We all want to save the world, but we are remarkably ineffective at it. We leave the car at home once a week, replace a few light bulbs and complain to our friends that the government should do something about AIDS. Perhaps we even donate a bit to charities.

The problem is that it just doesn’t add up. It feels good, but it often turns out there are far more effective things you could do. But how do you decide what the best way is to spend your precious time and money?

And herein lies the answer: who says your time is precious and you have little money? Perhaps you are just wasting it? What if you had much more time and money?

If you really care about the world, why aren’t you reading books about it, talking to politicians and devoting most of your time to helping out an NGO? Why do you spend your time staring at 1000 unread emails in your inbox? Why do you waste your money by paying your bills too late? Why haven’t you started that big dream company yet?

The biggest problem on this planet is inefficiency. If only people could free up their wasted time to do the things they believe in, the worlds biggest problems will turn out to be a piece of cake to solve.

The good news is that this is one of the cheapest problems to solve: teaching people how to use their time more effectively pays itself back many times over!

My favorite book on the topic of productivity is Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. In it, David Allen confronts us with our own blatant inefficiencies and he does so with a great sense of humor. He shows some really simple ways to tackle them. His solutions are almost obvious, if it weren’t for the fact that almost nobody uses them.

He doesn’t ask you to use any high tech solutions except for pen and paper. He doesn’t send you on an expensive three day training course, nor does he trick you into buying a DVD. He just explains you how to use your common sense and how to use your human nature to your advantage in stead of your detriment.

Once you’ve made the transition, you’ll never want to go back. It’s good for you, good for your colleges, good for your family and friends and good for the world.

So my plan is simple: I will use your donations to distribute free copies of Getting Things Done in the Central Business District of Melbourne, Australia.

The only condition will be that people actually read it. For that purpose, I will ask them to leave their name and email address so I can regularly stalk them to see if they’ve read it.

Why Melbourne? First because I live there, and second because it is a rich city where people have quite a bit of free time and know how to enjoy it. That means they can make a significant positive impact on the world at a very low cost to themselves.

What’s in it for me? I don’t think this is going to be a lot of work for me, so most of my ‘income’ will be in the form of fame and glory and the benefits of living in a more productive city.

As an experiment, I am participating in the Amazon Associate program, which means I get a bit of money for every book that people buy through my link. I’m keeping that! Call me evil, but I believe in doing good while making profit; it is the only way to make a huge difference on a global scale.

I will find the best way to distribute as many books as possible with your donated money. I will keep a public record of exactly what happens to the money.

I say, let’s be a bit more ambitious and offer $10 billion to the person who actually removes about 300 billion tons before 2013. In other words, whoever restores CO2 to preindustrial levels before Kyoto ends, wins.

I estimate that this proposal is anywhere between a thousand and a billion times more efficient than meeting the Kyoto target in 2012. By efficient I mean it is both cheaper and and will achieve more. It will completely and cheaply solve the climate problem once and for all and save our governments a lot of time and effort so they can focus on other things (like censoring the Internet).

As a bonus, it sets a standard for solving big problems before the next election, in stead of just pretending and leaving the real work to future politicians or (more likely) pure luck.

The best part is that it will only require a single organization that is willing to put in about $20 million up front.

For comparison, Kyoto aims to save about 10 billion* tons over the next four years , and it is extremely unlikely to succeed unless countries introduce very drastic and expensive measures right about now. And remember, reducing emissions is not the same thing as lowering CO2 levels; it’s slowing down a bit, not reversing direction.

If I haven’t lost you already, let me explain my thinking…

* = I could be off by a long shot here, I can’t find the number so I had to derive it in a pretty rough way.

How do you set a reward of $10 billion for only $20 million?

The X-Prize foundation, who recently awarded a $10 million prize to Virgin for their commercial space flight vehicle, have a little trick for this. They use the fact that nobody believes something is possible to their advantage. Watch this TED talk by Peter Diamandis for a brief explanation.

They didn’t actually have $10 million; they had only raised about $200,000(?). So Peter went to an insurance company and said, Wanna bet? And the insurance company, being experts at this sort of statistics said, ‘well, we think your chance of success is about 1 in 50, so if you give us $200,000 up front, we’ll pay you your $10 million if you succeed.”. The rest is history.

Now something as preposterous as removing one billion tonnes of carbon per year from the atmosphere, 300 times more ambitious than even Richard Branson can imagine, that’s gotta be impossible, right? Wanna bet? How about 1:500? All we need here is a someone with $20 million to spare, and an overconfident (and solvent) insurance company and we can actually offer a $10 billion award.

The best part is: the more ambitious the goal, the less money you need to put in!

Of course, the exact numbers are just a wild guess and it will take some research by professionals get them right. But I would argue that this is something worth looking into.

How much carbon do we want to get rid of and when?

This is a tricky question. There are several things at play here.

I think the best thing to strive for is to stabilize temperature, not to reduce it back to preindustrial levels. The latter would just put our planet through a double shock; sometimes it’s best not to pull the knife out yet. But if you don’t want to reduce temperature, why reduce CO2 levels?

As I explained in my last post, just stopping CO2 emissions is not going stop temperature rise, because temperature lags behind CO2 quite a bit.

That’s why we have to have lower CO2 levels so that they act as a brake on temperature rise. The question then is: how low? We could of course simply remove all CO2 from the atmosphere, but that would probably suffocate all plants, so that’s not a good idea. Whatever we do, we should probably never reduce CO2 beyond preindustrial levels.

Something that hasn’t been done as far as I know, is calculating what CO2 reduction would instantly halt temperature rise. Is this even possible, or is there a minimum period of time required? How much?

Also, this proposal does not ask for stopping CO2 emissions, it’s just a big cleanup while emissions continue. It means that from 2013, whatever technology is used for this solution, will be used in a scaled down version to compensate ongoing CO2 output. In that case, we could keep CO2 levels constant after 2012, and probably quite cheaply. That in turn gives us plenty of time to switch to renewable energy.

Another thing that we need to consider is, What if we later regret our choice of CO2 level? It is obvious that whatever technology we use to reduce CO2 levels, should have a kill switch: a way to turn it off instantly at any time. But any CO2 taken away before we press that button, is probably just gone. How do we get it back at present levels if somehow we decide to do so? Burning up the entire planet’s coal supply or cutting down all trees doesn’t sound very attractive. We need to think this through.

But uhh, isn’t it dangerous?

Yes, extremely. So is doing nothing according to some. It’s safe to say that our tampering with the planet has already passed the point of no return. Besides, as I argued in my previous post: just because something is natural, does not mean it’s good for us.

Is it legal?

Now this is the really interesting part. Part of the plan is that it’s up to the participants to figure out whether it’s legal and to deal with any goverment red tape. But doesn’t that make it more difficult? Yes, which is good as I have explained above.

But wait a minute, doesn’t this give an unprecedented amount of power to any company with $20 million to spare? Yes it does, but are you surprised by this? If the world financial crisis has taught us anything, it is that governments have completely lost their grip on global events. And do you really think there is a law that prohibits a company from tampering with global CO2 levels? And if so, do you think there is a UN agreement about that sort of stuff, so that it can’t be done in another country? And even if there was, it will probably be 2013 by the time they have finally agreed on their first common statement of concern.

Hopefully the very existence of this prize will encourage the world’s leaders to pick up the pace a bit and actually start governing the planet in stead of just their own countries.

I still think this is ridiculous

Well, yes and no. We need to get our act together, stop feeling good about our useless gestures and start solving all the worlds problems.

This will require some out of the box thinking and public brainstorming. It requires us to improve our intuition on this scale. We need to get used to thinking globally in stead of locally. Once we get better at that, the good ideas will roll out much easier.

I would rather see lots of bad ideas that at least strive to solve 90% of the problem, than good ideas that only solve 1% of it. We’ll get there!

Lomborg discusses the Precautionary Principle in his book, but none of his critics seem to refer to this discussion. They seem to ignore it, because they do exactly what he warns about.

Lomborg essentially argues that the Precautionary Principle is being abused by scientist to attract unjustified large amounts of resources.

