Cool It | Bjorn Lomborg | Talks at Google

Thank you for showing up. We have, I think, an interesting talk here. My name is Frank Reisroman. I work with google.org, and it's my pleasure to introduce Bjorn. Bjorn Lomborg here to you. Bjorn became very well known for another book, the Skeptical Environmentalist, that many of you may have heard of, that I think maybe somewhat to his own surprise, led to lots and lots of debate, on the back of which he was able to start a very interesting initiative called the Copenhagen Consensus, which has as its basic premise that the resources we have to do good, if you like, are limited. So it actually makes a lot of sense to prioritize our choices. Now, that leads right into what I consider one of the more interesting debates on development and environment that we have today, with some people like Jeffrey Sachs basically arguing what we should do is increasing the amount of resources. And there are so many other pots of money that we could in a way, transfer money in from, whether it's people chewing gum or the defense budget or so. And somewhat on the other side of the issue are people that say, no, resources are always going to be scarce. And therefore it makes a lot of sense to prioritize where we're going to put our dollars and out of that process, the Copenhagen Consensus. I had the pleasure to participate in that because I wrote one of those challenge papers and I was grilled by that panel of Nobel Prize winners that Bjorn put together, came this quite surprising conclusion that climate change shouldn't maybe be first on the priority list, but possibly relatively low. That led to another very interesting letter, sort of publicity and debate. And Bjorn took up the people who didn't like that conclusion and explained it in a way in this book of why that would be. And I hope that he will explain it to us and then engage you in a debate around these issues. And I look forward to that very much so. Bjorn, please.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, I'm actually. I'm going to give you the very quick, quick lowdown. I understand we have 30 minutes and I'm just going to talk about one of the most important issues in the world. So I'll do it fast. Hopefully that'll also mean you don't actually have to read as much of the book, but at least it'll give you a sense of the idea. Frank already gave away the first slide. I'm happy you didn't give away all of them. But basically the idea that we need to have a sense of proportion if we believe something to be true that's vastly exaggerated, it's unlikely to make good policy judgments because at the end of the day we have to get down to the point of saying there are many problems but not enough money. So we got to have a conversation about how should we spend that money. That's the one I want to engage in specifically, of course, with respect to climate change. My idea simply, and this goes for all environmental discussion and quite frankly for all public spending. It's unlikely that we make good judgments if we are scared witless. If somebody comes up to you and put a gun to your head and say, give me your wallet, you don't stand around and think about alternative uses for your money. It's like, oh, would I rather buy a toaster or something? You just hand over the money. And that's my point, that we need to say to the extent that this is not true, that for instance, climate change is not a catastrophe but a problem. We need to know because that's definitely going to impact how we're actually going to deal with climate change. So basically I'd just like to engage in this discussion how should we deal with climate change and what should we do? This is the discussion, of course, that Al Gore has also been very prominent in. This is from when both Al Gore and I gave a presentation to Congress. This is the second before he realizes who I am. But the point of course being that we need to have a sense of how should we think about climate change. Again, this is a huge and complex issue. I'm going to shorten it very dramatically and just make four, I hope, important points. The first of which is that global warming is real and it's man made. Let's just be very clear about this. This is not a hoax. This is not a left wing conspiracy of trying to tax man to death or something. This is for real. Global warming is real. It's man made. So let's just get a sense of this. I think we should thank Al Gore for having it put on the agenda. Especially of course in the U.S. he's moved a lot of the U.S. away from the oh, it's all a hoax and I think we should thank him for that. I would argue that our best information on global warming comes from the UN Climate Panel, the so called ipc. The likely temperature rise that we're going to see over the century is estimated around 5 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the central scenario, the A1B scenario from the UN climate panel. It could be larger, it could be smaller. And it's important to say that of course would very naturally mean if it's larger, the temperature rises larger, we should do more. If it's lower, we should do less. But it's still within the same range. And that's why I'm simply going with the central estimate. And it has the obvious implications of if it turns out to be worse or if it turns out to be less bad than the central estimate. The total cost of global warming is not trivial. It's about $15 trillion. That's certainly a number that ought to make most people sit up straight in their chairs and, and think hard about how should we deal with this. On the other hand, we also need to get a sense of proportion. This is about half a percentage point of the net worth of the 21st century. This is not the end of the world. This is not the defining moment of the 21st century, but it is a problem in the 21st century. And that's why I think it's incredibly important we understand we need to have a conversation about what should be our smart strategy to deal with climate change. So the point that I try to say in many ways is simply to say it's not a hoax, but it's probably not a catastrophe either. I'll get back to that and try to explain to you why that's not the case. It is a problem. I'm trying in many ways in this book to stake out what I think is the missing middle ground in much of this discussion, that it's one of the many problems we need to fix in the 21st century. And that leads me to the second point. So, first point, yes, climate change is happening, it's man made. But also, and that's the second point, consequences often vastly exaggerated, and that I would argue lead to bad judgment and bad calls for policy decisions. And here, unfortunately, Al Gore has a slightly less starring role because in many ways he's also been the proponent, but definitely not by any standard, the only one writing this issue. This is one of the quotes, and I'm sure you've seen many of these alike in papers, and we also almost see them daily. This is the Gore claim that this is a planetary emergency. And from the website for the movie it says we have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics, and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced. I would surmise that most of us have almost grown used to this sort of claims about climate change, that it's calamitous and in Many, many different ways. I'd like to take you back a little bit and look at some of these issues. Of course, this is not the only ones. I try to deal with more of the issues in the book, but I would like to give you a flavor of why this perhaps is fairly misleading. This does not mean that any of these things are not correct in the sense that we will probably see more extreme weather, we will see more heat waves, but it's incomplete in telling us what's actually going to happen. I'm just going to focus on four of these issues. Heat deaths, sea level rise, hurricanes and malaria. And let's take a look at each of these and see to what extent the standard version of what we're being told is the only part or is the best part of giving us a correct understanding of this issue. The first one is heat deaths. Are we going to see more heat deaths with higher temperatures? Absolutely, we are going to see more heat waves. We are going to see more people dying in heat waves. Unless, of course, we do something dramatically about it, which we should probably also do. But yes, with increasing temperatures, we're likely to see more heat waves. We're likely to