Bjorn Lomborg
Bjorn Lomborg
Bjørn Lomborgis a Danish author and adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School as well as President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institutein Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he argues that many of the costly measures and actions adopted by scientists and policy makers to meet the challenges of global warming will ultimately have minimal impact on the world’s...
NationalityDanish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth6 January 1965
CountryDenmark
I'm an old member of Greenpeace. I worried intensely, as I think most of my friends did, that the world was coming apart.
...children born today-in both the industrialized world and developing countries-will live longer and be healthier, they will get more food, a better education, a higher standard of living, more leisure time and far more possibilities-without the global environment being destroyed.
We've had the U.N. for almost 60 years, yet we've never actually made a fundamental list of all the big things that we can do in the world, and said, 'Which of them should we do first?'
Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die. But we don't have a technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems; the point is to prioritize solutions to problems.
On average, global warming is not going to harm the developing world.
So it's mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.
We're talking about probably five to eight trillion dollars on the total cost of global warming, and we'd much rather not have that.
Lots of people say we should fly less, heat less, and put on a sweater. But it's not going to happen. People are happy to say that for other people, but not themselves.
But this is an occupational hazard of being a scientist. You say this is the best information I have and then you realize that not everyone is going to read the footnotes or the whole book, so people are going to get the wrong impression.
When a business group tells us there is nothing wrong with the environment, naturally they may have good arguments, but we are also sceptical, because we know that they have an interest in these things.
To some, a cap-and-trade system might sound like a neat approach where the market sorts everything out. But in fact, in some ways it is worse than a tax. With a tax, the costs are obvious. With a cap-and-trade system, the costs are hidden and shifted around. For that reason, many politicians tend to like it. But that is dangerous.
We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we'll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports.
Just because there is a problem doesn't mean that we have to solve it, if the cure is going to be more expensive than the original ailment.
There is no doubt that we should take solar radiation into account. We have seen ground temperatures rising since 1975, and it is important to know to what extent that has been caused by the sun or by carbon dioxide.