Yohe and Lomborg
September 2nd, 2008Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Last week I had a post up titled “Yohe vs. Lomborg” focusing on an exchange in the Guardian between Gary Yohe and Bjorn Lomborg. Now, are you sitting down? If not the following might knock you over.
Gary and Bjorn have decided to discuss their differences and write a joint op-ed for the Guardian that has just been published. Can you imagine? Two people who disagree on climate change policies actually working together in the public eye. Shocking behavior. But admirable and exemplary. Here is how they start:
After a very public debate on the Guardian website over the past few weeks, we have learned some lessons. Here are a few that come to mind. First, even carefully-crafted prose can be misunderstood. Throwaway lines, even those inserted parenthetically, can carry as much weight as key sentences. Second, attributing motive is dangerous, distracting, and frequently wrong; it should be avoided, not only because it has consequences for us as individuals, but also because it easily distracts attention from the value of our analytical work.
To the extent that we have both been guilty of imprecision and attribution of motive in the heat of this debate, we are happy to report that cooler heads have prevailed. We recognise that despite our differences in view, we respect each other’s commitment to robust public debate informed by different perspectives. To that end we both have agreed to forswear recent comments, and to wipe the slate clean. With this essay we’d like to show how people who disagree on policy options can still agree to collaborate productively, even under the hot glare of the very public, and very political, debate over climate change.
Good for both Gary and Bjorn, and also for the rest of us. While some folks clearly want to see a brawl based on tribal loyalties, the view we hold here is that policy discussions are so much more useful as discussions. Please read the full text of their joint piece, and feel free to come back here and discuss.
[UPDATE: Richard Tol in the comments has this observation:
. . . climate change is not a policy issue. It’s entertainment for the degreed masses. Bjorn and Gary shook hands in public, and lost their entertainment value. They’ll be replaced by new champions for the cause in no time.]
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September 2nd, 2008 at 6:41 am
It seems that only one or two of the commentators at the Guardian blog have actually read and understood the article. For the others, it’s mud-slinging as usual.
Which confirms my hypothesis that climate change is not a policy issue. It’s entertainment for the degreed masses.
Bjorn and Gary shook hands in public, and lost their entertainment value. They’ll be replaced by new champions for the cause in no time.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:34 am
They wrote: “Moreover, we both see no place for mindless repetitions of the contrarian rhetoric that humans are not to blame every time climate policy is discussed; we are beyond that point.”
That was the statement that caused the mud-slinging that Richard talks about. It wasn’t necessary!
They also wrote: “We agree emphatically that there is no place for hyperbole or hysteria in discussions about climate policy”. They should have added “or childish name-calling”, then they might not have done it.
In fact most skeptics, far from mindless, raise many interesting and intelligently argued points which very often force scientists into making corrections. Hurricanes, gulf stream shift, past climate reconstructions, effect of pdo shift and poor instrument error adjustments are just some of the areas where the skeptics have been proven correct and the mainstream were wrong. Skeptics introduce a vital balance in any scientific endeavor. That used to be well understood. The actual main reason they remain skeptical on this issue though is long experience of many previous such disaster scenarios; all of which were wrong. Those previous scares were all due to overconfident scientists pretending to know things that they really didn’t, and they all used the same hyperbole and hysteria as the current propaganda campaign. If anyone wants to stop the skepticism then they need to stop behaving like snake-oil salesmen and stop the press release science.
Scientists cannot escape the fact that the theory is not backed up by the data. This is most probably because it is a very simplistic theory combined with a lot of speculation, such as the famed “positive feedback”. Worse, real data is often assumed to be wrong because it disagrees with the models. This reversal of the usual scientific practice breeds even more skepticism. While Hadley and others may postulate that eventually the current temperature plateau will pass, after which temperatures will then skyrocket - it really remains just an unprovable belief. So the question is not should we take the risk but exactly what is the risk? And how does that risk compare with other risks? That should have been the focus of the CC effort but since they used a 4 degree rise in temperature over 100 years, rather more dramatic than the IPCC and already falsified by real world data, it doesn’t instill much confidence in them.
I suspect the AGW edifice, being founded on sand, will collapse soon and neither scientists nor environmentalists will then be trusted for a very long time. The public are rather more skeptical now than before and so are some governments. The press will surely follow. To avoid that and get real progress on alternative energies people just need to just drop all mention of “climate change” and move on to “coming energy crisis”. There is really no disagreement there and the objectives are pretty much the same; pursuit of conservation and non-polluting energy sources.
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Just a point of clarification, re the statement:
“In either case, we agree that adaptation, CO2-cuts and R&D in some
combination are all necessary to tackle global warming.”
Am I correct to assume that Bjorn changed his mind and therefore will no longer call for the R&D only approach?
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Sylvia,
No he didn’t changed his mind. He always supported a carbon tax, albeit to an amount much lower than those proposed by the Stern report for example.
In his book “the skeptical environmentalist” he was ok with a tax of up to 7$/TCO2. Not sure where it stands now but it is less than 14$/TCO2. Stern was if I remember correctly between 80$ to 500$/TCo2E.
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:01 am
Lomborg once called for $7/tC (not CO2). Stern has $300/tC (Stern Review) and $25-30/tC (Science).
September 3rd, 2008 at 3:17 am
JamesG I think you have hit the nail on the head.
Never before have I seen ‘Science’ act in such a disturbing manner as it has over AGW. To stifle debate to the point of calling for people to be brought to account for holding differing opinions, to the point of criminal charges, concerns me more than the debate itself and leads me to conclude that ‘Science’ is no longer acting impartially in the search for the truth but is instead overtly political and thus sadly abused.
As a person who enjoys immensely reading about scientific pursuits and progress, who previously identified with environmental causes, I have become extremely skeptical of the motives of scientists and environmentalists. I think this period of time will be seen as a terrible mistake by those parties as they lose public respect and confidence.
Kind Regards
Michael
September 3rd, 2008 at 7:23 am
redbike
I wouldn’t question the motives of most environmentalists. They do a lot of great work identifying problems, some at great personal sacrifice. On this issue they just accepted the word of the scientists but it is probably a poisoned chalice because the nuclear lobby have now hijacked the issue and they’ll be difficult to shift. On a broader scale man is still poisoning the planet in many ways. The main coral killer is trawling, the cause of dead zones is agri runoff. Pesticides, effluent, chemicals and hormones are all chucked in the rivers and seas with gay abandon. Floods, droughts and erosion are made much worse by land clearances. Fish farms are poisoning the water table. Etc, etc. But when you blame absolutely everything on CO2, which is what is happening, it distorts and prevents any response to the real man-made problems. The polluters can now just blame CO2 and continue polluting. It’s all very much a backward step for real environmentalism.
September 3rd, 2008 at 7:41 am
The hubris on display here is truly frightening. All the graduate degrees and IQ points involved cannot paper over the simple reality that we just do not have sufficient information to make the kind of judgments that Yohe and Lomborg are discussing. The error bands are just too wide. So wide that they dwarf the analysis.
They have built an impressive scaffolding upon a foundation of shaky assumptions which are next to worthless. I am impressed with the learned analysis (once the assumptions are in place). But the analysis cannot have any more significance than the assumptions upon which it starts.
Wisdom starts with the recognition that what we don’t know is far greater than what we do. A little humility is in order. I see evidence here of a great deal of education, but an absence of wisdom.
This hubris is frightening and I’m not engaging in hyperbole. Seriously frightening.
September 3rd, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Thanks for the clarification Richard.
I was relying on my mem.
September 4th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
I wrote a follow-up post here.