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False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

Bjørn Lomborg

4.26 · Rating details · 358 ratings · 72 reviews

Hurricanes batter our coasts. Wildfires rage across the American West. Glaciers collapse in the Artic. Politicians, activists, and the media espouse a common message: climate change is destroying the planet, and we must take drastic action immediately to stop it. Children panic about their future, and adults wonder if it is even ethical to bring new life into the world.
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Hardcover, 320 pages

Published July 14th 2020 by Basic Books (first published June 23rd 2020)

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Start your review of False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

Aug 02, 2020 Marcus rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction

At this point it's obvious that climate change is as much a political issue as it is an environmental one. If that doesn't sound right, here's some proof. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize in Economics winner wrote a review of False Alarm for the New York Times. He's a smart guy who has written a bunch of books himself. Despite this, his review is dishonest and factually incorrect from beginning to end.

Here's Stiglitz's review: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/bo...
Here's Lomborg's response: htt At this point it's obvious that climate change is as much a political issue as it is an environmental one. If that doesn't sound right, here's some proof. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize in Economics winner wrote a review of False Alarm for the New York Times. He's a smart guy who has written a bunch of books himself. Despite this, his review is dishonest and factually incorrect from beginning to end.

Here's Stiglitz's review: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/bo...
Here's Lomborg's response: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-yo...

This isn't petty bickering over decimals between well-intentioned writers with different priorities. It's also not legitimately divergent interpretations of the same data. I get that using an author's own rebuttal to a bad review to show how bad the review is is, by definition, biased. But read them both. There's no way that Stiglitz didn't know what he was doing. He was preaching to the choir, his very specific choir. He knows that most people who read his review will use it to justify not reading False Alarm and write Lomborg off as a climate denier or a quack or worse. Charitably, I suppose you could say that Stiglitz wanted to dismiss Lomborg's book because it could cause people who are already less inclined to worry about climate change to become even more complacent and, as a result, to do less to address the issue. In any case, it's a dishonest and politicized review by a respected economist and it's perfectly illustrative of how the discussion around climate change has devolved into something a non-expert can't possibly be expected to make sense of.

I'm only focusing on Stiglitz's review because of how well it shows why counterpoints like False Alarm are needed. Lomborg's premise is that "global warming is now being used, often explicitly, to advance broader causes in a partisan political environment that shapes the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and much of the world.” Stiglitz is the perfect example of that.

If you've gotten most of what you know about climate change from newspaper and magazine articles, you should read this book. Maybe even read it alongside a more alarmist take on climate change like The Uninhabited Earth. One thing will become clear--while there is a consensus on the reality of climate change and the need to address it, there is nothing even close to a consensus on the scope of the problem or the best way to solve it. False Alarm, if nothing else, puts that fact into perspective. ...more

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Mar 02, 2021 Amora rated it really liked it

Shelves: political-science

The way the data and research is presented is very articulate but not as much as Michael Shellenberger’s book, in my opinion. At times Lomborg might have contradicted himself by presenting research that shows that wildfires aren’t increasing and later saying that climate change will affect wildfires. That aside, this was a joy to read. All the political noise has made it difficult to talk about real solutions to mitigate climate change and Lomborg presents actual solutions that have been extensi ...more

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Jul 13, 2020 Psocoptera rated it did not like it

You're not going to find more intellectually dishonest reading, which is an especially dangerous venture especially for a such a hugely important issue such as man-made climate change - a threat that is agreed upon by 97% of climate scientists or more.

Of course the defence will inevitably be "we agree climate change is happening, we just don't believe the all the hype from the media". Actually, the media are devoting much less attention to climate change than it deserves (when you compare with ...more

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Mar 30, 2020 Mama K rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Well-researched and verified investigation. Offers reality instead of rhetoric and common sense solutions. Should be required reading in high schools and colleges.
I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Jul 17, 2020 Pete rated it it was amazing

