Andri G. Wibisana, Jakarta
The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize seems to be controversial. Many have argued that Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did not deserve the Nobel prize because there is no clear relationship between environmental advocacy and peace-making.
Indeed, one may disagree with the Nobel Prize Committee with respect to the question of whether environmental advocates can also be categorized as peacemakers. However, one critic has gone beyond this question.
In this newspaper on Oct. 16, Bjorn Lomborg argued that, unlike the IPCC, Gore has only succeeded in telling us to fear climate change without being supported by scientific data. Bjorn Lomborg is head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
In addition, contrary to popular opinion, Lomborg seems to believe that climate change is not something that requires immediate preventive action. Climate change may even be beneficial, he says. Hence, so Lomborg argues, the Nobel Peace Prize will only divert our focus away from current real problems faced by humans, such as malnutrition and HIV/AIDS (The Jakarta Post, Oct. 16, 2007).
Many of Lomborg's charges against Al Gore are flawed. Lomborg argues against what he believes to be Gore's claim in his An Inconvenient Truth that a 20-foot rise in sea level will take place over this century. However, after watching the movie, I believe that Gore never said that.
Gore has indeed warned us about catastrophic consequences if the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets completely or partially disintegrate.
The IPCC has categorized such disintegration, together with the shutdown of the thermohaline circulation and the major perturbations of biosphere-regulated carbon dynamics, as large-scale singular events.
According to the IPCC, although the probabilities of those events occurring in this century are unknown or relatively small, they cannot be ignored because of the catastrophic and irreversibility of their consequences.
In addition, although science is still unable to define with certainty the ecological thresholds of those events, the IPCC concludes that there is low to medium confidence that rapid and large temperature increases would exceed the thresholds and eventually lead to large-scale singularities in the climate system.
Hence when Gore talks about the impacts of large-scale singular events, he is actually warning us that the thresholds of those events could be exceeded when no action is taken to curb the increase of anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. Contrary to Lomborg's opinion, I find there is nothing wrong with such a warning.
In addition, Lomborg has also accused Gore's An Inconvenient Truth of being one-sided. This may be true. However, Lomborg seems to forget that this charge also holds for him as a climate change skeptic. There are several examples of Lomborg one-sidedness.
Lomborg points out that the number of lives saved from cold-related deaths will outnumber the number of deaths from heat waves. Although such a statement is supported by some scientific studies, Lomborg's conclusion that climate change will save lives is an exaggeration. For one thing, scientific studies on the comparison between heat and cold-related deaths are confined to some temperate countries, namely developed countries.
There is no study on such comparisons in developing countries, which are considered by the IPCC as more vulnerable than developed countries as they lack the resources needed to adapt to heat waves.
Accordingly, the IPCC finds that the absence of studies on the impacts of heat waves on populations in developing countries has precluded a generalized comparison between heat and cold-related deaths.
For another, focusing only on heat and cold-related deaths does not capture the full picture of climate change impacts on human health. As the IPCC has predicted, a moderate increase in temperature will amplify the increase of heat-related deaths and illnesses. A similar increase in temperature is also likely to increase the risks of deaths due to floods, storms, hunger and the expansion of vector-borne diseases.
Frankly speaking, in no way will climate change save more lives.
Lomborg's imbalanced opinion can also be seen in his calculation against early emissions reductions, such as those set forth in the Kyoto Protocol. From his article, one may get the impression that the protocol and any other proposal for immediate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions is economically unjustified. Lomborg argues that they may create more costs than benefits and eventually leave future generations impoverished.
However, Lomborg ignores the fact that there are several economic studies that have shown that early emissions abatement is much cheaper than doing nothing.
Lomborg's deliberate one-sidedness is more apparent if we look at the controversies surrounding his book. Claimed to be a book that reveals the real state of the world, Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist has received severe critiques for its notoriously imbalanced views.
In a 2001 edition, Scientific American, a leading science magazine, published a series of articles that devastatingly attacked every issue analyzed by Lomborg in this book. Stephen Schneider, a well-known scientist, said the only true words he could find in the book were when Lomborg admitted ""I am not myself an expert as regards environmental problems"".
If Gore's relentless campaign, as Lomborg charges, will lead us to a blinkered focus on climate change, then such a focus goes in the right direction. And, fortunately, more and more people are becoming aware of this.
The writer is a lecturer on environmental law at the School of Law, University of Indonesia, and a PhD candidate at the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands.