see more people dying from heat. For instance, for the uk, which is one of the places where we have the biggest studies of heat deaths, it's estimated by 2050, we're going to see about 2,000 more people die from heat waves every year. That's important. That's certainly a piece of information that we should tell people. On the other hand, we should also realize that with increasing temperatures, we're going to see fewer cold waves, we're going to see fewer cold deaths, and cold deaths actually outweigh heat deaths dramatically in most countries around the world. So, for instance, for Britain, it's estimated that we're going to see by mid century about 20,000 fewer cold deaths. It seems to me that we are unlikely to make good judgments if we only hear 2,000 more, but we don't hear 20,000 fewer cold deaths. This actually holds for virtually all the planet. It's not true for probably the tropical regions there. It probably is heat death will outweigh cold deaths. But the general input is actually that it's holding true globally. We expect that around mid century we're actually going to experience 1.4 million fewer dead every year. That's an important point. Now, it's important also to say that if you just look at temperature, this would actually tend to say, oh cool, let's get some more global warming. That's not What I say, because this is just one of the many things in general, global warming is going to be more negative than positive. But only telling us about the negative part is unlikely to make for good judgment. So this particular part we need to start having a conversation about how should we deal with this, how should we best avoid the extra heat deaths and perhaps at the same time also get the extra avoided cold deaths? That's some of the things where I'd like to engage in. And I'll get back to that hopefully when we have the questions to start thinking about how can we deal with these issues smarter. But let me just move on and say this is one of the issues where I think we are being presented with a very one sided and misinformative view of what's going to happen with heat and cold. The second one is sea level rise. Yes. With increasing temperatures we're going to see sea level rises. Water like everything else, expands when it gets warmer. And, and that's probably, that's the main reason why we're going to see, that's about 60% reason of why we're going to see sea level rises about a foot over the coming century. This again is the central estimate from the UN climate panel. It has somewhere between half and 2ft of sea level rise, 1 foot being the central estimate from the A1B scenario. But again, it's important to say that's not The Al Gore 6 meters or 20ft of sea level rise. The very visceral and very, very amazing footage that probably most of you have seen from the movie where we see vast tracks of Florida disappear or San Francisco or New York or Bangladesh or Shanghai or Bombay or Holland for that matter. That's not what we're going to see. We are going to see a foot of sea level rise and that's a problem. But again, it's not a catastrophe. It's not zero, but it's not 20ft either. It's about a foot. And we need to get a sense of proportion. Just to give you a sense of context, over the last 150 years sea levels also rose about a foot. Yet it was not something I would surmise that we noticed very much. We dealt with it. To give you imagine asking a very old person who lived through most of the 20th century, it's likely to be a woman and ask her what happened throughout the 20th century. She's likely to talk about the two world wars, the, the fact that women got the suffrage of women, maybe even the it revolution. But it's very Unlikely that she'll say, oh, and sea levels rose because we dealt with it. And again, it's about saying, yes, it's a problem and we would definitely rather not have sea levels rise afoot. But it's not the end of civilization. Just like for much poor and much less technically able civilization over the last hundred 150 years, a sea level rise of one foot was not a catastrophe. It's something that we'll deal with. It's a cost, but it's something that we'll deal with. Just to give you a sense of proportion, again, right now about 10 million people get flooded each year. If we just assume that we would have more people and we'll have one foot of sea level rise, it's fairly easy to see that by 2100 we're actually going to have about 100 million people flooded. That this is the typical number that you get. This is also the number from the UN Climate panel. But it's important to read the footnote to that number. This is assuming that nothing else changes. This assumes that people don't get richer, which we always assume, and certainly also the UN Climate panel assume, and also assuming that people don't change their acts, basically that they'll be standing and looking in 2020 and seeing the waves start lapping up over their feet and saying, Ooh, in 80 years I'm going to drown here. But just stand there. Which seems probably a little unrealistic actually. If we assume, as the UN Climate panel does, that the average person in the developing world and also in the developed world will get somewhere between 6 and 12 times richer over the coming century, it seems very unlikely that we won't both adapt and also spend more money on trying to adapt to rising sea levels. If we just assume that we'll use the same proportion of our income, not just the same amount, but the same proportion over the coming century, if you run the same models, you actually get a situation where we'll see about 1 million people getting flooded in 2100. And what this of course points out is that there's something is very important when you talk about sea level rise, the physical sea level rise. But what is also important is what people actually do about it. Let me give you one example. The Maldives, they're beautiful place and they're also very iconic for sea level rise problems. If we look at a foot of sea level rise for the Maldives, if we just look at the geodesics, we can basically say, well, with a foot of sea level rise, we're going to flood 77% of the dry land of the Maldives, which will have a huge cost, about 121% of their GDP. Yet we also know from models that they could safeguard virtually all of that dry land at a cost of about 0.04%. Will they do that? Of course they will. Of course, you'd spent 0.04% to avoid a loss of 121%. Like most nations also did the last century and a half. We will actually engage in this. So the point is, just expecting that people will do no change is probably a very bad predictor of what's actually going to happen. Yet. They will lose some dry land, but not very much. And the real point here is also we can actually run the model with two different assumptions. The UN Climate panel has one assumption that says we're just basically going to ignore climate change. We're just going to go ahead and say, let's focus on the economy. That means we'll get fairly rich by the end of the century, but we'll also have fairly high sea level rise about a foot. We could also envision a nicer world where we worry more about the environment, worry more about climate change. It's a world that's less preoccupied about economics. It's also a world that will be slightly less rich. We'll still be much richer by the end of the century, but somewhat less rich. But it will also have lower sea level rise. It will have about 2/3 of the income, but also about 2/3 of a foot of sea level rise instead. Now, you would imagine that a world with lower sea level rise at least would mean that the Maldives would get less flooded. But that would actually be wrong because it turns out that the extra wealth that you lose in choosing the more environmentally concerned scenario actually means that they will be less able to safeguard their territory. We actually likely to see about three times more dry land being lost. It's important to realize that we're talking about very small fractions of land, because bottom line is that we will safeguard most of this. And it doesn't just go for the Maldives of Tulabu or on the Micronesia, some of these very, very small island nations. It's also true for the much more important nations like Vietnam and Bangladesh that are much more vulnerable, sorry, not much more vulnerable, but have much bigger, bigger population. Therefore we'll have many more people impacted potentially about this. So what this turns out to point to, I hope, is