Lateline interview with Lomborg

Once a year or so, journalists from major news outlets travel to the Marshall Islands, a remote chain of volcanic islands and coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean, to report in panicked tones that the island nation is vanishing because of climate change. Their dispatches are often filled with raw emotion and suggest that residents are fleeing atolls swiftly sinking into the sea.

The Obama administration released a new report this week that paints a stark picture of how climate change will affect human health. Higher temperatures, we’re told, will be deadly—killing “thousands to tens of thousands” of Americans. The report is subtitled “A Scientific Assessment,” presumably to underscore its reliability. But the report reads as a political sledgehammer that hypes the bad and skips over the good.

Björn Lomborg guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 September 2008

Solving climate change will be the most expensive public policy decision ever. Half-baked thinking won't fix it now.

One commonly repeated argument for doing something about climate change sounds compelling, but turns out to be almost fraudulent. It is based on comparing the cost of action with the cost of inaction, and almost every major politician in the world uses it. (...)