With his new book, Danish scientist Bjørn Lomborg has become an unlikely advocate for huge investment in fighting global warming. But his answers are unlikely to satisfy all climate change campaigners.
Few statisticians can have inspired more passion than Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish academic who became famous as the author of the controversial (some would say contrarian) Skeptical Environmentalist, which set him up as perhaps the world′s best-known critic of the dominant scientific view of global warming and the ensuing climate change.
Lomborg′s prolific output has been almost matched by books rubbishing his work: critics have described him as selective, unprofessional and confused. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN′s climate change panel, has compared him to Adolf Hitler – for the statistical crime of treating human beings too much like numbers.
Meanwhile, Time Magazine declared Lomborg one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. The respected Cambridge University Press (CUP) has published many of his books in the UK and the US, and the award-winning documentary maker Ondi Timoner and X-Men films producer, Ralph Winter, are about to release a film of his 2007 book Cool It (which carries the subtitle: the first optimistic film about global warming).
The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty once declared Lomborg guilty of exactly that, but a government review later cleared him.
Lomborg′s latest book, published by CUP next month, is likely to reignite these passions, because it appears to contradict so much of what he has said before and because he is straying into newly controversial territory. He is advocating that much more attention and money be lavished on climate engineering methods, such as whitening clouds so that they reflect back more of the sun′s heat.
Heat is something he is resigned to. When he gives talks, he says, he often meets “people who come up and say: ′I thought I′d hate you.′”
But Lomborg′s record on climate change is more nuanced than the stereotype suggests. From the beginning, he has said global warming is happening and is largely caused by humans. However, he has been consistently critical of what he sees as exaggeration of how much this matters, and of policies to tackle the problem. These would achieve too little and cost too much, he argues, meaning the money would be better spent on, say, reducing malaria and HIV/Aids, or extending clean water and sanitation.
In an example of the approach that enraged Pachauri, Lomborg argues in Cool It that predicted temperature rises could save more than 1.3 million lives a year. This, he says, is because many more people would be spared early cold-related deaths than would be at risk from heat-related respiratory fatalities. (Other academics reject his figures.) Lomborg concludes that because of imbalances in where deaths occur, the proposed extension of the Kyoto protocol to cut carbon emissions would “save 4,000 people annually in the developing world [but] end up sacrificing more than a trillion dollars and 80,000 people annually.”
Given this background, the title of Lomborg′s new book immediately indicates a change of emphasis. It is called Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits. This impression is reinforced by comments in the introduction that climate change is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world” and “a challenge that humanity must confront”.
Later in the book, reflecting on analysis by five economists of eight types of solution, he estimates that spending $100bn (£65bn) a year “could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century”.
He finishes: “If we care about the environment and about leaving this planet and its inhabitants with the best possible future, we actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming.”
Speaking to the Guardian about climate engineering as a back-up plan, he raises the possibility of “something really bad lurking around the corner”: the small-chance, big-consequence outcome his previous work appeared to dismiss.