mathematics teaching when using a rote, procedure-oriented mathematics curriculum. Likewise a text-driven, teacher-centered approach does not foster the kind of questioning and reflection that should take place in all classrooms, including those where math is studied.

{inserted 2/14/08: this page has been intentionally damaged, how and by whom I don't know. There was a script running here, something about which I know nothing, but several paragraphs are missing. For example, I quoted a RS math problem that dealt with buying candy bars, and how bad that is for someone. Then I spoke against the problem. I pick up here where the text seems unmolested}

Again, it's the interpretation that makes the politics. Notice the value judgements the RS people assign to the first problem--"consumerism" (bad), and unhealthy eating habits (bad). What if, instead of candy bars, the students were buying apples? Does the "politics" of the problem now change?

{other paragraphs are missing here}

The first problem is a straightforward application of mathematics. The assumption I would make, however, is that students would be familiar with multidigit multiplication before transitioning to this word problem. The very basic nature of the word problem is designed to use some knowledge the students most likely already have (they probably all understand what is going on in the problem) to extend their use of mathematics, to show them a type of problem in which multiplication is useful. This type of problem promotes mathematical understanding, which should easily be transferable to other types of math problems.

The second example is entirely different. The second example, by its very wording and nature--indeed, by its design--causes the mathematics to be secondary to the social goals of "global awareness" and "empathy", neither of which is a valid subject for mathematics.

Let me give another example. The first problem would be like a shop teacher's teaching the use of a saber saw. Students would already know the basics of how to hold and power the saw, and the problem causes them to extend this knowledge by actually using the saw to, perhaps, cut a curved line in wood. The second problem assumes from the start that we're going to make a shelf, and it will be a great shelf, and the focus is on the shelf, not the saw. The focus of the lesson in shop class should be the saw, not the uses of the shelf.

Elementary students need the building blocks of knowledge, which include rigorous math instruction. We don't build skyscrapers without starting with the foundation, and master piano players learn scales and Chopsticks before concertos. It amazes that these same people (lefties) who think that these children have the intellectual capacity to solve the world's problems don't think they can handle the memorization of times tables or the stress of taking a standardized test. Hold them to a measurable, identifiable standard? Perish the thought.

In closing, the RS people have things bass-ackwards. We should teach the math first, then the applications, then interpret the findings. Don't try to do it all at once, that only confuses the issue (and the students!). This is an ideal time to point out that we math teachers already do enough cross-curricular instruction in our courses--readings and writings about math and mathematicians, applications to art and science, history of math, etc. The RS people make no secret of their desire to use mathematics for social purposes, so let them do it. How fun would it be to watch social studies teachers apply mathematics to their courses of instruction?! I wonder if they'd gain a new appreciation for having an actual knowledge of math....

Bjorn Lomborg Speaks Again

I've written several times, all of them favorably, about Bjorn Lomborg (just type his name into the search box at the top or bottom of this blog).  I don't agree with everything he says but I like that he uses reason and not passion to make his points:

One of the most persistent claims in the climate debate is that global warming leads to more extreme weather. Green groups and even such respectable outlets as Scientific American declare that “extreme weather is a product of climate change.”

And the meme seems irresistible as a political shortcut to action. President Obama has explicitly linked a warming climate to “more extreme droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes.” The White House warned this summer of “increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events that come with climate change.”

Yet this is not supported by science. 

And Lomborg believes in anthropogenic global warming.

Update:  Paranoid models were not quite up to snuff:

Yet the leaked report makes the extraordinary concession that the world has been warming at only just over half the rate claimed by the IPCC in its last assessment,  published in 2007Back then, it said that the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade – a figure it claimed was in line with the forecasts made by computer climate models.

But the new report says the true figure since 1951 has been only 0.12C per decade – a rate far below even the lowest computer prediction.

The 31-page ‘summary for policymakers’ is based on a more technical 2,000-page analysis which will be issued at the same time. It also surprisingly reveals: IPCC scientists accept their forecast computers may have exaggerated the effect of increased carbon emissions on world temperatures  – and not taken enough notice of natural variability.

What's Going On With Bjorn Lomborg?

