Bjorn Lomborg, professional climate disinformation agent, has been busy lately with his usual op-ed schtick, saying the IPCC report is “more chill than you have read” in the Financial Post, and tearing down a strawman in the WSJ with “climate change doesn’t cause all disasters.”
While we could rehash his genocidal climate policy preferences, Lomborg recently did something much more simple, and entertaining, that just as well shows the shallowness of his supposed climate policy advice.
Because last Saturday, he tweeted an, admittedly pretty neat, clip of a building being moved, with a link to a short story about how it was shifted 50 feet and rotated 90° back in 1930, all while people inside continued to work uninterrupted. “Adaptation is simpler than many people think,” he added.
Lomborg followed that with another tweet, saying it’s “similar to how central Chicago was lifted 10 feet up in the 1850s and 60s,” when “they jack-lifted one city block -- with everyone still working and shopping -- at a time to raise the city from the shoreline of Lake Michigan, improving the sewage system.”
And finally, so you know these aren’t just flukes, a third example “from Alba Lulia in Romania, where 80 flats in one apartment building were moved in one go to make space for a boulevard (and many stayed in their apartments, watching from the balconies).”
Wow! Very cool! Apparently it’s far from unheard-of for entire buildings to be moved around, for example, one historic school in Shanghai was fitted with hundreds of hydraulic robotic legs that walked the school 62 meters over the course of 10 days.
Lomborg didn’t expand on his thoughts about what these examples are supposed to show, other than the first tweet’s mention that “adaptation is simpler than many people think.” He also didn’t happen to include any price tags for how much money it took to move these buildings, but apparently since it’s possible, we should chill about climate change, or something. He didn’t explain further.
But that makes sense, because if you think for too long about the implication that we could just adapt buildings to climate change by moving them, without disruption, you end up a fantasy land.
If the idea is to raise buildings to adapt to sea level rise, for example, then that makes sense and seems wise, assuming fossil fuel emissions are being reduced to stop the rising waters. But if you don’t reduce climate pollution, then raising a building will be a never-ending task. The waters will just keep rising, so you’ll keep having to raise your building.
So yes, you could install hundreds of hydraulic legs on each and every one of the buildings on every coastline across the planet, and have them move out of the way of the rising seas.
But where will they go? Are they just supposed to crawl on top of the buildings already there on higher ground? And more importantly, how long will they be able to stay at that new place? Will the legs also be fast enough to outrun other climate impacts, like wildfires? Are we bound for a world where, instead of just switching to cheap clean energy, we all live in — and presumably row, row, row our boats between — centipedal mobile homes powered by noxious fossil fuels?
If, despite multiple embarrassing debunkings on sea level claims alone didn’t do it, anyone still believed Lomborg operated with even the smallest shred of good faith, that should be laid to rest now as he appears to endorse the Howl’s Moving Castle adaptation plan. (As exciting as that may sound…)