Examination of Witnesses (Questions 182-199)
Professor Bjorn Lomborg
1 FEBRUARY 2005
Q182Chairman: We are most grateful to you for
coming along too. I know you were sitting through the previous
session, so you know exactly how we proceed. Is there something
you want to say at the beginning?
Professor Lomborg: I thought it might be good
to give away the bottom line. Global warming is happening and
it will have a serious impact. However, trying to do too much
to avoid global warming will also be costly, so the real dilemma
and the crux of the decision that we have to make as individual
nations and as a globe is to decide how far should we go along.
Unfortunately, the problem is it is going to be fairly costly
to do fairly little for people far into the future if we decide
to go far in the mitigation part; whereas that money could otherwise
be spent on many other things that would probably do more good.
Q183Chairman: You have answered the question
I was going to ask you which was whether you share the view of
scientists who say we are witnessing human-induced global warming.
To some extent you share their view but you are sceptical as to
whether it is quite as extreme as some people make out.
Professor Lomborg: There are several issues
on the science part. I do not doubt the fundamental idea that
if you put out more carbon in the atmosphere, all other things
being equal, it will get warmer. There are still a lot of uncertainties
but my argument is in general if there are a lot of people who
spend a large amount of their professional time looking at that
their arguments and models are probably better than our intuition
as to what will happen. The climate models that we have are the
best we have and the best understanding that we have right now.
However, there are two important qualifications. One is the climate
sensitivity which tells us how much is climate is going to warm
up if we double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That has
pretty much remained constant, the uncertainty that we have on
that parameter, since the mid-1970s, so in that sense we have
not become any smarter since the 1970s. It is still somewhere
between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Centigrade increase. The second part
is what is going to happen over 100 years. I totally agree with
Dr Pachauri. We have to make assumptions about what will happen
because we do make decisions that will last so long. On the other
hand, we also have to ask which of these scenarios is more likely.
There, I think the IPCC has chosen a somewhat timid way of saying
that they are all likely, but some clearly are more likely than
others.
Q184Chairman: Would you take the view that the
difference between the one range of options and the other range
of options presents very significant, different policy decisions
to be made following which one you take?
Professor Lomborg: They certainly indicate that
the damage will hit differently. If we are in the low end, up
to about three degrees Centigrade increase. It will primarily
hit the Third World. Whereas if we go beyond three degrees it
will also start having an impact on the First World. One of the
things that complicates the decision and what we can do is the
final parameter, namely the marginal idea, because obviously it
does not do very much good to say, "There are going to be
huge damages", if what we can do about those damages is very
slight. Dr Pachauri was mentioning that hundreds of millions of
people are dependent on rain-fed agriculture, so clearly we should
do something if global warming could seriously affect that rain-fed
agriculture. Surely that is not the argument. It could only be
the argument that we should do something if we could indeed change
their fortune. We have to look at what is the marginal impact
of what we can do. Even if we are going to have a situation where
we will impact on the high end of the temperature scale, we still
have to look at how much change can we do with political initiatives.
Q185Lord MacDonald of Tradeston: Where would
you put climate change in that list of, say, the top ten priorities?
I know you have attempted through the Copenhagen consensus to
ask a whole range of scientists what their priorities were. How
were they ranked and where would you think climate change sits
in them?
Professor Lomborg: The important part about
ranking issues is it does not make sense to rank problems. Probably
the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die but
we do not know how to solve it. You have to rank solutions. You
have to rank what can we do something about. There we have a group
of eminent economists including Nobel laureates to try to set
prices on costs and benefits of different things that we can do
to do good in the world. They found the top outcomes were dealing
with HIV AIDS, with malnutrition, with free trade and malaria.
At the bottom where they came in with bad proposals were proposals
like Kyoto and proposals that would go even further. It is important
to say this does not mean that they did not feel that some step
towards dealing with global warming would be relevant but not
nearly as far as Kyoto.
