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R. WARD
1.0 out of 5 stars An inaccurate and misleading book about climate change
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 September 2020
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Like Bjorn Lomborg's other writings about climate change, 'False Alarm' is a book that misleads the reader about the potential consequences of climate change and the costs of tackling greenhouse gas emissions. Lomborg accepts the undeniable evidence that climate change is driven by emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities, such as the combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation, he presents a distorted view of current knowledge by using distorted, out-of-date and cherry-picked research findings. But he is in complete denial of the scale of the risks posed by climate change impacts.

The result is a book that is more propaganda than a factual examination of the issue. It is at odds with researchers and scientific organisations around the world, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United States National Academy of Sciences, who have concluded that climate change poses an extremely serious threat to people around the world, which will continue to grow unless there is much stronger action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The arguments presented by Lomborg are often confused and contradictory. He claims that adapting to the impacts of climate change is easier and more cost-effective than cutting emissions, but admits that the economic damage from weather events around the world is increasing rapidly. He advocates more research on finding a magical new source of energy that does not emit greenhouse gases and is cheaper than fossil fuels, but dismisses wind and solar energy which is already producing power more cheaply than coal in many parts of the world, including the United States.

Are the heart of the book is a reliance on an out-of-date model of the economic impacts of climate change which does not reflect the latest scientific research. Lomborg also exaggerates the costs of renewables and other ways of reducing emissions, bizarrely doubling all the estimates he finds in the literature. The end result is that Lomborg suggests that there is an "optimal" level of global warming that is 3.75 Celsius degrees above pre-industrial temperature. This is a laughable conclusion. The last time global temperature was more than 2 Celsius degrees above pre-industrial temperature was about 3 million years ago during the Pliocene Epoch, when the polar ice caps were much smaller than today and global sea levels were 10-20 metres higher. Modern humans first appeared on earth less than 250,000 years ago so have no evolutionary experience of the climate that Lomborg suggests is optimal!

The book may seem superficially plausible because of the citation of academic references. But when you check the papers to which Lomborg refers, you often find that they do not state what he claims. When I contacted some of the researchers about Lomborg's characterisation of their work, they said that their findings had been misrepresented.

Overall, this book will appeal to those who, like Lomborg, arrogantly believe that they know better than the experts and think that the risks of climate change have been exaggerated. But the informed reader will be able to spot that this book is an exercise in motivated reasoning and is not a serious or credible examination of the issue.
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Nicholas J. R. Dougan
5.0 out of 5 stars “Life in the future will be very recognizable but… ” – as no newspaper headline ever said
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 July 2020
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I was surprised to realise that it’s over 12 years since Bjorn Lomborg published “Cool it!”, his last specifically on Climate Change, and almost twenty since “The Skeptical Environmentalist” brought him fame, or notoriety, depending on your viewpoint. Much of his work through his Copenhagen Consensus think-tank focuses on how to spend money most effectively to relieve poverty and other hardships around the world, and he is well known for his scepticism as to the cost-ineffectiveness of global policies on climate change.

The basic premises of False Alarm, therefore, did not come as a surprise to me. He advocates a four-pronged strategy to deal with climate change: a small but steadily increasing carbon tax, ideally one that is coordinated internationally, research into new carbon-free technologies (but little spending on deploying today’s immature ones), adaptation and, finally, research into geoengineering as an insurance policy (but not for deployment other than in extremis). Lastly, he reminds us that climate change is not the only challenge, and, indeed, for most people around the world even in the West, but especially in the developing world, it is far down their list of priorities. Prosperity, he says, is the overlooked climate policy – more prosperous people and peoples are better placed to deal with the effects of climate change as they are to overcome other problems.

Lomborg starts by asking why we get our reaction to climate change so wrong, and specifically how we became fixated on becoming “carbon neutral” by 2030 so as to limit global average temperature rise to 2.7F at the end of the century. (Minor gripe: he uses Fahrenheit in deference to the US market, only occasionally giving the Celsius equivalent; I would have preferred it the other way around, and giving both measures each time would surely have caused little additional work or disruption to the reading flow.) The answer: ask scientists a silly question - Lomborg says an impossible one - and you get a silly/impossible answer. He implicates mainstream media in particular – good news sells no stories, and headlines like “Climate Change Could End Human Civilization by 2050” as published in the New York Times sells more newspapers than “Life in the future will be very recognizable but could be somewhat more challenging in certain respects.”

