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Saturday, March 30, 2013

It's Worse Than I Thought -- When I Did the Calculations, I Got 42 Hours ....

The Weekly Standard is reporting:
Germany spends $110 billion to delay global warming by 37 hours.
The claim was made by Bjorn Lomborg
Lomborg campaigned against the Kyoto Protocol and other measures to cut carbon emissions in the short-term, and argued for adaptation to short-term temperature rises as they are inevitable, and for spending money on research and development for longer-term environmental solutions, and on other important world problems such as AIDS, malaria and malnutrition.
In his critique of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Lomborg stated: "Global warming is by no means our main environmental threat."
Right now, North Korea appears to be our main threat, environmental and otherwise.

China's voracious appetite for energy -- coal, nuclear -- is probably the earth's main environmental threat.

Finally, an environmentalist who gets it.

It will be a lot more cost-efficient to simply work on ways to prepare for that one degree rise in global temperature over one century. Some agricultural crops will actually do better. Some areas of the United States will actually benefit. And very few places will actually get worse. I assume there's not a lot of difference between 120 degrees and 121 degrees in the  Saharan Desert or Death Valley.

I speak from experience: I did not note much difference between forty degrees below zero and  thirty-eight degrees below zero when growing up in the Bakken. We didn't call it the Bakken then. Just to be clear on that.

Maybe that would be a great poll: if we could control global warming, would you prefer the average North Dakota winter extreme to be forty degrees below zero or thirty-nine degrees below zero? I know how I would vote.