Q186Lord Sheldon: You say in some of your writings
that the growth rate suggested is about 1 per cent a year and
your suggestion is that it is about 0.6 per cent a year. Is this
limited to the difference between the IPCC and yourself?
Professor Lomborg: No. The IPCC is now running
its scenario assumptions so it is no longer relevant to talk about
the 1 per cent of the 0.85 per cent CO2 equivalent increase per
year. It is mostly in presentations, for instance, in Scientific
America. Lately, you saw the study that showed that we are
getting more and more heatwaves in Europe. That was also run on
a 1 per cent increase and it is empirically unlikely that we are
seeing that kind of increase. We are probably seeing an increase
of 0.6 per cent. It matters in that it tells us that we are getting
too many troubles too soon, but it is not relevant for the IPCC
work now.
Q187Lord Sheldon: The difference between you
could possibly be narrowed over a period of time through different
arguments and papers being presented, could it not?
Professor Lomborg: Yes. I argue that it should
be, and it has been in many of the simulation runs in the sense
that they are now running with the scenario outcomes which differ
very widely but also have some of the ones in the low range. I
am pointing out that there is a sense of a reference term that
is used of 1 per cent carbon equivalent increase and that is an
unrealistic assumption. It simply gives us a sense that things
are going faster than they really are. That is sometimes used
in public communication but not by the IPCC any more.
Q188Lord Lamont of Lerwick: Accepting that it
is a question of costs and benefits and concentrating on solutions,
not just entering into a lot of Domesday scenarios, could you
briefly say what you think the main categories of damage, if there
is such a thing as climate change, were? You have referred to
rain-fed agriculture. Presumably there are some benefits as well
in other parts of the world?
Professor Lomborg: Yes. One of the impacts demonstrated
by the IPCC is sea level rise, which will happen everywhere, which
will be in the order of 30 to 50 centimetres by the medium estimates
of the different models. That is a significant amount and that
will mean that we will have to take more care of our coast lines.
It should however be realised that over the last century sea levels
rose somewhere between 10 and 25 centimetres, so it is not something
that we are unused to having to deal with. It will mean general
temperature increases although they will be spatially distributed
and different, but that will especially harm the Third World or
tropical countries that are already in warm areas; whereas for
many temperate countries it will be both a boon and a problem.
One of the good ways of showing that is for instance in Britain,
where we know that if we get higher temperatures it will mean
that we will get more heat deaths. It is estimated that Britain
will probably get 2,000 more heat deaths with global warming in
about 2050. On the other hand, you have to realise it means we
will have fewer cold deaths. Since cold deaths vastly outweigh
heat deaths, it is estimated that there will be perhaps 20,000
fewer cold deaths. You need to have these things in perspective.
The bottom line is that there will be problems, especially for
Third World countries at what I see as realistic temperature increases
of two to three degrees warming. It will be a mixed bag for most
developed countries.
Q189Lord Lawson of Blaby: You were listening
to Dr Pachauri's evidence. There is obviously a huge measure of
agreement in this area but are there any points of disagreement
that you would have with him or any observations of that kind
which you would like to bring to the Committee's attention?
Professor Lomborg: It is probably mainly on
the question of cost, where Dr Pachauri argues from what is known
as the bottom up part of economics, where they are telling us
there are a lot of free lunches around. There are a lot of things
we can do at no cost. Most practical economists, certainly macro-economists,
would tend to dispute that and say it is unlikely that there are
10 dollar bills lying around that companies routinely neglect
to pick up. It was very clear in some of his examples that he
was saying, for instance, when he saw the car waiting it had been
cooled for him when he arrived, so it had been wasting energy
on his account for those two hours. On the other hand, I think
he probably found it rather nice that it was cooled when he finally
entered the car. The driver could have saved that money and that
amount of emissions had he turned off the air conditioning but
it would also have been a less pleasant car to get into. There
are those trade-offs and if we want to do good things it will
typically cost money. I would agree with Dr Pachauri that we need
to make sure that we cost externalities but likewise we should
be careful not to count them twice. If we want to put cost on
externalities, we should also be encouraging extra implementation
of renewable energy, for instance.
