Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm: How climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet
This book will anger many. Why does this man – self-branded as “the sceptical environmentalist” – seek to downplay the greatest crisis facing human civilization?
False Alarm is an inconvenient wedge in the discussion on climate change. “Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem,” he writes. Compare this to the cries of protesters shutting down transport systems in central London; and the prophecies of “ecocide” persuading children out of school (while raising others to world-wide fame).
For Lomborg, street-panic on climate is partly the product of news cycles punctured by disaster events and selective evidence; “The rhetoric on climate change has become more extreme and less moored in the actual science,” he says. He raises some surprising evidence. Polar bears – which remain media martyrs for global warming – are increasing in number. Images of mass deforestation obscure the fact that levels of vegetation have increased, partly due to global warming. Forest fires and hurricanes are causing more damage primarily because of conditions unrelated to climate change, such as the expansion of cities in vulnerable coastal regions (what Lomborg calls “the expanding Bullseye effect”).
Last year, David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, offered climate-conscious audiences an apocalyptic vision of a fast approaching two-degree-warmer world. He spoke of the 150 million at risk of death “from air pollution alone”, the “200 million climate refugees by 2050”, and “whole regions… rendered uninhabitable by direct heat, desertification, and flooding.”
The New York Times, where Wallace-Wells’ the article that inspired the book was published, immediately ran a scathing review of Lomborg’s new book. In it, Nobel-prize-winning Joseph Stiglitz writes that “this book proves the aphorism that a little knowledge is dangerous.”
Cutting through the heat surrounding False Alarm isn’t easy when so much seems to be at stake. But from Lomborg’s point of view, the outrage of the NYT proves his central point. We are panicking about climate change so much that we are no longer bound by scientific evidence. Lomborg has posted a thorough rebuttal of Stiglitz’s “stunningly false and deceptive” review on his LinkedIn, which indicates gross misunderstandings of the book’s claims by its reviewer.
But academics have also fed politicians and journalists misleading projections. Many take no account of human adaptation and cherry-pick worst-case scenarios. Rising sea levels, for example, have led to claims that Wall Street in New York will be flooded by 2100. No, it won’t – dikes will be constructed, just as has been done in The Netherlands for hundreds of years. Likewise, rising temperatures will lead to greater use of air-conditioning, and forest fires will lead to greater efforts to prevent them. Lomborg’s example of road traffic accidents is one which policy-makers in all areas should keep in mind: “If politicians asked scientists how to limit the number of deaths to an almost impossible target of zero, one good answer would be to set the national speed limit to three miles per hour.” It is not enough to “follow the science” – leadership comes through making difficult judgements and compromising between competing goals across time and space
Lomborg does not deny the destructive impact of climate change. He emphasises that it will “in total have a negative impact on our planet and well-being.” Yet, the peddling of governments to cut emissions represent cheaply sold fantasies which will do more harm than good. This is what Lomborg identifies as the “central tension of climate policy”; all measures to curb emissions, so far considered, hamper economic growth to such an extent that they won’t save a world worth living in.
Taking New Zealand’s commitment to “carbon neutrality” by 2050, for example, Lomborg shows that the commitment would cost the country $61bn every year – 16% of the country’s GDP and more than the government’s entire budget.
But no effort emerges more forlorn than the Paris Agreement, which “will cost a fortune to carry out and do almost no good.” Countries are not only missing their own targets for carbon reductions but would need to increase their ambitions by a factor of one hundred to maintain global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the Agreement’s stated goal. To do so would reduce global output by $100 trillion a year, more than the damage of even our worst predictions on climate change, and all for a paltry reduction in global temperatures.
In discussing the complexity of this tension, Lomborg’s book shines. Climate change comes 13th on the United Nations’ list of Global Development goals, behind ending poverty, increasing literacy and promoting gender equality. Extinction Rebellion (XR) argue that social justice goals are aligned with climate change, because global warming will harm the world’s poorest, especially women. There is truth to this, but the “intersectional” thesis is also a little too convenient. Climate solutions will require less good intention and more hard cost-benefits analysis with desperate trade-offs. It is a worthy palliative to the sort of virtue-signalling often associated with climate activism. Cutting carbon emissions will place a burden on the poor through increased energy costs; while hampering global growth will only prolong poverty for billions – a moral crime in itself. It’s a point which Trump – despite his rejection of scientific evidence – recognised to his political gain; and it’s a point some climate activists – particularly XR protestors chaining themselves to tube carriages – recognise less. Climate change will harm the poor, but so will efforts to mitigate it.
Lomborg’s framework can be challenged, of course. Climate change is complex, requires the cooperation of billions of people, and doesn’t fit well with our short-term thinking about cost and benefit. Can we assume that climate change will be manageable in the next eighty years? Not if it undermines our current networks of global cooperation, supply chains and social stability. Lomborg’s research is sage enough to anticipate some of the complexity of this problem – he quotes liberally from William Nordhaus, the most respected climate economist. But is it possible that as our climate alters, its impact will be exponential, destabilising even our efforts to control it? There are no guarantees, and recognition of the dangers of alarmism should not undermine sober efforts to mitigate the problem.
And in fairness, Lomborg recognises global cooperation as crucial, because the big solution will come from innovation. Solar and wind supplies only 4% of global energy currently. “We should be innovating tomorrow’s technologies rather than erecting today’s inefficient turbines and solar panels. We should explore fusion, fission, water splitting, and more,” he says. These are bold ideas, which will only come from more money and more brainpower – and how do we get that? Investment in the developing world, growth, and sustained international cooperation. These are the balls politicians must keep in the air alongside warding off the worst effects of climate change.
Fourteen years after Al Gore’s film, False Alarm presents some different “inconvenient truths”. Its publication during a pandemic, when questions about how to manage risk across time have been thrust into the foreground, makes its case even more thought-provoking. Do we shut down the economy to save lives, while risking wellbeing for many more in the future? Where is the line between safety and liberty? And which future will produce the best outcome for the most people – a low-growth “green” trajectory, or a high-growth carbon one? False Alarm shows this to be a tougher choice than we would assume from the headlines. Hopefully it will contribute to a more productive, if no less urgent, discussion.