Sept. 1, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:54
1989 Conversations with Casey: Stefan Molyneux Interviews Bjorn Lomborg
Stefan Molyneux interviews Bjorn Lomborg, Author - The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It - Thought Leader: Bloomberg Summit 2011 - One of the 100 Top Global Thinkers: Foreign Policy, 2010 - One of the world's 75 most influential people of the 21st century: Esquire, 2008 - One of the '50 people who could save the planet': UK Guardian, 2008 - One of the top 100 public intellectuals: Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine, 2008 - One of the world's 100 most influential people: Time Magazine, 2004 - Director: Copenhagen Consensus Center - Adjunct Professor: Copenhagen Business School.
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux, host of Conversations with Casey.
Today on the program I am extremely honored to have Bjorn Lomberg.
He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It.
He has been called one of the top 100 global thinkers by foreign policy 2010.
He has been called by Time magazine one of the world's 100 most influential people and one of the top 100 public intellectuals by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine, and the UK Guardian has referred to him as one of the 50 people who could save the planet.
He is the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School.
So, Bjorn, I really wanted to thank you for taking the time to have a chat with us today and also wanted to compliment you, and I suspect this comes from your business training, for a thoroughly engaging and thought-provoking cost-benefit analysis, an actual analysis of opportunity costs in the global warming debate, ranking it relative to other concerns in the world.
I was wondering if you could talk about the thought process and the results that came out of the Copenhagen consensus.
Well, thanks a lot, Stefan.
And really, a lot of the praise doesn't belong with me.
I just happen to work with some of the world's top climate economists and economists of all shapes, working and saying, where can we spend money in the best possible way?
I simply bring them Together to answer that crucial question, which is, listen, we'd love to fix all problems in the world, but we don't.
And to the extent that we don't, don't we want to spend money first where we can do the most good?
That's what we try to do.
We try to say, if you spend a dollar on climate, or if you spend a dollar on dealing with malaria, or on malnutrition, or in schooling, all these other great things you can do, how much bang do you actually do?
How much good will you do?
And what it turns out is that our typical way of tackling, for instance, global warming, is a very poor way to help the future help people.
For every dollar you spend on a typical sort of Kyoto-style approach, you will probably only avoid a couple of cents of climate damage.
If you spent the same money on, for instance, micronutrient malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa especially, you could actually, for every dollar spent, Avoid up to 20 or more dollars of bad.
So fundamentally, we can do so much more good.
And that's really the kind of question that I try to engage people in, saying, where can you do the most good?
And I think that's fascinating.
And in your recent book, Cool It!, which I highly recommend, there was jaw-dropping information, I thought, on every page.
And that's very, very exciting stuff to read.
And what really shocked me was the degree to which the positive effects of climate change are ignored, suppressed or minimized because climate change has become like cancer.
Like there's no positive effect to cancer other than not dying from it, I guess.
And yet climate change is portrayed as a sort of satanic negative with no upside.
And one of the things that I really thought was teased out well in your book and elucidated very nicely was the degree to which there's some great stuff that comes out of climate change.
I was wondering if you could talk about some of the benefits because we're all so aware of the negatives, but it's nice to hear about some of the positives.
You're absolutely right. First of all, we don't hear about the positives.
We only hear about the negatives.
And the negatives are often very exaggerated, both of which leads to bad political judgment.
This is not to say that global warming overall is not a problem, but you cannot just tell one side of the story and expect us to make good decisions.
Take, for instance, heat deaths, which has been played out a lot.
Yes, we are going to see more heat deaths as temperatures rise.
We're going to see more heat waves and have more people dying from heat.
But likewise, as temperatures rise, we're going to see fewer cold waves, and hence fewer people dying from cold.
That's important, because actually many more people die from cold than die from heat.
And so we should be honest and say, on that particular area, we're actually estimating, just to take for Britain, where we have some of the best numbers, for Britain we're expecting by 2050, because of global warming, to see 2,000 more people die every year because of global warming.
But what you are typically not told is that we also expect from global warming with fewer cold waves to see about 20,000 fewer people die from cold.
So we need to hear both of these.
2,000 more dead, but 20,000 fewer dead.
And this actually expands to the entire globe except Sub-Saharan Africa.
Overall, we will see about 400,000 more people die from heat because of global warming, but about 1.8 million fewer deaths from coal because of global warming.
You need to tell both sides of that story.
