Bjørn Lomborg is Wrong to Say Climate Change is a Problem to be Solved
In a commentary article in the Financial Post on Tuesday, Bjørn Lomborg argues that Net Zero is “on its way out”, as politicians across the world face up to the high cost and tiny climate returns of raising energy prices. With voters “weary of soaring energy bills and annoyed by increasingly hysteric and patronising climate rhetoric”, governments from the US to UK, Germany to Australia are waking up to the “simple truth”: “aggressive Net Zero mandates are delivering economic pain for unmeasurable and far-off climate gain”. Lomborg senses “a new pragmatism” entering the climate debate.
Lomborg takes the example of United Kingdom, whose Net Zero law enacted in 2019 committed it to zero emissions by 2050. “Hailed as bold leadership, its reality has been economic sabotage” as the UK’s industrial electricity prices surged at four times the increase in the US — leaving the UK with the highest power rates in the Western world.
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When you’ve spent the last 20 years declaring that human made climate change exists and is a problem to be solved, how do you suddenly say it isn’t and never was, without destroying your credibility and reputation.
Climbing down bit by bit and hoping everyone else follows seems to be the preferred way. And in the best case scenario, when everybody has finished climbing down everyone tries to ignore it ever happened, like a dirty shared deed everyone is deep down ashamed of.
Like COVID.
This aspect of Lomborg’s work has also frustrated me. I always assumed that he had to take that position to get published and reach a wider audience without being cancelled. Time will tell if his position changes as the climate scam continues to be dismantled.
Never took him seriously. There has never been AGW. Zero to worry about. But he is queer ergo an Oracle.
Those who cling to the climate fantasy never talk about one solution – that is serious control of the number of people who are responsible for this naughty carbon. Reduce the population by 20%, reduce carbon emissions by similar amount. Problem solved
CO2 isn’t a problem.
After you.
People are precious – not the problem
There’s a halfway house somewhere. Clearly, the Clean Air Act did a great job ending London Smogs. You don’t have to be beside a diesel engined bus for long to think that there has to be a better way.
Passive houses are pretty cool.& cheap to heat.
If Elon could get data centres running in space how cool is that?
Appropriate solutions for genuine issues are great. It’s when the zealots force solutions inappropriately that we run into problems. Heating the rectory with a gas boiler isn’t a problem. Flying planes, powering ships, driving in the countryside, operating a tractor, all fine for now.
Much better to find a solution to the world’s poor cooking over an open fire, than mandate the closing of lean burn gas power stations elsewhere.
With Climate Change Politics there is no “half way house”, mainly because climate change politics isn’t and never has been about the climate. It is about control of the world’s wealth, resources and YOU. The climate is simply the excuse for that. —–“One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate policies are environmental policies anymore. We redistribute the worlds wealth via climate policy” —–Edenhoffer (Lead Author at the UN IPCC).
n the context of many of those worthwhile improvements, there is a lot of misappropriation of the reasoning behind them. In particular, claiming that human activity significantly changes the global weather. It is reasonable to invest in projects that can improve the local environment as you allude to, but diverting resources to “Net Zero” scams is a waste and could actually be negative for many people.
Reducing London smogs was achieved by burning coal in power stations instead of fire grates in everyone’s houses.
London smogs were caused by meteorological conditions in the Thames basin, temperature inversion over very moisture laden air.
“You don’t have to be beside a diesel engined bus for long to think that there has to be a better way.”
Horses and carriages?
There are no solutions just trade-offs. Diesel engine buses provide benefits that outlay any costs – otherwise we wouldn’t have them.
Brilliant article. Thank you.
Saying that Climate Change is a “problem to be solved” is nowhere near to what the demented end of the world phoney planet saving loons say. —-A “problem” does not equate to “end of the world, mass extinctions and billions of climate refugees”. —–A leaky roof is a “problem”, a broken washing machine is a”problem”, but they are not going to bankrupt you, or make you leave the country. —–A good way to look at it comes from Climatologist Judith Curry who has said “Sure, all things being equal, CO2 may cause a little bit of warming, but all things in earths climate are NOT equal”——-What Lomborg has consistently said is that even if CO2 may cause some change to climate, that this is likely very slow, and not the end of the world and that it is climate policies that cost astronomical sums of money that are the greatest problem as they cause impoverishment, and the destruction of the Industrial base all for little to no effect on global climate. ——-If Lomborg were to say “There is no climate change” he would then be in a position where he would have to PROVE it. But in the physical sciences… Read more »
Climate change isn’t a problem: without it the remnants of the Human population would be huddled in caves, permanently, cold and hungry waiting for the last Ice Age to end.
And words are important. That climate change happens – irrefutable – that it is cause by Mankind is not proven.
