Bjorn Lomborg was going to present some economic pointers to Duke University last week, but even UN approved estimates were too high-risk for Duke . Evidently the students are so poorly trained they couldn’t be trusted around a different point of view. Lomborg might seed all kinds of wicked ideas about them doing their own research. Though, more likely, it had nothing to do with the students. The real problem with Lomborg was that he threatened their branding. What if Duke lost some big lefty donors? (Or the biggest donor of all, Big Government?)
Lomborg shows how fragile the UN-Wall of Science is
All he aimed to do was to join together two separate UN economic factoids, but he had to be axed. He even agrees “climate change is a problem”. But agreeing on the science is not enough.
When climate alarmism meets cancel culture
Bjorn Lomborg, The Australian
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One of my [axed] presentation points was highlighting the latest full UN Climate Panel report which estimates the total cost of climate change. They found that unmitigated climate change in half a century will reduce general welfare equivalent to lowering each person’s income by between 0.2 and 2 per cent. Given that the UN expects each person on the planet to be much better off – 363 per cent as wealthy as today – climate might cause us to only be 356 per cent as rich by then. That is a problem, but certainly not the end of the world.
Except it’s not a problem, just an error bar. With blind economic models piled on broken climate models, fifty years from now the world might well be cooler, and poorer too.
But Lomborg’s point is still potent. The UN are complete hypocrites and troughers.
Interestingly activists at Duke apparently used the 2020 Australian fires against him. Apparently, they still think the whole Australian Continent was on fire. Bjorn has some interesting statistics:
But we know from satellite measurements, published in Nature, that while the fires near population centres had severe impacts, the total land area burned was 4 per cent – one of the lowest-ever percentages, from an average this century of 6.2 per cent and last century of 10.1 per cent. Four per cent is not “much of the Australian continent”. Such claims are more like rantings from people who have been watching too much alarmist TV.
Total area burned in January 2020 in Australia was 16.9 million hectares. But Australia is 7 million square kilometers. It might have been less than 4%.