Second only to the MSM Lomborg implicates university researchers and politicians as contributing to the hype for their own benefits – he does not suggest a conspiracy, rather a self-reinforcing group-think. He points out that environmental catastrophism goes back to the 1960s, and has already had a long history of promoting expensive, unnecessary and in some cases downright barbaric solutions to avert perceived Armageddons. Paul Erlich – in response to whom Lomborg supposedly wrote Skeptical Environmentalist – comes in for particular stick.

In the second section Lomborg concentrates on debunking suggestions that hurricanes, droughts or forest fires are actually worse natural phenomena than before (or linked to climate change), it’s just that we humans have placed more of our assets into harm’s way without taking appropriate precautions. He uses the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change and other government-funded reports to demonstrate just how relatively mild their predictions are compared to the hysterical reaction they are engineered to produce, and refers to the work of Nobel-Laureate economist William D. Nordhaus who has worked out the economic effect of the predicted temperature rises in terms of GDP – and concludes that the effects are all entirely manageable.
Lomborg details why almost nothing we have done so far has been effective In the third section and demonstrates the shocking expense of the subsidies that the EU, and Germany in particular, has paid (from taxpayers’ money!) to deploy renewable technologies (while attempting to phase out the one non-carbon technology that does work at scale, nuclear fission). But, he says, it’s the very attempt to work to arbitrary targets to reduce CO2 that is at fault – even if the Paris Agreement delivered as planned (and he explains why it won’t) the rise in temperature by 2100 would be reduced by an imperceptible amount. In the hard-hitting tenth chapter “How climate policy hurts the poor” he focuses on one of the key arguments of the book – which dovetails with his work in the Copenhagen Consensus – that inept climate policies actually cause deaths amongst the world’s poorest. The fashion for biofuels in the early 2000’s, for example, pushed food prices up by 75%, with predictable effects of poverty – and starvation – levels. He decries climate-based aid programmes which offer renewable (e.g. solar-based) off-grid electrification that entirely fail to meet the expectations of local people. Although written before the current campaign, it is interesting to view the intended effect of western climate campaigners on ordinary people in the rest of the world through the prism of “Black Lives Matter”; which Lomborg does not refer to that movement, he does suggest that the climate campaigners are “enacting a kind of imperialism”.

This is an excellent book. Apart from my minor quibble about F rather than C, my only concern is that he doesn’t take the time to explain why a temperature rise of 5C or 8.7F or whatever is only going to cause a small reduction on GDP and is entirely manageable. Our own dear George Monbiot and The Guardian (both quoted, not necessarily positively) are convinced and have played their part in convincing so many that this does in fact mean the end of the world, and Lomborg might usefully have spent more time providing evidence that such a rise in temperature would indeed something that we could, if necessary, adapt to. Highly recommended.