So what is the Precautionary Principle? Of course, there are lots of interpretations floating around, but in the context of climate change this is the authoritative one:

Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration 1992 states that: “in order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall be not used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

Now, as one would expect, this is non committal diplomatic talk at its best. The most explicit bit is:

lack of full scientific certainty shall be not used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures

Note that “lack of full scientific certainty” is something completely different than “an unknown probability”. This principle, at least the way governments have agreed on it at this point, can only be used for events that are quite likely, albeit not 100% certain.

Extreme events, if their probability is completely unknown, do not fall under this principle. This excludes Gores and Fogs twenty meter sea level rise and extreme weather events. At least until they present us with reasonable estimates of the odds, projected damage and the likely effect of reducing carbon emissions on these two factors. A term like “doubly whammy” is highly misleading in this context, because it incorrectly implies that we know these three things.

But if current diplomatic agreements do not support the critics interpretation of the precautionary principle, perhaps common sense does? I mean, it’s not as if politics is in any way related to common sense.

Let me introduce you to 10 ways the world could end… Here’s the list from that video:

• mental depression
• alien invasion
• ecosystem collapse
• particle accelerator mishap
• biotechnology mishap
• magnetic poles reverse
• solar flare
• epidemic
• asteroid

I would like to add some more items to that list of really bad things:

• nuclear war
• nuclear terrorism
• unexpected extremely rapid melting of Greenland or Antarctica
• tsunami wiping out several major cities
• current economic crisis resulting in global mayhem
• twenty degree rise in global temperatures in fifty years
• global sulfur poisoning
• benevolent effort to capture carbon from the atmosphere gets out of hand and causes the next ice age
• cutting down whatever is left of the Amazon
• cutting down every single tree on earth
• massive chemical accident kills off an entire ocean
• nearby supernova
• cosmic high energy event pointing directly at us
• Yellowstone explodes
• Other volcano or big earthquake kills tens of millions
• OPEC boycott
• military coup in the USA

I encourage you to brainstorm for a couple of minutes to come up with more ideas, if you have the stomach.

Now what I think is reasonable is to spend a significant amount of money on research into these topics. Such research should at least reveal the probability, likely damage and ways to prevent or counter it. Only after that has been done properly, is it justified to consider spending massive amounts on actually preventing them.

What I think is not reasonable is to guess the worst case damage for each of them and start defending ourselves against all of these issues regardless of cost and probability.

You might argue that because a twenty meter sea level rise is at least a topic of debate, whereas nobody seriously talks about an alien invasion, that this means the former is far more likely than the latter and thus justifies massive spending to be on the safe side.

But this argument is flawed. If the odds of an event are completely unknown, it means you can not tell whether it is more likely than something else of which the odds are completely unknown (unless they are correlated).

As far as I know the odds of twenty meter flooding are completely unknown and so there is no valid reason to think it is more likely than an alien invasion.

If on the other hand the odds of twenty meter flooding are known, then there is no excuse for treating it differently than any other issue that is effected by climate change. It means you have to look at the damage such flooding will do and different ways to mitigate it. It may turn out that such a massive catastrophe can be relatively cheaply avoided by cutting carbon emissions, but it may also turn out that the effect is irreversible and it is too late to cut carbon. In that case, evacuating coastal cities might be the next best option. But we simply don’t know at this point, so there is no point in cutting carbon or evacuating coastal cities before we have some useful numbers to work with.

A frequently heard argument is that fixing climate change is not that expensive so that we can comfortably afford to be a bit of inefficiency and err on the safe side of caution. I have two arguments against this point.

First, given our current societies obsession with even the smallest changes in purchasing power, I seriously doubt that there is any political will to spend more than strictly necessary. The only reason climate policy gets popular support, is because tax payers do not understand that they are the ones paying for it. The environmental groups are happy, suppliers of alternative energy are happy, even the traditional energy sector is happy with all the extra investments. Politicians are happy because they are making themselves popular. Utilities companies are happy because they will see their revenue go up as energy prices increase and they receive more subsidies. The only kind of political parties that would protest against this have a nasty reputation of supporting imprudent tax cuts and will be seen as crying wolf this time. Some government central planning agencies should be ringing their alarm bells about this, but they have no way of knowing that the proposed carbon price might be too high, because nobody tells them. Many environmental scientists don’t seem too keen on figuring out if this is the case either. I guess they’ve been the underdog for too long to realize what kind of power they have at this point in time.

Second, if you only focus on preventing unexpected climate events, then indeed even wasting 10% of our GDP is really not a catastrophe. But because we have no idea of the odds, we have no reason to justify spending more on these things than on the other 20+ doom scenarios I just summed up off the top of my head. We’re biased toward climate change disasters, so we conveniently forget about the other ones. If you add those up, you end up wasting a lot more than 10%. And let’s not forget, some of these issues are on our political agendas, e.g. ecosystem collapse, asteroid impacts, nuclear terrorism, tsunamis, financial crisis and the Amazon. Each of these is effected by many other factors than climate change and so even the most ambitious carbon measures won’t cover for them, even though they deserve equal attention given the lack of knowledge.

What about Ackermans paper?

Frank Ackerman wrote a paper ‘Hot, It’s Not – Reflections on Cool It!, by Bjorn Lomborg‘, to be published in Climatic Change. He spends a significant part of the article debating Lomborg’s credibility, which I will ignore in this discussion but I will come back to it later on.

I have stated before that Ackerman currently does not understand the proposed paradigm. I base this observation on the following quote:

If he had confined himself to actual examples of oversimplification and exaggeration in climate change rhetoric, Lomborg could have written a short, useful article – perhaps making the point that it is unhelpful and unnecessary to overstate the case, since the real problems of climate change are serious enough. Unfortunately, Lomborg did not write that article, but instead stretched his story into a book length claim that climate change is only a moderately serious problem, while the proposed remedies are all prohibitively expensive. Many other problems, in his view, are both more urgent and cheaper to solve.

There are three things at play in Lomborg’s book and Ackermans sees the least important two.

First, Lomborg indeed claims that “oversimplification and exaggeration in climate change rhetoric” is a problem. Second, he also claims that “climate change is only a moderately serious problem, while the proposed remedies are all prohibitively expensive”. But Lomborg makes the case that climate change is being looked at in the wrong way. That third – and in my opinion most important – statement is ignored by Ackerman.

Ackerman proceeds to analyze some of the numbers and models that Lomborg is using, basically disagreeing one or two orders of magnitude on some issues. Of course he also takes on the heat versus cold death issue and rightly so.

But just like Fog, he fails to put different solutions to heat and cold death in perspective. He does not answer the question whether the errors in Lomborg’s analysis make any difference to his conclusion, which still seems to be orders of magnitude safe from attack.

Ackerman tackles the issue of cost-benefit analysis:

There are three separate problems with the notion that cost-benefit analysis has shown other issues to be higher priorities than climate change: there are no meaningful monetary valuations for many of the benefits of climate mitigation; the range of policy options considered by the “consensus” was arbitrarily truncated; and the calculations in the “consensus” cost-benefit analysis rely heavily on wishful thinking.

Let me tackle the last two first. Ackerman overemphasizes the relevance of the Copenhagen Consensus results. The Copenhagen Consensus is an effort by Lomborg to create a top ten of the most effective ways to to improve the world. When he talked about it on TED, he clearly stated that it is very reasonable to be skeptic about that analysis. He encourages others to come up with an alternative way to set priorities for the world. If nobody else does that, than you can’t really blame Lomborg for begin a little overconfident. It takes competition to excel.

Let ‘s look at the first argument:

there are no meaningful monetary valuations for many of the benefits of climate mitigation

The fact that he does not suggest an alternative way of evaluating benefits gives me the impression that he believes there is no sensible way of prioritizing issues at all. I hope I am missing something, but that would imply we might as well do something completely random. In that case, I’ll opt for Lomborg’s plan.

