Cool It?

Skeptical "environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg has a new book out, and NPR gave him ample space to plug it this morning on Morning Edition. I only listened to about half of the interview, but he was claiming that IPCC projections for 21st century climate change are nothing to be alarmed about. My sense was that he was probably working from summaries published prior to the most recent report, the AR4.

Lomborg's idiosyncratic mishmash of economic progressivism and Eurocentrism has basically been made obsolete by the inclusion of more qualified economists and other social scientists on the present Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Nonetheless, I do plan to dip into his book at some point. When I finally got around to reading The Skeptical Environmentalist, I found that it was poorly organized and inconsistent in how it applied mathematical statistics to economic and climatological models. There is uncertainty in both, but that uncertainty is quantifiable and does not preclude us from using those models to make and shape public policy.