And also, I thought it was very powerful the way you talked about malaria.
I spent a little bit of time in Africa and seen some of the devastation that that illness can cause.
And of course, you hear about more malaria infections and deaths, but I thought it was really fascinating that we might end up with fewer as well.
Well, the fundamental point with malaria is that it's probably weakly correlated to global warming.
So we're overall probably expecting, say, 3% more malaria because of global warming.
But of course, if you actually care about people getting malaria, why on earth would you focus on avoiding perhaps upwards to 3% malaria in 100 years, when we know very well how to deal with 100% of malaria that's here right now?
Malaria is predominantly a disease of poverty.
You know, if you're poor, you get malaria and you die from malaria, whereas if you're rich, you don't get malaria, and even if you do, you don't die from it.
So, fundamentally, it's about saying we have also made this whole conversation on global warming into there's only one way to help any problem that global warming causes or is even partially causing, cut carbon emissions.
Well, it actually turns out to be one of the least effective ways.
If we all manage to do the Kyoto Protocol, which of course we never did, but even if we had, and even if we've done it very, very effectively, It would have cost about $180 billion a year, yet the effect would have been to avoid about 1,400 malaria deaths every year throughout the century.
Now, that's nice. That's a lot of money for not very much effectiveness, but it's still nice.
But remember, for much less money, for about $3 billion, you could save about 850,000 people from dying from malaria every year by just simply distributing bed nets and medicine.
It's very, very simple.
Or to put it very bluntly, every person that Al Gore and other people of Hill's Ilk could save through Kyoto-style procedures, for every person saved, the same amount of money spent on malaria prevention would have saved about 36,000 people from dying from malaria.
And I'm simply pointing out, saving 36,000 people for the same amount of money is a little bit better than saving just one.
Let's talk about Al Gore for a moment because it's really impossible to talk about climate change without bringing his name up.
Now, there are the usual and perhaps pointless personal hypocrisies that Al Gore, who predicts, what, 18 feet of water rising around the oceans has bought an oceanfront property and the fact that he's House usage of electricity is 12 times that of his neighbors and he takes all these airplanes around to talk about the dangers of carbon emissions.
Let's just cast that aside because that's sort of personal peccadilloes that may be petty to focus on.
But Al Gore's policies and what he focuses on, which are somewhat, you could say, exaggerated in his book and in his documentary, has really stampeded humanity in a direction of spending almost 80 billion dollars focusing on Kyoto and carbon trading and all of that kind of stuff.
The opportunity cost of 20 years and almost 80 billion dollars is huge relative to the amount of good that it could have done based upon something like your program or the program that came out of the Copenhagen Consensus.
That's kind of heartbreaking to me to think of how much good could have been done relative to how much has been avoided and not even achieved through Kyoto and other kinds of things.
But you seem quite nice to him in the book.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
Well, I think fundamentally, and you also mentioned, there's a lot of things that you can always blame on everyone.
I think it's important to get away from the blame game and climate change in other places, honestly.
Because this is not about saying Al Gore isn't of goodwill.
I think Al Gore wants to do good.
I think most of the people who are in the climate debate wants to do good.
So it's not about saying Al Gore is wrong in his intentions.
It's about saying that the policies that he and many, many others have proposed are sort of, I understand where they come from, but they just don't work.
Listen, basically people will say, If the problem is that we're emitting too much CO2 because we burn a lot of fossil fuels, that leads to global warming, and that's bad, why don't we just stop emitting CO2? That sounds reasonable.
That's the whole sense of our policy on climate change for the last 20 years.
The problem that we forget with this simple analysis is we don't actually burn fossil fuels to annoy Al Gore.
We burn fossil fuels because it powers everything we like about civilization.
It gives us light, it gives us heat, it gives us food, it gives us transportation, everything.
And that's why you can't just tell people, don't do that.
We will do it, and we'll do it more and more.
The only way that we can stop emitting CO2 is if we find other sources of energy that can provide us just as much great services but without the CO2. And that's about getting green energy going.
The problem is right now we've been focusing on getting ineffective green energy going by subsidizing it dramatically.
That's never really going to work.
You can do it for a little while as long as it's a boutique thing and everybody can just feel good about it, but it doesn't actually cost very much.
But as soon as it becomes a big issue in spending, you're going to cut it down.
We've seen that very clearly with the Germans.
The Germans are the biggest consumers of solar power in the world per capita.
If you've ever been to Germany, you know that's a little bit odd.
