The last time I referenced Climate change "luke warmer" Bjorn Lomborg was in a reply piece in the Intertel journal Integra a year ago. At that time I was responding to an Intertel member who had written (in the March, 2023 issue) that Lomborg's work was more accurate and believable than my earlier published (Integra) piece entitled Can We Finally Agree Global Warming Is Not A “Leftist Hoax” Or Green Conspiracy? Asking, in respect of the position statement of the American Geophysical Union (which has the largest contingent of climate scientists in the world):
"Question: Can any putatively high IQ society remain at contretemps with the largest professional scientific society on arguably the most critical scientific problem?"
For my Integra respondent the answer was a thundering, "Hell yes!" Adding:
I refer you to any or all of the work of Dr Bjorn Lomberg, acclaimed Danish climatologist, who has thoroughly debunked the global warming hoax.
To be clear, while Lomborg does agree that climate change is real and ongoing, he refuses to accept it's an existential threat to humans. Hence, why he is referred to as a "luke warmer". However, his minimizing of the threat - much of it- can be laid at the fact he is not a specialist in climate science. As I noted in a subsequent (June Integra issue) response to the hogwash about the "acclaimed Danish climatologist" :
"Contrary
to Ms. Simon's claims for Bjorn Lomborg's climate science bona fides, his Ph.D. is actually in
political science, not climate science. Hence, he is emphatically no
expert in climatology, more like a sophisticated quack. A Wikipedia article
on his background also notes:
"After the publication of The
Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was formally accused of scientific
dishonesty by a group of environmental scientists, who brought a total of three
complaints against him to the Danish Committees on
Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD),"
Lomborg’s hollow climate games were also exposed as long
ago as July 19, 2016 in FORBES (‘Bjorn
Lomborg's Climate Analysis Is A Hot Mess’) wherein we read
Lomborg has— to put it mildly — often seemed more intent on making provocative claims than on conducting careful analysis (for example, see these critiques from 2003, 2010, and 2015).
Now, in a WSJ op-ed last Thursday ('Polar Bears, Dead Coral and Other Climate Fictions', p. A15), Lomborg is at it again - filling a half page with dreck that I'm sure all the Intertel (& Mensa) climate deniers will love.
He begins by boasting about how the media news of dying coral reefs worldwide has been overblown, bellowing:
"The media had overflowed with stories about the great reef catastrophe...the latest official statistics show a completely different picture. For the past three years the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover than at any point since records began in 1986."
Of course this is noisome baloney. As is often the case, as I noted in my Integra reply last June) Lomborg plays fast and loose with statistics. As noted in the FORBES piece I cited taking Lomborg down:
"Lomborg mischaracterizes the results of an MIT analysis that he claims agrees with his own. But he overlooks an important difference: In estimating the impact of the Paris pledges, the MIT study separates out the effect of the Paris commitments from previous pledges made in 2009 and 2010. Lomborg effectively lumps them all together, by comparing the Paris outcomes to a no-policy scenario. Moreover, the MIT study (unlike Lomborg) is careful to take China’s peaking commitment into account."
In other words, this guy is almost as bad (at misrepresenting effects of climate change) as Gerald Posner is in his misrepresentations of the JFK assassination. In this WSJ op-ed, for example, he conveniently ignores a number of major problems with the measure
of total coral cover at the Great Barrier Reef, i.e.:
1. It does
not consider how the distribution and abundance of corals varies with different
reef habitats,
2. It is a
perimeter survey unlikely to include habitats with higher percentage coral
cover,
3. In not surveying shallower reef habitats, including the reef crest, it cannot measure the true impacts of cyclones or bleaching.
The coral bleaching arising from higher ocean temperatures was painfully visible to us when we took a tour-based submarine ('Atlantis II) across Carlisle Bay in Barbados in 2012:
The degree of bleaching and coral death was appalling and on a level that also was documented in the Great Barrier Reef at the time, e.g.
Most Caribbean coral reefs will disappear within the next 20 years unless action is taken to protect them, primarily due to the decline of grazers such as sea urchins and parrotfish, a new report has warned.
A comprehensive analysis by 90 experts of more than 35,000 surveys conducted at nearly 100 Caribbean locations since 1970 shows that the region’s corals have declined by more than 50%.
Since then dying coral reefs have now been documented from Cuba to the Venezuelan coast - as well as the eastern Pacific- and all this mass death can be attributed to higher ocean temperatures. As well as greater acidity, given the 90% of CO2 absorbed by the oceans has formed carbonic acid, i.e.
CO2 + H2O ® H2 CO3
All of these mean Lomborg has merely wasted space babbling propaganda. But no, this crank isn't done, going on with more twaddle that Pacific atoll islands like Tuvalu, aren't really at that much risk of drowning out because hey "sand from old coral keeps washing up on low lying shores replacing that which climate change has eroded." Nonsense which has been soundly refuted, e.g.