Q190Lord Sheppard of Didgemere: You have made
your thinking on scenario planning quite clear, but can you explain
in a little more detail? In your books you criticise the IPCC
method of construction. Can you then move on to the probability
theory and talk to us about which of those scenarios you think
are the most likely?
Professor Lomborg: Yes. As I briefly mentioned,
I think there is a problem in the fact that IPCC has declined
to say that some scenarios are more likely than others. It means
that we are basically faced with a huge variety of different outcomes,
and apart from the fact of climate sensitivity, which also has
uncertainty, we simply have a vast range of temperature outcomes
that could go from only "slightly troublesome" to "dramatically
problematic". What I tried to argue is that it really comes
down to the issue of saying, "How much is it likely that
renewables will gain in price efficiency over the century?"
There are good reasons to believe, as the models have also shown,
that since we have seen dramatic decreases in the cost of renewables
on account of about 50 per cent per decade over the last 30 years,
it seems likely that even if that continued at the rate of about
30 per cent, you would see that renewables, and especially solar
energy-which will be the long-term power source if we are getting
into renewable solar panelswill become competitive around
the mid-century. If that is the case, then it is very unlikely
that we would continue to use massive amounts of fossil fuels
by the end of this century. Then we have an outcome which is the
A1-T, the transition scenario, which I find the more likely one,
from the UN climate panel, which is also right in the middle of
most of the scenarios that the UN has, and which gives a temperature
increase of 2.5 degrees. It seems much more likely that we will
end up in a range of about 2-3 degrees, which is where the majority
of the scenarios are. It does not mean that it is the very lowest,
but it also does mean the high end of 5.8 degrees simply is a
combination of assumptions that seem fairly unlikely to happen.
Q191Chairman: What role would you have for nuclear
in all of that? How do you see nuclear developing in those future
scenarios?
Professor Lomborg: It is important to say that
I am arguing for what we should be doing, but I do not know what
China is going to do, as you have just mentioned. I do not know
their mind. I think, bottom line, what we have seen so far with
nuclear is that it is a more expensive way of producing energy,
which seems to indicate that it is not a good long-term solution,
and that the majority of the expansion that we are going to see
in world energy requirements will be in the third world, and then
we might also have security concerns over the waste materials
from nuclear processes.
Q192Lord Sheppard of Didgemere: The previous
speaker did not say much about how he and his colleagues were
talking to users in a particular industry. In your dialogues in
your home country and other parts of Scandinavia, have you had
much dialogue with businesses? Do we know what their 10 or 20
or 30-year thinking is on use of energy?
Professor Lomborg: No, I am sorry, I do not
know very much about it.
Q193Lord Skidelsky: Can I probe you a bit further
on policy on global warming? In your book you suggest that the
damage from uncontrolled emissions would be in the order of 5
trillion, and the costs of control would be in the same order
of magnitude, perhaps a little less. Are those numbers still in
the right ball-park?
Professor Lomborg: Yes.
Q194Lord Skidelsky: If they are, what are the
implications for policy? I can think of perhaps three. One is
reducing the damage by controlling emissions; the second might
be trying to compensate people for damage without controlling
emissions; and the third might be to do nothing or very little
and leave it to market forces and technology that is still unknown
to just reduce the level of emissions. Is that the range of options
you would be interested in considering? Have I left anything out?
Professor Lomborg: It is important to clarify
that I do not do these models myself. This is perhaps the most
respected global cost-benefit model developed by Professor Nordhaus
with Yale University, and the scale of the magnitude is about
right. The total cost discounted to today's money, so in essence
what we would have to pay to cover all damages that will come
at any future time, would be about $5 trillion. What you have
to then say is that if we went on to control it, in the sense
of an extended Kyotoof course it depends on what we actually
do, but if we did an extended Kyoto, which would basically freeze
the levels at about 1990 levels for the entire world, which does
not seem like an absolutely impossible follow-upcertainly
some musings from the EU have been on that kind of a solution
for the world after 2012if we were to choose that kind
of outcome, the total cost would run somewhere between $8-9 trillion,
so in essence $3-4 trillion more. It is important to say it is
not $5 trillion versus $4 trillion, because then it sounds like
you should pick the 4 trillion. It is $5 trillion and the four
more. It is important to say when you are talking about cost-benefit
analysis that you are not looking at the distribution between
people; and that is an important issue, which you rightly raise.