not just saying that yes, climate change has an impact, but also that wealth has an impact and that it's likely that the wealth will not only outweigh the problems, but likely actually is more important. So at least we need to have a conversation about if we actually want to help the Maldives and other nations, we should consider, should we deal with cutting the CO2 and thereby reducing the sea level rise, or should we perhaps be more concerned about making sure that they get rich enough to deal with their problems? The third one is the hurricanes. The idea that we are going to see ever increasing cost of hurricanes. That is true. If you look at this graph over the last 105 years of the impact of hurricanes in the U.S. you see a dramatic rise. You see Katrina over in 2005, definitely outpacing the previous record season in 2004, again outpacing Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Do you remember Hurricane Andrew? That used to be a very, very expensive hurricane. Now it's just a rather smaller one. So what we're definitely seeing is this dramatic increase in the cost. A lot of people use this as an argument for saying, see, this is what climate change does. Yet that is very misleading. Primarily, not entirely, but primarily this is caused by many more people having much more stuff and being much closer to harm's way to put it in one way, if we look at the population of the US over the last century, the US Population increased about fourfold, but the Florida coastal population increased in the same period 50 fold. It's just simply incredibly nice to live where you have a view of the ocean. But of course, it's also a pretty dangerous place. And also at the same time, people got much richer, actually, what would happen. And this was what some of these researchers did. They looked at what would have happened if all the hurricanes that have hit the US over the last 105 years had hit the US as it looks today. That is saying not just looking at what is the impact of climate change, but also what is the impact of social factors. And this is the picture. Watch for the change in what happens. This is their picture. This is what actually happens. The most damaging hurricane ever for the US is actually the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, which tore right through downtown Miami and would have caused a damage of more than $160 billion today. But back then, it tore through a downtown that had virtually, you know, virtually only sheds. It's probably not entirely true, but it gives the picture of what really happened. Right? We have a situation where we've gone from fairly few people with very little stuff to a lot of people with lots and lots of stuff. To get damaged. Actually, the great Miami hurricane, 1926, caused about 2,000 dead, so more than what Katrina did. The second largest was actually the great Galveston Hurricane in 1900, which was the most deadly hurricane ever in the US history, causing about 15,000 people to die. And only the third biggest was Katrina. And, and so. And also notice how Hurricane Andrew has gone up dramatically. Actually the US Sorry, the British insurance industry assumed that Hurricane Andrew would have cost about twice as much had it hit the US 10 years later. What this points out is that we have a very predominant signal from human action. That is not to say that climate change, sorry, from human, from social factors. That is where more people living close to home, harm's way with more stuff. That does not mean that there's not also possibly a climate signal, although that's much, much harder to actually decode. In here we assume that climate will actually mean that hurricanes will get more ferocious, probably not more in frequency, but probably stronger in their violence, and that will cause more damage. But let's take a look at what's the size of this again. If we imagine that climate change would keep getting getting worse and worse, but the social factors remained constant, I.e. that we froze the US as it is in 2007, what would happen by mid century? Well, we would see increases in the cost of climate damages of about 10%. Imagine, on the other hand, that we stop climate change. But imagine that the social vulnerability would develop as it has done over the past couple of decades. Then by mid century we will see an increase in the the damage of almost 500%. The point here again is to have a conversation at least about which ones of these two should we focus on dealing with first. Should we worry about cutting this or cutting this reasonably? We know that we could cut this, for instance, with the Kyoto protocol by about 0.6 percentage points. So we could cut a little bit of the extra damage that we're likely to see by mid century if we do climate change policies. On the other hand, we know that some of these social policies would be very easy to enact, fairly cheap to do, and could cut this potentially somewhere between 50 and 80%, or that is somewhere between 250 and 400 percentage points. I would argue that would be a much better thing to do first. And to give you a sense, because we don't even have a conversation about how we do that, to give you a sense of what that would entail is to start thinking about what do we know we can do. What, for instance, we give subsidies to insurance in Florida. That's stupid because we're basically encouraging people to build irresponsibly. Let's stop doing that, have better building codes. We know that that could probably cut damages somewhere between 50 and 80%. Again, that would be very cheap. And we could also, and we should probably also have much better enforcement of building codes. We should probably also so land and simply say there are some places where people can't move. We should probably also invest in, in wetlands, for instance, in front of New Orleans to lessen the impact of hurricanes hitting straight on. And of course we should also improve levees as we clearly should have done in New Orleans. So the idea here is again to start thinking about we have a conversation that seems so one sided that any question we ask seems to have to have the answer cut carbon emissions. I'm simply saying maybe there are more answers and sometimes cut carbon emission as the right and the best answer, but sometimes it might not be. So let's just take a look at the last one I promised the malaria incidence. Yes, malaria is weakly related to temperature. That is, if temperature rises, we're likely to see somewhat more malaria by the end of the century. It's estimated we'll probably see about 3% more malaria by the end of the century. But we've got to remember malaria is strongly related to wealth. Basically, if you're poor, you get malaria and you die from malaria. If you're a rich, you don't get malaria. And even if you do, you get cured from it. That's also of course why we've seen malaria was endemic in the Little Ice Ages, both in Europe and the U.S. it was even endemic in the Arctic Circle up in Northern Finland. The last epidemic in Holland was in 1946. Italy was only declared malaria free in 1970. We seem to have forgotten many of these things. What happened was temperatures increased, but we also got rich. And that of course basically eradicated malaria. So wealth is much more important when we talk about malaria than is temperature. And so the crucial question again is to say what do we want to do? Do we want to cut the malaria rate a little bit through climate change policies? By the end of the century, Kyoto could arguably cut about 0.2% of the extra malaria that we're going to see by the end of the century, or should we start worry about the 100% that we can cut very easily right now? Let me just put that in a graph for you. We know that Kyoto could probably avoid about 1,400 death by malaria every year throughout this century. I certainly think we should be a civilization that does that. But I would surmise that maybe we should be thinking about saving 850,000 people first at much lower cost, at about 1/60 of the cost, or to put it differently, for every person we save through climate change policies from malaria, we could, for the same amount of money, save 36,000 people through malaria policies. I'm simply saying shouldn't we at least first save the 36,000 before we embark on saving or spending trillions of dollars saving the 1,400 people here? It's again, a question about getting our priorities right. It's not saying climate change is not there, it's not saying