You start "Cool It" by boldly stating that polar bears illustrate the exaggerated claims about global warming. You write that polar bears "may eventually decline, though dramatic declines seem unlikely." Yet the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report, which you use to support your thesis, concludes: "As the amount of sea ice decreases, seals, walrus, polar bears and other ice-dependent species will suffer drastically." Don't you think that sounds like there will be dramatic declines?
I'm just saying that it will be harder for the polar bears but that they will not decline, and they're not going to be extinct or even appear to be affected at present.
But according to the report, they are showing signs of decline, and decreasing sea ice does threaten extinction. You write that what the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union, whose research fed the Arctic climate report, "told us was that of the 20 distinct subpopulations of polar bears, one or possibly two were declining in Baffin Bay; more than half were known to be stable; and two subpopulations were actually increasing around the Beaufort Sea."
About bears in the Beaufort Sea area, the report says that "declines in cub survival, and other ecological evidence are consistent with a changing sub-population status. Also, observations of changes in polar bear body condition and unusual hunting behaviours in polar bears (e.g. cannibalism, digging through solid ice to find seals) suggest a sub-population that may be under nutritional stress. These observations parallel those made in western Hudson Bay, where changes in sea ice, caused by warmer temperatures, have caused sub-population reductions. These observations, therefore, mandate increased vigilance in the southern Beaufort Sea region." That doesn't sound stable to me.
My sense, as I read this, is that it may be a problem for polar bears, but we do not see this in the data now, and that it certainly does not seem reasonable to assume that they will go extinct. They may go down in size, but what we've seen over the last 40 years is actually a dramatic increase in the number of polar bears.
But you are making the point that a stable polar bear population is a sign that global warming is overblown. But it's not stable.
No. I'm saying that if we believe the strong assumption that this is all due to climate change, then we will see declines. But it seems unlikely that we are going to see dramatic declines, as has been posited. What we're likely to see is a decline in some populations, but we haven't seen that decline in all populations. Moreover, we can much better deal with this through regulation of hunting of polar bears. That's basically the main point of the whole story. That we worry about helping them very little through climate change policies, whereas we could help them an enormous amount, if we wanted to, through cessation of shooting them. In the Hudson Bay, the best-studied area, 16 bears are dying from climate change, but we're shooting 49. Maybe we should stop shooting 49 and that would be a much better way of helping the bears. By trying to help through climate change policies, we can only save about .06 bears a year.
That just seems so shortsighted, Bjørn. The report concludes: "Future challenges for conserving polar bears and their Arctic habitat will be greater than at any time in the past because of the rapid rate at which environmental change appears to be occurring." Now, you write that polar bears "will increasingly take up a lifestyle similar to that of brown bears." Then, in a footnote, you quote from the report: "The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment finds it likely that disappearing ice will make polar bears take up 'a terrestrial summer lifestyle similar to that of brown bears, from which they evolved.'" Are you saying that polar bears will be OK, that the species will survive if they evolve backward?
Yes, that's certainly how I read it.
But you edited the quote. The whole thing goes like this: "It is difficult to envisage the survival of polar bears as a species given a zero summer sea-ice scenario. Their only option would be a terrestrial summer lifestyle similar to that of brown bears, from which they evolved. In such a case, competition, risk of hybridization with brown bears and grizzly bears, and increased interactions with people would then number among the threats to polar bears." That sounds like the species faces much more dire chances to survive, wouldn't you say?
They're saying that it's difficult. Their only option would be this summer lifestyle. So this is what they can do. Yes, this is not going to be easy, but this is exactly what they can do.
It's possible. But Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service, who studies polar bears, has said: "We have seen with our own eyes that climatic warming is causing the ice to break up earlier, and that is affecting the survival of the bears." He stipulates that climate change is happening too fast for the bears to revert to a summer lifestyle. "They don't have time to evolve backwards."
OK. But I've talked to a different expert that's up in Greenland, who works for the Danish government, and he has looked over my chapter, and said that it's OK.
You write: "Alarmism has a long history in the climate debate. Perhaps most chillingly, this was evident in the witch trials of medieval Europe." Are you really comparing Gore, Bill McKibben, the Natural Resources Defense Council, New Scientist magazine to the leaders of the Inquisition?
No, no, not all.
What's the purpose of that analogy?
