Bjorn's Bangladesh Bullshit

[hatrack]

EDIT

Bjørn Lomborg, in a recent interview, told Bangladesh, the country, not to worry too much about global warming, and instead, to focus on other problems. He equated concern over sea level rise in a country where sea level rise is a very significant problem with immorality. While Lomborg may be correct to point out the obvious – that Bangladesh has a lot of problems in public health and other areas to worry about – he is wrong to suggest that sea level rise in that low lying country can be addressed just as the Dutch have managed the sea in The Netherlands.

Lomborg seems to not know much about sea level rise. He once noted that sea level rise had stopped, or even decreased, by referring to a single year’s worth of data (see graphic above). That statement and his suggestion that sea level rise should be a low priority in a country that may be the most threatened by sea level rise in the world (aside from island nations) is reminiscent of a statement by J.R. Spradley, a delegate at an international conference on climate change in 1990, speaking about sea level rise in Bangladesh. He was quoted in the Washington Post as saying “The situation is not a disaster; it is merely a change. The area won’t have disappeared; it will just be underwater. Where you now have cows, you will have fish.” (Washington Post, December 30th, 1990.) Part of Lomborg’s argument is typical for him. He generates a straw man by equating concern over climate change with concern over a meteor about to smash into the earth. In the interview he said,

Projecting scary scenarios are probably unhealthy to deal with real issues. Now, if there was a meteor hurtling towards earth, we should tell people. If there was really something destroying the earth we should definitely be telling people and doing something about it. My point is if you, for instance, look at climate change, it is often portrayed as the end of the world. But if you look at for instance the UN climate panel, they tell us by about 2070 the total cost of global warming is going to be somewhere between 0.2 and 2% of the GDP. And that emphasises what I am trying to say – global warming is real, it is a problem, it is something we should fix, but it’s not the end of the world.

The problem with this is that sea level rise is, essentially, the end of the world, if you are Bangladesh. The most troubling part of Lomborg’s statements is that he equates the Netherlands with Bangladesh. The Netherlands is about 25% below sea level, but the sea is kept back by dikes. Other than their cheese, chocolate, love of splitting the restaurant tab, this is probably what the Dutch are most known for. Indeed Dutch engineers were drafted into managing water related problems around the world for centuries. So maybe the Dutch can help Bangladesh keep the Indian Ocean off it’s turf when that ocean is 8 meters above the present level. Lomborg looks to the Dutch to do just this:

… how much of a problem is [sea level rise in Bangladesh]? The Dutch has shown us 200 years ago, you can handle sea level rise fairly, easily and cheaply, you can do the same thing here and you will do the same thing here. Remember when people say, global warming is a big problem and we need to put a wind turbine here – any amount of wind turbine or solar panels that we are going to put in the next 50 years, are going to have absolutely no impact on the sea level rise that towards the end of the century. They may make a tiny difference towards the 22nd century, but if want to do anything about sea level rise, it’s all about adaptation. Globally there seems to be actually less ferocious hurricanes, one measure is accumulated cyclone energy, which is sort of a good global estimate and it’s actually been at some of the lowest levels since we started monitoring in the 1970s. There is a theoretical argument that you will see slightly fewer but slightly stronger hurricanes towards the end of the century. Again, this is not by any means the end of Bangladesh.”

The Netherlands is about 41,543 square kilometers in size with about 17% of that reclaimed from the sea, this and other land kept dry by dikes. Bangladesh is about 147,570 square kilometers. The Netherlands does not get tropical cyclones very often. Bangladesh gets the worst of them. There are geological differences between the regions that matter as well. Bangladesh is, essentially, a giant delta (I oversimplify slightly) which means that part of is is sinking all the time even while the sea level goes up. Flooding along rivers becomes a big problem with sea level rise. Both regions have rivers. Bangladesh, however, is a country made out of rivers, and among them is the Ganges, which is the world’s third largest river by discharge. Bangladesh probably has more problems with flooding than any other nation. In 1988, 75% of the entire country of Bangladesh was covered by a flood.

EDIT

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/03/12/lomborg-tells-bangladesh-not-to-worry-about-sea-level-rise/

[Fred Sanders]

1. Science Truthers are pure evil, lying about the science, preying on the uninformed, and then selling the lies for selfish profit

[GliderGuider]

2. Bjorn, again?

Last edited Sun Mar 15, 2015, 09:49 AM - Edit history (1)

In January of 2004 I was a summa cum laude graduate of the "Bjorn Lomborg School of Don't Worry, Be Happy". But by September I was a full-blown Peak Oil/Climate Change Doomer™. All from looking at the actual data. Of course I wasn't receiving any funding to help me maintain my original beliefs...

[eppur_se_muova]

3. I wonder how many people drowned because someone listened to his "advice" ?

One of my favorite quotes from The Simpsons:

Jay Sherman (movie critic): *heavy sigh* How do you sleep at night ?
Rainier Wolfcastle: On top of a big pile of money, with several beautiful ladies.

[LouisvilleDem]

4. 8 meters above the present level?

Is there any peer reviewed science that is predicting that kind of rise? I know that AR5 contains nothing that drastic...

