The upside of global warming
2007-10-05 12:18
Oslo - Global warming could save
lives, a self-styled sceptical environmentalist, said
on Thursday.
Clashing with the UN health agency, Danish statistician
Bjorn Lomborg told the Reuters Environment summit the world
should not overlook benefits of climate change such as the fall
in the number of deaths from icy winters.
"You see a lot about deaths from heatwaves, much less on
avoided deaths," Lomborg said.
He estimated that about 200 000 fewer people were dying
every year worldwide because of global warming - many more
people survive because winters are less chill than die from
heatwaves and other effects.
The UN's World Health Organisation (WHO), targeted for
criticism in a new book by Lomborg entitled Cool It, stuck by a 2003 estimate that 150 000 people died overall from climate change in 2000.
That study said the main factors for the rising toll were
malnutrition, malaria and diarrhoea in developing countries.
"Lomborg is guilty of the bias in selection of evidence of
which he accuses others," said Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, a
senior WHO scientist and an author of the study.
He told Reuters that Lomborg's research was "academically
sloppy" because it failed to credit the WHO with estimating
temperature effects.
"We assume that people will largely adapt to heat and cold,
reducing the importance of this effect," he said. And he said
there were many other hard-to-quantify factors that would need
to be taken into account for a full picture.
Too much focus on negative effects
"The estimates omit many other, largely negative health
impacts of climate change, from increases in severe hurricanes,
to droughts, to disappearance of glaciers supplying fresh
water, to increased risk of conflict, and so on," he said.
Lomborg, who won fame as the author of The Skeptical
Environmentalist, writes in his new book that the WHO report
"simply left out cold and heat deaths" and that the 150 000
figure was "based on only doing part of the math".
He said he stuck by his findings despite Campbell-Lendrum's
criticisms, saying the WHO was wrong to assume that people
would adapt to cold and heat but not to other threats such as factors bringing malnutrition.
Lomborg said there was often too much focus on negative
effects of climate change, making it harder to find smarter
solutions to climate change than costly caps on emissions of
greenhouse gases.
Lomborg's main recommendation is for the world to invest
0.05% of global gross domestic product, or about $25bn a year, in research into clean energy technologies.
He says that would be far cheaper than the $180bn
that he estimates as the cost of implementing the UN's Kyoto
Protocol, the main plan to cap emissions of greenhouse gases in
36 industrial nations.
Lomborg says that money would be better spent on fighting
Aids, malnutrition and malaria and measures to liberalise
trade.
- Reuters