I read the full article. The author for transparency, writes many free market leaning books and columns. As for Judith Curry, for someone "fact" based and uses "skepticism" she sure uses a lot of interesting talking points that I've heard before. This excerpt in particular led me scratching my head, There are no positive results? None from reducing air pollution or creating global standards? Hurricanes may not result in more loss of life, but they have gotten significantly more expensive. I don't see a lot of well thought answers but maybe that's just due to the article. Otherwise, she doesn't really stand for anything. I guess that's "true science", but science informs policy. While, I'm sympathetic and agree that alarmism is counter productive, I feel like she has own agenda that isn't "true science".
excerpt of an interview with Freeman Dyson. And yes, I already know what Dyson's reputation is among alarmists. https://www.marijnpoels.com/single-...ginning-to-understand-what-the-effects-may-be
Yes they are old and don't address what she has been doing recently. But there is enough evidence to show she is not unbiased in what she is saying. The very fact she is taking money from oil companies eliminates her as unbiased and frankly makes her opinions tainted 0- she can not be taken seriously since she does have an agenda (she is representing the oil industry, not science)
I probably speak for many, but I'll say it's substantial crap debunked by reputable science not beholden to the oil industry. You won't see it because you likely have me on ignore. I wonder why?
I'll just put this here. Hardly surprising. The Intercept: A MAJOR COAL COMPANY WENT BUST. ITS BANKRUPTCY FILING SHOWS THAT IT WAS FUNDING CLIMATE CHANGE DENIALISM.
What are the facts disputing the 2 meter rise in sea level and impact it will have on cities? You are putting up an opinion piece behind a paywall by the way.
Lomborg on addressing sea-level change: Examining the Latest False Alarm on Climate High seas won’t displace 187 million people—and the claim isn’t even new. By Bjorn Lomborg May 30, 2019 6:50 p.m. ET You’ve probably seen the latest alarming headlines: Rising sea levels from climate change could flood 187 million people out of their homes. Don’t believe it. That figure is unrealistic—and it isn’t even new. It appears in a new scholarly paper, whose authors plucked it from a paper published in 2011. What the earlier paper actually found was that 187 million could be forced to move in the unlikely event that, in the next 80 years, no one does anything to adapt to dramatic rises in sea level. In real life, the 2011 paper explained, humans “adapt proactively,” and “such adaptation can greatly reduce the possible impacts.” That means “the problem of environmental refugees almost disappears.” Realistic assumptions reduce the number to between 41,000 and 305,000—at most, less than 1/600th of the figure in those headlines. Sober findings get less attention than alarming and far-fetched speculation. The United Nations’ climate-panel scenarios all show that the world will be far richer and more resilient by the end of the century. That means we’ll be better able to tackle challenges like flooding—as much poorer societies have done for centuries. We have more know-how and technology than ever to build dikes, surge barriers and dams, expand beaches and construct dunes, make ecosystem-based barriers like mangrove buffers, improve building codes and construction techniques, and use land planning and hazard mapping to minimize flooding. Journalists looking for alarming headlines get help from climate scientists who gloss over adaptation and from public-relations teams that know their audience. A 2018 paper looked at two scenarios. In the first, sea levels rise almost 3 feet during the next 81 years, yet no one thinks to change the height of a single dike anywhere in the world. That would cost $14 trillion globally a year. The authors acknowledge this wouldn’t happen: “It is clear that all coastal nations have, and will continue to adapt by varying degrees to sea level rise.” In the second scenario, they try to account for adaptation, though they assume that as soon as any nation gets as rich as Romania is today, it will freeze its efforts. Even with this odd assumption, estimated flooding costs still fall 88%. The press release announcing the study skipped the second scenario and trumpeted the $14 trillion figure. So did every news story. Today, some three million people are flooded annually, costing around $11 billion in flood damages and $13 billion in dike costs, a total of 0.05% of global gross domestic product. In an updated version of that influential 2011 paper, the authors examined what would happen in a more realistic world where people adapt more as they get richer. They found that even in the hottest world, spending an additional 0.003% of GDP on protection would reduce the number of displacements from flooding by two-thirds, while the total cost would fall from 0.05% to 0.008% of global GDP. Climate change is real and needs to be addressed, but when we are asked to spend trillions of dollars on policies that would transform the global economy, we need to demand more than hype and spin. Mr. Lomborg is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and “Cool It.” Appeared in the May 31, 2019, print edition as 'Examining The Latest False Alarm On Climate.' https://www.wsj.com/articles/examining-the-latest-false-alarm-on-climate-11559256615?mod=e2two
It would depend on the percentage of those 187MM that are poor. Gov't don't spend billions to protect the land that poor people live on. Also sea level rise isn't the most significant (and costly) effect of Climate Change. Also he asserts pushing policies that would cost trillions but doesn't site where that number comes from.