[GliderGuider]

5. Here are a couple.

Scientific reticence and sea level rise (pdf)

ftp://rock.geosociety.org/pub/reposit/2012/2012112.pdf - High tide of the warm Pliocene: Implications of global sea level for Antarctic deglaciation

And here is a general-readership article distilling the above paper: http://www.bitsofscience.org/2-degrees-climate-warming-pliocene-sea-level-rise-5353/

Google is your friend - if you actually want to find the answer to your question. There are lots of papers on this out there.

[LouisvilleDem]

6. Two comments

The first paper is from 2007 and woefully out of date. For example:

Assuming a nominal ‘Charney’ climate sensitivity of 3 ◦C equilibrium global warming for doubled CO2, BAU scenarios yield a global warming at least of the order of 3 ◦C by the end of this century. However, the Charney sensitivity is the equilibrium (long-term) global response when only fast feedback processes (changes of sea ice, clouds, water vapor and aerosols in response to climate change) are included (Hansen et al 2007). Actual global warming would be larger as slow feedbacks come into play. Slow feedbacks include increased vegetation at high latitudes, ice sheet shrinkage, and terrestrial and marine greenhouse gas emissions in response to global warming.

The very notion that climate sensitivity is 3 ◦C is not supported by the latest research, which is why in AR5 the IPCC lowered what it considers the likely range from what it stated in AR4. Since AR5 was published, the number of papers arguing for even lower sensitivity figures (some suggesting the number could be below 1 degree) has only increased. The fact that this paper quotes the 3 ◦C number, and then proceeds to explain that it is too low based upon the unsupported (and incorrect) notion that IPCC estimates do not include "slow feedbacks" merely demonstrates how outdated its conclusion are.

And what exactly are those conclusions? To put it lightly, they are not exactly brimming with confidence:

Under BAU forcing in the 21st century, the sea level rise surely will be dominated by a third term: (3) ice sheet disintegration. This third term was small until the past few years, but it is has at least doubled in the past decade and is now close to 1 mm/year, based on the gravity satellite measurements discussed above. As a quantitative example, let us say that the ice sheet contribution is 1 cm for the decade 2005–15 and that it doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. That time constant yields a sea level rise of the order of 5 m this century. Of course I cannot prove that my choice of a ten-year doubling time for nonlinear response is accurate, but I am confident that it provides a far better estimate than a linear response for the ice sheet component of sea level rise under BAU forcing.

Given the behavior of the climate since this paper was published in 2007, I think it's fair to say choice of a ten-year doubling time is not accurate.

The second paper is an educated guess at what conditions were like during the Pliocene. Assuming that sea levels will reach the same levels that they did during the Pliocene simply because a few computer models think we might be in the same temperature range as then is a stretch. There are so many unknowns about what things were like that long ago that there are literally dozens of other reasons beyond temperature that ocean levels were as high as they were during the Pliocene.

I agree that there are probably a few published papers out there that contain doomsday predictions of sea level rise. However, the stated purpose of IPCC reports is to have experts analyze the all of the papers published and research conducted since the last report and make a determination as to what the latest consensus opinion is. Offering up two papers, one of which is 7 years old, hardly qualifies as proof that the experts at the IPCC got it wrong in AR5 when they said the sea level rise would be between 26 and 82 cm by 2100. More importantly, they admitted that our current understanding of sea ice loss is rather immature:

Anthropogenic forcings are very likely to have contributed to Arctic sea ice loss since 1979. There is low confidence in the scientific understanding of the observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent since 1979, due to the incomplete and competing scientific explanations for the causes of change and low confidence in estimates of internal variability.

Arctic temperature anomalies in the 1930s were apparently as large as those in the 1990s and 2000s.There is still considerable discussion of the ultimate causes of the warm temperature anomalies that occurred in the Arctic in the 1920s and 1930s.

[GliderGuider]

7. Whatever you want to believe is fine by me. nt

[NickB79]

8. Antarctic ice shelves are melting dramatically, study finds

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/26/collapse-antarcticas-glaciers-ice-melt-sooner-than-thought-scientists-warn

Dr Paul Holland, a climate scientist at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), said the loss of the shelves would speed the complete collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet, which would eventually cause up to 3.5m of sea level rise. But he said it was highly unlikely this would occur this century. He said the “worst case scenario” for 2100 was that ice sheets would contribute an additional 70cm to the sea level rise caused by the warming of the ocean.

And on the other side of the continent, the east Antarctic glaciers aren't faring much better:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2015/03/21/study-suggests-that-key-glacier-east-antarctica-melting-from-beneath/bHdvnCgezdZh9091pyFTwM/story.html

The Totten Glacier covers an area of 40 miles by 18 miles. It is losing an amount of ice ‘‘equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbor every year,’’ notes the Australian Antarctic Division.

That’s alarming, because the glacier holds back a much more vast catchment of ice that, were its vulnerable parts to flow into the ocean, could produce a sea level rise of more than 11 feet — which is comparable to the impact from a loss of the West Antarctica ice sheet. And that’s ‘‘a conservative lower limit,’’ says lead study author Jamin Greenbaum, a PhD candidate at University of Texas Austin.

3 meters here, 4 meters there, but hey, who's counting, right?