That is one of the reasons why many people would argue that it
would be immoral for us to say, "well, it is going to be
very costly for us to do something now, like carbon emissions;
it is going to be a problem for people in the Third World especially,
but that is 100 years from now and it is not us, so why do we
not just keep the money?" In cost-benefit terms that would
be a rational outcome but we might not feel that to be a morally
correct outcome. But then the argument is: should we then try
to compensate these people directly? I do not see that there is
any way that we can reasonably do that. Should we then try to
help them in some way? I think most people would be inclined to
say "yes"; and the question then becomes: should we
help them through the way we limit damage, that is by limiting
our carbon emissions, which is a fairly inefficient way of helping
them; or should we rather be helping them in general in the sense
that we help people in those areas with the top priorities from
the Copenhagen Consensus, saying we deal with HIV/AIDS, malaria,
micro-nutrient deficiencies, and free trade, enabling these countries
to get much richer in the long term?
Q195Lord Skidelsky: And they are less dependent
on those factors which might
Professor Lomborg: Yes, yes. At the Copenhagen
Consensus one of our participants, Tom Schelling, put it very
eloquently. He said, as you also mentioned earlier, that it is
likely by the UN scenarios in 2100 that the poor countries will
be much richer than they are now, probably even richer than we
are now; so when we are talking about helping Bangladesh in 2100
we are really talking about helping a rather affluent Netherlands,
and we have to remember that. His idea, his thought experiment,
was to say: "Imagine I was a rich Chinese or a rich Bolivian
or rich Congolese in 2100, looking back on 2005 and saying, `how
odd, they cared so fairly much for me and spent so much money
on helping me rather little, now that I am so rich too, and cared
so fairly little for my grandfather and my great-grandfather,
who needed the help so much more and whom they could have helped
much more'." That encapsulates the real dilemma: should we
help people in a hundred years from now inefficiently or should
we help people now efficiently, and thereby also their descendants,
and make them a much more resilient society better able to deal
with the problems that they will have no matter what?
Q196Lord Layard: Is it not the case that we
know pretty well what the costs will be, but we do not really
know what the damage would be? It may be the average damage that
is applied, but we are talking about extreme uncertainty when
we come to the damage. For example, we know that if the Indian
monsoon is plus 10 per cent, you get major flooding, and if it
is minus 10 per cent you get a lot of drought. We really do not
know how the spread of the monsoon will be affected by this. We
are talking about 1 billion people. To have the discussion in
terms of expected values, when at one end it would be catastrophic
for a whole continent and might lead to mass migrations, which
would have a big impact on all kinds of peoplethis is the
problem. I do not have a view, but I can see the danger of conducting
this discussion in terms of expected value when we know the costs
but we do not know the damage.
Professor Lomborg: You are absolutely right
that we have to be more explicit, but I think you will find it
gives much the same impactalthough Tol, who comes after
me, will probably give you much better information on the expected
damages. The bottom line here is to say that if we are in a world
where, if we put out carbon dioxide for a sufficiently long time,
the monsoon will fail or the Gulf Stream will turn or the West
Antarctic ice sheet will slip, then the real question here again
is not to say would we rather not have thatof course we
would notbut the real policy issue is, would we then want
to do Kyoto, which would probably postpone the collapse of the
Gulf Stream or the stopping of the monsoon or the slipping of
the West Antarctic ice sheet for six years? It is really a question
of asking how much you are willing to spend to postpone those
problems, rather than to avoid them. Of course, as you move further
along and say you are willing to make very, very strong changes
in your emissions, then you can also actually change the outcome
of these. Mostly, and certainly when we are talking about realistic
cuts in carbon emissions over the coming decade, I would say we
are only talking about postponement. No matter what damages lie
ahead, it is really just a question of how much it is worth for
us, if those damages were to happen, to postpone them for some
years.
