Author of the week: Bjorn Lomborg

last updated 8 January 2015

The “Skeptical Environmentalist” is a hard guy to pin down, said Krista Mahr in Time.com. Nine years after making his name by arguing against cutting carbon emissions, Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg is now calling for a major international investment to combat global warming. “Investing $100 billion annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century,” he writes in his new book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change. Some media outlets have characterized the shift as a sharp U-turn, but Lomborg claims that his views have been misrepresented in the past, because there’s so little room in the climate debate for nuance.

Lomborg has never cast doubt on the idea that human activity has caused a warming of the planet, said Juliette Jowitt in the London Guardian. “The point I’ve always been making,” he says, “is it’s not the end of the world.” Even today, Lomborg claims that government-mandated cuts in carbon emissions would create more problems than their positive effects would be worth. But he’s also become convinced that global warming can be addressed with new, more cost-effective solutions. “The most promising,” he says, involve “massive increases in R&D funding for green energy technologies and geo-engineering.” He’s particularly excited about using seawater mist to artificially whiten clouds and block out some of the sun’s heat. Of course, that idea is itself controversial.