Zitat des Tages von Bjorn Lomborg:
Think on a 50-year scale, which is a much more natural time-scale for global warming. The US is right now spending about 200 million dollars annually on research into renewable energy.
Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues.
So it's mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.
The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.
But this is an occupational hazard of being a scientist. You say this is the best information I have and then you realize that not everyone is going to read the footnotes or the whole book, so people are going to get the wrong impression.
My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.
It seems incontrovertible to me that there is a global warming effect and that it is going to be serious, probably not in the amount of, say, six degrees warming, but it's likely that we'll get two to three degrees warming and that will be serious enough.
On average, global warming is not going to harm the developing world.
The Kyoto treaty has an estimated cost of between US$150 and $350 billion a year, starting in 2010.
Wishful thinking is not sound public policy.
Just because there is a problem doesn't mean that we have to solve it, if the cure is going to be more expensive than the original ailment.
I really try to say things as they basically are and it so happens that it is a good message that things are getting better, but there are still problems.
The obvious issue is providing clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth at the cost of little more than one year of the Kyoto treaty.
When a business group tells us there is nothing wrong with the environment, naturally they may have good arguments, but we are also sceptical, because we know that they have an interest in these things.
Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it's important to get the sense... are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?
I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.
To prepare adequately for the challenge of global warming, we must acknowledge both the good and the bad that it will bring. If our starting point is to prove that Armageddon is on its way, we will not consider all of the evidence, and will not identify the smartest policy choices.
The saddest fact of climate change - and the chief reason we should be concerned about finding a proper response - is that the countries it will hit hardest are already among the poorest and most long-suffering.
A review was published in Nature, very scathing, essentially calling me incompetent, though they didn't use that word. I am putting a reply on my Web site in a few days, where I go through their arguments, paragraph by paragraph.
We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we'll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports.
Lots of people say we should fly less, heat less, and put on a sweater. But it's not going to happen. People are happy to say that for other people, but not themselves.
The only thing that will really change global warming in the long run is if we radically increase the speed with which we get alternative technologies to deal with climate change.
I'm a vegetarian, but I don't expect other people not to eat meat.
I think Al Gore has done a great service in making global warming cool. He's basically taken it from a nerdy, almost ignored issue to making it what it is - namely, a problem.
