Watch those assumptions

Bjorn Lomborg: Let’s Spend Smarter to Save the World:

If the global warming circus has a bad boy, it’s Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and longtime foil of folks clamoring for big global schemes to tackle climate change, like former vice president Al Gore.

Mr. Lomborg, speaking at the WSJ Eco:nomics conference in California, is sticking to his guns. In a nutshell, he says, that means “If we are going to spend money to do good, let’s try to do the most good.”

His Copenhagen Consensus, a gathering of Nobel-prize winners, drafts a wishlist for global problem solving—not just focusing on energy, but everything from education to combatting tuberculosis. Audience members at the conference voted for education and energy research as their top priorities.

Mr. Lomborg’s presecription [sic] for saving the world does not mean signing up for another Kyoto protocol to slowly curb greenhouse-gas emissions, but doing little things such as spending on better nutrition and healthcare in the developing world, he says. He’s afraid the global climate talks slated for Copenhagen in December will be a simple continuation of the climate gabfest circuit that started in Rio de Janiero in 1992: “Let’s try again, but make it even harder,” he scoffs.

If cap-and-trade plans like Kyoto are a bust, what should the world do? Vastly ramping up research and development of new energy technology offers the most bang for the buck, he says, and is “absolutely better” than capping carbon emissions. Each dollar spent on energy R&D would bring $11 in benefits, his group figures; each dollar spent on traditional cap-and-trade plans brings about $0.90 in benefits.

But there’s one big complication with tallying up costs and benefits: The chance that climate change is pushing the world toward irreversible tipping points that would bring sudden, catastrophic change rather than gradual warming.

That’s a lot harder to plug into the spreadsheet, Mr. Lomborg acknowledges: “How do you risk-manage for that?” That’s precisely why lots of cost-benefit analyses of climate policies are increasingly focusing on the so-called “fat tail” of catastrophic change. Ponying up cash to minimize the risk of really bad things happening is just as rational as buying fire or flood insurance, many argue.

In the end, Mr. Lomborg did take a glancing shot at Mr. Gore, who will speak later Thursday at the same event. Climate change is an emotional issue “that politicians can cash in on,” Mr. Lomborg said. “They can make all the promises, but somebody else will have to pay for it.”

The debate is served. Stay tuned.

What’s that you say? You’re just aching to find a ginormous, flashing neon orange, visible from low Earth orbit example of a bad assumption leading someone to bad conclusions? You came to the right place! I give you Bjorn Lomborg and his “how can it be, really?” assumption.

I know some people will think I’m being flip or disrespectful to the our shared situation, but let me draw an analogy here to something that I suspect most people reading this site aren’t familiar with: Computer chess. When writing a chess program, one of the (many) wrinkles one has to deal with is how you make it represent a checkmate situation as efficiently as possible. When the program is searching through possible lines of play, it looks at a mind-blowing number of board positions, and has to evaluate them as quickly and accurately as possible. Programs commonly look at each side’s remaining pieces as well as their position on the board. The pieces have pretty standard values–a pawn is 1, a rook 5, a queen is usually 9, etc. But what to do about a king, which is never actually captured in a game? One simple, brute force approach is to assign a huge value to the king (e.g. 100,000), so large that it’s virtually infinite, at least compared to the rest of the evaluation function. If the cmputer sees that in 8 moves you can checkmate checkmate your opponent, it will simulate you actually capturing the king on your next move and calculate a gigantic shift in the evaluation of the resulting position and know it has to do anything to avoid that line of play. The value of the now-missing king is so big that it swamps out the value of all other pieces, position, etc. and takes precedence.

This is the situation we have with climate chaos. If we assume that climate chaos will result in just a little flooding or drought, and just a slight uptick in hurricanes and/or their strength, and just a bit higher probability of heat waves killing many thousands of people, like the one that struck Europe in 2003, then Lomborg probably has a valid point.

If, however, we listen to people like Hansen and others who point out that we’re already locked into a huge amount of impact from climate chaos, and that we could be on the brink of triggering a catastrophic release of methane and CO2 from defrosting tundra and undersea hydrates deposits, then suddenly the critical inherent assumption in our evaluation function–the value of our “king”, i.e. the impact of climate chaos on human beings–is wildly wrong and we’ve inadvertently programmed ourselves to reach a very wrong conclusion. And that affects everything that flows from that conclusion, from individual consumption behavior to our voting patterns to our public policy.