Bjorn Lomborg

'The Skeptical Environmentalist' was much more the idea of the scientific argument of realizing that we need to be skeptical about a lot of these stories that we hear and to put them in context.

I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm an old member of Greenpeace. I worried intensely, as I think most of my friends did, that the world was coming apart.

To some, a cap-and-trade system might sound like a neat approach where the market sorts everything out. But in fact, in some ways it is worse than a tax. With a tax, the costs are obvious. With a cap-and-trade system, the costs are hidden and shifted around. For that reason, many politicians tend to like it. But that is dangerous.

If we invest in researching and developing energy technology, we'll do some real good in the long run, rather than just making ourselves feel good today. But climate change is not the only challenge of the 21st century, and for many other global problems we have low-cost, durable solutions.

If every country committed to spending 0.05 per cent of GDP on researching non-carbon-emitting energy technologies, that would cost $25 billion a year, and it would do a lot more than massive carbon cuts to fight warming and save lives.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Even if every major government were to slap huge taxes on carbon fuels - which is not going to happen - it wouldn't do much to halt climate change any time soon. What it would do is cost us hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of dollars, because alternative energy technologies are not yet ready to take up the slack.

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.

In the rich world, the environmental situation has improved dramatically. In the United States, the most important environmental indicator, particulate air pollution, has been cut by more than half since 1955, rivers and coastal waters have dramatically improved, and forests are increasing.

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.

The main environmental challenge of the 21st century is poverty. When you don't know where your next meal is coming from, it's hard to consider the environment 100 years down the line.

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

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