[Vision2020] 8 States Running Out of Water
Ted Moffett
starbliss at gmail.com
Tue Sep 8 17:50:24 PDT 2015
Speaking of climate change "deniers," Bjørn Lomborg, who has been given a
significant podium for years in various media to promote his approach to
AGW (anthropogenic global warming), which, while not totally denying global
warming is occurring, minimizes the extent of the problem, asserting the
money that might spent on addressing global warming would be better spent
on other human problems,
*was sliced and diced August 31, 2015 on Realclimate.org, by one of the
most brilliant and knowledgeable climate scientists on the planet, Stefan
Rahmstorf, Professor of the Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University:
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/ <http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/>*
*I encourage anyone who is a "climate change denier," to carefully and with
an open mind study this Rahmstorf article pasted in below. However, I
dislike stereotyping views on AGW into opposing camps, such as "warmers"
and "deniers." There are wide range of differing viewpoints on AGW, thus
such oversimplifying stereotypes do a disservice to rational objective
discussion. as this academic work from Yale implies:*
*March 16 2015* Global Warming’s Six Americas’ Perceptions of the Health
Risks
<http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication/article/global-warmings-six-americas-perceptions-of-the-health-risks/>
*http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication/articles/archives/C72
<http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication/articles/archives/C72>*
*Rahmstorf is an expert on sea level rise that may be induced by global
warming, so Lomborg made a strategic mistake by wading into those
scientific waters, a mistake Rahmstorf was only too happy to pounce upon.*
*Especially bizarre was the news in Rahmstorf's article that the Australian
government offered a university $4 million to make Lomborg a professor, a
development which contradicts the often heard claim that academia promotes
global warming science to attract grants and publishing privileges to
promote questionable science indicating global warming is a serious
problem. In this case, the financial reward was aimed at promoting within
academia the opposite point of view, though apparently, according to the
Rahmstorf article, Lomborg's academic credentials simply did not pass
muster, thus he was not given the professor position, though the Australian
government "vowed to find another university."*
*As Rahmstorf points out, and I paraphrase, a spokesperson like Lomborg who
gives the appearance of academic credibility on climate science, while
decidedly lacking it, easily misleads a public that is not going to dive
deeply into the scientific literature to cross check Lomborg's assertions
on global warming. The fact Lomborg receives as much media attention as
he does contradicts the often heard claim that skeptical views on AGW are
not given widespread coverage.*
*I've pasted in the entire article, in part because the Realclimate.org
website was having problems, though I eventually found the article in
question. The article is followed by extensive discussion on the
Realclimate.org website, which I found quite
worthwhile:http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/08/bjorn-lomborg-just-a-scientist-with-a-different-opinion/
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/08/bjorn-lomborg-just-a-scientist-with-a-different-opinion/>*
Bjorn Lomborg, just a scientist with a different opinion?
Stefan, 31 August 2015
Bjørn Lomborg is a well-known media personality who argues that there are
more important priorities than reducing emissions to limit global warming.
In a recent controversy centering on him, the Australian government (known
for its contradictory position on climate change
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/jun/16/what-does-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbott-really-think-about-climate-change>)
offered the University of Western Australia (UWA) $4 million to make
Lomborg professor – which UWA first accepted, but then after massive
protest from its staff and students refused
<http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-08/bjorn-lomborg-uwa-consensus-centre-contract-cancelled/6456708>.
The Australian government was quick to label it a “freedom of speech” issue
that Lomborg should get a university position, and vowed to find another
university
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2015/may/15/how-conservatives-lost-the-plot-over-the-rejection-of-bjorn-lomborg>
that would host him. However, free speech doesn’t guarantee everyone a
university position; there are also academic qualifications required.
*Lomborg’s publication record *
Let us thus start by looking at Lomborg’s track record in the scientific
literature. This is where original research results, i.e. new findings, are
published. One can look this up in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science
<http://wokinfo.com/>, the main data base of the scientific literature.
According to this Lomborg only has published 20 papers, of which 15 have
never been cited by anyone (Fig. 1). The number of citations shows whether
any other researchers in the world have found the results interesting
enough to discuss them in their own papers (whether critically or
otherwise). Only one of Lomborg’s papers has a reasonable number of
citations: 42. This is on a problem of game theory, apparently resulting
from his PhD thesis. On closer inspection, the other articles appear to be
merely opinion pieces that made it into the Thomson Reuters data base by
appearing in periodicals that are indexed there, including Forbes, Foreign
Affairs or New Scientist.
