[Vision2020] New In Theaters: Economist Lomborg's Film "Cool It" Regarding Anthropogenic Climate Warming

[Paul Rumelhart]

I'm afraid I don't have the time to look into this as much as I'd like, 
and I'll have to leave town today for a while, but I'd just like to 
point out something about sea level rise predictions.  The largest value 
I've seen so far for the amount of sea level rise per year is 3.1 plus 
or minus 0.7 mm/year.  For example, as seen on this page: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise.

We're talking about a 1 meter rise in sea level here.  Assuming the 
largest possible value for sea level rise (3.1 + 0.7 mm/yr):

1m = 1000mm

1000mm * (1 yr / 3.8mm) = 263.16 years.

We're not talking about sitting around for 263 years with no sea level 
rise and then suddenly we get a 3 ft+ surge.  We're talking about the 
sea level slowly rising over 263 years.  That's equivalent to dealing 
with a 1m sea level rise that has been slowly happening since 1747.  
Simply abandoning buildings naturally and having the population move 
around as land slowly sunk into the ocean would be all that is required, 
at least in the U.S.  If the U.S. even exists in 2273.

Paul

Ted Moffett wrote:
> A review of Lomborg's film "Cool It" from Andy Revkin of the New York
> Times, with a response from Lomborg, is lower down.
>
> I first address recent comments on Vision2020 that connect to economic
> issues that relate to Lomborg's film, comments that did not mention
> fossil fuel depletion or climate change, and reference Nobel Prize
> winning economist Paul Krugman regarding Lomborg's arguments in a
> debate between Krugman and Lomborg.
> --------------------------
> The national debt should only be incurred "in the event of sudden
> emergency?"  As possibly, protecting the US coastline from a 1 meter
> or more rise in sea level from climate change?
>
> This severe economic impact may occur from climate change even if
> there is no major economic crisis from resource depletion, even if air
> and water remain clean, safe food is abundant, human rights are
> protected, terrorism and war stops, Wall Street finds ethical
> salvation, in short, even if every aspect of human life appears to be
> progressing well... Fossil fuel depletion, and of many resources, is
> eventually a major problem, of course, especially with expanding
> population, but...
>
> We are facing or are soon to face two "emergencies" that may impact
> the national debt: fossil fuel depletion and climate change.  And
> these are two problems that our government, both Democrats and
> Republicans, are not sustantially addressing, though I think it clear
> that the Democrats are trying to do more overall, even if their
> approach is flawed, to face these issues.
>
> I'm not going to mostly blame politicians or fossil fuel coporations
> for the inaction on these problems, though of course they are partly
> to blame:  voters may vote out of office politicians who promote
> policies that indicate economic sacrifices must be made in the costs
> of energy (cap and tax, NO!), and fossil fuel corporations are
> supplying products most consumers demand, regardless of political
> orientation.  How many operators of fossil fuel powered vehicles
> participated in Moscow's recent "Park It" 350.org action?
>
> "...quasi-sustainable economy" in Western Europe?  I'm not sure what
> "quasi" means in this context, but there is not one major developed or
> developing nation on Earth, in Europe, Asia etc. whose economy would
> not face drastic consequences if the global multinational economic
> system shifted away from non-renewable non-sustainable fossil fuels as
> a primary energy source, before a massive shift to atlernative energy
> sources was in place, which is not realistically possible for decades.
>
> Even nations who have shifted energy sources more to solar, wind
> etc.(and consume far fewer resources and energy per capita as do
> people in the US), as some nations in Europe, still depend on trade
> with nations who have not, to maintain their standard of living;
> therefore these nations are still dependent on multinational economic
> activity that is largely fossil fuel powered and resource extractive
> intensive, contributing to climate change.
>
> Fossil fuels, especially the world's huge coal reserves, can likely
> continue to greatly power the multinational economic system for
> decades, some would argue longer, with coal liquification or
> gasification, before depletion, especially of oil, will become
> critical.  The US has huge (think Saudi Arabia) oil shale deposits,
