Bjorn Lomborg: 'Catastrophe' overheated

Again newspapers and television are packed with stories of environmental degradation, extreme weather and global warming. Consider last year's floods in central Europe and the recent hot weather and forest fires for which global warming is blamed, spurring a widespread demand to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases.

This view comes not only from environmental organisations but also from politicians and researchers. Prominent researcher John Houghton compared extreme weather with weapons of mass destruction and called for political action. But is this analysis accurate? The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cannot find any significant development in extreme weather in the 20th century, although there is a tendency that global warming is likely to cause more precipitation. This is the conclusion of the IPCC's latest report. Houghton readily cites the World Meteorological Organisation to the effect that global warming has shown itself to give rise to more extreme weather such as heatwaves. Unfortunately, this much-cited news flash from the WMO was only a press release, not based on any research, and when questioned the WMO acknowledged that its results could be explained merely by "improved monitoring and reporting".

Of course, such distinctions fit badly with the general claim that global warming is becoming a WMD.

The intuition would be that as the weather gets warmer, we will get hotter and, consequently, more people will die from heatwaves. But this is a severely flawed argument.

Basically, a global temperature increase does not mean that everything just becomes warmer. Global warming will generally warm minimum temperatures much more than maximum temperatures. In both hemispheres and for all seasons, night temperatures have increased much more than day temperatures. Likewise, most warming has taken place in winter rather than summer. Finally, three-quarters of the warming has taken place the cold areas of Siberia and Canada.

All of these phenomena are, within limits, good for agriculture and people. Yet we are constantly being told that global warming is what brings on heatwaves such as those we're seeing right now. Not correct. Global warming has generally only decreased the number of cold days. The US, northern and central Europe, China, Australia and New Zealand have experienced fewer frost days, whereas only Australia and NZ have had their maximum temperatures increase. For the US, there is no upward trend in maximum temperatures and for China they have been declining.

Of course, as global warming goes on, maximum temperatures will also start to increase. Yet the idea of comparing this with WMDs seems curiously misleading. Yes, eventually heatwaves will cause more people to die from the extreme high temperatures, but what is neglected is that many more people will not die from cold spells. In the US, it is estimated that twice as many people die from cold as from heat, and in the UK it is estimated that about 9000 fewer people would die each winter with global warming. But don't wait up to see the headlines in the next mild winter saying "9000 not dead".

Even if extreme weather is not getting worse, the damaging effects caused by extreme weather are indeed increasing. But the key factor is not global warming. The more important factor for explaining the damaging effects of extreme weather is much more direct in its causality: there are more people in the world, they are wealthier, and many more prefer to live in cities and coastal areas. Accordingly, extreme weather will affect more people than before and, because people are more affluent, more absolute wealth is likely to be lost.

Florida is an example of this development. When Florida was hit by a hurricane in September 1926, the economic loss was $US100 million. In 1992, a similar hurricane destroyed property to the value of $US38 billion. Clearly a bigger disaster – but not due to a development in extreme weather. The explanation comes from economic growth and urbanisation.

In other words, we are probably getting more vulnerable to extreme weather but this is only weakly related to climate change. It therefore seems tenuous to blame the damage unfolding on global warming and it is meaningless to argue – as Houghton does – that the wise political solution is primarily extensive action against global warming.

Although global warming has not had much effect on extreme weather in the past, it might have a greater effect in the future. According to the IPCC, some extreme weather is likely to develop this century. However, we lack reliable data about the consequences for the damage caused by extreme weather in the future.

The only available study is about tropical hurricanes. Here data shows that, although the extent of hurricanes will increase in the future, this effect will contribute to only 5per cent of the rise in economic damage caused by extreme weather. The other 95per cent will be due to societal factors such as economic growth and urbanisation.

If our goal is to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather, limiting carbon emissions is certainly not the most cost-effective way. In the Kyoto Protocol, industrialised countries have agreed to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30 per cent in 2010.

This will be extremely expensive and will have only a negligible effect. The global cost will be large: the estimates from all macro-economic models show a cost of $US150 billion ($224 billion) to $US350 billion every year. At the same time, the effect on extreme weather will be marginal: the climate models show that Kyoto will merely postpone the temperature rise by six years from 2100 to 2106. Most global warming problems will occur in the Third World, yet these countries have many other, more serious, problems with which to contend. For the cost of Kyoto, in 2010, we could permanently solve the biggest problem in the world – we could permanently provide clean drinking water and sanitation for every person in the world. Should we not deal with the most pressing problems for real people first?

Endorsing Kyoto seems to have become the way to show our willingness to do good. But we can't do all good things simultaneously. I would prefer that we got our priorities straight and dealt with the most important issues first.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, is director of Denmark's National Environmental Assessment Institute. He is on a speaking tour of Australia sponsored by the Institute of Public Affairs. Details at: www.ipa.org.au

eventually heatwaves will cause more people to die from the extreme high temperatures,

Hmmm, mainly from anticipatory actions of government & eco-activism based on "Global Warming" non-sense:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,95260,00.html

"France claims that the recent European heat wave (search) was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 of its countrymen. But for most of the summer, it has been much hotter in the American West, and no one can find even one body attributable to the heat."
***
"My University of Virginia colleague Robert Davis and I looked into the issue of heat and mortality in American cities and published our findings in several academic journals. Given all those bodies in France and the big blackout, perhaps it's a good time to get these out of the dusty library stacks and tell what we found.
People who study mortality and climate have known for years that most temperate-zone cities have had some "threshold" temperature at which daily mortality suddenly begins to skyrocket. People who study economics will argue that this is a market ripe for adaptation.
How have Americans adapted to our warming cities? They stopped dying. Even though the local temperature keeps going up and up, the threshold at which deaths skyrocket has become higher and higher, and now is beyond the highest temperatures."
***
"European cities are virtually devoid of air conditioning in large part because the energy to run them is so expensive. And why is that? Pressured by vocal environmentalists, European governments have levied energy tax after energy tax, with the latest excuse being global warming.
The mathematics of this problem are terribly transparent. In order to meet their self-imposed targets from the Kyoto Protocol (search) on global warming, European nations already have taxed energy, but they have not done enough. Consequently, even more restrictions are being proposed, especially by the German government. Unaffordable air conditioning will become even more expensive, killing more and more Europeans the next time the temperature reaches what passes for a few degrees above what is normal in Dallas.
Europe has effectively imposed a continuous blackout on air conditioning, and now it is paying the price."

