No Oil for Pacifists: Cool It

UPDATE: Sept 15th

In today's WSJ, Kimberley Strassel reviews Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming:

In this world of Republicans and Democrats, meat-eaters and vegetarians, dog lovers and cat lovers, we have a new divide. On one side are global-warming believers. They've heard Al Gore's inconvenient truths and, along with the staff of Time magazine, feel "worried, very worried." Humanity faces no greater threat than a warming Earth, they say, and government must drastically curb carbon-dioxide emissions. On the other side are those who don't think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, they don't think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn't clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good.

Standing in the practical middle is Bjorn Lomborg, the free-thinking Dane who, in "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (2001), challenged the belief that the environment is going to pieces. Mr. Lomborg is now back with "Cool It," a book brimming with useful facts and common sense.

Mr. Lomborg--"liberal, vegetarian, a former member of Greenpeace," as he describes himself--is hard to fit into any pigeonhole. He believes that global warming is happening, that man has caused it, and that national governments need to act. Yet he also believes that Al Gore is bordering on hysteria, that some global-warming science has been distorted and hyped, and that the Kyoto Protocol and other carbon-reduction schemes are a terrible waste of money. The world needs to think more rationally, he says, about how to tackle this challenge. . .

Mr. Lomborg's cost-benefit approach won't sit well with leftists who see global-warming programs as a proxy for other goals (say, reducing "materialism"). And his calls for taxpayer-funded R&D investments won't sit well with small-government conservatives who may be skeptical of global warming in the first place. But his analysis is smart and refreshing, and it may bridge at least one divide in our too divided culture.

I started Cool It last night; except for its overuse of the passive voice, I recommend the book. Here's a long quote (at 5-8; emphasis in original) addressing the claim that warming is killing polar bears:

Over the past few years, this story has cropped up many times, based first on a World Wildlife Fund report in 2002 and later on the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment from 2004. Both relied extensively on research published in 2001 by the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union.

But what this group really told us was that of the twenty distinct subpopulations of polar bears, one or possibly two were declining in Baffin Bay; more than half were known to be stable; and two subpopulations were actually increasing around the Beaufort Sea. Moreover, it is reported that the global polar bear population has increased dramatically over the past decades, from about five thousand members in the 1960s to twenty-five thousand today, through stricter hunting regulation. Contrary to what you might expect--and what was not pointed out in any of the recent stories--the two populations in decline come from areas where it actually has been getting colder over the past fifty years, whereas the two increasing populations reside in areas where it is getting warmer. . .

The best-studied polar bear population lives on the western coast of Hudson Bay. That its population has declined 17 percent, from 1,200 in 1987 to under 950 in 2004, has gotton much press. Not mentioned, though, is that since 1981 the population has soared from just 500, thus eradicating any claim of a decline. Moreover, nowhere in the news coverage is it mentioned that 300 to 500 bears are shot each year, with 49 shot on average on the west coast of Hudson Bay. Even if we take the story of decline at face value, it means we have lost about 15 bears to global warming each year, whereas we have lost 49 each year to hunting. . .

[Thus] our worry makes us focus on the wrong solutions. We are being told that the plight of the polar bear shows "the need for stricter curbs on greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming." Even if we except the flawed ideas of using the 1987 population of polar bears around Hudson Bay as a baseline, so that we lose 15 bears each year, what can we do? If we try helping them by cutting greenhouse gases, we can at the very best avoid 15 bears dying. We will later see that realistically we can do not even close to that much good--probably we can save about 0.06 bears per year. But 49 bears from the same population are getting shot each year, and this we can easily do something about. Thus, if we really want a stable population of polar bears, dealing first with the 49 shot ones might be both a smarter and a more viable strategy. Yet it is not the one we end up hearing about. In the debate over the climate, we often don't hear the proposals that will do the most good but only the ones that involve cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This is fine if our goal is just to cut those gases, but presumably we want to improve human conditions and environmental quality. Sometimes greenhouse gas cuts might be the best way to get this, but often they won't be. We must ask ourselves if it makes more sense to help 49 bears swiftly and easily or 0.06 bears slowly and expensively.

MORE:

The new Global Warming Primer from The National Center for Policy Analysis includes this (at 26):