This book is a failed attempt to rubbish Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool it!
In Chapter One Friel proves, unsurprisingly, that Lomborg is not part of the `consensus that projected unprecedented warming with potentially catastrophic consequences if green house emissions were not significantly reduced'.
Chapter Two looks at the numbers of polar bears. Lomborg claimed that their numbers have risen, from 5,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 today. Friel cites a 2001 report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Polar Bear Specialist Group that there are between 21,500 and 25,000. Then he berates Lomborg for writing of a `stable' bear population when the report said `stationary'.
Al Gore said, "polar bears have been drowning in significant numbers." Friel seems to think that the Center for Biological Diversity's 2008 report proves this true when it wrote, "polar bears are at risk of drowning in large numbers" and "polar bear drowning events are expected". But that is not the same as saying that they are currently `drowning in significant numbers'.
Friel often misreads Lomborg. For example, Lomborg wrote, "Some of the largest colonies contain more than twenty thousand pairs [of Emperor penguins] each, several of which may be increasing." Friel writes, "penguin colonies in one of the areas (and not `several', as Lomborg wrote) `may be increasing'". But Lomborg's `several' referred to colonies not to areas.
Lomborg cites the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 estimate that sea levels will rise about a foot by 2100: Friel calls Lomborg's statement `narrowly accurate' and `not wholly inaccurate'. Yet Friel then tries to justify Gore's 20-feet rise estimate as `a not entirely hypothetical possibility'. Again, Friel quotes reports saying that sea levels could rise by five feet by 2100, without assessing how likely this is.
Friel quotes a 2002 conference of the American Geophysical Union, "The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades." He can't see that this wrecks the case for `unprecedented warming'. (If these levels were seen decades ago, they are not unprecedented.) Nor can they be a `record', yet The New York Times headlined the conference, `Arctic Ice is Melting at Record Levels, Scientists Say' (8 December 2002). This is the kind of exaggeration that Lomborg criticises.
Other examples include a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which concluded that climate change is `largely irreversible' for the next 1000 years, and James Hansen writing, "If the present overshoot of this target CO2 [of 350 ppm] is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects."
Again, the Worldwatch Institute said that we will have to end `the emission of carbon dioxide by 2050 to avoid catastrophic disruption to the world's climate'. The Independent's Michael McCarthy reported, "Lord Stern said new research done in the past two or three years had made it clear there were `severe risks' if global temperature rose by the predicted 4 degrees C to 7 degrees C by 2100. Agriculture would be destroyed and life would be impossible over much of the planet, the former World Bank chief economist said."
But the IPCC said in 2007, "Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase with increases in local average temperature over a range of 1 to 3 degrees C, but above this it is projected to decrease." Yet Friel concludes, "It is also fair to say that Lomborg's prognosis that `we will be able to feed the world ever better' because of global warming was not supported by either Lomborg's own sources or the 2007 IPCC assessment of the issue."
The IPCC also said in 2007, "Abrupt climate changes, such as the collapse of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet, the rapid loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet or large-scale changes of ocean circulation systems, are not considered likely to occur in the 21st century, based on currently available model results."
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