Shelves: environment, nonfiction

False Alarm : How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (2020) by Bjørn Lomborg is Lomborg's latest book. The gay vegetarian Dane who accepts the IPCC consensus and proposes a carbon tax sets off some environmentalists like few others. His latest book is his second about Climate Change after 2007's Cool It. Lomborg's main points are that the impact of Climate Change is often exaggerated and that the current mitigation strategies are unwise.
It's wor False Alarm : How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (2020) by Bjørn Lomborg is Lomborg's latest book. The gay vegetarian Dane who accepts the IPCC consensus and proposes a carbon tax sets off some environmentalists like few others. His latest book is his second about Climate Change after 2007's Cool It. Lomborg's main points are that the impact of Climate Change is often exaggerated and that the current mitigation strategies are unwise.
It's worth noting that there are clearly already people who have written or given a rating to the book without having read it on Goodreads merely to slander Lomborg. It might be better to look at Amazon where reviewers are more likely to have actually read the book.
In False Alarm Lomborg extensively uses official data, IPCC results and other quality predictions about how much Climate Change has and is going to cost. This includes the work of William Nordhaus who won the Economics Prize in honour of Alfred Nobel for his work on Climate Change Economics.
Lomborg has updated his work from Cool It to include the latest results on how the impact of weather related disasters has reduced as a percentage of GDP over the past 40 years and also how the fatalities as a result of extreme weather have collapsed since the 1920s, going from 500K then to 25K today while global populations have increased from ~2B To 7.8B today. There is also fascinating data on how much US fire there has been from 1920 when records started being kept to today. Lomborg also points out that getting richer and adapting better to changes in sea level and extreme weather events works. For poor countries especially an extra thousand or two dollars of income per year enables much better climate resistance.
Climate Change has been seen as a problem now for over 30 years and so the strategies that have been employed since 1990 can now be examined. Here Lomborg looks at the how the various treaties have gone. The Rio, then Kyoto treaties promises and then the failed attempt at Copenhagen and now the raft of promises made in Paris are examined. Lomborg points out that carbon intensity hasn't even fallen. Germany's Energiewende is pointed out to be staggeringly expensive at hundreds of billions of Euros and due to a recent drive against nuclear is no longer even reducing emissions much. Lomborg makes the point that subsidies renewables has not gone well.
Lomborg proposes that a low carbon tax should be levied. He also proposes that far more money should be spent on energy research. He suggests spending on better energy storage, improved nuclear technology and as a last resort on climate engineering. Here Lomborg has changed his views on when climate engineering should be engaged in.
False Alarm is a very interesting read for anyone who wants a different take on Climate Change to that espoused by some environmentalists. Lomborg believes that Climate Change is happening and the recent changes are driven by human C02 emissions but the severity of the crisis has been exaggerated and humanity's ability to respond has been severely underestimated. He also points out that the current response to Climate Change is unwise and isn't working. ...more

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Oct 18, 2020 Morten Greve rated it did not like it

If this book was your only source of information regarding ongoing anthropogenic climate change – consequences, policy options etc. – you'd be forgiven for thinking that the following claims are true:

- The key message of the 2018 IPCC special report on 1.5 C warming is that it will be exceedingly difficult to keep warming close to 1.5 or even just below 2 C – and, by implication, that this is not a desirable target (p. 24-25).

- Renewable energy sources (wind and solar) are hopelessly expensive a ...more

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Jul 23, 2020 Esben Kranc rated it did not like it

Another prioritization book from Lomborg that does not take into account the risks of climate change. The book's sources are not relevant when speaking of the climate because of their underestimation of the (in this case, economic) effects of climate change. It is the same mistake as is so prevalent in other works like it. Lomborg's thoughts are a danger to the world by downplaying the impacts of global warming and trusting in markets that have crashed about every 15 years.

Joseph Stiglitz' NY Ti ...more

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Jul 15, 2020 Cristie Underwood rated it really liked it

Shelves: kindle

Even though I do not agree with the author's opinion, this was an interesting book. The author's argument was laid out in a manner that made the reader understand their passion for the subject. I try to read books with different points of view from myself and this one was a really interesting one. ...more

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Aug 05, 2020 Vinay rated it it was ok

2.5
Its always good to hear different views and this book tries to swim against the almost universal opinion that the Climate Change is our #1 challenge of our times. And the author have made some excellent points viz.
1. Not succumb to doomsday-ish panic
2. Investing more on innovation
3. Assessing our plans in terms of Cost vs Benefit
But (a big one), I cant help but notice that either he downplays the real threat or overestimate our capability in address a complex problem like this
- He argues tha 2.5
Its always good to hear different views and this book tries to swim against the almost universal opinion that the Climate Change is our #1 challenge of our times. And the author have made some excellent points viz.
1. Not succumb to doomsday-ish panic
2. Investing more on innovation
3. Assessing our plans in terms of Cost vs Benefit
But (a big one), I cant help but notice that either he downplays the real threat or overestimate our capability in address a complex problem like this
- He argues that we (Homo Sapiens) are more adaptive to environmental changes than we think. But we are talking about the most complex thing among us which is the Environmental Eco System. We still dont fully understand it (proof: predict weather a year from now) and any complex system will function in exponential manner i.e. chagning any factor will affect the whole system on a logarithmic scale (not linear) and our lack of complete understanding warrants much more action and genuine concern. For example if climate change is likened to bacteria that doubles every minute and it takes 100 years to fill half the bottle, we cant think that we still have 100 years to deal with it before the bottle becomes full.
- Most of his analysis are until 2100. Lets say we stick to 8 F increase by 2100 and people are wealthier then than now, but what about 2200? One key thing is that once we reach a tipping point there is no coming back, even if we try to. So thinking and making plans for next century is far sighthed but still not enough when we talk about climate change. Even if we argue that we are more innovative than today, we are dealing with a system that stayed stable for past millions of years and we manage to disturb one of its components (temperature) in a span of few decades.
I'd still argue that Climate Change is still the Big problem that we need to deal with because in all other aspects like Poverty, Health, Education... we are getting better and as the author argues we shouldn't bankrupt our progress with bad investment(s).
Having said that, its always good to have an opposing view so that we dont make biased decisions, but unfortunately this book despite making few (very) good points, falls back on key details. Definitely recommend for those having time to get some different perspective and please leave it at that. ...more

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Aug 01, 2020 Raghu rated it really liked it