that it's not overall going to be negative, but it's about both saying it's not the catastrophe that we are being told it's a problem, and, and also getting a sense of is our right responses really what we're usually being told. And that leads me to the third option, and I'll go through the last two points fairly quickly. The third one being we need smarter alternatives. Right now, we talk a lot about cutting emissions, which makes us feel good and all fussy and warm inside, but actually does very little good at very high cost. That's not a good deal. Just to show the Kyoto Protocol, which is in many ways the standard argument of what, what we should be doing. If everybody implemented the Kyoto Protocol, the US didn't and Australia didn't, and if everybody lived up to it, which a lot of the signatories didn't do either, Canada, famously so, but also Japan, most of Southern Europe, even my home country Denmark, are having a hard time living up to these conditions. But even if everybody did so, and not just for the next five years as the treaty expects, but for the rest of the century, that is a lot of ifs and a lot of fairly strong ifs. If all of that happened, this is what would be the change, the cost of the Kyoto Protocol. If we didn't do anything, we would have seen a temperature development over the last hundred years of about 2.6 degrees centigrade. If everybody had done the Kyoto Protocol, we would have seen a slightly lower temperature rise up to about 2.4 degrees at the end of the century. This is entirely incontrovertible. This is studies from some of the lead authors of the UN Climate Panel report, and everybody comes to the same sort of conclusions. Or to put it differently, the temperature that we would have seen in 2095, we would have postponed until 2100. So basically, the Kyoto Protocol at its very best buys the world about five years at the end of the century. Not a terribly good investment, especially when we realize it cost about about $180 billion a year. This is the average of all the major macroeconomic models that have looked at the cost of Kyoto the EU has just proposed. They're now going to okay, if nobody else is going to do it, we're going to save the world. That's at least the rhetoric behind it. What they're saying is they're going to cut their emissions by 20% by 2020. Yet the effect will be miniscule at best. It will postpone global warming by about two years at a cost of about $90 billion. What I'm simply trying to get us to start thinking about is maybe we're barking up the wrong tree. Maybe we're trying to do something that makes us feel good, but actually has very little effect 100 years down the line. Maybe we now start to need to think about smarter solutions. And let me give you an example before I move on and say what that should be, because this is very iconic in many ways. This is the polar bear example. Yes, polar bears will be negatively affected by climate change by the lack of our Arctic ice in the summertime and the Arctic. It's important to say that polar bear populations have actually increased fairly dramatically from 1960, but they will go down, although it seems unlikely that they'll go down just as much as we've been predicted, by 2/3, simply because if for no other reason, we'll simply feed them. But let's just go with saying, yes, we will see loss of polar bears. What can we do? And this is the. The kind of conversation that I think is crucial for us to have. If we do the Kyoto Protocol, we can assume with reasonable assumptions that we will probably save about one polar bear every year. Now, that's good, but it seems surprising to me that we have such little conversation about the fact that every year we shoot about 1,000 polar bears. I don't know about you, but it seems to me that maybe we should stop shooting 1000 polar bears first before we start talking about spending trillions of dollars avoiding one polar bear dying. Again, it's simply about getting back to having rational, smart conversations. This does not mean that we shouldn't do something about climate change, but it means that we should perhaps start thinking about how can we do this in a better and a smarter fashion. And that's why I want to focus on, say, right now, it cost about $20 to cut a ton of carbon dioxide and before for most of you, it probably doesn't really mean anything, but it's fairly expensive, certainly because we're going to cut billions of them before it really matters. So it has a real cost. Of course this means that most countries, most rich countries will do a little mainly to shine their halos and feel good about themselves. And poor countries like China and India are not going to do anything simply because they have much more important issues like feeding their population or curing their kids from infectious diseases or giving them an education. So the idea here is to say maybe we have a problem when cutting CO2 costs $20 a ton and the benefit is assumed when you look at the economic studies, around $2 per ton of carbon dioxide, that's a bad deal. What I would argue is instead of just cutting these tons and forging forward and actually doing very little good at very high cost, maybe we should much rather focus on cutting the cost of cutting CO2. Maybe we should start focusing on how can we get that number to go down. Because at the end of the day, this is not about cutting carbon emissions now. It's about making sure that we cut carbon emissions dramatically for the entire world by the end of the century. But we'll only get to that point if we get people much cheaper options. And that's why I would argue the long term solution would much more focus an investment and sorry, research and development and demonstration on non carbon emitting energy technologies. What I'm supposing that we should do for proposing to do for Kyoto too is instead of focusing on just cutting more, which makes us feel good but does very little good, let's focus on making sure we invest much more in research and development. I propose 0.05% of GDP. It would still be, it would be $25 billion a year. It would be a tenfold increase in the research and development, yet it would be about 1/7 of the cost of Kyoto. It'd probably be a hundredth of the cost of Kyoto too. So basically we're saying we have a way which would be much cheaper, yet do much more good and arguably would solve global warming in the medium term simply because it would allow us to have cheap or even cost effective strategies to deal with climate change come midcentury. So this is about making sure that instead of trying to solve the problem now, when it's expensive and will quite frankly end up doing fairly little good, we should start having a conversation about how can we make it much cheaper to solve by mid century, by Allowing ourselves to get technologies both for our kids and grandkids, but also, and crucially, for the Chinese and the Indians, who are then likely to take it up if it's cheap, but not likely to do so if it's expensive. This also leads to the fourth point, and then I'll shut up. That we need to realize that climate change is by no means the only challenge that we're facing in the 21st century. There are many other problems and many other places where you can do more good. I think that was also what Frank alluded to the introduction. This, of course, is the discussion that Al Gore very quite rightly argues about. We should think about this as our generational mission. We should think about how do we want to be remembered by the future? How do we want our kids and grandkids to think about us? Al Gore actually argues that we should listen to the voices of the future, and they're going to say, what on earth were you thinking? I think he's probably right, but they might be talking to Al Gore instead. But the point, of course, being we've got to ask ourselves, how do we best prioritize? Al Gore and many others argue we should be spending Kyoto, or even more than Kyoto, we should be spending $180 billion to do virtually no good 100 years from now. I would argue that our kids and grandkids are not going to be very thankful for that. And I'd like at least to compare this to what the UN estimate that for about $75 billion a year, we could solve all major basic problems. We could give clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care, and education to every single human being on the planet. I would like us to think about what would we rather be remembered for. Of course