Let’s study his more detailed argument about cost-benefit analysis:

In the case of climate change, it is possible, at least in principle, to calculate the cost of emission reductions. On the other side of the balance, the benefits of reducing carbon emissions include decreases in all manner of harms to people and nature, and a lowered probability of truly catastrophic, irreversible changes. What is the dollar value of a human life saved, of a coral reef or a polar bear surviving undisturbed in its natural habitat, or of the lowered chance of catastrophe due to a slowdown in the rate of melting of the Greenland ice sheet? Does the dollar value of a human life depend on the income of the person whose life is saved? Simply asking these questions reveals why there are no meaningful answers. But without those answers, cost-benefit analysis is unable to incorporate and measure the most important benefits of climate change mitigation.

The wonderful thing about Lomborg’s paradigm is that it solves this dilemma. No longer do you have to answer the question how many dollars a human life is worth. If you use his approach, you are suddenly comparing human lives to human lives and dollars to dollars: no fuzzy combination.

When Lomborg deals with malaria, he compares the number of people saved using a health care system to the number of people saved using the climate system. He expresses the cost of the health care system and the cost of manipulating climate in dollars, but that is not the same as setting a price on a human life.

It is tempting to confuse “the maximum number of lives you can save with one dollar” with “the maximum amount of dollars you are willing to spend on saving one life”. Lomborg enables us to talk about the former, while Ackerman refers to the latter. Lomborg would ask a politician ” How much money would you like to spend on saving lives” and will then use his method to save as many lives as possible on that budget.

Once you start combining issues, things get messy. Lomborg does not solve this. But when you look at the current climate change debate it still represents a huge improvement.

Currently, politicians are presented with one huge complicated package. The climate scientists tell them that for an X amount of dollars, they are buying themselves part of the solution to a very large number of problems. They are free to choose the size of the package and even who is going to pay for it, but not the details of the package.

For example, one billion dollars might get them 5 million penguins, 3000 polar bears and 600 less cases of malaria. Half a billion dollar will get them half of all those, two billion twice as much. It’s like having to choose a bundle for your cellphone, where for $10 you get 60 minutes and 10 messages and for $5 you get 30 minutes and 5 messages.

But what if for some reason you would actually want less penguins and more bears and malaria? What if you don’t care about text messages and just want more minutes? The current consensus seems to be that you are out of luck and not ‘allowed’ such choices. Ackerman soothes our pain by arguing that such choices are subjective anyway.

In comes Lomborg: no longer do we have to buy text messages and calls in one package; we can get a separate package for both of them and make up our own mind about how much we want of both of them. Likewise, Lomborg offers politicians the freedom to choose which problems they want to solve and how much they want to spend on each of them: he frees them of the one size fits all solution currently on the table.

As Ackerman argues, it is difficult – if not impossible – to put a dollar value on a human life, or a polar bear. But politicians do this for a living, usually with the blessings of their voters. One can debate if their choices are arbitrary or well founded, but it is undeniable that they make them.

An economist can tell a politician: “I can save penguins at $5000 a piece, polar bears for $10,000 and prevent malaria for $10 dollars per person: what can I get you?”. The politician is then free to decide how many penguins, polar bears and malaria he wants to order. The economist will then get back to him with a list of measures, which may or may not include cutting carbon.

Note that this does not imply that a penguin is worth $5000, a polar bear is worth $10,000 and a human live saved from Malaria is worth $10! Just like a text message is not worth 50 cents. These amounts are simply the cheapest penguin, polar bear or prevented death from malaria that the economist can get you. There is nothing arbitrary about that.

Take some time to digest that one, it’s tricky.

Lomborg considers a so called Kyoto Forever policy, in which emissions are still reduced after the current agreement ends. Ackermans calls this:

… something as utterly bizarre and inconceivable as extending the Kyoto Protocol unchanged for 300 years …

He is right, but the question he does not answer is how the protocol should be changed over the next centuries. Enter the realm of the End Game, a topic mostly avoided.

William McDonough explains the concept of the End Game quite eloquently when he talks about Cradle to Cradle design:

Modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. If we come here and say, well, I didn’t intend to cause global warming on the way here, and we say it’s not my plan, then we realize it’s part of our defacto plan, because it is the thing that’s happening because we have no other plan. And I was at the White House for president Bush meeting with every federal department and agency and I pointed out that they appear to have no plan. If the end game is global warming they are doing great. If the end game is mercury toxification of our children down wind of coal fire plants as they scuddle the clean air act, then I see that our education program should be explicitly defined as brain death for all children, no child left behind.

So what is our End Game for climate change?

We haven’t got a clue what is going to happen hundreds of years into the future, but we do know this:

First, if there is no emission reduction plan after Kyoto ends a couple of years from now, emissions will simply go up again and the effort of the last couple of years will have negligible impact on future temperatures and even less on heat deaths, malaria, flooding, etc.

Second, the only way to stop carbon levels from increasing, is to have zero net emissions. This may seem trivial, but I have yet to see this expressed in clear language. But even zero emissions will not stop temperatures from rising any time soon. Some alarmist even fear temperatures spiraling out of control, but assuming that they don’t, it still takes a long time for temperature to ‘catch up’ with the latest CO2 level.

Given these two arguments, it is reasonable to assume that a Kyoto Forever protocol will have to be more strict than the current one.

The difficult part is estimating the cost beyond the near future, which Ackerman points out.

So we face a dilemma here, as to how far in the future we can legitimately compare Kyoto with with other solutions? My personal educated guess is about 30 years.

I don’t think it is controversial to say that even a Kyoto Forever will have no measurable impact on heat deaths, malaria, flooding, etc as soon as 2040, whereas Lomborg’s proposals – even if vastly overestimated – do. Beyond that time it is unfair to compare them.

Ackerman concludes as follows:

The massive effort that is needed to address the climate crisis today could do the same for the decades to come. Suppose that we spend money today to launch a new set of technologies and industries based on maximizing energy efficiency, renewable energy production, and sequestration, thereby creating the jobs, incomes, and products that shape the life of the next generation. Our descendants will not blame us for having reduced the level of short-term shopping opportunities at the mall. They will be especially happy to get a more tolerable climate as part of the package. And that – unlike Lomborg’s fantasies – would really be cool.

This just confirms Lomborg’s point: that same massive effort, jobs and incomes, could have been used to take care of heat deaths, malaria, flooding, poverty, AIDS, hundreds of times over. The term “more tolerable climate” has no value without specifying which particular benefits you have in mind. Once you do specify them, it turns out there are infinitely better ways to achieve these benefits.

How is doing something useless in stead of doing something useful cool?

The organizational perspective

One question that I have only subtlety touched on, is Why does Lomborg make so many mistakes? There is an entire website dedicated to them, so that has to mean something.

One explanation floating around is that he is sponsored by big evil oil companies to tell lies. Please refer to my earlier post on conspiracy theories for that one.

Ackerman points out a strong bias in the literature cited by Lomborg. He shows several tables where the world is divided between climate skeptics and climate believers and where Lomborg only cites the skeptics and ignores the believers. Now this division requires a fair bit of skepticism.

Firstly, it suggests that he actually knows what differentiates a climate skeptic from a climate believer. Second, it suggests these two groups are the same size. Third, it suggests the papers of the first group are equally relevant to Lomborg’s analysis as the papers of the second group. This may all turn out to be true, but he makes no effort to prove it in a systematic way or even to suggest these possible shortcomings of his analysis. Fourth, even if it holds up, it is a well known phenomena that scientists tend to mainly cite their in crowd and not look outside their own discipline, so this argument should be presented in perspective.

My theory of Lomborg’s flaws is a bit more boring: he is trying to do too much.

Basically he tries to understand every big problem in the world, and what the most important factors are that drive these problems. Make no mistake: the IPCC usually keeps these other factors constant (for very good reasons, this is not an allegation). But we also need an IPM (International Panel of Malaria), IPHD (Heat Deaths), IPHD (Hurricane Damage), IPFD (Flooding Damage), IPPB (Polar Bears) to achieve what Lomborg is trying to do.

So we end up with one man trying to do more than a massive agency plus a whole bunch of imaginary massive agencies. Anyone who lives an even remotely organized live should recognize that that is just asking for trouble.

Given the sheer number of problems in the world and the number of important factors that contribute to it, Lomborg can only strive to have a very flimsy understanding of them. For each factor and each issue, there are probably dozens of experts who can easily shatter his analysis to pieces. And this is exactly what happens.