Warnings on global warming have been rife since the beginning of the 1990s. Environmentalists have implored the world to switch to renewable energy alternatives. The issue has received widespread support from liberal western governments in the form of subsidies and tax breaks for renewable energy solutions. The environmental movement has supported it through sustained attacks on nuclear power, fossil fuels, and natural gas. The mainstream media have highlighted the urgency of implementing solar Warnings on global warming have been rife since the beginning of the 1990s. Environmentalists have implored the world to switch to renewable energy alternatives. The issue has received widespread support from liberal western governments in the form of subsidies and tax breaks for renewable energy solutions. The environmental movement has supported it through sustained attacks on nuclear power, fossil fuels, and natural gas. The mainstream media have highlighted the urgency of implementing solar and wind energy solutions. Liberal-minded billionaires have promised financial backing through charitable trusts. Yet, after thirty years of activism, if we take stock of the role of solar and wind energy deployment around the world today, we find that they hardly deliver 1.1% of global energy needs. Even by 2040, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects less than 5% of global energy for solar and wind. So, how come the world did not adopt renewable energy more widely, given such a favorable environment? Is it because of a conspiracy by fossil fuel giants in preventing renewable alternatives from being implemented? Or is it because people do not understand the impending catastrophe, looming in the form of CO2 in the atmosphere? Or is it because the solar and wind energy solutions do not provide an alternative at an acceptable price? Author Bjorn Lomborg digs deep down into these questions and shows what is wrong with the entire climate change narrative.

The book argues its case in five sections. The first two sections examine the climate change orthodoxy, its pronouncements, the fear complex it creates, and what is wrong with it. Section 3 is on the fallacies of the approach in ‘fixing’ climate change. It shows why Green energy is a damp squib, why the Rio, Kyoto, and Paris accords fail, and how the Climate Policy hurts the poor. Section 4 is on the author’s prescriptions on how to ‘fix’ climate change, through innovation, carbon taxes, and traditional human adaptation. The last section is on making the world a better place by tackling other challenges equally important as climate change.

Bjorn Lomborg is not a climate change denier, even though many environmentalists slam him so. He accepts that the world is warming. But he does not buy into the alarmist predictions of the future. He says that we need not resort to extreme measures of opting for zero GDP growth, not eating meat, abandoning coastal areas to live, or installing solar panels and wind turbines at an exponential rate to deal with it. Nor do we have to abandon the Earth and move to Mars. There are simpler and more rational methods to secure our future.

Lomborg says the way forward is not through individual actions that reduce emissions because it will make little impact on the ground. This is because of the ‘rebound effect’ which offsets our emission gains. What is the rebound effect? When we do something like forgoing meat and becoming vegetarian to reduce carbon emissions, we save some cash by doing so. But we end up spending the savings in ways that lead to more emissions because we have the tendency to ‘reward’ ourselves for doing a good deed. This is the rebound effect. The author shows the fallacy of many common notions of such “good acts”.
We can reduce food waste by buying less food, which will reduce the demand for food and produce less food, leading to less agricultural emissions. However, in a 2018 study in Norway, researchers found that people spend the money saved on goods, whose production emits much CO2 which more than offsets the original emissions. Similarly, walking instead of taking the trains in Europe emits more CO2! European trains aren’t big emitters whereas we spend the money saved by walking in products which emit CO2. However, car-pooling loses only 32% in the rebound effect. Research shows that overall, we lose 59% of emission savings from “virtuous” behavior to rebound effect. More interestingly, the book shows that ‘flight shaming’ achieves nothing substantial. Even if every single one of the 4.5 billion people flying in a year stayed on the ground and continued to do so till 2100, it will reduce global temperature rise only by 0.05ºF in 2100. Since “flight shaming” saves a lot of money, the rebound effect will be significant. The sensible thing is to focus on the carbon efficiency of airplanes.

Similarly, the Environmental push to combat climate change via lower growth in advanced nations is short-sighted. Some even advise zero growth for rich nations. This will only mean slower growth for its trading partners in poor countries in Asia, Africa, and South/Central America. It will cause them to linger longer in poverty. Poverty makes them endure preventable diseases like malaria, diarrhea, and tuberculosis that much longer. The author says it is dumb to choose a ‘no growth pathway’ for the future as advocated by some groups. Instead, we must opt for a ‘high growth path’ by investing massively in education, health, and technology, especially for the world’s poorest. This will reduce poverty and increase human and social capital, which results in the push for a healthier and cleaner environment.

Lomborg rightly believes in the power of Innovation and Human adaptation as two important ways of ‘fixing’ climate change. In 1967, Stanford scientists predicted that hundreds of millions will die in India in the 1970s because of over-population causing starvation. Norman Borlaug’s innovations in high-yielding grain varieties not only disproved it, but India is a food surplus nation now, despite the population multiplying 2.2 times. California did not solve the massive air pollution of the 1960s in Los Angeles by banning the use of cars. Instead, scientists invented catalytic converters which make today’s air much cleaner in LA despite the number of cars increasing many folds. Similarly, the Club of Rome report predicted the world’s supply of fossil fuel running out by the 1990s, but the shale revolution has given us a glut. The author shows many areas where innovation can deal with climate change without going to extreme measures.
The other point the author emphasizes is the underestimation of the Human capacity for adapting to the environment. Science shows that sea levels have risen about a foot in the past 150 years. But we have adapted to it without even realizing it. People in Nijmegen in Holland and Houston, Texas have shown how to adapt even as they live in floodplains. People in Bangladesh and the east coast of India have adapted to severe tropical cyclones with various measures such that we see much less loss of life today. Californians have adapted well to forest fires in the past century. So, the author says we can adapt to a warming climate as well through many cooling approaches.

