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Bjorn Lomborg’s Warm, Fuzzy World

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (2002) and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007) is rather unique in that he poses as both a climate contrarian and an environmentalist. Despite his self-adopted plumage, if Lomborg is an environmentalist, I am Dick Cheney.

Lomborg’s forecast is sunny, warm, glib, breezy and comforting — a retort to all those climatic crisis-mongers who think global warming portends a world that is irritating, hot, nasty and destructive of human and natural life. While a number of arctic biologists believe, for example, that receding ice will kill polar bears which use it to hunt for seals, Lomborg has a solution. In Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007), the Danish adjunct professor of business tells the polar bear pessimists who tell us “No ice, no bears,” that the creatures are rational inhabitants of their world (a species of economist, perhaps, much as he is), who will respond to a lack of ice by behaving like brown bears from which they descended — foraging on land, rain or shine, warm or not. No ice, Lomborg tells us, no problem. In Bjorn Lomborg’s world, the warming, melting Arctic will have nice things: more birds and butterflies. He leaves out mosquitoes, wasps and the carcasses of dead polar bears that haven’t read his books.

Lomborg is, in fact, as he often is, a little bit correct and massively wrong at the same time. Traveling in the Arctic interviewing game officials and hunters, I was told that a few polar bears have become land animals, rummaging through garbage dumps and mugging tourists. One enterprising polar bear put a tourist hiking in a park near Iqaluit, on Baffin Island, into a hospital while I was visiting. Most of the time however, polar bears’ feeding habits are changing more slowly than their environment and they’re going very hungry, losing considerable weight as the Arctic ice recedes.

Lomborg’s world loves numbers, and positively relishes warmth. Despite his general ignorance of how the Earth system operates (both his Masters and PhD. were in Political Science), Lomborg parses his case on “what science tells us” and dedicates his new book to coming generations. A reviewer wrote in Nature, however, that his case is “built on a deep misconception of Earth’s system” (Dasgupta, 2007, 143) — a rigorous scientist’s kind way of stating that Lomborg’s argument is a waste of innocent trees that could have been left standing to absorb some surplus carbon dioxide. Lomborg’s work reminds me of a Native American joke in which a white politician (usually, but not always, George W. Bush) is given the name Walking Eagle, meaning “This bird is so full of shit that it can’t fly.”

In his so-called ‘analysis,’ he is given to taking a few instances out of a vast record and blowing them out of proportion to support his allegation that — while it is real — global warming does not merit crisis-level government intervention. He is of the George W. Bush School of Climate Change: who’s scared of a few degrees of warmth? This ‘what-me-worry brand of climatology’ sells very well, however. One day in mid-2007, shortly after Cool It! hit the streets, I clicked onto Amazon.com and found it ranked the 50th best-selling book on its list of several million. On October 19, 2007, it ranked #123.

Lomborg’s picture of the Arctic’s future also differs sharply from that of Inuit who live there. Witness Sheila Watt-Cloutier, former chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. “What is happening affects virtually every facet of Inuit life,” Watt- Cloutier told the Eleventh Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Montreal, December 7, 2005. “We are a people of the land, ice, snow and animals. Our hunting culture thrives on the cold. We need it to be cold to maintain our culture and way of life. Climate change has become the ultimate threat to Inuit culture” (Watt- Cloutier, 2005).

“Inuit are adaptable and resourceful,” said Watt-Cloutier. “We have to be to survive in the Arctic. But the ACIA [Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, 2004 report] foresees a time — within the lifetime of my eight-year-old grandson — when environmental change will be so great that Inuit will no longer be able to maintain their hunting culture. Already Inuit are struggling to adapt to the impacts of climate change… How would you respond if an international assessment prepared by more than 300 scientists from 15 countries concluded that your age-old culture and economy was doomed, and that you were to become a footnote to globalization?”

Ranging from the Arctic to Great Britain, the controversial professor cites authoritative-sounding numbers that 3.6 degrees F. of warming would cause 2,000 more heat-related deaths a year in England, but 20,000 fewer deaths related to cold weather. Never mind that within a couple of centuries, such a temperature rise could provoke enough sea-level rise to drown all of London and much of the rest of coastal Earth. Lomborg does not give statistics on deaths by drowning.

He roundly condemns diplomatic attempts such as the Kyoto Protocol as ineffective and expensive, and lays out his own plans to limit average global temperature rise to 4.7 degrees C. At even lower levels of temperature increase, however, many scientists actually trained in these fields assert that ‘feedback loops’ will provoke a runaway greenhouse effect. While it may not even be within humankind’s power to stop a temperature increase from global warming at a specific point, the last thing we want to do is to set the target so arbitrarily high that the Earth, within a couple of centuries, could lose its permanent ice.

Lomborg sprays forth a fog of numbers that sound very precise, but mean very little. He discusses the urban heat-island effect and concludes (on pages 21 and 22 of Cool It) that planting trees and installing ponds in London could cut temperatures 14 degrees F. Additionally, painting asphalt surfaces white could, he says, reduce temperatures 18 degrees F. He provides numbers and cites a source (Greater London Authority, 2006). But does anyone really believe that planting trees, building ponds, and painting black surfaces white would reduce London’s temperatures 32 degrees F? A fraction of that would provoke an ice age.

Londoners, break out your heavy overcoats!

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).