When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years.

Bjorn Lomborg

Categorized in : Thinking Years Past

My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.

Bjorn Lomborg

suggestions drinking water

Winter regularly takes many more lives than any heat wave: 25,000 to 50,000 each year die in Britain from excess cold. Across Europe, there are six times more cold-related deaths than heat-related deaths...by 2050...Warmer temperatures will save 1.4 million lives each year.

Bjorn Lomborg

winter europe years

On average, global warming is not going to harm the developing world.

Bjorn Lomborg

global-warming average world

Money spent on carbon cuts is money we can't use for effective investments in food aid, micronutrients, HIV/AIDS prevention, health and education infrastructure, and clean water and sanitation.

Bjorn Lomborg

hiv cutting water

We need to invest dramatically in green energy, making solar panels so cheap that everybody wants them. Nobody wanted to buy a computer in 1950, but once they got cheap, everyone bought them.

Bjorn Lomborg

green energy needs

There is no question that global warming will have a significant impact on already existing problems such as malaria, malnutrition, and water shortages. But this doesn't mean the best way to solve them is to cut carbon emissions.

Bjorn Lomborg

carbon-emissions cutting mean

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

want long thinking

We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more, but the number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.

Bjorn Lomborg

cnn numbers past

Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues.

Bjorn Lomborg

issues groups needs

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

energy years thinking

Global warming is real - it is man-made and it is an important problem. But it is not the end of the world.

Bjorn Lomborg

important real men

So it's mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.

Bjorn Lomborg

overcoming helping world

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

issues taken thinking

The total efforts of the last 20 years of climate policy has likely reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent, or about 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

Bjorn Lomborg

kyoto effort years

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

get-better messages trying

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

degrees three two

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

technology running long

Listen, global warming is a real problem, but it's not the end of the world. A 30-centimetre sea level rise is just not going to bring the world to a standstill, just like it didn't over the last 150 years.

Bjorn Lomborg

real sea years

For the longest time in Denmark I didn't want to say what I was politically. I thought it was irrelevant.

Bjorn Lomborg

irrelevant denmark want

I'm a vegetarian, but I don't expect other people not to eat meat.

Bjorn Lomborg

vegetarian meat people