I am largely in agreement with Bjorn Lomborg’s vision and prescriptions. I also do not believe that rational, factual arguments support climate change alarmism. However, I have also some differences with the author.
One problem I have with the book is that it puts too much store by computer models of the future. First, it does not seriously question the climate computer models. Even though there are nearly 40 models in use, none of them agree with one another. Most predictions made in the 1990s on the warming of the Earth in the next twenty years have been wrong. When we use the models to work backward in time to see if its temperature computations of the past agree with the observed ones, they fail there too. The actual observed global temperatures in the first two decades of the twenty-first century have been much lower than the models’ predictions. The same is true about sea-level rises, intensity and the number of hurricanes, etc. The author uses other computer models which suggest that strong global action to reduce climate change would cause far more hunger and food insecurity. These models may be just as wrong as the climate models. History has shown us that long-term predictions for human societies invariably bomb because they do not adequately factor in the immense adaptive genius of human beings.

Another issue I have is that the author does not seriously question the thesis of the CO2 as the principal actor in climate change. He accepts it as conclusive. So, he proposes ‘carbon taxes’ as one solution to “fix” climate change. As of today, over 40 countries worldwide have adopted some price on carbon. It is through direct taxes on fossil fuels or through a cap-and-trade program. These efforts have been in place since the early 1990s. However, most countries have found it difficult to implement them with prices that are high enough to induce deep reductions in carbon emissions. In Australia, they suspended efforts to increase carbon taxes after a backlash from voters. No one wanted rising energy prices. A similar backlash happened in France, too. As a result, carbon pricing has, so far, played only a subsidiary role in efforts to mitigate climate change. Not that the people are stupid. Rather, the arguments of the environmental movements on climate change have not convinced them.

Yet another issue I have with the author is his benevolent view of Geoengineering solutions to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. Environmentalists also regard this as a potential solution. I find this inconsistent and dishonest of the environment movement. Elsewhere, they oppose GMO products and cloning of animals because it is playing with Nature without understanding the consequences. How is Geoengineering any different? Throughout the book, author Lomborg says that we don’t understand well how the Earth’s climate works. Science has not conclusively established the “cause and effect” link between CO2 and global warming in the way alarmism projects it. Many scientists don’t agree with the UN panel’s orthodoxy on this question. In such a case, isn’t Geoengineering playing with Nature, if we suck vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere? Can’t it have drastic consequences for plant life on Earth? Won’t the earth get a lot colder without its beneficial greenhouse effect?

The salient characteristic of religions is that believers cannot question its dogmas. This is a difference between science and theology. If NASA says that they are sending a spacecraft to the Moon and that it will land at a certain point in Moon a few days later at a certain instant, it is a scientific statement for me because I have seen it happen repeatedly. But now, NASA says that they have a climate computer model and that it predicts the Earth’s average temperature could be 7.4ºF higher than today at the end of this century. I can only take it as a subjective opinion and not as a proven, hard fact. The environment movement, some scientists, and the liberal world insist that we must treat it as a proven fact. In pursuit of this, they attack anyone who disagrees as a ‘denier’. To me, this is getting close to being a dogma, pushing climate science closer to being a religion. We want it to remain Science.
...more

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Oct 18, 2020 Audrey rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, 2020-books

I appreciated this book’s honest, common-sense, non-agenda examination of climate change. The author shows how panicking about it doesn’t solve anything. He offers common-sense, low-cost solutions that everyone ought to agree on, whether climate skeptic or climate doomsayer. He comes from the position that carbon dioxide is the biggest cause of warming and that climate policies must benefit people as well as the environment. The writing is clear and engaging and easy to understand. There are 80 I appreciated this book’s honest, common-sense, non-agenda examination of climate change. The author shows how panicking about it doesn’t solve anything. He offers common-sense, low-cost solutions that everyone ought to agree on, whether climate skeptic or climate doomsayer. He comes from the position that carbon dioxide is the biggest cause of warming and that climate policies must benefit people as well as the environment. The writing is clear and engaging and easy to understand. There are 80 pages of endnotes. If you want to skim, you can read the last paragraph of each chapter and the concluding chapter.

Some highlights:
• Media and politicians use scaremongering tactics to attract viewers and/or votes.
• Agreements like the Paris Accord are useless.
• Global warming, like everything else, has benefits as well as harms. Cold kills more people that heat, and crops thrive in warmer, CO2-rich environments.
• Humanity is highly adaptable and innovative, as history has shown over and over again.
• Wind and solar are weak and inefficient. Natural gas and nuclear energy do not produce CO2.
• Forcing people into starvation and poverty to reduce CO2 emissions is immoral as well as useless.
• Floods and fires are not more frequent. More people are building homes in flood and fire zones. While natural disaster damages have increased, deaths have decreased.
• Increasing prosperity will help the planet more than decreasing it.

===================

The science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem. Yet, we now live in a world where almost half the population believes climate change will extinguish humanity. This had profoundly altered the political reality. It makes us double down on poor climate policies. It makes us increasingly ignore all other challenges, from pandemics and food shortages to political strife and conflicts, or subsume them under the banner of climate change.