They're not like the sunniest country in the world.
But the fundamental point here is to say they have spent about $75 billion in total subsidies for electricity that's worth about $3 billion.
So a huge subsidy.
And the net effect will be of all that spending to postpone the increase in temperature by the end of the century for seven hours.
They bought the world seven hours by the end of the 21st century.
That's not a whole lot of good for a lot of money.
What, of course, they should have done is they should have focused on get solar panels to become much cheaper.
That's basically the outcome from the Copenhagen consensus on climate, saying, what is the smartest solution to deal with climate change?
It's not subsidizing inefficient technology now.
It's about getting Green technology to become so cheap that everyone will want it in, say, 2035.
Imagine if we could invest in research and development because the price on solar cells and many other green technologies are coming down.
They're still way too high, but they are coming down.
Imagine if we, by investing in research and development, can make them come down faster.
Then we could make the whole world switch over.
Instead of in 2035, we could make them switch over in 2033.
That would be... Fantastically more effective.
Would do much more good at much lower cost.
That's the way to go with climate change.
And that's really my bone to pick with Al Gore and many others.
It's not that they don't have goodwill.
It's about saying their solutions haven't worked.
They've been trying for 20 years.
They've failed for 20 years.
I think it's about time that we say, instead of making the very costly policies that do virtually no good, let's focus on policies that'll be much cheaper and actually do a lot more.
You said in your book that in your community you're considered somewhat left-wing and you said that's quite a remarkable thing, given where you're coming from, which of course I agree with.
But one of the things that I find very heartening is the degree to which you focus on how much free trade could add to the...
I think it's two and a half trillion dollars a year, could add to the wealth of the world.
And secondly and relatedly, the degree to which We can solve problems like the effects of global warming because it's really kind of impossible to deal with the cause of global warming of CO2, if that turns out to be correct.
There's just no way to deal with it without going back to the Stone Age, which is not something that's going to happen.
But you say that if we want to deal with the effects of global warming, by far the best thing to do Is to generate as much wealth as humanly possible so we have the resources to deal with the effects.
And some of the things, as you say, like malaria can be dealt with by simply getting people into cities, mosquito netting, better medication and so on.
What is it you think that drives people's opposition to the idea that we get more wealthy and therefore we can solve these problems?
Do you think it's because they think that that wealth must inevitably come from environmental predation of some kind?
I think there's several different reasons.
I think that's part of the reason that, yes, you can get richer, but you're also going to get more dirty, which, of course, is not what we see in the data.
If you look at most places that are very dirty, they're poor, whereas places that have cleaned up their act are typically very rich.
The places that cut down forests are, again, poor places, whereas most of the rich world is actually reforesting.
It doesn't mean that in the process of getting rich, we very often made a very conscious choice of saying we'd rather have more wealth, and then we'll cut down our forests, we'll pollute our seas, and we'll actually also pollute ourselves, and only later on be rich enough to then start cleaning up.
But the overwhelming evidence indicates that we're actually better off, also environmentally in the long run, As we get richer.
This is not true for CO2, or at least we haven't reached that tipping point yet.
But one of the points, of course, that I tried to make earlier is only if we get cheap green energy will everybody switch over.
And that's a question about technology.
And the crucial point here is to recognize that technology is typically the place where we manage to both marry our will To want to do good with our ability that it becomes so cheap that we'll actually be willing to pay for it.
So I think you're absolutely right when you mentioned, for instance, free trade.
Free trade came out number two on the Copenhagen consensus list, fundamentally because we ignore the fact that long-term free trade would have a tremendous benefit, especially for third world countries.
Let me just walk you through this because it has an interesting comparison to global warming.
Remember, global warming is not predominantly a problem now.
It will be a problem in 100 years.
It will not be predominantly a problem for rich countries because we can adapt, but it will be a problem for poor countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam who will have a harder time adapting.
But the very same thing is the case with free trade.
If you look at a successful Doha round, which we haven't gotten yet, the economist models estimate that the benefit would be about $125 billion per year right now.
Most of that would go to developed countries simply because we'd be better poised to take advantage of more free trade.
But in the long run, the benefit from free trade is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time.
You can actually build in other people's innovations and you will be able to get even more trade, even more innovation going.
And so in the long run, the models indicate that because of what they call dynamic growth effects, basically that all economies will grow slightly faster We're estimating that the benefits towards the end of the century will be on the order of $5,000 billion a year, or $5 trillion. And most of that, about four-fifths of that, will go to the developing world.