[image: Lomborg1] <http://www.realclimate.org/images//Lomborg1.jpg>[image:
Lomborg2] <http://www.realclimate.org/images//Lomborg2.jpg>
*Figure 1 Lomborg’s citation record in Web of Science, as viewed on 22 Aug
2015. The ten most-cited papers (out of 20) are listed. Click to enlarge.*
That means that apart from one paper in 1996, Lomborg has never published
anything in any field of science that was interesting or useful to other
scientists, or even just worth the bother of contradicting in the
scientific literature. PhD students at many universities are expected to
publish two or three original research papers from their PhD, and without
that, they are generally uncompetitive for a postdoc position.
For comparison I also show a snapshot of the publication record of an
economist who really studies the economics of climate change: Gary Yohe
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Yohe> (Fig. 2) – to give readers
unfamiliar with bibliometric data an idea of what they look like for a
regular scientist at professorial level. One number illustrates the point:
Lomborg’s papers were cited once last year, Yohe’s 608 times.
[image: Yohe1] <http://www.realclimate.org/images//Yohe1.jpg>[image: Yohe2]
<http://www.realclimate.org/images//Yohe2.jpg>
*Figure 2 Gary Yohe’s citation record in Web of Science, as viewed on 27
Aug 2015. The ten most-cited papers (out of 93) are listed. Click to
enlarge.*
*Lomborg’s public comments on sea-level rise*
I study sea-level rise <http://www.pik-potsdam.de/sealevel/>, and I first
noticed Lomborg’s sea-level comments in October 2008, when he
published an opinion
piece in the Guardian
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/14/climatechange-scienceofclimatechange>
(via Project Syndicate) in which he wrote:
Since 1992, we have had satellites measuring the rise in global sea levels,
and they have shown a stable increase of 3.2mm per year (1/8 of an inch) –
spot on compared to the IPCC projection. Moreover, over the last two years,
sea levels have not increased at all – actually, they show a slight drop.
Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?
The first sentence is a debating trick frequently used by those wanting to
downplay climate change: Lomborg compares the observed *past* rise with
average projections for the *future*. However, in the projections sea level
rise accelerates over time in response to global warming, so if the rate of
rise is already now as high as models expect only in several decades, this
is not “spot on”. When comparing like with like, i.e. the same time
interval, it has been shown both in the journal Science
<http://www.pik-potsdam.de/%7Estefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_etal_science_2007.pdf>
and in the 4th IPCC report
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/the-ipcc-sea-level-numbers/>(published
2007) that the observed rate of rise greatly exceeded the projections
available at the time of Lomborg’s writing. (In the 5th IPCC report the
projections are about 60% higher
<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/10/sea-level-in-the-5th-ipcc-report/>
than in the 4th and now do match past observations.)
Lomborg’s second sentence is also a classic debating trick of climate
skeptics: confuse the public by cherry picking some short interlude which
goes against the long-term trend (Fig. 3). This is always possible with
noisy geophysical data.
[image: Bjorn_Lomborg_Sea_Level_Rise]
<http://www.realclimate.org/images//Bjorn_Lomborg_Sea_Level_Rise.png>
* Figure 3 The data behind Lomborg’s claim of falling sea level. Image
courtesy of Greg Laden’s blog
<http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/03/12/lomborg-tells-bangladesh-not-to-worry-about-sea-level-rise/>.*
Ironically, the title of Lomborg’s article was “Let the data speak for
itself”, but he did not show the data. (I did later in a response
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/cif-green/2009/mar/09/climate-change-copenhagen>-
for those wanting to read more on my exchange with Lomborg, see the
Appendix below.)
*Misrepresentation of IPCC reports*
Lomborg has quite a history of misrepresenting what is written in IPCC
reports. I noted this already in the Guardian exchange about the 4th IPCC
report. Lomborg has likewise seriously misrepresented what IPCC says about
sea level in its latest (5th) report. In a newspaper column for Project
Syndicate
<http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/realism-in-the-latest-ipcc-climate-report-by-bj-rn-lomborg>,
which got published in newspapers in many countries, he wrote:
For sea-level rise, the IPCC now includes modeling of glacier responses of
3-20 centimeters, leading to a higher total estimate of 40-62 cm by
century’s end – much lower than the exaggerated and scary figure of 1-2
meters of sea-level rise that many environmental activists, and even some
media outlets, bandy about.
Compare this to what the IPCC actually writes about sea level in its Summary
for Policy Makers
<http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WGIAR5_SPM_brochure_en.pdf>
:
For RCP8.5, the rise by the year 2100 is 0.52 to 0.98 m.
(RCP8.5 is a scenario with unmitigated rise in greenhouse gas emissions.)
For the lowest emissions scenario RCP2.6 (which involves drastic emissions
reductions starting in a few years and leading to zero global emissions by
2070) the best-estimate sea-level rise by the year 2100 given by IPCC is 44
cm. The emissions reductions needed to keep sea-level rise so moderate is
the kind of scenario that Lomborg has devoted his career to prevent.
