Bjorn Lomborg

If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity?

Bjorn Lomborg in The Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2008

Here's my answer. I'd give $1 million of it to Bjorn Lomborg to go away. Lomborg might not take a powder so cheap, but he ought to if he's really concerned with humanity, because his noise is delaying progress on climate action.

It would actually be hard to prove he's doing a million dollars worth of damage, and equally hard to quantify the benefit of the expense, but let's just consider it a rounding error and move on, Bjornless. Besides, there'd still be $9,999,000,000 left.

Anyway, his question is fundamentally silly. It stems from a consumer mentality -- as if you can "spend" $10 billion to buy solutions to immense geo-political and structural problems such as global hunger, disease, terrorism, or climate change. Maybe you can in a Copenhagen conference center, but not in the real world.

The breakfast tables in the grand hall of the NY Yacht Club were full of suits, gathered to hear Bjorn Lomborg, who appeared as he usually does in a short sleeve polo shirt, peddling his popular brand of global warming denialism.

It was a friendly crowd, pulled together by the right wing Manhattan Institute, ready to guffaw easily at Lomborg's jokes aimed at Al Gore. The irony was that to legitimate himself, Lomborg's opening gambit was to project a photograph of himself, the blond Lilliputian, shaking hands with the former Vice President, Nobel Laureate and Oscar winner.

But the crowd was not quite prepared to deal with two things in particular that Lomborg had to say: one, that global warming is real, the science legitimate; and two, that President Bush's ethanol policy is "just very, very bad." But he more than made up for it to his hosts by saying there's no need to do much to solve climate.

Yesterday in Part 2, we examined the intellectual dishonesty at the core of Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus. Today, in the third and final installment of this series, Bjorn's wildly exaggerated statistics on death from excess cold and his stratagem for covering his trail are both exposed.

The Cold Weather Ruse

So let's get back to the cold weather that Bjorn talks about in his little book. He takes his dumb idea -- that global warming means fewer people will die of cold -- and builds a sandcastle fortress of false evidence around it. Here's what he says on page 17.

Yesterday in Part 1 of this series, we explained why American global warming denialists are eager to host Bjorn Lomborg at the New York Yacht Club next week: for he will come peddling his unique brand of inaction called the Copenhagen Consensus. Today, in Part 2, we take a look at the false choice that sits at the core of the Copenhagen Consensus.

The False Choice

On page 44 of his book, you'll find a chart that basically summarizes what the Copenhagen Consensus is, at a single glance. It's a prioritized list of 17 global problems that need attention. #1 on the list is HIV/AIDS. Last on the list is climate change. The chart is titled: "Global priority list for spending extra resources, from the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus." Other things on the list include battling malnutrition, various sanitation and water solutions, malaria control, even trade liberalization.

The list was prioritized by "a panel of top-level economists, including four Nobel laureates." (Note: that's Al Gore times four!) The single criterion they used? How much "good" in the world each dollar spent on each solution does. Thus:

Preventing HIV/AIDS turns out to be the very best investment humanity can make: each dollar spent on condoms and information will do about forty dollars worth of social good.

Does this mean that Bjorn's hosts -- the Manhattan Institute -- together with their fellow right-wing travelers, are now ready to campaign for greater global investments in HIV/AIDS control? Will they be handing out condoms with the Manhattan Institute logo at the Yacht Club breakfast? Unlikely. That's not the positive take-away they are ready to promote.

It is rather, this negative take-away about climate opportunities that they are focused upon selling:

In 2004, Time magazine named Bjorn Lomborg one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He's a hot selling author who's managed to carve out a reputation for occupying the reasonable middle ground in the global warming debate.

He's done that by calling himself a "skeptical environmentalist," even though he's hardly an environmentalist. He's a 43-year-old adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School with a PhD in political science who once directed Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute for a period of two years.