Bjorn Lomborg, Danish statistician, economist, former radical Greenpeace activist and author of the bestseller book The Skeptical Environmentalist advises that global warming would have both good and bad impacts. He accepts that man contributes to global warming, but that environmentalist attempts to stampede us into irrational and very costly climate policies are foolish and economic suicide. Lomborg has done leading research on man’s use and management of global resources, and introduces the science-based “skeptic” view in contradistinction to the hysterical and politically-partisan environmentalism that has misled global climate policies.
Consistent with progressive propaganda, enviros must continually manipulate discredited crisis themes to attract a compliant and lazy environmental media establishment – “global warming” became “climate change” which became “extreme weather.” All the while, demonizing man’s release of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) as the existential threat to survival on planet earth.
Lomborg recently made the following salient points exposing the irrational obsessions over CO2:
• When “superstorm” Sandy hit the east coast of the United States on October 29, It resurrected the unwarranted claim that global warming was to blame for such events, together with the morally irresponsible argument that we should help future hurricane victims by cutting CO2 emissions;
• Sandy ranks only 17th in damage costs for US storms, and both the number and power of hurricanes that make landfall in the US have been declining since 1900;
• In the UN’s 2012 report on extreme weather, the IPCC said that it puts little trust in any cause of hurricanes due to global warming;
• The US has not seen a hurricane of Category 3 or higher since Wilma in 2005. Those seven years without strong hurricanes is the longest such span in more than a century.
The real damage from the insidious claims that man’s CO2 causes the record snow fall this winter in the northern hemisphere or Sandy, or other weather events is the political opportunism and reflex to enact more costly and misguided environmental regulations to control CO2.
Climate computer models show that the world’s most ambitious climate policy, the EU’s “20-20-20” plan, will have a net cost of roughly $250 billion a year for the rest of the century, or about $20 trillion in total. Yet it would reduce sea-level rise by just four inches by 2100.
If the US had adopted the EU’s plan, the cost and the benefit would probably be similar -- at a net cost of about $500 billion annually the US might get less than a one-inch reduction in sea-level rise by the end of the century.
Further, if we could get the entire world including the biggest CO2 emitters China and India to make drastic CO2 cuts by the end of the century, we would reduce sea level rise by only 7 to 18 inches by the end of the century. Models show that the cost would be at least $40 trillion annually. (Bjorn Lomborg, Copenhagen Nov. 13, 1012)
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