Bjorn Lomborg interview, Part 2: Global warming politics and assessing his critics

May 6, 4:26 PMSF Environmental Policy ExaminerThomas Fuller

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"When someone throws mud at you, some of it sticks. And I occasionally see references where some people say, ‘Oh, he was convicted of scientific dishonesty,’ which of course is not true, but I think most of us have moved on and people know that this was mainly a politically motivated decision that was overturned when lawyers looked at the real impact.”

Getting Burned By Global Warming

The impact of Bjorn Lomborg's first book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, is hard to overestimate. The Economist wrote 'This is one of the most valuable books on public policy - not merely on environmental policy - to have been written for the intelligent general reader in the past ten years.' 

One gauge of how important it was is to look at the vehemence of the attacks it received. A group of scientists who had also developed into media 'darlings' found themselves confronted and often contradicted by Lomborg's book. What infuriated them most seemed to be that Lomborg was using their own statistics against them. In his native Denmark, Lomborg was accused by three environmentalists of intellectual dishonesty, a case that went to the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. The committee initially found against Lomborg, but was overturned decisively by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and a band of 308 scientists petitioned to have that committee disbanded. Lomborg's real sin apparently was to show facts and figures that contradicted the global warming alarmists' view of the world, something for which they still haven't forgiven him, if one goes by what is available on the Internet.

But the battle was just beginning. In Scientific American, a rebuttal to the book was published, featuring articles from some of the scientists whose work had been criticised in the book. Some of the language used against Lomborg personally and professionally verged on libel or hysteria or both. It took another spirited defence, including articles of support in The Economist and favorable reviews in The Washington Post, to balance out the attacks. The Daily Telegraph called it 'probably the most important book on the environment ever written.'

Forgiven, not Forgotten

“I’ve met with John Rennie since then, I haven’t had the chance to talk with Stephen Schneider. I think all of these guys are motivated by good intentions. I think some of them got carried away, and I think it was a bad call on their part and not entirely in good faith.

"I think it shows much more, this discussion is so emotional, that we sort of get caught up in the ‘We’ve got to do something, and if Bjorn says this is not the right thing, he must be an evil person.’ I try to convince people that this is probably a very bad way of tackling criticism and at the end of the day, if we don’t listen to people like me, if we just go ahead and do another Kyoto Protocol, which has already failed twice, once in 1992 in Rio and second in Kyoto in 1997, we will essentially waste another 10 years.

"And surely that’s not what Stephen Schneider, John Rennie and all the others want to do. So I think there’s a huge point in saying, even if you don’t agree with me, certainly you would want to listen to the argument that maybe we’re committed to making a very poor investment that will not fix climate change."

“I think all of them are really smart people. I think they have a hard time getting out of the… the emotions get the better of them, and I think they want to score points. I think the majority of views of people in the media are people I disagree with and that’s why I keep focusing on them the most, but I would also say that many of the people on the other side of me, saying ‘there’s nothing about global warming at all’ are just exaggerating.

Fox vs MSNBC Is Not The Way To Address Global Climate Change Policy

"In fact the majority of the people in the media, Jim Hansen and others, are very frustrated with how slowly it’s going and so they have to overstate their arguments, and so I think it comes back to the argument, and my point—that right now, we’re just not handling this issue very well. We are actually not following any policies that have any reasonable chance of success. And that’s why we will have this frustration for a long time to come, until we realize that this is not about making fossil fuels so expensive that we won’t use them, it’s about making green energy so cheap that everyone will want to use them.”

Lomborg is careful not to jump into American politics ("This is not my country and I don’t pretend to know American politics intricately") but has considered opinions on Obama's energy policy and the growing tendency to treat climate change as a partisan political football: "There’s certainly a tendency in all places, especially in the U.S. to make this into a partisan issue. And that’s unfortunate because, just like the Republicans need to get away from ‘oh it’s all a left-wing conspiracy to raise taxes,’ I think the left would do good to say ‘It’s not a right-wing conspiracy to say we need to do this in the most effective way possible.’

"And so my point has been to say surely global warming is real, but we’ve got to tackle it intelligently. Hopefully, intelligence is not a right or left wing trait. It’s not a Democrat or Republican trait, it’s something we can all get together on."

This is the second half of Examiner.com's interview with Bjorn Lomborg. To see part one of the interview, click here.