we'd like to solve everything, but if you had to make a pick first, at least, should we spend twice as much on doing virtually no good or half that amount on doing everything good? And it seems almost like a flip question, but of course it is a crucial question. What kind of society do we want to leave behind? And that's why I engaged also in the Copenhagen Consensus, where we got some of the world's top economists to tell us, where are the best things to do for humanity? What. Where do we get the most bang for our buck if we actually want to help humanity? What they came out with was to tell us if we prevent hiv, AIDS in sub Saharan Africa, we could do amazing amount of good for the money that we spend. Likewise with micronutrient, malnutrition, free trade, Malaria. They actually also told us how much good this would do. They told us for every dollar we spend, for instance, on preventing HIV AIDS, we end up doing about $40 worth of good. That's a great humanitarian investment. It's not a private investment. I'm sorry, you can't actually make money off of this because these are going to be happy people running around alive. But that's hard to tax. But what it does mean is that it actually means we've done a lot of good. These economists, including four Nobel laureates, also told us at the bottom of the list was the Kyoto Protocol. It still does good, but it just doesn't do very much good. It does. They estimate around 30 cents for every dollar we spend, which is why they call it a bad investment. The point that I would like to make is to say we need to focus much more on these issues in the short term. But we also need to realize we need to find smarter ways to deal with climate change. Not the command and control ones that cost a lot and do very little good because they're up front, but much more about investing in research and development. So summing up, yes, global warming is real. We are very often being misled by the very dramatic emphasis that has been being placed and quite frankly, often very misleading emphasis that's being placed on the catastrophe. It is overall going to be a negative impact. It is going to be one of the problems, as I said started out saying it's going to cost us $15 trillion. We definitely want to get the solution right, but we need to start thinking much smarter about how we deal with those solutions. It's about, yes, a carbon tax, but that's not really going to do much. It's mostly about dramatically increased research and development. So. So we'll deliver solutions by the end of this, sorry, by mid century. And then we also need to ask the question, how do we want to be remembered? I want to be remembered as part of the generation who made sure that climate change would be solved in the long run. But I also want to be part of that generation that actually said we want to fix all the major issues first, where we can do an amazing amount of good at low cost before we tackle one of the hardest problems that if we tackle them right now, is going to cost a lot and do very little good. So I'll leave you with that and thank you very much. I'll look forward to your questions. Okay. All right. Yes, sure. Any questions can be directed to Meg. I think they tell you you have to go up There. I'm not sure with the microphone. You have to talk to Mike, apparently. Hi, I'm Hans Rosling, visiting professor from Sweden. What's most surprising in your presentation is that it's so little money you ask for 25 billion US dollar a year. That's what the foreign exchange in China accumulate during a month, I think now, or a month and a half. And it's less than 10% of the agricultural subsidies existing in the world already mobilized. So it means that that money you're asking for is already mobilized and is in political hands, so you don't have to ask for more money now. Isn't that the most difficult thing, to stop investing in the past and start investing in the future with the money which is already collected in public hands? Yes, and I think this also underlines. I mean, you're absolutely right. We do a lot of stupid things already in many, many different ways. Part of this, of course, is part of the political process, because it's not rationality that's describing this. This is also farmers who want a lot of money and have a lot of influence. This is also a military industrial complex that has a lot of influence. There's a lot of reasons why we don't do the right things as we do today in the Copenhagen Consensus. We have this sort of byword that we try to say, this is not about getting everything right. It'd be really nice if we could. If we could get everything rational. But that's unrealistic, I think, to expect, because there are many other priorities that are driving the agenda. It's not about getting everything right. It's about getting things slightly less wrong. And so I'm simply trying to argue for. Let's at least try to be slightly more rational, and maybe we can get moving in thinking smarter about this. Yes. Hi, I'm Marius. I'm from Norway. So we completed the Scandinavian trifecta. Is this really all just Danes and Norwegians and Swedes here? So a lot of. A lot of arguments you hear allude to the sort of point of no return, that if we don't do enough by a certain time, we're all going to hell and there's nothing we can do anymore. And so if this is really the case, then I would be willing to make a poor investment because it seems like a cost that we just have to bear. And so what do you have to say about this sort of argument? There are two parts to this argument. One is to say that we need to have more than just the. The presentation, that it's possible that we could have a point of no return, because you can make that argument for virtually any policy matter. I mean, if you're allowed to think 100 years ahead, you could easily argue, and I think quite reasonably argue, that if we don't do something about HIV aids, you could have a collapse of all of sub Saharan Africa, which essentially could turn into terrorist nest the size, you know, Afghanistan, just the size of sub Saharan Africa, which could be a pretty dangerous thing. The 21st century and accumulation of nuclear weapons. You can go along with those scenarios if you want to. So we partly have to have more than just the possibility that this could happen, but an actual probability. But the second part is also to say I actually argue that my proposal will have more chance of actually doing something about climate change. Because look at what we've actually done. In 1992 in Rio, we decided we were going to cut our emissions down to 1990 level by 2000. We overshot that by 12%. In 1997, Kyoto Protocol, we argued that we were going to cut our emissions some 5% below 1990 level. Yet we probably are going to overshoot that by almost 20%. It seems unreasonable to me to say, okay, so we missed this twice and we've done really bad. Let's try for a much more ambitious target. It's just not the right way to go. And that's why I'm saying even if it was the right thing to say we should do this, you will never get most countries, and certainly not most of the main emitters throughout the 21st century, that is the developing world, China and India and all the others, to get to do this, as long as it costs so much. So your theoretical argument might still hold water, although I doubt it, because we know some of these things. And for instance, the stopping of the Gulf Stream is not going to happen. But there might still be unknowns out there that could argue for it. But we just don't seem to do this in a political setting. That's why I'm saying it's not only a smarter way to deal with this problem, and as the professor before said, maybe it shouldn't be $25 billion, maybe it should be $50 billion. I'm not saying this is the right amount, but I'm saying it's the right direction that we should be looking at. So at the end of the day, we really have to come to terms both with the fact that we need better estimates for these dangerous tipping points before we can actually use them as arguments for pressuring politics. But even if they were there, they would still be fairly weak, considering our ability to having gotten any political traction on this issue beforehand. We need a different approach, and that's what I'm trying to present. And I actually think that would also do more to alleviate your fear, even if I also say that there's probably more and better ways to deal with the world's big problems.

