The latest on the climate front:
Bjorn Lomborg, an influential figure among climate change sceptics, has thrown his weight behind a drive to forge a global deal to halt rising world temperatures at a summit in Copenhagen this year.
“It’s incredibly important. We need a global deal on the climate,” Mr Lomborg told the Financial Times….“If that disappoints some people who are sceptics, I am not the least bit unhappy.”
Hey, that’s great! Except, um, for what comes next:
He is concerned that the United Nations-led consensus that a climate treaty must focus on cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from rich countries is mistaken. “It’s a costly way to achieve very little,” he said.
Instead, Mr Lomborg argues, there are cheaper ways of halting temperature rises. These include tackling sources of climate change other than carbon dioxide, such as methane and soot; investing in new technologies; adapting to the effects of climate change; planting more forests; and weighing up whether emissions cuts are cheaper to do now or later.
So what exactly is new here? Lomborg has always accepted the fact of climate change, he’s just argued that halting it isn’t as important as cleaning up drinking water in Africa or tackling malaria or doing more agricultural research or whatnot. He’s never denied global warming, he just thinks it’s not that big a deal.
So it sounds like nothing much has changed on that front. The U.S. military, however, is slowly but surely starting to see reality:
The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.
….An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.
….Ms. Dory, who has held senior Pentagon posts since the Clinton administration, said she had seen a “sea change” in the military’s thinking about climate change in the past year. “These issues now have to be included and wrestled with” in drafting national security strategy, she said.
Well, that’s going to pose a problem for conservatives, isn’t it? What are they going to do when four-star generals start telling them they need to take climate change seriously? Their heads will explode.
Which wouldn’t be such a bad outcome, I suppose, would it?