It's to point out that weather has always been a huge part of human discourse. Previously, when most of us lived in the country, and we were dependent on the foods there, we had a tendency to blame anything and everything for what went wrong. Now we are much smarter, but we're still not smart enough to say, Well, so how should we deal with climate change? Clearly the medieval times should not have looked to the witches but to their agricultural practices and their strict limitations of imports and exports of food between neighboring cities, which is what economists said were the main reason that people starved dramatically.
Well, I have to say that linking today's media reports about the climate to the Inquisition seems like the same kind of reckless hyperbole that you accuse others of.
In that case, I'm sorry. That's actually a little disturbing. I have not read it like that at all. Sometimes you don't see these things yourself. I would also hope that my editor had pointed that out to me. The idea was simply that we have a long historical tradition of looking in the wrong place for solutions. I actually take that point, and I should change that slightly in the next edition, if there is a second edition.
What do you think of conservatives like Sen. James Inhofe relying on your work to support their claims that global warming is a hoax? I mean, Inhofe and company are not exactly socially progressive people.
No, I know.
Or ecologically minded.
Yeah. It's something I've given a large amount of thought to. But whenever you enter a debate and have a relevant political discussion, people are going to pull at you from both sides. The most misunderstood idea is that I think it's all a hoax, which I definitely don't think it is. Or that I'm saying, "Oh, let's just continue to use those oil wells" -- I don't do a Texas accent very well, do I? -- that I'm a spokesperson for big oil. I'm not. Those are portraits that have been painted by some of my opponents.
But these pie-in-the-sky arguments that we're going to cut our emissions 50 or 60 percent by 2050, with no sense of how this is going to be achieved other than, "Oh, thank god, that's someone else's problem," are doing the environment a big disservice. Remember the worry about bird flu a couple years ago? The funny thing is the bird flu hasn't gone away -- the risk is still there. But we've stopped talking about it because for a moment we worried so much about it that now we are just sick and tired of it. It's not helpful to worry too little about climate change, but it's also unhelpful to worry too much. What we need is a reasonable worry throughout this century in order to fix it.
You have another big fan in novelist Michael Crichton. I bet he based his protagonist in "State of Fear," the scientist who runs around debunking global warming and making fun of liberal movie stars, on you. Did he interview you or talk to you before he wrote it?
No.
Did you read "State of Fear"?
Yeah. I love those kinds of books. I love "Jurassic Park." I'll go and see those kinds of movies. I thought the action part was great. But it was a very schizophrenic book because it had all this action that was really cool and then it had all these ...
Lectures.
Yeah. And one of things that annoyed me about it was that a large part of the argument was saying that, "See, the temperature hasn't increased here, so therefore climate change is not real." That's of course arguing from a single instance, which is not what we're talking about. And so I thought that was a fairly weak argument. There were some arguments in there that were reasonable to be made, but in general I didn't think it made the overall argument very well. And I just don't understand the final point that environmentalists want to set off a tsunami. That's one of the few things that are not correlated at all to climate change. So it's not the best book. But to a certain extent I would argue we shouldn't get our information from "The Day After Tomorrow," and likewise we shouldn't get our information from "State of Fear."
Don't you think it's kind of odd that the Bush administration invited him to the White House to talk about climate change?
They did? Yeah, that is weird.
You sure do get hit with a lot of criticism. What drives you to stick to such an economic view of global warming?
To me it seems evidently moral to ask, How can I do the most that I possibly can with the money that I'm going to be spending? Quite frankly, most of us are not going to cut thousands of tons of CO2; most of us are not going to distribute condoms in sub-Saharan Africa or any of the other massive amounts of things we can do. We can do a little bit. We can change to better light bulbs. But most of us are going to rely on big macro structures for change, and those are things we make through our policies by choosing politicians. Right now we're heading down a road where a lot of people are focusing on Kyoto-style things that will do a little good for a lot of money. That's better than doing nothing. And I recognize the goodwill. But I would like to engage people in saying, If you have all that goodwill, shouldn't we spend it in the best possible way?
Do you think you're a contrarian?
No. Contrarian is somewhat of a curmudgeon, isn't it?
Someone who stakes out a ground to go against the grain.
I don't think I'm that. In 20 years, I think everybody's going to think this way.
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Listen to Bjorn Lomborg read a brief passage from "Cool It," about a seldom acknowledged benefit of global warming, here.
About the writer
Kevin Berger is the features editor at Salon.
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