So it's exactly the same thing.
It's not about right now, but it's about the future.
And it's mostly going to be good to developing countries, not to developed countries.
And the beauty of this is, The benefit of a freer trade, that is a successful dough around, will be about 10 times as much good as the disbenefits of us not fixing global warming will be mostly to developing countries.
10 times as good? How is it we're talking so much about Kyoto, which we don't seem to be able to get through, and so little about another policy that would do so much more good for the very same countries, namely a successful dough around?
Well, I mean, one argument that I've made before is that basic economic realities that I think you address well in your book.
Human desires are infinite.
All resources are finite.
And so you have to look at opportunity costs.
You have to do cost-benefit analyses if you really care about the outcome.
But, of course, $80 billion is a lot of money.
And a lot of people... We may sort of talk about their best intentions, but if you peel away the economic layers, there's a significant amount of incentive to fearmonger.
Because if you fearmonger, as you point out in the book, you immediately raise whatever you're fearmongering about to the very top of the list.
Because as people say, what does it matter whether we deal with free trade?
If the world is going to burst into flames this time next Tuesday, that kind of raises things in terms of priority.
It raises things in terms of spending.
And unfortunately, there is a kind of cycle.
We've all seen this who are over 20.
We've all seen these kinds of cycles before.
That starvation is going to hit by 1980.
I remember that when I was a kid.
That was a lot of fun. We're running out of oil.
There's gonna be plagues.
Killer bees are coming.
I mean, the amount of fear-mongering that goes on and the amount of money that flows towards that fear-mongering is significant.
And I think it erodes people's integrity in the long run.
And fundamentally, I think most people also recognize that it's a very poor way to make decisions.
If we only make decisions on fear-mongering, we're basically giving money to the people who shout the loudest, who have the cutest animals.
That's unlikely to be a good decision-making process.
And so in some sense, what I try to say is that the Copenhagen consensus and the way we try to prioritize issues by simply saying, where do you get the most bang for the buck, the next most bang for your buck, and so on, based on Very reputable academics is simply a better way to make decisions.
And in some ways, we call ourselves the defenders of the boring problems, the problems that don't have anyone that shout really loudly, but that can do a lot more good.
Now, at the end of the day, as you also point out, we're never going to get totally successful.
We're never going to do all things right.
But this is a process about moving us to making more smart decisions, or at least less poor ones.
So, I'd like for you to make the case for what was at the top of the Copenhagen consensus, which was dealing with AIDS. AIDS has, to some degree, obviously vanished in terms of public consciousness from the first world or from the developed world, but it is a medieval plague, particularly in Africa.
I was wondering if you can talk about why that was at the top and just how important that issue is.
Can I just mention, though, that it's actually not on the top of the 2008 list.
We've done two lists. We do the list every four years, and we're doing it again next year.
Basically, to try to take into account what has been done and what do we know we can actually do in the future.
HIV was a very big problem in 2004, and there was a lot of money that could be spent and was spent very, very sensibly on getting simply better protection.
Now we're much more talking about how can we get better treatment of people, but it turns out to also be much, much more costly, and one of the concerns that you can have about HIV is actually that HIV is one of the celebrity diseases.
It does not mean that there's no problem with HIV. There definitely is a problem, but often there are other diseases, less well-known diseases and perhaps less glamorous diseases, where we can do a lot more good at much lower cost.
So AIDS was a tremendous investment in 2004.
I'm not so sure that it's the best investment.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't be focusing on it.
We're actually doing a Copenhagen consensus just on HIV simply because we still are spending About 15, 16 billion dollars a year, and we want to make sure that we spend those well.
But let me tell you what was the top of the priority list in 2008 and number two in 2004.
Which I think is an exciting and also in many ways an underreported problem, namely micronutrient malnutrition.
It's often so underreported that you probably don't even know what it is.
It's essentially recognizing that a billion people have too little food.
But the problem with food is it's actually pretty expensive to provide one or two or three meals a day for a billion people.
What it also turns out is about two and a half billion people on this planet, almost half of this world's population, lack one or more micronutrients.
Essentially, they lack a vitamin pill.
But that is very, very cheap to do something about.
About two billion people lack just iron.
They don't get enough iron in their diet.
And basically, we could fix that by fortifying their food, by adding iron to flour or other staples, just like we add iodine to salt.
