Lomborg, global warming, and opportunity costs

I've not read Bjorn Lomborg's new book (nor his previous one), but I have read enough of what he has written to suspect that some of those who are ridiculing one of his arguments don't understand it. For example, Bob Park of the American Physical Society's "What's New" writes:

Bjorn Lomborg's "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming" is out. Well, yes it is getting warmer he finds, but aside from polar bears, it just means more beach weather. We've got bigger problems, he says. Instead of spending all that money trying to prevent warming, let's focus on making everyone rich so they can all buy air conditioners.

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula writes:

He also has a bad argument about relative spending: he suggests that spending on climate change would reduce spending on other pressing issues, like the fight against malaria. It's a bad choice. Malaria research is already underfunded — it's a third-world disease, don't you know, one that mainly affects those tropical countries, so the wealthy western nations typically don't prioritize it very highly. We don't take our big pots of money and allocate it into aliquots appropriate to the world's needs already, so for an economist to sit there and pretend that climate research is a drain on tropical disease research is comical. Especially since he seems unaware of how one feeds into the other. Hey, if the world warms up, tropical diseases will creep northward into Europe and North America, and then we'll be fighting the economic effects of both direct effects of climate change and new diseases.

But as I understand it, Lomborg is making a simple point about opportunity costs--that money spent on climate change mitigation can't be spent on other things, and that it would be better off spent on things like fighting malaria (which I'm sure he would agree with Myers is underfunded, since it's #4 on the Copenhagen Consensus 2004 list of "very good projects" to spend money on), because the amount of benefit received for each dollar spent is so much greater.

To make the same point--I have looked into putting solar cells on my house, both to reduce my carbon footprint and my long-term energy costs, but I've decided against it because even with the tax incentives and my power company's willingness to subsidize half the cost, it's still not cost-effective. (I'm hoping new solar cell technologies will improve efficiency and lower cost so that I will be able to become less dependent upon the electrical grid). Instead, I've spent much smaller amounts of money that have had far more bang for the buck, replacing my incandescent lights with CFLs (though LEDs and other new promising technologies are on the way as better sources of light), adding insulation, and improving the efficiency of my air conditioning units through regular maintenance. These things I've done not only have an impact on my energy use and climate change, they are things which provide me with direct economic benefit as well--thus these are things that rational people will be doing independently of government regulation and spending.

Lomborg--or at least the Copenhagen Consensus--is not saying that climate change deserves no attention. The premise of the Copenhagen Consensus is that if the world spent an additional $50 billion over the next five years to address ten categories of global challenges (one of which is climate change), how would that money best be spent to provide the greatest net benefit. That seems to me to be an entirely worthy effort, and this kind of cost-benefit calculation should be given greater weight in public policy decisions. Instead, however, most politicians like to make arguments based on the assumption that any law, regulation, or government spending that saves even one life (or prevents one child from seeing something offensive) is worth doing, whether or not that generates enormous opportunity costs.

My personal behavior--and I suspect that of those criticizing Lomborg on this point--demonstrates that I don't consider climate change my number one priority. In my case, I live in a large house that uses a lot of electricity, I travel frequently by plane, I drive a car instead of using public transportation, I eat meat instead of being a vegetarian like my wife. Each of these things causes, directly or indirectly, an increase in carbon dioxide emissions over the alternatives.

UPDATE (December 16, 2008): I just came across this description of Lomborg's overall behavior with respect to the climate change debate, which I think is likely accurate.

Boob Scotch

Last night, Einzige sent me an email (which I opened this morning) pointing me to a video of a song by Bob Log III called "Boob Scotch" (NSFW). Bob Log III is a guy who performs wearing a motorcycle helmet, singing through a telephone microphone, and simultaneously drums and plays guitar. The sound was very familiar, reminiscent of a band I saw perform at the University of Arizona Social Sciences Auditorium back in 1994 called Doo Rag. As it turns out, Bob Log III was half of Doo Rag, the guy I remember singing through a vacuum cleaner hose.

The other bands who performed at UA that day (April 30, I'm a bit obsessive about collecting information) were Formica Bob, A Band Called Moss, Teeth, Click, Cortex Bomb, Irving, The Lonely Trojans, and the Fells. I was there with my friend Pam, who knew people in Irving and The Lonely Trojans, the latter of which included a student, Chris Morrison, from one of my philosophy classes, who's now using the name "C.S. Morrison" for his music, probably due to the large number of other musical Chris Morrisons.

