By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | April 22, 2014
In Bjørn Lomborg’s latest oped: Global Warming’s Upside-Down Narrative Lomborg points out the following:
- The IPCC says unmitigated climate change will cost 0.2-2% GDP/year in 2070.
- The IPCC says climate policies in 2070 will cost more than 3.4% and likely much more than that.
This is why climate mitigation makes no economic sense: the cure costs more than the disease.
But, wait, “Skeptical Science” tank driver Dana Nuccitelli has an op-ed today in the Guardian where he claims the IPCC uses only a select range of measures: the 0.2-2% is expressed in “annual global economic losses”, while the other is expressed “as a slightly slowed global consumption growth”.
He only achieves that by cutting out the actual quote from IPCC report, as you can see in the screen cap helpfully provided by Lomborg in his Twitter feed that compares texts. Note the ellipsis:
Source: [ https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/458628793825890305 ]
And that’s why we label the Dana Nuccitelli/John Cook “skeptical science” enterprise in our blogroll as a category all their own, “Unreliable”.
Nuccitelli eliminated the full text of that section of the third IPCC report so he could bolster his headline claim “preventing global warming is the cheap option”.
Imagine the screaming if any climate skeptic did something like that in an MSM venue.
Meanwhile Lomborg in his op-ed points out what is really worth worrying about, and it isn’t the beloved global warming “crisis” of the Skeptical Science Kids.
We live in a world where one in six deaths are caused by easily curable infectious diseases; one in eight deaths stem from air pollution, mostly from cooking indoors with dung and twigs; and billions of people live in abject poverty, with no electricity and little food. We ought never to have entertained the notion that the world’s greatest challenge could be to reduce temperature rises in our generation by a fraction of a degree.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-says-that-the-un-climate-panel-s-latest-report-tells-a-story-that-politicians-would-prefer-to-ignore#bd8cy6Bgh00L3roM.99
We live in a world where one in six deaths are caused by easily curable infectious diseases; one in eight deaths stem from air pollution, mostly from cooking indoors with dung and twigs; and billions of people live in abject poverty, with no electricity and little food. We ought never to have entertained the notion that the world’s greatest challenge could be to reduce temperature rises in our generation by a fraction of a degree.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-says-that-the-un-climate-panel-s-latest-report-tells-a-story-that-politicians-would-prefer-to-ignore#bd8cy6Bgh00L3roM.99
We live in a world where one in six deaths are caused by easily curable infectious diseases; one in eight deaths stem from air pollution, mostly from cooking indoors with dung and twigs; and billions of people live in abject poverty, with no electricity and little food. We ought never to have entertained the notion that the world’s greatest challenge could be to reduce temperature rises in our generation by a fraction of a degree.
Lomborg makes more humanistic sense than Nuccitelli, and he doesn’t have to make lies of omission to get his point across.