Our website dealt already with the topics brought forward and the persona of Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish idol of the American right. We keep wondering who actually supports his activities – could it be that the support comes just from pay by lobbying-for-business-interests media like The Wall Street Journal, that hired him for an Opinion Column? Could it be that this paid-for Opinion Column actually stands in for the previous paid-advertisement quarter-page by Mobil Oil, then ExxonMobil, that used to be part of that page?

It is quite interesting how Professor Lomborg manages to support philanthropy ideas as long as he manages to extricate corporations from public scrutiny. He is ready to have the world throw money at the poorest part of humanity as long as the richest corporations can avoid scrutiny for the full impact of their ways of doing business. He never considers full costing effects that include what business used to call externalities – the punishment on all of us for letting them make their huge profits, and then give away those profits to their own management, to the politicians that do not investigate them, and eventually, from their tax-deductions, some small change to the poor.

As the argument goes, instead of spending money on new technologies that are less polluting and have less of an impact that results in climate change, we should rather keep the old technologies in place and spend money – government money that is – on the direct needs of the poor – feed them, help them build schools and sanitation systems.

We post the attached article from today’s WSJ as a good example of the Bjorn Lomborg argument. It is important to read this right this coming week, right before the start of the Copenhagen Conference, as we might find soon that many country leaders, recipients of Foreign Aid funding, will also argue – “gimme direct support money” because our private banking accounts, where we put those funds we took from you, have lost in value in the latest series of crises. The people of the valley Lomborg wants to help, benefited practically very little from the system that did not speak of global warming, while not minding damage to the environment – local and global -  and we believe that the poor could get out more from our addressing global issues directly.

We worry about the eventual Copenhagen Consensus concept, and would not like to see Professor Lomborg monopolize or even copyright those words.

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Climate Change and Melting Glaciers: Nepal’s poor have more pressing problems.
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424…

By BJØRN LOMBORG, IN OPINION, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Global warming has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series leading up to the December United Nations conference in Copenhagen on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue:

Nine years ago, Maya Bishwokarma moved with her family to Kathmandu from Trisuli, a remote village in the hilly Nepal countryside. Their search for a better life has proved elusive. She and her husband and two sons live in a small, two-room house with her brother-in-law’s family, near the bank of a small stream that has been converted into an open sewer.

“The life of the poor is more miserable here [than in the countryside],” Mrs. Bishwokarma told a Copenhagen Consensus researcher in June. “Our kids are suffering.” The family cannot afford to send their children to a good school.

One of the visible signs of this family’s hardship is the lack of basic amenities. Their hut has electricity, but rolling blackouts mean there is no power for as much as 16 hours a day. Even during the wet season, Mrs. Bishwokarma must line up with other local residents to collect water handed out every six days by government officials. Due to a long drought, the price of vegetables and food has soared.

The lack of water in the shadow of the Himalayas may seem like a strong argument for drastic, short-term reductions in carbon emissions. Indeed, the plight of people like the Bishwokarmas has been used by Al Gore and other campaigners to argue for just such cuts. Climate activists argue that there is a link between melting glaciers in the Himalayas and water shortages elsewhere.

On the surface, this makes sense. But when we dig deeper, we find that the Himalaya glaciers are difficult even for scientists to understand. Most suggestions of rapid melting are based on observations of a small handful of India’s 10,000 or so Himalayan glaciers. A comprehensive report in November by senior glaciologist Vijay Kumar Raina, released by the Indian government, looked more broadly and found that many of these glaciers are stable or have even advanced, and that the rate of retreat for many others has slowed recently.

Jeffrey S. Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona, declared in the Nov. 13 issue of Science that these “extremely provocative” findings were “consistent with what I have learned independently,” while in the same issue of the magazine Kenneth Hewitt, a glaciologist at Wilfrid Laurier University, agreed that “there is no evidence” to support the suggestion that the glaciers are disappearing quickly.

When glaciers thicken and expand, the summer runoff into rivers decreases. In other words, when climate change does increase glacial melting, the flow of water to poor people like the Bishwokarmas will increase for several decades.

This does not mean that we should cheer on climate change, which will affect the planet in a myriad of complex and challenging ways. It does cast new light on one argument for drastic, short-term carbon cuts. It is important, after all, that we base our response to global warming on the most solid scientific expectations.

What did Mrs. Bishwokarma have to say about such questions? Several times, she asked the Copenhagen Consensus researcher to explain what “climate change” was. When it was explained, she agreed that it was a concern.

But she added that the government of Nepal and others should spend money “first on our everyday problems, then on global warming.” To her, with the perspective of living in a slum and unable to send her children to good schools, that prescription makes a lot of sense.

Mr. Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank, and author of “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming” (Knopf, 2007).