So the argument is simply that Kyoto doesn't work?

Kyoto is not an issue I follow much. It's too discouraging, I don't know the science so it's hard for me to decipher the claims/counter-claims and any social response seems to be predicated on such massive change that it seems unlikely until the very last moment. But I thought that opponents' argument against Kyoto is that it is "too expensive" and "bad for the economy" and etc etc. Such make-weights have been used against so many things which now seem obvious -- seatbelts and racial integration, for one smallish and one huge example -- that I no longer take those arguments seriously.

But this article -- Save the world, ignore global warming  -- by Bjorn Lomborg claims a more telling argument. Kyoto doesn't do the job:

Even if everyone (including the United States) did Kyoto and stuck to it throughout the century, the change would be almost immeasurable, postponing warming by just six years in 2100.

Lomborg readily admits that climate change is indeed for real and a problem but simply that Kyoto doesn't do enough. Any basis to such a statement?

UPDATE: Unless I am missing something, Lomborg's critique is far more sophisticated than the simple snering denial you hear from Rush Limbaugh and his followers. Lomborg agrees that there is a problem but that Kyoto is simply not a good solution. No?

Via Crooked Timber.

UPDATE 2:

Robert Frost opines on the issue:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Update: Here are two blogs which seem to focus on this issue: RealClimate and Mark Lynas

Comments

[Thomas Palm]

The Kyoto treaty is designed to limit emissions up to 2012. Any reductions after that are supposed to be negotiated in further treaties, the process of which has just started. Therefore Lomborg's talk about how little sticking to the Kyoto treaty for the rest of the century would do is highly misleading. Kyoto is the first step, and how much we'll do later on should be adjusted as we see how much reductions cost and as the knowledge of the climate improves.

[Luke Francl]

When you look at the geologic record, the cost of global warming is almost immeasurable.

http://ebulletin.le.ac.uk/features/2000-2009/2004/12/nparticle-vkt-hgf-t4c

Once the landlocked ice melts, we're looking at 5-10 meters rise in sea levels within a decade. I think the result of that would be absolutely catastrophic: world-wide war at the least.

Lomborg is a shill for interests that don't want to do anything about global warming. He's just a more sophisticated version of the ideologues who say global warming doesn't exist. His argument that we could do much more with the Kyoto money to make people's lives better is ill-placed. If he wants to look at environmental issues economically, he should investigate the best way to spend $100 billion to prevent global warming from getting worse.

[Brett Bellmore]

As an exercise for those who think global warming is going to melt the Antarctic ice cap, I suggest you look up the temperature trends near the poles. Just because the average temperature is going up, doesn't mean the warming is happening where there's ice around to melt.

[David Sucher]

I think that defining the problem as "global warming" unfairly simplifies the matter. The issue really is "climate change" -- and that can include any combination of global warming/cooling with localized cooling/warming.

[Luke Francl]

Brett, temperatures at the Arctic Circle, at least, are rising. It's affecting the plant and animals there and the livelihoods of the people who make it their home.

If you read the article I linked to, the authors note with concern that the ice shelf over Greenland is receding. Its loss would mean a 7 meter increase in sea levels. 100 million people live within 1 meter of the current sea level.

David -- true, but "climate change" is a feel-goodism used by conservatives because it sounds less disturbing than "global warming". The issue is "climate change" but the average temperature of the world is rising, so I think it fair to call it global warming.

[David Sucher]

But Luke, I thought that the issue really is -- in the larger sense -- "climate change." It doesn't really matter whether it's getting colder or hotter as the fundamental policy issues involve how we should make decisions in the face of uncertainty, the "precautionaty principle" and so forth.

[Anna]

2 things -

You are aware of the new climatologists' blog, realclimate.org? ("A number of climate scientists have teamed up to set the record straight", says Chris Mooney)

also - with the rather large caveat that I haven't actually, like, _read_ any of Lomborg's work - here's an interesting observation made a while back ( in http://mentalspace.ranters.net/quiggin/archives/001253.html )
"I began with a very positive attitude towards Lomborg. He seemed to be taking a sensibly optimistic attitude towards environmental problems, pointing to our successes in fixing up pollution problems, the ozone layer and so on, rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios. Then I gradually realised that Lomborg only endorsed past actions to address environmental problems - whenever any issue came up that might involve doing something now, Lomborg always had a reason why we should do nothing."

[Laurence Aurbach]

There is general agreement that Kyoto by itself won't effectively address the problems brought on by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases. It's a first step in a longer-term process to deal with climate change.

Lomborg has been making the same argument for a few years; Crooked Timber contributor John Quiggen refuted several of Lomborg's arguments in an Australian Financial Review column. On the question of whether mitigation measures pass a reasonable cost-benefit test, Quiggen says,

...one of the big difficulties in this is that, while it's possible to make reasonably good estimates of the costs of implementing Kyoto and of going on to stabilise CO2 emissions, there are no good estimates of the cost of doing nothing. The only numerical estimate I've seen is from Nordhaus and it is both arbitrary (literally plucked out of nowhere) and absurdly low. This is the number that Lomborg is relying on when he says things like "all studies show costs exceed benefits". A more correct statement would be "Nordhaus' guess says that costs exceed benefits."

