Fund Disease Control and High-Yield Farming, Not Global Warming Fears
June 30, 2004
A panel of world-famous economists just announced how they would spend $50 billion to make the world a better place. They say they’d use the cash to prevent the spread of diseases such as AIDS and malaria, and to reduce malnutrition through better crop research and cheap little iron tablets.
Using the money to try to prevent global warming was a “very bad” project, they concluded. They found the costs of making a real climate difference insanely high.
The expert panel, which calls itself the Copenhagen Consensus, includes four Nobel prize winners. They were convened by Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, head of the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute. Lomborg’s ground-breaking book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001), documented that while most environmental trends are improving in the affluent countries, they lag in the poor ones.
He argues that making the world’s billions of poor people healthier-and ultimately richer-will go far to help the environment. We can’t save the forests if billions of poor people are cutting too much firewood instead of burning kerosene, and clearing too much land for low-yield farming.
The Copenhagen panel’s list of “very good” projects:
1) Combat the spread of AIDS with $27 billion, to avert 30 million new cases in Africa and Asia.
2) Combat widespread and health-sapping anemia-especially common among women and children in rice cultures-with cheap iron tablets for $12 billion, or genetically enhanced “golden rice” at even less cost.
3) Promote freer trade. That has no price tag, but requires First World countries to permit more imports of low-cost Third World products, especially farm commodities.
4) Control malaria, which sickens 300 million people and causes 2.7 million deaths per year. DDT, used indoors, is the most cost-effective, longest-lasting mosquito repellant and killer.
5) Reduce hunger by raising poor-country crop yields through agricultural research, which would also boost the incomes of poor farmers and landless workers who suffer most from chronic hunger.
The panel ranked the Kyoto global warming treaty 16th out of 17 possible projects for the $50 billion. They concluded the treaty wouldn’t prevent much warming unless it beggared human society clear back into mud huts. Even then, we’d destroy too much of the world’s forest to get firewood.
Critics of the Copenhagen Consensus were not hard to find, of course. Dr. Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, one of the most outspoken Kyoto advocates, declared, “Climate change is not an economics problem. It’s an ethics problem.”
However, the ethical use of limited human resources is both an economic and ethics problem.
History tells us the world has been through two recent climate cycles. The 550-year Little Ice Age was preceded by a 400-year Medieval Warming from 900-1300 AD for a total of 1150 years. Before that was the dank, cold Dark Ages (600-900 AD) and the Roman Warming (200 BC to 600 AD) for a total of 1100 years.
In the past 15 years, ice cores and seabed sediments have told us the surprising news that an irregular 1500-year cycle has governed the Earth’s climate for at least the past 400,000 years. The North American Pollen Database reveals a complete reorganization of our continent’s vegetation every 1650 years over the past 32,000 years.
The cycle has been too long and too moderate for ancient sagas and most modern historians to note. It’s driven by a tiny, irregular cycle in the sun’s irradiance that we didn’t know existed until we could measure it from satellites outside the Earth’s obscuring atmosphere.
Koyoto, to make any difference at all will have to eventually deny fossil fuels to all countries. How ethical would it be to quadruple the price of energy, and stop improvements in 3rd World living standards, if the current Modern Warming is the first phase of another natural, solar-driven 1500-year cycle?
The Copenhagen Consensus’ economists sound sane and humane. The man-made warming scaremongers don’t.
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