Danish political scientist and climate change contrarian Bjørn Lomborg says the poorest countries in the world need coal and climate change just isn’t as big a problem as some people make out.

Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott says “coal is good for humanity” and there are more pressing problems in the world than climate change, which he once described as “crap” but now says he accepts.

So it’s not surprising then that the latter should furnish the former with $4 million of taxpayer funds to start an Australian arm of Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Centre (CCC) at the University of Western Australia’s business school.

The CCC has consistently said that targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions are too expensive and money should be spent elsewhere

After a couple of weeks of doubt and confusion over the origins and the funding of the centre, latest reports suggest that the idea came from the Prime Minister’s office.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister told Fairfax media it was “the government’s decision to bring the Lomborg consensus methodology to Australia”.

More on this “methodology” and some pretty fundamental problems with it in a bit.

Students at UWA are gathering names on a petition and campaigning in protest, saying Lomborg’s appointment as an adjunct (unpaid) professor there damages the university’s reputation and is an embarrassment. The University’s Student Guild claimed that “students, staff and alumni” were outraged.

Former government climate commissioner Tim Flannery, whose Climate Commission was defunded when the Abbott government won office, said the funding was “an insult to the scientific community”.

A $4m methodology?

So is this “methodology” the Abbott Government has spent $4million on any good?

Broadly, Lomborg claims that by doing a cost-benefit analysis of various policies to attack global issues, you can work out where you get the most “good” for the money you spend.

“What we are doing is economics, not science,” Lomborg told ABC Radio earlier this week, with no hint of irony.

Dr Frank Jotzo, director of the Centre for Climate Ecnomics and Policy at the Australian National University, was once invited to write a paper for Lomborg’s centre in 2008, which was sharply critical of how the cost of the impacts of climate change were treated.

He told me:

Within the research community, particularly within the economics community, the Bjorn Lomborg enterprise has no academic credibility. It is seen as an outreach activity that is driven by specific set of objectives in terms of bringing particular messages into the public debate and in some cases making relatively extreme positions seem more acceptable in the public debate.

The Copenhagen Consensus Center’s Vice President Roland Mathiasson responded, saying they worked “with more than 100 of the world’s top economists, seven Nobel Laureates and Cambridge University Press” and “I don’t think they agree with Dr. Frank Jotzo’s statement that their work has “no academic credibility..

Jotzo added:

My reference to lack of academic credibility relates to how the ‘Consensus’ exercises are set up, not to the work of those invited to contribute to them. The exercises are framed as discrete choices of different objectives or policy options, when in reality the sensible course of action will almost always be a mix of different objectives or courses of action. The problem with this framing of false alternatives was called out, for example, by a group of academics who contributed to the 2008 Consensus exercise in a paper published in the journal Climate Change Economics. The same occurs in the “Post-2015” exercise, for example on climate change where some options get summarily dismissed on the basis of scant analysis, when in reality a portfolio approach would clearly be superior. This is not the making of the expert panel, it is inherent in the way in which the exercise is set up.

Lomborg has said that his Australia Consensus Centre will look at climate change, but it won’t be a big part of what it does.

One reason for that is because Lomborg’s work over the years has routinely underplayed the importance of climate change and its impacts.

Jotzo told me there are two key ways in which Lomborg’s methods manage to push climate change down the list of priorities.

Firstly, it uses low estimates of the cost of each tonne of carbon dioxide using economic modeling techniques which fail to properly price the impacts of climate change.

Estimates of this “social cost of carbon” vary massively. A study led by Stanford University scientists in January, for example, tried to better represent the costs of climate change impacts and found that each tonne of carbon dioxide had a cost to society of $220, compared to US government estimates of about $37.



Secondly, these economic methods allow for the use of what’s known as “discount rates”.

For example, if you buy a car that uses less fuel but costs more to buy, people will tend to discount the benefit because it takes a few years to get back the extra money you spent.

In short, it’s a way of putting a price on human impatience (imagine telling a person living in 50 years time that you decided not to cut emissions in 2015 because you thought they were worth less dollars than you are now).

On the point of discount rates, Jotzo is blunt:

There is no broadly ethical case that can be made for present generations to be so selfish to say that we will not invest in mitigating climate change because the benefits of our investment today will accrue to future generations and not to us.

What’s more, Jotzo says that while cost-benefit analysis can be useful, it doesn’t work when you apply it to climate change policy.

How do you price, for example, the loss of a Pacific island nation and what that would mean for the cultures that have thrived there? What’s the price losing multiple species of flora and fauna or the Great Barrier Reef Jotzo adds:

Climate change is exceptional because it has all of these dimensions that go beyond the practical capability of cost benefit analysis.

Lomborg’s funding

Exactly how and where Bjorn Lomborg’s think tank has gathered its cash over the years has been a tough story to get the bottom of.

When the Danish Government’s funding of the CCC ran out in 2012, Lomborg had already registered the US arm of the think tank four years earlier.

Since 2008, the US tax records of the Copenhagen Consensus Center show it has gathered about $5million in income, more than half of which had come in 2012 and 2013 (the most recent years for which records are available).

Lomborg himself was paid $975,000 via the think tank in those two years.

Yet much of the think tank’s income is not disclosed because, according to the think tank, “given how some parts of the blogosphere vilify Dr Lomborg” this is the sort of attention those donors can do without.

