HOW DO YOU POLITICIZE THE POLITICAL?:

Return of the Skeptical Environmentalist: In his new book Cool It, Bjørn Lomborg shows how ‘the science’ on global warming – covering everything from polar bear extinction to the disappearance of Greenland – has been distorted and politicised. (Tony Gilland, 12/21/07, Spiked Review of Books)

Essentially, Lomborg’s argument is that, on the basis of our current understanding of climate systems and the role played by CO2, we will eventually have to cut CO2 emissions significantly. Right now, however, is a bad time to be worrying about it because the harmful effects of climate change in the medium-term future are manageable, and can be managed far more cheaply than can the massive cuts in CO2 that would be required to avoid those effects.

So according to Lomborg, we could get all the world’s current energy from solar cells taking up space equivalent to 2.6 per cent of the area of the Sahara – the reason we don’t is because ‘it would be horrendously costly’. Based on the fact that solar energy has come down in price by about 50 per cent per decade over the past 30 years, Lomborg estimates: ‘Even at a much slower pace, it will probably become competitive before mid-century for many uses, and before the end of the century for most uses.’ He points out that this is only one such opportunity, and proposes that all nations should commit themselves to spending 0.05 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in R&D on non-carbon emitting energy technologies as a long-term approach to tackling global warming.

In Cool It’s penultimate chapter, ‘The Politics of Global Warming’, Lomborg discusses how the science of climate change is becoming politicised. He argues that when the chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, argues for dramatic CO2 cuts, the IPCC scientists ‘effectively become agenda-driven advocates’, who misuse ‘their standing as scientists to pursue a political agenda’ which will eventually undermine the credibility of the scientific discipline.

To back up this point, he cites the influential statement from the IPCC’s 2001 report that most warming in the past 50 years is due to humans. The wording of the text changed from ‘there has been a discernible human influence on global climate’ to this line finally included in the official summary: ‘Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.’ Yet when asked by New Scientist about the scientific background for this change, Tim Higham, spokesman for the UN Environment Program, responded: ‘There was no new science, but the scientists wanted to present a clear and strong message to policymakers.’