Latest news

08-03-2010 - Lomborg in WSJ interview with India's environment minister

...The question is, what comes next? The author of the Copenhagen Consensus (not to be confused with December's Copenhagen summit), Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, has talked about a "third way" forward: acknowledging that climate change is real, but pursuing a cost-benefit approach that would commit countries to projects that yield the greatest benefits for the greatest number of people. "I've read Lomborg," Mr. Ramesh says with a smile. "I don't think you should dismiss Lomborg the way climate evangelicals have dismissed him. He makes reasonable points. The spirit of science is the spirit of enquiry, of questioning."

Read it online

About BL 2010 March 8 WSJ Ramesh.pdf

20-02-2010 - 2010 Febr op-ed: Climate Science or Climate Evangelism?

As George W. Bush and Tony Blair learned the hard way, the public does not take kindly to being misled about the nature of potential threats. A similar shift in global public opinion is occurring with respect to climate change, owing to a stream of revelations about climate scientists' sloppy, if not tendentious, practice.

Listen to the op-ed

BL op-ed 2010 Febr Climate Science or Evang.pdf

10-02-2010 - Lomborg's article in Globe&Mail: Climate strategy on a road to nowhere

From Monday's Globe and Mail
Published on Friday, Feb. 05, 2010

Bjorn Lomborg
Climate strategy on a road to nowhere

After a string of empty promises agreed to in Rio, then Kyoto, then Copenhagen, Canada needs a new approach in making meaningful change to emissions policy

Like many countries, Canada has grappled with how to respond effectively to climate change. The federal government has reportedly contemplated both a cap-and-trade carbon emission reduction scheme and a carbon tax, while attracting environmentalist scorn for allowing the development of the oil sands production industry. This month, it announced it would match U.S. greenhouse-gas emission reduction targets – but has yet to establish how it will reach those targets. (...)

Read it online

A BL 2010 Febr 5 Globe&Mail.pdf

11-01-2010 - Lomborg's Skeptical Enviromentalist is among TOP 50 SUSTAINABILITY BOOKS

This unique title draws together in one volume some of the best thinking to date on the pressing social, environmental and ethical challenges we face as a society. These are the Top 50 Sustainability Books as voted for by the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership’s alumni network of over 2,000 senior leaders from around the world.

In addition to profiles of all 50 titles, many of the authors share their most recent reflections on the state of the world and the ongoing attempts by business, government and civil society to create a more sustainable future.

23-12-2009 - Financial Times: We should change tack on climate after Copenhagen

By Bjorn Lomborg
Published: December 23 2009
After 12 days of protests, posturing and seemingly endless palaver, the elephantine gath ering that was the Copen-hagen climate summit has laboured mightily and brought forth . . . a mouse. As vague as it is toothless, the accord on curbing greenhouse gas emissions that emerged from the Bella Centre this weekend imposes no real obligations, sets no binding emissions targets and requires no specific actions by anyone. (...)

19-12-2009 - Lomborg in Hindustan Times

6)Star Statistician: Bjorn Lomborg
Why: He would have appeared on CNN’s “Larry King Live” by the time you read this. In the run up to Copenhagen, the professor at the Copenhagen Business School has written for Time, Newsweek and the Hindustan Times, and his views are sought by everyone from the Economist to the government of Mali, which wants him to advise them on how to spend money they might receive to tackle the effects of climate change. So the Playstation addict and author of two books (“Have you played Uncharted 2?” he asks a HT reporter, who hasn’t) roams freely through the highly restricted 1,100-seat media centre, pursued for interviews.
Lomborg’s USP: Using the services of economists and Nobel laureates, he advocates a move from spending money on global warming — it simply does not make economic sense, he says — to use radical technology-based solutions. The future: Some of Lomborg’s fixes sound like science fiction — whitening clouds so they reflect more sunlight back into space — but he merely collates and commissions what is done by solid scientists. Some say the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center understates the risks and costs of climate change and overstates the costs of preventive action. The Guardian said he was one of the 50 people who could save the planet. Either way, you’re going to hear a lot from Lomborg.