I mentioned Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, in at least three previous posts. Here's a short, recent conversation with Mr. Lomborg.

Cold On Global Warming

I like Ryan Sager's writing style, and this opinion piece on Democrats and global warming shows why.

Some of it is pure PC. Democrats know they're "supposed to" care about global warming and feel guilty about driving their SUVs back and forth to soccer practice and going through warehouses full of fast-food containers on family trips. But so long as the politicians play their prescribed roles (Democrats: furrowed-brow, ineffective concern; Republicans: utterly insincere, ineffective concern), it's just not a voting issue.

And he scores points with me here:

That was the premise of a recent exercise conducted by political scientist Bjorn Lomborg (author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist") with a number of U.N. diplomats (including U.S. Ambassador John Bolton). Lomborg gave each functionary a fictional $50 billion to spend on world problems - obliging them to chose which problems need to be solved first.

Anyone who mentions Bjorn Lomborg is OK in my book! But go read the article to find out how the UN diplomats spent their $50B. You'll find that your Kyoto-loving bureaucrats aren't even interested in addressing global warming fictitiously, much less in reality!

Bjorn Lomborg on the IPCC

I've mentioned Danish leftie vegetarian Bjorn Lomborg before and now I'm going to mention him again. Bjorn (may I call him Bjorn?) has written a piece for The Telegraph, and as you might expect it contains some tasty tidbits:

This week, the United Nations' climate scientists will release a major report synthesising the world's best global warming research. It will be the first time we've heard from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since its scientists won the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore.

The IPCC's Assessment Report will tell policy-makers what to expect from man-made climate change. It is the result of rigorous and painstaking labour: more than can be said for the other Nobel Prize winner. The difference between Gore's claims and IPCC research is instructive.

While Gore was creating alarm with his belief that a 20-foot-high wall of water would inundate low-lying cities, the IPCC showed us we should realistically prepare for a rise of one foot or so by the end of the century. Beyond the dramatic difference, it is also worth putting that one foot in perspective. Over the last 150 years, sea levels rose about one foot - yet, did we notice?

Oh, there's so much more. Go read the whole thing.

Update: But wait, there's more!

John Coleman, the founder of The Weather Channel, gives his (quite strong) opinion about the reality of global warming. Coleman joins 'a pioneer of hurricane research', Bill Gray, and 'the father of climate science', Reid Bryson, on the list of eminently qualified people who don't buy into the climate change drivel.

With Finite Resources, Which Problems Should Government Tackle?

So asks the Copenhagen Consensus Conference. I was attracted to this article because the conference is the brainchild of Right On The Left Coast hero Bjorn Lomborg (type "lomborg" into the search engine at the top of this blog page to learn more about him).

The experts are considering detailed reports by prominent international researchers regarding ten challenges, including air pollution, armed conflicts, diseases, education, global warming, malnutrition and hunger, sanitation and access to clean water, subsidies and trade barriers, terrorism, and women and development. In each area, the researchers define the problem, suggest options for solving the problem[*], and assign a benefit-to-cost ratio (BCR) to each solution. The higher the BCR, the more cost-effective the solution is.

Prime Minister Rasmussen concretized the value of the CC08 exercise by referring to the earlier version in 2004. He noted that in 2004, CC04 participants put controlling the HIV/AIDS epidemic in developing countries at the top of the list. Consequently, the Danish government began to devote a higher proportion of its overseas development aid to combating that disease, doubling the aid from $100 to $200 million per year by 2010.

Rasmussen got ahead of the 2008 deliberations a bit when he turned to the subject of climate change. He argued that the case for action is strong, and that the world needed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions. To address the problem, Rasmussen called for "a new Green industrial revolution and a new Green world economy." Interestingly, the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus report ranked measures to address climate change at the very bottom, finding that proposals for carbon taxes and implementing the Kyoto Protocol would have costs that "were likely to exceed the benefits."

Go read more.

Climate Change and Nuclear Energy

Bjorn Lomborg, the skeptical environmentalist on whom I've written several posts, has another great opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.  While I don't agree with everything he says, I do celebrate his pragmatism:

In his second inaugural address on Monday, President Obama laudably promised to "respond to the threat of climate change." Unfortunately, when the president described the urgent nature of the threat—the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms"—the scary examples suggested that he is contemplating poor policies that don't point to any real, let alone smart, solutions. Global warming is a problem that needs fixing, but exaggeration doesn't help, and it often distracts us from simple, cheaper and smarter solutions.

