FWIW I haven’t looked much into this but my surface impression is that climate change groups are eager to paint CCC as biased/bad science/climate deniers because (1) they don’t like CCC’s conclusion that many causes in global health and development are more cost-effective than climate change and (2) they tend to exaggerate the expected harms of climate change, and CCC doesn’t.
My impression is that most of Lomborg’s critics don’t understand his claims—they don’t understand the difference between “climate change isn’t the top priority” and “climate change isn’t real”.
From what I’ve read, Lomborg’s beliefs on climate change are in line with John Halstead’s Climate Change & Longtermism report.
From the Australia Climate Council link, the most egregious claim I see from Lomborg is “But the [2014 IPCC] report also showed that global warming has dramatically slowed or entirely stopped in the last decade and a half.” (The link in the article is broken but I found it via archive.org.) It looks to me like Lomborg’s claim is literally true according to Australia Climate Council (I actually thought it was false but apparently I was wrong and Lomborg was right), but possibly misleading. In the context of Lomborg’s article, it doesn’t look to me like he’s trying to claim global warming isn’t happening, but that it’s exaggerated.
Last time I talked to John Halstead about this, he was (as am I) pretty skeptical of Bjorn Lomborg on climate, so I think even if Lomborg on climate looks superficially similar to John’s report that does not mean EAs generally agree with him on climate.
Speaking for myself (working on EA Climate full-time), reading Lomborg on climate is frustrating because he (a) gets some basic things right (energy innovation is good and under-done, climate is less dramatic than some doomers make it, human development is also shaped by lots of other things etc), but (b) completely exaggerates and misportrays other things (e.g. estimating the effect of the Paris Agreement until 2030 and claims this as its entire effect when the whole point of the agreement is to change the trajectory over the long run). So, I think he is acting in bad faith or at least with questionable epistemics and tactics on climate.
That said, two things can be true at the same time—that his climate work is awful and that his GHD work is much better and I believe this view to be most consistent with the evidence, i.e. I don’t think Bill Gates would have strongly endorsed his recent book if it were as polemical and misportraying of global health than his work on climate has been (where Gates has, to my knowledge, not endorsed him).
FWIW I haven’t looked much into this but my surface impression is that climate change groups are eager to paint CCC as biased/bad science/climate deniers because (1) they don’t like CCC’s conclusion that many causes in global health and development are more cost-effective than climate change and (2) they tend to exaggerate the expected harms of climate change, and CCC doesn’t.
My impression is that most of Lomborg’s critics don’t understand his claims—they don’t understand the difference between “climate change isn’t the top priority” and “climate change isn’t real”.
From what I’ve read, Lomborg’s beliefs on climate change are in line with John Halstead’s Climate Change & Longtermism report.
From the Australia Climate Council link, the most egregious claim I see from Lomborg is “But the [2014 IPCC] report also showed that global warming has dramatically slowed or entirely stopped in the last decade and a half.” (The link in the article is broken but I found it via archive.org.) It looks to me like Lomborg’s claim is literally true according to Australia Climate Council (I actually thought it was false but apparently I was wrong and Lomborg was right), but possibly misleading. In the context of Lomborg’s article, it doesn’t look to me like he’s trying to claim global warming isn’t happening, but that it’s exaggerated.
Last time I talked to John Halstead about this, he was (as am I) pretty skeptical of Bjorn Lomborg on climate, so I think even if Lomborg on climate looks superficially similar to John’s report that does not mean EAs generally agree with him on climate.
Speaking for myself (working on EA Climate full-time), reading Lomborg on climate is frustrating because he (a) gets some basic things right (energy innovation is good and under-done, climate is less dramatic than some doomers make it, human development is also shaped by lots of other things etc), but (b) completely exaggerates and misportrays other things (e.g. estimating the effect of the Paris Agreement until 2030 and claims this as its entire effect when the whole point of the agreement is to change the trajectory over the long run). So, I think he is acting in bad faith or at least with questionable epistemics and tactics on climate.
That said, two things can be true at the same time—that his climate work is awful and that his GHD work is much better and I believe this view to be most consistent with the evidence, i.e. I don’t think Bill Gates would have strongly endorsed his recent book if it were as polemical and misportraying of global health than his work on climate has been (where Gates has, to my knowledge, not endorsed him).