Hi. Thank you for coming. My name is Amy, I'm not from Scandinavia. Yes. I wanted to ask you what your response would be to the following criticism, which is essentially my criticism. I feel as though this presentation gives false dichotomies. It gives a dichotomy between the environment and wealth. It gives a dichotomy between the social good and the environment. And I feel as though actually those things are inextricably intertwined. For example, if you worsen the climate, and I think here you're using the lower estimates of the ipcc, which actually already assume that we're mitigating the amount of carbon dioxide we produce significantly. So maybe if we just are doing adaptation, we shouldn't be using those estimates. But we'll suggest that not only do we have a global change of temperature, but we have a change in the climactic patterns, which means that some regions are affected more than others. Those will probably be predominantly poor regions which are going to worsen the problems that they are already facing, which leads to social conflict, all those sorts of things. So loss of water, loss of arable land, and you can't just buy your way out of those things. You can't air condition your way out of the heat that is ensuing because your livelihood is dependent upon the creatures that you feed and eat and upon the land that you used to do so. So I don't. What I'm asking is, I think that most environmentalists that I've seen from the IPCC or anyone who studied this problem suggest that we cannot just adapt. We also need to mitigate the problem. And so they're essentially promoting a two pronged approach. So what I'd like to understand is why you think adaptation is going to be sufficient when the majority of scientists do not, and how you're getting those numbers of what the actual cost of CO2 or benefit of CO2 is. Are you factoring in things like warfare? Are you factoring in things like loss of arable lands? Are you factoring in things such as the cycling or increase of carbon dioxide that might come with trying to increase wealth in these developing nations or the tundra being defrosting Yes.

I think there were more questions in there, but I'll try and answer at least two of them. Your very specific question of saying why are you only saying adaptation? I'm sorry? Because then clearly this came across in the wrong way. I'm saying we should be adapting now and we should be realizing that adaptation is the thing that will help a lot of people most. But I am saying that we should invest in research and development. So basically, and if I can allow this metaphor, it's not entirely true, but it gives you the sort of flavor. If we have solar panels which. Which are about 10 times as expensive as fossil fuels right now, rich people will put up a few of them. Notice, most people actually only put up solar panels on sloped roofs because then their neighbors can see that they're good people. But the main point, of course, is that you only do this to a certain extent, and you only do it if you're rich in a rich country. You don't do it if you're in a poor country. What I'd like to see is that we make development so that solar panels actually become competitive. If they become close to competitor, most people will drop them. If they're actually better than fossil fuels, we don't even need to have this conversation. So clearly we need to mitigate, but we should do it when it's a smart thing to do. Again, to give you a Danish example, we put up a lot of windmills in the 80s and 90s and felt incredibly good about ourselves. The problem was they were all inefficient. So we put up about 10,000 windmills. Now we've had to tear them all down and put up efficient windmills instead. I'm simply arguing maybe we shouldn't have put up all the inefficient ones, but we should have waited until they were efficient and then put them up. So it's the discussion of saying when should we do this? But I also agree, absolutely, we need to solve climate change in the long run, but we'll do so by making sure that it's much cheaper to deal with, not that it's much more expensive. The second part of your question is the idea of saying they all intertwined that in a sense, the fact that climate change gets worse also means that especially in the third World, people will get worse in all other respects. That's absolutely true. If climate change gets worse, people will also be more affected, as I pointed out, for instance, with malaria and a lot of other things, as you also mentioned. But what we also got to remember is that goes both ways. If people have more malaria, they're much less able to deal with climate changes that are going to happen in 2100. And I'm simply arguing the relative benefits of focusing on one rather than the other first. And you say I'm creating a false dichotomy. And I will agree to you that, yes, we should be focusing on a broad range of issues. But I'm also saying when there's such a big difference between something that will do, say, $40 worth of good for every dollar and something that will do $0.30 worth per dollar, we should probably be doing much more than $40 first. And so my point here is to give you the brief example again, we're truncating a lot because this is a short discussion, right? But saying, for instance, if you could do something about malaria. Now, malaria is not just a disease that kills people. It's very debilitating. Somewhere between half and 2 billion people get infected by malaria each year. So most of them survive. They get lots of times. But it has debilitating consequences simply because most economies will hire two people for every one job because at any one time, one is going to be ill with malaria. So if you could stop that, we have pretty good econometric estimates that show that the average growth rate per capita per year would be somewhere between 0.3 and 1% higher. That essentially means that we would be able to make these countries two to three times richer by the end of the century. And that, of course, is implicating that maybe instead of focusing on making them suffer climate change slightly later, by 2105, instead of 2100, maybe it'd be better to make sure that they don't have malaria now so that they'd be incredibly much richer to deal with the problems that they anyway will have to deal with by the end of the century. So it's simply a question of saying, yes, they intertwined, they're not equal in the way that we can both address them and in the way that it will help the people on the ground. So, yes, we need mitigation in the long run, but we need to focus much more on adaptation, make sure that we actually care about real people helping real people efficiently first before we try to help very few people inefficiently in the future. The only way we deal with climate change is then by investing research and development so we get cheap technologies by the end of the century.

Thank you.

Thank you. Hi, I'm Peter Nevi. My father was Danish. So we're back on track. So one of the things I like about the Copenhagen Consensus is you get got your economist pals together and economists know how to maximize expected utility, which is what we need for rational action. But they can only do that with a set number of alternatives. And you know, it seems to me that trying to predict so far in the future would be like going back to 1900 and predicting without the advent of automobiles and computers and so on. So what I would propose is, you know, maybe we should do like the Mountain View Consensus where we go out and we gather the engineers and the entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists and say, what are the possible technologies that we may have to deal with without the hundred years and then decide how to do it. I think you're onto something very, very important. And that's also why when I present what we're doing here is we try to take into account what would happen over the next couple of hundred years. That's of course very, very hypothetical. But we talk about what we can do within the next couple of years. We talk actually about what should you be doing in 2008-2009-2000-2010, 2011? Because those are the kind of questions we're actually faced with. So should we do the Kyoto Protocol? Should we invest in research and development over the next coming years? Should we invest in mosquito nets? Right now those are the kinds of questions that I think are fairly tangible. But you're absolutely right. At the end of the day we're talking about hundreds of years and we don't know. I'm simply saying at least we should base it on the best knowledge that we have. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Maya and I have. It's actually a two part question. Firstly, I think one of the central theses that you make is that prioritization is very important. But I'm wondering why you chose to weigh environmental spending against spending on health care or, you know, childcare and so forth, rather than focusing on, say, defence spending or industry subsidies. So that's the first part. And then the second part is that it seems that on virtually every topic, your conclusions are very different from everyone else. And that seems to suggest that most other scientists or the scientific community is either corrupt or incompetent. So how would you explain that?