Q197Lord Layard: Am I right in thinking that
the reason why the oft-quoted fact that Kyoto will make almost
no difference in 2040 is because of the very long lags between
the greenhouse gas build-up and the temperature effect? In which
case, is it correct that the Kyoto agreement will have much more
effect after 2040 than it would before, and is it misleading just
to focus on the 2040 vision? Equally, if you had the follow-up
to Kyoto, is it right that we should be got into this fatalistic
mood that we have got into by this statement that Kyoto will have
no effect by 2040 if similar things to Kyoto could have a big
effect further on? We must agree that we have to look further
on as well, precisely because of these lags.
Professor Lomborg: It is in fact not true thatit
depends what you think and how you define "big effect",
but in 2040 it will have no measurable effect, but still in 2100
it will postpone global warming for about six years. No, it will
not have a major impact, nor if you look in the very long-term.
This is assuming that in 2012 you just keep the promises that
you have already made, but you make no new ones. Basically, if
Kyoto is just defined as the 2008-12, it will have absolutely
no effect whatsoever. So we are assuming at least that we keep
those promises for the rest of the century.
Q198Lord Layard: The statement on Kyoto is that
after 2012 we abandon Kyoto and go on to the growth path we would
be on anyway.
Professor Lomborg: Then it would have no effect
whatsoever. You would not be able to measure it. My statement
is that if you keep Kyoto for the rest of the century-that is
the Kyoto requirements, namely 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels
for the rest of the century-it will postpone global warming for
six years. Of course, if you do more it will have a great impact.
There is no doubt that you can achieve more. What is regularly
forgotten in that discussion though is that you cannot say, "Kyoto
is going to cost perhaps $150 billion a year and it is not going
to do very much good, but we are going to do much, much more later
on". Then of course the cost will also rise, and you need,
if you are going to compare the two, to compare like with like.
Q199Lord Vallance of Tummel: If you had the
power personally to determine the next round of international
negotiations post-Kyoto, what would you prescribe?
Professor Lomborg: The problem with much of
the discussion around climate change is that we tend to think
about what we should do over the next 10 years, whereas the real
discussion is to make sure that we deal with climate change over
a 50-year or 100-year period. There are two versions of this.
Firstly, it will be exceedingly difficult to get the developing
countries in on cutting emissions. It will get exceedingly difficult
to keep those promises as we get more and more loopholes. We are
basically asking a lot of nations to do what is not in their individual
interests but only perhaps in their collective interest, so it
is a very, very difficult treaty to go through. We have already
seen this for Kyoto, just for the European Union. I predict that
several countries will not make the cut when we come to 2008 and
it will be a very hard bargain just to get there, and there has
certainly been a lot of political will. In that sense, it would
make much more sense, instead of trying to get countries to do
what is essentially not in their own private interests, to get
them to invest in research and development, especially of renewables,
to make sure that renewables get cheaper a little sooner, so that
by 2050 renewables actually will be cheaper. Then, of course,
you do not have to convince any countries to take over renewables
because it will be cheaper than using fossil fuels, and then obviously
they will want to do so. The second thing is that it is probably
likely that investment in renewablesalthough it is very
hard to show with economic modelswill be much more efficient
than, for instance, doing Kyoto. Just if we could move forward
a few years to the time when we shift over to renewables around
mid-century, it would have a greater impact on the climate than
if we all did Kyoto. It would probably be much, much cheaper.
Just to give you an example, the US spends about $200 million
on renewables research and development. If they increased that
effort tenfold it would still just be about 1 per cent of the
cost of Kyoto, and it would probably do much, much more good.
Again, it is about making sure that we make the long-term interests
more in line with what we want, namely for people to switch over
to renewables, but not to try to cut right now, which is expensive
and does fairly little good.
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