Tuvalu is slowly disappearing. What happens when its land is gone? (nationalgeographic.com)
And which we see every time we now travel to Barbados, i.e. at how much beach shore has been reclaimed by the sea- even necessitating government projects to replenish eroded shoreline, like we saw while staying at Sugar Bay resort in January, e.g.
The one fact Lomborg did get right is when he wrote that cold causes more deaths than heat-high temperatures, at least for now. But he exaggerated the factor difference by nearly 3 times (claiming 25 times more deaths, when the actual factor is nine times more.)
The 'cold deaths over heat deaths' cited by Lomborg is somewhat of an anomaly in a drastically warming world and he never factors in the sociological basis for this. Cold temperatures are curable and tolerable with appropriate clothing, shelter and fuel for heating. Very high temperatures, such as we beheld in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest some years ago are not. Because the latter require special medical interventions to enable survival. See e.g.
After Portland and Lytton Are Humans Even Ready For The Cusp Of The 'Runaway Greenhouse'?
As for cold deaths, poverty obviously makes those
resources needed for survival inaccessible. In northern climates these sociological biases the
statistics towards cold-related deaths. (E.g. there are over 600,000 homeless
in the U.S. who often can’t stay warm in colder cities- and refuse going to shelters where they may get mugged.)
But let us note that as the global temperatures increase, the frequency of
extreme cold events will decrease and extreme heat events will soar - for the reasons given above..
At some point the death rates will equalize and by the onset of the runaway greenhouse an upward heat death trend will take hold and exceed cold-related deaths. This will
occur as power grids collapse world wide from ever increasing demand, and temperatures
soar to > 100 F even at night. This
also portends arrival of the cusp of the runaway greenhouse effect.
In the IPCC’s SSP5 -8.5
scenario we can be expected to see an increase of 5.7 C by 2100, which is the
level expected by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists -
which noted six years ago that IPCC climate report understated the
threat. By logical extension, this current one also does. Do the
math. If the current rate of CO2 concentration increase is at 2.5
W/ m2 the CO2 concentration is increasing at 2.5 ppm/
yr. (Some math that Lomborg never bothers to do. Wonder why.)
Then add 75 yrs. projected increase to the current mean yearly
value of 415 ppm. In 75 years that means an additional (2.5
ppm/ yr. x 75 yrs.) = 187.5 ppm or 415 ppm + 187.5 ppm = 602.5
ppm. But most climate scientists - such as Prof. Gunther Weller-
take 600 ppm as the threshold for triggering the runaway greenhouse effect.
Lomborg, on the basis of his 'don't worry, be happy' bollocks is often called a "lukewarmer" by those who deride his fanciful shtick. But the biggest reason for tossing shade on his baloney is that he totally ignores the effects of melting permafrost - which we saw first hand in Fairbanks, AK, in March 2005. That was when several ice towers collapsed at the Ice Art Festival after permafrost melting.
In March 2019 I cited a ground-breaking paper in the
journal Nature Geoscience, by Natalie Shakhova and Igor
Semiletov of the University of Alaska- Fairbanks' International Arctic Research
Center (IARC). In the paper the authors warned that the Arctic Ocean
is releasing methane at a rate more than twice what existing
scientific models predicted. The two UAF researchers focused on the
continental shelf off the northern coast of eastern Russia - the East Siberian
Arctic Shelf. Underlying this region is sub -sea permafrost. When the
permafrost melts, the methane (CH4 ) is released.
The authors, in a follow up paper, actually showed the rate
and mechanisms of subsea permafrost degradation and that it can be a meaningful
prerequisite for near future predictions of methane release in the
Arctic. Ice-wedge degradation has been observed before, but this is the
first study to determine that rapid melting of ground ice (as opposed to
sub-sea permafrost) has become widespread throughout the Arctic.
Permafrost has been frozen for far longer than humans have
been on the planet. That’s a good thing because permafrost contains over
a trillion
metric tons of organic carbon deposited by generations of plants, and
all that carbon remains locked up so long as it’s frozen. It no longer is. It's melting at a fearsome rate which Lomborg at least ought to take into account. But be assured he never will, yet he is the one who blasts climate scientists like Prof. Gunther Weller "piously pretending to 'follow the science' while telling "half truths". Lomborg needs to take a look at himself in his mirror. Oh, and check out the reinsurance market and why - contrary to his fantasies - climate devastation is expected to increase over the coming decades with accompanying exploding insurance costs (WSJ, 'Insurers Braced For More Beryls', July 20, Exchange)
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