My own research on DeSmog has found that many of the earlier donors to Lomborg’s US think tank have been linked to the conservative side of politics, some with links to the billionaire Koch brothers.

I didn’t choose to make a big deal of those links to the oil billionaire Koch brothers, but others, such as prominent US climate commentator Joe Romm, did.

As I also reported on DeSmog, Lomborg’s think tank has attracted significant funding from so called “vulture capitalist” and major US Republican donor Paul Singer, the billionaire hedge fund manager

We at least know that Lomborg’s Australia Consensus Centre has been funded with $4million of cash from the Federal Government.

Curiously when UWA first announced the centre on April 2, there was no mention of government funding at all.

UWA has said it will be looking to raise further cash. A glance at the board of the business school or its list of corporate partners might offer clues as to whose doors the university will knock on first.

Origin of the Think Tank

There have been conflicting stories about just how the Australia Consensus Center came to get the government cash and find a home at UWA (which is likely to have a plusher office than the parcel service corner shop in Massachusetts that is currently the address for the US arm of CCC).

I was sent an internal UWA communications bulletin intended to help “senior leaders” at the university to respond to questions about the consensus centre, including a list of Frequently Asked Questions.

If asked “How did the Australia Consensus Centre come to UWA?” the correct answer, according to the UWA memo, was that “UWA was approached by the Federal Government”.

Yet when Lomborg himself was asked about how the centre came into being, he told ABC Radio National: “I have spoken widely with the University of Western Australia and we came up with a proposal that the Australian Government actually liked.”

Now The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the idea originated in the office of the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, after previous reports had Education Minister Christopher Pyne as a key player.

Lomborg on climate science

When Lomborg talks about climate change, he has a set of rehearsed lines saying he accepts that climate change is real, its caused by humans and that it’s a problem.



But when Lomborg does venture beyond his standard talking points into climate science commentary, he routinely infuriates genuine climate scientists. In my view, this is for good reason.

For example, Lomborg has claimed that a recent slowdown in the rise of globally average temperatures is a sure sign that climate change computer models that predict higher temperature rises in the future are probably wrong.

Yet there is a plethora of studies in the literature explaining the “fake pause” and they mostly relate to the way some climate models don’t capture short term natural changes in the world’s climate, such as volcanic eruptions and La Nina climate cycles, which can both have a cooling influence on glob al temperatures.

Lomborg likes to pick points in time when climate indicators superficially seem to support his arguments that climate change might not be quite so bad.

In 2008, for example, Lomborg wrote an opinion article in The Guardian. I pick this older article because sufficient time has now passed to give us a crude test of Lomborg’s predictive ability. Was he right to highlight the things he chose to highlight?

Lomborg wrote: “Since 1992, we have had satellites measuring the rise in global sea levels, and they have shown a stable increase of 3.2mm per year (1/8 of an inch) – spot on compared to the IPCC projection. Moreover, over the last two years, sea levels have not increased at all – actually, they show a slight drop. Should we not be told that this is much better than expected?”

What Lomborg didn’t mention was that the average rate of sea level rise for the 20th century was 1.7mm per year and that it was now rising faster (he could have got this from the IPCC report which came out the previous year).

And what’s been happening to sea levels since?

Satellite measurements of global sea level rise from 1992 to 2014. Text added by Graham Readfearn Photograph: CSIRO

That tiny blip which Lomborg felt compelled to mention was, well, one of a number of very tiny blips as sea levels continue to rise caused chiefly by melting glaciers, ice sheets and rising ocean heat. Science Blogs blogger Greg Laden has a better graphic than mine illustrating Lomborg’s view on sea level rise.

Talking of ocean heat, in the same column Lomborg said this measure was “arguably” more important than others, such as the globally averaged temperature.

He told readers that “the heat content of the world’s oceans has been dropping for the past four years” and that “this is again much better than expected”.

In actual fact, if you look again at the IPCC’s assessment the previous year, the ocean heat content of the oceans had not been “dropping” but had been rising a little slower than previously.

But what has happened to ocean heat content since then?

A recent scientific paper in Nature Climate Change finds that since 2006 the oceans have continued to gain heat.

Another assessment of ocean heat content, put together by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, gives us a chart covering the top two kilometres of the ocean and sort of speaks for itself.

Chart showing global ocean heat content from the surface to 2000 metres deep. Text added by Graham Readfearn. Photograph: NOAA

On Planet Oz 18 months ago, we had a look at Lomborg’s claims that the world’s poorest were crying out for more fossil fuels which, Lomborg argued, were the only real way they could drag themselves out of poverty.

Then, I argued that the positions Lomborg takes on these issues are underpinned by a nasty habit of picking the lowest available estimates of the costs of climate change impacts.

Last year, when Lomborg spoke to a coal company-sponsored event in Brisbane in the shadow of the G20 talks, Lomborg suggested that because the International Energy Agency (IEA) had developed one future scenario that saw growth in the burning of coal in poor countries, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa, that this somehow meant that fossil fuels were just what they needed.

Yet Lomborg ignored an important rejoinder to that assessment, which had come from the IEA itself, and which I pointed out at the time.

The IEA said its assessment for Africa was consistent with global warming of between 3C and 6C for the continent by the end of this century.

Lomborg’s approach is, as he (very) often states, an effort to come up with “smart solutions” to the world’s biggest problems working out what gets you the “most good” for every dollar spent.

There’s nothing “smart” about spending $4 million of taxpayer cash on a highly questionable methodology that by design downgrades climate change.