The elite use only a small portion of their large incomes on energy, so even dramatic price increases matter much less to them. This is why it is easier for the rich to argue for high energy taxes. In fact, financial benefits from climate policies (like subsidies given to a homeowner for erecting a solar panel or insulating a house, or driving a Tesla) overwhelmingly go to the richest.

We need to be aware than when we insist, as part of foreign aid packages, that the developing world align with our climate priorities, we are enacting a kind of imperialism. We are not listening to what the citizens of these countries want. We are jeopardizing their opportunity to lift their populations out of poverty for the sake of our own concerns. This isn’t just bad policy. It’s grossly unethical.

Currently we have promised to spend $1-$2 trillion every year, and we won’t be able to tell the difference in temperature even in a hundred years. Indeed, it turns out that if we measure all the benefits of reduced climate damage in monetary terms, every dollar the Paris Agreement costs will avoid just 11¢ worth of long-term climate damage. That isn’t sensible.

For the world’s poor, climate policies are often worse than ineffective. They are destructive. Take nutrition. Climate activists often point out that higher temperatures will make more people hungry, so drastic carbon cuts are needed. But a comprehensive study published in 2018 in Nature Climate Change shows that strong global action to reduce climate change would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.

The truth is that climate change plays a relatively small role in determining future well-being. It is clear that if we’re motivated only by trying to reduce the impact of rising temperatures, we’re literally ignoring the most important factors—such as education, health, technology, and access to plentiful energy—in Africa’s future well-being.

The amount of crops needed to fill an SUV’s fuel tank with biofuel would feed a child for an entire year, and every gallon of biofuel wiped out forty meals. The huge growth in biofuel inevitably contributed to a reduction in food and an increase in food prices: a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian found that biofuels had forced global food prices up by 75 percent. The results of the price hike were devastating. After food prices first spiked in 2008, the UN special envoy for the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, declared that a “silent tsunami” had pushed a hundred million people into poverty and thirty million into hunger. The World Bank subsequently estimated that between June and December 2010 an additional forty-four million people fell below the extreme poverty line because of food price hikes. ... Strong climate campaigner George Monbiot called the subsidies driving the biofuel industry’s growth “a crime against humanity.” Yet, by the point of the backtrack, vested agricultural interests had made the bad policies almost impossible to overturn.

Climate alarmism too often leads us to policies that while well intentioned, crowd out much more effective ways of helping people. It comes down to this: when we see a malnourished child or a town hit by a hurricane and seriously suggest that we should make lives better by cutting a ton of carbon dioxide, we are not actually trying to do good, but rather imposing our own priorities on people who have little power to assert their own.

Constant scaremongering and green energy industry lobbying lead to scarce resources instead being poured into rolling out more and more of today’s inefficient solar panel and wind turbine technology.

The activists would rather we cut carbon dioxide emissions at any cost than invest in a solution that could allow factories to continue belching carbon dioxide into the air. The campaigners are less concerned with reducing the rise in temperature than they are with reducing the use of fossil fuels.

The reason we pursue any climate change policy is to make the world better than it would otherwise be. Our goal is to make sure that both people and the world’s environment are better off than they would have been had we done nothing.

We have reduced the scale of other challenges, and we need to continue that work for the future. We also need to solve global warming. But we need to do so with the knowledge that climate change is not the only problem facing the world, nor is it the largest.

The apocalyptic rhetoric [of the 60s and 70s] did significant damage. ... Population control came to be seen as “the only possible salvation of the underdeveloped world,” as Ehrlich put it. Some researchers started considering adding chemicals to water supplies or staple foods to make the world’s poor temporarily sterile. It gave urgency and legitimacy to end horrific abuses committed by governments, including forced sterilization campaigns and coerced abortions. In just one year, in 1976, the Indian government force-sterilized 6.2 million men. ... Ehrlic advocated that humanity’s most hopeful scenario was to cut off food aid to Vietnam, Thailand, Egypt, and India—and sit back and watch while famine and food riots killed half a billion people.

Fixating on scary stories about climate change leads us to make poor decisions. ... Overspending on bad climate policies doesn’t just waste money. It means underspending on effective climate policies and underspending on the opportunities we have to improve life for billions of people, now and into the future. That’s not just inefficient. It’s morally wrong. ...more

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Jul 17, 2020 Jack rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Must Read!

This book like Apocalypse Never uses a solid approach to assessing the impact of climate change, climate change policy and misreporting of climate change reality. It’s sometimes hard to work through the data, so the book would be significantly improved by aa summary showing exactly how little will be achieved by the Paris accord and similar massively expensive policy solutions. The bottom line is that climate change is being overblown by media looking for readers, by politicians lookin ...more

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Aug 04, 2020 Drtaxsacto rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I've been a fan of Bjorn Lomborg since the Skeptical Environmentalist. His basic message has not changed - that we need to pay attention to climate change just not to the nut cases who make the extreme case of a one best way to solve the issues.

For me there were several issues he raises -
1) The extremists see one best way and fail to offer any assumptions about adaptation - that ignores the human propensity to fit their needs to their environments.
2) He does a good job of contrasting the techno I've been a fan of Bjorn Lomborg since the Skeptical Environmentalist. His basic message has not changed - that we need to pay attention to climate change just not to the nut cases who make the extreme case of a one best way to solve the issues.