The opposite is also true: experts tend to only understand their own field of expertise and don’t have a clue about the big picture. The IPCC must focus on the impact of climate change while keeping all other factors constant. Again and again this post show experts that debunk the details, but not even once offer a revised big picture. They either don’t have one, or do not know how to translate their observations to it.

It is extremely difficult to be able to consistently think while switching between many orders of magnitude. It is a mental minefield. In all likeliness you lose sight on one end of the scale.

Politicians ruling from their ivory tower are a perfect example of people who get the big picture, but forget the small picture, resulting in completely ineffective policy or even extreme cruelties like war.

In the other extreme we find people who are completely obsessed with one little topic. Society is geared towards this kind of behavior because it is a necessary evil for specialism; a cornerstone of civilization.

There is also – if you allow me a little excursion – a Darwinian argument for the inability of most people to clearly think between so many orders of magnitude. Humans are the only species on this planet that are actively concerned with the survival and well begin of their entire species! I have yet to see a polar bear be even remotely concerned about a another bear that he has never met. This is probably our main competitive advantage in an age of mass species extinction and the reason that we are probably not going to be one of the unlucky ones.

In fact, I expect to see four types of species thrive on global change: intelligent and communicative species like humans and crows, species that have already proven themselves useful (or cute) enough for us to protect, brute force survivors like cockroaches and plain lucky ones.

But back to my point here: the most probable reason for Lomborg’s many mistakes is that he is trying to do more than the IPCC and all other single issue groups combined. If his paradigm gains enough credibility for more scientist to at least try to work with it, we will start seeing far better results.

What if Galileo had lived today and taken his telescope to the Vatican to look at Jupiter’s moons? What if for some reason we had not already discovered them? The pope would reply that his telescope is flawed and that Hubble has delivered impressive pictures of far away galaxies. Who is Galileo to presume that he could see something as ridiculous as Jupiter’s moons using such a primitive tool?

Conclusions

We live in a world where fuzzy thinking is the norm, not the exception. A world where religion thrives, hypocrisy on a global scale is seen as a necessary evil. A world where feeling good is more important than doing good. Worse still, it is a world where dragging people out of their comfortable illusions is seen as bad.

We are making tremendous progress, but please do not for once have the illusion that we have reached enlightenment as a species.

Education equips us with the mental tools to better deal with our shortcomings. It is for that reason that highly educated people, including some scientists, are usually less susceptible. It is certainly the reason why many people demand scientists and others with great responsibilities to be completely immune. That’s what they pay you for!

I hope to come up with a more eloquent way of phrasing it soon, but this will have to make do:

Climate change is not inherently good or bad. It is only the effect of climate change on issues that matter. For any particular issue, climate change is not the only factor that influences it. When dealing with an issue, we should focus on the most effective ways to do so.

Now get to work!

Back to Part 1 or Part 2

My short answer to the critique on Cool It is that it is mostly right about the details, but completely wrong about the big picture. The most comprehensive resource of critique on the book can be found on http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/. Kåre Fog and others have spent many years creating an inventory of every mistake – big and small – that Lomborg has made over the last decade.

The idea behind the site is the following:

For every piece of information in the books, you have to check if it is true and if the presentation is balanced. If the concrete information given by Lomborg is correct and balanced, then it follows that his main conclusions are also correct. But if the information is flawed, then the main conclusions are biased or wrong.

This is in clear disagreement with my statement that one can actually be mostly right on the details, but completely wrong on the big picture. One could consider this a pointless philosophical debate, but since it is the main premise of his entire effort, there is no harm in analyzing the statement.

It sounds very intuitive that if the details are wrong, than the whole must also be wrong. On the other hand we have this conventional wisdom that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. What does this tell us, apart from that it is generally a bad idea to listen to your intuition without proper training?

There are actually plenty of examples where all the details are “wrong”, but the big picture is right. Many individual measurements of the length of an object may all be wrong, but their average is pretty accurate. The algorithm that Google uses to rank pages may very well be wrong on each individual page, but the results are impressive nonetheless. Most climate models divide the world into arbitrary squares that have nothing to do with reality, yet their results are useful. The same goes for many other assumptions and simplifications in computer models. Newton’s theory about the universe is completely wrong, but the predictions are nonetheless useful. The vast majority of authors on Wikipedia are not the worlds best experts at what they write, but collectively their produce a similar or – according to some – even better result than those same experts would have achieved.

Fogs hypothesis here is false. Even if all Lomborg’s facts are completely wrong, his main conclusions can still be right. Vice verse even more so.

Recently the site also tracks mistakes made by Al Gore and Fog has come to the following conclusion:

However, when Al Gore and Lomborg are judged by the same standards, there is a wide difference in credibility. In those texts that deal with the climate issue, Lomborg has on average about one flaw or error per page. By comparison, Al Gore´s book has 325 pages. Even if we consider that, because of photos and large letters, this would compare to only 100 pages of Lomborg´s type, that would amount to only 0,13 flaw or error per page. In the film, there is on average one flaw or error every 9th minute. You have to watch the whole film in order to meet as many distortions as there are in 10 pages of one of Lomborg´s books.

Although I appreciate Fogs gesture to correct for the number of images in Gores book, this is complete nonsense. Perhaps he should also compensate for the fact that a picture is worth a thousand words?

If comparing the “credibility” of two works based on the number of errors makes sense, then what would you say in this case?:

Person A : “On pllus oone iz too.” (5 errors)

Person B : “Murder is legal.” (1 error)

Another interesting point of view from Fog is the following:

Especially during the first years of his public appearance, this was Lomborg´s style again and again, and it has – justifiably – made a lot of his opponents become his enemies.

Very professional indeed…

But perhaps Fog’s actual arguments do make a case against the main messages of Lomborg’s book?

Before we deal with them – and rest assured I will not be very kind about Lomborg’s examples either – let me summarize what I think are the core take home messages of Cool It. That is, what I take home from it, not necessarily what Lomborg intents to convey; I can’t read his mind.

My personal take home messages from Cool It

• Climate change should be analyzed from the perspective of the individual issues it affects. The effectiveness of climate change policy should be judged on their merits for these issues and contrasted with other ways to tackle these issues. Not even the IPCC does this currently.
• For most, if not all, known issues, controlling climate is the least effective way to tackle them.
• The Kyoto protocol in its current form is not realistic, which leads to countries failing their responsibilities. This in term uses up precious international willingness to cooperate on other issues.
• The debate around climate change has lost its scientific objectivity and resembles a witch hunt.
• The Precautionary Principe is abused to rally unreasonable effort to deal with speculative scenarios.

How bad are Lomborg’s Errors?

In his book Lomborg deals with a number of worldly issues that climate change has an effect on. On lomborg-errors.dk Fog analyzes most of these issues. I do not claim that these are the only issues that climate change has an effect on and I can’t recall Lomborg claiming that either.

Any other issues should be (re)investigated from the same perspective, with the same question: how does adjusting climate relate to other ways of tackling the issue.

But there are also issues, you might argue, that can’t be analyzed that way, because we don’t understand them well enough? I will discuss that in the next section about the Precautionary Principle.

The issues for which I will assess Fogs critique are polar bears, heat versus cold deaths, melting glaciers, sea level rise, hurricanes and malaria. For each of these issues I will quickly summarize Lomborg’s analysis. In particular, I will repeat Lomborg’s estimate for the relative effectiveness of climate control versus other measures. I will cite Fogs most important critique on the issue. By most important I mean the things that would mostly impact the Lomborg’s estimate of the relative effectiveness of climate control versus other measures.

I can save you some reading by telling you that the answer is usually: not much (except perhaps for heat deaths). A recurring theme is that even if Lomborg’s analysis are off by a huge margin, climate control is so unimaginably ineffective that it dwarfs even the most blatant errors. It is like trying to shoot at a skyscraper from two meters away: very hard to miss. Fog shows no sign of realizing this and in stead tends to ignore all factors but climate change.