Yep, very good questions, both of them. The first one, it's true that what we look at is money that you consciously spend to do good. Those are the money that we look at, many much money we spend on ourselves. We buy clothes for ourselves, even though we know that that pair of jeans could probably have saved. The average cost of saving a human life in Africa is $62. So most of us spend a lot of money, just egotistically. Most of us spend most of our government money on our local area here in San Francisco or in California or at most in the United States. And much of that money, of course, could be spent much, much better in some off place in Sambia or some other place. So we don't talk about the 99% that we somehow say this is for ourselves in one way or another. I would argue that most countries, maybe not the United States, but I would still argue that they should. Most countries would argue that their military spending is not a spending that they use to do good in the world. They spend it on themselves, just like they spend a million dollars in saving one person here. Whereas we could save people much. We could save a village or two for that amount. So most of the spending is egotistical, right, in your own country. But we simply talk about. Most people seem to be willing to spend at least a little. We can have a conversation. Should be half a percent, 1%, 2% of our GDP, but it's around there. Denmark spends about 0.8% of our its GDP plus we also provide peacekeeping forces. Some of these other things that you could also reasonably argue are just doing good money. That's the money that we try to spend. That's why we don't talk about military budgets, because we quite frankly, don't think they're competing on the same pool. It's not money to do good for the world. It's money to do good for the United States if it's the United States military spending. But I would argue even if we then assume that we should bring in that money now, I would find it hard to actually think we have in international relations. We have very, very poor estimates of whether this is a good or bad investment. But even if we then assume it's quite clear that the Iraq war was probably not a good idea, if we could wring out $100 billion from George Bush's fist and spend it on doing something good, I would still say, okay, great, you got the 100 billion, but we still want to spend it, right? So my point is simply to say I'm just making a ranking of all the different good things you can do in the world. And then you should at least rationally pour the money in from the top and see as far down you can go. If you only have $5 billion, you can't go very far. If you have 50, you can go much further. If you get $250 billion, I'm happy. But we would still want to fill it from the top. And that would be my argument for that part, the second part of how come that I'm saying something that's so dramatically different. I think it's much more a question of saying that we are typically just being told because this, you know, there's a lot of forces going on here, most perhaps strongly the media that loves, you know, bad news. It just simply sells a lot better. And we also have a tendency for most researchers to focus on areas that have problems. Now, this is natural thing, and actually we should be very happy for it because if we didn't, we'd be in deep trouble. We want people to focus on. On all the things that can go wrong, whereas there's not nearly as much focus on all the things that actually will go better. If you look at virtually all studies on cold and heat deaths, for instance, virtually all reports almost exclusively talk about heat death. And now that's any one research's prerogative to say, that's what I'm focusing on. But of course, that's not likely to make good judgments on the overall. The studies that I cite as the biggest cold and heat death study from, I think it's about 40 researchers around all of Europe. There's also some other studies, but they are much more patchy for the rest of the world. But all over Europe, they did this study for over 10 years. And looking at both what are the impacts from northern Finland and Helsinki all the way down to Athens on what are the impacts both of cold and heat, it seems to be more realistic and reasonable to use, but it's just not the typical thing you do because you either do cold or you do heat death. And not surprisingly, many more people get into heat death, because that seems to be sort of the thing that we're talking about. So it's not that we don't know this, but it's just simply a fact of saying it's just not as important. Likewise, when you talk about hurricanes, a huge amount of energy has gone into talking about are hurricanes increasing or not? And the main discussion in the hurricane community is really a question of something saying we are seeing increasing hurricane intensity, but the question is, is this a cause of global warming, or is this because we've been bad at measuring it before and they're telling us we don't actually know, and we probably not know for the next 10 years, but that's where all the research and interest is, because that's what has the hook in the media. But everyone, most of these researchers, Weber and. And Emanuel, the two ones that made the big studies that Al Gore cites, and I actually quote that, and I have a longer book coming out in Britain on the same topic with all the extra footnotes and stuff, I quote them there, where they basically say, sure, this is an interesting academic study, but the most important thing, of course, is to say that by far the majority of the damage comes from the social factors. They put out a press release, nobody picked it up because it's not interesting in the same way. So it's not that this is something that most researchers don't know or they're stupid or incompetent or anything, but it's just simply that that's not the sexy part that we're typically being told. So I would argue that there is a lot of sort of undercurrent knowledge that I think is incredibly important for us to get out there if we're going to make good judgments.

So I guess my response would be that if, in fact, people aren't doing this because it's not sexy to do it, it seems that the angle that you've taken, which is to pit environmental spending against spending on other social issues in a way, is perhaps just to be kind of contrarian and therefore get all the attention that this book has got and so forth, that it just almost seems like, just on a personal level, that perhaps it would be more worthwhile to actually take on those larger battles of actually spending, you know, whether it's military spending or whether it's industry subsidies and so forth, which are so, you know, kind of grossly unfair or can quite, you know, don't have any controversy around sort of the science behind them and so forth, that that's almost like a more kind of worthy cause, you know. And then secondly, with respect to, you know, the second part of my question about the scientists, I guess what you're pointing to is the fact that the interdisciplinary kind of methodology that you've used or, you know, just the outlook that you have allows you to kind of come up with some of these conclusions. And again, you know, that I don't have the statistical background or the scientific background to actually say, oh, well, you know, Al Gore is right and you're not, and so forth. But again, it almost seems like it's a question of choices that we make and choices that we kind of put out there for use by other people, because clearly a lot of, you know, conservatives who are all about kind of continuing to spend more on military expenditure and industry subsidies or whatever, have used you and your work as a tool to sort of say, hey, look, it's not a big deal at all. And this is all just hype and it's all just the liberals getting hysterical again and so forth. And it's just from some of your comments, it seems like you're actually not in that camp at all. But, you know, you are sort of being used as an instrument that way. And I think that that's a reflection of the choices that one, you know, decides to make.

