Bjorn Lomborg: Patient Zero of Climate Denial

Thank you. I'm actually very excited about this because I don't often get thrown into a podcast without any prior knowledge of what's going to happen. Well, that's the way we like to do it here. Yeah, we like. We like our guests are are subjects to be a mystery. The guests are a mystery. That would be very a different podcast. Yeah, that would be Robert Evans invites people in off the street. I also like that you've got a machete on the table, just just to let me

know who is boss here. Well, now you know, this is a very democratic machete. Anybody can use the machete for any purpose if you feel the need to hit something. I have it on good authority that all of the equipment in here can be hit with the machetes. That correct, Sophie. We're allowed to damage all the equipment, all of the walls, the windows, the poison room. Well, technically can can be. It is possible. I mean theoretically, this is a big machete.

He's right, I think you want something would probably be throwned upon. I'll tell you what, I don't want my fingerprints on there. I don't know. I don't know you well enough to know what you're gonna do. I had very different plans. I had very different plans for what to do with the machete before you said that, Well, I don't know who to guess to joke about murdering, Um damn. That would have been a great time to

joke about. Good old Yeah, good old fashioned murder. Speaking of good old fashioned murder, today, we're talking about new fangled kinds of murder, the kind of murder where you just talk to people and write bad books and it leads to unspeakable human suffering and possibly millions of deaths. Isn't that a cool thing to talk about? That's one hell of a murder. Yeah, it is. It is the

guy that we're talking about today. The actual death toll from his work can't quite be quantified yet, but I think one of these days he'll be recognized as real piece of shit. I'm gonna start with a little bit of a winding introduction, so I hope you'll forgive me for that, Eric. When I was sixteen years old, Michael Crichton released State of Fear, the second to last novel

he would publish in his lifetime. Now, I was a big fan of Crechton's work ever since stumbling across the Lost World in second or third grade, I dutifully devoured his canon. State of Fear was decidedly different from his prior works, though. The plot was that a group of radical environmentalists using experimental technology were attempting to create a series of natural disasters in order to convince the public of the dangers of global warming, because of course it

wasn't real now. The book was filled with graphs and charts and like quotes from actual scientific studies, which is not common for a sci fi techno thriller. It included a thirty page bibliography, all of which was angled at convincing the reader that global warming was not that big

a deal. Actually cool book. Yeah. While a work of fiction, State of Fear also served as Crechton's manifesto against what he called the politico legal media complex should politicize science and unjustly scared people about the dangers of climate change. So the fun book to read at age sixteen. Crechton's work was a massive success, as most of his books were, because the man did know how to write a crowd pleasing thriller, even if it was a crazy piece of

anti climate change propaganda. Received widespread praise from conservatives. Senator Jim im Hoff declared it required reading for the Senate Committee on Environmental in Public Works. He called on Crechton to testify before said committee in two thousand five. Yeah, if you want, If you want, like a real nutshell encapsulation of how fucked American politics has always been. The Senate called on a science fiction the author of Jurassic

Parks to testify on climate change. That was the guy that blends for dogs with dinosaur d n A. They've not seen Jurassic Park, jesssic Park two three, jesssic World. It's bound to lead the disaster, Yeah, exactly. They trust him, how can they trust him. It's like if you had if there was like a clown focused terrorist group and you called Stephen King to speak to like like the Senate about terrorism and stuff because he wrote it. But I guess King though it would be interesting to get

into his mind. I'd love to have him in the sort of c I A or FBI table. Yeah, I do feel like King would actually have some insight into the mind of a terrorist. Yeah, isn't Einstein that says, you know, the true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. And potentially maybe that's why Crichton is trusted. He was not a dumb man, although like he had a very specific kind of intelligence. Michael Crichton, A lot of people don't know this. Um was a trained doctor.

I forget he went on he created Yeah, he's the creator of the R And he was a medical student. He at his m d and then kind of piste

off the college. He got his m d. Yet because he then didn't work as a doctor and went on to become a science fiction author and like apparently just got the m d so that he could like write good science fiction about medical stuff like um terminal strain or whatever the hell that book was um, but yeah, so he's he's he's not a dumb man, but he has This is the kind of problem you let come up with a lot, especially in the global warm and debate, people who are not dumb but have a very specific

kind of education and intelligence, and then assumed that they understand climate science. That's like, yeah, that's what this episode is really about. So yeah, Crichton Yeah, was called upon to testify before the Senate Committee on Environmental in Public Works in two thousand five. In two thousand and six, the APG awarded Michael It's Journalism Award, which sounds impressive until you learn that the APG is the American Association

of Petroleum Geologists. Yeah, famed unbiased source sub climate journalism. Actual climate scientists, of course, did not like State of Fear. Several of the people who authored studies that crit and used to prove his points even spoke up to complain that he completely misinterpreted or outright misrepresented their research. Peter Doran, author of a Nature paper on cooling in the Antarctic, echoed the concerns of many when he complained, our results

have been misused as evidence against global warming. This is a famous study that cited by anti climate change people that how like there's ice and like one of the poles is increasing and they're like, look look at these ice sheets are actually getting bigger. So and it's like, well no, but the other one is getting smaller. In the total amount of ice lost from the polls does not over like doesn't doesn't like they don't balance out.

We're net down a shitload. Eyes thank you, Sophie. So if he's correcting my mic placement, because I'm here in the office this time and she gets to micromanage me, but I love. I was just saying, I thank you. Is this shattering Greek pillar that's a shattering ashes from well, there's it's from a couple of places the Roman empires where, but they also there's there's big bronze ones up on Congress. It's a symbola. Yeah, sorry, Sophie, I didn't mean that.

I'm just gonna go cry. I've heard Sophie. Do you want to hit something with a machette? I wouldn't hand that to me, right, Well, I'm just trying to make your podcast better. Well, Sophie, I want everyone to hear every single word that you say. Robin. Now you've shamed me, and now I feel bad. Great, continue, I'm once again the bastard of my podcast. Which is it takes one to know one that you have to dive into the

character to truly understand the complexities of bastardry. As Nietzsche said, if you stare into the abyss long enough, eventually you hurt your boss's feelings. Natsch was a very poetic man. Yeah, he was a great podcaster, a little bit at very anti semitic really, but it was a different time podcasting was in this evolved an art form. I didn't even know how to record things. Anyway, I should continue with

the episode. Uh so. Peter Duran, author of that Nature paper and Cooling in the Arctic, complained that yeah, that Crichton had misinterpreted his results and misused them as evidence against global warming. The American Geophysical Union, which includes more than fifty scientists, stated unequittically that state of fear quote changed public perception of scientists, especially researchers, and global warming towards suspicion and hostility. This is a big books, like

number one on the charts. For quite a while, it was like a very popular release that had a real negative impact on global warming. And this is the place where I admit shamefully that young Republican Robert Evans found this book deeply compelling. Of course, even then, I was a bit too savvy to take the words of a science fiction author as the end of the argument against

vast scientific consensus. So I started going through the bibliography, and while I was doing it that I came upon the one work that Michael seemed to hold in the highest regard, a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lumborg. Have you ever heard of Biorn motherfucking Lumborg. But I'm guessing he's Scandinavian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think Danish. Um. Yeah. So there's a couple of versions of the Bijorn Lumborg

story that you'll hear. I'm gonna read one paragraph that's sort of like how he's generally introduced when you read a news article about this guy. A former member of Greenpeace, a self described leftist, a backpacking outdoorsman, and a vegetarian. Lumborg in nineteen nine seven, was paging through a copy

of Wired magazine in a bookstore in San Francisco. He happened across an interview with Julian Simon and University of Maryland economists, known for his optimistic prediction that population growth was unlikely to exhaust the planet's resources. Later that year and intrigued, Lumborg set about in Denmark with ten of

his brightest students to examine Simon's claims. Expecting to prove Simon wrong, Lumborg and his students were surprised to find that many of the economist predictions about the state of the environment were on the mark. This discovery led Lombard to pen a few op eds for a center left Danish newspaper and eventually the publication in Denmark of the first Day of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Now, the book was essentially a thoroughly argued case against the scientific consensus on

global warming. Lombard pointed out what he called a number of inconsistencies that he claimed to have uncovered between the hard scientific data and the party line of climate scientists and environmental activists. Lomborg would use what looked to my sixteen year old brain like compelling scientific data to argue his points. Among other things, that Lombard argued, number one, species are not going extinct at a weirdly high rate. Number two, the world is not losing ice, and thus

the seas are in no real danger of rising. Number three, global temperatures aren't increasing in any worrying way. And number four there's more trees than ever. So what are environmentalists worried about? It sounds silly like talking about now in two nineteen, but in two thousand one it was a different media ecosystem, Like the fact that the world was shifting its climactic pants was not quite as obvious to everybody.

The whole climate change debate has been around one a long time, in the eighties at least at least oh yeah,

and really even before that. Um Murray book Chin, who is a philosopher I'm a fan of um, kind of an anarchist political thinker in nine in the nineteen sixties, wrote a lengthy series of essays talking about how, uh, carbon emissions and like fossil fuse we're going to lead to like massive climate catastrophe unless we adopted like vastly radically different ways of living that we're like not compatible with kind of the consumptive capitalist system that we existed

in currently. Like that's nineteen sixty five. He's writing this stuff very clearly later. So, yeah, people knew about this for decades. It's just that nobody took it seriously until we had what three category five hurricanes hit the US East Coast in the course of like a y area. But even that doesn't seem to be enough evidence for people. Well, fine fastening, and there's an elemententy that's sort of not sympathizers. But until you experience something, you can't actually know anything's real.