For me there were several issues he raises -
1) The extremists see one best way and fail to offer any assumptions about adaptation - that ignores the human propensity to fit their needs to their environments.
2) He does a good job of contrasting the techno-optimism of the 1950s (where we thought technology could solve everything) to the pessimistic apocalyptic visions of today. Everything can be managed if we think about what we need to do.
3) Many of the international joint treaties/goals are absurd. So some of the goals of the Paris Accords could be better implemented with less attention to reductions and more toward management of the issues including expanding education and reducing poverty - markets do work.
4) US, Mexico, China and the EU account for 80% of the carbon emissions.
5) He introduces the concept of the Expanding Bullseye. Storms are not increasing but their severity is because of an increasing concentration of housing in targeted areas. Between 1900 and now Florida's population has increased 67 fold - and much of that is concentrated in coastal areas.
6) Often the tradeoffs of "sustainable" solutions is to look the poorest in our world into poverty.
He makes a strong case for economic growth. There will be some tradeoff between responding to climate issues and economic growth. And for Lomborg we should err on the side of economic growth in part because the poorest then get a raft of benefits which ultimately help us manage climate issues.
7) Lomborg makes a strong case for a good bump in R&D on things like energy storage and alternative technologies in areas like nuclear. He is not a fan, and has some convincing data on the absurd ineffective nature of solutions like solar and wind power.

There are several areas where I think Lomborg relies too much on dodgy projections - but he is upfront about their potential use and abuse. But if you want to get out of the extreme discussions about climate change - this is a wonderful resource. ...more

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Aug 31, 2020 Andy rated it really liked it

Reading this book put me through the 5 stages of grief.

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Aug 01, 2020 Wayland Coker rated it it was amazing

Climate alarmism too often leads us to policies that while well intentioned, crowd out much more effective ways of helping people. It comes down to this: when we see a malnourished child or a town hit by a hurricane and seriously suggest that we should make lives better by cutting a ton of carbon dioxide, we are not actually trying to do good, but rather imposing our own priorities on people who have little power to assert their own. It has become too easy to believe that policies aimed at cutti ...more

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Nov 02, 2020 Jason Green rated it it was amazing

Another honest look at the environmental challenges facing our planet. I first read Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never and then read False Alarm to learn more about environmental alarmism. The books are compatible and the learnings from one reinforce the learnings and the conversation topics from the other. This is one of the most important topics of today, with plans on the table to fight the most expensive war in history we need this conversation to make sure we are focusing on the right ...more

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Jul 17, 2020 Mudit rated it did not like it

Garbage

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Jul 28, 2020 Michael Combs rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I would not give five stars to a work that contains a fundamental error, but "False Alarm" is so pertinent that everyone on Earth should read this book. Whether climate change skeptic or alarmist, there is much that both sides will find valuable and useful, but before I indulge in fulsome praise Mr. Lomborg does have a fundamental flaw in his presentation: being ignorant of or overlooking thousands of prior periods of natural climate change that warmed Earth far more than even the most unlikely ...more

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Dec 29, 2020 Machiel Reyneke rated it really liked it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Looking at environmental impact through the lens of economic tradeoffs, this is a very interesting read. A lot of the book uses our current environmental/economic models to project into an uncertain future. I agree with the author that we can make better, more pragmatic tradeoffs by not invoking alarmism. There are known investments that yield good ROI for the (known) problems that we will face, and alarmists are doing themselves no favors by ignoring them.

That said, the book doesn’t touch the t ...more

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Nov 17, 2020 Jeff Rudisel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, history, economics, politics, 2020

Poverty-reduction/prosperity-increase turns out to be the best climate policy.

How media and political exaggerations and hype-mongering more often lead to excessive harm than to balanced benefit. Media crisis-merchant business models and other conflicting interests inevitably lead to innumerable false alarms and over-reactions that cause great harm.

The stats and projections cited here by Lomborg are certainly extremely well-founded, and he certainly does not claim that the problem of human-induce ...more

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Nov 07, 2020 Alicia rated it it was amazing

Great discussion of climate change, even for non-scientists like me. Lomborg demonstrates that “climate change is real, but it's not the apocalyptic threat that we've been told it is. Projections of Earth's imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive but largely ineffective policies that hamper growth and crowd out more pressing investments in human capital, from immunization to education. False Alarm points the wa ...more

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Nov 28, 2020 Carlos Oliver rated it it was amazing

No notes on this one either. Very sober, scientific, and humanistic approach to climate issues.

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Jul 21, 2020 Lams rated it really liked it

A nice case for progress and economic growth to build resilience against climate change. Strong reminder that society and the developed world have other responsibilities than climate, reducing poverty should be pretty high on that list and not to be sacrificed easily to «save the planet». I saw Stiglitz called this book «dangerous» in his NYTIMES piece - but when people and societies are asked to make huge sacrifices, dangerous books nourish democratic deliberation. Looking forward to following ...more

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Aug 18, 2020 Tom Cross rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Fabulous book that debunks climate change hysteria, puts climate change in proper context and uses rigorous economic analysis to prioritize climate change spending versus other global priorities. It’s a must read for anyone that wants real facts and rigorous analysis on climate change versus climate change hysteria and propaganda spread by Al Gore and his minions.