Right. I'll just make two very brief comments. Obviously, when you put out something that hopefully people will read, it also means that they'll be pulling at it at all kinds of angles. And I'm not surprised that conservatives will pull some of these things. Liberals will of course also pull some of these things, like, oh, so burial. Lombard supports CO2 tax, and he says that it's all right and all these things. And that's the nature of political battles. All I can do is to say as loudly and clearly as possible that I'm trying to say both things. I'm actually trying to annoy both liberals and Republicans. And so I hope I succeed in that. And the second part is I do see your point of saying that this is in a sense, maybe just a way just getting attention. But honestly, I can only say that that's not my intention to do this. I really do this because I think we have a tendency to focus and over focus on some issues and thereby under focus. I don't think necessarily that all. I definitely think that there are some incredibly important environmental problems, but they are very often very different from the ones that we hear about. And not to put you in the spotlight, but most people don't know what the biggest environmental problem is world right now is, but it's indoor air pollution. It kills 1.4 million people. We don't hear about it because it's not Sexy. It kills 1.4 million people because most, you know, it probably affects almost 3 billion people that have low or little access to, for instance, fossil fuels. They'll burn cardboard or dung or whatever they can get their hands on. This especially affects women and children because they are there when they cook the meals. But it also is used to keep people warm. Of course, the solution to that is not environmentally regulating dung, but to actually get them LPG or kerosene is something that would be much, much cleaner to them. Most cities in the Third world are incredibly clean compared to the indoor of most indoor of most homes in third world cities. And that's of course one of the things where. Yes, that's a huge problem. Likewise actually, although most people don't believe that probably the biggest environmental problem that's also what the US EPA is estimating is outdoor air pollution, namely particulates. It probably kills about 110,000Americans every year and we brought it down dramatically. But we should do much more about it. Put particulate filters and special and diesel cars which emit the vast majority of particulate air pollution. So again, we need to get a sense of proportion. That was actually what my prior book was about within the environmental dis. Have a conversation about which things should we be worrying about? Which things should we perhaps not be worrying so much about. And I would say this is just this discussion writ on a larger scale. And I think we're so focused on climate change and cutting carbon emissions that we fail to see that there are many other things that we can do that would help people a lot more, that would help the planet a lot more and hopefully also help the environment in the long run. Much more.

Thank you very much for coming.

Last question. Yes, I've been told from Scandinavia. No, New Jersey. Close. Since this is the last question, I'm going to give you a difficult job and ask you to do the rest of the work for us. You said you wanted to open a discussion and a debate. Can you tell us about some criticisms that have been leveled against your numbers and your facts here? Because it seems to me this is a very rational, numbers driven presentation that you've explained why the media doesn't pick up on it. But what about what did Al Gore criticize after he shook your hand? Yeah, well, unfortunately Al Gore left before I started and he's actually repeatedly said he doesn't want to debate me, which I think is a little bit of a shame. But yes, there's been a lot of people out there criticizing me. For instance, some of the things that are being leveled at is when you look at the impact on. Sorry, I'm just trying to. Sorry, I'm just trying to remember the numbers here. When we look at for instance, heat and cold death, it's important to say that the UN Climate panel. I accept the UN Climate panel first working group, which is basically all about the climate change science. The second and third working group get a little more fussy. Those are the ones who said 100 million people will get flooded and then didn't say that if we did change, it would be 1 million. And I think there's, you know, they have a tendency to quote things that are perhaps a little more convenient to them. And they actually, they say that, for instance, for heat and cold deaths, that there will be a lot of heat deaths. And they come up with all those numbers that a lot of people have researched on. And then they say they will be also offsetting cold deaths, but it seem unlikely that they will outweigh the heat deaths. And when you look in the report, they actually cite this European study, but they don't give any quantification of this at all. And I'm simply pointing out that the one that I quoted is, as far as I can see, the only period published study that looked at the whole globe. These are only the European studies, the only one that's looked at the, the entire continent and an entire continent and done a study both of heat and cold deaths. And then there are some other meta studies that I also cite that actually shows that probably cold deaths will outweigh heat death dramatically. That's also what we see in most of the studies that have been done in individual nations also, for instance in the US but they still say the other thing. And I think that's an unreasonable summary of the material. And I think they quite frankly don't do a good job in summarizing that. And they don't have any global numbers. I do present global numbers, but the important point, of course, is to say I'm not saying this is the end of the discussion in that sense. I'm saying at least we need to realize that there's both more heat deaths but also fewer coal deaths, whether they outweigh. That's what I'm presenting because that's the only data that I can see out there that's actually tried to do this for the entire globe. But of course, this is a complicated matter. It might not be, and it might be something that we should be, certainly something that we should be focusing much more. And that of course goes back to the other question of saying should we invest much more in people also doing research on cold deaths. Absolutely. And we're not. And that's one of my concerns. And that goes for a lot of these issues where you can get into this. And I think it's a relevant discussion of saying, well, are you just sort of showing one side side of the argument? I am and I really try to achieve the best data that we have on these different issues. But of course, it's not the only story that's out there. And so I'm saying this, as far as I can tell, is the best that you can describe on all these different areas. But it's not the final discussion, it's the best that we know for now. Likewise, when you look at hurricanes, for instance, people, people will point out, we've just seen a lot of criticism has been out there on that point. We've seen that people have come out and there's actually been arguments that the vicious hurricanes have almost doubled over the last century if you just look at the data. The problem, of course, with those kinds of arguments is that we also know that they have huge data gaps and that they are actually dramatically over. Dramatically bigger than what even our most pessimistic models can explain. And that's why I'm saying, well, if we look at the peer reviewed studies, actually try to compare the relevant importance of the social factors and the climatological factors, you get the kind of numbers that I present. But again, this is not the end of the story, but it's certainly the kind of conversation that we need to have. So. And I can also hear now that I'm. Because obviously when asked that kind of question, you really have to go into every single one of the numbers. And I'm not quite sure whether I actually did a good job in answering your question because I sort of went off on all these tidbits. But that's what the conversation will then have to be. If you start going into the direct numbers, it's going to be about how reliable is the this source, how reasonable is it to assume this, how much do we believe in the different studies given the fact that we very often have poor geographical coverage and so on. So I'm sorry, I have to leave you with a perhaps slightly unsatisfying answer. But I mean, I honestly believe that when people have come out, they've certainly had a lot of invective but fairly little substance in their criticism. Someone told me a long time ago when the Harvard Law School tells people that when you have a good case, you should pound the case and when you have a bad case, you should pound the table. And certainly a lot of the criticism that is being leveled at me, I would say have more of pounding the table quality to it. And that makes me feel fairly reassured because at least I'm making an important point. Okay, in the interest of time, I'll shut up now. And thank you very much for speaking with me, with us. Thank you. Thanks a lot.