Telling his readers that sea-level rise might just be 40 cm so they should
not worry, without telling them that this low number would require massive
mitigation efforts, is rather misleading.
The risk of a rise of 1-2 meters is dismissed by Lomborg as “exaggerated”
and “bandied about” by “environmental activists and even some media
outlets”. But surely Lomborg knows that a large part of the sea-level
expert community considers this a serious risk, as documented in a number
of peer-reviewed scientific publications? The thoroughly peer-reviewed US
National Climate Assessment <http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/>, published
some months before Lomborg’s newspaper article, summarizes the state of
science on future sea level in the following graph (Fig. 4).
[image: US national assessment]
<http://www.realclimate.org/images//US-national-assessment.jpg>
*Figure 4 Sea level rise according to the US National Climate Assessment
(2014) <http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/>. The high end scenario of 6.6
feet equals 2 meters of rise between the years 2000 and 2100. *
And an expert survey
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379113004381> in
which 90 sea-level experts (in contrast to Lomborg, all with a good
track-record of research in this area) took part has come up with this
distribution for the upper reaches of sea-level rise by 2100 (Fig. 5).
.
[image: survey_histogram1]
<http://www.realclimate.org/images//survey_histogram1.png>
*Figure 5 Distribution of the experts’ answers to the upper limit of the
‘likely’ range for the RCP8.5 scenario by the year 2100. Many experts
consider a global sea-level rise between 1 and 2 meters quite possible in
case of unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions. *
*Cynical misinformation offered to developing nations*
Lomborg’s message to the newspaper readers has thus nothing to do with a
fair portrayal of how much sea-level rise the scientific community expects.
Rather it is a distortion and blatant attempt at downplaying future
sea-level rise. Looking at Lomborg’s many other Project Syndicate columns
<http://www.project-syndicate.org/search?query=Lomborg&language=english&sortBy=relevance&sortOrder=desc>
shows that this is not a singular case but a regular pattern in his
columns. This is all the more irresponsible given that Project Syndicate
opinion pieces are widely reprinted by newspapers in developing nations,
where reporting on the actual state of science is often poor and where
people are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Earlier this year Lomborg travelled to Bangladesh to tell people there
<http://bdnews24.com/environment/2015/03/11/danish-economist-warns-bangladesh-about-climate-politics>
that “focusing on global warming instead of child nutrition is quite
frankly almost immoral” (his standard false dichotomy
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma>). He further claimed:
The Dutch has shown us 200 years ago, you can handle sea level rise fairly,
easily and cheaply, you can do the same thing here and you will do the same
thing here.
It only takes a look at Google Earth to see how preposterous
<http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/03/12/lomborg-tells-bangladesh-not-to-worry-about-sea-level-rise/>
the comparison of Holland and Bangladesh is (Fig. 6). The latter coastline
is vastly more difficult to defend against rising seas, and unlike Holland
it is in the path of tropical cyclones.
[image: Holland] <http://www.realclimate.org/images//Holland.jpg>
[image: Bangladesh] <http://www.realclimate.org/images//Bangladesh.jpg>
*Figure 6 Coastlines of Holland (top) and Bangladesh at similar scale.
Holland expects to spend 1.2 to 1.6 billion Euro
<http://www.deltacommissie.com/doc/advies_samenvatting_en_aanbevelingen.pdf>
(1.4 to 1.8 billion US$) per year until 2050 to upgrade its already
well-established coastal defences – but it has a straight, easy-to-defend
coastline with only a small river delta region. Bangladesh in contrast is
largely a river flood plain with major problems draining the monsoonal
waters to the sea (closing the coast with a huge dike is not an option)
combined with storm surges from tropical cyclones. [See more in Appendix
2.] *
Lomborg’s cynical attitude towards the victims of sea-level rise could
hardly be better illustrated by another Project Syndicate op-ed
<https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/who-s-afraid-of-climate-change>
he wrote. There he dismisses even a catastrophic 20-foot sea-level rise (6
meters – a plausible outcome of unmitigated global warming in a few
centuries <http://www.pnas.org/content/110/34/13745.short>) which would
inundate about 16,000 square miles of coastline where more than 400 million
people currently live:
That’s a lot of people, to be sure, but hardly all of mankind. In fact, it
amounts to less than 6% of the world’s population – which is to say that
94% of the population would not be inundated.
What a cavalier way to dismiss the plight of 400 million people, coming
from a rich Dane who in 2012 received a salary of US$ 775.000 in the US
<http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/06/25/3453053/koch-bjorn-lomborg-lousy-t-shirt/>
via conservative foundations!
