Panic - Part 3 - The Skeptical Environmentalist

Science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem. Yet, we now live in a world where almost half the population believes climate change will extinguish humanity. This has profoundly altered the political reality. It makes us double down on poor climate policies. It makes us increasingly ignore all other challenges, from pandemics and food shortages to political strife and conflicts, or subsume them under the banner of climate change.

Lomborg, Bjorn. False Alarm (p. 13). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

Global temperature and GDP are both rising, and each affects the other. Our efforts to rein in temperatures will cost resources and lead to slower GDP growth. Rising GDP typically means more greenhouse gas emissions, which will speed up rises in temperature. In order to understand what the future holds, we need to get a grasp on exactly what these two variables mean, how they interact, and how much control we have over each.

Lomborg, Bjorn. False Alarm (p. 53). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. 

Lomborg's approach is similar to Rosling but he chooses a different pair of variables for his narrative. Lomborg is interested in the effect of temperature on GDP (and cost/benefit in general). Rosling uses GDP per person for his four population classifications as they vary over time. Both authors agree on the basic science of Climate Change. Lomborg, like Gates, wants to look at the cost of "fighting" Climate Change. Both Lomborg and Gates are talking about the same thing. What is the "green premium" for Gates is a "hit" to GDP for Lomburg.

The two approaches have different applicability in different scenarios. 

Where I am now, in the province of BC in November 2021, I'm sitting in a triple whammy of climate catastrophe: 

• Heat dome in the summer costing hundreds of lives
• Fires in the summer denuding swaths of forest making landslides more common
• Floods causing the evacuation of a good-sized down and shut-down of critical supply lines for millions of us

Gates could only talk about measures that would hypothetically prevent whatever costs might be assigned to all this. We would need to factor in the idea that climate change only makes these things more probable without really being able to assign an exact or useful probability. IPCC models (MAGICC) cannot climate effects on the scale of any of the BC problems.

Lomborg would (in principle) be able to assign a number to lost GDP and a "back of the envelope" for costs of preventing the problem (climate change or not) such as:

• Air conditioning and better services during record temperatures
• Improved forest management
• Vast flood management programs (billions), such as the one in Calgary intended to deal with another flood like the one in 2014

When you get down to particulars, you can see there are a lot of practical problems with Lomborg's approach, but you get the idea. Prevention of climate impacts costs money - lots of it. The cost of prevention may indeed exceed the cost of the impact being avoided. In theory.

The Gates approach has a problem called the "attribution paradox". He would need to somehow have some kind of model of the world with and without prevention measures along with a model of what the climate (specifically in the province of BC) would look like with and without global measures to fight climate change (say, model the actual climate). There are a lot of hypotheticals here - "counterfactuals". Gates has the advantage of a specific assumption: zero emissions in 2050. Of course, that suffers from the obvious fact that it will never happen, causing Gates to slip into Science Fiction.

Rosling would point out that this whole scenario is being played out in the world of the richest billion while the "poor" are being totally ignored by the news, along with ideas of hypothetical adaptation. 

My own opinion is that Gates and Lomborg's approaches can both be considered Science Fiction, but both give us to model the world in numbers within two or three orders of magnitude. We'd love more precision but it is unlikely that the real world will surrender more precision than that. Rosling's approach points to what we are missing in the entire discussion and, in fact, points to what we should be doing to help the ones who need help the most. Rosling may not give us solutions but he specializes is facts rather than Science Fiction.

Science Fiction famously gets it right sometimes. More often it gets it hilariously wrong. And sometimes, the real world turns out to be much, much worse than we could have imagined.

It is worth pointing out an important difference between Rosling and Lomborg. Rosling is concerned about general ignorance. Lomburg is concerned about climate panic. Both of these phenomena are as real as a heart attack -- things to concern us quite independently of the climate danger.

"Playing with Graphs"

Lomburg and Rosling sometimes use almost identical data, drawn to different scales to reach different conclusions:

And herein lies the central tension within climate policy, and one I will return to again and again. Tackling global warming means limiting the rise in global temperature, or even trying to reverse that rise. This means cutting carbon dioxide emissions dramatically, and as we saw, even stopping the entire rich world’s emissions of carbon dioxide will not be nearly enough. And this will mean giving up the cheapest and most reliable energy

Lomborg, Bjorn. False Alarm (p. 62). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. 

It is instructive to read these two sides by side. Broadly speaking, Lomborg fails to properly account for who it is seeing the benefits and bearing the costs. Lomborg sees problems and solutions from inside the bubble of the obscenely rich.

The key issue is resilience. Our BC horror show would play out very differently in Nepal or Afghanistan. This is what we mean by climate change disproportionality affecting the poor. Lomburg's perspective gets us thinking differently about our personal experience.

 "MORE RAIN"

Like most other things, global warming has both downsides and upsides. More rain can indeed lead to more flooding in some places. But more rain can also alleviate an existing drought. Overall, when we look at all the scientific evidence, while an increase in rain often does alleviate droughts, it generally doesn’t lead to more flooding, probably because humans use much of the additional water in agriculture and industry.

Lomborg, Bjorn. False Alarm (pp. 65-66). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

The "rain" we worry about comes from tornados, hurricanes and the torrential sky rivers such has the "Pineapple Express". There is no such thing as a "good" hurricane, but it does seem to be true that relatively mild "sky rivers" are responsible for most of the rain that falls on California, with or without disastrous effect. The BC floods did not "prevent drout". They resulted in wide spread long term damage to the agricultural industry in BC.