And so when people say, oh, you know, it's all melting beyond and the poles and stuff, until they actually visibly see it, they can't fully understand the complexities of it. So um, it's that. It's that Christopher Nolan mentions in Inception and about how like one wants a seed is planted in your head, it's very hard to sort of un route. Yeah, and if you don't have trust in your government, then why would you trust that. They say, but the climate is being destroyed and I'm just talking

to hear like, because obviously the climate is changing drastically. Well, you need to do is rub your hands together and you understand the friction causes heat. And the more people that are on the planet, the more cars there are, the more food there needs to be grown. All of that. It is logical, But I am trying to understand why people don't believe. You know, there's a lot of reasons.

I think a lot of it comes down to people like Lumbourg because there's this this kind of war that really started in the nineties, the late nineties against scientific consensus. Like there was a time when if scientists in like nature came out with a study saying like, we've got

a big fucking problem. Um, the idea that you'd have a bunch of people just rejected out of hand because they believe there's a conspiracy by China to like convince people global warming is reel like that would that would sound absurd to people, And now the president has essentially spread that same line, like it's um, this is a lot of this is like where we are right now is the culmination of a process that lumb war was a major part of starting this, this war against kind

of an understand a shared understanding of reality. Um. And part part of the problem is that this issue was so politicized and it's like, I don't think al Gore was wrong in making it like a key cornerstone of like his presidential campaign and just like his personal activism, but the fact that Gore was associated with Clinton and that Republican having grown up in a Republican home, I can tell you the kind of hatred of the Clintons that existed in the late nineties and in two thousand

was beyond rational. It was. It was a kind of mania that overtook the conservative right and that is still very much asn't in prevalent um. And so because al Gore, who was connected to the Clintons, was making this point, it had to be fake and so that was a big driver of all of this. So there's a lot of this that's tied together. It's it's the end of a process in which kind of at the the apex

point of the process, nobody believes anything. There's no sort of authority beyond the one guy that you like, if you're that sort of person or whatever pundits you trust. Um, And yeah, it's it's a real problem. Yeah, um, it's interesting. I also wonder though, if all the people are pushing the climate change is a hoax thing generally are quite wealthy well, and they won't be affected by ultimately, ultimately,

you know, the world and the humanity will survive. Right now, there may be millions billions of death caused because the climate change, but ultimately humanity will survive. And I think they're very rich, will always be good. They could just move somewhere else. Yeah, they'll move somewhere. That's going to go from having brutal winters to being like Los Angeles when Los Angeles burns down, So ultimately there and give a ship. Well, yeah, that's actually kind of where this

is headed a little bit. Yeah, no, no, no, no, this is this is what the podcast is for. So the unavoidable conclusion from reading Lomborg's book and taking it seriously was that everything was more or less hunky dory with the climate. Uh Now, Bjorn did not deny that there were some environmental problems. He didn't even come out and deny that human beings were changing the climate. But his argument was that all of the issues we were having were things that could be solved by better conservation

and modest infrastructure investments. Nobody needed to say stop driving cars, or stop burning coal or stop fracking gas. The people telling us to do all that, we're just fearmongers. That's that's Bjorn Lamborg's line. Now, sixteen year old Robert Evans took Lumborg's book apart and used many bits arguments for a series of debates in his speech and debate class. And then he grew up and into the real world

and stopped being a young Republican. Somewhere between reading the work of actual climate scientists, which Lumborg is not, and living through four of the hottest years on record, he came around on the whole climate change thing. But I was not the only person fooled by Bijorn Lumborg. The median narrative around him was just too good for bunches

of overly credulous journalists to not flock to him. One example of this was a two thousand and one New York Times profile released right before the publication of the English translation of The Skeptical Environmentalist. The title scientist at work from an unlikely corner eco optimism. That's nice eco optimism quote. Strange to say the author of this happy thesis is not a steely eyed economist at a conservative think tank, but a vegetarian, backpack toting academic who was

a member of Greenpeace for four years. He is doctor Bjorn Lumborg, a thirty six year old political scientist and professor of statistics at the University of our hosts in Denmark. Now. The article went into loving detail about how Lumborg had been converted from environmental apocalypticism by reading the work of Dr Julian Simon, Who's that doctor we talked about a little earlier. Now. Simon is famous for having some very public arguments with a guy named Dr Paul or Like

over resource scarcity. Erlick was like a doom kind of a doomsayer. He wrote like a book about how like human population was going to like reach an apocalyptic level and cause massive resource scarcity, and his predictions turned out to be largely untrue. And Simon actually made a bet with him about, like, you know, they picked five resources and Airlock bet that they would all increase in cost over the next couple of decades, and Simon bet that

they would decrease, and Simon wound up being right. Um, can I ask you, do you think that people aren't necessary worried about the whole climate change thing as a whole, as an actual doomsday possibility because they've gone through so many doomsday possibilities. So we've had the millennium bug, we you guys have had the nuclear threats from Russia. We are constantly barraged by these end of the world scenarios

that never usually happened. That when we are presented with one that's actually in front of us, happening live in front of our eyes, that most people can just brush it aside because I've experienced other doomsday scenars that have

actually just sort of gone bine wind. I absolutely think that kind of particularly some of the Hollywood like the Day After Tomorrow ship, like that's that's actually really hurt the cause of getting people to take this seriously, because the problem is not um that the world is going to end. Human beings are very adaptable. The majority of us will find a way to survive no matter what

happens to the climate. Like even if a fucking asteroid hits, I have no doubt that a lot of people will figure out how to make that ship work, because we're just we're cunning little bastards. Um. The problem is that, like it's not an apocalypse thing, it's like what what do we want the world to be? What do we want the world to be for our kids, for our grandkids. Do we want it to be the sun racked nightmare healthscape where people knife fight to death over jugs of water? Um,

A lot of people don't. Yeah, that's that's another scary thing. Is I am hoarding water and nights? But that's very little to do with the podcasting machete. Um No, it's it is weird how a lot of people will uh, you know, height being by themselves, which means that they always have like bad voices in their heads. And if that have bad voices in their heads, I don't really

care about other people. And so the idea of an apocalyptic yes scenario where where their their life gets twist turned upside down is actually welcoming because most people's lives

are kind of difficult and challenging. Well, if I can get into like, uh, my my own fringe political beliefs on this, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are some very dehumanizing aspects to the kind of capitalism that we enjoy in the United States, and a lot of people's lives are incredibly difficult and there's very little hope that things will lighten up or that they'll be able to retire. There's like no light at the end of the tunnel. There's

just a series of distractions. And so the ideal that it might all come tumbling down and you would get to be king of the waste land and not have to clock in at work at Target the next morning. Right that that that does, that is very attractive to a chunk of the population, especially the people who believe that they would thrive that environment. Yeah, that's that's an important key I think, is that they would believe they

would thrive when the reality is two days in the woods. Now, Eric, speaking of the dehumanizing realities of modern American consumerst capitalism, it's time for an it plug. Is this a good This is a good one, Yeah, nailing it products. We're back boy. A lot happened in that break number one. I grabbed my throwing bagels. I don't know if you if you're aware of this, but I throw bagels on the show. It's a much in a kind of substitute to think, Well, your guests. I actually planned to combine

the two. So here's what I'd like to do when we when we hit a point of maximum rage in this episode, um or perhaps at the end of it, I'm going to throw these bagels and I want you to slice them out of the air like a modern samurai with the Sisters machete. You want to do that? All right? Sophie says that it's approved by everyone at corporate, so we're good to go. I also have to say I just tried the pair editions sugar Free Red Bull. I hate Red Bull as a general rule. I hate

the company, the ad campaign. This is delightful. The pair version is really tasty. I hate that it's so good, but it's fantastic, and I like that you gave it a little like you are a commercial now. Thank you. You've become America. I God, damn it. It happens every time I come back to Los Angeles. When can I show him a photo of this fucker? Yeah? Show him young beyond Lumborg so you can see how this guy okay, because I was gonna say, Michael's all right, Michael's in

all right face. No, No, he's fine. So this is young born Lumborg. So for anyone listening, he looks like Hitler's wet dream. He kind of looks like, um, what I like, what Aaron Carter would look like if he didn't do drugs, like you know, this little blue eyes, blonde hair, and it works for him. Yeah, but how does he look now, Well, we'll talk about that a little bit. I want to get to where this guy winds up bad but not great? Right? Is he a

personification of what's going on inside his mind? Yeah? Kind of. Actually it's a personification of what's happened to his arguments over the years, which I think happens. I mean, look at Steve Bannon. If Steve Stevie Banny, right hat Steve Bannon, if he looks like you know, if he looked like Hercules and was like just you know, I hate these types of people, I'd be like, I'm gonna listen to that guy. He's a beautiful man. He must be healthy,

both physically and therefore mentally. But Steve is full of like regular type skin, you know, where like clearly skirmishes have happened on this face. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, there's a war between his acne and his cirrhosis, and like it's it's a vicious battle. Paul, Steve, No, don't ever, Steve Bannon. You know what, it doesn't get said enough, Paul Steve