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Sep 05, 2020 Jeff Kissel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, social-economics, social-environment, social-society

This book was recommended to me by my father. I did not expect to agree with much in the book given the title and my current understanding of the risks of climate change. I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong in this case. The book is clear and well argued and, having a background in economics myself, spoke my language. I think it is a worthwhile read for anyone trying to wrap their head around the climate issues.

Bjorn’s proposed solutions are the framework conservative and moderate leaders SH ...more

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Sep 29, 2020 Bill Leach rated it it was amazing

The subject of this book, subtitled "how climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet", is explored in detail by Lomborg. A great amount of information that is generally not known puts a unique perspective on where the hysteria around Global Warming is leading the world. By focusing most of our attention on climate change, we are ignoring other, bigger issues that could make the world a much better place.

To be clear, Lomborg states that Climate Change is r ...more

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Dec 02, 2020 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: 21st-century, politics, political-science, fringe-science, science, fringe, cultural-marxism, climate-change, evironmentalism

The only reason Lomborg misses 5 stars is he believes the world will continue to get richer. It is not unusual for many to believe this is true but, sadly, we are about to run into a demographic collapse. This will cause all types of growth, except in the USA, to become impossible. Why?

Types of growth:
1. Consumption led
2. Investment led
3. Export led

These 3 types of growth have lit a fire under capitalism since the 15th Century.

Throughout the OECD, childbirth rates are 1.6 (2.1 is simple re ...more

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Mar 04, 2021 David Mihalyi rated it liked it

Shelves: 2021

Bjorn Lomborg is the most famous dissenting voice on climate change. He doesn't dispute man made warming exists, but believes the seriousness of the issue is way overstated. He makes his long case for it in this book, which is partly a rehash of various earlier books, articles and op-eds.

Let's start with the good stuff from the book.
-He highlights that focusing our efforts on climate change mitigation involves some trade-offs. The money spent on it could have been spent on some other urgent pri Bjorn Lomborg is the most famous dissenting voice on climate change. He doesn't dispute man made warming exists, but believes the seriousness of the issue is way overstated. He makes his long case for it in this book, which is partly a rehash of various earlier books, articles and op-eds.

Let's start with the good stuff from the book.
-He highlights that focusing our efforts on climate change mitigation involves some trade-offs. The money spent on it could have been spent on some other urgent priorities, which may have higher benefits over long-term horizon. This approach is often missing in the prevailing climate change discourse ("we need all hands on deck").
- Some believe that climate change is likely to make the planet inhabitable for most humans. The book slams many such misconceptions which are often based on exaggerated headlines, misrepresentation of research findings or unscientific doomsayer narratives.
-The book is framed around the theme of "The World Is Getting Better, but Good News Doesn't Make Headlines". You may recognize it from other books on tangentially related topics by Hans Rosling, Stephen Pinker, Charles Kenny, Andrew McAfee. There is lots of truth to such framing and this kind of optimism may also cheer you up a bit.

The more troubling stuff:
- Although I am no expert on climate change, it seems pretty clear that the book misrepresents where the scientific consensus is and what the major debates are on various sub-topics. It is clearly selective in which paper it chooses to describe and how. For example, on the economic impacts of climate change (the part I know best), it discusses work by Nordhaus and Tol but not their criticism, nor the work by Burke, Hsiang or Weitzman which arrives to starkly different conclusions.
- Many of Lomborg's more basic arguments are weak and one sided. He highlights rebound effects when a climate continuous person switches to cheaper alternative (the extra emission from using that saving on something else), but conveniently forgets about it when consumers switches to a more expensive greener alternative. Bashes renewable subsidies, but ignores fossil subsidies.
- He jumps around between taking down a strawman agenda, where all climate policies are totally enforced ("kills the economy") and one where not much is happening anyway ("pointless attempts" ). He doesn't seem to acknowledge the messy reality of climate politics, where any agenda is ever only partly implemented.
- Lomborg doesn't tell you why he believes his views are at odds with much of the mainstream scientific community. Surely he is aware of his reputation as a contrarian / dissenting voice. What is his own judgment on why he is right and so many others are wrong. Does he believe he is more knowledgeable or smarter? Less biased or political? Un-corruptible?
-While the book (rightly so) describes mitigating climate change as a complicated and expensive venture, there is not much nuance to the difficulties in alleviating poverty. His repeated calls to redirect money from climate change to other programs make it sound like any money not spent on electric car subsidies in the US could instead be effectively deployed to pull people out of poverty in Bangladesh. If only it were that easy.

Read it if you like contrarian books, but make sure you read something more balanced also. ...more

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Sep 05, 2020 Debbie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction

This is an important book; a must read for anyone concerned about climate change and/or who is affected by climate change policy—which covers most of us. The book explores challenges with climate change policies: most importantly how to balance raising poor nations out of poverty by increasing GDP (with associated outcomes that include increased life satisfaction, wellbeing and resiliency to climate change), while limiting the negative outcome of doing so—the rise in global temperature. Lomborg This is an important book; a must read for anyone concerned about climate change and/or who is affected by climate change policy—which covers most of us. The book explores challenges with climate change policies: most importantly how to balance raising poor nations out of poverty by increasing GDP (with associated outcomes that include increased life satisfaction, wellbeing and resiliency to climate change), while limiting the negative outcome of doing so—the rise in global temperature. Lomborg examines with utmost detail through discussion, charts, and corresponding references the cost of climate change impact and the cost of policies to mitigate it.

