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Bjorn Lomborg is eloquent, articulate, suave, debonair and recklessly dangerous. Lomborg’s disingenous truthiness provides a fourth category to “lies, damned lies, and statistics” which might referred to “Lomborg statistics“. He struck again with a Times opinion piece calling into question UK investment plans to fight global warming.

It is hard, almost, to account for all of Lomborg’s deceptions within this article. He speaks of costs, for example, of renewable power systems without seeming to account, in any way, for the value of the energy that they would produce. He focuses on the United Kingdom, isolating its efforts from any other nation in the world when this is “global warming”, not “UK warming”. His cost figures as to the risks of Global Warming are, to be polite, absurd and discount (do not count, actually) the cost value of low probability but very high impact events. (And should carry a disclaimer.) And, of course, his account uses net present value (NPV) terms, which highly discount the value of tomorrow relative to today.

But, don’t worry, the global warming denial wing of the flat-earth society will lap Bjorn Lomborg up as some form of gospel even as Lomborg writes “Let’s be clear. I’m not contesting the existence of global warming. Doing so is silly.”

In short, Lomborg is arguing that the United Kingdom is committing to spending a hundred billion pounds on renewable energy to have a less than neglible impact on global warming.

With the best-case scenario the huge UK effort means that the temperature at the end of the century would be 2.4532342C. The effect is a difference of about 0.00038C – or about one three-thousandth of a degree in a hundred years.

What a waste? No. Well, only if you uncritically accept Bjorn Lomborg’s representations as fact, which they are not, or as resonable, which they are not.

Let me use just one, relatively minor example of disingenuity hidden in public.

The British Government estimates the cumulative carbon saving from all its plans at somewhere between 950 and 1,100 million tonnes of CO2 by 2030. The Department for Business will not give a figure beyond that timeframe but, given that wind turbines have a lifetime of about two decades, this seems the relevant cumulative reduction given the investment.

See the issue. If not, follow the logic. By the way, I’ll be honest. I have not seen this UK government plan or estimate, but I will simply take Lomborg at face value as representing it accurately (which, of course, is a high risk assumption perhaps making an ASS out of U and ME).

Note an issue yet?

The UK investment is for about 100 billion pounds between now and 2030 in renewable energy projects, with a heavy component of that to be wind. Wind turbines last 20 years. For the cumulative impact to to be achieved by 2030, all of the wind turbines would have to be in the ground, producing, by 2010, no? Hold it, the investment is cumulative over the coming several decades. In 2030, therefore, if we take a very straight line evaluation of wind investments (roughly 5 billion pounds per year for the next 20 years or so, with every year’s investment lasting 20 years), about 50 percent of the wind energy benefit would come post 2030 and not count in the cumulative impact.

If one were to assume (again, ASS …) that 100% of the investment is in wind power, then the cumulative impact of the investment would be perhaps 2,000 billion tons, and not 1000 billion tons.

This, of course, doesn’t delve into the discussion of so many other issues in this distorted short OPED, like the absence of discussion of the economic value of job creation in renewable energy sector nor the simple value of the produced energy. Sadly, dissertations could be written and websites filled by examining and dissecting Bjorn Lomborg’s serial distortions. And I, for one, don’t have the time to write the dissertation that this one OPED might well merit.

It is sad that such abuse of facts and figures are facilitated into public discussion and then require efforts to dissect and debunk them.