Steve Bannon, uh Stevie b So, yeah, Lumbard. When we talked about Julian Simon, the guy got into that argument with Paul Aerlic And he's like a frequently quoted scientist by people who want to deny climate change because one of the things that they'll always argue is that we'll back in the seventies and eighties, everybody was telling us there was going to be a population bomb and population a resource crisis, and that didn't happen, so clearly like

this is the same thing, and everybody's worried for nothing. And Simon is one of the apostles of he was right about the population crisis. And that is one of the things whenever we're getting too talks about climate change and people bring up population is a problem, that's zero percent of the problem. The the overall human population is not an issue. It's resource expenditure by people like us. Um It's not like the issue is not that there's too many people being born in Sub Saharan Africa, or

in India or in China. It's a little bit, but that's most A lot of that's because they're making stuff to be sold in the Europe and in Europe in the United States, it's not a population issue. It's the

types of resources being consumed. And also like more than anything related to Yeah, it's more an issue of billionaires and millionaires and upper middle class people in the kind of resources they spend, like celebrities flying their private jets from one airport in l a to the other to skip midtown traffic, which happens way more often than you

would expect. Oh, you can track their planes. Yeah, Um, it's more of that than it is like look at all these people and yeah, that that's part of like what Steve Bannon Actually that's one of the racist arguments that he'll make about like, well, if you're really concerned, we should like be concerned about all these population, you know, problems going So it's like this weird thing on the right where but both point to Paul Erlick and his fears of a population bomb to be like, look, climate

change isn't real because they were wrong about overpopulation. And they'll also complain that like all these hordes of of poor, non white people from like the global South are going to like using up the world's resources, when that's not at all the case, like it's this double edged sword of racism, uh, and also not doing anything about the core problems of climate change. It's very frustrating. I do wonder with these signs who say, you know, they're opposing

climate change and stuff. I do want to sometimes if that's just good money it is with Lumberg, I'm not gonna say Simon died. I think before the debate really took off, he was right about the population stuff, So I mean, I don't want to lump him in with Lamborg,

but Lumborg sees himself as that kind of figure. So Simon gains a lot of renowned for being right about the fact that like there was alarmism around the global population, and Lumborg painted himself as that kind of guy, and he would bring this story up specifically when he did news interviews so that people would conservatives in particular, would see him as like, oh, this is the next iteration

of that kind of scientist. This is the clear eyed Galileo type contrarian scientists who sees the reality through the political bullshit of climate change and understands that it's not really a problem. We can keep fracking. Like that's how he's painting himself. So it's important to understand that so um. One of the reasons that Lumborg was so convincing, particularly to journalists who again didn't know anything about science, like the guys at the New York Times wrote this profile piece,

is that his book had a shipload of citations in it. Uh. In many of the articles about Lumborg in the early two thousand's, you would read quotes like this one from the Times. Dr Lumborg has presented his findings and the Skeptical Environmentalists a book to be published in September by Cambridge University Press. The primary targets of the book, a substantial work of analysis with almost three thousand footnotes, are statements made by environmental organizations like the World Watch Institute,

the World Wildlife Fund, and green Peace. Virtually every one of these pieces you would find includes references, and often multiple references, to the fact that Lumborg's book had like

three thousand footnotes. So like that's part of the claim of like, how how like this is a really seriously research scholarly look at how many footnotes it has, Like people would like there's you can find like videos and stuff of people like like whole opening the book and like pointing out how thick the section of footnotes is, and like I did that when I was in school, to point out, like, look, this guy is really like look at how many fucking we're excited he has. That

means it's like a real solid work of science. So you see you once sort of side Oh yeah, absolutely, I was. I was raised very conservative, very Republican. Um I thought that George W. Bush was the best president since Ronald Reagan? Who was the best president? And when and how long did we take you to sort of distance yourself from him? I mean as soon as I went to college and made friends who both were not

white and also had not grown up middle class. It's a bear in mind, like how challenging it had to take you to be from one place to another. And you're clearly smart, and you clearly have resources where you want to read and stuff. Then we're asking the general populace to just switch off to Netflix for an hour

and maybe read an essay. Yeah, it read an essay that's like dense and hard to understand, and they might come across stuff like research on how one Arctic ice sheet is increasing in density, and like you have to also ask them, no, no, don't stop just because you read one thing that doesn't seem like like it actually takes understanding a lot of different things, like not just like what's happening with like ice sheets, but what's happening

with like air currents and like like weather patterns, species, like, well, they have to understand chaos theory, yeah, in its most complex form, which is ah and and then you get to this situation where like you wind up telling people just look, all the scientists agree about this, so just believe them. But then there's maybe if you need to know comp chaos theory, maybe we should talk to Michael

Crichton about it. It's seemed frustrating he didn't get that. Yeah, and Creighton Lost World still a fine book, but god damn it, dude. So yeah, Journalists who liked Lumbourg would point out, like all of those fucking footnotes, like that was one of the biggest arguments to like why the Skeptical Environmentalist was a credible book, um, And most people who looked at all those footnotes assumed that his arguments were actually supported by the research included there. In spoilers,

it was not as with Crichton. Several of the scientists cited in the Borg's books spoke out to warn that he had misinterpreted their work. A bevy of experts took to the field to complain that the skeptical environmentalists was nothing but a pack of deadly lies. For one example of how dumb this ship is, I'd like to quote an article written by Dr E. O. Wilson, a Harvard professor, a two time Pulitzer Prize winner, and an actual biologist.

He's commenting on Lumburg's claims that fears of mass extinction brought on by climate change are bogus, using bad data and lies. Lumbarg estimated a species lost worldwide of just point seven percent over the next fifty years point zero one four percent per year. Now, Dr Wilson, who was an actual biologist again and not a fucking statician and economist like Lumborg, wrote this. Before humans existed, the species extinction rate was very roughly one species per million species

per year point zero zero zero one percent. Estimates for current species extinction rates range from one hundred to ten thousand times that, but mostly hover close to the one thousand times pre human levels point one percent per year, with the rate rejected to rise and very likely sharply. Wilson goes on to note, based on the work of Stuart Pim of Columbia University's Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, anywhere from one to several birds species go extinct annually

out of ten thousand known species. Hence, say point zero one to point zero three percent of all living bird species are extinguished per year. But birds are unusual, and that threatens bird species receive an extraordinary amount of human intervention. The real figure of observed extinctions would be much higher, very likely ten per year, point one percent or more, if it were not for their heroic efforts to save

species on the brink of extinction. Now, that article and that quote from Dr Wilson came from two thousand one, but time has proved Dr Wilson right and Dr Lumbourg wrong. The Center for Biological Diversity notes we're currently experiencing the worst spate of species die off since the loss of the dinosaurs sixty million years ago. Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural background rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we

are now losing species. It up to a thousand times the background rate, with literally does is going extinct every day. It could be a scary future. Indeed, with as many as thirty of all species passably heading towards extinction by mid century. So Lumborg says point seven percent of all species by mid century. The reality is but even even

that forty, I think most people don't care. Right, But what it seems like people don't understand is if you lose one animal, it's snowballs and sort of triggers effect. Like you need to like we need to win the heart of people in different ways I learned. So there's this woman called Dr Erica McAllister. She works at the Natural History Museum, and she is a fly expert, and

I did an interview with her about flies. And there is one fly that creates chocolate, pollinates chocolate, and because of global warming, we're actually losing that fly, which means that potentially we could lose chocolate. If you get to people in that way, I can see people protesting fast ladies and chocolate if you can convince the it's real.

Like one of the problems is that, like there's a lot of people who when you tell them that we're losing species, will get angry and say, funk all those species. I want them dead. I'm going to drive the biggest I'm going to modify my car to release more pollution

so that it will kill them faster. Because there's this big propaganda game that's been played in the US to make it look like um, the point of a couple of specific cases where like the Environmental Protection Act led to farmers losing access to pieces of their land to preserve like wetlands and keep it species of frog alive, and it like led to people murdering some of those species, like like as an act of protest against what they

saw as government overreach. Like it's this, there's this hateful and utterly lunatic chunk of the right that has been trained to respond to any talk of global warming with just like violent rage, which is why you'll see people threatening to kill Greta Tunberg, that that that the young environmental active. It's amazing to watch, you know, obviously really sad for her and almost kind of fair what could

happen to her. There's a piece of me that's like as fucked up as it is, and I'm horribly sorry that she is going through this and very proud of her for being an activist. It's good that it's been made this obvious that there's this young girl just saying I want the world to be habitable by currently like when I'm an adult, I want to be able to like enjoy wetlands and like glaciers, Like I want to be able to live in the kind of world that

y'all grew up in. And every like this chunk of the populace threatening to murder her um and like like like that we see this this kind of hate unleashed that like it really is that irrational. It really has been, because yeah, Lumboard is ground zero for spinning that up, like he's a part of this convincing everybody like that was the first stage was convincing them there's this conspiracy.