For starters, let's address the three horsemen of the climate apocalypse that Mr. Obama mentioned.

Historical analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased globally by 15%...

Claiming that droughts are a consequence of global warming is also wrong. The world has not seen a general increase in drought...

As for one of the favorites of alarmism, hurricanes in recent years don't indicate that storms are getting worse...

This does not mean that climate change isn't an issue. It means that exaggerating the threat concentrates resources in the wrong areas.

The left's solutions are always the same--more government control, more showy proposals that endanger prosperity, more punishing of success and affluence.  Lomborg, rightly, sees better alternatives.

One of my litmus tests to determine if someone truly believes or is just an ideologue is their stance on clean, safe, relatively inexpensive nuclear energy.  If they support use of that clean, mature technology, then we have some common ground on which to stand.  If not, they're just a leftie spouting off their talking points, and I have no use for that.  There's even a documentary at Sundance:

Meanwhile, sit down for this: at the current Sundance Film Festival–Robert Redford’s baby–there is debuting a new documentary about environmentalists who have changed their mind and are now pro-nuclear power.  Does Redford, who signs direct-mail letters for the anti-nuke NRDC, know about this?  The film is called Pandora’s Promise, and here’s what one early critic at Sundance has to say about it:

When was the last time you saw a documentary that fundamentally changed the way you think? It’s no secret that just about every political and socially-minded documentary shown at Sundance is preaching to the liberal-left choir. The issue may be dairy farming, human rights abuses in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the marketing of AIDS drugs, or Occupy Wall Street (to list the topics of four festival docs this year), but the point of view is almost always conventionally “progressive” and orthodox. So when Robert Stone, who may be the most under-celebrated great documentary filmmaker in America (watch Oswald’s Ghost if you want to touch the elusive truth of the JFK assassination), arrived at Sundance this year with Pandora’s Promise, a look at the myths and realities of nuclear power, he was walking into the lion’s den. For this isn’t a movie that preaches to the choir. It’s a movie that says: “Stop thinking what you’ve been thinking, because if you don’t, you’re going to collude in wrecking the world.” Pandora’s Promise is built around what should be the real liberal agenda: looking at an issue not with orthodoxy, but with open eyes.

When liberals use reason, I can understand them. When they just emote and cry and beat their drums, I can't. The lefties I've quoted above, I could sit down over a burger and have a nice discussion with them.

Things Are Going to Hell in a Hand Basket, But It Isn't Because of Climate Change

There's so much good stuff in this article that it's hard to find something to snip--you should read the whole thing!

The United Nations Climate Summit will begin in New York this Tuesday, but environmental activists didn’t wait. All day Sunday, they filled the streets of Manhattan for a march that featured Al Gore, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, and various Hollywood actors.

But they certainly didn’t act like a movement that was winning. There was a tone of fatalism in the comments of many with whom I spoke; they despair that the kind of radical change they advocate probably won’t result from the normal democratic process. It’s no surprise then that the rhetoric of climate-change activists has become increasingly hysterical. Naomi Klein, author of a new book on the “crisis,” This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, said, “I have seen the future, and it looks like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.” In her new book she demands that North America and Europe pay reparations to poorer countries to compensate for the climate change they cause. She calls her plan a “Marshall Plan for the Earth” and acknowledges that it would cost “hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars.” But she has an easy solution on how to pay for it: “Need more money? Print some!” What’s a little hyperinflation compared to “saving the planet”?

Nor is Klein alone in her hysteria. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is releasing a new film in which he warns that the world is threatened by a “carbon monster” that is treated like a kind of Godzilla that must be killed off by ending the use of carbon-based fuels.

One reason the rhetoric has become so overheated is that the climate-change activists increasingly lack a scientific basis for their most exaggerated claims. As physicist Gordon Fulks of the Cascade Policy Institute puts it: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea-ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.” He points out that there has been no net new global-warming increase since 1997 even though the human contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 25 percent since then. This throws into doubt all the climate models that have been predicting massive climate dislocation.

