Let's Chill About Global Warming

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Emil Jupin

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People have said you're ignoring some of the more dire predictions, cherry-picking your data if you will. Why do you suppose that is?
I'm always very, very surprised when people say I'm cherry-picking because I'm taking the median scenario from the U.N. climate panel. A lot of people say I'm consistently taking the most optimistic of points. I mean, by God, I'm saying what is the most likely — the median — temperature increase: 2.6 degrees C or 4.7 degrees F. Now it might get warmer than that. But it also might be cooler than that. This is the most likely outcome, what most people call the business-as-usual scenario. Likewise when I say "a one-foot rise in sea level," the U.N. says it's somewhere between half and 2 feet. It seems to me that saying 20, as Al Gore famously said, is cherry-picking.

I really think if it's an indication of anything, it's that the public debate has gone so far toward the one extreme that obviously it has to be 20 feet and anyone who says it's slightly less than that has got to be bonkers.

And why do you think that might be?
At the end of the day climate change is such a sexy topic. There's a question I very often get: Why isn't it ok to exaggerate a little bit? It's for a good cause. The problem is that's true for everything. Why isn't it O.K. to exaggerate about the state of health care? Everyone can come up with a good story to exaggerate for a good cause. But, then, democracies end up being screaming contests. Instead of having a rational conversation, we have a situation where everyone ends up screaming at the top of their lungs and what we listen to...are the ones who shout the loudest. That's unlikely to be a good way to prioritize.

You look at the median predictions of how global warming will affect the world. But a lot of people in climate change talk about meeting thresholds beyond which we would face drastic changes. If there were, say, a 15% risk of hitting one of these thresholds — even if it weren't the most likely scenario — shouldn't that change the calculation quite a bit?
Well it depends on whether we know where the thresholds are; when we don't it really becomes a distribution again. If you know where there's a specific threshold — if we pass this particular threshold, we all die — then it becomes fairly easy. We should definitely stop it. But if we don't know where these thresholds are, but we know that they are out there, it simply becomes more valuable to do something. That's absolutely true.

You talked about the taking the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) data. They put out a report earlier this year that concluded maybe it wouldn't be all that expensive to combat climate change. How do you take that?
Basically, what they came out and said was not that different from the numbers in my book: that for 3% of GDP you can cut emissions dramatically. Yeah. Hell, yeah.

I thought that it was something like 3% over the next two decades and that the annual GDP change was lower.
Yeah, it's 0.12%, as a lot of people like to point out. But that's an annual cumulated and that's why it accumulates into 3 percentage points by mid-century. The [0.12%] figure is a bit like selling people TVs and telling them what the hourly interest rate is going to be. That's a little bit of a cheater.

It means we'll be 3% less rich by 2030. We haven't spent anywhere near this amount in the last 50 years to do anything good in the world. So it seems a little naive to say now it's all cheap.

Why do you think people ascribe a political stance to your views? People assume you're conservative.
Which is so bizarre. For the longest time in Denmark I didn't want to say what I was politically. I thought it was irrelevant. I'm a self-described slight lefty in Denmark, which probably makes me incredibly left-wing in the U.S., so I'm very, very surprised. But I think this is because [climate change] has become so polarized in many ways, that it becomes either a hoax to Republicans, or to Democrats catastrophe. And what I like to say — and it's a little flip but I hope it's actually fairly true — is that I hope smartness is not a Republican or Democratic trait.

People have accused you sometimes of being a climate change denier, which you're not. Why do you think that is and how do you feel about it?
Well it's a curious thing that people react so strongly to me and people will go a fairly long way to make implications about why I'm saying what I'm saying, that I'm really just grudgingly conceding [climate change], that it's a third-generation denial strategy or something. I've always found that when you have to resort to psychological explanations of your opponents it must be because you don't have very good arguments.

There's a famous claim that somebody told me from Harvard Law School, that if you have a good case you should pound the case, but if you have a bad case you should pound the table.

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