Lomborg - disingenuous poser

It's been hard to take Bjorn Lomborg seriously ever since this effort:

but for a guy who presumably wants to be taken seriously, he's still busy confirming that one of his largest priorities is getting his misleading takes noticed and endorsed by fake sceptics and lukewarmers.

I mean, with his Tweet today, about the Australian fires, he starts with this graph and a complaint that this fire season extent is being "exploited", as it is not extreme:

But the tweet links to a his Facebook post in which he immediately makes a major concession:

The fires were definitely different in that they have mostly happened in the states of New South Wales (home of Sydney) and Victoria (Melbourne). Here, the fires this year are much larger than they have been in the previous few decades.

Indeed, New South Wales may be a record at 4.9 million hectares burnt, although it has seen almost similar sized fires in 1951-52 (more than 4 million hectares) and 1974-75 (4.5 million hectares).

Victoria at 1.2 million hectares is also a record for the last decades, but it is vastly smaller than the 1851 Black Thursday fire, which in one day burnt a quarter of Victoria or 5 million hectares.

So, one could say,  on Facebook he explicitly acknowledges the importance of where the fires have occurred, but is happy to still happy to run with the argument that this fire season wasn't anything special.

One of the comparisons he makes should make anyone suspicious - how confident could anyone be about area estimates of fire damage in Victoria in 1851, given that the place was still being colonised?  Oh look, here's the answer, given at the Moyhu blog in 2017 - you can't have any confidence in that figure at all.

In fact, on 10 January, the Moyhu blog had already given some key information relevant to Lomborg's entire Facebook argument - he warned of the trap of putting areas of savanna burnt in Australia into "total area burned" statistics:

I looked up more references on savanna regions. This paper gives some general averages:

State	Annual average area burnt M ha savanna
NT	18.1
WA	10.6
Qld	8.56

And there is the dilemma. These numbers would dwarf most years of temperate forest burning. But that is what we want to know about, so they must be separated. This is not being done systematically. In particular, there is the random inclusion of savanna data for 1974/5 in the Wiki list.

So Lomborg acknowledges - when you read beyond his tweeted graph - that the current fire season is remarkable for the area of temperate forest burned, but his graph nonetheless only does a half hearted attempt at indicating what that area is (by removing NT area burnt.)  Moyhu's post indicates that the same area again of savanna is burnt in Qld and WA. 
  
In any event, Australia is huge and but a moment's thought should make anyone realise that talking about Australia wide figures for anything tells us nothing useful about the effect of regional changes under climate change.    To take an obvious example:  in the case of rainfall - if the top of Australia gets more rain on average under climate change, and that leads to less savanna burning, that hardly compensates if at the same time the southern and much more heavily populated and utilised regions are drying out and start burning more regularly.    Going by memory, that type of change in rainfall patterns is actually what the CSIRO thinks may happen under climate change.   But by ignoring the regional changes, and looking at rainfall continent wide, you can pretend that it isn't a problem.

You see shallow propagandists like Andrew Bolt doing this all the time - throw up a graph of national rainfall figures and saying "see, it's not getting dryer overall". 

So Lomborg is, again, engaging in cheap and misleading analysis, designed to maintain his status as a "contrarian", but it's clear that he is more interested in endorsements by denialists and lukewarmers than making a genuine contribution to seeing serious political action on climate change.    Very much like Judith Curry, I would say.  There is no other explanation.