Polar Bears

Short story: some environmentalists suggest that polar bears are being driven to extinction and that reductions in carbon are necessary to prevent this. Lomborg claims the extinction trend is dubious, as well as the direct link to climate change. Most importantly he concludes that in order to save the polar bear it is far more effective to adjust hunting policy than to change carbon emissions.

Before I go into this discussion, I would like to take you on a detour to show you some common forms of fuzzy thinking.

First of all, let me remind you that there are millions of species on this planet and many of them are going extinct. Obsessing with a single species just because it is big and hugable is unwise.

Second, the fact that a species exists is not enough reason to save it. Malaria exists, yet we love to get rid of it. Is it not unreasonable to ask why we need the polar bear in the first place.

A common response to this argument is that we do not know the value of a polar bear or any other species for that matter. First of all this in not true for a lot of species that we regularly interact with. We use cows for food and milk and malaria tries to kill us. We have gotten pretty good at putting a price on these species, whether it is for getting more of them or wiping them out. Second, if we do not know the value of a certain species, it is not a valid reason to just put a random (usually high) price on it. I will explain this in part 3 where I discuss the common misinterpretation of the precautionary principle.

Despite this, it is important to note that in Lomborg’s paradigm, one does not have to put a price on a species. This is one of the reasons why it is so useful. I will get back to this point when I discuss Ackermans paper in part 3.

Another issue that is often left unspoken, is our obsession with increasing or decreasing populations. When it comes to plagues of otherwise benevolent species, most people are well aware that increase is not always a good thing. But when it comes to more regular numbers, we suddenly associate increase with good and decrease with bad, for no particular reason.

We should ask ourselves how many polar bears we actually want. We don’t want them to roam the streets of Vancouver or be at risk of extinction. But with no further information, there is no point in saying more is good and less is bad.

Lomborg avoids this question by taking an arbitrary year as a reference point and Fog avoids it by arguing about that particular choice. Both are implicitly assuming that whatever is ‘normal’ for nature is good for us and they only disagree on what exactly is normal.

The reason behind the assumption that whatever is normal for nature must be good for us, is that we see nature as the constant factor and humans as the agent of change. This is pretty arrogant. While humans are certainly responsible for a lot of changes in the world, nature is not a passive bystander. It is constantly trying new things and it won’t politely stop if one of those things wipes us off the planet. The other problem is that even if nature is a passive bystander, our own changes make us sensitive to new factors. What may have been a harmless polar bear population 20.000 years ago, may now be a threat. It is just one more example of something that sounds reasonable but isn’t. Think about this next time you here somebody say “but it’s natural!”.

But all of this is irrelevant to the question at hand: what are the most effective ways to control the polar bear population?

Here is Fogs critique.

It seems Fog agrees with Lomborg that adjusting hunting pressure is the easiest way to adjust bear population, but he doesn’t put it that way. In stead, he claims that Lomborg does not understand the concept of sustainable yield. Turns out that Fog doesn’t understand it either when he says:

This is nonsense due to Lomborg´s lack of understanding of the concept of sustainable yield (as explained above). If we want a stable population, we can shoot 49 bears annually without compromising the stability. If the 49 bears were not shot, a similar number of bears would die from other causes.

In fact, sustainable yield is a little more tricky than that. It is about keeping hunting pressure low enough so it does not damage vital ecosystem functions that would lead to the extinction of that species. If you take away the hunting pressure and you end up with a population explosion, not with bears conveniently dying from other causes. The explosion in turn might be undone if there is not enough food to support this growth, but this is not essential.

Compare it to your bank account: with $100 and an interest rate of 5%, using $5 per year is a sustainable yield. But the amount on your account (i.e. the population size) is arbitrary. You could reduce it to $50 dollars and end up with a sustainable yield of $2.50 per year. Likewise, you could leave it alone for a while and watch it go up to $200; the extra money doesn’t disappear ‘from other causes’.

For ecosystems there are some lower and higher limits to the population size, but there is more than one possible sustainable yield. So no, if the 49 bears were not shot, a similar number of bears would not necessarily die from other causes.

Next, Fog basically admits that Lomborg is right:

On the other hand, when the environment becomes less favorable, then the sustainable yield decreases, and the number of bears shot annually will have to be reduced to avoid an acceleration of the ongoing decline.

Fog does not even mention reducing carbon emissions in his critique. He does not present a new analysis that shows how reducing carbon emissions is even remotely as effective as reducing hunting pressure.

There is no need to reassess Lomborg’s conclusion on this matter, based on this information.

Heat and Cold deaths

The short story: Lomborg claims that increasing temperatures actually save lives. This is because many more people die due to cold than due to heat and because most of the temperature increase will go towards warmer nights and warmer winters. Heat deaths will increase a bit, but cold deaths will more than compensate for it, according to his analysis.

This seems to be Lomborg’s favorite example, which is a pity because it also turns out it is the easiest to criticize.

But first of all, let’s get some perspective here. While our two friends are arguing about a plus or minus sign for 150,000 deaths per year, ask yourself, How many people actually die every year on this planet?

About 62 million according to a possibly unreliable source. Here’s the top ten according to WHO:

1. 12.6% Ischaemic heart disease
2. 9.7% Cerebrovascular disease
3. 6.8% Lower respiratory infections
4. 4.9% HIV/AIDS
5. 4.8% Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
6. 3.2% Diarrhoeal diseases
7. 2.7% Tuberculosis
8. 2.2% Malaria
9. 2.2% Trachea/bronchus/lung cancers
10. 2.1% Road traffic accidents

Do you see heat and cold deaths on this list? No. So why are we even talking about this?

Once again, for each of these diseases, ask yourself how we can get rid of them. How effective is reducing CO2 emissions relative to others measures such as medicine?

Fog makes it pretty clear that Lomborg’s analysis on heat and cold deaths is dodgy at best. But he leaves the most important question unanswered:

As explained in the introduction to this page, the study referred to is based on calculations that deal with seasonal variation and moderate warmth, but not with heat waves. Therefore, what Lomborg concludes on the basis of this study does not refer to heat waves.

Great, but how does reducing carbon emissions affect the number of deaths from heatwaves? What other ways are there to reduce the number of deaths from heat waves? How do they compare? Perhaps this quote sheds some light?

In more northerly cities there is still a scope for adaptation, such as more widespread air conditioning. However, a recent study by Kalkstein (link here) finds that a warmer climate will cause more heat-related deaths here, even when adaptation is included in the models.

As an aside, I always find it fascinating when scientists claim to completely understand the next hundred years of human ingenuity by stating that “adaptation is included in the models”.

Fog seems to conclude here that apart from reducing carbon there is absolutely nothing we can do for these people. To translate that to Lomborg’s paradigm: there is only one way to tackle heat death, which is therefore the best way.

I doubt it, but will leave it as an open question.

Melting glaciers

Lomborg asks the critical question: how do people use glaciers? How does climate change effect such usage and in what ways can we compensate for these changes. Fog seems to interpret these questions as a mere distraction:

Glaciers worldwide have been receding at an accelerating pace during recent decades, concomitant with the general rise in air temperatures worldwide. Lomborg manages to shift focus completely away from this fact, by various distracting excursions.

More concerning is this – incorrect – remark:

Modern recession of glaciers is presented mainly as a consequence of emergence from the little ice age

Lomborg actually says that because of the little ice age, humans have already had a recent taste of receding glaciers even before humans accelerated the process. That initial experience hasn’t killed us, so it is not immediately obvious that continuation of this process will kill us. Several critical remarks go without any explanation as to their relevance, such as:

but the recent acceleration in glacier melt is left unmentioned

or:

The only tropical glacier mentioned by Lomborg is that on Mount Kilimanjaro

These statements lack a conclusion, like: “because the recent acceleration in glacier melt is X, the cost of Lomborg’s proposed measures increase by Y and thus enter a similar price range as cutting carbon.”. Presenting them without further argument, turns them into rhetorical arguments. It is then left to the reader to assume Fog knows why this is important but did not have time to specify.

