The Millennial Files

Global Warming Denier Follows Gore at Congressional Hearing

I suppose it was in the interest of being “fair and balanced” that  Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish Global Climate Change denier (deny-er)  was asked to speak at the invitation of Republicans looking to protect the investments and profits of their benefactors, Chevron, Standard, Brtiish Petroleum and Shell Oil.

Most people have not heard of Dr. Lomborg, but in the environmental arena, he threw that culture in a tailspin when he published “The Evironmental Skeptic” in 2001. In short, it accused various environmental groups of exaggerating information and data to preserve their own organizations: If most people felt air and water were no longer polluted, or whales were no longer in danger of being extinct, there would be no reason for groups like World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club to exist.  

I became aware of this text as required reading in a Global Environmental Politics class I took at UCLA in 2002. What we discovered was, while Dr. Lomborg raised some important questions, his logic and use of footnotes left something to be desired. For one, the footnotes did not always directly support his statements, but it looked as if he was using them to infer it. However, the use of these footnotes, which were about one-fourth of the book implied validity — which I thought to be an interesting strategy. He has since come under more scrutiny, but will no doubt be considered a darling of Republican naysayers and deniers, especially Oklahoma Senator Inhofe.

One of the first things Lomborg said to the Senate panel this week was “Climate change is most commonly constructed through the alarmist repertoire – as awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control…” No one is currently saying it is beyond human control. It is very much in our control. We started it, and we can at least mitigate, if not stop it. It’s just a matter of will and determination. People are free to recycle, use energy-efficient lightbulbs, purchase fuel efficient vehicles as well as recycle waste as much as possible. Governments can also subsidize develoment and purchase of clean energy such as solar, wind and fuel cell. The only thing that makes us helpless is the stranglehold Big Oil has on our politicians and thus our energy policy.

Lomborg also said “Very often, we only hear about the heat deaths but not the cold deaths –…repeated in the official literature, as in the US 2005 Climate Change and Human Health Impacts report, where heat is mentioned 54 times and cold just once. We need to know just how much more heat deaths we can expect compared to how many fewer cold deaths.”

Why? Dr. Lomborg appears to reason more people currently die of cold than heat, as if to imply global climate change could actually save lives. The reports he refers to are estimates whose logic I fail to see (again, the inference trick). Further, I have yet to see any massive death tolls related to cold documented in recent history, other than the recent cold snap in the U.S. Northeast.

Fortunately, the mainstream media gave very little attention to this performance, so most people are not aware of it. However, I have no doubt soon supporters and beneficiaries of large, multinational energy companies will quote Dr. Lomborg as a basis for their continued denial of global climate change. Anyone not versed in the abundant evidence of the existence of global warming should be prepared for this onslaught of denier “intellectually-based” arguments.

Nevertheless, it is NOT the scientists who are debating the existence of global warming and climate change. Think about who is, and consider the source.