It's been awhile since I've mentioned Bjorn Lomborg on this blog so let me correct that now:

Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, told me that all of the carbon-reduction targets advocated by the U.N. or the European Union would result in imperceptible differences in temperature, at enormous cost. “We would be far better off and richer if we did simple things like painting roofs in hot climates white and investing in new technologies that could help us adapt to any change that is coming,” he says. Even the U.N.’s own climate panel admits that so far, climate change hasn’t included any increase in the frequency or intensity of so-called extreme weather.

Bjorn Lomborg on Green Jobs

I've mentioned Mr. Lomborg several times on this blog--just enter his name in the search box at the top (or preferably the one at the bottom) of this page to see other posts. To cut to the quick, he's a leftie Danish vegetarian environmentalist who believes in anthropogenic global warming.

He also makes sense when discussing how to deal with it.

In this article he puts the lie to the idea of "green jobs":

Political rhetoric has shifted away from the need to respond to the "generational challenge" of climate change. Investment in alternative energy technologies like solar and wind is no longer peddled on environmental grounds. Instead, we are being told of the purported economic payoffs—above all, the promise of so-called "green jobs." Unfortunately, that does not measure up to economic reality.

The Copenhagen Consensus Center asked Gürcan Gülen, a senior energy economist at the Bureau for Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, to assess the state of the science in defining, measuring, and predicting the creation of green jobs. Gülen concluded that job creation "cannot be defended as another benefit" of well-meaning green policies. In fact, the number of jobs that these policies create is likely to be offset—or worse—by the number of jobs that they destroy.

On the face of it, green-job creation seems straightforward. Deploying more wind turbines and solar panels creates a need for more builders, technicians, tradesmen, and specialist employees. Voilà: Simply by investing in green policies, we have not only helped the climate but also lowered unemployment. Indeed, this is the essence of many studies that politicians are eagerly citing. So what did those analyses get wrong?

And then he tells us.

The end of the first page ends thusly:

The fundamental problem is that green-energy technologies are still very inefficient and expensive compared to fossil fuels. Deploying less efficient, more expensive alternative-energy sources will hurt businesses and consumers, not help them.

As I said, I like the way he addresses his concerns with an economics mindset. Go read the entire article for yourself if you want to find out what's on page 2.

Update, 2/14/11: Check out this book on Amazon :-)

Environmentalism and the Skeptical Mind, Part 4

Two organizations, whose websites can be found here and here, both claim that Greenpeace uses unlawful and dishonest tactics to promote a far-fetched message. They rail against genetically engineered foods, ignoring the fact that foods and animals have been cross-bred for millenia. They put fake "warning labels" on foods in stores. They participate in anti-corporate activism, to include having members arrested in the 1999 Seattle WTO riots. Additionally, they've become a shakedown organization.

My favorite example of their extremism combined with lack of science is "golden rice". Golden rice is a genetically engineered product that takes a daffodil gene and implants it into rice. So what, right? Well, this golden rice has vitamin A. Lots and lots of vitamin A. About a half million children in the world go blind each year due to vitamin A deficiency, most in Africa and Asia. What food could these children be eating? Golden rice. The creator of this food has offered to give it away and let people plant it. Greenpeace and its belief in "Frankenfoods" fought the idea and convinced governments not to allow it, and golden rice still isn't grown. Children still go blind. All for a political cause.

But enough about those yahoos. Let's talk about the Kyoto Protocol.

I'll bet if you asked 10 people on the street what the Kyoto Protocol is, none would know. If you asked 100, only a few would know. Yet, this is the biggest thing going in environmental circles--and fortunately the US has nothing to do with it.

The protocol, agreed to in Kyoto, Japan, aims to curb the air pollution blamed for global warming. Over 140 countries, accounting for 55% of greenhouse gas emissions, have ratified the treaty--but developing countries like China, Brazil, and India, not known as bastions of environmental care, are exempted. For those that have signed on, the protocol demands a 5.2% reduction in greenhouse emissions (from 1990 levels) by 2012. Each country set its own specific reduction amounts, and the US, though not a signatory, has agreed to reduce emissions by 7% between 2008-2012.