And he didn't say it was a conspiracy. He just said that, like, look, there's this the reality if you look at the real data, it's actually not that bad. On all these groups are just trying to scare you, like there's this conspiracy of fear. Then that's that. Like the whole lady behind Crichton's book is that there's a literal conspiracy to like make you believe if this is

happening when it's not. And that's the that's step one to getting and the in stage of this like long and I don't even think it was really a plan, but the natural conclusion of the start of this, where you just get everyone to distrust this information believe they're being lied to, is when this young woman steps up. People are just like screaming spittle flecked hatred at this this girl for daring to be like, I'd like it if there were ice in the future. Yeah, it's pretty

scary the people, the people that are out there. Yeah, And Lumbourg is an important guy to understand to know how we got from, like where we used to be as a species, about like kind of basic scientific consensus and where we are right now, particularly in the United States. But but also the thing is I do try and

understand people that don't understand, right. And if most people, well actually all people can only experience life through their own sis, right, And if people are also not curious because the majority of people are not curious, which is their curiosity is focused. They're curious about whatever they're into. They're not curious about but even now. Some people just

aren't right. They just sort of float around, just sort of colliding into things, and just life takes them in a different path and they almost have no control and where they're going. And most people just haven't got that curiosity to read more than one clickbay article. And so it's very so it's so easy to be brainwashed into thinking that, yeah, yeah, what if it is a conspiracy? Because all the proof I have is it's getting hotter,

but because the news tells me is getting hot. Look at this nicely dressed Danish man with beautiful blonde hair holding up a book with like three thousand citations telling me not to worry. All right, Well, I I'm going to go back to worrying about, like, you know, the

fact that my kid doesn't have healthcare or whatever. I have other ship to deal with out so yeah, the uh it turns out that Lomborg, also speaking of that bibliography, puffed it up to a kind of ridiculous extent by including a lot of sources that were not rigorously researched scientific studies. So like the way that it was framed is like this is all the scientific citations. It wasn't

all scientific citations. I'm going to read a quote from an article by Matt Nisbet, a professor of communication and a writer with a skeptical inquirer. He uncritically and selectively cites literature, much of it non peer reviewed, and misinterprets or misunderstands the previously published scientific research. Several scientists observed that most of Lamborg's three thousand citations are to media

articles and secondary sources. Lomborg's research is conceptually flawed. He ignores ecology and connections among environmental problems, taking instead a human centered approach. In several cases, he uses statistical measures that are not valid indicators of the problems Here. Reports are improving on the topic of biodiversity. E. O. Wilson and a team of reviewers find that Lomborg's work is strikingly at odds with what every expert in the field

has stated. The review, appearing in Nature goes broader in concludes that The Skeptical Environmentalist is a hastily prepared book on complex scientific issues which disagrees with broad scientific consensus, using arguments too often supported by news sources rather than by peer reviewed publications. So he picks news sources where people have misinterpreted scientific studies, then uses those arguments in his book, and then includes those citations to puff up

his three thousand citation counts. That it seems like because people think he's actually reading science and actually understands it, but of course he can't. Like, one of the things you noticed that's really frustrating that we're gonna get to in a bit is how many different types of scientists it takes to debunk Lumborg's work, which points out that it's fundamentally absurd to assume that any statistician, any economist period anywhere in the world could write a competent book

on climate change. It's not possible because it requires so much different expertise from so many different fields to actually have a hope of understanding the whole scope of the problem and analyzing all this correctly. And Lumborg that's not what he's good at. I'm sure he's fine enough at fucking economics, but like that, this is not economics. Is there not artificial intelligent programs now to sort of create models of climate change and where it could possibly begin

in the future. Well, that's just the chi coms trying to trick us, right, right, there is so much wrong with the Orn Lumborg's book that I could literally right five or six episodes just going through everything that's been debunked in it, and not finished getting through everything lumbarg

got wrong. And I'm not going to do that because we all have better shipped to do, and because a number of incredibly authoritative scientists have already gone through the trouble of doing line by line breakdowns of everything in the book. Rather than just go over every single thing that beyond got wrong, I'm going to quote from the Union of Concerned Scientists. They invited a group of the world's leading experts on water resources, biodiversity, and climate change

to review the skeptical environmentalist quote. Reviewing Dr Lumborg's claims are Dr Peter Gleek, an internationally recognized expert on the state of fresh water resources. Dr Jerry Mallman, one of the most highly regarded atmospheric scientists and climate modelers, and top biologists and biodiversity experts. Doctors Edward O. Wilson, Thomas Lovejoy, Norman Myers, Jeffrey Harvey, and Stewart Pim This is again,

that's uh, what are we at? There? Seven doctors seven different experts at the top of their fields, all reviewing this book. Liars, liers, and of course none of them are statisticians, are economists. Quote these separately written expert reviews. They all had them like right, separate things that like they weren't influencing each other, unequivocally demonstrate that on closer inspection, Lumborg's book is seriously flawed and fails to meet basic

standards of credible scientific analysis. The author's note how Lumborg consistently misuses, misrepresents, or misinterprets data to greatly underestimate rates of species extinctions, ignore evidence that billions of people lack access to clean water and sanitation, and minimize the extent and impacts of global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human caused emissions of heat trapping gases.

Time and time again, these experts find that Lumberg's assertions and analyzes are marred by flawed logic, inappropriate use of statistics, and hidden value judgments. He uncritically and selectively cites literally You're often not be reviewed that supports his assertions, while ignoring or misinterpreting scientific evidence that does not his consistently flawed use of scientific data is, in Peter Gleek's words,

unexpected and disturbing in a statistician. All this makes me think, you know what, maybe free speech isn't the right puff for humanity. It's it's it's it's hard to read the story of Lumburg and not feel like we need to have a couple extra laws about when you and I don't think it's a free speech is a problem. I think it's that it's we too narrowly interpret the the

fire in a crowded theater rule that nobody disagrees that. Like, yeah, if somebody's shouting there's a fire and causes a stampede and someone dies, Yeah, of course that person should be criminally liable. What happens when a guy does this? Why isn't he criminally liable for the impact? He knows what he's doing, Like, yeah, that that should be more tests. Like you should just be allowed to have a book, I think, you know, speaking as a guy who's written

a book. Yeah, yes, you should just be allowed. You should have like some basic knowledge. Basic you should have

some knowledge know all you're doing. It's it's frustrating, like there should be One of the difficulties with this is, like so many of these issues and the issues we have with like getting people on board with like a basic understanding of the consensus of climate change is that there's so many individual studies, Like if you just read the summary of the study, you could argue like, oh, this proves that climate changes in a problem, and then

if you actually go into what the scientists are saying, they're like, no, no, no, no no. This may seem like it's not a problem, but it actually plays into this problem and this problem and this problem, and it's a part of this chain of events that leads to this thing. That's exactly what scientists have been telling everybody

for years. You're misinterpreting my research. But that doesn't matter because somebody just like, waves, look, this study says it's not a problem on Fox News, and then my parents are like, well, I guess we don't have to worry. Yeah, it's it's frustrating, you know, it's not frustrating. Um ice cream, ice cream? And what the ads for this podcast might be ice cream? Sofiare we sponsored by ice cream? Let's hope that it's ice cream sponsoring this and not another

coke Brother's ad. It might be another Cooke Brother's add. I hope it's a vaping add and not a Coke Brothers add. Same thing. No it's not. I mean, technically vaping could reduce overall climate emissions if it really is killing people. But that's so, that's what I said on the Daily's Like guys a cople of days ago, I said that, Um, I think that the n r A is actually the best thing America has currently in its fight against climate change. You know, every every death leads

to a few a common footprint. I will, I will say, if we really want to get down that road. The greatest ally the world has in fighting climate change its climate tobacco industry. Man, the best fight is climate change in itself, like it will kill at people, kill that many people. We've gotten too good at disaster recovery. And this is how we get sponsor, Yes, sponsors like Philip ors tobacco solving climate change one year olds lungs at a time. Was that a good ad? Plug? Sofie absolutely

not products? All right, we're back. So all of these debunkings we've gone through were public information basically as soon as Biorn Lumborg's book was out in serious people had time to read it, but none of the authoritative deconstructions of Lumborg's work seemed to matter. He kept right on making bank as the profit of Everything's fine, and capitalism will save us all from the climate catastrophe capitalism created. His website Boron Lumborg Get the Facts Straight, includes a

short selection of the many awards he received. One of the hundred Top Global Thinkers foreign Policy two thousand eleven, Thought Leader Bloomberg's Summit two thousand eleven. One of the hundred Top Global Thinkers Foreign Policy two thousand and ten. One of the world seventy five most Influential People of the twenty first century, Esquire two thousand and eight, One of the fifty people who Could Save the Planet UK Guardian two thousand eight, One of the top hundred public intellectuals.

Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine two thousand eight. One of the top hundred public intellectuals Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine two thousand five. One of the world's most hundred influential people. Time Magazine two thousand four. Wow, Right, isn't that fucked up? Well, it's It's also not surprising that because these people making those lists are probably in turns, like ultimately the truth is that the people making lists aren't educated in that field.

