Guardian: Big excloo – Bjorn Lomborg very worried about global warming! Some say it’s just a new book with the same old same old.
You all remember Bjorn Lomborg, I’m sure. He’s the economist, statistician, and writer in Denmark, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001 which won him opprobrium and encomium in vociferous conflicting shares from standard-issue environmentalists and global warming doubters. It’s not that he sought to refute the greenhouse effect, but that he concluded that wrenching the global economy into a low-carbon mode was far more expensive than the benefits to humanity would warrant. He’s generally lumped in with the deniers, although he’s not one exactly, but he certainly enables that wing of thought.
On Monday in the UK The Telegraph‘s Juliette Jowit reported in an “Exclusive” that “The world’s most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is ‘undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today’” and she further calls his new stance a “U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.” Her profile of Lomborg ran as a sidebar.
The Telegraph’s coverage promptly inspired other news media to jump in. Many don’t see so much a dramatic about face – which even Lomborg says he’s not making – as more a refinement of his stance. That is, he never denied the physics of climate change, but he now believes that some measures to spend money to get ready for it and abate it are sensible.( He’s not gone all Joe Romm and Al Gore on us, demanding immediate reconstruction of industrial society. But he does urge a carbon tax to raise $100 billion for investment in research on greener tech, geo-engineering foils to solar forcing, and adaptation.) Plus, he has a new book out.
Among the most pointed ripostes is at New Scientist, where environment reporter Michael Marshall selects and comments on passages from the Telegraph’s coverage. Marshall concludes that “Lomborg may now think that tackling climate change is more worthwile than he used to , but his solutions have not changed much.” and cites a New Scientist interview with him by Fred Pearce as evidence.
At the Guardian, the Telegraph’s arch-rival, John Vidal reports environmental groups giving tepid-at-best welcome to Lomborg’s latest. And back at the Telegraph, provocateur columnist, very funny man, and also sour puss James Delingpole, no cheerleader for slowing global warming, says Lomborg has been a “warmist” which means greenie all along. Delingpole makes a case. But he embarrasses himself by tossing in, for no discernible reason, that Lomborg is not only a leftist Dane (true, and slightly pertinent) but gay (not pertinent, presumably true, and journalistically stupid to bring up as germane).
Most English-language press has been in the UK and Australia, but the NYTimes‘s John Collins Rudolf covered it. He seems to simplify Lomborg’s stance in his lede, calling him a “climate contrarion” when he gained fame not for denying warming, but for saying it’s not worth the money to try to stop it asap.
It all seems a bit tedious and frothy.
A few other headlines:
- The Australian: The climate change sceptic show was never out in the cold has not changed his mind ;
- NY Daily News – Aliyah Shahid: Bjorn Lomborg, climate change skeptic, now bleives global warming is an international threat ; Derived largely from the Guardian’s coverage.
- The New Republic (via NPR) – Bradford Plumer: Climate Change Skeptic Acquiesces ;
An analysis of much the same material is at Media Matters For America: How will right-wing media react to former climate skeptic Lomborg? The post makes no effort to answer its headline question. Reader/commenters do that, colorfully.
- Charlie Petit
