[tt] WSJ: (Lomborg) Chill Out

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Chill Out
http://opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110010597
[Linked by Arts & Letters Daily.]
7.9.13

BOOKSHELF

Bjorn Lomborg provides a calm voice in the heated debate over global
warming.
BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

In this world of Republicans and Democrats, meat-eaters and
vegetarians, dog lovers and cat lovers, we have a new divide. On one
side are global-warming believers. They've heard Al Gore's
inconvenient truths and, along with the staff of Time magazine, feel
"worried, very worried." Humanity faces no greater threat than a
warming Earth, they say, and government must drastically curb
carbon-dioxide emissions. On the other side are those who don't
think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, they don't think
that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn't clear
that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it
will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good.

Standing in the practical middle is Bjorn Lomborg, the free-thinking
Dane who, in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (2001), challenged the
belief that the environment is going to pieces. Mr. Lomborg is now
back with "Cool It," a book brimming with useful facts and common
sense.

Mr. Lomborg--"liberal, vegetarian, a former member of Greenpeace,"
as he describes himself--is hard to fit into any pigeonhole. He
believes that global warming is happening, that man has caused it,
and that national governments need to act. Yet he also believes that
Al Gore is bordering on hysteria, that some global-warming science
has been distorted and hyped, and that the Kyoto Protocol and other
carbon-reduction schemes are a terrible waste of money. The world
needs to think more rationally, he says, about how to tackle this
challenge.

Mr. Lomborg starts by doing what he does best: presenting a calm
analysis of what today's best science tells us about global warming
and its risks. Relying primarily on official statistics, he ticks
through the many supposed calamities that will result from a hotter
planet--extreme hurricanes, flooding rivers, malaria, heat deaths,
starvation, water shortages. It turns out that, when these problems
are looked at from all sides and stripped of the spin, they aren't
as worrisome as global-warming alarmists would suggest. In some
cases, they even have an upside.

Take flooding. After the 2002 floods of Prague and Dresden, Tony
Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder all argued that the
floods proved the need for Western governments to commit themselves
to Kyoto. Mr. Lomborg agrees that global warming increases
precipitation. Yet to the extent that more precipitation has already
increased river flows, it has done so largely in the fall, when
rivers are at low levels and there is little risk of flood. Truly
bad floods have historically accompanied colder climates, since
plentiful snow and a late thaw produce ice jams that block rivers
and produce high water levels. These sorts of floods have in fact
decreased in the 20th century, at least in part because of global
warming.

The picture is the same for other "disasters." Yes, sea levels will
rise--probably about a foot over this century. But they have already
risen a foot since 1860, and the world has coped. Yes, more people
will die from heat; but significantly more people will not die from
cold. Yes, glaciers will melt, but they'd be melting to some degree
in any event, and in the meantime this melting provides extra water
for some of the world's poorest people. (The Himalayan glaciers on
the Tibetan plateau--the biggest ice mass outside the Antarctic and
Greenland--are the source of rivers that reach 40% of the world's
population.)

Such a nuanced look at the good and bad of global warming gives Mr.
Lomborg a chance to pursue his bigger theme: Anti-warming policies
(like those of the Kyoto Protocol) that require energy taxes or
other checks on economic dynamism are inefficient and even harmful.
They serve as short-term ways of dealing with what is a complex and
long-term problem. They cost a lot now and yet do little to reduce
global temperatures in 100 years' time.

Better, says Mr. Lomborg, for today's world to manage the effects of
global warming and devote its resources to problems it can fix, thus
putting the entire globe in a better position to solve the
underlying problem in the future. An example? While we've had fewer
floods in the 20th century, the floods we do have get more attention
because of the huge economic losses that now accompany them. The
losses have nothing to do with global warming and everything to do
with the ever-growing numbers of people who migrate to flood-prone
areas.

Mr. Lomborg cites studies showing that by implementing Kyoto--at a
cost of trillions of dollars--we might be able to achieve a 3%
reduction in fluvial and coastal flooding damages. If we instead
adopted smart flood policies--e.g., an end to public subsidies that
encourage people to settle in flood plains, a shrewder use of
levees--we could achieve a 91% reduction in damages at a fraction of
the Kyoto cost.

As for the long term, Mr. Lomborg argues that governments do have a
role to play. But he presents a real inconvenient truth: The world
has been dependent on fossil fuels for generations, and it is
ludicrous to believe that it will end that dependency in a few
decades. Yet only a drastic reduction in fossil-fuel use will cut
carbon-dioxide emissions enough to stop or significantly slow
climate change. Rather than governments imposing costly energy taxes
to little benefit, Mr. Lomborg argues, they should fund research
programs aimed at finding breakthrough technologies.

Mr. Lomborg's cost-benefit approach won't sit well with leftists who
see global-warming programs as a proxy for other goals (say,
reducing "materialism"). And his calls for taxpayer-funded R&D
investments won't sit well with small-government conservatives who
may be skeptical of global warming in the first place. But his
analysis is smart and refreshing, and it may bridge at least one
divide in our too divided culture. The dog and cat lovers will never
get along.

Ms. Strassel, a Washington-based member of The Wall Street Journal's
editorial board, writes the weekly Potomac Watch column. You can buy
"Cool It" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.