He has repeatedly demonstrated that significant gains could be made for large populations of impoverished people around the world by concentrating resources on clean water, decent food, and very ordinary medical care, especially preventative care.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with his overall political views, these arguments have been very strong weapons against the preposterous assertions of the chattering classes that only massive, UN type international efforts to forestall global warming, or other elements of the Litany, can save humanity from some amorphous looming calamity.

The utterly hysterical response from the tranzis was a good indication of how close his arrows came to the center of the target.

As in any situation, his role must be taken in context, and, regardless of his larger political beliefs, he very adequately demonstrated that much of the tranzi/ngo chatter about catastrophic (fill in the blank) was nonsense.

I’m not sure if the impression was right or not, but I always thought his main driver in picking “CAGW is real” as a starting point was because his book was written at a time when it looked like attempting to argue otherwise was futile and just got you labeled as a crank.

That’s probably part of it. But Lomborg’s main point in SE was that there are more important priorities than AGW for the time and money we collectively have to deal with all problems, even if we don’t challenge the science behind AGW. The book wasn’t intended to challenge AGW as a premise, but rather to challenge Kyoto, etc. as conclusions necessarily derived from that premise.

And by “ruining”, I mean simply making it impossible for humans to survive in. Lomborg seems to concede that we are behaving in a way which will eventually do this. For me that is a massive, and massively wrong, thing to concede.

I wholly agree with you about technological advance. Onwards and upwards.

“…we are the only species on the planet capable of affecting our habitat for the better”

Indeed, I do not see how we can possibly measure whether we are ruining the planet. For that matter, the very notion presupposes that we are interlopers whose artifices rather than being integral to the planet are in fact inherently at odds with it…which seems to me in fact to underpin the anti-humanity stance of the watermelons.

That’s not to say that rivers cannot be polluted, fish killed, the atmosphere altered, and so on. Merely that we exercise benign influence as well as malign. And with trivial exceptions like otters building dams or birds building nests, we are the only species on the planet capable of affecting our for the better. Leave a flock of sheep on a grassy hillside and the flock will denude it and then move to the next hillside to do the same, until it runs out of grass and starves. Only we can maintain grassy hillsides at a level capable of sustaining (I use the word advisedly) of flocks of sheep in their tens or hundreds of millions. Kudos to us, I say.

As to whether Lomborg argues that technology might be a way out of any warmist fix, I cannot say. For my part, I’m pro-technological advance, always and everywhere. That’s how we learned to set fires and cook food. Anything less is a retreat before the sun god, back into the cave.

Setting Lomborg aside, what you say illuminates how much the debate has turned against the CAGW-ers.

Yes, I find all that very persuasive.

I’ve read The Skeptical Environmentalist and skimmed some of Lomborg’s other work. I think your prejudices are accurate, but I’m not sure that means he has contributed nothing to bringing the debate back onto more reasonable ground. Merely by insisting on reasonable debate (and being successful and widely know for it) he has surely helped bring the debate back to more reasonable ground, if only by making the radicals seem less credible, by comparison.

I can only speak for myself but, when I encounter a highly polarized debate with highly emotive rhetoric on both sides, my inclination is to suspect that both sides are more or less equally off the mark. (I had reason not to conclude that in this particular case, but it’s generally a reliable model.)

Also, part of the reason that opposition to Kyoto and other such policy proposals is gaining ground is because of the prior work of Lomborg and others like him. So, even if you’re right that he contributed nothing to bringing the debate back to more reasonable ground, he contributed a lot to the solidity of that more reasonable ground, in my opinion.

Thanks.

To summarise. In the long run we are indeed ruining the planet, but since there’s nothing we can now do about that, we might as well improve what we can now improve. That makes a kind of sense, even though it skates around the core argument, which is about whether we really are ruining the planet.

Does he go into the notion that in the longer run humanity might learn how to impose a technological fix?

It you argue that, you would reckon that the best bet for preventing Warmageddon is for the world to progress as much as possible, technologically and economically? The trouble with cutting carbon emissions now is that that’s a bad trade-off. Little is accomplished on the carbon front. Much harm is done on the progress front.

I consider Warmageddon very unlikely, but not impossible, and that technological and economic progress should be speeded up (a) anyway, and (b) to enable us better to deal with Warmageddon in the unlikely event it happens.

Since the whole object of the Green tendency is now to halt progress, you can see how that would rile them. But does Lomborg say all that?

I think that was his argument.

My problem with Lomborg is that he, for all that he is caricatured as a loony libertarian devil-take-the-hindmost free-marketeer, is in fact a utilitarian statist collectivist. He has no problem with coerced transnationalist policy-making. But he’s very good at demonstrating that in their own terms, the publicly-stated goals of the Tranzis are forlorn, counterproductive or misdirected.