Global Warning
Climate Change and “Climategate”
Bjørn Lomborg
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COPENHAGEN – Thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, and environmental activists have arrived in Copenhagen for the COP15 global climate summit with all the bravado – and self-regard – of a group of commandos who are convinced that they are about to save the world. And, although the political differences between them remain huge, delegates are nonetheless congratulating themselves for having the answers to global warming.
The blustery language and ostentatious self-confidence that fill the Bella Center here remind me of a similar scene: Kyoto, 1997. There, world leaders actually signed a legally binding deal to cut carbon emissions – something that will elude the Copenhagen summit-goers. But what did the Kyoto Protocol accomplish? So far, at least, virtually nothing.
To be sure, Europe has made some progress towards reducing its carbon-dioxide emissions. But, of the 15 European Union countries represented at the Kyoto summit, 10 have still not meet the targets agreed there. Neither will Japan or Canada. And the United States never even ratified the agreement. In all, we are likely to achieve barely 5% of the promised Kyoto reduction.
To put it another way, let’s say we index 1990 global emissions at 100. If there were no Kyoto at all, the 2010 level would have been 142.7. With full Kyoto implementation, it would have been 133. In fact, the actual outcome of Kyoto is likely to be a 2010 level of 142.2 – virtually the same as if we had done nothing at all. Given 12 years of continuous talks and praise for Kyoto, this is not much of an accomplishment.
The Kyoto Protocol did not fail because any one nation let the rest of the world down. It failed because making quick, drastic cuts in carbon emissions is extremely expensive. Whether or not Copenhagen is declared a political victory, that inescapable fact of economic life will once again prevail – and grand promises will once again go unfulfilled.
This is why I advocate abandoning the pointless strategy of trying to make governments promise to cut carbon emissions. Instead, the world should be focusing its efforts on making non-polluting energy sources cheaper than fossil fuels. We should be negotiating an international agreement to increase radically spending on green-energy research and development – to a total of 0.2% of global GDP, or $100 billion a year. Without this kind of concerted effort, alternative technologies simply will not be ready to take up the slack from fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, the COP15 delegates seem to have little appetite for such realism. On the first day of the conference, United Nations climate change chief Yvo de Boer declared how optimistic he was about continuing the Kyoto approach: “Almost every day, countries announce new targets or plans of action to cut emissions,” he said.
Such statements ignore the fact that most of these promises are almost entirely empty. Either the targets are unachievable or the numbers are fudged. For example,
Japan’s pledge of a 25% reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 sounds incredible – because it is. There is no way the Japanese could actually deliver on such an ambitious promise.
China, meanwhile, drew plaudits just before the Copenhagen summit by promising to cut its carbon intensity (the amount of CO2 emitted for each dollar of GDP) over the next ten years to just 40-45% of its level in 2005. Based on figures from the International Energy Agency , China was already expected to reduce its carbon intensity by 40% without any new policies. As its economy develops, China will inevitably shift to less carbon-intensive industries. In other words, China took what was universally expected to happen and, with some creative spin, dressed it up as a new and ambitious policy initiative.
Then again, spin always trumps substance at gatherings like this. Consider how quick the Copenhagen delegates were to dismiss the scandal now known as “Climategate” – the outcry over the release of thousands of disturbing emails and other documents hacked from the computers of a prestigious British climate-research center.
It would be a mistake not to learn lessons from this mess. Climategate exposed a side of the scientific community most people never get to see. It was not a pretty picture.
What the stolen emails revealed was a group of the world’s most influential climatologists arguing, brainstorming, and plotting together to enforce what amounts to a party line on climate change. Data that didn’t support their assumptions about global warming were fudged. Experts who disagreed with their conclusions were denigrated as “idiots” and “garbage.” Peer-reviewed journals that dared to publish contrarian articles were threatened with boycotts. Dissent was stifled, facts were suppressed, scrutiny was blocked, and the free flow of information was choked off.
Predictably, the text of the more than 3,000 purloined emails have been seized on by skeptics of man-made climate change as “proof” that global warming is nothing more than a hoax cooked up by a bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals. And this is the real tragedy of “Climategate.” Global warming is not a hoax, but at a time when opinion polls reveal rising public skepticism about climate change, this unsavory glimpse of scientists trying to cook the data could be just the excuse too many people are waiting for to tune it all out.
What seems to have motivated the scientists involved in Climategate was the arrogant belief that that the way to save the world was to conceal or misrepresent ambiguous and contradictory findings about global warming that might “confuse” the public. But substituting spin for scientific rigor is a terrible strategy.
So, too, is continuing to embrace a response to global warming that has failed for nearly two decades. Instead of papering over the flaws in the Kyoto approach and pretending that grand promises translate into real action, we need to acknowledge that saving the world requires a smarter strategy than the one being pursued so dogmatically in Copenhagen.
Bjorn Lomborg is Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org
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JohnQPublic 12:18 12 Dec 09
This is how the skeptical media is treated at Copenhagen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUtzMBfDrpI&feature=player_embedded
IanSleath 02:04 12 Dec 09
Nice article Mr Lomborg.
I think when we see comments from DavidCOG that are so full denial of the facts, and delivered with such venom, we see the decievers are on the back foot.
Yes the earth is heating and has been for the last 300 Years, as it has in many other periods in the earths history which is scientific fact. The human contribution to that heating is negligible and it is also a fact that the gloabla warming has been used in an attempt to decieve the people of the world into accepting global government to save us all from certain destruction. What a load of rubbish.