It's it's a lot of it's. I think it's a mix of those and like editors who come from a wealthy background, because a lot of news editors do, and who have like friends in all these industries and stuff, and they're like, ah, this is the guy telling us it's fine. Yeah, I think that's a chunk of it, especially for like Foreign Policy and Esquire. Um. Now, you know when you do your behind the Bastard podcast, Yeah, do you have a lot of anger just boiling? Are

your things? Yeah? I go shooting about once a week. I have a lot of different machetes that I hit stuff with. I work out about ninety minutes a day. Yeah, very nice. YEA. I wonder like, how just hearing all of that out, how you just stays in? I do not stays in. I do a lot of drugs. It does help, Yeah, to be honest, like speaking of the n r A shooting is probably the best cathartic thing for dealing with that kind of rage. I have to say, you know, like I'm very much sort of an anti

gun person. But at the same time, I don't want to judge people, especially once i've until I've experienced it, and I think it's a shooting range and it's fun. Whether or not you think they should all be banned, it's objectively fun. Yeah, it's very fun. Yeah. Yeah. That has nothing to do with what the law should be right right right now. Um, if you've noticed from all of those Top Thinker awards, they all came out at latest in two thousand eleven, and a majority of them

are from two thousand ten or earlier. It's weird that Lumborg seems to be considered a top thinker much less often in these days of Category five hurricanes and apocalyptic mud slides in the Midwest and hottest years ever on record in California's largest wildfires, and like weird, Yeah, because I guess what what what people's thought behind it is that things like that have always happened, So I I know that for example, in the UK during the Roman

times there were melons that you could grow, you can grow melons. And then in Charles Dickens times, in one of his books, I think it was David Copperfield, the Thames was frozen over which is the river that runs through London, which I've never seen it frozen, Like it was so frozen they could build bonfires on it. So's it's wild And so I understand that that, you know, clime, it does change all the time, but I think people don't understand that it's sort of changing at a rate.

I think part of Lumburg's falling from graces that people have started to like like California has always had wildfires, We've never had Malibu burned down, Like I think that was a wake up call to a chunk of people. I think that, like especially in like Florida and stuff, part of why it's gotten harder and why like a lot of people on the right no longer say climate

change isn't happening. They'll say that like either humans aren't behind it or that you know, and we'll get to this the line Lumborg especially now, it's like, oh no,

it's absolutely happening. It's just what everyone says we should do cut emissions and stuff that's wrong, and there's other things that we should do, but like you can't even like a bount of the arch conservatives living on the Florida coast, one of the most conservative, like you can't you can't have those kind of hurricanes hit as regularly as they are and be like nothing's changing. It's it's at this point it's like, oh wow, we've had three once in a century storms in like a couple of years,

like maybe there's a problem. Um. So now the debate has changed, like well what do we do about the problem and stuff? And Lumborg has tried to pivot on that. He has been less successful. Once again, we'll we'll, we'll get to um. But you know, it's in the first few years after The Skeptical Environmentalist was published by the Oxford University Press and two thousand one, which fucking Oxford

University Press, Lumborg was everywhere he was on. He was on Newsnight, sixty Minutes, the Late Show Larry King, and he made regular appearances on CNN, MSNBC and of course Fox News. All of these sources accepted Lumbourg as an expert, while the real expert shouted desperately that he was as ship filled as a poop factory. I'm proud of that one, Sophie,

thank you. I think one hint as to why this happened is included inside that first fawning New York Times article from two thousand one, Dr Lumborg also chides, and this is him talking about like what he calls the litany, which is the term he used for like the doom and gloom like stuff being said about climate change in the early two thousand's. Dr Lumborg also chides journalists, saying they uncritically spread the litany, and he accuses the public

of an unfounded readiness to believe the worst. The litany has pervaded the debate so deeply and so long. Dr Lumborg writes that blatantly false claims can be made again and again without any references and yet still be believed. This is the fault not of academic environmental research, which balanced incompetent, he says, but rather of the communication of environmental knowledge, which taps deeply into our doomsday beliefs. And I think if you completely reverse everything that he just said,

that is an accurate explanation for lumborg success. The problem is not that journalists uncritically spread the gospel of climate change. The problem is that journalists uncritically accept people claiming to be experts and will write glowing articles about them. If they just have a three thousand you know, entry work cited page and their bibliographies. People don't want to buy into doomsday beliefs, not really. Most people want to believe that everything is going to be fine and they don't

need to worry about a problem. So we'll happily listen to a handsome European who misreads real studies to show us that everything is fine. And I think Lumborg's ability to tap into all of these things is why he's been successful, or at least why he was. Do you think that uh, I like to sort of asking you questions. You're very smart, and I want to see what comes out of your face. Um, do you think that the world is sort of experiencing a mass by stand or effect?

So always it's like always, yeah, I'll just con that's just going, oh well, someone else will sold that out. Yeah. I think we always are. And I think it's like a natural consequence of I think like one of I'm on record of saying, like one of the worst things that ever happened is twenty four hour television news. It's uh, might be what destroys us as a species. Like if

there is a big apocalyptic nuclear war or something. I think the core of it will lie in the twenty four hour news cycle, UM one way or the other, because it's just this this machine that exists to exhaust people's ability to give a fuck and to productively deal

with problems. UM. And I think it's a big part of like why you have this kind of decision fatigue, in this assumption that like somebody else will handle it, which is like what a lot of people on the right will point to now that we you can't completely deny climate change, so they'll say, well, scientists are going to figure out a solution, like they'll figure out a way to fix the whole problem. Well yeah, as well, yeah, they share, well, uh, there won't be consequences. Hey, as

a French person, I really miss beheading people. You know, honestly, I really think we should bring that back. I you know what, I think the actual solution would be, Like the worst thing you could do to the people who are actually responsible for most of this is if you were to take away like the the oil and gas executives,

the people that like, uh, what's the company? Um starts with an E. No, no, no, well yeah, those guys too, But like the the people that like these these oil and gas companies who like new Back and like at least the seventies and stuff that climate change is going to be a problem, and like direct like like the cigarette companies, covered up evidence that it was going to be an issue so they can maintain their profits. I

think you take all of those people's money. I think you take all of their family money and you lack them, uh in, anyone who profited from the family business into making no more than the like median American salary and make them live in a normal apartment and make them just be a normal person. And you have that enforced upon them so that they never will ever be able

to get access to do anything like that. But on the way there that they have to do to Sessa Lanister style of walking, I'm okay with a little bit with a bell, and they have to walk around naked. I think Mitch McConnell naked walking around the streets of Washington, they say, with his big yeah, but okay, hear me out on this. That makes him into that gives him

the the opportunity to behave as a victim. If Mitch McConnell has to work seven shifts a week at the Applebee's to make rent on his one bedroom apartment, and then he's got like number one. He's got to like depend on all these people, and they have to depend on he has no privileged position. But also like all these people are like, hey, Mitch, it's a hundred and fifteen today, thanks, asshole. Like I I do think that like the worst thing you could do to a lot

of these people. Um. I think there's folks like your your Paul's Maniford out there who need to be locked up because they're just too dangerous. But I think most of these people need to be um locked away from the things that are most valuable to them, which is wealth and influence. Um. And I think that will hurt more more than any guillotine ever could. Although I get the impulse, I don't know, it's just a restaurant, chack. I didn't say it's bad. I don't want him, like

like I want him at a restaurant. Yeah, I don't want the people. I don't want the staff members of Apples have to deal with. Mitch McConnell. I want to be able to go to an Applebee's and get problematically drunk off of their terrible cocktails and make Mitch McConnell serve me in you know what you know, and we need to open a brand new apple base, right so the oldest stuff member mc Apple's, Ms McConnell and Alex Jones.

There a just running that would be a great just just an Applebee's staffed by the people who are like behind, like largely behind our current era of like post truth like nonsense. That's that actually would be a great place to get Like I would never not be mettingly drunk in that place, Like I would be a problem to that.

That would be man, It would finally be like I try to be on my good behavior when I get really drunk at like restaurants and stuff because they don't want to cause a problem for like the white staff or something, because they're working people. But if Mitch McConnell was serving my table, I would make it my business to puke. Can I make a suggestion? Yes? So, according to cheat sheet dot com, the most hated restaurant and fast food chain in America is Red Robin, and I

think it's a great place for choccon. Mitch McConnell at a goddamn Red Robin or a uh this roadhouse. Hey, hey, hey, hey, Okay, I've not had the privilege of of enjoying an Applebee's or a Red Robin. Oh man. Applebee's is great, Applebee's is well, what if you use at a waffle house? Everybody's thrown up at a waffle house. Yeah, but they don't serve liquor like a waffle I I have been

I actually, I've never been sober in a waffle house. Um, but you I want to go to a place where I could get I want Mitch McConnell to hand me like a gigantic margarita that's like a leader in length, and I want to as he's handing it to me, take a sip from it while it's still in his hands, and then vomit directly onto him. And then you can bring me another. But now you're victimizing him. That's fine, I would Washington. I'm out about David Busters because people

also bring their screaming children. That would be Chucky Cheese. I can't suggest Chuckie Cheese as my friendship with Jimmie Loftus is very important, but honest people can debate over which specific type of shaming would be most maybe have him circulate, because it would be fun to have him like clean up after me at a six Flags too, because I can funk up a six Flags. I really would love to hear him say, would you like fries

with that? These would all be very helpful if we could just if we could just establish like basic income and healthcare, uh, and then make it so that like our most unplay doesn't service jobs are all held by former Republican congress people kind of managed by the former people who used to do their jobs. Here's question. A lot of these people are a religious in terms of like a lot of the religious Yeah, right, because I do wonder like the real religious people wouldn't they want

to take care of the planet. You know, I've never understood that, like the people that preach will and stuff and then they're going, it's God's will for me to be an asshole that they're not taking care of the planet.

