Lomborg on Lomborg

I posted a few weeks ago on news that Bjorn Lomborg was hedging his bets on global warming.

Here's a clarifying update from Lomborg himself in the WSJ...

After years of being accused of believing something I didn't believe—or, more accurately, not believing something I really did—I made headlines last month for changing my mind even though I hadn't.

Confused? Imagine how I feel.

It's worth explaining what happened to me because it tells us something important about why the global warming debate has produced so little in the way of results.

First, a little background. Ever since 2001, when I published "The Skeptical Environmentalist"—a book in which I argued that the world's environmental problems were getting better—I've been wrongly accused of being a global warming denier.

The fact that I've always asserted the reality of man-made climate change never seemed to make an impression on my critics. What mattered was that I had the temerity to question two key tenets of the received wisdom about global warming: I was skeptical of the idea that we were facing the apocalypse, and I didn't accept that the only solution was to mandate drastic cuts in carbon emissions.

That's the way it is with heresy—there is no middle ground....

My reputation among climate activists worsened in 2008, when the Copenhagen Consensus Center, the think tank I founded, published the results of a wide-ranging cost-benefit analysis of solutions to 10 of the world's most pressing problems....

The main global-warming solution our experts analyzed was the carbon-cutting approach advocated by Al Gore and endorsed at the 1997 global climate summit in Kyoto. We found that compared to solutions to other problems, direct carbon cuts were woefully ineffective....The Kyoto approach is not the only way forward. In 2009, we convened another group to look at a variety of potential solutions to climate change beyond simply cutting carbon. Our experts (including three Nobel laureates) identified a number of other approaches to the problem that were economically feasible and likely to have a quicker and more powerful impact....

[After] an Aug. 31 interview with the Guardian, the British newspaper...what happened next was startling. The Guardian reported my commonplace observation as evidence of "an apparent U-turn" by "the world's most high-profile climate change skeptic." This set off a media stampede; news organizations around the world scrambled to report my so-called change of heart....