(2006-11-30) Lomborg Interview

Fresh interview with Bjorn Lomborg. Perhaps this is most clear when you look at the movie from Al Gore (Inconvenient Truth). Everything he says is technically true. He says for instance that if Greenland melts, sea levels will rise about 20 feet. This is technically true. But of course the very evocative imagery of seeing Holland disappear under the waves - or New York, or Shanghai - leaves the impression that this is all going to happen very soon. Where in fact the UN climate panel says that the sea level rise over the next 100 years is going to be 30 cm - about 20 times less than he talks about. So there is a dramatic difference between what we're being told and what we're actually seeing. Which is also why I am writing a new book which comes out next fall on Climate Change, and I will address some of these issues... Global Warming is an important issue and one which we should address. But there is no sense of proportion either in environmental terms, or indeed in terms of the other issues facing the world. If you just take the environmental problem first, it's very clear that what causes by far the majority of deaths is lack clean drinking water (Clean Water) and lack of sanitation. Millions of people are dying each year from this. Also taking the new WHO estimates of what really kills people, these are the huge issues. The second biggest problem is indoor Air Pollution, which probably kills somewhere between 1 and 3 million people each year, basically because people are too poor to use good fuels and end up using dung or cardboard or whatever they can find. Only a very distant third comes climate change, which the WHO puts at 150,000 to die right now.