In Australia, for John Quiggin’s leading enviro blog, a special guest named Charles Young brilliantly deconstructs prominent climate change-dismisser Bjorn Lomborg.
Lomborg is a statistician who convenes conferences in Europe to argue that climate change is a trivial problem compared to hunger and AIDS in Africa. (Though, as John Quiggin points out, he wasn’t outspoken about aid to Africa until he decided climate change was getting too much attention.)
Following his let’s-emit-like-crazy advice, the Wall Street Journal in an editorial last summer declared that global warming was "a problem that’s a few centuries off."
I’d say it’s the WSJ editorial page that’s a few centuries off. They seem to be stuck in the 19th.
But never mind. Young’s is a terrific piece that takes on Lomborg point by point.
Here’s the crux:
Ought I to stop smoking? Or would it be better to donate some money to Oxfam? Certainly the immediate increase in global welfare would be much greater if I were to give some money to Oxfam. So I’ll have another cigarette.
Most of us will have no difficulty in seeing the flaw in this line of reasoning – and will recognise a type of casuistry at which addicts excel. However, if we substitute “tackle HIV/Aids” for “give money to Oxfam” and “reduce greenhouse gas emissions for “stop smoking”, and if we get a number of eminent economists to confirm that the first gives more immediate benefits, then we have the message being conveyed by Bjorn Lomborg (“Climate Change can Wait”, 2/7/06) – and most of us are too overawed by the Nobel prize-winners to spot the flaw. This message, as Lomborg states it, explicitly suggests that inaction on climate change is acceptable for the present. Moreover it implicitly suggests – to those who are severely addicted, or very stupid, or a bit of both – that it is even misguided to take action on climate change, since doing so might get in the way of the other worthy goals.
Kit Stolz 