The scope and magnitude of addressing climate change globally is enormous—I struggled at times to get my head around it. But False Alarm revealed how actions like driving electric cars and having solar panels and wind turbines are but a minuscule solution, and that actions and related policies do more to benefit a great number of companies through tax breaks and subsidies than reduce global warming. It also highlighted how (some) media outlets exaggerate and manipulate climate data and research to shock, instill fear and panic. But more importantly the book explores and proves with data how ineffective climate change policies of nations and agreements between nations are—including the infamous Paris Agreement. Through detailed research and data Lomborg discusses the cost of implementing the Paris Agreement, estimated to cost between $1 -2 trillion per year from 2030 onwards. Yet its impact, how effective the efforts will be in lowering global temperature is minuscule—only .05 degrees by the year 2100 (p 117)! This is insanity.

The last third of False Alarm is devoted to solutions. This is where it gets interesting; there are numerous strategies that can be implemented, including a global Carbon tax, as well as significant investment in research for alternative fuel sources and climate change solutions. Granted, Lomborg acknowledges the challenges in implementing coordinated efforts for carbon tax, yet there are options for creating such a coordinated strategy that addresses the problem. He outlines other solutions too that can be implemented at the national level—smart policies that can save lives and reduce the effects of global warming—policies for land use and building zoning, as well as using materials on roofs and roads that mitigate the effect of warming. Much can be done that involves changing human behavior that goes beyond targeting consumers to invest in expensive options like electric cars and solar panels on their homes.

False Alarm is well written, without academic jargon. All Lomborg’s ideas and claims are backed by solid data; readers can easily find his sources and look them up online for further reading. An excellent and essential read for all.
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Jan 11, 2021 Brian rated it really liked it

Bjorn Lomborg yet again delivers a rational tour de force to help us to remember our priorities. Resources are scarce and it makes the most sense to calculate how to best allocate resources without being influenced by fads or mass hysteria. Climate change is just such a hysteria.

Lomborg takes pains to underline that he does believe that humans have a slight impact on the climate and that we likely can, at huge expense, modify that trajectory ever so slightly over the long term. Rather than blind Bjorn Lomborg yet again delivers a rational tour de force to help us to remember our priorities. Resources are scarce and it makes the most sense to calculate how to best allocate resources without being influenced by fads or mass hysteria. Climate change is just such a hysteria.

Lomborg takes pains to underline that he does believe that humans have a slight impact on the climate and that we likely can, at huge expense, modify that trajectory ever so slightly over the long term. Rather than blindly pursuing that objective, he encourages us to remember all of the other ways in which we can radically improve our lives and those of our posterity in more substantial ways than blindly building windmills and taxing carbon.

His approach to addressing climate change is to:

1. Think of it in terms of results, not intentions (building nuclear reactors is less sexy but more effective in reducing carbon than building windmills or solar farms, for example)

2. Balance the costs of changing the climate against those of adapting to the changes. Often it is much cheaper to adapt to climate change than to influence it. Building a levy to stop flooding may be much more efficient than trying to reduce carbon.

3. Remember that innovation and economic growth are often both the easiest and most effective approaches to solving large obstacles. Moreover, humans have fewer children as they become wealthier, stabilizing population growth. Unfortunately, governments often invest in short-term, popular solutions like subsidizing wind and solar over longer-term more investment in research for more scalable solutions.

Perhaps the most important subtle message in the book is to stop working against ourselves. Subsidizing ethanol production where more than a gallon of oil is burned to produce a gallon of ethanol is not a great way to reduce carbon. We should also embrace changes to cleaner carbon, such as moving from coal to gas, rather than insisting on moving directly away from all carbon. Moves away from nuclear toward fossil fuels are also foolish.

Fundamentally, Lomborg promotes a rational approach to government and individual decision-making. Unfortunately, most governments are more worried about headlines that will get them re-elected in the very near term and thus de-incentivized to invest in long-term research or projects. While I appreciate Lomborg's respected voice in this discussion, I find that Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never presents a more unified and consistent plan for addressing climate change. ...more

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About Bjørn Lomborg

Bjørn Lomborg

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Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author and president of his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI) in Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he argues that many of the costly measures and actions adopted by scienti ...more

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“WE NEED TO take a collective deep breath and understand what climate change is and isn’t. It is not like a huge asteroid hurtling toward earth, where we need to stop everything else and mobilize the entire global economy to ward off the end of the world. It is instead a long-term chronic condition like diabetes—a problem that needs attention and focus, but one that we can live with. And while we manage it, we can live our lives and address the many other challenges that ultimately will matter much more for the future.31 In” — 1 likes

“The Paris Agreement will be the costliest pact ever agreed to, by far. It will cost us $1–$2 trillion per year from 2030 onward, if actually fully implemented. Yet the agreement will do almost nothing for the climate: all of its promises will reduce the temperature rise by the end of the century by an almost imperceptible 0.05°F. And none of the big emitting countries are anywhere close to actually delivering on their promises. Spending trillions to achieve almost nothing is, not surprisingly, a bad idea. Every dollar spent will produce climate benefits worth just 11¢.” — 0 likes

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