Do the maths for the real story on climate disasters

At the Glasgow climate conference, President Biden declared climate change an “existential threat to human existence as we know it.” No, it’s not. Climate change is not a meteor hurtling toward Earth to destroy humanity. Rather, it is a chronic, manageable condition humanity can live with. So argues Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

BBC Radio 4's The Today

2012-06-19 Bjorn Lomborg

BBC asked Dennis Meadows, co-author of Limits to Growth, to debate its predictions, but he said no sound bite would convince people who would listen to people like Lomborg. Yet, this debate is not about sound bites, Lomborg explains on the BBC Today program. It really is about a 40 year track record of spectacularly bad predictions. Limits to Growth set the agenda for worrying about the wrong problems with poor solutions. 

Global warming is a significant, long-term problem. Unfortunately, we’re tackling it with very costly, and very ineffective, feel-good solutions.

Lomborg writes in The Australian that we should instead focus on cost-effective CO2 reductions like shale gas in the short term and green R&D in the long run.