perfidy

In a Monday morning Telegraph opinion piece, Dr. Bjørn Lomborg opines that environmental scientists might be going 'round the bend:

Last Tuesday, 11 of the world's leading academies of science, including the Royal Society, told us that we must take global warming seriously.

Their argument is that global warming is due to mankind's use of fossil fuels, that the consequences 100 years from now will be serious, and that we therefore should do something dramatic. We should make substantial and long-term reductions of greenhouse gases along the lines of the Kyoto Protocol.

This is perhaps the strongest indication that well-meaning scientists have gone beyond their area of expertise and are conducting unsubstantiated politicking ahead of next month's meeting of the G8.

Now, granted, he's a political scientist, not an environmental scientist, but he's got a reputation for clear thought, and I'd assert that clear thought might be more enlightening than the howling of doom-mongers.

Here's the thing - part of his current exposition of clear thought, embodied in the article linked above, revolves not around debating the correctness of the views of Kyoto Treaty proponents. He points out that, even if you accept them all at face value, they're missing something important. The pro-Kyoto arguments go into great detail about what "will" happen if Kyoto's not put in place, with facts, figures, pictures, and for all I know, hand-puppets. So they're clearly hip to using data to make their case for projections of a dire future.

The same scientific facility and diligence could be applied to a post-Kyoto world, too, wouldn't you think? Lomborg does. And he uses their own projections to reveal that which they "know" but don't share with us, namely that if Kyoto is put into force, the bad effects it's supposed to delay will only be delayed by six years. 6 - not 60 or 600, six.

Color me unimpressed.

He goes on to point out:

Moreover, they should also tell what they expect the cost of the Kyoto Protocol to be. That may not come easy to natural scientists, but there is plenty of literature on the subject, and the best guess is that the cost of doing a very little good for the third world 100 years from now would be $150 billion per year for the rest of this century.

Never mind - color me actively opposed. Unless they cease the pretense that this is anything but a way to hobble the developed world so that the third world can catch up, disdain for Kyoto proponents is all I can muster. Not for nothing did the US Senate vote unanimously in favor of a resolution calling the Kyoto Treaty a "bad thing" or words to that effect.

[wik] See also Robert Novak's latest, in which he reports:

"In reality, Kyoto was never about environmental policy," a White House aide told me. "It was designed as an elaborate, predatory trade strategy to level the American and European economies." The problem for Europeans has been that Bush refused to go along, ruining the desired leveling effect. The EU's industries have been devastated, while the U.S. has prospered.

Europeans' desire to bring U.S. prosperity down to their level is no conspiracy theory of American conservatives. Margot Wallstrom, the Swedish vice president of the European Commission, in 2001 (when she was commissioner for the environment) said the Kyoto Protocol was "not a simple environmental issue . . . this is about international relations, this is about economy -- about trying to create a level playing field."

They should be encouraged to intercourse themselves, sez me.
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No wallflower, Lomborg, he finishes by pointing out what we perhaps might ought to be worrying about, including AIDS, malaria, malnutrition, free trade and clean drinking water; all things that perhaps we might be able to positively affect.

And, unspoken in Lomborg's article - the comparison between those challenges and the alleged challenge of global warming. Those maladies are inarguably bad, but global warming, and the shifts in global climate, have been occurring since the Earth initially cooled from whatever flaming rock it used to be, and I find it hard to credit arguments that there's some static configuration the climate on Earth is supposed to have. It certainly wasn't static before mankind and his evil SUVs started tooling around, and I question how reasonable it is to expect it to be so in the future.

(If you can get past the bad plot and the breathlessly overdone drama, I'd recommend Crichton's State of Fear for a decent bibliography of the failings of global warming activists' critical thought processes)