Copenhagen: conned again

To be fair, if you were convinced that global warming would be a wast of money, which could be better spent on other foreign aid projects, arguing against funding for global warming would at least help the long-term goal of increasing funding for other projects.

But you’re right. It does suggest that the focus on AIDS and world health was primarily for rhetorical effect. Out of curiosity (being that I’m generally unfamiliar with Lomborg’s views), what do you think he would prefer governments to spend money on? I suppose he could think that fighting AIDS is the top priority despite having his own agenda, or could think that it is important but unlikely to recieve widespread support from the developed world.

Yes, i agree with the above posters about the logical gap here…in other words, it does make sense that Lomborg would spend most of his time campaigning against the global warming focus if he thinks it is diverting money from more important causes like AIDS, etc. The economic logic his crew use seems compelling and while I agree, its doubtful their motives are pure, their argument really needs to be addressed. The Economist seems pretty convinced too that this is a strong case and as they arent advocating something dumb like using the money to build high ways in the Amazon, maybe liberals should consider refocusing…

The fact that Lomborg misrepresents the conclusions of his own panel of economists only adds to the suspicion that his original aim was not so much to explore the possibilities as to produce a conclusion in favour of his own political prejudices.

Given that he is writing this kind of thing in the Telegraph today and worrying out loud about what US$150b would buy the world, it’s perhaps a little surprising that he hasn’t also wondered out loud just what the expenditure of a similar sum by the US has bought Iraqis over the past 18 months. At any rate the US’ misadventure in the Middle East shows us that it’s not as though the world doesn’t have $150b to spend as it sees fit, right now. At the moment the economic argument against the invasion of Iraq is looking pretty compelling to me, wonder what Lomborg has to say about that allocation of scant resources? Perhaps economic analysis of human activity’s interaction with the climate is a simpler exercise than cost/benefit on war in Iraq?

SH:
The difference is that AI would prolly quite openly say that the bombing is more important than what the soldiers were doing, wereas Lombard is claiming that he considers AIDS funding more important. It’s this rhetorical inconsistancy which is at issue, not his ability to judge the merits of alternate courses of action.

If we were to assume that global warming were to proceed monotonically, that low-lying places get progressively more warm and marsh-like, we’ll find our habitat increasingly hospitable to the sort of mosquitos that spread malaria.

Perhaps in like fashion, American polities, roiling in fear of untrammeled sexuality, lie to their children and guide them away from practices which reliably protect them from infections and unwanted pregnancies.

The trend looks good for malaria and AIDS.

Look. The reasons for reducing carbon dioxide emissions are obvious at ground level, if you’re an oxygen-breather, like me. In terms of oil we’re getting close to running out of the sweet light crude. Hello, China! Hundreds of millions of Hondas.

Sure, we’ve got close to a millenium’s worth of coal in the bank, but do we want to go back to that? There may be as much in methane hydrates sitting in the ocean, but will we still be recognizably human once our descendents have burned it all?

We think we’re all so smart. Isn’t it time to demonstrate it? Or at least find out whether we are or not?

Shorter Sebastian Holsclaw: You cannot criticise a rightwing writer on climate change in December 2004 without having condemned an Amnesty International press release in Spring 2003 concerning US bombing of an Iraqi TV station. Gotcha, dumb liberal hypocrite!

Giles, I think that what Lomborg says is wrong. What John Quiggin denotes is rather that this wrongness is not an error but a deliberate act. So it is not so much that Lomborg is wrong than he is a lier.

DSW

-The Copenhagen Consensus gives us great hope because it shows us that there are so many good things we can do. For $27 billion we could prevent 28 million people from getting HIV. For $12 billion we could cut malaria cases by more than a billion a year. Instead of helping richer people inefficiently far into the future, we can do immense good right now.

Yeah, damn him and his fight against Kyoto. Has anyone who attacks him even read his damned book?

