Bjorn Lomborg on the Dara report

I missed last week's Dara report, which took the long-since-debunked 300,000 global warming deaths figure, upped it a great deal, and stuck it out on the airwaves to see if the media were interested. By and large they were.

Bjorn Lomborg has responded with a withering analysis of the report's failures, exaggerations and outright deception.

September 26 was a triumph for public relations. An organization called DARA launched a report called "Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2nd Edition. A Guide to the Cold Calculus of a Hot Planet." The study, sponsored by 20 countries, projected some astoundingly large impacts from climate change, both on the number of deaths and the economic impacts. The report has produced a media heyday for climate alarmism, but is a house of cards built on dubious analysis and erroneous claims.

Comments

[Richard Drake]

Ben: I needed to articulate the question, then I began to understand what the "it doesn't" referred to (strange how often that happens), then I read your answer. Wow. Every now and then one feels "that's the most important thing that's ever been written on Bishop Hill." I know it's a little subjective, like Roy Jenkins thinking Gladstone was our greatest Premier while writing that biography, then the same with Churchill. But this just hit the top of the charts for me.

It is an obscene irony that 'development' agencies now celebrate traditional lifestyles. Imagine if Oxfam et al were to launch a campaign in the UK to get people to live as peasants. They would soon find themselves lacking those fancy offices not a mile from my house. Yet this is how they tell people in other countries they should live. And they have access to policy-making institutions, and we Bishop-Hillers do not.

How do we get Martin Durkin to turn that passionate insight into a film?

[Ben Pile]

You're too kind, Richard.

TGGWS did touch on those points. And Durkin's previous film, Against Nature made many such points - in 1997! It's worth seeing if you can get hold of it. It's actually much better than TGGWS, and explores environmentalism much more broadly and deeply, rather than focuses on climate. I did have a copy, but lost it recently in a catastrophic hard drive failure -- one reason I've not been blogging recently as it had all my notes, links, etc on it (and yes I've spent 100s trying to get it recovered).

A film is in the planning stages. Don't expect to be on Ch4, though.

[Chris S]

@geoffchambers

I stand corrected, many thanks. After reading the various mission statements and indices I lost the ability to focus (and will to live;).

[geoffchambers]

Richard Drake to Ben Pile: "that's the most important thing that's ever been written on Bishop Hill."

Ben needs an interlocutor like Richard Betts to force him to express his ideas in a way the rest of us can follow ;-)
I think we all have an inkling of what he’s on about on an anecdotal level: the fact that climate change is not just a scary graph, and that environmentalism is not just fear of climate change. We tend then to try and fit rather complex ideas involving a vast social/ideological movement into easy categories and say: “It’s a religion” or “ecofascism” or “yah boo to watermelons” and the possibility of rational discussion ends there. It takes something as bad as this Climate Vulnerability Monitor to persuade sensible people like Richard Betts to come out and admit “This is not defensible”.
Perhaps now rational discussion can commence (I mean outside our little world of sceptics, of course).

[Sean]

There have been some climate change deaths already - but they were all caused by the fuel poverty created by climate change activists driving up energy costs with green profiteering.