by Salvatore Cardoni, Take Part, June 2, 2011
Bjørn to stretch the truth? (Photo: Adrian Dennis/Getty)
On June 2, 2011, TakePart published an exclusive interview with Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish statistician and former climate change skeptic.
Because we questioned two of Lomborg's answers, we submitted them to the Climate Science Rapid Response Team (CSRRT) for analysis.
Founded in late 2010, the first of its kind organization is a match-making service that links members of the media with top scientists. The end goal is to improve communication about climate change.
What follows are the two TakePart questions, Lomborg’s answers that we believed to be questionable, and the truth according to CSRRT.
TakePart: You’ve argued that climate change isn’t the end of the world. Why not?
Bjørn Lomborg: Listen, if you look at the best models out there that indicate what’s going to happen, we’re looking at a sea level rise of somewhere between half and two feet. This will constitute a problem. We know that sea levels rose about a foot over the last 150 years. But it has a very small consequence. And if you look at all of the impacts that are likely to come from global warming, most of them are negative, the economists argue that the total impact by the end of the century will be on the order of 2-5% of global GDP. That means we will be less rich. That means we will have to spend more money on dealing with the problems that global warming will incur on us. That’s the bad. But remember, 2-5% is not 100%. It is a problem, but it is not the end of the world.
The Truth
Turns out, TakePart was not the first media outlet to question Lomborg's sea level assertion.
When we contacted CSRRT for their review of his answer, we were directed to their debunking of a similar claim Lomborg made in a November 22, 2010, Washington Post op-ed: "the fact that the best research we have—from the United Nations climate panel—says that global sea levels are not likely to rise more than about 20 inches by 2100."
Back then, Think Progress asked CSRRT to assess his statement.
Three scientists—the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology's Ken Caldiera, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Josh Willis, and Rutgers University's Alan Robock—independently confirmed that Lomborg had misrepresented the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report.
Read their full debunking here.
TakePart: You’ve argued that to do that sort of R&D, the world would need an annual investment of $100 billion. In practical terms, how would you pay for it?
Bjørn Lomborg: At the end of the day, that’s a question for politicians to answer. All economists would ask how much bad is an extra ton of CO2? The answer is about $7.00 per ton of CO2. So that’s 6 cents on a gallon of gasoline. If you did this across the world, then we would raise about $250 billion every year. So that would amply pay for the $100 billion in research and development. There’s some beauty in saying we should tax the bad. But let's not kid ourselves; this won’t stop the problem. It will reduce emissions about 10%, but it will be able to raise the funds that are necessary to actually discover the technology that will solve the problem.
The Truth
Gary Yohe, Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Weseleyan Univesity, responded in an email to TakePart’s questioning of Lomborg’s claim that an extra ton of CO2 would cost $7.00:
This question is about the social cost of carbon—estimates of the present value of economic damages that can be associated with emitting one ton of carbon dioxide (or carbon, depending on units) at some point in time.
IPCC (2007a, 2007b) reports that estimates of the “social cost of carbon” (discounted economic damages that can be attributed to incremental emissions of carbon typically denoted SCC) vary widely and change over time. The United States EPA (2010) reviewed this literature so that it could offer estimates that could be applied in analyses of a wide range of regulations that might have positive or negative implications with respect to carbon emissions. The range was represented by four values for 2007 (2007$): $5, $21, $35 and $65 per ton of carbon dioxide, but the distribution is not symmetric. Any specific estimate depends upon assumptions about time preference, risk aversion, inequality aversion and the specification of uncertain parameters like climate sensitivity (the increase in equilibrium global mean temperature associated with a doubling of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases relative to pre-industrial levels). Estimates as high as $95 per ton of carbon dioxide were noted in Chapter 20 of IPCC (2007b).
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