climate change panic

http://www.speakerscorner.co.uk/file/b087b84d6935209f2b718cb5d441b07f/bjorn-lomborg-believes-we-are-sending-wrong-messages-about-climate-change-to-our-children.html

Worth a thought! I've heard Lomborg lecture, and I couldn't understand why some people were so critical of him, since almost everything he said seemed to make good sense to me. I still think so. He isn't a 'climate change denier', a term that seemes to have been created by the sort of lunatic fringe environmentalists who won't be happy until we've wiped mankind off the planet or wiped out all traces of modern life and gone back to hunting and gathering. He accepts the good science that has been done in the field, but like me, thinks we ought to concentrate on good science and come up with sensible solutions based on good science, instead of the knee-jerk reactions resulting from the sheer panic we so often seem to be immersed in today.

In the post, he warns that creating panic, under the excuse that we need to create awareness, is causing big problems. In that he is certainly correct. The New Scientist today (27 june issue) gives a quote that 1 in 3 american kids aged 6 to 11 are afraid the earth will cease to exist before they grow up because of global warming and other problems. We should certainly want everyone to be aware of the potential dangers if we do nothing about global warming, but creating this kind of fear in our kids is totally counter-productive. It surely must affect their health, and for teens facing a multitude of other emotional difficulties, it must also have a direct impact on suicide rates or other stress-related ilnesses such as eating disorders. we should be more responsible and more balanced, if only for our kids' sakes.

In adults, panic is dangerous too. As Lomborg has often pointed out, we are now spending huge amounts of money to avert relatively minor potential problems at the expense of solving actual current problems. It is far more important to address short term climate change than long term, because long term changes are more open to solution by future technologies at much lower cost than today. Lomborg has previously pointed out that protecting polar bears by reducing future climate change is rather more expensive and ineffective than protecting them by simply stopping shooting them, and in any case, they are multiplying, not becoming rarer.

We can reduce CO2 emissions in the long term by developing desert-based solar farms in the next few decades, and if we delay the investment in these until the technology is mature and low-price, the overall long term climate impacts per dollar will be far greater than if we invest in immature, expensive technologies today. However, this is not how policy makers are behaving. They are wasting huge amounts of money today to achieve much smaller long term results, leaving no money left to address shorter term issues of equal or greater importance. In the far future, we will also have a wide range of technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, so even the existing build-up will probably one day be economically reversible. So we should worry far less about CO2's impacts in the far future, because it will simply be much less of a problem thanks to future technology.

The targets are sometimes wrong too. As Kirk Smith points out in the New Scientist, it would be much more sensible today to tackle methane than CO2, and the reasons CO2 is being tackled instead are based on old and innacurate assumptions about the relative effects on warming of methane and CO2. It is also easier to deal with methane. Another important gas is water vapour, especially in the higher atmosphere, but it too is largely ignored in favour of CO2.

Problems that are further away are of lesser importance today. That is often ignored, and people often become sanctimonious about the impacts our lives today might have on future generations. However, technology has not stopped developing - indeed we have a very long way to go before technology change even stops accelerating. Problems far away might look big, but to the vastly superior technologuies that will also be around when they arrive, they might actually be fairly trivial. So we should discount the magnitude of far away problems according to the expected development in technology in the same timeframe. That is never done, and indeed many climate change pronouncements seem to ignore future technology progress completely. But it makes absolute nonsense to predict a world where our behaviours continue as today, where consumption accelerates, where we carry on using resources the same way as we have in the past, or where we use the same technology to provide for the many needs in our everyday lives. There will even be far more wealth to deal with the problems in the future, thanks to worldwide economic growth. Our kids won't have to spend as much to fix it, and they will have far more money anyway. Unless, that is, we waste it all by building up vast debts today to avert the problems by overspending on premature and ineffective solutions.

We need good science if we are to understand and fix the problems ahead. We also need policies that are sensible, and based on good science, good economics, up to date, and focused on the biggest bang per buck, with appropriate discounting for problems further in the future. Then perhaps we can begin a sensible dialogue based on facts instead of doom-mongering.