I read this in the Kindle edition, which is/was published before the hardback. The illustrations, always a weakness of ebooks and kindles in particular, aren’t bad, although it was good to be able to look at them on my PC (via the PC Kindle app) to see the detail. I also downloaded the synced audible audiobook - Jim Seybert does a credible job or narrating.
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Peter Kettle
5.0 out of 5 stars Corrective to the hysteria about climate.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 September 2020
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This is a wonderful and clear explanation about the climate of our planet. It is also a corrective about the 'do gooders' who are filling our children with terror about their future. It is a rebuke for ill educated autistic school girls who believe fervently that we will all be dead in ten years time. This book gives the reader the chance to learn about the issues before leaping out to glue yourself to the railings. Salutary and brilliant.
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Michael Davison
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, but don’t expect Climate Change Activists to understand it!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 October 2020
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Well presented, with solutions offered not just the same old rubbish “fossil fuel bad, solar/wind good”, the inclusion of cost/benefit analysis helps show just what the costs are and how stupidly we have been to blindly follow the Climate Activist agenda and waste money, not that the private sector is complaining. The section on raising up the poor nations out of poverty is especially illuminating, showing that given the tools and training, they do not need to rely on charity but can stand on their own and prosper, that will not please the Charity Aid Industrial Aid complex who rely on these people for their well paid jobs.
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Gordon Ballantyne
5.0 out of 5 stars Factoids for sensible people
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 August 2020
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Excellent reality check to quieten the shouty eco warriors who want to spend all the family silver on useless projects.
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Dr Danczak
5.0 out of 5 stars We are doing very well indeed
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 July 2020
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The headline sums up in a sentence, the overarching view of some that they have the right, in the Quixotic fight against nature to determine societal outcome when the campaigners will be long gone and will not have to answer for the mess they have made on the road to hell paved with good intentions.
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Kevin T
5.0 out of 5 stars How can I get this Book to Canada's Prime Minister Trudeau before he really destroys Canada?
Reviewed in Canada on 5 November 2020
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Wow, we can all agree climate change is real. What we are seeing right now with ideological governments, such as the one in Canada, is that the Prime minister of this country is destroying from within when really there are smarter ways to address climate change. He needs to read this book before he does more harm...in fact, many media outlets should do the same to stop the fear mongering AND start the real process of addressing climate change. False Alarm does just that; attack the issue with reason that would actually get real changes in the world much faster and more orderly for the working class family that are loosing their jobs for a cause that is mute by the sheer way it is being addressed. On a personal note, I have already purchased two additional copies as gift for those close to me so that they can grasp the real issues on the subject AND not the worrying headlines we hear about that 2030 is a marker year of destructions....according to the media and their select "experts". We don't need to have a baseline fear that the inevitable will happen WHEN we can address this as a global issue in a smart way. A must read for those that want to understand and take climate change seriously. For those that understand what RCP8.5 is; it will never be and stop counting on it for your fear mongering. I know I will educate others where I can with reason rather than fear.
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Alf Reading
5.0 out of 5 stars Hört auf die Wissenschaft
Reviewed in Germany on 31 August 2020
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Wer der Wissenschaft folgen will, sollte dieses Buch lesen und nicht nur die verkürzten Darstellungen in den Medien.
Als Einleitung führt der Autor viele Beispiele an, wie Medien die Ergebnisse von wissenschaftlichen Studien nicht nur verkürzt sondern auch aufgebauscht bis verfälscht als Katastrophenvorhersagen veröffentlicht haben. Dann stellt er in gewissem Kontrast dazu den Zusammenhang von CO2-Emissionen zu Temperaturanstieg und Folgeschäden gemäß den Studien des IPPC vor. Anschließend erklärt er wie der Nobelpreisträger William Nordhaus u.a. Ökonomen die Klimamodelle um Berechnungen der volkswirtschaftlichen Kosten von durch Emissionen verursachten Klimaschäden ergänzt haben und diese den Kosten von möglichen Emissionsminderungen gegenübergestellen. Nach diesen Modellen ist die Summe der volkswirtschaftlichen Kosten am geringsten bei Emissionsminderungen, die den Temperaturanstieg bis 2100 auf ca. 3,75°C (6,75°F) begrenzen. Eine schärfere Begrenzung des Temperaturanstiegs würde demnach Minderungen erfordern, die nur zu Kosten möglich wären, die wesentlich höher wären als die Kosten der dadurch vermiedenen Klimaschäden. Das Pariser KlimaAbkommen setzt dagegen relativ willkürlich ein Ziel von maximal 2°C Temperaturanstieg, das jedoch durch die konkreten Verpflichtungen der Teilnehmerstaaten zu Emissionsminderungen gar nicht erreichbar ist. 

Die optimalen Kosten können nur erreicht werden, wenn die Emissionen effizient, d.h. mit den geringsten möglichen Kosten vermieden werden. Als effiziente Lösung empfiehlt der Autor eine global einheitliche Steuer auf CO2-Emissionen. Zusätzlich empfiehlt er staatliche Förderung von Forschung und Entwicklung, da mit der aktuell verfügbaren Technologie die erforderlichen Emissionsminderungen nicht zu gesellschaftlich akzeptablen Kosten möglich sind. Außerdem sind Maßnahmen zur Anpassung an den nur teilweise begrenzbaren Klimawandel nötig. Der Autor stellt z.B. die globalen Kosten von direkt wirksamen Schutzmaßnahmen vor Überflutung den wesentlich höheren Kosten einer Emissionsminderung gegenüber, die indirekt den Anstieg des Meeresspiegels vielleicht um wenige cm mindern könnte. Als Backup empfiehlt er auch, Techniken des GeoEngineering zu erforschen, mit denen notfalls der Temperaturanstieg wesentlich schneller begrenzt werden könnte als durch Emissionsminderungen, die erst nach Jahrzehnten verzögert wirken.