my suspicion is that's a reference to the Green New Deal, which Lomborg has discussed in a number of places, e.g. http://www.maciverinstitute.com/201...g-off-pain-their-green-new-deal-would-create/ there was an estimate of $20 trillion years ago to deal with and address the sea-level rise problem for Bangladesh alone, which we've talked about previously so I don't think Lomborg's use of those numbers is controversial
Good essay by Mike Hulme on his blog about the latest claims of a climate-induced extinction crisis. An excerpt: . . . Here are five reasons why I am an extinction denier. The rhetoric of climate change and extinction does not do justice to what we know scientifically. Climate prediction science is fundamentally based on probabilistic forecasts which underpin the quantification of risk. There is a range of possible values for future global warming. It is as false scientifically to say that the climate future will be catastrophic as it is to say with certainty that it will be merely lukewarm. Neither does it do justice to what we know historically. Some like the American veteran journalist Bill Moyers have called for a war-like stance in relation to climate change, using the analogy of the late 1930s: “In the second world war, the purpose of journalism was to awaken the world to the catastrophe looming ahead of it. We must approach our climate crisis the same way”. But as the historian and Liberal politician James Bryce explained in 1920, “the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.” We should beware of false or trite analogues. The rhetoric of climate and extinction does not help us psychologically. It all too easily induces feelings of terror as Ed Maibach at George Mason University bluntly remarks, “As a public health professional (and as a human), I find the prospect of 3 or 4 degree C of global warming to be nothing short of terrifying.” But inducing a state of terror generates counter-productive responses in human behaviour. Nor does the rhetoric of climate and extinction help us politically. Simply ‘uniting behind the science’ or ‘passing on the words of science’ gets us no further forward politically. Even if climate science predicted the extinction of humanity, as Darrick Evensen explains climate change “raises a host of ethical, historical and cultural questions that are at most tangentially connected to any scientific findings.” And finally the rhetoric of climate and extinction does not help us morally. Even if we take these claims literally, the mere fact of human extinction by no means impels us to conclude that the correct moral response must be to prevent that extinction. There may well be other moral demands upon us which take precedence, and yet which we ignore. Why the human species above other species? Why are the future unborn more morally demanding of us than the dispossessed victims of today? Why is suicide the worst sin of all? Despite what some claim, climate change is not a black and white issue. It has many shades of grey. By this I mean that interpreting the significance of the fact that humans are altering the world’s climate is not self-evident. To believe that there is an absolute truth to be told about what climate change means, or what ‘it demands of us’, is misguided. What climate change means is not ‘revealed truth’ emerging from some scientific script. The political meanings and individual and collective responses to climate change have to be worked out iteratively. They have to be negotiated within the political structures and processes we inhabit, negotiations that can’t be circumvented by an appeal to the authority of science being ‘on our side’. (Of course this must also include the possibility of renegotiating some of those same political structures). https://mikehulme.org/am-i-a-denier-a-human-extinction-denier/
Not so surprisingly, the opinion piece is misleading in its characterization of the 2011 paper. I gives the impression that the 2011 paper says adaptation is inevitable "in real life". Read the paper and tell me if that's the conclusion you draw. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2010.0291?mod=article_inline& I'll quote from it: ... However, this does not mean that protection will take place, and a question remains about its practicality—and proactive adaptation in general, especially in the world’s poorest countries, such as most small-island states or sub-Saharan Africa [11]. Looking at the literature, two distinct views concerning protection emerge [12]. The pessimists assume that protection is unaffordable and/or largely fails, and that most potential impacts are realized with sea-level rise leading to large-scale forced displacements of population on an unprecedented scale. This leads to an argument for stringent and immediate climate mitigation and preparation for environmental refugees. The optimists assume that protection will be widespread and largely succeed, and residual impacts will only be a fraction of the potential impacts. Hence, the main consequence of sea-level rise is the diversion of investment into new and upgraded coastal defences and other forms of adaptation (e.g. flood-warning systems). As we consider larger rises in sea level, hence concern that protection and proactive adaptation, in general, may