Saturday, October 13, 2007
Though they toss it in on a Saturday, at least the Boston Globe has given space to Bjorn Lomborg to address Al Gore's new trophy: An inconvenient Peace Prize
...Gore told the world in his Academy Award-winning movie to expect 20-foot sea-level rises over this century. He ignores the findings of his Nobel co-winners, who conclude that sea levels will rise between only a half-foot and two feet over this century, with their best expectation being about one foot. That's similar to what the world experienced over the past 150 years.
Likewise, Gore agonizes over the accelerated melting of ice in Greenland and what it means for the planet, but overlooks the IPCC's conclusion that, if sustained, the current rate of melting would add just 3 inches to the sea-level rise by the end of the century. Gore also takes no notice of research showing that Greenland's temperatures were higher in 1941 than they are today.
The politician-turned-moviemaker loses sleep over a predicted rise in heat-related deaths. There's another side of the story that's inconvenient to mention: rising temperatures will reduce the number of cold spells, which are a much bigger killer than heat. The best study shows that by 2050, heat will claim 400,000 more lives, but 1.8 million fewer will die because of cold. Indeed, according to the first complete survey of the economic effects of climate change for the world, global warming will actually save lives.
Gore has helped the world to worry. Unfortunately, our attention is diverted from where it matters. Climate change is not the only problem facing the globe...
The Nobel Peace Prize has long been an international embarrassment ... and I'm afraid the remaining Nobels are quite possibly not far behind.
I wouldn't dismiss the problem of global warming so readily. I was a skeptic, myself, but with the recent news of the Arctic ice cap melting so fast, I'm now a bit worried. See links:
http://tinyurl.com/5nqme
and
http://tinyurl.com/34uhoj
I don't think most people, most skeptics, are simply or unthinkingly "dismissing" concerns.
Philip Stott, nicely taken up here by Melanie Phillips, offers perhaps the most incisively acute commentary on the phenomena surrounding the warming phenonmenon I've ever come across:
"But, more importantly, the politics of this process illustrate perfectly J.F. Lyotard’s telling prediction in The Postmodern Condition that science will become increasingly legitimised by the ‘social bond’, that is, by what society wishes to be true. Do you think anyone would receive the Nobel Peace Prize for showing that ‘global warming’ is not a threat? In Europe especially, ‘global warming’ is the chosen trope of the political classes. It is a powerful Barthesian myth, and its aim is to exclude all other constructions of knowledge from debate. Al Gore’s ‘elevation’ is simply part of this process of exclusion, namely the trampling down of any dissent by an increasingly assertive, self-referential, grand narrative in the style of Marxism. ..."
I find Lyotard's prediction particularly acute, but the reference to "increasingly assertive, self-referential, grand narrative in the style of Marxism" is likewise telling.
Phillips has an adjacent post on the topic as well, The Other Consensus, one that is likewise pregnant with meaning, and I love the wry dig at the end.