Bjorn Lomborg

I really try to say things as they basically are and it so happens that it is a good message that things are getting better, but there are still problems.

The Kyoto treaty has an estimated cost of between US$150 and $350 billion a year, starting in 2010.

Even if I was a bad right wing guy, to the extent of whether my arguments are right or wrong, they’re right or wrong independently if I’m right or left.

Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues.

But this is an occupational hazard of being a scientist. You say this is the best information I have and then you realize that not everyone is going to read the footnotes or the whole book, so people are going to get the wrong impression.

Just because there is a problem doesn’t mean that we have to solve it, if the cure is going to be more expensive than the original ailment.

I think it’s great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.

The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.

My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.

So it’s mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.

Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it’s important to get the sense… are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?

The obvious issue is providing clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth at the cost of little more than one year of the Kyoto treaty.

There is no doubt that we should take solar radiation into account. We have seen ground temperatures rising since 1975, and it is important to know to what extent that has been caused by the sun or by carbon dioxide.

When a business group tells us there is nothing wrong with the environment, naturally they may have good arguments, but we are also sceptical, because we know that they have an interest in these things.

It seems incontrovertible to me that there is a global warming effect and that it is going to be serious, probably not in the amount of, say, six degrees warming, but it’s likely that we’ll get two to three degrees warming and that will be serious enough.

A review was published in Nature, very scathing, essentially calling me incompetent, though they didn’t use that word. I am putting a reply on my Web site in a few days, where I go through their arguments, paragraph by paragraph.

On average, global warming is not going to harm the developing world.

We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we’ll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports.

Think on a 50-year scale, which is a much more natural time-scale for global warming. The US is right now spending about 200 million dollars annually on research into renewable energy.

The fact that we’re catching more fish per person than we’ve ever done before doesn’t mean that there are not particular places where we’ve managed fisheries badly.