ignore global warming and "save the world"

i don't normally lift an entire article, but this one touched me... and reminded me of several previous posts in my archives on global warming and the kyoto accords...


'Ignore Global Warming,' Says Former Greenpeace Member
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
December 14, 2004

Buenos Aires, Argentina (CNSNews.com) - A former member of Greenpeace who became disillusioned with what he saw as bad eco-science urged a United Nations climate change conference to "save the world" by ignoring global warming.

"Climate change is a huge thing, but there is very little that we can do about it," Bjorn Lomborg told CNSNews.com following a speech in Buenos Aires on Monday.

Lomborg, the author of the new book Global Crisis, Global Solutions, also wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book devoted to debunking many of the alarmist claims of environmental groups. He is attending the U.N.'s Conference of Parties or COP-10 meeting on climate change here.

In an essay published Monday in the London Telegraph, Lomborg wrote that "global warming has become the obsession of our time" and "is the moral test of our age."

Lomborg believes that global warming is real and is caused by C02, but he adds that mankind can "do very little about the warming."

Lomborg, an associate professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, is in Buenos Aires trying to convince world governments to worry less about climate change and concentrate instead on what he considers solvable problems, such as AIDS, poverty and inadequate sanitation.

Lomborg organized the "Copenhagen Consensus," an international team of economists and others who conducted a cost-benefit analysis of the world's most pressing problems.

"So in a curious way, global warming really is the moral test of our time, but not in the way its proponents imagined. We need to stop our obsession with global warming and start dealing with the many more pressing issues in the world, where we can do [the] most good, first and quickest," Lomborg argued.

According to Lomborg, any effects that global warming may have on people 100 years from now will be muted because poor nations are projected to be much wealthier and thus better equipped to deal with any climate complications.

"The people who are going to be affected by it in 2100 are likely going to be much richer," Lomborg told an audience at the Universidad de Ciencias Monday night.

"By the U.N.'s own scenarios, everyone [in poor nations] will be at least as rich as we are today in the developed world in 2100; and much more likely, they will be 2 to 4 times more wealthy than the developed world is today. Of course, the developed world will be even much richer than that," Lomborg predicted.

"Imagine if you were a rich Chinese or a rich Rwandan or a rich Bolivian in 2100, looking back on 2004, saying how odd that the people of 2004 were so concerned about helping me a little bit through climate change and so relatively unconcerned about helping my grandfather and my great-grandfather who needed the help much, much more," he said.

"If we can't do everything, let's make sure that we actually do something that is going to help the world a lot rather than just a little," Lomborg said.