Lomborg's op-ed: Scared silly over climate change

We are frightening children with exaggerations – they believe they don't have a future and that the world is going to end The continuous presentation of scary stories about global warming in the popular media makes us unnecessarily frightened. Even worse, it terrifies our kids. Al Gore famously depicted how a sea-level rise of 20ft (six metres) would almost completely flood Florida, New York, Holland, Bangladesh, and Shanghai, even though the United Nations says that such a thing will not even happen, estimating that sea levels will rise 20 times less than that. When confronted with these exaggerations, some of us say that they are for a good cause, and surely there is no harm done if the result is that we focus even more on tackling climate change. A similar argument was used when George W Bush's administration overstated the terror threat from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This argument is astonishingly wrong. (...)