Here is Fogs final conclusion:

The overall balance is projected to be as follows: In the upper Indus, there will be initial increases of water flow ranging from +14 to +90 % over the first few decades, followed by decreases of -30 to -90 % after 100 years

That seems to be roughly along the lines of Lomborg’s conclusion. Perhaps a few decades more or less, but no orders of magnitude difference. So I see no reason to assume that Lomborg’s proposed measures will turn out orders of magnitude more expensive, based on this new information.

This remark puzzles me, so perhaps I misunderstood:

Lomborg does not explain how it should be possible that water flowing in the rivers during winter should be stored and kept until summer.

This is what dams do, isn’t it?

Once again, Fog does not show that CO2 reduction is the cheapest way to solve this particular problem.

Sea level rise

Lomborg reminds us that the twenty meter flooding pictures shown by Al Gore are completely ridiculous and that the latest consensus is closer to 30 cm. More importantly he shows that if left unchecked it will cost us only a tiny fraction of the total available landmass, albeit a pretty important fraction. However, he argues that building (better) defenses against the sea is dramatically cheaper than trying to slow sea level rise.

Fogs introduction to this topic is complete speculation. He conveniently throws the IPCC reports in the bin due to recent discoveries and talks about all sorts of possible sea level rises.

I understand his arguments: the last ice sheet model that I saw was dodgy at best. Not to mention the fact that many climate models are written in Fortran, which is enough reason not to trust them

Fogs assumption that CO2 reduction will prevent such catastrophes is just as much speculation. One can not give a sensible estimate on the odds that we are not already beyond tipping point or that Kyoto’s reduction will keep us below such tipping point. It is safe to assume that any measures will decrease the chance, but such decrease might be anywhere between 0.00001% and 100%, which means it’s just a guess.

By sidestepping peer reviewed works and simply guessing there is no longer a fair comparison. We can have the discussion again at the next IPCC report, or if an alternative scenario makes it through peer review. At that point, Lomborg should also revise his analysis. See also my discussion on the precautionary principle later on.

Eventually Fog seems to settle, with some reservations, for 50 cm. But he does not show what the effect of this change is on Lomborg’s calculation and conclusion.

Furthermore I find not even a single comment on Lomborg’s proposed solutions to flooding mitigation.

Given the extreme difference in effectiveness between these proposals and changing carbon levels, I doubt that another 30 cm makes a difference.

Hurricanes and extremes

Lomborg argues that most of the increase in hurricane damages is not due to more severe storms, but due to increased value at risk. Had some of the storms from many decades ago hit today, they would have caused similar or even more damage than Katrina. Fog counters this argument as follows:

as if we had to choose whether damages were due to denser infrastructure or to increasing wind speeds, instead of admitting that both factors contribute in tandem

If this argument sounds reasonable, you are still not getting the point: go back to my crash course on dodos.

When we hear ‘in tandem’ we are inclined to think 50-50. But there is no reason for this to be the case. It could just as well be 99.999:0.001. Even more importantly, even if temperature increase and denser infrastructure increase damage on a 50-50 basis, it doesn’t mean their solutions deserve equal attention and resources.

Lomborg argues that changing CO2 concentrations will reduce future damage far less than other methods, per dollar invested. To visualize how big this difference is, let me remind you of the legendary Hans Brinker who put his finger in a dike to prevent a disastrous flooding. Why didn’t he just buy carbon credits?

The following is so typical about Fogs methodology that I will just show it, even though it is irrelevant:

‘Page 100 bottom : “Had it hit today, it would have caused damage of about $100 billion . . “. Flaw: Lomborg´s source, Pielke et al. 2007, gives a figure of $78 billion. “‘

Sorry, but $78 billion is about $100 billion. Lomborg is trying to argue that storms really haven’t changed by a factor 10 like others suggest. To make his point, that 10% discrepancy is irrelevant on such a huge difference and simply makes it easier to read. Not to mention the fact that converting historic dollar values to present day values is black magic to a certain extend anyway.

Fog marked this as a flaw, which is a relatively severe rating (his system starts with comments, followed by remarks, flaws and the worst rating is error).

Fog also makes exactly the kind mistake Lomborg was warning against, when he compares the number of dead people per hurricane:

Page 100 bottom, note 509: In the note: “Notice that both hurricanes . . . caused many deaths . . “.

Flaw: The important omission is that hurricane Katrine caused the death of 1,200 – 1,300 people, making it the second most fatal hurricane after the Galveston hurricane. Estimates for the Great Miami hurricane range form 373 to 800 dead

The population at risk has grown so the number of deaths per million at risk has probably decreased.

Fog seems to completely disagree with Lomborg’s suggestions for alleviating hurricane damage:

That better warning systems today would have evacuated much of the city is at odds with what actually happened when Katrina struck in 2005.

As far as I know the way the US goverment dealt with Katrina was one of the worst blunders in their history. It is not just about warning systems, it is also about what you do when the storm actually hits. So when you look at it with that in mind it turns out that even a poorly managed flooding disaster in 2005 results in relatively less casualties than a long time ago.

But most importantly, once again, Fog is not comparing the effectiveness of CO2 reduction to that of other measures. He simply dismisses such other methods.

Let’s hear what the experts have to say on Lomborg’s story on storms. This is where things get interesting, because here we find Chris Mooney explicitly disagreeing with Lomborg, but implicitly agreeing. His main critique seems to be this:

Lomborg seems to ignore worst-case scenarios and precautionary thinking.

Interesting, but I will deal with “precautionary thinking” in part 3. Suffice it to say Lomborg is correct when he ignores worst-case scenario’s that have no explicit odds associated.

He continues:

Although he spends much time discussing how societal changes–the moving of persons and property into harm’s way–make us increasingly vulnerable to hurricanes, he fails to seriously consider the idea that when you add global warming to said societal changes, the result could be a double whammy.

And:

Alas, it’s not an “either-or,” it’s a “both-and.”

And:

So if you ignore them and only focused on addressing that vulnerability, you’re only dealing with a part of the problem

This is exactly the same flawed reasoning as with the Hans Brinker example above. It is not a double whammy, more like a 1.03 whammy. Further more, every dollar spent on lowering that 1.03 is better spent on other measures than carbon reduction. At least show a reasonable alternative distribution. The current argument is completely qualitative.

And here he basically admits Lomborg is right, or at least that Fog is completely wrong:

the most immediate policy prescription ought instead to be investing in better hurricane preparedness

The fact that I actually found this article through Fogs links is rather confusing.

Lomborg is not ignoring the effect of a carbon reduction measure, he is putting a number on them and comparing that number to other measures. It’s fair to debate his number, but neither critics are doing that. In fact nobody is doing that, and that is the problem.

Malaria

Lomborg’s argument is pretty straight forward here: Malaria used to be one of the biggest problems for western societies, even in temperate climates. Not anymore. Yes, Malaria likes it when the planet heats up a bit, but our medical systems overwhelmingly compensate for that. Malaria is solved as soon as suffering countries get help or get their act together and do something about it.

Fogs arguments on this issue are the most fuzzy of all yet. In stead of properly countering Lomborg’s arguments, he speculates that poverty in Africa won’t be solved. Once again he conveniently ignores scientific consensus here. Perhaps it’s time for a new phrase, to join Climate Deniers. How about Africa Deniers?

The second part of that comment is also worth reading:

‘Comment: Nobody can know for sure what will happen. We do not know for certain if Africa will manage to get out of its poverty trap, and we do not know if the malaria parasite will develop resistance faster than we can develop new anti-malaria drugs.’

The argument about drug immunity has nothing to do with climate change. How is this supposed to prove Lomborg is wrong?

This is by far the weakest attack of all. In no way is he convincing me that the effect of climate change on malaria is even nearly as relevant as the effect of policy. Using carbon emissions to get rid of malaria is completely absurd.

Final score Lomborg versus Fog

For none of the above issues does Fog convince me that climate control is a relatively effective way to tackle them, with a possible exception for heat deaths. On some issues he gains a few orders of magnitude at best, but turning a turtle in a race car does not get you to the next star.

I encourage other scientists to try harder: my main point of this post is to convince people to change the way they think about climate change. Secondary objective is to show that tackling climate change directly is a waste of resources.

Critics will have to come up with significantly bigger – and well founded – numbers to win this race.