Put simply, the climate is one of the most complex, nonlinear, chaotic systems known to man and therefore, by definition, cannot be predicted. To ignore chaos is fraud. To claim that any extreme weather event (or even bushfires)has been caused by our emissions of carbon dioxide is fraud. I defy anybody to refute the above. Climate is forever changing naturally.
And saying climate change can be seen in real time is like saying you can see paint drying or a seed growing.
Great article and I agree. Would be good to invite Lomborg to reply, though, and interesting to read what he might have to say.
“It was never about the climate”, in which case what IS it about? Never mind current daily, worldwide in-country road and rail vehicle-miles, sign on to Flight-radar24 and zoom out to encompass the Atlantic, or the whole of Europe or the USA and see the uncountable number of aircraft in the air at any one time. How many millions of litres of fuel per second does that represent?
How long have we got with current and as-yet undiscovered reserves, never mind the fossil fuels needed for all the other applications. Are the 15-minute cities a clumsy attempt to draw attentiin to the issue? Isn’t that what Bjorn should be investigating?
As with compact fluorescents, EVs electricity pylons (and windmills/solar to some extent, never mind CCU and hydrogent) are probably a dead end. Shouldn’t there be an argument about continuing to do what works and put the energy and money into what happens when fossil fuels become scarce?
The ‘peak oil’ argument, so common 15 years ago, is just not relevant. We keep discovering vast quantities of fossil fuel reserves/resources and we continue to find more efficient ways of getting them (think fracking in the US from 2011). And we keep improving the efficiency of how we use them. ‘How long have we got. . .’? A very long time.
One economic argument for moving away from hydrocarbon fuels is that eventually they will run out. Before that happens, scarcity and difficulty mining/recovering them will drive prices up. Of course, we will run out of gas and oil a hell of a lot sooner if we stop people prospecting for more than we currently know about. One thing that amuses me is when the alarmists look at the data on CO2 levels and try to project those into the future. At this rate by so and so date CO2 levels will reach 1,000 ppm. Well, perhaps, but in your world view that would mean continuing to find more gas and oil and continuing to pump it out at much the same (or greater) rate. If, as some suggest, we’re running out of oil and gas then that won’t happen, will it?.. And even if we do reach 1,000 ppm would that be so terrible? Add in the finding that CO2 levels trail behind climate change temperatures and the whole argument collapses. I think we’re a bit away from having cars individually powered by ‘Mr Fusion’ reactors (See Back to the Future part x – where x is a number between… Read more »
One day the Sun will explode… one day…
Don’t forget to stockpile the factor 1,000,000 sun cream.
Without looking for the book to check, I think Lomborg was one of those features in The Deniers. What this book found is that many people criticised global warming in their own sphere of knowledge but made the mistake of assuming all the others had it correct. The book shows that they didn’t. Lomborg comes from the world of economics where it has been fairly plain from the start that Net Zero would be an economic disaster, as we are seeing. There was also a high level of faith in the IPCC but as the noted Fritz Varenholz found, when he actually read their reports he found them full of errors and lies.
So he still believes the imaginary disease exists, he just wants a different cure.
He’s a Socialist idiot who believes in central economic planning and control, rather than competitive free market capitalist activity out of which invention and innovation spontaneously emerge and best options delivering most benefits are voluntarily adopted.
The very process that has reduced poverty, hunger, disease and made everyone wealthier – the very thing on which he says spending £billions instead of on Net Zero could be improved. Again with the planning and control he favours.
Changes in climate take place over many generations, so slowly and incrementally that no single generation is aware.
It took three to four thousand years for GB to become an island due to global warming and climate change. . Are we to believe the Brythonic Celts whose ancestors had migrated across the land bridge from continental Europe as the ice sheet retreated were aware this was happening? Perhaps Stone Henge was built to “stop” climate change.
Or, Bjorn thinks that if he declares CC is a scam then no one will listen to his reasoning. But if he says it is a problem we can overcome with financial prudence then he will curry a hearing and at least save us from financial shipwreck. Maybe he has taken the correct approach so that at least we shall still have a civilisation when the penny drops and the hysterics have run out of scares.
Great article
Wiki: Lomborg was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned an M.A. degree in political science at the Aarhus University in 1991, and a PhD degree in political science at the University of Copenhagen in 1994.
So, as I expected! The guy has insufficient understanding of basic Physics and Chemistry, and is wishing for a Scientific solution to extricate himself from the naive political problem that he has constructed himself.
And, to make the problem impossible to solve to his satisfaction, he will likely reject any explanation that requires basic knowledge of some branch of Physics or Chemistry to which he is oblivious, of which there are plenty.
And so the Green Madness continues.
Been thinking exactly this about Lomborg for years, though of course not with Doc Doshi’s insight and precision.