I think Lomborg’s view is being misrepresented. His position is that the framework of the Kyoto protocol will provide very little, if any, relief from global warming and while demanding great expenditures, while the inevitable effects from global warming (even with implementation of the KP) will present the greatest harm to the poorest nations. Lomborg is campaigning for a focus on dealing with such inevitable effects of global warming. There is a legitimate place for rational argument over the feasability and usefulness of the Kyoto protocol and while money diverted from such a protocol may not necessarily be spent on AIDS, most certainly money spent on KP implementation will never be spent on AIDS. It’s an unrealistic expectation that we all drop our hammers to become AIDS activists.

Unlike the concensus in the scientific community on the anthropogenic contribution to global warming, there is no such consensus that the KP will have the beneficial effects so hoped for.

No dan you absolutely can criticize whomever you want. But last time I raised the problem of AI on this site it was pointed out that counting the number, emphasis and order of paragraphs in such public pronouncements was childish. Nice to see that not everyone agrees.

As for Lomborg himself I’m not sure what the criticism is. If you believe that AIDS is one of the more pressing problems in the world and that attention to it is being sucked away by attention to global warming, you can do two logical things. You can attempt to raise the profile of AIDS problems or you can try to decrease the attention paid to global warming. The concepts are not contradictory.

John S: the option valuation models tend to have a term representing the “dividend yield” of the underlying asset. If something is actually getting worse at a predictable rate while you wait, then the option value is substantially attenuated. So yes, I would certainly have advocated waiting to do something about global warming until we were sure that there was a problem, but it is my personal view that this moment has long since passed.

Shorter Seb: In discussing possible carbon reductions in December 2004, what really matters is that I’m sulking because someone disagreed with me on an entirely unrelated topic 18 months ago; this proves that *I was right all along* about everything.

Amongst other things, that Amnesty report was the one devoted to the US. Righteous indignation over a report on the US because… it condemned US action. My gosh, that’s so exactly like criticism of Lomborg (and why, oh why should he criticised at all? it really is a mystery!) for dodging the very main issue at the center of his “work”. Why didn’t we see it before.

You can attempt to raise the profile of AIDS problems or you can try to decrease the attention paid to global warming. The concepts are not contradictory.

No, they aren’t. They also aren’t mutually dependent. By what bizarre logic does the former require the latter?

Should more attention to the issue of nuclear waste disposal come at the expense of attention to the issue of obesity? I mean, the two things are not even in the same category of issues. What is it, the theory of communicating vases applied to social policies and public attention??

“Amongst other things, that Amnesty report was the one devoted to the US. Righteous indignation over a report on the US because… it condemned US action.”

Wrong. It was allegedly a condemnation fo ‘war crimes’. Also the discussion was about a month ago.

And hey dan, I’ve been sick lately. If I can’t sulk when I’m sick….

But you are right I shouldn’t have whined. Back to Lomborg. What about it. If you think less serious problem A is detracting significantly from more serious problem B why is it illegitimate as a tactic to show why A isn’t that serious?

Isn’t the real problem that you don’t think AIDS really is more serious? You think that global climate change is more serious. Which is precisely why he has to argue the way he does. First he needs to convince people that climate change is less serious than they think.

Lateral thinking Jet! Spending that much on alternative fuels research would be serious overkill though, I think, because even one hundredth that sum (on top of what is already going into such research) would revolutionize our energy economy within a few years.

It could be funded by a carbon tax set at such a minuscule rate – a US$1.5b per annum carbon tax for the world representing about $0.00006 per kg CO2 emitted or about $0.0003 per litre oil consumed (by a quick and dirty calculation on i) world CO2 emissions and ii) world oil consumption, this year) that I don’t think an economic case can be made against it. I mean, if you believe a carbon tax ought to be funding other things as well as fuels research then fine – we can clearly afford to do them as well for this kind money.

That $0.0003 per litre was only for oil, btw. Were the carbon tax spread right across the fossil fuel sector – coal, oil, natural gas, LPG etc – as it ought to be, the already minuscule rate would become “unmeasurably cheap” or somesuch :)