Part 3 or back to Part 1

Upon closer inspection however, it turns out that the critique completely misses the point. The same goes for Ackermans paper ‘Hot, It’s Not – Reflections on Cool It!, by Bjorn Lomborg‘ and the other critics that I’ve been able to find so far.

What they are not seeing, is that Lomborg is proposing a paradigm shift. Or at the very least, they don’t understand the paradigm shift. I demonstrate this later on, but let me first explain this new paradigm. Please pay attention, as paradigm shifts tend to be hard to get if you are not used to them.

TOC:

1. A new paradigm for looking at climate change? (part 1)
2. Introduction to the new paradigm
3. How to properly use this paradigm in your critique of Lomborg
4. Debunking Cool It Critique (part 2)
5. My personal take home messages from Cool It
6. How bad are Lomborg’s Errors?
   1. Polar bears
   2. Heat and Cold deaths
   3. Melting glaciers
   4. Sea level rise
   5. Hurricanes and extremes
   6. Malaria
   7. Final score Lomborg versus Fog
7. What’s with the precautionary principle? (part 3)
8. What about Ackermans paper?
9. The organizational perspective
10. Conclusions

A new paradigm for looking at climate change?

The way I interpret Lomborg is as follows:

Climate change is not inherently good or bad. It is only the effect of climate change on issues that matter. For any particular issue, climate change is not the only factor that influences it. When dealing with an issue, we should focus on the most effective ways to do so.

If this doesn’t strike you as new, please read it again. If you don’t understand what I am saying here, please leave a comment and I will try to rephrase it somehow.

Introduction to the new paradigm

When two scientists look at a problem from completely different angles – i.e. paradigm – it is almost as if they are speaking two different languages. They both can’t make any sense of each other. Have you ever noticed how people who don’t speak your language properly always seem less intelligent? That’s human nature and it doesn’t help the situation.

What does help is a translator and both parties trying to learn each others language. I hope to contribute to that end in this rather lengthy blog post.

Let’s get started with a simple example, before I go through the critique in more detail. The numbers and assumptions in this example are not important; they are like your high school math examples. Remember the smart kid in class that always took these examples too seriously and asked annoying questions? That might have been me, so let’s not do that here shall we?

Question:

Imagine the Dodo is still be out there and that we interact with it in our traditional way: club them to death on a massive scale just for the fun of it. Now it turns out that if global temperatures increase by two degrees Celsius, 5% of the dodo population will die every year in heat waves. Your objective is to have as many dodos as possible in 2100. Environmental groups, governments and big oil companies have settled on a deal giving you $50.000 dollars to do this. What would you do?

Allowed assumptions (trust me, I’ve seen worse assumptions in some peer reviewed papers):

• There are 1000 dodos in the year 2000.
• Dodos do not have babies
• Dodos are immortal except when it comes to clubbing and heat waves
• Currently, 100 dodos are clubbed to death every year
• For a beer ($5) you can convince somebody not to club
• Temperature goes up by 0.02 degrees per year (2 degrees per century)
• For one degree Celsius above 2000 levels, 2.5% of dodos die (5% for 2 degrees)
• Reducing temperature by 0.01 degree costs $100
• No inflation or economic growth
• No change in human population
• Measures stop if dodo goes extinct or when you run out of money

The model

I created a simple Google Spreadsheet to simulate four different solutions. You can find it here.

Dodo population projection in four different scenarios. The 0 line is mostly hidden behind the A line.

Solution 0: doing nothing

Temperature will increase by 0.02 degrees per year, clubbing proceeds at 100 dodos per year. This will result in the dodo going extinct in 2009. Total cost is $0.

Solution A: keep temperature stable

Temperature will not increase, but clubbing continuous at 100 dodos per year. This will result in the dodo going extinct in 2009 after which the climate measures are suspended and the temperature increases at 0.02 degrees per year again. Total cost is $2000.

Solution B: stop clubbing

Temperature will increase by 0.02 degrees per year, but clubbing stops. Dodo population decreases steadily to 525 in 2049 when the money runs out. After that, the clubbing continues and the dodo is extinct in 2054. Total cost is $50,000.

Solution C: do both

Temperature does not increase and clubbing is stopped. Dodo population remains stable at 1000 until in 2041 when the money runs out. After that, the clubbing continues and the temperature starts to rise, causing the dodo to go extinct by 2051. Total cost of $50,000.

Comparison:

Solutions 0 and A both result in the dodo going extinct by 2009 and they do not use the full budget. It is safe to conclude that they are no good.

Solutions B and C fail to save the dodo from extinction, but do manage to keep the dodo around for another half a century. The important differences between these two is that even though solution B delays the final extinction by a couple of years compared to solution A, the number of dodos is lower at most times for B.

Since you have completely failed your objective, it is tricky to judge which solution is better, but it is clearly either B or C.

If you were forced to choose between either controlling temperature, or controlling clubbing, you should definitely go for the latter.

The best solution is probably a combination of both measures and more modeling would be required to figure out which combination.

How to properly use this paradigm in your critique of Lomborg

If this example was unleashed into the scientific community, it would receive very strong criticism from all sides.

Lomborg and the energy industry would probably argue that lowering the temperature is far more expensive and that even the slightest attempt at reducing temperatures would result in a quick extinction of the dodo.

Greenpeace would say the negotiations were unfair and demand that the government puts in much more money to save the poor dodos. They would also be very upset about the clubber bailouts. They will probably release a slightly modified version of this video.

Animal lovers would demand severe punishment for clubbers in stead of beer bribes.

Ecologists would demand that the model at least includes reproduction. At that point a strong debate will take place over the proper estimates for reproduction. If this debate gets overheated than people who suggest a high birth rate are seen as climate change deniers.

Still others would rigorously point out that I have completely mislead the world by stating that the cost of scenario C was $50,000 while the actual result was $50,400 due to a severe bug in the model.

This would go on forever and most of the critique would be completely legitimate.

However, it misses the point.

All critics seem to have in common that they do not phrase their answers within the same paradigm. They invariably do not explain how their critique influences the solutions to the issue being discussed. They either take the focus away from the issue and back to climate change in general or only focus on the effect of climate change on the issue.

I will use the example of Greenpeace hypothetically protesting against buying beer for dodo clubbers. I will show how they would likely present their argument and then explain how they should properly do it.

Expect a quote from them along the following lines:

Rewarding people who do bad things is bad! We should punish them and use the money for alternative energy! How dare Sjors present such a ridiculous scenario?!

What they neglect to do here is explain how to save the dodos. They should do their own research on a modified model and add the results to their press release:

In stead of paying $1000 dollars per year to clubbers, we have put the clubbers in jail and invested in alternative energy. We were able to buy a very small wind mill for $50,000, which reduced the yearly temperature increase by 0.0001%. We find no significant difference between our results and curve B before 2049, but after that our result is dramatically better. We end up with about 100 dodos in 2100, whereas solution B predicted complete extinction by 2054. We saved more dodos for the same price!

Now the discussion is using the same language and now we can start comparing options. Critics could now argue that you can’t just put clubbers in jail for 100 years and that buying a $50,000 windmill had absolutely no effect. They will then propose a scenario where the clubbers are sent to jail, but there is no subsidy. Using the same model they will find that this solution has the same result as the hypothetical Greenpeace plan, but is $50,000 cheaper.

It is crucial to guard against fuzzy reasoning where people all of a sudden start taking about additional factors, without actually accounting for them in a quantitative way. For example, one might argue that the proposed investment in alternative energy will create jobs. Such reasoning is misleading however, since the original argument was about saving dodos, not about creating jobs.

If you want to include jobs into the equation, that’s fine, but then you must first rephrase the objective to something like: “Create five jobs and save the dodos.” It may then turn out that there is more than one way to create these jobs and save the dodo.

You may of course disagree about the validity of the paradigm itself, but this is not currently happening, simply because none of the critics show any sign of understanding it, as I will show later on.

Part 2

It is a great thing when the whole world joins together for one hour to think about something important. I love that about Earth Hour. But why just climate change? There are so many other problems in the world.

