Lomborg Non-Disappearning Islands
Bjorn is an economist and not a scientist and I think he thought it best to appear to lean in and then show the fallacy of the AGW policies.
My comment to the article:
The pro-climate change, ex-global warming, ex-climate crisis campaign has been more of the marketing marvels of this century, and it is largely falsehoods.
This is not science but pseudo-science and mostly politics. The mere fact that water vapor is 100 times more prevalent than CO2 and is a much better GHG than CO2 should give some pause, for why has the temperature of earth not run away already?
The CO2 scare is based on a rise of 400ppm, and this is supposed to raise the temp of the earth by 30%. Really?
Would your coffee become warmer if the thermos had CO2 inside the insulating layer? This the GW theory and violates the second law of thermodynamics.
Why has the past 20 years seen no warming of significance? Why is the hockey stick, a complete fraud not being recognized? Why was the IPPC founded to promote CO2 as the culprit?
There is a long trail of orchestrated attempts to have CO2 be the villain. Well it is not.
Another comment that is pro-AGW:
Mr Lomborg has no scientific qualifications, and misinterprets the Science. He would do well to read the large body of research on the topic, and acquaint himself with the conclusion of every one of the world's 80 Science Academies -- that 'Man's burning of fossil fuels is warming the Earth, and the results will be strongly negative', or equivalent. Here is a good start -- from America's premier Science Academy, the National Academy of Sciences: http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/exec-office-other/climate-change-full.pdf
And my answer:
@Warren Beeton So thousands of scientists cannot be bought off by pro-AGW interests? And what you are saying is that you are believing in what the media is telling you that 300ppm increase in CO2 will raise the temp of earth by 30% Stop and think about that claim.
I can tell you the models are wholly inaccurate and as many skeptics comment: Models are not science. Read the NIPCC at Heartland if you want a different view. Or go to Cato to use the climate calculator to determine that if the USA were to go away that the temp would be much less than the 0.3C reduction that Lomborg mentions. It is your future, judge it wisely.
Oct. 13, 2016 7:20 p.m. ET
Once a year or so, journalists from major news outlets travel to the Marshall Islands, a remote chain of volcanic islands and coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean, to report in panicked tones that the island nation is vanishing because of climate change. Their dispatches are often filled with raw emotion and suggest that residents are fleeing atolls swiftly sinking into the sea.
Yet new research shows that this is not the entire—or even an accurate—picture. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean that global warming isn’t real, or that world leaders and scientists shouldn’t tackle the adverse effects of climate change, but hype and exaggeration serve no one.
Using historic aerial photographs and high-resolution satellite imagery, Auckland University scientists Murray Ford and Paul Kench recently analyzed shoreline changes on six atolls and two mid-ocean reef islands in the Marshall Islands. Their peer-reviewed study, published in the September 2015 issue of Anthropocene, revealed that since the middle of the 20th century the total land area of the islands has actually grown.
How is that possible? It seems self-evident that rising sea levels will reduce land area. However, there is a process of accretion, where coral broken up by the waves washes up on these low-lying islands as sand, counteracting the reduction in land mass. Research shows that this process is overpowering the erosion from sea-level rise, leading to net land-area gain.
This is not only true for the Marshall Islands. The researchers write that within the “recently emerging body of shoreline change studies on atoll islands there is little evidence of widespread reef island erosion. To the contrary, several studies have documented noteworthy shoreline progradation [growth] and positional changes of islands since the mid-20th century, resulting in a net increase in island area.” The most famous of these studies, published in 2010 by Paul Kench and Arthur Webb of the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji, showed that of 27 Pacific islands, 14% lost area. Yet 43% gained area, with the rest remaining stable.
Representatives from the Marshall Islands have been vocal about the need for strong global action on climate. President Hilda Heine has told reporters that longtime residents are leaving the Marshall Islands because climate change is threatening the nation’s existence. It’s true that approximately one-third of the population has relocated to the U.S.—but for reasons more mundane than climate change.
Some 52.7% of the Marshall Islands population lives below the poverty line, according to the Asian Development Bank. Only 39.3% of the population age 15 years and above is employed. In its 2015 human-rights report on the island nation, the U.S. State Department said that significant problems include “chronic government corruption, and chronic domestic violence,” along with “child abuse, sex trafficking, and lack of legal provisions protecting worker’s rights.” Marshallese citizens also have an easy immigration pathway to America and can live, work and study in the U.S. without a visa.
It is understandable why Marshall Island leaders might prefer to talk about global warming. But blaming today’s emigration on rising seas does a disservice to all.
Telling viewers in the U.S. starkly that they’re “making this island disappear,” as a report from CNN’s John Sutter did in June 2015, makes for good, blame-laden television. But this reductionist, fact-averse rhetoric contributes to the idea that climate-change discussion should be a two-sided, cartoonish fight between those who say it is not real and those who say it is the worst problem facing humanity.
Even more insidiously, doom-mongering makes us panic and seize upon the wrong responses to global warming. At a cost of between $1 trillion and $2 trillion annually, the Paris climate agreement, recently ratified by China, is likely to be history’s most expensive treaty. It will slow the world’s economic growth to force a shift to inefficient green energy sources.
This will achieve almost nothing. My peer-reviewed research, published last November in the journal Global Policy, shows that even if every nation were to fulfill all their carbon-cutting promises by 2030 and stick to them all the way through the century—at a cost of more than $100 trillion in lost GDP—global temperature rise would be reduced by a tiny 0.3°F (0.17°C).
In a rush to do something—and be seen to be taking drastic action—more sensible approaches to counter global warming have been overlooked. Instead of simply mandating less carbon output, we need more R&D spending on green energy, including more efficient fission and fusion, cheaper solar and wind, and improved storage. New technology is crucial if green energy is to out-compete fossil fuels.
Policy makers who want to help the residents of the Marshall Islands today should look at improving the islands’ resilience and ability to cope with severe weather by improving infrastructure and storm preparedness. Tackling issues like poverty, health care, corruption and domestic violence would do even more. Those who seek to help should keep the bigger picture in mind.
Mr. Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, is the author of “The Ske
We should revisit occasionally what the proper role of government is. As the constitution was a good sense of direction, we need a core set of principles to add in order to deal with the future.
So many want to engineer society, remove risk, assist certain groups, rather than let individuals thrive and raise communities. Why?
Is Democracy where we all "get it good and hard" or is it the best means to a free society?
Should we roll with the special interests, or make the government achieve its proper role, what is that role, and how to do this?
When do deficits and governments become too large?
Government is becoming more elitist while trying to sell corrections to problems it created, what makes this possible?
This could also be inserted into the field above, or erased
Currently as a society, we are having a most difficult time discussing political issues. What is driving this? And why a rebirth in political culture would be a good thing.
Are "markets" dead as some would conjecture? Or is free enterprise what got us here?
At the heart of economics there are several possible economic schools of thought, the essence of these schools of thought and how they relate to our lives.