Interestingly enough, there's no clear plan how to do this. Canada and Japan have both said they are unsure if they will be able to meet their targets. In fact, Canada's emissions are currently 20% higher than they were in 1990, making their hurdle that much higher. Kyoto dictates goals, which may or may not be met. There's no roadmap given to achieve the goals, and no reward for meeting them or sanction for failing to meet them. Kyoto is just words on paper.

An attempt to extend Kyoto past 2012 was made last December--and this was before the protocol even went into effect!--met with failure. India and China refuse to negotiate, and the US still will not sign. Italy, an EU member, also refused to consider limits past the 2012 date. Kyoto is dead in the water, and it's just begun.

Bjorn Lomborg, discussed in Part 3 of this "series" I'm writing, also addresses Kyoto. He thinks the costs of implementing Kyoto will far outweigh the benefits. For the $150 billion to $350 billion annually that Kyoto would cost--in dubious "renewable energy" projects and doubtful technologies--Lomborg says we could provide everyone in the world with basic health, education, water, and sanitation. Where would the money be better spent?

Two "events" marking the implementation of the protocols are worthy of mention due to their humorous content. On February 16th, 35 Greenpeace protesers stormed the International Petroleum Exchange in hopes of paralyzing oil trading at the London exchange. But they themselves were attacked by the traders, many of whom were under age 25! The Times Online had this quote from one of the protesters:

"We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs," one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. "I've never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view."

Well maybe, jack***, if you were talking instead of blowing whistles and foghorns and releasing rape alarms tied to helium-filled balloons so they couldn't be easily silenced, maybe if you weren't trespassing and trying to disrupt what to these people was very important business, maybe you might have found someone more amenable to listening to your point of view.

Oh, the trading continued and 27 of the protesters were arrested. :-)

The 2nd funny event comes to us from Belgium. Dang, have the Belgiques ever done anything worthwhile? Well, Belgian schools were asked to support "thick sweaters" day to celebrate the implementation of the protocol. Live From Brussels reports, via Joanne Jacobs:

"The idea was to turn off the heating in the school buildings for the day, to save energy, and to have everybody wear extra clothing instead, including thick sweaters." (Darren says: Jimmy Carter, anyone?)

"So far, so good. My wife follows the lesson plan, explains it all to the kids and turns off the heating in her building. But then, for some classes, her pupils need to go to the other, larger school. There, they also have 'thick sweater day'. But they didn't manage to turn off the thermostat.

"Result: super hot classrooms. Talk about global warming.... And to make things even worse, because everybody was wearing extra clothes and things were getting really unbearable, apparently some teachers even opened the windows of their classrooms, with the heating still on full-blast...."

You gotta love this symbolic crap.

The earth's climate has been changing naturally since the place was created. We know that during dinosaur times, areas that are non-tropical today were pretty tropical. We know there was an ice age several millenia ago. We also know that Europe experienced a mini-ice-age as recently as a few centuries ago. We don't know for sure if any temperature changes are the result of man-made action, Mt. Pinatubo, or natural cyclical variations of climate.

Heck, we don't even know if it's going to rain next Sunday. And these people want to tell us what the climate will be like a century from now?


Update: Here is some environmentalism I can get on board with.

Update #2, 3/6/05 9:52 am: An article from the Detroit News about the end of government-imposed environmentalism and the success of wealth-created environmentalism.

Update #3, 3/18/05 5:18pm: Here's more on the worthlessness of the Kyoto Protocol.

I've Long Been A Fan of Bjorn Lomborg

My favorite gay leftie Danish vegetarian statistician continues to be dead right about global warming.

Here's more about him.

Your Feel-Good Policies Are An Ineffective Inconvenience (and are probably causing even bigger problems)

Bjorn Lomborg on plastic bag bans:

Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to reduce plastic pollution, which will include a ban on single-use plastics as early as 2021. This is laudable: plastics clog drains and cause floods, litter nature and kill animals and birds.

Of course, plastic also makes our lives better in a myriad of ways. In just four decades, plastic packaging has become ubiquitous because it keeps everything from cereals to juice fresher and reduces transportation losses, while one-use plastics in the medical sector have made syringes, pill bottles and diagnostic equipment more safe.