Imagine having the worlds attention for one hour – something nobody has ever achieved – what would you say? What would you want 6.7 billion people to think about?

So here is my challenge for anyone who cares about the world, has a camera and some free time:

Send me a one hour video with your top 10 best ways to help the world!

Rules

There are just a few simple rules:

1. A top 10 of of best ways to help the world
2. 60 minutes
3. Explain the problem
4. Explain how it can be solved on a global scale
5. Provide a simple first step for individuals to contribute or learn more
6. No lies: be prepared for some serious fact-checking by the community
7. No divine intervention: it’s just us this time

I will pick a personal favorite, but at the end of the day there will be more than one winner. On Saturday the 28th or March 2009, at 20:30, everyone will show their favorite video to their friends, family and community.

Prizes

At this point, I will buy the winner a drink, but I’m trying to obtain more interesting prizes.

A bit of background

About a year ago I watched a talk by Bjorn Lomborg about setting global priorities. The question he asked himself is how to save the world with 50 billion dollars. If you have been watching the news lately, you will be painfully aware of how little money that really is.

Most people, including me back then, would assume that fixing climate change should at least be somewhere on that list. The eye opener is this: it’s all the way down the bottom! It turns out that if you have a limited budget to do good in the world, climate change is the last thing you should worry about.

I didn’t really know what to do with that information, until recently when two things happened more or less at the same time: I heard about Earth Hour and I read Bjorn’s recent book on climate change: Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming

Now I’ve always been a bit skeptical about Kyoto and about symbolic actions from the green movement in general. As a physicist and environmental scientist I already knew that Kyoto is too small to make a difference. Read the book if you want to know why, but to put it very simply: it is like walking to the moon.

There is a very important difference between a first small step towards a bigger goal and a first small step to nowhere (same goes for bridges…). Kyoto will not stop what we have set in motion, it will barely even slow it down. With or without Kyoto, humanity will have to deal with the same effects of climate change.

But until I read the book, my attitude was that if people enjoy walking to the moon, I should let them. It’s probably a Dutch thing: live and let live… Not much harm in people saving the planet in vain, right? Turns out I was wrong.

Bjorn presents an eye opening analysis of climate change. During my time as a masters student in Sustainable Development, I always looked at climate change as an umbrella phenomenon with all sorts of effects in other areas. For example, it causes temperature and sea level rise, habitat change, hurricanes, tropical diseases, etc. But we only looked at these issues from the point of view of climate change.

The remarkable thing about Cool It, is that it looks at all these issues from the perspective of the issues themselves. So in stead of just asking “What is the effect of climate change on tropical diseases?”, he would ask “What factors influence tropical diseases, and what is the relative role of climate change?”.

This is a massive eye opener! In stead of looking at the big, unfamiliar and scary monster of climate change, you are all of sudden looking at a large group of smaller monsters, that we are familiar with. It turns out we know quite a bit about tropical diseases, river flooding, etc.  Even more, for each of these monsters, reducing CO2 is by far the least effective way of defeating them. Just to make the book more controversial, some monsters are even easier to defeat with more CO2!

So where does Earth Hour come in? Well, because it turns out we can’t defeat all the little monsters if we all focus on the wrong attack strategy. Bjorn makes an excellent case that our global obsession with climate change is distracting us from solving the real problems. In fact, the obsession is making us ignore or even aggravate these real problems.

Focusing all the worlds attention for one hour on just climate change is therefore not only unproductive, it is counter productive!

Now I’m not saying that Bjorns own list of priorities is the best solution (although it looks pretty good actually), but I would like to see more people think very critically about priorities. People need to ask themselves tough questions, like:

• Should we spend $180 billion per year to delay the inevitable climate change by a few years or $50 billion to save polar bears, dramatically reduce flooding and hurricane damage, malaria, HIV, poverty, starvation, malnourishment, etc, etc, etc, etc?
• Should I spend my money on buying green bags and carbon credits, or donate to an anti malaria charity that can save far more lives per dollar?

We are living in a unique moment in time. Never before could a message be passed to the majority of humans in the world, including the ones that don’t have any electric lights to turn off. A date and time has already been conveniently picked. People will be together in the living room with their lights off. They will be thinking “Now what?”. So let’s give them something to watch, something to think about.

Let’s give everyone something to match their own taste: some people like drama with nice special effects, others like boring economic stuff, still others like personal stories. Not to mention the fact that there are quite a few languages and cultures out there. That’s why we need more than one winning video.

About the rules

A top 10 of best ways to help the world

I want the videos to focus on solutions, because I want the videos to result in quick and decisive action. Think years, not centuries. Sure, there are many problems out there to which there is no known solution yet, but there are also plenty of problems to which there are good solutions that just need to be executed. Focus on those.

It really has to be a top 10, not just ten examples. You really have to be convinced that your number one is the best thing you can think of. Similarly you agree that the number two is really good, but a little less so.

Just imagine getting a phone call from Google offering you a billion dollars, but you have to chose only one, right now! You’d better have your answer ready!

60 minutes

Because there are 60 minutes in an hour. That means you have about 5 minutes per problem, which is plenty of time. Have a look at some TED talks to learn how to present an incredible amount of information in a very short time.

Explain the problem

Because the focus is on solutions, this part should be done quickly. For example: “Malaria is killing millions of people per year, which is bad.”.

Explain how it can be solved on a global scale

These are kind of things the big players can work on, like your government:

“50 oil tankers filled with DEET should do the trick for about X tax payer dollars.”

Remember: you can’t just create money out thin air (actually you can, but it’s not recommendable), so really think about where that money comes from. What would your country or big corporate be willing to sacrifice? Or even better: how is it going to make money out of it?

Provide a simple first step for individuals to contribute or learn more

Sometimes only the big players can make a difference and they just need a bit of convincing. In that case you could say something like:

“There will be a rally to demand that our goverment spends $100 million on fixing malaria. Join us on [date, location] or find out what’s happening in your town at [website] ”

Perhaps there is a fund that people can donate money too: mention it.

But remember to think about how these first small steps will lead to the bigger solution. Don’t just start a walk to the moon!
No lies: be prepared for some serious fact-checking by the community

Please accompany the video with some documentation with references to your sources. I encourage you to release a first version of your video early on. That way, people can fact-check and discuss the content, while you can still make changes.

I am personally not amused by documentaries that present blatant lies, very dubious “facts” or mislead the audience in some other way. For example, I get very upset when a narrator mentions a huge number without putting it into perspective (e.g. “How would you feel if a coal company put a ton of CO2 on your house?”). Or when an extremely unlikely event is presented as inevitable (like a 30 meter sea level rise).

I’ve seen a lot of documentaries do this, so don’t let examples from Michael Moore or Al Gore guide you too much. There should always be room for some artistic freedom, but please do not mislead people: the world is complicated enough already.

Helping the world is very serious buisness and justify very strong debate. It requires documentary makers to swallow strong criticism and to learn from it. It also requires critics not just to be very civilized, but to really contribute. A comment like “You are stupid, this won’t work because of gravity.”, should be replaced by something like “Unfortunately your solution won’t work due to gravity, because [physics for dummies]. Perhaps you could consider [way to deal with gravity]. Good luck.”
No divine intervention: it’s just us this time

Some people believe mankind is doomed and that some sort of higher being wants to punish us for our sins. Others think that prayers might help. Still others think the earth belongs to Mother Nature and is better off without humans anyway. I think that is all complete rubbish. Tell that to the next person you meet who is dying from HIV.

The world is complicated enough without accounting for divine plans. Taking them into account will distract us from finding real solutions and from making progress towards a better world.

How to help

I am very busy, so any help – including taking over the entire project – will be greatly appreciated!

Other things you could do:

Tell your friends about this project. Especially your video-savvy friends. Of course, you can make a documentary with your cell phone camera, but if you happen to have a friend with a better camera: why not?

Read about the worlds challenges and possible solutions. The Copenhagen Consensus Center could be a good place to start, since their goal is “to improve the prioritizing between various efforts to mitigate the consequences of the world’s biggest challenges”.

Invite all your friends – although it might a bit early – to your home to watch the best video on Saturday the 28th or March 2009, at 20:30.