Global warming: why cut one 3,000th of a degree? September 30, 2008
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions, Temperature.Tags: Bjørn Lomborg, climate change, co2, environmentalist, Global Cooling, global warming, Kyoto Protocol
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Global warming: why cut one 3,000th of a degree?
Bjorn Lomberg
By Bjørn Lomborg
From The Times, September 30, 2008
Britain’s efforts to reduce the speed of global warming will cost huge sums of money and have a pitifully tiny effect.
Global warming is seen everywhere as one of the most important issues. From the EU to the G8, leaders trip over one another to affirm their commitment to cutting CO2 to heal the world. What they do not often acknowledge – in part because it would lose them support – is that the solutions proffered are incredibly costly and will end up doing amazingly little good, even in a century’s time. This is the truly inconvenient truth of the politics of global warming.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4849167.ece
Bjorn is right if AGW only costs $15 trillion this century, ignore it. But for example, if an annual $2 trillion grain harvest fails, the cost isn’t $2 trillion, it is two billion dead or about $2 quadrillion. The costs of 200 cities building a trillion dollar dyke each, would be $200 trillion. The cost of the loss of Himalayan weltwater would be 1/2 the worlds GDP for six decades, about $6 quadrillion.
Bjorn also fails to understand the morality of actively destroying a poor nation’s future capital, like with AGW, vs simply not funding foreign aid. The former is evil and the latter merely rude.
What is Bjorn using as an economic value of a developing world life in the future’s hyperglobalized world, $5?? Best estimates are maybe about a $100000 2050 “developing world” per capita GDP, so every death would be maybe $2.5 million lost. At one billion preventable deaths, that is $2.5 quadrillion. Bjorn is saying there would only be 6 million AGW-deaths if doing nothing. Absurd.
Bjorn also fails to recognize reflexivity and game theory, and how small climate treaties can catalyze lerger efforts.
What’s worth more, the $100/yr you spend on drinking water or the $10000 summer vacation? That’s what AGW does; destroys food and water presently uncosted.