That gets into a really complicated subject of like theological debate, because there's a there's a sizeable chunk of American Christians in particular, it's not just the United States phenomenon, but it's bigg here who believe that um the apocalypse is preordained essentially, so that's like, why would you take care of this world? It's ending soon. There's also a chuck of people like who believe like God gave us dominion over this planet, so we're supposed to use it and

use it up and like use all the resources. And there's even people who will argue that like God provides with new resources when we use the old ones, and like that's why we've discovered all this this gas under the earth to frack. That was God being like, don't worry about those pesty arabs holding all the oil here,

just suck it out of the earth, the like whatever problem. Yeah, there's a bunch of different frustrating things, and I think, um, those people, once upon a time you couldn't take them seriously, like like in mainstream politics. Um, And what Lumbourg provided was a chance for like kind of the more technocratic conservatives like my parents who are like religious but not

really religious. Um, they could look at this guy's arguments and be like, well, now here's a smart, educated scientist with a doctor in his name, and he's making he's not saying like God's going to take care of it. He's saying that like you know, he's making what seemed like very logical arguments Forroy, this isn't a problem or why what problems exist will be solved very simply, um, without us changing our lifestyle or dealing with the problems,

and like a fundamental level of our society. And it's it's consumption of resources. Um. So yeah, it's uh, it's come that's killing humans, actually, isn't it. Yeah it always Yeah, it's just comfort. People are scared of change. Yeah, yeah,

it's always comfort that's killing humans. Um. From a literal point of view, um, in terms of just the fact that we're eating stuff that's clogging our arteries and giving us heart attacks at a younger age up to like the fact that we'll ignore uh doom as it rules like leers down on our heads because we want to go out to Applebee's and we don't want to worry about climate change. I'm not saying Applebee's is bad. Um. Yes, you know what, I'm gonna go to an apple Bae's

off for this, not today, but maybe not today. I know that when I go drive past one, I might stop just to experience I uh, you know, Applebee's is often a staple place for me to get wasted when I'm not at home and I'm at like a roadside motel, because you'll often run into an Applebe's next to a roadside motel, and I have I have gotten drunken mini and Applebee's. And if Mitch McConnell were the ones serving me,

I would happily troubled the pocket on his apron. That would be great, especially if Paul Ryan came out with, like this the sawdust that you use to soak up the vomit, and like, yeah, that would be really sweet. Now back to Bjord Lumborg. So another reason Lumburg was able to have such an outsized impact on the debate over climate change in the United States is the simple fact that misreading and misrepresenting a mix of actual scientific papers in news articles it's a lot easier than conducting

authoritative research. The people who do conduct authoritative research are very busy, and when a guy like Biorn comes along and shotguns at a book full of nonsense, they have to spend valuable time slowly debunking all of the many, many things he got wrong. I'm gonna quote here from something Dr E. O. Wilson wrote about the difficulty of combating the sort of misinformation. My greatest regret about the Lumborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that

has to be expended to combat it. In the media, we will always have contrarians like Lumborg, whose salies are characterized by will for ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication with genuine experts, and destruct of campaigning to attract the attention of the media rather than scientists. They are the parasitic load on scholars who earned success through the slow process of pure view and approval. The question is how

much load should be tolerated before response is necessary. Lumbourg is evidently over the threshold. And this is kind of what we were talking about, Like what do you what

do you do about these people? In a perfectly sane world, Like I think that someone like Lomborg would face criminal charges for his misrepresentation of scientific fact for the same reason that like if you caught um a diving instructor telling kids that the safest way to dive was head first into the shallow wind of the pool, that guy would face charges even though all he was doing was giving people information. Um, because you're clearly misleading people into

a dangerous situation. Charasitic skullars. Yeah, that's a great quote from Yeah, parasitic scholars. And that's another thing is you know, why did these people go into that field? So did they go into the field because of the bettlement of the world all the betterment of themselves? And do they do the betterment of themselves because they love themselves little?

Because they have a desperate need for affection, and because like the old oose, go two different paths, right, And I think in Lumberg's case, it is that desperate need to be famous. I think it's this sort of narcissism that like he he couldn't accept he was a professor of like statistics and ship like that's not in the

most exciting life in the world. I'm sure it's very satisfying that the people who legitimately like it, um but I think Lumborg is the kind of guy that had a thirst to be famous and was like, well, this is the fucking easiest way to do that. I mean, yeah, yeah, Now we've just talked about sort of how Dr el Wilson was like expressing his frustration that like a guy like Lumburg can just like shoot out a bunch of nonsense, and then real scientists, whose time is incredibly valuable and limited,

have to like spend hours debunking all of it. And it's it's a very frustrating problem with our current system. Um And that might make it seem like there were no penalties Born faced for lying constantly. There were a little bit of of There was a little bit of a penalty he faced. Several official complaints were made to the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology in Innovation. They evaluated these complaints and found that the work that he had

published was fundamentally dishonest. But they found that they couldn't punish him because Lumberg wasn't an expert in any of the relevant fields, and thus he couldn't be considered guilty of like fraud essentially, like because he was not really a climate scientist, they couldn't say that he was purposefully misrepresenting his case rather than just sucking up does sane? Yeah, isn't that crazy? Oh? The world is so annoying sometimes. Yeah,

you've come around on climate chande people. Yeah. In two thousand seven, Born published a new book, cool It, in which he explicitly accepted the reality of human caused climate change. This was seen by many as an abrupt reversal of his previous attitude. Borne clarified in an interview with The Guardian, who declared him an influential thinker, that it was not or I think they were one of the ones who

said he was going to save the world. Yeah, uh yeah, they they voted him one of the fifty people who could save the planet. So an interview with them, and they were more critical of him in this. In this article, Lumborg denies performing a U turn. He reiterates that he has never denied anthropogenic global warming and insists that he long ago accepted the cost of damage would be between two and three percent of world wealth by the end

of the century. This estimate is the same, he says, as that quoted by Lord Stern, whose report to the British government argued that the world should spend one to two percent of gross domestic product on tackling climate change to avoid future damage. Incidentally, ship like this is why Reginda Pechori, chairman of the UN Climate Change Panel, compared Bjord Lumborg to Adolf Hitler, not because she thought he was a literal Nazi but for the statistical crime of

treating human beings like numbers. And the odd thing is Bjorn isn't even all that great at numbers. The Stern Report estimated it would take between five and twenty percent of global GDP to effectively fight climate change. The Guardian pressed Lumborg on this quote, not on a expectedly however, the Stern Report estimates that damage at five of GDP, however, not two to three percent. The difference, according to Lumbarg,

is that the two use a different discount factor. This is the method by which economists but recalculate the value today if money spent or saved in the future, or, to put it in another way, the value today of this generation's grandchildren's lives. So sorry, I got it wrong. The Strent Report did and say it would take five to of GDP to fight climate change. It said that the damage of climate change would be five to of

GDP if nothing was done to fight it. Um Lumbourg said that the damage would be two to three percent, and then he claimed, by sort of weasel math that the reason for the difference between the two numbers is the differing value that he and Lord Stern put on the lives of our current children. Basically, yeah, so that's cool. Well, I mean I guess in a way there is a sad truth to that. Sure, I mean I do hate kids,

so yeah, them invaluable little fuckers. But um, I don't like too much when people just go straight for the ad Hitler um nausea um or whatever whatever that that Latin phrases that whenever people just want to use an example, they'll go to Hitler. Because there is a truth to people being numbers. We're just algorithms walking around with little legs, just walking around, right, That's what we are, which is numbers. We're not there with them. I think in her case,

she was making a really she wasn't like. I think she was making actually a pretty salient point, which is that when you treat people like numbers in this way, you really are creating humanized scientific crime. You're devaluing their lives in the prod like in the course of like making into an argument that shouldn't be an argument over the numbers purely, like like deep devolving it into that.

But but I guess, but yes, but the reality is that it is like that, right, I mean, there's those beautiful paintings of generals on on horseback, right, and you'll see behind them thousands of soldiers just sort of marching towards the war that they want to fight. But ultimately the most important person and is that person in the horseback, and everyone else is just sort of chess pieces at the back, right, I mean. And and we are using less and less humans to to get the needs of humans.

