I haven't read Lomborg's book but understand he's a statistician, not an environmental scientist. The difficulty with a statistical approach lies in the detail.
We may have more land in forest now than 100 years ago, but that forest may be a monoculture and we have lost biodiversity in cleared rain forest. Example: I recall flying over South East Asia in the late 1960s and there was tropical rain forest as far as the eye could see. Last year on a similar route all I could see was palm oil plantations.
Many places have less pollution now than 50 years ago, but the pollution we have is longer lasting and more environmentally dangerous.
These effects of human activity you've mentioned above are not related to CO2 emissions. Reducing CO2 emissions is not going to increase forest growth.
I'm not referring to Lomberg here, but climate change deniers follow the standard route used by many politicians and others. Cherry pick data, set up a straw man, use irrelevant statistics, quote the extremists, and the "some scientist said something some time and was wrong" approach.
Can you give us some examples of this so-called cherry picking by so-called deniers? I would suggest that the cherry picking by these so-called deniers is done in order to create a balance because of the cherry-picking by the alarmists.
So one ends up having to write a full page reply to adequately deal with a one sentence claim. That's one reason I generally don't engage with them while I can be more productive elsewhere. I doubt there is anything to done about man-made global warming, and certainly not by me.
That sounds to me as though you are not seriously concerned about the issue if you cannot be bothered to write a full page reply in order to clarify a point.
As I've mentioned before, my concern about the alarm generated about human-induced CO2 emissions, is that such alarm is not scientific, and is not balanced in a way that presents all known relevant factors.
When climatologists talk about their research in the media, it seems to me they are wearing a 'different hat', a bit like a claimed Christian who is enrolled in the army to fight a war. His religion tells him to love his enemies, but his government tells him to kill his enemies.
I'll give you a one-page example of a bias in the reporting of the effects of increasing CO2 levels, with regard to ocean acidification.
I mentioned in the other thread that I started, called the Climate Change Hoax, that I was rather puzzled why a climatologist, or even a marine expert, would give a talk on the dangers of ocean acidification without even mentioning what the pH of the oceans actually is.
Those who are not particularly curious about such issues would tend to presume that the oceans were already acidic and getting worse. Everyone understands that acid can be harmful. It has a negative association.
Now why would a climatologist or marine expert, during an interview, not even bother to mention what the current pH of the oceans is estimated to be, and how much it has reduced during the past couple of hundred years?
Well, to answer that question, all you have to do is search the internet, where you will discover that a pH of 7 is neutral, below 7 is acidic, and that the current average pH on the surface of the oceans has fallen from 8.2 to 8.1 during the past couple of hundred years, approximately, and perhaps very approximately.
Such a small reduction in pH levels does not sound alarming. That's why the alarmists would not mention it. That's an example of cherry picking the data.
It's also revealing that BartvanderWolf responded to my post, in the other thread, that a 0.1 reduction in pH levels represented a 30% reduction in alkalinity, which is another example of a misleading statement designed to create alarm. 30% sounds very significant. It implies we're almost a third of the way to complete neutrality, beyond which, acidity rules.
However, the pH scale is logarithmic for good reason. "Acidity Percentage" is not common chemistry terminology and doesn't have much meaning. In order to go from a pH of 8.2 to 7.2, which is still slightly alkaline, the reduction in percentages terms is 900%. The image at the bottom of the page shows the connection between percentages and pH levels.
In case you want to question my sources, this image is from NOAA who seem to believe that CO2 rises will be a problem.
https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/A+primer+on+pHThis site also mentions the following:
"Calling this phenomenon “ocean acidification” when surface seawater will remain “basic” under future emissions scenarios is alarmist.""Many scientists have observed that natural variability in seawater acidity (and thus pH) is strong and can be much larger on short time scales than the observed and projected changes in acidity due to ocean acidification over the scale of decades to centuries. While this is true, the reason that scientists are concerned about this slow, long-term change is that it constitutes a changing baseline."However, what this article does not mention is the obvious fact that sea creatures will tend to swim towards parts of the ocean that have a more suitable alkalinity for their survival. Humans tend to be stuck in the same place, because they've bought a house and have a job in the locality. Fish, dolphins, whales, and so on, are free to move to the most conducive sea environments. If they don't like a part of the sea which is too acidic, they'll move. They are often not as stupid as humans.
