Bjørn Lomborg: how global warming will save lives - UnHerd

Bjørn Lomborg: how global warming will save lives - The Post

Bjørn Lomborg: how global warming will save lives

The Danish author told UnHerd why we should avoid climate catastrophism

A spell of extremely hot weather has hit Europe this month, bringing with it a raft of apocalyptic headlines. Named Charon, after the boatman in Greek mythology who navigated the river Styx into Hades, the heatwave has immediately been linked to climate change and, by extension, humanity’s faltering attempts to combat it.

Bjørn Lomborg is the former director of the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen, as well as an author widely known for his bestselling book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which challenged the pessimism of climate change orthodoxy.

He spoke to UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers this week to argue that, in the short to medium term at least, rising temperatures actually provide humanity with positive opportunities, and can save rather than eradicate lives.

Based on two studies from medical journal The Lancet — one which compares annual heat deaths to annual cold deaths, and another which measures the impact of temperature changes on mortality over time — Lomborg suggested that rising temperatures are saving on average well over 150,000 lives a year (Figure 1).

“While you see heat deaths going up, as you would expect, you also see cold deaths going down,” the writer said. “Over the last two decades, temperature has saved more lives than it’s cost. It has caused about 116,000 more heat deaths, but it’s avoided about 283,000 cold deaths each year.” As a result, “we’re now saving about 166,000 lives because of higher temperatures.”

Scientific studies frequently point out that cold temperatures are more deadly than high ones — by a factor of ten, according to the Lancet (Figure 2) — but Lomborg argues that this fact is still too often overlooked.

“Every country in the world has more deaths in the winter than in summer,” he claimed. “It’s mostly because as temperatures get colder, people’s […] blood vessels constrict to keep [their] core body temperature warm enough — that increases your blood pressure. So we know that, everywhere, blood pressure increases as you get colder. And that means you have more risk of strokes and blood clots and so on.”

Because the coverage of heat waves has become so alarmist, according to Lomborg, simple measures to mitigate these problems are avoided. If Charon’s implications for the future are as catastrophic as we are led to believe, the remedy must be highly sophisticated — nothing short of a technological miracle. The Danish writer makes the case for simple urban planning measures, but concedes that they may fail to placate the doom-mongers.

“There are very smart, simple ways to keep very large areas — urban areas — cooler, and we should definitely be embracing those. That’s about having more water features, more greenery, more light surfaces,” Lomborg said. “So paint the tarmac or the rooftops white or in a light colour that can dramatically reduce a heatwave temperature up to about 10°C: much more than any climate policy could do. And of course, much cheaper, much faster and also prettier.”

This isn’t to say that rising temperatures are totally without consequence. If this trend continues, heat deaths might overcompensate for the falling cold deaths, yet this won’t be the case until well into the second half of the century. By then, Lomborg believes, the world population will be richer and more knowledgeable, and therefore better equipped to deal with higher temperatures.

“The likely outcome is that we’ll get the benefits while we’re relatively poor,” he suggested, “and even if we do nothing else to fix climate change, which I’m not arguing, we will be in a much better position to handle it.”

The media’s reaction to the European heat wave betrays a lack of perspective and pragmatism, Lomborg argued, which is analogous to “a religious experience”. He went on:

He’s not a climate change skeptic, he’s a moderate and realist.

Refreshing.

It is refreshing to read, but to be fair, he’s named his own book the Skeptical Environmentalist. The environment takes more than just climate change into account, as does his thesis.

He may be right about deaths, but I would need to understand more. We have also had very cold winters despite 1.2C of warming. Are these going to reduce?

What about sea level rise, extinctions…?

That’s the problem with Lomborg, I’d say. If you are looking for the most cost-effective solution to well-defined short-term problems I am sure his advice is excellent. But the big risk with the climate is with uncertain, very-high-risk longer-term problems. And by focusing on the simpler short-term stuff he is implcitly downplaying the bigger long-term risks.

After all, the big worry is not that we have a single, major heatwave, but that it is a possible symptom of much bigger problems to come.

What about sea level rises? It’s been rising for centuries, due to the earth warming for centuries, and the rate isn’t increasing.

Meanwhile the likes of Obama and Pelosi happily buy expensive properties adjacent to the sea (and there appears to be no monetary devaluation of such property in regard to their location). And they’re still building hotels in the Maldives etc, despite their melodramatic protestations about disappearing into the ocean.

Extinctions are another matter, though the human causes for these are often not to do with climate change.

I suppose we just move New York somewhere else

Okay, he might be right with cold weather causing more deaths than warm. But seriously using one metric is just dumbfoolery at its peak. What about rising sea levels, food shortages, ocean acidification, wildfires etc etc. They’re nothing to worry about, right? Duh