> though environmental impacts and costs are large for development.
> Natural gas exploitation may also allow for a longer period before
> critical depletion of fossil fuels has drastic economic impacts (now
> the damage to water supplies from "fracking" to extract natural gas is
> a major issue).  If development of methane hydrates becomes practical
> as an energy source, highly uncertain, another fossil fuel will be
> available (total carbon in methane hydrates is more than is contained
> in all traditional fossil fuels: oil, coal, natural gas).
>
> But anthropogenic climate warming should be addressed before fossil
> fuel depletion is even close to critical, or probable severe impacts
> of climate change from CO2 emissions (large scale CCS, carbon capture
> and sequestration, remains questionable, despite the US coal
> industry's claims in their "Clean Coal" propaganda campaign) are
> likely to be beyond human capacity to prevent ( MIT study on
> probabilities of global warming discussed here:
> http://globalchange.mit.edu/resources/gamble/ ), without risky
> untested geo-engineering.
>
> While estimating the economic costs of climate change is difficult,
> these costs could stress the multinational economic system rather
> drastically (an academic review of the "Stern Report on the Economics
> of Climate Change," an often cited and also criticized analysis, is
> here: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/weitzman/files/JELSternReport.pdf
> ).
>
> A new film from economist Bjorn Lomborg, "Cool It," is now or soon to
> be showing in theaters in the US.  Lomborg is well known for
> conceeding that global warming from human impacts is happening, but
> that the proposals put forward by many environmentalists to address
> the problem are ineffective and expensive, that economic resources
> would be better spent on adaptation to climate change and addressing
> other problems: poverty, hunger etc.  However, Lomborg does advocate a
> carbon tax!
>
> Regardless of the truth of Lomborg's specific arguments, it is highly
> improbable, given a realistic assessment of the political, economic
> and technological hurdles to largely shifting the multinational
> economic sytem away from massive CO2 emissions from fossil fuel
> dependence within a few decades, that climate change will be addressed
> soon enough to prevent serious impacts that will demand expensive
> adaptation and possibly extreme geo-engineering of the Earth's climate
> system.
>
> What would it cost the US economy to protect valuable coastline from a
> 1 meter rise in sea level?  Would the private sector pay for this
> protection (costs of course passed on to consumers), would the cost be
> totally immediately supported by the taxpayer via government action,
> or by more government debt?
>
> As Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman phrased it in a
> discussion regarding anthropogenic climate warming with Lomborg on CNN
> with interviewer Zakaria, Dec. 13, 2009 (transcript of interview here:
> http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0912/13/fzgps.01.html )  "You
> have to guard against the substantial possibility of really
> catastrophic change."
>
> Loomborg's approach appears to not face the degree of probability of
> catastrophic change from human impacts on climate, that climate
> science indicates, in his economic equations, though I think he raises
> important issues regarding the problems, even failures, with the
> approaches to solving the problem that many environmentalists
> advocate, the Kyoto Protocol, etc. and what may be unavoidable though
> very risky, geo-engineering of the Earth's climate.
>
> However, humanity is already unwittingly geo-engineering the climate,
> and any response to this development is only a more deliberate
> conscious effort at geo-engineering to prevent undesirable impacts.
> Planting a forest with the intent of sequestering carbon to lower
> atmospheric CO2 levels is geo-engineering climate.
>
> The choice now is not whether or not to geo-engineer Earth's climate,
> but how best to geo-engineer with the least risks.
> ---------------------------
> *********************
> Below is a review of "Cool It" by the New York Times Andy Revkin,
> which Lomborg took seriously enough to respond to, as can be read
> below:
>
> http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/cool-climate-film-takes-on-truth/
>
> November 12, 2010, 9:52 am
> ‘Cool’ Climate Film Takes On ‘Truth’
> By ANDREW C. REVKIN
> 1:29 p.m. | Updated below
>
> An earnest non-scientist probing the relationship of people, climate
