Ronald Bailey, Reason.com
Wednesday, April 17, 2002

Schneider’s piece is remarkable for its dishonesty. He first deploys the familiar red herring that "most of his nearly 3,000 citations are to secondary literature and media articles." Lomborg’s chapter on global warming features more than 600 endnotes. Nearly half refer to publications from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and most of the rest refer to studies from such agencies as the World Meteorological Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and to peer-reviewed articles from Science, Nature, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and the like.

True, IPCC publications are "secondary literature," but Schneider himself calls the IPCC "the most credible international assessment body" dealing with climate change. (Needless to say, Schneider has not followed his own stringent rule about citing only peer-reviewed articles when discussing scientific issues and public policy. In "The Genesis Strategy," 80 percent of the endnotes refer to newspaper and magazine articles, government reports, and other secondary sources.)

Schneider makes some more substantive claims. For brevity, let’s deal with three of them: that Lomborg gets the basic climate science wrong, that he botches global warming cost-benefit analyses, and that he misrepresents the Kyoto Protocol.

Interestingly, Schneider admits his own "lingering frustration" over the scientific "uncertainties" that surround projections of future global temperatures.

In any case, Lomborg does not deny global climate change. As he puts it, he "accepts the reality of man-made global warming" but questions claims such as Greenpeace’s assertion that it is "one of the greatest threats to the planet." To support his skepticism, Lomborg analyzes a lot of controversial scientific information and concludes that future global warming is likely to be at the low end of the projections made by the IPCC for the next century.

Lomborg agrees with those climatologists who think the earth is more likely to warm only 1.4 degrees Celsius during the next century rather than the 5.8 degrees predicted by the highest projections. He points to research suggesting that computer models that project high temperatures by 2100 do not take proper account of a number of negative feedbacks, such as clouds that tend to cool climate.

Lomborg also makes a persuasive case that due to technological improvements, the amount of greenhouse gases humanity will add to the atmosphere will likely be at the low end of the emissions scenarios put forward by the IPCC. Less greenhouse gases means lower future temperatures.

Schneider demonstrates his misunderstanding of research that contradicts his views when he dismisses Richard Lindzen’s work on the iris effect by calling it a mere extrapolation from "a few years of data from a small part of one ocean."

In a letter to Scientific American, Lindzen points out that the findings are applicable to the entire tropics. Lindzen also notes that, far from relying excessively on his findings, Lomborg devoted only a quarter of a page to his iris effect paper. "As our paper amply stresses (and as Lomborg acknowledges), there remain uncertainties in our work," he writes.

Lindzen concludes that Schneider’s critique of Lomborg "misrepresents both the book he is attacking and the science he is allegedly representing."

Oops!

Schneider makes a number of surprising errors. He attacks Lomborg’s analysis of the costs and benefits of trying to slow global warming by limiting the emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels.

Schneider claims that forcing industries to cut back on fossil fuels "could actually reduce some emissions at below-zero costs." He bases this suggestion on engineering estimates that are notoriously overoptimistic.

For example, in a 1995 study published in Into the 21st Century: Harmonizing Energy Policy, Environment, and Sustainable Economic Growth, 37 companies agreed to participate in a comprehensive energy audit that the engineers predicted would increase their electricity efficiency by 11.2 percent. A year later, the companies had realized only a 3.1 percent increase in electricity efficiency.

Lomborg accepts that energy efficiency can be tightened up marginally, but he is correct that no one seriously believes that efficiency alone can replace the services provided by the energy that would be lost in cutting fossil fuel use by as much as 60 percent.

Perhaps even more misleading is Schneider’s discussion of the Kyoto Protocol. Schneider dismisses Lomborg’s analysis as a straw man argument. You decide.

Lomborg suggests this thought experiment: Extend to the end of the century Kyoto’s provisions for cutting carbon dioxide emissions to around 5 percent below 1990 levels. Then examine the costs. Lomborg knows global warming activists actually intend to force the world to cut back global fossil fuel use by at least 50 percent below model projections. But by looking at what it would cost to implement the comparatively mild Kyoto, one gets a good sense of the magnitude of the problem.

Climatologists widely agree that implementing the Kyoto cuts would reduce the globe’s average temperature by an undetectable 0.15 degree Celsius by 2100.

Achieving that minimal climatological result could, according to some econometric models, cost as much as $1 trillion. As mentioned earlier, had the United States joined the Kyoto Protocol, overall costs would have been even higher, costing the U.S. $2.5 trillion over 10 years.

The mean estimate of the total cost for the entire world of doing nothing about global warming is around $5 trillion over the next century. In other words, if humanity simply allowed the pace of global warming to proceed, the median estimate is that it would cost $5 trillion to adapt to it.

Estimates for different proposed cuts in fossil fuel use aimed at stabilizing the atmosphere at various average temperatures run between $8 trillion and $38 trillion over the next 100 years. Assuming the lower cost, this means it would cost the world $8 trillion to avoid $5 trillion in costs due to global warming.

Concession Stand

Scientific American’s second review is by John P. Holdren, a longtime collaborator with Paul Ehrlich who teaches environmental policy at Harvard. His review boils down to a bait-and-switch strategy: He answers a question that has not been asked.

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