18-12-2009 - COP15 news

Lomborg on TV2 on Dec 8.
Dec 9: Listen to ABC breakfast show with Lomborg
Dec 11: Bloomberg TV
Dec 12: Fox news with Paul Gigot
Dec 13: DR1 debate
Dec 15 Tue 2pm: Lomborg live on CNN (watch here live) and on ABC radio. Listen to Lomborg on NPR
Dec 18 5pm ET: Lomborg on CNN Campbell Brown show

09-12-2009 - Global Warming and Mt. Kilimanjaro

Global Warming and Mt. Kilimanjaro The glaciers on the famous peak, receding for more than a century, attract many tourists; the people of Tanzania attract much less attention.
By BJORN LOMBORG
Climate change has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series, leading up to the United Nations conference on global warming in Copenhagen that starts this week, on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue:

Every year, more than 10,000 tourists are drawn to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, driven in no small part by the fear that the mountain's magnificent ice will soon melt.

Mary Thomas lives not far from their path, on the southwestern slopes of that mountain, but tourists do not come to her town of Mungushi. (...)

30-11-2009 - Climate Change and Melting Glaciers

Climate Change and Melting Glaciers
Nepal's poor have more pressing problems. By BJORN LOMBORG

Global warming has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series leading up to the December United Nations conference in Copenhagen on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue:

Nine years ago, Maya Bishwokarma moved with her family to Kathmandu from Trisuli, a remote village in the hilly Nepal countryside. Their search for a better life has proved elusive. She and her husband and two sons live in a small, two-room house with her brother-in-law's family, near the bank of a small stream that has been converted into an open sewer.

30-11-2009 - Lomborg: Under heat, climate-change contrarian won't wilt

Interview with Bjorn Lomborg. John Allemang
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published on Friday, Nov. 27 2009
Under heat, climate-change contrarian won't wilt.
The controversial Bjorn Lomborg doesn't deny global warming. But he believes it's ‘an incredibly bad deal' to spend so much money on cutting carbon emissions, he tells John Allemang.

Former Danish statistics professor Bjorn Lomborg created a storm of controversy when he published The Skeptical Environmentalist , a 1998 work that was denounced by scientists for its cost-benefit critique of the Kyoto Protocol but also praised for its willingness to challenge environmental orthodoxy.

Dr. Lomborg published a follow-up book, Cool It , a decade later and is now the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which explores how to do the greatest good in the world with limited economic resources. On Dec. 1, he will take part in the Munk Debate on climate change in Toronto. John Allemang spoke to him this week. (...)

23-11-2009 - Cyclones and Global Warming

NOVEMBER 22, 2009, Wall Street Journal Cyclones and Global Warming A survivor in India says carbon cuts won't help. By BJØRN LOMBORG
Global warming has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series leading up to the December United Nations conference in Copenhagen on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue:

One week after Cyclone Aila flattened Lakshmi Bera's mud, bamboo and thatched grass house in May, a Copenhagen Consensus researcher found her family of five under the open sky. Their only protection was a plastic tarp.
"We have been living on a bowl of rice for the past few days", said 35-year-old Mrs. Bera. "The food that we had stocked up was lost. Whatever water we are getting we are sharing with our cattle, since the animals too are suffering. The only clothes we have left are the ones we are wearing."

18-11-2009 - Global Warming as Seen From Bangladesh

Wall Street Journal.
BJØRN LOMBORG, Nov 9 2009.
Global Warming as Seen From Bangladesh

The following article is part of a series leading up to the December United Nations conference in Copenhagen on how ordinary people in different countries view global warming.

When the monsoon rains come, Momota Begum and her husband and children must take turns sleeping in their tiny concrete house's one bed to escape the waste and human excrement that can wash in from outside. They live in a three-decade old refugee camp in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is run for Urdu-speaking people who found themselves on the wrong side of the border after Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan in 1971. (...)

06-11-2009 - Lomborg: Climate Change and Malaria in Africa

WALL STREET JOURNAL
By BJORN LOMBORG
Climate Change and Malaria in Africa
Limiting carbon emissions won't do much to stop disease in Zambia.
NOVEMBER 1, 2009

When he first got sick, Samson Banda didn't realize he had malaria. Only after he came down with a serious fever did he end up at a clinic in the Bauleni slum compound in Lusaka, Zambia. The clinic has just a few nurses and staff with basic medical skills. Locals can wait for an entire day to be seen.

Unchecked malaria is serious. Nine out of 10 of the world's annual one million malaria-caused deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease—transmitted via mosquitoes—can cause low blood sugar, an enlarged spleen and liver, severe headaches, a shortage of oxygen to the brain, and renal failure. It can lead to coma and death. Twenty-seven year-old Samson was ill for six months before he started to recover. (...)