> and energy travels the globe describing his menu for avoiding
> dangerous global warming.
>
> Cameras follow every move. The articulate, energetic man, aided by a
> skilled filmmaker using evocative imagery, distills a momentous but
> complicated issue to digestible sound bites, jabs at his ideological
> and intellectual antagonists and delivers an illustrated lecture to a
> rapt audience.
>
> This description could easily fit former Vice President Al Gore and
> the film crew that shot “ An Inconvenient Truth.” But now it also fits
> Bjorn Lomborg, the self-described “skeptical environmentalist” who is
> the focus of (and a co-writer of) “Cool It,” a new documentary that is
> clearly trying to be a counterpunch to the Gore film.
>
> The prime theme of “Cool It,” taken from  Lomborg’s book of the same
> name, is that global warming is a serious problem but that raising the
> cost of polluting forms of energy is a highly inefficient solution.
>
> There are many experts in energy technology who have made this point
> for a very long time, perhaps most notably  Martin Hoffert at New York
> University in a string of influential papers and  Richard Smalley, the
> Nobel laureate in chemistry who devoted the final years of his life,
> even as he fought cancer, to describing how advancing energy
> technologies was the prime imperative of this generation. With the
> paralysis of the climate treaty process and American legislation
> capping greenhouse gases, a direct focus on  energy innovation as a
> climate, economic and security strategy is gaining some traction in
> policy circles.
>
> But these days, celebrity and edge appear to be required ingredients
> if you want to make a feature-style documentary.  Ondi Timoner, a
> much-lauded documenatarian who directed the film, told The Wall Street
> Journal she had  no intention of making her film on Lomborg an assault
> on Gore:
>
> I’m a Democrat, I was a page in the U.S. Senate. I’m not against Gore…
> The anti-‘Inconvenient Truth’ would say global warming is not
> happening. The reason I wanted to make the film is the pragmatic
> solutions that he puts forward… Until alternative energies become less
> expensive, fossil fuels are never going to go away…. That’s my
> favorite point and I hope that’s what people take away from the film.
>
> I hope she’s right, although my guess is a lot of viewers will focus
> on the conflict — and the jabs at the environmental left — more than
> the substance, where it exists. (I know. It’s a movie. How dare I ask
> for substance…)
>
> Lomborg’s main prescription, derived in part from his periodic
> consultations with panels of prominent economists, is to invest
> heavily in research on non-polluting energy technology and
> countermeasures to greenhouse heating, collectively known as
> geo-engineering. (He reprises his geo-engineering push in a
> forthcoming issue of Time Magazine.)
>
> In his book, Lomborg proposes that a modest carbon tax could pay for
> all of this work at a fraction the cost of a cap on emissions of
> greenhouse gases, the approach pursued by Europe under the Kyoto
> Protocol (and rejected in the United States).
>
> Does the film succeed? “Cool It” is eminently watchable — which is no
> surprise given Timoner’s involvement. Lomborg, as always, is charming
> and persuasive, frequently shown riding his bicycle through
> Copenhagen’s busy streets — in what has to be seen as a dig at Gore,
> who in his film is often seen racing through airports.
>
> But it suffers from the same simplification syndrome that weakened “An
> Inconvenient Truth.”
>
> In that film, for example, Gore breezily concluded by saying, “We
> already know everything we need to know to effectively address this
> problem,” a phrase  he modified in subsequent statements, saying
> existing technology was sufficient to start on the path to limit
> warming.
>
> In “Cool It,” Lomborg breezily ticks down a laundry list of high-tech
> ways to engineer the atmosphere, for example, but punts on the tougher
> questions related to such planet-scale enterprises — such as the
> inevitable diplomatic dispute over who sets the planetary thermostat
> and how blocking the sun does nothing to stem the buildup of carbon
> dioxide, much of which will stay in the atmosphere for many centuries.
>
> He proposes spending tens of billions of dollars (a bargain, he
> insists, compared to the hundreds of billions that would be spent on a
> cap-and-trade style approach), but he doesn’t say how he’d convince
> the United States or China to adopt the necessary carbon tax.
>
> And he doesn’t deal with the full pipeline for innovation that is