The devil is in the details. "Good" climate change usually seems to emerge from a counter-factual fantasy world where everyone turns out to have been wrong and the author magically turns out to be the prophet of Utopia.

"HEAT AND COLD"

Lombard shows that cold kills more than heat. Therefor heat is, overall, a good thing. There are many things wrong with this argument. Why not compare heat deaths with snake bites? Heat deaths and cold deaths are very different phenomena. In fact, 

We would love to see a gapminder graph of this issue to see how both of these causes differ based on income. In fact, Rosling provides a relevant graph. If you are very poor, you are far more likely to be killed by any kind of disaster.

Lombard's case is basically that all these deaths are preventable. Perhaps true if you can afford it. My times in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Mexico were spent almost entirely in air conditioned facilities. The people I saw exposed to all risks (including the weather) did so with no options to mitigate the threat - in may cases, not even a roof over their heads. For example, many construction workers I lived in open tin shacks and earned enough ($1 per day) to put them in Rosling's "level 2", making them (in theory) three times more likely to survive (for example) extreme heat or cold. The "lefel 4" people in the same country would have eight times the survival rate of the poorest.

"GLOBAL GREENING"

Another thing we hear is Green is good, More C02 means more green, C02 is therefor good for you.

Other versions of this graph drop the fig leaf and chart "green" versus C02 emissions. The problem is that the data is a time series. The Y axis could be number of flat screen TV's.

There is nothing "green" about the BC crisis. Trees were replaced by mud. Crops were replaced by lakes. It is worth digging down into the specifics here, which also claim that desertification and drought have been decreasing. As far as I know, the data is, to put it mildly, "controversial".

We also see signs that Rosling could help us out here by asking where it is getting greener or dryer and who, exactly benefits or pays the cost? Not by country but by the individual wealth of the farmer. It is a sad reality of farming that a bumper crop doesn't necessarily mean a cash windfall, but a bad crop can put you out of business.

"The Reggie"

One simple way that we can get a sense of the scale of the effects of different cuts is by using the carbon trading system. The RGGI, or “Reggie,” is a carbon-trading marketplace covering the northeastern United States. It is just one of many around the world, but the first and biggest in the US.6 The RGGI puts a cap on the amount of carbon dioxide that large, fossil-fuel-run power plants can emit in the region. Then it allows emittance authorizations to be bought and sold. It costs about $6 to buy an authorization for one ton of carbon dioxide. If you buy an authorization, it means there’s one ton less that power plants can purchase. If you don’t use the authorization, that means all the power plants, between them, need to find a way to emit one ton less over the next year. Essentially, you’ve spent $6 and reduced global emissions by one ton. The RGGI puts the actions of individuals in perspective. It gives us a sense, for instance, of the scale of the impact of Attenborough’s promise. Cutting seven pounds of carbon dioxide would cost a little less than 2¢ on the RGGI. Attenborough might as well have just donated 2¢ to the climate cause.

Lomborg, Bjorn. False Alarm (pp. 113-114). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. 

Lomborg does manage to contribute a "truthy" measure of how much a unit of carbon prevention is worth (similar to Gates' "premium"). The concept is not bad and it relies on an arbitrary assumption that the RGGI actually does represent the value of keeping a ton of C02 out of the atmosphere. In actual fact, "cap and trade" scheme are famously corrupt. We no longer accept the idea that you can buy the right to pollute. But still ...

A "back of the envelope" calculation might be based on Gates' claim that we need to get 51 billion tons that we need to remove. Then we need a numerator - the cost of climate change to the world GDP, say, at 2 degrees of warming feared by Gates, welcomed by Lomburg and hardly a realistic "best case" scenario. This is very hard to come by, but lets say climate change at 2 degrees results in a 10% reduction to GDP (as opposed to the end of the world, as many assume). Global GDP is 150 trillion. 10% of that is 15 trillion. 15 trillion / 51 billion gives us about $300 per ton. To me, that confirms my suspicion that governments are going very easy on industry with the $6 figure. And we need to remember that the $300 figure doesn't include the cost of thousands of deaths, the disappearance of most ecosystems we know along with the species that depend on them, including us.

It is far more realistic to follow Gates' approach to estimate the "premium" cost of providing goods and services in a carbon-free way case by case. Very few of these cases present a "premium" as low as 10%. For example, the "premium" for gas should be about 100%, reflecting the difference between the zero-emission ideal (electric cars) and gas-powered vehicles. We can compare this to the timid but politically outrageous "carbon tax" in Canada of 6%. Like cap and trade, the number is political and has nothing to do with reducing carbon.

Of course, Lomburg would disagree with my back of the envelope challenge, saying he expects global GDP to increase, say, for the next century or so. But I am talking only of the obvious fact that GDP will increase less than it would because of climate impacts.

Lomborg's book is interesting and he's great to watch in person (see many videos) but my overall impression is that he succumbs to the economist's tendency to price out "externalities" while painting a rosy picture of the future.

I grew up in a place (Alberta) where such a mindset defined politics - even on the "left". Most of the time this was characterized by outright denial of climate change coupled with totally unrealistic prices for fossil fuels -- leaving out all "externalities". The left-leaning Federal Government sings the same tune. In Gates' terms, the premium will be negative. It should be noted that Canada's carbon tax is a slightly more sophisticated version of the Reggie along with Lombard's assumption that we can fight disaster with traditional economic models, which never actually model the real world.

While Lomborg deserves credit as an independent thinker, there is not much light between his arguments and those adopted by professional snake oil C02 salesmen such as Wrightstone. Wrightstone is actively deceptive. Lomborg is just wrong - basically off by one or two orders of magnitude.