So wie viele „Klimaaktivisten“ an die Ergebnisse von Klimamodellen als bewiesene „Wahrheit" glauben, stellt auch der Autor die Ergebnisse der Modelle manchmal zu kritiklos dar, und ich vermisse Erläuterungen der zugrunde liegenden Annahmen und Parameter. Wenn für diese keine exakten Werte sondern nur Intervalle angenommen werden können, dann kann das Ergebnis eigentlich auch kein exakter Wert sondern nur ein Konfidenzintervall sein. (So berechnet die US Umweltbehörde EPA in ihren Modellen aktuell für 1 t CO2 Klimaschäden zwischen 42 $ - 123 $.) Im Lösungskapitel hätte ich mir neben der CO2-Steuer auch eine Erklärung des Emissionshandels als ähnlich wirksames marktbasiertes Instrument gewünscht.

Trotz dieser Mängel vergebe ich wegen der Fülle an Informationen und der schlüssigen Argumentation 5 Sterne. Viele Beispiele und Maßangaben sind auf USA bezogen. Trotzdem ist das Buch auch auf Englisch gut lesbar. Ich wünsche ihm viele Leser in Deutschland, auch wenn vermutlich kein Verlag eine deutsche Übersetzung herausgeben wird.
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Jim from Calgary
5.0 out of 5 stars No matter your view on climate change, you should read this book!
Reviewed in Canada on 18 August 2020
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Fantastic book, highly recommended for everyone on the spectrum - from doomsday apocalyptic climate change alarmists to the most ardent deniers, and everyone in between. LP berg doesn’t cover the science of climate change, which is why it’s a safe book for everyone. He covers, and very practically at that, the fact that using best available data from the IPCC and other reputable sources, the Paris Accord will do nothing to change the course of humanity. There are too many of the biggest emitters doing not enough to curb emissions. And even if everyone did all they could, it still wouldn’t make a hill of beans of difference. He talks about how cutting CO2 at all costs is foolish. First, there are benefits including a greener world. Second, some warming makes many places more liveable. Third, humans are adaptive and it would be far cheaper to build more dikes and berms and sea walls that it would be to eliminate CO2. And finally, he points out that innovation will solve our issues, as it always does. Rather than throwing trillions at inefficient wind and solar, we should be investing in other technologies that will actually address our energy needs. This is a very practical book that frankly everyone should read.
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RAS
5.0 out of 5 stars Well written, easy to read
Reviewed in Canada on 27 August 2020
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A must read for anyone looking for an alternative view to the climate hysteria that permeates mainstream media, and much of the political world. Lomberg points out much of the same hypocritical behaviour in the climate movement as Michael Moore in "Planet of the Humans", but presents it without Moore's Malthusian gloom. While I am skeptical of Lomberg's basic premise of CO2 caused warming, some of the solutions he puts forward, particularly in dealing with the developing world, simply make sense in any context. It is simply appalling to deny third world countries access to the same highly efficient and affordable sources of energy used to build our own economies, in the name of a bogus crisis. Well written, easy to read and thought provoking, from a life long climate researcher.
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David McGruer
5.0 out of 5 stars A solid look at the many exaggerated claims and suggestions to improve human lives.
Reviewed in Canada on 8 August 2020
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Even though the author buys into important errors in the related sciences, he shows how critical it is to examine claims of danger carefully, objectively and measure expected climate effects against the vast benefits to humanity that come from the continued use of fossil fuels. We can become so wealthy that adaptation to changing temperatures will be really easy and be a hundred and more times more effective than the current ridiculously ineffective policies we see all around us. A great read for anyone who cares about the future of humanity and our environment.
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