Quote:

---

Yesterday the Guardian reported that Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish scientist with the shock of blond hair who made a name for himself decrying the world's hysteria about climate change, makes a surprising claim in his upcoming book – that confronting climate change should be a global priority, and that a $100 billion per year investment could solve the crisis by the end of the century.

That sounds a little counterintuitive coming from the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. But Lomborg, who was on the TIME 100 list of the world's most influential people in 2004, has never said that global warming is a hoax, as have some of the conservative voices his views have been aligned with. What Lomborg has argued is that while climate change is real, it is not the catastrophe it has been depicted by some scientists to be, and the world would be better off adapting to it than continuing to spend money on cutting carbon emissions while ignoring other high global priorities, like finding a cure for malaria or ending hunger.

Lomborg's new book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits, puts global warming higher on that theoretical list. Lomborg told the Guardian that he amended his thinking after the last Copenhagen Consensus in 2008, a project that asks a group of economists how $75 billion (the approximately total of foreign aid budgets) should be spent to most efficiently improve life on earth.

http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,1231000098_1721781,00.ht
ml (excellent interview; he makes a lot of sense)

Quote:

---

The first Consensus in 2004 placed the costly policy of developing a carbon tax to cut emissions at the bottom of the list, under things like fighting HIV/Aids. But in the project's second round in 2008, economists ranked a variety of approaches to mitigating global warming higher. Considering these new approaches, Lomborg said, caused him to rethink how global warming spending could be effectively applied.

---

In any case, Lomborg skeptics needn't fret – he hasn't exactly made any effort to steer clear of controversy. With his newfound enthusiasm for putting R&D money into now widely unpopular climate engineering methods, such as “cloud whitening” to reflect heat back up to the sun, he is sure to give them plenty of new material to work with.

---