Top 30 Bjorn Lomborg Quotes

I think Al Gore has done a great service in making global warming cool. He’s basically taken it from a nerdy, almost ignored issue to making it what it is – namely, a problem.

I’m no expert on American politics.

‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ was much more the idea of the scientific argument of realizing that we need to be skeptical about a lot of these stories that we hear and to put them in context.

I think it’s great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.

Just because there is a problem doesn’t mean that we have to solve it, if the cure is going to be more expensive than the original ailment.

The only thing that will really change global warming in the long run is if we radically increase the speed with which we get alternative technologies to deal with climate change.

Think on a 50-year scale, which is a much more natural time-scale for global warming. The US is right now spending about 200 million dollars annually on research into renewable energy.

When a business group tells us there is nothing wrong with the environment, naturally they may have good arguments, but we are also sceptical, because we know that they have an interest in these things.

Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues.

I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.

We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we’ll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports.

Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it’s important to get the sense… are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?

Lots of people say we should fly less, heat less, and put on a sweater. But it’s not going to happen. People are happy to say that for other people, but not themselves.

The fact that we’re catching more fish per person than we’ve ever done before doesn’t mean that there are not particular places where we’ve managed fisheries badly.

I’m an old member of Greenpeace. I worried intensely, as I think most of my friends did, that the world was coming apart.

We need to invest dramatically in green energy, making solar panels so cheap that everybody wants them. Nobody wanted to buy a computer in 1950, but once they got cheap, everyone bought them.

So it’s mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.

The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.

Wishful thinking is not sound public policy.

There is no doubt that we should take solar radiation into account. We have seen ground temperatures rising since 1975, and it is important to know to what extent that has been caused by the sun or by carbon dioxide.

There is no question that global warming will have a significant impact on already existing problems such as malaria, malnutrition, and water shortages. But this doesn’t mean the best way to solve them is to cut carbon emissions.

The saddest fact of climate change – and the chief reason we should be concerned about finding a proper response – is that the countries it will hit hardest are already among the poorest and most long-suffering.

For the longest time in Denmark I didn’t want to say what I was politically. I thought it was irrelevant.

Money spent on carbon cuts is money we can’t use for effective investments in food aid, micronutrients, HIV/AIDS prevention, health and education infrastructure, and clean water and sanitation.

But this is an occupational hazard of being a scientist. You say this is the best information I have and then you realize that not everyone is going to read the footnotes or the whole book, so people are going to get the wrong impression.

If we invest in researching and developing energy technology, we’ll do some real good in the long run, rather than just making ourselves feel good today. But climate change is not the only challenge of the 21st century, and for many other global problems we have low-cost, durable solutions.

If every country committed to spending 0.05 per cent of GDP on researching non-carbon-emitting energy technologies, that would cost $25 billion a year, and it would do a lot more than massive carbon cuts to fight warming and save lives.

A review was published in Nature, very scathing, essentially calling me incompetent, though they didn’t use that word. I am putting a reply on my Web site in a few days, where I go through their arguments, paragraph by paragraph.

I’m a vegetarian, but I don’t expect other people not to eat meat.

I really try to say things as they basically are and it so happens that it is a good message that things are getting better, but there are still problems.