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Scientists surveyed by the Independent have declared cuts in carbon emissions a failure and are willing to go to "geo-engineering." Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but we can’t even geo-engineer a river basin with cloud seeding. I could go on with examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences proving that it is the irresistible force when it comes to managing natural forces.

Why is this? Well, you know the drill Kübler-Ross drill: Immobilization, Denial, Bargaining, Depression, Testing, Acceptance. Bush, of course, was Denial as official policy. Now we’ve reached "Bargaining." For example this slap some spackle on it approach from Bjorn Lomberg. In it he manages to make a series of scientific blunders, including forgetting to mention that famine has been going down, because of the use of carbon based fuels. He also cherry picks his numbers. This is typical of the devastation caused by pseudo-science at work.

For example:

Finally, it is simply wrong to say that storms are growing stronger every hurricane season. Even for the Atlantic hurricane basin, which we tend to hear about the most, the total hurricane energy as measured by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has declined by two-thirds since the record was set, in 2005.

What he is talking about is "Accumulated Cyclone Energy." It isn’t a good measure of hurricane energy, but a quick and dirty formula which takes the 6 hour estimate of maximum wind velocity, squares it, and then divides by ten thousand. Anyone who has read the National Hurricane Center’s forecast discussions, knows how often they are filled with guesstimates based on satellite presentation, discarding of measurements, or desire to be conservative. Furthermore ACE, as it is called, doesn’t take into account the diameter of a cyclone, which can vary widely with the same windspeed. This isn’t an attack on NHC, but underlining the realities and uncertainties of weather forecasting.

Lomberg, on the other hand, isn’t a scientist making the best of difficult conditions, but a liar. ACE hasn’t "declined" since the record was set, but instead cyclically peaked in 2005. No scientist who studies climate change has stated that global warming destroys long term climate cycles, but instead, creates a long term pressure on the wobble. Lomberg’s lie, and this would get a paper flunked in even the softest of social science class – measuring from a peak of activity and confusing this with a trend – is one of several in this one piece.

What’s his job? He’s a business professor, and he is making a fat killing, giving people the business. The fact is, that the world has not even tried carbon reductions in any serious way. Every regime put in place has a pair of big black holes: the United States, and China, which account for almost 40% of world carbon dioxide emissions, the main source of human driven global warming. It’s difficult to fix anything, if the nations driving the problem don’t want to change. One might as well try and fix global arms dealing without the US, which accounts for roughly 40% of all global arms sales.

If you need to know the cost of letting people who have a profit motive in denying a problem, or pushing pseudo-scientific garbage as a way of pushing people down the road of non-solutions, consider the cost of HIV denial.

Lomberg’s message: do a little bit of profitable time wasting, and get paid a great deal to tell very obvious falsehoods. It is a strategy that he profits from, and everyone else will pay for. Humans proved that they could not even manage the risk associated with the real estate market in the world’s most advanced economy for 8 years, now Lombergians want to do for the climate, what Goldman Sachs and others did for the credit markets: create a vast death lottery, where people hope that some one else will pay for the collapse when it comes. Lomberg is betting he will be dead before the bill comes due. But then, he’s getting his money up front. 

Related posts:

  1. Early Morning Swim: Al Gore Discusses GOP Global Warming Denialists with Rachel Maddow
  2. GRITtv Live: Wangari Maathai – The Politics of Global Climate Change
  3. The Global Warming Lie Detector
  4. Warming Up the Climate Change Denial Crowd
  5. FDL Book Salon Welcomes Paul Starobin, After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age