Hi everyone,
The recent discussion about Lomborg has inspired me to go beyond the
narrow limits of Patrick Moore's website (!) and do some more reading
on the subject.  I ran across the following review (Sept. 2001) of
Lomborg's work by John Gillott at
http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000002D229.htm .  (There are
a number of other fairly thoughtful pieces at spiked-online.com as
well.)

I still have not read Lomborg's book--that's a caveat--but hopefully
I will this summer.  With that confession, let me paste an excerpt
from Gillott's essay here.  Let us also assume for the sake of
argument that Gillott's rendering of Lomborg's argument here is
accurate (which I assume but cannot verify).  Gillott writes:

        "Lomborg's foray into economic modelling and forecasting is
quite speculative, but it does illustrate that the optimal strategy
for managing the impact of climate change may well be to favour
economic development over immediate reductions in greenhouse gas
emissions. One aspect of this can be put very crudely, he suggests:
it would benefit people in developing countries a great deal more if
the USA were to ignore calls to stabilise emissions of carbon dioxide
and instead gave them the money it would lose doing so (or cancelled
the equivalent amount of debt), and carried on regardless.

        "Despite using similar models, Lomborg ends up in a very
different place to the mainstream UN-sponsored Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is not that the scientists
involved with the IPCC have presented bad data, but rather that they
haven't even analysed certain issues. Lomborg tells us that a
political decision was taken that the IPCC should not take a
cost-benefit approach to climate change - and Lomborg does something
that the IPCC failed to do: he assesses the likelihood of the
different scenarios presented for this coming century. The
influential climatologist Stephen Schneider suggests that the IPCC
wanted 'to avoid endless disputes', which may be true - but it has
the effect of giving official sanction to worst-case scenarios.

        "In a hard-hitting section, Lomborg takes aim at the IPCC for
allowing climate policy to be 'used as a tool for charting an
alternative course of development'. '"Against the background of
environmental scarcities" [quoting from an IPCC report] this course
has to focus on eco-efficiency, industrial ecology, eco-efficient
consumption, etc.' Basically, the IPCC concludes that it will be
necessary to decouple wellbeing from production. Indeed, 'it will be
necessary to make people understand that the performance of things
cannot keep improving, for the sake of the environment.' "

Jim here: again, for the sake of argument, let us simply grant that
Gillott interprets the gist of Lomborg's *policy* argument here
correctly.  E.g. Lomborg argues that "it would benefit people in
developing countries a great deal more if the USA were to ignore
calls to stabilise emissions of carbon dioxide and instead gave them
the money it would lose doing so (or cancelled the equivalent amount
of debt), and carried on regardless."  That's a fairly
straightforward argument, and one that merits consideration whether
Lomborg makes the argument or someone else makes it.

It seems to me that various aspects of Lomborg's *policy* arguments
deserve to be taken seriously.  For example, if the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did indeed make a political
decision not to take a cost-benefit approach to climate change, then
that deserves philosophical analysis.  Essentially it sounds to me as
if the IPCC adopted a "precautionary principle" approach as regards
climate change.  Whether reported by Lomborg or someone else, that
*decision* is worth examining.

I have previously expressed (philosophical) reservations on this list
about the use of the precautionary principle in environmental ethics
and policy (see e.g.
<http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0005&L=enviroethics&P=R2602>
).  It sounds to me as if Lomborg is simply expressing similar
reservations about the use of the precautionary principle by the
IPCC.  If in fact it would make more sense for the IPCC to assess the
*likelihood* of different scenarios for the coming century, then
Lomborg's argument can be seen as a fairly standard call to use more
probabilistic modes of reasoning in policy (so-called Bayesian
approaches).  That's not an "anti-environmental" argument: that's
simply a philosophical argument, and one worth looking at.

Enough for now.  Fire away!    :-)

Jim T.