Pam's two friends in Irving were Greg Petix and Gerard Schumacher who were also in the Lonely Trojans. The two went on to form another band called the Weird Lovemakers, and Gerard still has a band called The Knockout Pills.

Wikipedia seems to have way too much information about Tucson bands... I just learned that Schumacher was also in The Fells and intends to return to Australia this year, and that Petix formed a band called The Cuntifiers (no albums released yet).

Internet People

Dan Meth's song and animated tribute to virtually every major viral video of the last several years.



UPDATE (September 30, 2007): Rumors Daily has tracked down links to the videos referenced.

Our dogs featured on RESCUE's new website

Arizona RESCUE has gone through a website redesign, and the new design now features photos of our dog Otto and our former foster dog Ollie. The front page cycles through photos of rescued dogs and cats at the top right; Otto is the black and white dog with the ball in his mouth and Ollie is the bassett hound. Both can be seen simultaneously on any of the other web pages, such as the "About RESCUE" page, where Otto's second from the left and Ollie is third from the right.

Kat previously blogged about Ollie almost a year ago.

Also check out RESCUE's donation page...

Marcello Truzzi's Zetetic Scholar online

Eastern Michigan University sociology professor Marcello Truzzi was a co-founder and co-chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, now just CSI) and the editor of its original magazine, The Zetetic (later renamed Skeptical Inquirer). After he broke with the group over what he perceived as dogmatism and a desire for a more academic than popular approach, he published his own journal on paranormal and fringe science subjects, the Zetetic Scholar.

George Hansen has now put the first five issues of the Zetetic Scholar online at his website as PDFs, along with the tables of contents of issues six through eleven. (Only one other issue, a larger one identified as a double issue, twelve and thirteen, was published.) Issues 9, 10, and 11 are noteworthy for publishing debate about CSICOP's "Mars Effect" controversy. My personal collection includes only issues 9 through 12/13, so I'm happy to see the older issues made available.

Truzzi died of cancer on February 2, 2003. He was a meticulous researcher who was very generous with his time and sources. I corresponded with him on a number of occasions, and had several telephone conversations with him about skepticism and the Mars Effect controversy, about which I've assembled a very lengthy chronology and bibliography (large RTF file). When I wrote a chapter on "Veteran Psychic Detective Bill Ward" for Joe Nickell's book Psychic Sleuths, Truzzi provided me with a few newspaper clippings on Ward that he had obtained while researching his own book on psychic detectives, The Blue Sense.

Truzzi was agnostic to a fault--he would refrain from coming to conclusions even when evidence was overwhelming.

Maricopa County foreclosure and notice rate database

The Arizona Republic has an online database of 2007 foreclosures and notices of trustee's sales, searchable by community (mostly cities), region, or zip code. I'm sorry to see that my neighborhood (mostly built up in the last 3-4 years) has pretty high rates of 25.9 foreclosures per 10,000 households and 115.94 notices per 10,000 households. At least I'm not in Surprise's 85388 zip code, which has seen 310.9 foreclosures per 10,000 households and 997.8 notices per 10,000 households. Ouch! That's over 3% of the zip code foreclosed upon already, and another 10% in danger, and we haven't even seen the peak of ARM resets yet.

Draper vs. Plantinga on Evil and Evolution

Part two of the Internet Infidels' "Great Debate" project has been posted at the Secular Web, on "Evil and Evolution." Draper makes an argument for atheism on the basis of a version of the problem of evil informed by evolution, and Plantinga gives a version of his argument that evolution undermines naturalism. Each offers an objection to the other, followed by a reply.

Reader questions are being solicited for the next couple of months, which the authors will respond to on the site.

Two free issues of Reports of the NCSE

I have two extra copies of the latest issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Education, which contains my article, "Trouble in Paradise: Answers in Genesis Splinters," which I'll send to the first two U.S.-based readers of this blog to request a copy in the comments.

This is getting ridiculous

August's total was 3249, beating last month's record high by an additional 746!

Memory and the persistence of falsehood

From the Washington Post:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

The article suggests that when we hear or read a denial of a statement, we tend to remember the association of the items in the statement but not the fact that the statement was a negation. Thus nonsense tends to persist in the face of refutation.