So we don't need as many farmers, we don't need as many soldiers because we've got drones and we'll have robots one day and stuff. And I guess there is that sort of sad truth that we don't need that much manpower anymore to run society. And so the people at the top, And I'm not saying I agree with this, but I'm just saying that the people at the top are going to go, no, we don't need as many people anymore. Oh yeah, I think the people at the

top think that way. And I think what you're getting at is sort of a debate that historians they have like the great man theory versus like the trends enforces theory of history. But I think one reason why the people at the top um never stay that way all that long on like a generational basis. Why things switch and turn and the nations and power change so much

is because they think that way. They think that the most important guy is the guy marching like sitting on the horse with that army of nameless people around him. And then uh, poor Serbian peasant named Gavrilo princep pulls out a gun and shoots the Archduke of Austria Hungary Empires fall in. The British Empires no longer really a thing, um, and like that that I think is And that's the kind of thing that people like Lumbourg always miss when

they treat people like numbers like that. And it's the kind of thing, you know, on the other side of thing, It's the kind of thing that people like um, Hillary Clinton miss when they derive a bunch of people making memes on the internet is like unimportant to the overall thrust of the election, and then it turns out that

actually that may have made a real difference. Yeah, yeah, I think that the people in power always disregard the potential impact of like one or a small group of just random people who have a thought in their head. And like I think that's I think there's nothing that's more powerful, um than individual people's ability to funk up the works. And that can be good and that can be bad because it means that a little girl like Greta Thumberg um can make a an international impact on

a problem just by being the face of it. I think that is it the dala lama paraphrasing. But one of these quota is if you think that you're not important, or if you're if you think you're not big enough to make a change, try and sleep with a mosquito. Yeah. Um,

And I'm really paraphising it and butcherying it. But you know, there's the positive side of that, then there's the negative side, so that a guy like bord Lumboard can misread or directly misinterpret a bunch of scientific studies and lead to have a major impact on like why we don't deal with the problem back when the problem is manageable and instead it becomes something that might consume huge chunks of

the world uh and its population. Um. So I think in both ways, the little person is always more important than the big people want to give them credit for being um. That just not entirely a good thing. It's completely a moral factor in history, but it is I think a factor in history that the people at the top often Now, the good news about all of this is that by two thousand seven people were starting to

get wise to be Orn's little schemes. The Guardian noted in their rite up of his second book, some statements appear to contradict each other directly. In the space of four pages of cool It, he writes that climate change will not cause massive disruptions are huge death tolls, that the general and long term impact will be predominantly negative, and that it is obvious that there are many other

and more pressing issues. The point I've always been making, he explains, now, is it's not the end of the world. That is why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should also be spending our money well. Speaking of spending money, well, Bjorn has a bunch of suggestions for stuff that we should be investing in rather than reducing emissions to directly fight climate change.

He's a big advocate in improving nutrition in poor countries, improved access to contraception, more vaccinations, all of what you're great things. In two thousand two, Lumborg formed the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which he build a away to bring the world's top economists together to solve the planet's greatest problems, because of course economists are the best folks to solve our problems. If I had to think of one group of professionals most famous for never being wrong, it would

be economists, or maybe weatherman. In two thousand eight, the Consensus Center ranked thirty priorities in order of like what should be confronted first to deal with like the greatest challenges of the world. Mitigating global warming was ranked last number. Thirty six was improving crop yields, sevent was green energy research, and twelve, interestingly enough, was geo engineering. And this gets us onto the subject of what precisely Lumborg thinks would

be a better use of money than reducing emissions. He's come around to the necessity of climate engineering, because now more than a decade after he started urging everyone not to worry about climate change, reducing emissions is too expensive and slow a way to reduce climate change for his tastes, So that's nice. So this is something Lumborg wrote in

two thousand nine. There is a significant delay between carbon cuts in any temperature drop, even halving mobile emissions by mid century would barely be measurable by the end of the century. Making green energy cheap and prevalent will also take a long time, consider that electrification of the global economy is still incomplete after more than a century of effort. Many methods of atmospheric engineering have been proposed. Solar radiation

management appears to be one of the most hopeful. Atmospheric greenhouse gases allow sunlight to pass through, but absorb heat and radiate some down to the Earth's surface. Althose being equal, higher concentrations will warm the planet. Solar radiation management would bounce a little bit of sunlight back into space, reflecting just one of the total sunlight that strikes the Earth, could offset as much warming as that caused by doubling

the pre industrial levels of greenhouse gases. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in nineteen nine, about a million tons of sulfur dioxide was pumped into the stratosphere, reacting with water to form a hazy layer that spread around the globe and by scattering an absorbing incoming sunlight, cool the Earth's surface. For almost two years, we could mimic this effect through stratospheric aerosolid insertion, essentially launching material like sulfur dioxide or

soot into the stratosphere. Another promising approach is marine cloud whitening, which sprace water droplets into marine clouds to make them reflectable sunlight. This augments the natural process where sea salt from the oceans provides water vapor with cloud condensation nuclei. It is remarkable to consider that we could cancel out the centuries global warming with nineteen hundred unmanned ships spraying

seawater missed into the air to thicken clouds. He sounds like he's learning his signs from that Mr. Burns episode. He wants to cover the sun. He's just a we'll just shoots sudden the sky and build two thousand boats to fire water up into the clouds. That's way better

than reducing emissions. That sounds economically friendly. It's just so fucking dumb, like like out, it's just like, don't do He tells everyone don't do anything for more than a decade, and then he's like, Okay, we need to launch two thousand giant boats to shoot seawater into the clouds and also if we considered spreading sulfur over the stratosphere. So he's gone so far on the other side that he's been,

he's lost it again. Yeah, that's clearly more rational than cap and trade stopping rainforest log you know, in any of that stuff like unmanned boats and sulfur into the sky, all perfect solutions with no conceivable downsides. Yeah. Biorn's tactics have gotten no better in recent years. Uh. No better than that is suggesting thousands of boats, uh, shooting water

to the sky. Uh. In two thousand fourteen, John Stossel, writing for Real Clear Politics, asked Bjorn Lumborg how much President Obama's goal of getting one million electric cars on the road by ten would slow down warming. Lumborg replied one hour. This is a symbolic act. Once again, Lumborg was very wrong. Greg Layden, a biological anthropologist writing for Science Blogs, actually spoke to an expert quote. I asked atmospheric scientist and energy expert John Abraham about this, and

here's what he said. If you put one million clean cars on the road and have them last fifteen years before moving them, and you take the typical admissions of a vehicle and you have saved over in the last fifteen years, and you know, there's a bunch of number. Basically he crunched the numbers on it, uh, and he like came to the conclusion that over their lifetime just

one million cars. If you did not build any additional cars after that point, you just put will million on the road and kept them there fIF fifteen years, you would have saved the total equivalent of twenty one hours of emission for the entire planet um, which is a

significant amount. And that's again just a million, not increasing it at all, not replacing them after they wear out in fifteen years, which means Lumbourg's calculations to John Stossel was off by it does seem like a little scientists are going beyond shut up. Yeah, they're constantly shut up for more like twenty years now. Yeah, they've been saying, shut the funk up. Dude, you don't know what you're talking about. But I think he knows what he's doing.

In two thousand sixteen, Bjorns Copenhagen Consensus Center was paid sixty thou dollars by Australia's Education Department to help produce a report that, among other things, called limiting world temperature increases to two degrees celsius a poor use of money, since it would leave you less than one dollar of social, economic,

or environmental benefits for every dollar spent. Meanwhile, reducing world trade restrictions through the Doha Trade Round would be orn calculated yield two thousand and eleven dollars of benefit for every dollar spent. Universal contraception access would return a hundred and twenty dollars per dollar spent. Now, reading stuff like that might make you question a couple of things. Number one, how good is Bjorn's math? Are there any factors that

might influence his calculation? Might have led him to calculate that reducing global temperature increases only yields a dollar of value for every dollar spent, Well, reducing trade restrictions leads to two thousand dollars of benefit, Like are there may be any conflicting interests he has that might be influencing his math in some way? What he thinks like economist? He does think like an economist. He thinks like an economist who might be being paid by a specific group

of people. Well, yeah, yeah, and I do sometimes like some comedians. So a couple of comedians in the UK have gone sort of gone to the right, yes, politically speaking, when they weren't really like that when I sort of first met them, and uh, I was observing them and from afar and so not admiring, but understanding that, oh, yeah, there's more money. Yeah, if you're not getting that much work as a comedian that you are currently now, and

you understand that the right is rising. They went there and and now they're going there and they are getting more work. And it's interesting because I'm going, whoa, You've become something totally different because you have to survive. Yeah, and you've decided that it's worth it to take money from you can't you know, you're not gonna make that greater living as a statistician teaching at a college in Denmark. You'll be comfortable, but you're not gonna you're not gonna

be rich doing that. Whereas if you become born lumbourg and tell people that climate change isn't a big deal and open this consensus center that advises people that reducing trade restrictions is a better way to fight global warming than stopping global warming. Um, well, that actually turns out to pay pretty well. So I found a good break down of where Bjorn Lumborg's funding comes from, written by Graham Redfern of Diesmog, a website focused on cutting through

the pr spin around climate change issues. Their research revealed that the Copenhagen Consensus Center or c c C, registered as a nonprofit in the United States in two thousand eight. Since then, it has received more than four million dollars in grants and donations. Three quarters of that came in two thousand eleven and twelve. Lumborg salary for a single year was seven hundred and seventy five thousand dollars, representing it nearly a quarter of what it had received by

two thousand twelve. He's basically an Instagram model that's pushing those like drinks to lose weight. Yeah, that's exactly what he's doing, but like instead telling everyone not to cut

global emissions now. Back in two thousand six, when the uh CCC first started to look at gaining support for its efforts in the United States, they hired Washington lobbyists in PR veteran James harf Um and so like they like, this is a this is like a lobbying group for somebody in the lobbying group's primary goal has been to like convince people that emission should not be cut, that carbon should not be taxed, that fossil fuel use should

not be reduced. Now, again, this leads us to the question of, like, who's actually giving these people that money, And we don't know where all of it comes from. We know that in its first year, the center received a hundred and twenty dollar grant from the Randolph Foundation. That foundation's money comes from the one point two billion dollars the Randolph family made by selling the chemical company

to Procter and Gamble. The trustee of the Randolph Foundation is Heather Higgins, the CEO of Independent Women's Voice and chairman of the Independent Women's Form. And that sounds good, right, Independent Women's Voice. That sounds like a woke progressive organization. Yeah, it's actually a hardcore right wing lobbying group that accepts money from, among other people, Charles Coke. I look forward.