Going without disposable plastic entirely would leave us worse off, so we need to tackle the problems without losing all of the benefits...

But we need to be honest about how much consumers can achieve. As with other environmental issues, instead of tackling the big-picture problems to actually reduce the plastic load going into oceans, we focus on relatively minor changes involving consumers, meaning we only ever tinker at the margins...

But even if every country banned plastic bags it would not make much of a difference, since plastic bags make up less than 0.8 per cent of the mass of plastic currently afloat on the world’s oceans.

Rather than trying to save the oceans with such bans in rich countries, we need to focus on tackling the inferior waste management and poor environmental policies in developing regions.

Research from 2015 shows that less than 5 per cent of land-based plastic waste going into the ocean comes from OECD countries, with half coming from just four countries: China, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam. While China already in 2008 banned thin plastic bags and put a tax on thicker ones, it is estimated to contribute more than 27 per cent of all marine plastic pollution originating from land.

Moreover, banning plastic bags can have unexpected, inconvenient results. A new study shows California’s ban eliminates 40 million pounds of plastic annually. However, many banned bags would have been reused for trash, so consumption of trash bags went up by 12 million pounds, reducing the benefit. It also increased consumption of paper bags by twice the saved amount of plastic – 83 million pounds. This will lead to much larger emissions of CO₂...

We also need to consider the wider environmental impact of our bag choices. A 2018 study by the Danish Ministry of Environment and Food looked not just at plastic waste, but also at climate-change damage, ozone depletion, human toxicity and other indicators. It found you must reuse an organic cotton shopping bag 20,000 times before it will have less environmental damage than a plastic bag.

If we use the same shopping bag every single time we go to the store, twice every week, it will still take 191 years before the overall environmental effect of using the cotton bag is less than if we had just used plastic.

Even a simple paper bag requires 43 reuses to be better for the environment – far beyond the point at which the bag will be fit for the purpose.

The study clearly shows that a simple plastic bag, reused as a trash bag, has the smallest environmental impact of any of the choices.

That knowledge doesn't make the lefties feeeeeeel any better about themselves, though, and it certainly doesn't give them reason to exercise compulsion over the rest of us, so it must be ignored.

Update:  Related:

FLASHBACK: HOW TO SOLVE THE PLASTIC CRISIS:

This is a crisis made — and growing worse — throughout developing Asia.
Just eight countries in the region are responsible for about 63 percent of total plastic waste flowing into the oceans. Little of that junk has been exported by rich economies. Instead, it’s almost solely generated by Asia’s newly minted consumer classes, the vast majority of whom lack access to garbage collection, modern landfills and incineration. Any progress in reducing ocean plastic will have to start with them.

Bans on plastic straws in America are just a power move by local greens, not a serious response.

Update #2, 7/27/19:

More Reasons To Love Bjorn Lomborg

I don't agree with every single utterance from his lips, but the guy makes sense more often than not:

Climate alarmists and campaigning environmentalists argue that the industrialized countries of the world have made sizable withdrawals on nature’s fixed allowance, and unless we change our ways, and soon, we are doomed to an abrupt end. Take the recent proclamation from the United Nations Environment Program, which argued that governments should dramatically cut back on the use of resources. The mantra has become commonplace: our current way of living is selfish and unsustainable. We are wrecking the world. We are gobbling up the last resources. We are cutting down the rainforest. We are polluting the water. We are polluting the air. We are killing plants and animals, destroying the ozone layer, burning the world through our addiction to fossil fuels, and leaving a devastated planet for future generations.

In other words, humanity is doomed.

It is a compelling story, no doubt. It is also fundamentally wrong, and the consequences are severe. Tragically, exaggerated environmental worries—and the willingness of so many to believe them—could ultimately prevent us from finding smarter ways to actually help our planet and ensure the health of the environment for future generations.

Because, our fears notwithstanding, we actually get smarter. Although Westerners were once reliant on whale oil for lighting, we never actually ran out of whales. Why? High demand and rising prices for whale oil spurred a search for and investment in the 19th-century version of alternative energy. First, kerosene from petroleum replaced whale oil. We didn’t run out of kerosene, either: electricity supplanted it because it was a superior way to light our planet.