> required to take a promising technology from idea to breakthrough. A
> greatly intensified research effort is a vital, but insufficient,
> facet of any plan to foster progress without disrupting the climate.
>
> Its chiding tone in places is unlikely to build the sense of consensus
> and excitement around an energy quest that Lomborg seems to desire.
>
> The film makes fun of British students exploring ways to save energy
> instead of pointing to such students — and education on the globe’s
> energy challenge — as a critical component of a strategy to foster
> progress without overheating the planet.
>
> I would have loved to see Timoner explore the world’s energy challenge
> and opportunities without building her film around the tug of war
> between liberals and libertarians. I think there’s a way, but that’s
> easy for me to say.
>
> The film is provocative and well worth seeing, and I’m sure it’ll have
> a long life on Netflix. But my guess is that it will end up being
> another slosh to the shallow pan of public attitudes on climate.
>
> A more substantive discussion of the policy issues can be found in  a
> recent onstage conversation between Lomborg and Carl Pope, the head of
> the Sierra Club, following a screening of the film at the Commonwealth
> Club in San Francisco.
>
> I know. I’m an energy and climate wonk. The most compelling, even
> exciting, argument I’ve seen for the United States to engage in a
> sustained energy quest was that of Richard Smalley. The following
> video of Smalley making his presentation is funky and grainy, but, to
> my eye, more compelling than anything brought to movie screens so far.
>
> I’ll be posting a short interview I did with Lomborg about the film
> over the weekend, along with an open call for questions for him.
>
> 1:29 p.m. | Updated
> Lomborg sent this initial reaction to the post:
>
> The film doesn’t zero in on mechanisms to raise money for the
> solutions advocated, but focuses on the fact that we’re already
> willing to stomach a cost of around $200 billion to achieve very
> little (EU 20/20/20), so looks at ways to better allocate that.
>
> Ideally for me the film would have been an hour longer and contained
> many more of the points I make in the book! :-)
>
> Instead, this is a film that focuses strongly (and, I hope,
> powerfully) on the smart solutions, and I’ve shot extra videos for the
> movie’s website, DVD, YouTube, etc., that address points that didn’t
> fit in. So there’s a clip put out already that elaborates on my view
> of how the money can be raised, and there’s more such videos in the
> works on a range of other points.
>
> I’ll be tracking down links to the ancillary content and will add them
> as I find them (or as you find them!).
> ----------------------------
> Another review of "Cool It" from "Seattle Weekly:"
>
> http://www.seattleweekly.com/movies/cool-it-1101446/
>
> Cool It
>
> The science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the
> sort of hard-sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjorn
> Lomborg. Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the movie's
> eponymous source book, the Danish adjunct professor of statistics
> became, over the past decade, a thorn in the side of the
> environmentalist consensus on climate meltdown. Given a soapbox (and
> an inexhaustible supply of black tees), the gadfly gets to air his
> cost-benefit objections to widely accepted proposals and entertains
> what-if alternatives that sound dubious for the long-term. Thanks to
> knee-jerk condemnation by scientists back home, he's cast as the
> rationalist victim of groupthink, and has a counterproductive advocate
> in Timoner. How seriously can you take any portrait that follows a
> segment of criticism with its subject doting on his momma? Versed in
> the visual rhetoric of pseudo-journalism, the Sundance-approved
> director of DiG and We Live in Public displays a weakness for
> heavy-handed pivots, unexamined arguments, and wall-to-wall filler
> music. Timoner does present a colorful cast of supportive scientists
> and scores a funny dig at green indoctrination with a classroom of
> schoolkids fretting over Dad's toaster usage. But by the time we're
> being hustled through the finer points of algae energy and the renewed
> viability of dikes, Lomborg sounds like an infomercial huckster, down
> to the vow to have money for “all the remaining problems of the world”
> thanks to his low, low price for managing global warming.
>
> Nicolas Rapold
> ------------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>
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