The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.
Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.
But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.
Examining eight methods to reduce or stop global warming, Lomborg and his fellow economists recommend pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as "cloud whitening" to reflect the sun's heat back into the outer atmosphere.
Apparently Lomborg has joined a fairly exclusive club. Mainly that of people with famous books that no-one seems to have actually read.
The only way anyone can say Lomborg has "changed his mind" about global warming is if they've never read his book in the first place. Contrary to what is usually reported, The Skeptical Environmentalist does not deny either global warming in general or anthropogenic global warming. In the Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg argued that while global warming is a very real problem, we need to be careful about what measures we take to fight it, as some of the policies being advocated to reduce CO2 emissions would end up costing us much more than unchecked global warming.
Of course, saying that we need to apply rational cost-benefit analysis to global warming was treated as heresy. The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, infamously compared Lomborg's views to Hitler's. He said, and I am not making this up:
What is the difference between Lomborg’s view of humanity and Hitler’s? You cannot treat people like cattle. You must respect the diversity of cultures on earth. Lomborg thinks of people like numbers. He thinks it would be cheaper just to evacuate people from the Maldives, rather than trying to prevent world sea levels from rising so that island groups like the Maldives or Tuvalu just disappear into the sea. But where’s the respect for people in that? People have a right to live and die in the place where their forefathers have lived and died. If you were to accept Lomborg’s way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing.
That's right, folks. Cost-benefit analysis is genocide.
As Lomborg himself says in the Guardian article:
Lomborg denies he has performed a volte face, pointing out that even in his first book he accepted the existence of man-made global warming. "The point I've always been making is it's not the end of the world," he told the Guardian. "That's why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well."
The problem is that no-one has read the point he was making. The entire "environmentalist" movement had a knee-jerk reaction to Lomborg's book; all they saw was someone voicing the wrong opinion.
The level of journalism displayed by the Grauniad is just appalling. In the header, they refer to Lomborg as "the world's most high-profile climate change sceptic". He isn't a climate change skeptic at all, unless now "climate change skeptic" means anyone who doesn't agree with Al Gore.
I'm now going to do something that, apparently, the Guardian is incapable of: actually quote from Bjørn Lomborg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Amazing, I know, but that's the kind of blog I run.
Summing up
Global warming has become the great environmental worry of our day. There is no doubt that mankind has influenced and is still increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and that this will influence temperature.
There's your climate change denial. What kind of idiots do they hire to write their articles?
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