JamesF 07:46 12 Dec 09
While I applaud the sense of talking cost-benefit; Lomborg alone among enviros seems capable of that; I cannot understand why he persists in supporting AGW.
Yes, there is warming from the Little Ice Age. Yes, CO2 can act as a greenhous gas. But as the (very old) revelations of the hockey stick frauds show, and as the (very new) revelations of Darwin (Australia), Oregon (US) and other fraudulently adjusted temperature data sets show, any claim to unprecedented or substantial warming is looking very shaky.
Why persist in calling CO2 'pollution'?
The connection from warming (small though it is) > greenhouse > CO2 > man-made CO2 is simply not made out. If it isn't, CO2 isn't pollution.
By all means talk about particulates, sulphur and other polluting nasties. But leave CO2 alone until there is some real science behind it, not the "post-normal" science these frauds put out.
SamGardner 09:57 12 Dec 09
Der Björn,
Didn't you do enough already to set back the case for stopping climate change? Although your article is very sensible, and gives some good pointers, your past mistakes will cause everybody to read it with suspicion.
Maylee 01:19 05 Jan 10
Climate change is inevitable. Carbon based chemistry (including CO2, which can never be thought of as a pollutant ) is the basis of ALL life on earth. We are all carbon credits. CO2 is a very precious molecule when it comes to food security for developing nations. No wonder some want to sequestrate it and store it for the future.
The current temporary interglacial optimum (since 1850) has been a cosmic event, controlled by our sun. No one is certain how long this benign period will last and it would be sensible to promote conservation and optimum use of energy resources and invest in sustainable energy in anticipation of the inevitable next "Ice age". I have great respect for those who can think and plan for the long term - say 100 years, and certainly beyond the next political term of office.
For all the scaremongering at Copenhagen 15, the anti- CO2 crowd only have the tail of the elephant to talk to as they have backed the wrong assumptions in trying to understand the scale and mechanisms that drive global climate.
The real science was right on on their doorstep with Danish scientist Henk Svensmark's group and their cloud studies. Everyone should go home and do some independent homework to get a proper perspective of the earth's place in the Milky Way Galaxy before succumbing to Cap, Tax and Trade hysteria.
Kennelmaster 12:51 06 Jan 10
If the Kyoto effort resulted only in CO2 levels that would have been attained by taking no action at all, could this not be regarded as empirical data that mankind , despite its best efforts, can have no effect on climate change ?
rtechow11 11:22 20 Jan 10
Bjorn, I agree totally with your analysis. Pardon the late post but I have just found Project-Syndicate from the Australian newspaper and want to comment.
Aside from the ineffectiveness of Kyoto and the difficulty of getting all significant emitters to sign up to genuine CO2 reductions, there is also the difficuly in getting it to stick with voters. It will be a difficult and I think an impossible hurdle.
Voters have blithely been promised clean energy technology breakthroughs. Technology actually takes a long time to develop, get out of the lab and mature into low cost. We need to work with enhancing existing technologies in the short term - and they aren't terribly impressive.
Whats likely to happen, with an effective ETS, is the energy costs to voters will increase substantially. It is hard to see otherwise. It won't be equitable either. Country and outer suburban dwellers who typically drive long distances will be hit harder than inner city dwellers who can use public transport. Farmers production costs will increase in getting their product to market. Housing costs will increase because houses are made out of CO2 intensive products which are heavy and energy intensive to transport.
The net point is that some segments of an individual country will be hurt more badly than others. Fertile fields for voter anger. When voters are hurt financially they tend to change their opinions and vote differently.
In Australia a 5% swing in votes gives landslide changes of government. Just 2.5% of voters can produce a 5% swing. That means a tight consistancy in voter opinions needs to be maintained not just for the next election but all subsequent elections. (Until clean energy becomes cheaper than untaxed carbon based energy).
In practice this probably means less than 1.5% can change their minds on ETS if it is to succeed over time.
Politicians currently think that all they have to do is to get an ETS in place and it will be there for all time. That's wrong. In Australia Pauline Hanson tapped underlying voter angst and turned poltics upside down for a time and permanently destroyed political correctness. Even if the major parties stitch it all up between them, a Pauline Hanson will come along eventually and tap voter ETS angst. Whoever that new Pauline Hanson might be, he/she only has to change 1.5% of the votes to destroy governments - if properly directed in the Australian electoral system (due to preferential voting).
In short an ETS in a democratic country is strategically on a hiding to nothing. Like Rome, Napoleon, Hitler, and Israel today every battle must be won simply to keep the staus quo in place. A single major loss and the entire empire unravels. A reversal of ETS in one country would certainly lead to attempts to do so in other democracies.
I can't see how an ETS is politically sustainable in the timeframes needed in democracies when voters are hurt financially.
DavidCOG 08:36 11 Dec 09
No surprise that Lomborg would spin the version of events being played by all the other Deniers. And like the other Deniers, note that not a single strand of the science has been refuted or challenged.
For a more credible analysis of the stolen email smear campaign, a collection of articles is available from http://enviroknow.com/2009/11/25/climategate-the-swifthack-scandal-what-you-need-to-know/
Get your climate science from climate scientists, not scientific illiterates - especially ones like Lomborg who only escaped censure from the Danish science establishment for dishonesty because they deemed him incompetent!
The planet continues dangerous heating and humans are responsible: that is the assessment of all credible scientific findings.