Chill Out

Bjorn Lomborg provides a calm voice in the heated debate over global warming.

By Kimberley A. Strassel
Thursday, September 13, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

In this world of Republicans and Democrats, meat-eaters and vegetarians, dog lovers and cat lovers, we have a new divide. On one side are global-warming believers. They've heard Al Gore's inconvenient truths and, along with the staff of Time magazine, feel "worried, very worried." Humanity faces no greater threat than a warming Earth, they say, and government must drastically curb carbon-dioxide emissions. On the other side are those who don't think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, they don't think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn't clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good.

Standing in the practical middle is Bjorn Lomborg, the free-thinking Dane who, in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (2001), challenged the belief that the environment is going to pieces. Mr. Lomborg is now back with "Cool It," a book brimming with useful facts and common sense.

Mr. Lomborg--"liberal, vegetarian, a former member of Greenpeace," as he describes himself--is hard to fit into any pigeonhole. He believes that global warming is happening, that man has caused it, and that national governments need to act. Yet he also believes that Al Gore is bordering on hysteria, that some global-warming science has been distorted and hyped, and that the Kyoto Protocol and other carbon-reduction schemes are a terrible waste of money. The world needs to think more rationally, he says, about how to tackle this challenge.


Mr. Lomborg starts by doing what he does best: presenting a calm analysis of what today's best science tells us about global warming and its risks. Relying primarily on official statistics, he ticks through the many supposed calamities that will result from a hotter planet--extreme hurricanes, flooding rivers, malaria, heat deaths, starvation, water shortages. It turns out that, when these problems are looked at from all sides and stripped of the spin, they aren't as worrisome as global-warming alarmists would suggest. In some cases, they even have an upside.

Take flooding. After the 2002 floods of Prague and Dresden, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder all argued that the floods proved the need for Western governments to commit themselves to Kyoto. Mr. Lomborg agrees that global warming increases precipitation. Yet to the extent that more precipitation has already increased river flows, it has done so largely in the fall, when rivers are at low levels and there is little risk of flood. Truly bad floods have historically accompanied colder climates, since plentiful snow and a late thaw produce ice jams that block rivers and produce high water levels. These sorts of floods have in fact decreased in the 20th century, at least in part because of global warming.

The picture is the same for other "disasters." Yes, sea levels will rise--probably about a foot over this century. But they have already risen a foot since 1860, and the world has coped. Yes, more people will die from heat; but significantly more people will not die from cold. Yes, glaciers will melt, but they'd be melting to some degree in any event, and in the meantime this melting provides extra water for some of the world's poorest people. (The Himalayan glaciers on the Tibetan plateau--the biggest ice mass outside the Antarctic and Greenland--are the source of rivers that reach 40% of the world's population.)

Such a nuanced look at the good and bad of global warming gives Mr. Lomborg a chance to pursue his bigger theme: Anti-warming policies (like those of the Kyoto Protocol) that require energy taxes or other checks on economic dynamism are inefficient and even harmful. They serve as short-term ways of dealing with what is a complex and long-term problem. They cost a lot now and yet do little to reduce global temperatures in 100 years' time.

Better, says Mr. Lomborg, for today's world to manage the effects of global warming and devote its resources to problems it can fix, thus putting the entire globe in a better position to solve the underlying problem in the future. An example? While we've had fewer floods in the 20th century, the floods we do have get more attention because of the huge economic losses that now accompany them. The losses have nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with the ever-growing numbers of people who migrate to flood-prone areas.

Mr. Lomborg cites studies showing that by implementing Kyoto--at a cost of trillions of dollars--we might be able to achieve a 3% reduction in fluvial and coastal flooding damages. If we instead adopted smart flood policies--e.g., an end to public subsidies that encourage people to settle in flood plains, a shrewder use of levees--we could achieve a 91% reduction in damages at a fraction of the Kyoto cost.

As for the long term, Mr. Lomborg argues that governments do have a role to play. But he presents a real inconvenient truth: The world has been dependent on fossil fuels for generations, and it is ludicrous to believe that it will end that dependency in a few decades. Yet only a drastic reduction in fossil-fuel use will cut carbon-dioxide emissions enough to stop or significantly slow climate change. Rather than governments imposing costly energy taxes to little benefit, Mr. Lomborg argues, they should fund research programs aimed at finding breakthrough technologies.


Mr. Lomborg's cost-benefit approach won't sit well with leftists who see global-warming programs as a proxy for other goals (say, reducing "materialism"). And his calls for taxpayer-funded R&D investments won't sit well with small-government conservatives who may be skeptical of global warming in the first place. But his analysis is smart and refreshing, and it may bridge at least one divide in our too divided culture. The dog and cat lovers will never get along.