fail, increases, and the potential for the pessimist’s view to be realized grows. ... Climate mitigation remains a viable strategy to avoid the 4°C world considered in this paper [78]. Reducing temperature rise reduces the magnitude of sea-level rise, although importantly, stabilizing global temperatures does not stabilize sea level. Rather, it stabilizes the rate of sea-level rise, a process that has been termed the ‘commitment to sea-level rise’ [5]. Hence, a need to adapt to sea-level rise would remain even under mitigation, and mitigation and adaptation policies are more effective when combined in coastal areas: mitigation reduces the rate of sea-level rise to a manageable level and adaptation is required for the remaining rise [2]. At present, the appropriate mix of mitigation and adaptation is not well understood, partly because scenarios of sea-level rise under different stabilization trajectories are poorly developed as already discussed, and partly because of uncertainty about adaptation. Combined with the uncertainties in sea level already discussed in §2, this is an important area for further research. Without mitigation, the fundamentally different outcomes come down to how successful adaptation, and protection in particular, might be. While there is extensive literature in both the camps, which this paper has termed the ‘pessimists’ and the ‘optimists’, respectively, there has been little attempt to reconcile these two perspectives and really understand coastal adaptation as a systematic process [10,12]. The ‘pessimists’ seem to take it as read that adaptation will either fail or people will not even try to adapt. In contrast, the ‘optimists’ appear overly confident that benefit–cost approaches describe human behaviour in response to threats such as sea-level rise [3,10]. Both views can find empirical evidence to support them. In particular, the response to relative sea-level rise in subsiding coastal cities support the optimist’s perspective as they have all been protected, rather than fully or even partially abandoned. This includes cities in developing countries such as Bangkok in Thailand. However, adaptation failure cannot be ruled out, and major disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and its impact on New Orleans certainly suggest caution. New Orleans’ defences are now largely rebuilt and upgraded to a much higher standard than before Katrina at a cost of US $15 billion [79], but it is too early to assess the long-term effect of Katrina on the city (cf. [80]). In more general terms, it is certainly plausible that extreme events can trigger a cycle of decline and ultimately coastal abandonment [81]. Much more research on adaptation in coastal areas, including protection, is required. Historical analogue studies could be especially valuable.
You know the game Russian Roulette? With six bullets, there's only a 17% chance you lose. . . . Does climate change have a 17% chance of being real?
Okay, I've given the Nicholls et al a skim, and it doesn't appear to me that Lomborg has necessarily misrepresented anything. And I'm not sure that Lomborg OR Nicholls give "the impression" that adaptation is inevitable. That's YOUR characterization (bolded) of Lomborg's essay. I don't think that's what he's saying. I take it he is saying we have a choice of (a) whether to spend money and also a choice (b) about how much to spend. Perhaps it would be better to say that adaptation in certain contexts and locations is "likely"; but the primary point of both essays seem to be the providing of an overview of a range of scenarios. Here is what I read as the relevant section of the 2011 Nicholls paper: Assuming no adaptation, of the two land-loss mechanisms considered in DIVA, submergence is a much larger contribution to the loss than erosion. Under these conditions, land loss amounts to a total of 877 000–1 789 000 km2 for a 0.5 and 2.0 m rise in sea level, respectively (figure 2). This amounts to approximately 0.6–1.2% of the global land area. The net population displaced by this rise is more significant, being estimated at 72 and 187 million people over the century, respectively (roughly 0.9–2.4% of the global population). This reflects the high population density in coastal areas.6 The results are consistent with the literature on environmental refugees (e.g. [75]), which forecasts large population displacements owing to sea-level rise. Most of the threatened people are concentrated in three regions in Asia: east, southeast and south Asia (figure 3). Given 0.5–2 m rise in sea level, a total of 53–125 million people are estimated to be displaced over the century from these three regions alone. In the three small-island regions (Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean), 1.2–2.2 million people are displaced over the century, with all three regions contributing significantly. It is noteworthy that impacts in some regions such as north and west Europe and the North America Atlantic Coast, impacts are much greater for a 2.0 m scenario than for a 0.5 m scenario. This reflects that pre-existing defences provide benefits for a 0.5 m rise, but are overwhelmed by a 2.0 m rise. . . . If we assume protection with dikes and nourishment, the number of displaced people falls dramatically to comparatively