Climate Change: Can We Stop It?

By Bill McKibben, New York Review of Books. Posted October 8, 2007.

Reviewed:

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming
by Bjørn Lomborg
Knopf, 253 pp., $21.00

Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility
by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
Houghton Mifflin, 344 pp., $25.00

What We Know About Climate Change
by Kerry Emanuel
MIT Press, 85 pp., $14.95

Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren
edited by Joseph F.C. DiMento and Pamela Doughman
MIT Press, 217 pp., $19.95 (paper)

During the last year, momentum has finally begun to build for taking action against global warming by putting limits on carbon emissions and then reducing them. Driven by ever-more-dire scientific reports, Congress has, for the first time, begun debating ambitious targets for carbon reduction. Al Gore, in his recent Live Earth concerts, announced that he will work to see an international treaty signed by the end of 2009. Even President Bush has recently reversed his previous opposition and summoned the leaders of all the top carbon-emitting countries to a series of conferences designed to yield some form of limits on CO2.

The authors of the first two books under review have some doubts about a strategy that emphasizes limits on carbon emissions, Lomborg for economic reasons and Nordhaus and Shellenberger for political ones. Since any transition away from fossil fuel is likely to be the dominant global project of the first half of the twenty-first century, it's worth taking those qualms seriously.

In his earlier book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish statistician, attacked the scientific establishment on a number of topics, including global warming, and concluded that things were generally improving here on earth. The book was warmly received on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, but most scientists were unimpressed. Scientific American published scathing rebuttals from leading researchers, and its editor concluded in a note to readers that "in its purpose of describing the real state of the world, the book is a failure." A review in Nature compared it to "bad term papers," and called it heavily reliant on secondary sources and "at times … fictional." E.O. Wilson, who has over the years been attacked by the left (for sociobiology) and the right (for his work on nature conservation), and usually responded only with a bemused detachment, sent Lomborg a public note that called his book a "sordid mess." Lomborg replied to all of this vigorously and at great length, and then went on, with the help of The Economist magazine, to convene a "dream team" of eight economists including three Nobel laureates and ask them to consider the costs and benefits of dealing with various world problems. According to his panel, dealing with malaria ranked higher than controlling carbon emissions, though again some observers felt the panel had been stacked and one of the economists who took part told reporters that "climate change was set up to fail." Lomborg later conducted a similar exercise with "youth leaders" and with ambassadors to the United Nations, including the former US emissary John Bolton, with similar results.

In his new book, Cool It, Lomborg begins by saying that the consensus scientific position on climate change -- that we face a rise in temperature of about five degrees Fahrenheit by century's end -- is correct, but that it's not that big a deal. "Many other issues are much more important than global warming." In fact, he argues, it would be a great mistake either to impose stiff caps on carbon or to spend large sums of money -- he mentions $25 billion worldwide annually on R&D as an upper bound -- trying to dramatically reduce emissions because global warming won't be all that bad. The effort to cut emissions won't work very well, and we could better spend the money on other projects like giving out bed nets to prevent malaria.

Lomborg casts himself as the voice of reason in this debate, contending with well-meaning but wooly-headed scientists, bureaucrats, environmentalists, politicians, and reporters. I got a preview of some of these arguments in May when we engaged in a dialogue at Middlebury College in Vermont; they struck me then, and strike me now in written form, as tendentious and partisan in particularly narrow ways. Lomborg has appeared regularly on right-wing radio and TV programs, and been summoned to offer helpful testimony by, for instance, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, famous for his claim that global warming is a hoax. That Lomborg disagrees with him and finds much of the scientific analysis of global warming accurate doesn't matter to Inhofe; for his purposes, it is sufficient that Lomborg opposes doing much of anything about it.

But Lomborg's actual arguments turn out to be weak, a farrago of straw men and carefully selected, shopworn data that holds up poorly in light of the most recent research, both scientific and economic. He calculates at great length, for instance, his claim that the decline in the number of people dying from cold weather will outweigh the increase in the number of people dying from the heat, leading him to the genial conclusion that a main effect of global warming may be that "we just notice people wearing slightly fewer layers of winter clothes on a winter's evening." But in April 2007, Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the panel of experts whose scientific data he prefers to cite, released a report showing, among many other things, that fewer deaths from cold exposure "will be outweighed by the negative health effects of rising temperatures world-wide, especially in developing countries."

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Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, most recently Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.

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