*Conclusion*
To answer the question posed in the title: No, I do not think Lomborg is a
scientist who just happens to have a different opinion from the majority.
First of all, there is very little indication that he is actually working
as a scientist, given his near-zero scientific track record since his PhD
work according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science. Second, the arguments he
presents to the wider public on sea-level rise can hardly be seen as made
in good faith – rather, they appear to me carefully crafted (and admittedly
rather eloquent) distortions, aimed to deceive his lay audience about the
seriousness of the threat. In short, I would consider much of Lomborg’s
writing propaganda.
Ever since his “Skeptical Environmentalist” book Lomborg has a simple,
single message: don’t worry about reducing fossil emissions. Whether he
denies or plays down the seriousness of global warming, sings the praises
of adaptation, advocates to prioritize other problems or pushes
geoengineering, the message is always the same: anything is better than
phasing out fossil fuels.
As seen by the lack of citations, this message has zero credibility or
impact in the scientific community. After all, scientists can judge the
merits of the arguments. Unfortunately, Lomborg’s propaganda message is not
only popular with fossil fuel interests, but continues to get ample space
in the media.
*-----------------------------------------------*
*Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett*
On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 4:54 PM, Scott Dredge <scooterd408 at hotmail.com>
wrote:
> Tom wrote:
> <Any time you climate-change deniers want to chime in, please do.>
>
> You can just Google 'climate change hoax' and click on a number of sites
> that provide irrefutable opinions:
>
> http://www.globalclimatescam.com/
>
>
> http://wakeup-world.com/2014/07/07/the-climate-change-hoax-the-lie-is-in-the-cause/
>
> <http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/news.php>
> http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/news.php
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> From: thansen at moscow.com
> Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2015 07:34:30 -0700
> To: kmmos1 at frontier.com
> CC: vision2020 at moscow.com
> Subject: Re: [Vision2020] 8 States Running Out of Water
>
>
> California is currently experiencing its worst drought since 1901 and it
> has been getting worse for the last 30 years.
>
>
> http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/16/the-california-drought-is-even-worse-than-you-think.html
>
> Any time you climate-change deniers want to chime in, please do.
>
> Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .
>
> "Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
> http://www.MoscowCares.com <http://www.moscowcares.com/>
>
> Tom Hansen
> Moscow, Idaho
>
> "There's room at the top they are telling you still.
> But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
> If you want to be like the folks on the hill."
>
> - John Lennon
>
> On Sep 8, 2015, at 6:55 AM, Kenneth Marcy <kmmos1 at frontier.com> wrote:
>
> *8 States Running Out of Water*
>
>
> *http://tinyurl.com/p5cqv59 <http://tinyurl.com/p5cqv59> *
> While drought conditions have improved in many regions of the United
> States, higher than average summer temperatures and patchy rainfall over
> the summer has contributed to one of the worst wildfire seasons on record.
> There are currently at least 60 large fires burning across the country. So
> far this year, more than 8 million acres have been destroyed by fire, a
> level of devastation seen in only six other years since 1960.
> It is the fourth consecutive year of drought for most of the western
> United States. The dry summer has raised particular concern about
> California, where 46% of land area is in a state of exceptional drought
> conditions — the worst level of drought — up slightly from the already
> especially bad drought level in the spring. This was the highest such share
> nationwide and the kind of water shortage that happens only once a century.
>
> <[more of the article at the link]>
>
>
> *5. Idaho > Pct. Severe drought * 18.8%
> *> Pct. extreme drought:* 29.3%
> *> Pct. exceptional drought:* 0.0%
> Nearly 50% of Idaho is currently in a state of either severe or extreme
> drought conditions. The worst of the drought stretches along Idaho’s
> western border and encompasses the entire northern tip of the state, from
> the top of Idaho County through Boundary County. Nearly 1.5 million state
> residents are affected by the drought. Droughts create dry conditions that
> increase the likelihood of wildfires. Currently, there are wildfires
> burning in west-central and northern Idaho that have lead to the evacuation
> of residents and the deployment of over 1,000 firefighters. The drought in
> Idaho is a part of a much larger national pattern that encompasses much of
> the western United States. Idaho has experienced severe drought conditions
> every year since 2012. The state’s Department of Agriculture reinitiated
> the Idaho Rangeland Drought Task Group last year to help drought-affected
> farmers take advantage of assistance provided by federal and state agencies.
>
>
>
>
>
> *http://tinyurl.com/p5cqv59 <http://tinyurl.com/p5cqv59> 8. South
> Carolina 7. Utah 6. Montana 5. Idaho 4. Nevada 3. California 2.
> Washington 1. Oregon **Ken*
>
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> mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com <Vision2020 at moscow.com>
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