26-10-2009 - The View from Vanuatu on Climate Change

(...) Torethy Frank, a 39-year-old woman carving out a subsistence lifestyle on Vanuatu's Nguna Island, is one of those "innocent people." Yet, she has never heard of the problem that her government rates as a top priority. "What is global warming?" she asks a researcher for the Copenhagen Consensus Center. (...)

30-09-2009 - Lomborg interview at Barron's: A Smarter Approach to Climate Change

_{DANISH STATISTICIAN AND MORAL CRUSADER Bjorn Lomborg rarely misses an opportunity. Speaking by telephone last week from his apartment in Copenhagen, Lomborg told me about his recent initiative to get the world to deal sensibly with climate change. (...)}

22-09-2009 - Interview with Lomborg on Deutsche Welle

CLIMATE | 22.09.2009

Cutting carbon emissions won't stop climate change, expert says

As world leaders meet at the UN to discuss climate change, Bjorn Lomborg tells DW he expects little to come from the talks. He tells politicians there are better ways to spend billions than on fighting climate change. (...)

21-09-2009 - Lomborg's op-ed in Forbes

09-21-2009: Climate Change: A Perilous Path

Our costly ''solutions'' could be more harmful than global warming itself. Evidence is growing that relatively cheap policies like climate engineering and non-carbon energy research could effectively prevent suffering from global warming, both in the short and long term. Unfortunately, political leaders gathering at a special meeting of the United Nations in New York this week will focus on a very different response. (...)

07-09-2009 - Lomborg op-eds in August

06-08-2009 - Lomborg’s latest op-eds:

18-07-2009 –When it comes to global warming, talk of treason is in the air

18-06-2009 – Scared silly over climate change

15-07-2009 - Mr. Gore, Your Solution to Climate Change is Wrong (Esquire)
in the News in English section

18-05-2009 - Interview with Lomborg in the Barron's

Global Warming Is Manageable -- if We're Smart

THE NEXT TREATY TO CURB GLOBAL WARMING WILL BE negotiated this December in Copenhagen, Bjorn
Lomborg's home city. Called by The Guardian (U.K.) "one of the 50 people who could save the planet," Lomborg, a
statistician, is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's
Guide to Global Warming" (2007). He also maintains a Website on environmental issues at www.lomborg.com.
Contrary to widely held belief, Lomborg isn't at all skeptical of the fact that global warming is a problem, or that
humanity is contributing to it. To get some idea of his real message, Barron's recently caught up with him at an
event hosted by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, in which he presented his views on the major priorities
for helping the world's poor. Afterward, he sat down to answer our questions in clear, unaccented English,
marshalling facts and figures with stunning ease. (...)

16-03-2009 - GW will save millions of lives

Dire predictions about climate change and health omit the cost of cold, says Bjorn Lomborg.

By Bjorn Lomborg, 13 Mar 2009

Global warming will increase the burden on the British health system because more people will suffer from heat-caused illness. This was the message delivered to a conference in Copenhagen this week by Alistair Hunt, a researcher at Bath University. "I am trying to bring home the impact of climate change to everyone," he said. (...)

16-03-2009 - Climate change decisions should be based on science, not political activism

Better to leave it off. Bjørn Lomborg: Stefan Rahmstorf is a respected climate change scientist but by labelling me a 'spin doctor' who 'fools the public' he shows weakness in his argument on sea level rises

Bjørn Lomborg, Guardian, Monday 9 March 2009 12.58 GMT

In an article in the Guardian last month, I criticised an effort by a group of scientists and activists to cast aside the consensus view of thousands of scientists from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The group is organising an emergency summit on global warming in Copenhagen this month. The organiser calls the IPCC's work "wishy-washy" and says her conference is "not a regular scientific conference. This is a deliberate attempt to influence policy." (...)

04-03-2009 - IQ2US debate about carbon emission on Youtube!

The entire playlist: Carbon Emissions Debate can be found here.

