Bill Fucking Maher Hosted Bjorn Fucking Lomborg - Fuck You Forever, You Oozing Bag Of Pseudo-Comedic Pus [View all]

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About 700,000 people watch Maher’s show on HBO each week. A clip of Lomborg’s appearance on YouTube, shared by the conservative commentator Dave Rubin, has been viewed more than 1.7m times (Rubin incorrectly described Lomborg as a climatologist – he is actually a political scientist and a director of a thinktank). In the clip, Lomborg said two climate economists, including the Nobel-winner William Nordhaus, had come to similar conclusions this year: that if the planet warmed by 3C by the end of the century, the effect on global GDP would be just two or three percentage points. Nordhaus and others use what are known as Integrated Assessment Models. Peter Howard, a leading climate economist at New York University who researches IAMs, says “the devil is really in the details”.

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Lomborg regaled Maher with data he said showed the amount of coral on the Great Barrier Reef “has been at the highest level” since records started in 1986, and had recovered from low levels seen five years ago. He did not mention the reef had just been through probably its worst mass coral bleaching event on record. The data cited by Lomborg was taken from underwater surveys carried out by the Australian Institute of Marine Science. But the latest data from those surveys, Aims said this week, was “conducted before and during the recent mass bleaching event, one of the most serious and extensive on record”.

Bleached coral was still counted as alive, Aims said, and “as such, the most recent coral cover result did not capture how many corals survived or died following the 2024 bleaching”. The increase in coral cover over the reef has been driven by fast-growing corals that are the most susceptible to heat stress. Aims said the high levels of coral cover was “due in part to a period between 2018 and 2022 that was relatively free of disturbance events that cause widespread coral mortality on the reef”.

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In the clip, Lomborg didn’t talk about the risks of allowing the planet to warm by 3C. Considering global heating of just over 1C has likely pushed the planet to its hottest levels for at least 100,000 years, getting to 3C would push human civilisation well past anything it had experienced before. Prof Mark Howden, director of the Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions at the Australian National University, has been involved in several UN climate change assessments. He said at 3C, heat stress would be “many times worse” affecting human physical and mental health, increasing the risks of food insecurity and malnutrition, threatening many species with extinction, pushing up rainfall intensity and flood risk, and increasing sea levels that could result in the displacement of 400 million people.
“The world at 3C would be a poorer and riskier place, with inhabitants having diminished lives and livelihoods,” Howden said.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/24/bill-maher-great-barrier-reef-bjorn-lomborg-claims-temperature-check