Climate Council exposes Bjorn Lomborg’s climate fallacies

The low down on Lomborg BY CLIMATE COUNCIL 13.05.2015 Last week’s announcement that the University of Western Australia would no longer house Bjorn Lomborg’s ‘Consensus Centre’ was a fantastic outcome for science. However, the fact that the Centre is still trying to establish itself in Australia is deeply troubling.

Misinformation is harmful. Just as false information about the ‘benefits’ of tobacco misled the public and damaged health, so false information about climate change and its impacts can mislead the public and decision-makers, delaying much needed action to stabilise the climate system. Here are the top four reasons why Lomborg’s arguments about climate change are flawed.

1. Lomborg fundamentally misunderstands climate science.

Lomborg does not deny the existence of human caused climate change, but he has consistently misrepresented the basic climate science. For example:………

Lomborg has challenged the link between climate change and an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events……
Lomborg believes that global warming has ‘dramatically slowed or entirely stopped’ over the last 12 years. This is a common myth that we’ve busted already………
When Lomborg does acknowledge the impacts of climate change, he inaccurately downplays them. For example……

2. Lomborg doesn’t get that we need to address the cause of climate change, not just some of the symptoms. Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Centre has consistently claimed that targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions are expensive and that the money should be spent elsewhere. For example, he suggests that to stop deaths from heatwaves it is better to invest the money in building water features and reducing asphalt in cities, instead of committing to significant cuts to our carbon emissions.This argument is flawed because:

Solutions to curb our carbon emissions are becoming increasingly cheaper……

We need to address the cause of the problem not just the symptoms. ……

3. Lomborg forgets that climate change makes many existing challenges worse

Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Centre has asserted that other issues need to be prioritised before considering climate change, like tackling infectious disease, poverty and malnutrition. Of course these issues are important and, in fact, climate change makes a lot of these existing problemsworse. On the other hand, solutions to climate change can be integrated with tackling poverty and disease (for example, through the provision of solar energy systems to remote communities to provide electricity, instead of building centralised fossil fuel plants and expensive transmission systems). A healthy environment and healthy people are not mutually exclusive, in fact healthy and productive people depend on a healthy environment……..

According to the IPCC: throughout the 21st century, climate change is expected to lead to increases in ill-health in many regions, especially in developing countries………

Climate change will hit the poorest the hardest………

Countries on the frontline of climate change can’t afford to wait……

4. Lomborg has no credibility in the scientific community

Lomborg is a statistician and political scientist by training, and a self-proclaimed climate contrarian whose views have no credibility in the research community.

As Dr. Frank Jotzo, Director of the Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at ANU explains:

Within the research community, particularly within the economics community, the Bjørn Lomborg enterprise has no academic credibility. It is seen as an outreach activity that is driven by a specific set of objectives in terms of bringing particular messages into the public debate and in some cases making relatively extreme positions seem more acceptable in the public debate.

Lomborg’s message hasn’t varied at all in the last decade………When someone is unwilling to adapt their view on the basis of new science or information, it’s usually a sign those views are ideologically motivated. http://www.climatecouncil.org.au/the-low-down-on-lomborg

May 15, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, climate change - global warming

No comments yet.

Antinuclear

Australian news, and some related international items