minor levels of 41 000–305 000 people displaced over the twenty-first century. Hence, in contrast to the no-protection scenario, the problem of environmental refugees almost disappears. The costs of protection are zero if we assume no protection. In contrast, the dike and nourishment responses have substantial costs. The incremental adaptation costs7 are estimated at roughly between US $25 and $270 billion (1995 values) per annum for 0.5 and 2.0 m in 2100, respectively. Dike costs dominate these response costs, and dike maintenance becomes an increasing component of the costs over time. This illustrates an important long-term consequence of a widespread protection response to sea-level rise that will continue to grow beyond 2100. In 2100, the relative mix of nourishment, dike construction/upgrade and dike maintenance costs is 36, 39 and 25 per cent; and 13, 51 and 37 per cent for the 0.5 and 2.0 m rise in sea level, respectively. The regional spread of these costs is quite variable with east Asia, North America Atlantic, North America Pacific, north and west Europe and South America Atlantic being the five regions with the highest costs (figure 4). In terms of avoided human displacement as a function of protection investment, not surprisingly, the benefits are highest in the regions with most threatened people: east Asia, south Asia and southeast Asia. It directly affects those on the coast, but also has knock-on effects further inland. So again, I'm not sure what the complaint is about Lomborg's misuse of the 2011 paper. I take it he is primarily interested in simply documenting where the 187 million displaced refugees figure comes from. His more significant complaint is the more recent paper by Bamber et al., who cite the Nicholls figure in their conclusion: We note that for risk management applications, consideration of the upper tail behavior of our SLR estimates is crucial for robust decision making. Limiting attention to the likely range, as was the case in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR5, may be misleading and will likely lead to a poor evaluation of the true risks. We find it plausible that SLR could exceed 2 m by 2100 for our high-temperature scenario, roughly equivalent to business as usual. This could result in land loss of 1.79 M km2, including critical regions of food production, and displacement of up to 187 million people (38). A SLR of this magnitude would clearly have profound consequences for humanity. Lomborg has a problem I take it with the authors' argument to focus on the worst-case scenario rather than "limiting attention to the likely range" as was done in the IPCC AR5.
This: In real life, the 2011 paper explained, humans “adapt proactively,” and “such adaptation can greatly reduce the possible impacts.” That means “the problem of environmental refugees almost disappears.” Realistic assumptions reduce the number to between 41,000 and 305,000—at most, less than 1/600th of the figure in those headlines. The selective quotations gives the reader the impression that the 2011 paper argues that because humans adapt the problem of environmental refugees almost disappears. That's one possibility. It's also possible that adaptation won't happen anywhere close to the extent that it should, hence the paper refers to the scenario of 187 million people being displaced as a "real risk": However, if realized, an indicative analysis shows that the impact potential is severe, with the real risk of the forced displacement of up to 187 million people over the century (up to 2.4% of global population). I'll quote again from the 2011 paper: In essence, there is a low-probability/high-consequence tail to the sea-level scenarios, although we have no basis to evaluate what that probability might be. While the IPCC AR4 report also acknowledges this fact, the presentation failed to communicate this important point effectively, and most readers of the IPCC assessments failed to notice this caveat concerning the published scenarios. From the perspective of those interested in impact and adaptation assessments, this is an important failure that we hope the next IPCC assessment will explicitly address. The 2011 paper is arguing for adaptation and protection investment, which is well understood as essential for mitigating the damaging consequences of climate change. And yet, for the purposes of developing useful impact/adaptation assessments one can't just focus on the "likely range", but must pay special attention to the "low-probability/high-consequence tail" as well. So it is strangely contradictory to me that this would be his main criticism.
okay, I've got it. I guess I wasn't reading that as a statement of "inevitability" but I can see how you might read Lomborg that way. I still think that contradicts the rest of what he is arguing re: making choices about where to spend money and about how much to spend. Especially in light of making policy based upon different sets of probabilistic assumptions. and on edit: it occurs to me that Lomborg might have tightened up his meaning by inserting the word "even" into that sentence to avoid being misinterpreted: i.e., "In real life, even the 2011 paper [observes] humans 'adapt proactively,' and 'such adaptation can greatly reduce the possible impacts.' "