If our goal is to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather, limiting carbon emissions is certainly not the most cost-effective way. In the Kyoto Protocol, industrialised countries have agreed to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30 per cent in 2010.
This will be extremely expensive and will have only a negligible effect.

Mankind's impact is only 0.28% of Total Greenhouse effect

" There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, (the Kyoto Protocol) would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures -- one-twentieth of a degree by 2050. "

Dr. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia,
and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service;
in a Sept. 10, 2001 Letter to Editor, Wall Street Journal

Anthropogenic (man-made) Contribution to the "Greenhouse
Effect," expressed as % of Total (water vapor INCLUDED)

Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics % of All Greenhouse Gases
% Natural

% Man-made

Water vapor 95.000%
94.999%
0.001%

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) 3.618%
3.502%
0.117%

Methane (CH4) 0.360%
0.294%
0.066%

Nitrous Oxide (N2O) 0.950%
0.903%
0.047%

Misc. gases ( CFC's, etc.) 0.072%
0.025%
0.047%

Total 100.00%
99.72
0.28%

The reality is a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration over current levels, that the UN/IPCC "story line" pretends, even if were true, could not induce significant temperature change whatever its source.

Climate Catastrophe, A spectroscopic Artifact?

"It is hardly to be expected that for CO2 doubling an increment of IR absorption at the 15 µm edges by 0.17% can cause any significant global warming or even a climate catastrophe.
The radiative forcing for doubling can be calculated by using this figure. If we allocate an absorption of 32 W/m² [14] over 180º steradiant to the total integral (area) of the n3 band as observed from satellite measurements (Hanel et al., 1971) and applied to a standard atmosphere, and take an increment of 0.17%, the absorption is 0.054 W/m² - and not 4.3 W/m².
This is roughly 80 times less than IPCC's radiative forcing.
If we allocate 7.2 degC as greenhouse effect for the present CO2 (as asserted by Kondratjew and Moskalenko in J.T. Houghton's book The Global Climate [14]), the doubling effect should be 0.17% which is 0.012 degC only. If we take 1/80 of the 1.2 degC that result from Stefan-Boltzmann's law with a radiative forcing of 4.3 W/m², we get a similar value of 0.015 degC."

A Lukewarm Greenhouse
"The average warming predicted by the six methods for a doubling of CO2, is only +0.2 degC."

However, we lack reliable data about the consequences for the damage caused by extreme weather in the future.

Not to mention the lack of data supporting the fundamental basis of the supposed "Global Warming" theories, the "heat forcing" character of changes in CO2 concentration on a water plentiful world.

CO2-Temperature Correlations

"(1) correlation does not prove causation, (2) cause must precede effect, and (3) when attempting to evaluate claims of causal relationships between different parameters, it is important to have as much data as possible in order to weed out spurious correlations.

***

Consider, for example, the study of Fischer et al. (1999), who examined trends of atmospheric CO2 and air temperature derived from Antarctic ice core data that extended back in time a quarter of a million years. Over this extended period, the three most dramatic warming events experienced on earth were those associated with the terminations of the last three ice ages; and for each of these climatic transitions, earth's air temperature rose well in advance of any increase in atmospheric CO2. In fact, the air's CO2 content did not begin to rise until 400 to 1,000 years after the planet began to warm. Such findings have been corroborated by Mudelsee (2001), who examined the leads/lags of atmospheric CO2 concentration and air temperature over an even longer time period, finding that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lagged behind variations in air temperature by 1,300 to 5,000 years over the past 420,000 years."

[ see also: Indermuhle et al. (2000), Monnin et al. (2001), Yokoyama et al. (2000), Clark and Mix (2000) ]

"Other studies periodically demonstrate a complete uncoupling of CO2 and temperature "

[see: Petit et al. (1999), Staufer et al. (1998), Cheddadi et al., (1998), Raymo et al., 1998, Pagani et al. (1999), Pearson and Palmer (1999), Pearson and Palmer, (2000) ]

"Considered in their entirety, these several results present a truly chaotic picture with respect to any possible effect that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration may have on global temperature. Clearly, atmospheric CO2 is not the all-important driver of global climate change the climate alarmists make it out to be."

Global warming and global dioxide emission and concentration:
a Granger causality analysis

http://isi-eh.usc.es/trabajos/122_41_fullpaper.pdf

"We find, in opposition to previous studies, that there is no evidence of Granger causality from global carbon dioxide emission to global surface temperature. Further, we could not find robust empirical evidence for the causal nexus from global carbon dioxide concentration to global surface temperature."

Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics	% of All Greenhouse Gases	% Natural	% Man-made
Water vapor	95.000%	94.999%	0.001%
Carbon Dioxide (CO2)	3.618%	3.502%	0.117%
Methane (CH4)	0.360%	0.294%	0.066%
Nitrous Oxide (N2O)	0.950%	0.903%	0.047%
Misc. gases ( CFC's, etc.)	0.072%	0.025%	0.047%
Total	100.00%	99.72	0.28%