The beauty of that is it would cure an enormous and almost invisible problem.
Most of these two billion people, we're actually estimating the two billion people lacking iron, on average lose 17% of their physical strength and lose about eight IQ points.
So in some ways you could say about one-third of this planet's inhabitants are dumber And weaker than they need to be.
And we could do something about it very, very cheaply.
The fortification would cost about $250 million, not billion, million dollars.
Overall, if we also take into account zinc and iodine and vitamin A, which are the other main deficiencies, we could probably help about 2.5 to 3 billion people For about $350 million a year.
It turns out to be the best investment that we could make, making, for every dollar we spend, about $20 worth of good in the world.
Very simple, very cheap.
Something you don't hear about because it's not easy to make scaremongering campaigns about, but it does mean it's not important.
Yeah, I can't imagine there would be many Hollywood horror films about the lack of vitamin pills, whereas helicopters freezing in mid-flight is very dramatic and subject to intense computer-generated animations.
I wanted to also talk about the alternatives to cutting carbon emissions.
One of the ones you talk about in the book is this marine cloud whitening and the degree to which that could eliminate all of the effects or potentially eliminate all of the effects of global warming with 1900 Unmanned boats going around the ocean.
I love this kind of stuff. Science to me is just fantastic.
It's a fantastic playground of possibilities.
Could you talk a little bit about that and the cost relative to what's being proposed in the more political arena?
Yes. Very clearly, when you talk about global warming, people want to cut carbon emission because that's what's causing the problem.
But one of the ways that we also deal with some problems is simply by putting a band-aid on top of it.
We deal with the effects of it instead.
And one way to deal with effects is to simply say, Well, if the problem is that the planet is warming up, maybe we should find a way to cool it down.
Now, it turns out that low-lying clouds actually cool the planet simply because they reflect more sunlight off and they keep in extra heat.
Most clouds are created by very small nuclei of different origin over the seas.
It's very often sea salt that's simply been whipped up from wave action.
Over the South Pacific, There's too few particulates, simply because there's not enough, if you will, pollution in the air.
So there's actually less clouds than could be.
And so what they have found is that if you Picked up a little more wave action.
You could actually brighten the clouds a little bit.
You could make slightly more clouds.
It wouldn't be visible by the naked eye.
It wouldn't be anything that you would ever notice.
But the point is, calculations would actually show that that could entirely cancel the extra warming that we're going to get from globe warming in this century.
And as you mentioned, the total number of boats needed For doing this, and remember, the boats is about 30, 40 yards long.
They're not big boats in any way, and they would cost $2 to $3 million each to fabricate.
We would need 1,900 boats.
That would be enough to offset the entire 21st century global warming.
Now, remember, this is not something we've already done, and we also want to make more I'm not modeling on whether there are any unforeseen consequences, but it does seem to indicate that there's another and potentially much cheaper way to tackle global warming.
What the initial results seem to indicate is the total cost will be on the order of $6 billion in total to avoid all of 21st century global warming.
That's an order of about a thousand times cheaper than anything else we're talking about, which seems to indicate it's certainly something we should be discussing.
We are not very much doing that in the conversation because everybody focuses on cutting carbon emissions.
But what we try to say is, well, if there's a much smarter, much better bang for your buck program out there, at least we should be looking at it.
And it is dismal the degree to which some climatologists and other people who frankly are on the gravy train, and that doesn't mean that they're wrong, but it means that we can be reasonably skeptical of their motives in the same way that climate alarmists or climatologists can be skeptical of people in the pay of energy producers or other People who have a vested interest in minimizing global warming's effects.
But it is disheartening the degree to which creative solutions like that are simply dismissed out of hand as not being worth looking at.
And I mean, I think we can all understand that because if there is a solution to global warming, then we can stop spending $80 billion a year funding it, funding the research.
And that means, or at least spend less, and that means that people are going to be, they're going to have to retrain or adapt in some way.
Well, Stephan, I tend to think the world is slightly less sinister.
I don't actually think people are being consciously that way, but most people think of problems to be solved within their own box.
And that's not particularly surprising.
So if you're focused on CO2, that's also where the solution is going to come from.
But yes, as you say, if we're going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars as a society to spend on We're not doing very little towards global warming.
At least we should start asking, is there another way that we could actually spend much less and obtain much more?