I look forward to when they start implementing like the transgenders against clouds and all of these different we'll get it really woke. Yeah, we'll like Biorn wouldn't be the right spokesperson. Now, you'd hire someone who is like very much like I don't know, you hire someone like all of that money, yes, like an eight year old, like an eight year old kid from Cameroon, and you'd have him be like I love fossil fuels like that is

that is where we're going next. Yeah, and then you'll call everyone racist who argues with him, and while complaining that all the left does is call everybody racist who argues with them like it's it's it's beautiful. I love the way the media works. It's perfect, there are no problems. So yeah, I'm going to read a quote from d smog about the Independent Women's name d smog blog. So yeah, they do a lot of really good analysis on like the disinformation campaign. The name of a company. I thought

it was the name of a person. I was like, no, the great name for someone that works Graham red Fern, which is also a pretty good name for something read firm actually, but I think it's pronounced at fern. It's fucking Australian. I don't know, people, nothing makes sense over there. Yeah, no, that's not I was like most Scottish, Yeah, well Scott's Irish quote. Staff Writers of both organizations regularly express skepticism about the science of human clause climate change in site

Lomborg's views approvingly. A recent article from the International Women's Form, senior fellow of Vicky Alger claimed a majority of scientists believe that global warming is largely nature made, ignoring several studies that show the vast majority of research from scientists

studying climate change believe exactly the opposite. Now funders of the i w F include, as I said, the Claude Lamb Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Coke and the Donors Trust, a conservative political action fund that spent millions of dollars on climate change denial. This means that Charles

Coke indirectly has helped fund be Yord Lumborg. Now Higgins continued to pump tens of thousands of dollars directly into Lumborg Center over subsequent years, but in two thousand and fourteen, when that de small article was written, the author was only able to track down where about five thousand dollars of the four point three million in funding it had

received up to that point had come from. However, in two thousand fifteen, read Firm revealed that Paul Singer, a Republican billionaire venture capitalist was one of the CCCS major backers. He gave more than two hundred thousand dollars to the group. Mr Singer also helps fund the Manhattan Institute, the think take behind the fallacious claim that Alexandria Accassio Cortes's Green

New Deal would cost a hundred trillion dollars. In recent years, Biorn Lumborg seems to have dropped most of the pretense of being a leftist environmentalist. He's appeared in five videos for Praguer University with titles like his climate change our biggest problem, our electric cars really green, and the Paris

Agreement won't change the climate. His grift seems to be less profitable these days than it was in the era before mega hurricanes regularly battered our shores and records setting summers and wildfire seasons where a matter of course, but Lumborg still does a brisk business and media appearances. As of the writing of this episode, his most recent appearance was in a Fox Business video with the title green Innovation Trump spending. When tackling him at Change Colon Expert,

he was the expert. YEA, let' show him what he looks like, now, this is Bejord Lumberg after twenty years of climate denial. Does he look at me? It doesn't look that bad. So I think you really have sold it. I think I was expecting like a gruesome creature. I think he's he's Mick jaggered at least fifty in the last twenty years. Jagger hasn't Mick jaggered that much. But Sophie, Sophie's definitely has a very negative reaction to his waddle.

A waddle wattle shaming. This is waddle shaming. Yeah, she's holding her skin and making it so thicker. Now, Eric, if I know my audience and I don't, the one thing they love more than anything else is when we hit things. The one thing they love more than anything else is when we hit things. So I'm gonna give you the giant machette and I'm gonna throw I'm gonna throw it right past all of the recording equipment. But because that's a good idea, Yeah, he's got holding one.

Are you holding the whole bag? I'm gonna throw the whole bag. I always took the whole back. It would be irresponsible to throw a single bagel, all right, So I'm going to throw them at Eric, who's wielding the machete as if it were a baseball bat, and he's going to try to hit him as hard as he can and really just swing it. There's nothing you can hurt in this room full of delicate electronic equipment, nothing at all. Audience. I have Anderson, she has protected Anderson's fine.

All right, I'm gonna throw it. Yeah, alright, tossing back to me. We got it, you got you got it. We gotta get it. We gotta get him going across the road, because it's conscious going if you drop it. No one's ever been hurt by a two ft machete, never, not once in history. Yeah, I didn't make a very smooth samurai cut. It's okay. It takes practice to really be able to do damage with that thing. But I definitely got really happy with how that went. How did

it feel? I felt? I feel really manly. I want to go to war now. Yeah, I see. I see how easily I could be turned. You know, everyone can. And if people like Lumbard get their way that that I will be buying a lot more machetes for a lot of people to try to get him. The field that way, I see that there is a box of tissues on the table. I'm now gonna grab him and I will remove the prints from the actual machette out of dumb man. There we go, I did grab the blade.

I'm gonna find Lumbourg's Hollywood Hills home. I've seen enough cs I to know how to get rid of. I don't think he lives in the Hollywood Hills because it's one of the places it's going to face the consequences of climate change fastest. Anderson is on the mic and you get onto me for pouring liquids on the microphones? What's wrong with Anderson on the microphone? Anderson slabbers sometimes

the classy broad, classy broadskin slab She's a good dog. Eric, You got any plugg doubles to plug now or at the end of our episode? Yeah. I do have an album called Alien of Extraordinary Ability, which is the title that the American government gives you, and I say, you know, outsiders when when they come in and apply for a visa. That is a sweet title, like our our immigration. But that's a great title, Alien of Extraordinary Ability. So I like that. So that's an album I've also got you know,

my show. If you're in Los Angeles, I've got a show called Born of Chaos, which is about the time I escaped the psychiatric hospital. Um, so you know I've got some things. Just basically follow me on Instagram. That title makes me want to marry a European, renounce my US citizenship, become any UTH citizen, go through that whole year's long process, and then move back to the United States and get a green card so that I can be declared an alien of an extraordinary ability. Yeah, it's

pretty cool. Also, I'm no longer because now I have a green card. When you get a green car, yes, and now I'm I'm a permanent resident. Well that's not as cool as it being an alien with extraordinary ability. No, but I want was and it felt good and I'm sure it did right well, audience, check out Alien of Extraordinary Ability. Um, I will say as well. I'm now leaving this podcast slightly angrier. Yeah you should. Everyone should leave the podcast angrier. I mean, I hope like Catharsis

of hitting the bagels with the Yeah. Sure, yeah, I see I see why. Um, I see why people get there and go out. I am in no way training the audience for things to come by by pushing machetes and bolt cutters on people and teaching them that these objects can can can help them deal with their anger at the bastards or what I'm doing at all. And I do wonder what your machetes coming by them? You know, any machete company that wants to sell branded behind the

bastard's machetes. I feel like we can make a lot of money with them. Same thing with bolt cutters, because we're we're big into the pushing bolt cutters right now. I just have to suggest people get basically anything with the cheap Harper freight ones because that's won't cut through theoretically beats his security gate. You really you want some like heavy beuty bolt cutters you want to be spending.

I'm sure it's available. You could in fact get the bolt cutters from it one that you used to break through his security. Uh yeah, not that we encourage that behavior, because we don't. It does seem like that's what that's where I was gonna go, like in twenty years time, like you know, it's gonna be Hunger Games style. Um, you know, the masses versus Amazon you know, my hope is that we can avoid that by by making some pretty sharp course corrections now. But if we can't, Fiskers

brand machetes resist rust very well. Uh. So you know they'll chop bagels, they'll chop through Uh okay, yeah, you're right, Sophie. How do we lead this out without me at suggesting more crimes? A firm handshake? Do you have, UM anything you want to plug? I already talked about bolt cutters. No, I mean, like, hey, what about the environment? Bro? I just want to plug trees. I do want to plug trees. What tree frogs? Not mine? Sophie's wearing a sweater. It

seems comfortable. We have shirts on t public dot com behind the Bastards UM. You can find the podcast on behind the Bastards dot com where the sources will be although the coding of the site is sometimes broken, but you can generally figure out what the sources are. UM. And you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at

at Bastard's pod. Uh. You can find me on Twitter at I right, okay, And I have a new podcast with my friends Cody and Katie called Worst Year Ever about the election, so we I definitely will definitely talk more about bolt cutters and machetes on that podcast, so if that's something you're into, check it out. Eric. Thanks for being on the show until next week. Hug a Cat buy some bolt cutters. Consider investing in the machete your three