Climate is an issue but not a catastrophe

In this paper an interview with sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg is published. There is extract from this interview: Was is a major shock for you when you found out that things you believed in during your Greenpeace times were not true? Of course it was. Most of us grow up with a clear vision of what is the biggest problem and what can be done about it. That is because the media teach us to think in this way. I was inspired by the statements of the US economist, Julian Simon, that the state of our environment was not as bad as was stated. I knew he was mistaken. My students and I wanted to prove why he was not right and where he was wrong. But instead we started to realise that many ideas we believed in - how we were losing rain forests and everything was polluted - simply were not true. I have to stress that that does not mean there are no problems. There are many. But in general things are moving in the right direction even though some are getting worse. And that was what I wanted to say in my first book [Sceptical Environmentalist]. When you look at the facts you will see that all major indicators are moving in the right direction. Not as much and as far as they should but still... You are a major critic of Kyoto. What is most wrong with it? Kyoto has been the only global agreement on global warming. So it is obvious we have to talk about it. In my opinion at this time everybody agrees that Kyoto is not very efficient. The protocol was negotiated in 1997 and stipulated that the CO2 emissions have to be decreased by 11.5% compared to the level they would reach in 2010. That was not a trivial volume. If we managed to continue this trend by 2050 OECD countries would have decreased their CO2 emissions by 50%. And that certainly is not trivial. But this development would have trivial effects on the climate. By the end of this century these actions would delay global warming by 5 years. But the costs would be around 18 bill. USD a year. We are talking here about enormous amounts of money spent on something that will not show the desired effect in 100 years. That is not a good deal. What is the alternative? First we have to say: global warming exists. It is and it will be a problem and we have to address it. But we also have to know that it is a long term problem and so the solution also has to be long-term. We certainly will not solve the problem in the next ten, twenty years. And everybody talks about such time frames. Let us talk about the next 100 years. Look at the models. In one of them we can do as we wish regardless the climate. We can drive, fly, do anything Al Gore wants. In 2050 you will not notice any difference. And therefore in my opinion short-term costly solutions do not make sense. In my opinion it is sensible to invest in research and development of technologies that will allow us to use renewable sources, cheaper and cleaner than oil. (author)