Most of the participants in the climate debate would say this should not be a long-term solution, but certainly geoengineering is something that could buy us a decade or several decades I think the main thrust of this argument is simply to realize we shouldn't take any solutions out of the equation just simply because they're politically incorrect.
Right. Now, I just wanted to end up by giving the opportunity to address something that I heard about that was, I mean, you say the world is not as sinister as perhaps I see it, but one of the things that I would put forward as evidence of its sinisterly nature is that, I mean, you've obviously faced a fair amount of professional criticism, which I think we all welcome.
I mean, ideas tend to be sharpened on a whetstone, and I think opposition is very good.
But you've had significant attacks upon you.
You've gone up against your disciplinary body and had that overturned or at least questioned.
And now it seems that you're facing some significant opposition.
Was there an election campaign or promise that was put forward to put your institution out of business?
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that because that seems to me quite a chilling and dark hand over the landscape of intellectual inquiry.
Well, it's a very depressing thing in a sense that we have an election in Denmark.
We're funded almost entirely by the Danish state, and the likely winner, the left wing in Denmark, has made it one of their campaign pledges to actually stop funding us and defunct us as soon as possible.
And, of course, that's somewhat disheartening.
I think it both speaks to the fact that there is a lot of people who seem to believe that any time you say, well, there are other and possibly smarter solutions, you're just simply wrong or you're the devil or you shouldn't be allowed into the conversation.
And I absolutely agree with you there.
We shouldn't be making those kinds of points.
We should be welcoming new ideas into the conversation because chances are we're going to end up making smarter and better and more well-informed decisions.
The other part, of course, is that there is a tendency to say, no, we don't want to hear any of their positions, and we just want to cut any sort of support to any other place that might make smarter decisions available, might make smarter arguments available for us to make more nuanced decisions.
And so, of course, my problem right now is that we're looking anywhere, and of course, I'd also be very heartened to If any of your viewers would be interested to see if somebody would try and help fund us into the future when the likely left-wing victory will take away our money.
Well, I mean, if politicians in general hold up to their record of keeping campaign promises, you may actually be in the clear and it may just be a vote-winning tactic.
Of course, that's a big risk and it's easy for me to say without having the laser on my forehead.
But yeah, I just wanted to sort of reiterate that, that if people do want to submit any kind of help to you financially or in other ways that they obviously should go to.
Now, so where is it that they can go for information about what it is that you're doing?
CopenhagenConsensus.com has all the information, all the books that we have written with Cambridge University Press, all the information about the numbers that we've been discussing here, along with my book Cool It!, which is available on Amazon.
And there's a documentary around that as well and I think that's an inevitable result of the hysteria around this.
I mean if you and I are standing on top of a burning building and there's a fireman below with the trampolines for us to jump onto and you say let's jump we're gonna burn to death and I say wait let's think about our alternatives you're likely just gonna grab me by the neck and throw me down with you because that's the level of emergency that we're facing and the level of rhetoric and and panic That is in this debate has unfortunately shut down some of the calmer voices.
Not completely, of course.
You're out there doing your thing, which I think is fantastic.
But it is facing an exhaustion in the general population, as you point out in the book.
Interest in global warming, the fear of global warming is beginning to diminish as a number of these scandals and a number of the predictions have not come true.
And somebody I was talking to about this said something quite interesting.
He said, well, when I was in graduate school, the professors taught things in physics from first principles.
They didn't say, well, there's a consensus among physicists.
And the... This sort of 96% number, which is good reason to be skeptical about, seems to be falling apart a little bit.
People seem to be less inflamed by the rhetoric.
And hopefully in the sort of after effect of that kind of panic, there will be room for more reasons and economic and impartial and mathematical and empirical based decision making.
And I certainly do applaud you for continuing to push that agenda forward because it is an uphill battle.
I really understand that. Well, thank you very much.
No, I think there is a good room for that.
And I think ultimately we have to recognize that if we have this conversation that it's the end of the world or indeed it's not happening, it's not a very fruitful conversation.
What we need to realize is that there is a problem with global warming as there is with many other things, but it's not the end of the world.
And we need to have a calm conversation about how do we fix this and all the other problems in the world in the smartest possible way, realizing there's limited money.
I really appreciate that and thank you so much for taking the time and I'll put some links to some of your speeches.
Your shorter TED speech I thought was really, really well presented and so hopefully we can bring some more calm, rational, objective analysis to this challenging problems and thank you so much again for your contributions and thank you so much for taking the time for Conversations with Casey.