[Glen Raphael]

Anna: I don't find the observation as interesting as you do. You quoted: Then I gradually realised that Lomborg only endorsed past actions to address environmental problems - whenever any issue came up that might involve doing something now, Lomborg always had a reason why we should do nothing.

There's a rather severe selection bias problem there. All past actions have involved compromise. People who know something about the environment but don't know any economics or statistics might propose some outlandish scheme, people like Lomborg would weigh in with skepticism, the scheme was modified to address the most obvious and costly problems, more data was gathered, and gradually a consensus was forged that enough people could live with that it actually passed muster. That is to say, past actions included the input of people like Lomborg. Proposed future actions may not have. In any case, they are in a different category. Some proposals are intuitively or after some degree of analysis reasonable enough that Lomborg doesn't object to them, so you never hear him complaining. Other proposals don't yet meet his standards and so you do.

Lomborg isn't saying do nothing. He's objecting to a proposal to do a specific something for which a sufficiently strong case has not yet been made.

Incidentally, I read _The Skeptical Environmentalist_ and found it reasonable convincing. He does a good job of distinguishing the scary predictions in the popular press with what the IPCC actually found and claimed and on what basis they claimed it. Incidentally, the expected increase in sea level over the next century is about 40 centimeters, which is about the same as the increase we had over the last century. (Lomborg's reference on this is the 2001 IPCC report; there's a nice chart showing the different ranges on page 265 of _Skeptical Environmentalist_)

[Thomas Palm]

_The Sceptical Environmentalist_ has gotten terrible reviews in the scientific community for the way it only select data that suits Lomborg's goal, creating a false picture of the real scientific knowledge. Here are some links:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000B2956-A846-1CDA-B4A8809EC588EEDF&sc=I100322

If you want to know what IPCC has to say about sea level rise, why not read what IPCC has to read since it is easily available on the net:
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/409.htm
The statement that we've had 40 cm sea level rise during the last century is wrong, it's more like 15 cm. For this century expactations are a bit over 40 cm with a large uncertainty, but it is an accelerating process so the century after that the rise will be even faster.

[Glen Raphael]

I'm aware of a number of negative Lomborg reviews but I don't find them convincing. Many of the respondents show little sign of having actually read the book and thought about the arguments being presented. Here's a Guardian article about the Scientific American controversy:

http://www.greenspirit.com/lomborg/photos/AnthonyBrowneObserverScientificAmerican.htm

Here's Lomborg's response to the SciAm article that SciAm wouldn't allow him to even post on his own website), as mirrored by the founder of Greenpeace, a Lomborg supporter:
http://www.greenspirit.com/lomborg/

(incidentally, most of the links on the page you gave are now dead. The last link is probably dead because the Danish scientific community no longer defends the original charges they made - see here:
http://www.lomborg.com/critique.htm )

I appreciate the link to the IPCC and to realclimate.org -- I've added that last one to my rss reader.

[Thomas Palm]

Lomborg being a politcal scientist is no doubt better at propaganda than the scientists who oppose him. Take his claim to be an environmentalist and former Greenpeace member. It always sounds good with sob stories about people who reluctantly find out that their earlier beliefs have been wrong, but is it true? Wikipedia states that "He has claimed to have been a former member of Greenpeace. When challenged that Greenpeace had no record of him ever being a member or supporter, he stated that he had given money to Greenpeace collectors."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjorn_Lomborg
This talk about Lomborg as an environmentalist is repeated in your Guardian article, which shows that the author hasn't done his homework. Since some of my former links turned out to be inactive, here is a working description of Lomborg, his works and methods:
http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/
It is impressive how a political scientist with no credential in any of the subjects about the environment he now talks about has become something about a world authority, but it says more about the shallowness of the media that prefer style over contents.

That Scientific American doesn't want someone to copy their entire article is not that surprising, although from a PR purpose complaining was a bad move. For Lomborg to claim that he can't reply to the complaints without cypying the article was silly, though. People have responded to critique for ages without doing that kind of copying.

Calling Moore "the founder of Greenpeace" is misleading. Unlike Lomborg he actually was an active member, but like Lomborg he has shown how profitable it can be to oppose environmentalism:
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Patrick_Moore

And here you can find the Dansih Research council's final decision:
http://www.forsk.dk/uvvu/nyt/presse/lomborg_press_uk.htm
They do not state that Lomborg was right, only that it is not worth the trouble to go on, given that already in their first decision they decided that Lomborg had not participated in scientific fraud since his book shouldn't be classified as science.

[Matt Warbasse]

I would like to introduce an opposing view that the earth is actually cooling down. My research shows that during the the months of September-May, the earth actually gets colder. This process has gone widely unnoticed, but poses a serious threat to the livelihood of our world. Occasionally disguised a cyclical weather change known as winter, this is actually a form of progressive global change. Thank you for considering my opinion.