Bjorn Lomborg earned the wrath of many scientists by calling into question the direness of global warming.  Now, in this wide-ranging interview, find out why he claims that Al Gore is 'wildly exaggerating' about climate change and its effects.

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish political scientist and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a controversial book about the costs and benefits of reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change. He spoke to NEWSWEEK about the Stern Review, Al Gore and his critics.

NEWSWEEK: The Stern Review, a 2006 report on the economics of climate change, concluded that averting the worst impacts of climate change will cost 1 percent of global GDP annually, and that failure to address the problem could cost a projected 20 percent of global GDP.
LOMBORG: It understates the costs of dealing with climate change. It says it's 1 percent. Even the U.N. estimates that it's somewhere between 3 and 5 percent, depending on the time frame. And it dramatically exaggerates the cost of not doing something. Most models show that the costs by the end of the century from global warming say 3 percent of GDP. Basically it's a non-peer reviewed study that was commissioned by the UK government to come out and support the UK government's policy. It tells us a very different story from all of the peer reviewed, published studies that it bases itself on.

The Stern Review doesn't necessarily say, don't invest in HIV and malaria vaccines, which you say we should devote our resources to.  Aren't you like a doctor saying diet or exercise, instead of diet and exercise?
No. The Stern Report is more like a doctor standing in the midst of a war zone and saying, "Hey, lets treat everyone." That doesn't work. We do triage, and we do that in every other area. So it's always struck me as slightly curious that people say, "Oh, we should do everything." Well, of course we should do everything. But as long as we haven't done that very well over the last 50 years, shouldn't we do things where we do an amazing amount of good first?

Do you accept the Stern Review's characterization of climate change as a market failure?
Oh, absolutely. One, it's definitely a problem. It's man-made. Climate change is  caused by us burning fossil fuels. That's also why it's a market failure, because we need to price CO2. But, the way that it's being projected as the biggest, most dramatic issue of the 21st century is simply blatantly wrong.

The Stern Review concludes that the poorest countries will be affected most by climate change.
The fact that developing countries are going to be harder hit makes a lot of people say, "And that means we should deal with climate change." But if you have more global warming, you're going to be harder hit, for instance, by malaria and many other problems. Likewise, if you have more malaria, you're going to be much more vulnerable to global warming. I'm asking a very simple question: "If there are other ways that we could help those developing countries much more, wouldn't that be a better way?" Isn't better to help people with malaria right now than to focus, for instance, on climate policies like the Kyoto Protocol, that will do virtually nothing 100 years from now, and of course nothing today?

By setting targets for global carbon emissions reductions, doesn't the Kyoto protocol provide an incentive for R&D?
Basically, trying to live up to the Kyoto Protocol means that you buy a lot of windmills. Now, obviously, you would imagine that a very little bit of that money spent would go to produce more efficient windmills. If you spend 100 percent on windmills, 1 percent will go to R&D. I'm simply saying, "Well, if it's R&D that we need in the long run, why don't we spend 10 percent on R&D, and actually buy that outright, and save the 90 percent for other things that we would presumably like to do, like dealing with some of the world's other problems, or simply dealing with some of the problems that the first world cares about, like getting better hospitals?"

What do you make of companies that give the impression of doing something environmentally beneficial, but actually may not be doing anything at all, an idea that might be described as an eco-scam?
I don't like the using the world eco-scams because it makes us feel like somebody's trying to do the public. In any situation, you have a lot of good ideas, and some of these ideas end up getting funded, and I'm sure almost all of these people were driven by great ingenuity and want to do good. And, it only just happens to be that it was a bad idea, like with biofuels.

You've argued that climate change has been over-dramatized by people such as  Al Gore.
Gore, obviously, has gotten everybody to realize that this is a big problem, and I think in that sense he should be congratulated. Now, I think he's done so by wildly exaggerating many of the truths about climate change. He talked about a sea level rise of 6 meters, when indeed the U.N. Climate Panel envisioned something that's probably one-twentieth of that. It's very unhelpful to talk about a problem and exaggerate it by 20 times, because 30 centimeters [11.8 inches] of sea level rise is a problem, whereas 6 meters [about 19 feet] would be a catastrophe.

He will tell you about hurricanes, but the much more important part of that is to say, if you actually care about saving people from future Katrinas or future Andrews, you have to ask yourself, "Is cutting carbon emissions the best way to do so?" The answer is overwhelmingly, "No." It's about stopping subsidized insurance in Florida, which encourages people to build irresponsibly. And it's about making sure you have better levies in New Orleans.

What Al Gore and many others do is a little bit like talking to a man who's sedentary, obese and alcoholic, and saying to him, "The best way to improve your health is by wearing a seatbelt." It's not untrue that that would also help.  But it's probably not the advice to give first.

What do you think about the criticisms that have been levied against your work?
There are a lot of people out there who feel very strongly about this one issue, global warming. It must piss them off when someone points out, "Well, your solution is just not a very good one for all the main problems of the world." Yes, there's been a lot of criticism. I find the most significant one is the fact that quite a number of people tried to get me impaled for scientific dishonesty in Denmark. I've written a book with a lot of numbers, and there's no doubt that some of these numbers aren't going to be correct. But it seems to me that I've been very close in most of these areas.   Source

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