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One of the nice things about living in Amsterdam is that I can ride to work on my bike. Compared to the Scandinavians, the Dutch are not very safety conscious. You see many people ride in the dark without lights, and not even children wear helmets. Maybe I have a vivid imagination, but accidents do happen.

Winter is coming, and it will be dark soon on the way to and from work, so I have fitted out my bike with a set of the excellent Reelights (no batteries), and I am thinking about buying a somewhat naf looking Illuminite jacket, and maybe a pair of their gloves. It is worth it, I bike along the Amstel river, and through a beautiful, green area. It is a nice way to start the day.

I have moved from the shores of the Mediterranean to the banks of the Amstel River in Amsterdam. I am now in the land of windmills, canals, clogs, and parakeets.

Parakeets? There are flock of bright green Rose-ringed parakeets (Psittacula krameri) in Amsterdam. They are noisy birds, and the story goes that one owner got so fed up with his pet parakeets that he let them fly off. Since they came from the foothills of the Himalayas, they had no problem surviving and breeding in the Netherlands.

Will the parakeets compete for resources with the local bird populations? Probably not catastrophically. Owls and goshawks now feed on them, keeping their numbers down. But they are probably here to stay.

In the Financial Times, Clive Crook reviews Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,

One man who was not rooting for Al Gore to win the Nobel Prize was Bjorn Lomborg. The smiling Dane is the anti-Gore. Unimpressed with An Inconvenient Truth , his new book challenges many of that film’s alarming statements about global warming. Mr Gore and his admirers are paying no attention, needless to say, and that is a pity.

Lomborg’s capacity to anger his opponents is limitless. Of course, he disagrees with them, an outrageous affront in itself. He says that the state of the environment is not dire. He also argues that cutting greenhouse gas emissions should not be the world’s top priority, another scandalous provocation. He makes it worse by being pleasant and reasonable (not to mention Danish), turning up in T-shirt and jeans all the time, supporting his arguments with too many footnotes and acting in other ways designed to offend.

A disinterested review of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming is hard to find. I am predisposed to like the book because I have known Lomborg since he published The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001 and find him unfailingly courteous, open-minded and keen to engage in discussion. Most reviewers are prejudiced in the opposite direction. Lomborg’s arguments receive scant attention. The man is the target. E.O. Wilson, the biologist, once described him as “part of the parasite load that science must bear”. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told a newspaper: “If you should follow the thinking of Lomborg, then possibly what Hitler did was right.” Such remarks sink ad hominem criticism to new lows.

As in his previous books, Lomborg does not challenge the scientific consensus, such as it is. For the most part, he merely describes it dispassionately and thinks through the policy implications. On global warming, he cites IPCC projections for rising temperatures and their effects as his baseline. He is no “climate change denier”, nor does he quarrel with the view that man-made influences are the principal cause. He proposes, among other things, a moderate carbon tax to encourage abatement. But he questions the need for more radical measures to cut carbon, arguing that the costs would be great and the benefits limited. He says that the Kyoto protocol was expensive and ineffective: the resources that aggressive carbon cutting absorbs can be better used. He favours not death camps and a trans-European slave state, as Mr Pachauri may suppose, but a big expansion of aid to combat HIV and malaria in Africa. Admittedly, that could be just a front. The book’s discussion of rising sea levels is typical of the Lomborg approach. The latest IPCC projections talk of a rise of a foot by the end of the century, he notes. Mr Gore talks of a rise of 20 feet. The present science suggests that even under extreme assumptions about the rapid melting of Greenland’s ice, such a rise would take 1,000 years. If the IPCC’s projections are correct, the rise in sea level this century does not pose a catastrophic threat. Lomborg concludes that adaptation where necessary, such as the building of coastal defences, is a better investment than an immediate and costly assault on carbon emissions.

Reviewing the book for Nature, the economist Partha Dasgupta disdainfully highlighted what he saw as a critical flaw. “The earth system’s deep non-linearities” make it impossible to forecast what will happen if concentrations of greenhouse gases rise to the level Lomborg envisages, Mr Dasgupta says. There might be a sudden catastrophe or there might not be. This type of radical uncertainty undermines orthodox cost-benefit analysis. Hence, “Lomborg’s thesis is built on a deep misconception”. It is an important point - though it seems harsh of Mr Dasgupta to say “these truths escape Lomborg” as if they do not also escape the IPCC, Sir Nick Stern and anybody else who bases policy proposals on conventionally estimated projections of climate.

For the moment, after all, those projections are all we have. It may be true that carbon abatement should be approached as a question of insuring against an improbable catastrophe (rather than of avoiding lesser harms that are confidently expected to occur), but this insight sheds no light on the practical question of how much mitigation is enough. It points to a research agenda - one worth pursuing, to be sure - not a policy. If it skewers Lomborg, it skewers everybody else as well.

In the vast popular literature on climate change, Lomborg’s short book stands apart for its calm, civil, even-handed analysis. It is suffused with concern for socially beneficial priorities and for practical steps to do good. Almost uniquely in its genre, it understands the idea of opportunity cost. It provides some badly needed balance. You can see why so many people find it completely infuriating.

This has got to be one of the best deals around. I got this mail from the highly ranked Toulouse School of Economics,

Tuition fees for [the English language] Master’s degree amount around 300 Euros for one academic year. Social security (compulsory health insurance) for students amounts 200 Euros per academic year. For living expenses in Toulouse, you should count at least 500 Euros per month (survival) and more probably 700 to 800 Euros all included.

Best regards
Aude Schloesing

Toulouse School of Economics
Université Toulouse 1
Manufacture des Tabacs
31042 Toulouse Cedex (France)
tel: + 33 (0)5 61 12 87 65
fax: + 33 (0)5 61 12 86 37
tse@univ-tlse1.fr

Here is an article on The Katoomba Group’s Ecosystem Marketplace, The Innovator: Can Lars Christian Smith Take Protected Areas to Market?

Freeman Dyson is usually worth reading. Here he is on global warning and other matters.

Here are some recent non-fiction books, suitable for summer reading,

Peter L. Bernstein, Capital Ideas Evolving.

Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Niall Ferguson reviews the book here.

Tyler Cowen, Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.

Chris Dillow, The End of Politics: New Labour and the Folly of Managerialism.

Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China.

Probably not. Very good article in The New Yorker.

Most of our current knowledge comes from observing bonobos in captivity.

Captivity can have a striking impact on animal behavior. As Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the University of Southern California, recently put it, “Stuck together, bored out of their minds—what is there to do except eat and have sex?”

From BBC’s website,

The focus on reducing carbon emissions has blinded us to the real problem - unsustainable lifestyles, says Eamon O’Hara.[...]

We urgently need to think about the more fundamental concept of sustainability and how our lifestyles are threatening not only the environment, but developing countries and global peace and stability[...].

How many people are tired and weary of modern living? The endless cycle of earning and consumption can be exhausting and does not necessarily bring happiness and fulfillment. Can we do things differently, and better?

I don’t think an appeal to our better selves to change our lifestyles is going to work. And I certainly don’t want the government to tell me in detail what I can or can’t do.

What we need to do is to get the prices right. The enormous environmental problems in China and India show what happens if you don’t get prices for water, power, and pollution right. This is not at all simple and easy to do; rich OECD countries are also struggling to get to grips with it. But it is absolutely fundamental.