Lomborg on Stossel: Whom can you trust?

Watch Late Show with David Letterman – Ricky Gervais, Bjorn Lomborg, Foo Fighters Apr 12, 2011 Air date: 11:35 pm, 11:35 pm TV Network: CBS 

2013-07-01 The World Bank offers a shoddy climate catastrophe in its latest report. It is depressing the World Bank has embraced this worst-case thinking in a series of highly tendentious reports, co-written by Germany's leading doomsayer Schellnhuber and Bill Hare, long-term Climate Policy Director for Greenpeace. The report estimates that temperatures will increase 0.7°C in about 20 years (by the 2030s, page 22). This is far outside the current reality. It is almost twice as the rate of temperature increase over the past 160 years.

The latest alarming news about climate change is that huge swaths of densely inhabited land will be underwater by 2050, with their cities “erased.” These reports – which appeared in The New York Times and many other media outlets – are based on a good research paper by scientists at Climate Central, but they get the story wrong.

This is part of a damaging pattern. Climate change is a man-made problem that we need to tackle, but many of the news stories about its purported effects are scaring us without justification and misleading us about how to act.