(2 of 14) MAJOR REDUCTIONS IN CARBON EMISSIONS ARE NOT WORTH THE MONEY DEBATE:BJORN LOMBORG
(13 of 14) MAJOR REDUCTIONS IN CARBON EMISSIONS ARE NOT WORTH THE MONEY: CLOSING ARGUMENTS PT1
On BBC World News Channel: Verizon-FIOS: Channel 94 or 107Optimum/Cablevision Channel 104March 7: 2:10 am, 10:10 am, 3:10 pm, 8:10 pm (EST) March 8: 2:10 am, 10:10 am, 3:10 pm (EST)

20-02-2009 - Global warnings - Lomborg's latest op-ed in The Guardian

The Copenhagen protocol will not succeed unless China and India sign up, but bribing these nations to take part is counterproductive
Björn Lomborg, guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 February 2009

This December, global leaders will meet in Copenhagen to negotiate a new climate change pact to reduce carbon emissions. Yet, the way that it has been set up, it will inevitably fail. The best hope is that we use this lesson finally to deal with this issue in a smarter fashion.

The United States has made it clear that developing countries must sign up to substantial reductions in carbon emissions in Copenhagen. Developing nations – especially China and India – will be the main greenhouse gas emitters of the 21st century – but were exempted from the Kyoto protocol because they emitted so little during the west's industrialisation period. Europe, too, has grudgingly accepted that without developing nations' participation, rich nations' cuts will have little impact...

22-01-2009 - IQ2US debate about carbon emission on radio

16-01-2009 - Vote results of the IQ2US debate

Major reductions in carbon emissions are not worth the money - was the topic of the latest Intelligence Squared US debate (Jan 13). Bjorn Lomborg, Peter Huber and Philip Stott spoke for the motion.
Though they started out with 16% for their proposal and 49% against ("major reductions in carbon emissions are not worth the money"), they ended with 42% for, 48% against - see attached chart.

If you go to the website www.iq2US.org, click on past debates/downloads, and you can find there the full transcript of the debate and images, and from Jan 21 also the audio record.

18-12-2008 - Lomborg will participate in the IQ2US debate on Jan 13 2009

Intelligence Squared US debate series:
Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Major reductions in carbon emissions are not worth the money
Moderator: John Donvan
Speaking for the motion: Bjorn Lomborg, Philip Stott and Peter Huber
Speaking against the motion: L. Hunter Lovins, Oliver Tickell and Adam Werbach
THIS EVENT WILL BE RECORDED FOR BBC WORLD NEWS.

Panelists for the motion

Bjorn Lomborg is the author of the bestsellers Cool It and The Skeptical Environmentalist. He was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2004, one of the "50 people who could save the planet" by the UK Guardian in 2008, one of the world's 75 most influential people of the 21st century by Esquire in 2008. He has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Economist. He is presently an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and in 2004 he started the Copenhagen Consensus, a conference of top economists who come together to prioritize the best solutions for the world's greatest challenges.

Philip Stott is an Emeritus Professor and biogeographer from the University of London, UK. Although a scientist, for the past ten years he has also employed modern techniques of deconstruction to grand environmental narratives, like "global warming." Stott was editor of the internationally-important Journal of Biogeography for 18 years. He broadcasts widely on TV and radio, and writes regularly on environmental issues for The Times of London, among other publications.
THIS EVENT WILL BE RECORDED FOR TELEVISION.

17-12-2008 - En støjsender i klimadebatten: Ude i verden er han en helt. Hjemme kalder man ham en 'støjsender'.

Bjorn Lomborg is on the cover of Jyllands-Posten, one of the leading Danish papers, on Dec 15 2008. The interview with him can be read only on the printed edition of the newspaper.

17-12-2008 - Did the Poznan climate talks produce more than a lot of hot air?

The Reuters article about Poznan quotes Lomborg's article that was published one day before in Forbes:

(...) Meanwhile, Bjorn Lomborg, author of the "Sceptical Environmentalist" writes in the business magazine, Forbes, that rather than wasting money on meetings to decide global agreements which will inevitably be ignored, the world's poorest would be better served by improvements to their living conditions now.
"Interventions like improving malnutrition and child health in the Third World deserve a much higher priority than carbon cuts to battle climate change," he says. More should be invested in research and development of low-carbon energy sources in conjunction with helping lift the poorest out of poverty, argues Lomborg.(...)

16-12-2008 - Focus On Trade, Not Climate Change

Bjorn Lomborg, 12.15.2008
An economic argument against stricter caps on carbon emissions.

While the world focused on United Nations-led discussions about climate change last week, international trade talks fell apart.
The World Trade Organization head says progress on the Doha Round--negotiations to lower trade barriers--is stalled until well into next year...