For generations, we have consistently underestimated our capacity for innovation. There was a time when we worried that all of London would be covered with horse manure because of the increasing use of horse-drawn carriages. Thanks to the invention of the car, London has 7 million inhabitants today. Dung disaster averted.

He believes global warming is real and that man has a real impact on it, but notice his solution:

We know from experience that more prosperous countries are more able to respond to the challenges that climate change will pose. They are much more resilient to natural disasters while more able to invest in measures such as greener cities and flood protection. Yet instead of first making sure that everybody is better off and more resilient, our response to global warming has been to try to cut back carbon emissions too soon. In reality, this means reining in growth and making do with less than we could have otherwise.

But this approach flies in the face of history. The way we have made progress against disease, malnutrition, and environmental degradation in the past is by growing, by discovering, and by innovating. Naturally, it is a hard sell to tell the hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty in China and elsewhere that they ought to stop burning coal, roll back their prosperity, and go back to a life of poverty.

Even when I don't agree with his entire argument, his logic is sound.

I've written several posts mentioning or quoting him, take a look.

Heed The Words of a Wise Vegetarian

Bjorn Lomborg, whom I've written about so many times, is my favorite gay leftist Danish vegetarian:

Around the world, we’re being told to stop eating meat. Headlines, think tanks and activists all ask us to change our diet to combat climate change. 

The Washington D.C.-based World Resource Institute suggests that resource management will require Americans to cut their average consumption of beef by about 40%, and scientists from Manchester University just claimed that “a typical summer barbecue for four people releases more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than an 80 mile car journey." One of the professors points out that “the production of a 100g medium-sized beef burger releases enough greenhouses gases to fill more than 60 balloons.”

The scientists propose a solution: we all need to replace our burgers with “veggie sausages,” swap the cheese for half an onion and replace the butter with “vegetable spread”. Voila: half the emissions. 

I’m a vegetarian myself for ethical reasons, but the climate scientists’ barbecue prescription leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth — and it is not just the vegetable spread...

In a first world setting, the reality is that going entirely vegetarian for the rest of your life means you reduce your emissions by about 2%, according to a study of the environmental impact of Swedish vegetarians...

Going vegetarian can help a little bit, but it's both an unrealistic and inefficient policy to push on people across the world. We should focus on research to develop cleaner, maybe artificial, meat and cheaper clean energy. And while we do so, we can have our summer barbecues without being told they destroy the planet.  link

Nothing is worth giving up that barbecue bacon burger I had a couple nights ago!

Electric Cars Are Not Necessarily Good For The Environment

So says liberal vegetarian (and skeptical environmentalist) Bjorn Lomborg, about whom I've written several times:

Electric cars are promoted as the chic harbinger of an environmentally benign future. Ads assure us of "zero emissions," and President Obama has promised a million on the road by 2015. With sales for 2012 coming in at about 50,000, that million-car figure is a pipe dream. Consumers remain wary of the cars' limited range, higher price and the logistics of battery-charging. But for those who do own an electric car, at least there is the consolation that it's truly green, right? Not really...

A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds.

While electric-car owners may cruise around feeling virtuous, they still recharge using electricity overwhelmingly produced with fossil fuels. Thus, the life-cycle analysis shows that for every mile driven, the average electric car indirectly emits about six ounces of carbon-dioxide. This is still a lot better than a similar-size conventional car, which emits about 12 ounces per mile. But remember, the production of the electric car has already resulted in sizeable emissions—the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle.

So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally.

It's hard to argue with someone who makes sense. Go read his entire piece here.

Who Does This Guy Think He Is, Bjorn Lomborg?

This apostate will be silenced/canceled, no doubt:

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. 

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30. 

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

• Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction” 

• The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

• Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003

• The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

• The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

• Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s 

• Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor

• We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

• Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism...

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence. 

 And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. 

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

• Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress 

• The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land 

• The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium 

• 100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50% 

• We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities

• Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%

• Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did

• “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions

• Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon

• The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants

 

There's obviously much more at the link.