Little did I know when criticising Bjorn Lomborg's book early last week, that the week would turn out to be quite a rematch in this area. Even Mr. Lomborg got space in the news.

The United Nation's climate change conference will be held in Copenhagen in December this year. As a preparation for the meeting, 2000 scientists from 80 countries gathered in Copenhagen last week, and they are stepping up on their warnings. The sea level is now estimated to rise  more than awhole meter by end of 2100, as opposed to 18-59 cm which was the previous estimate from 2007. A second press release states that even 40 percent of the world's energy needs in 2050 could be satisfied by renewable electricity, if the right political and financial decisions are made now. The conference also states that, instead of costing money, strict greenhouse gas regulations can in fact increase economical profitability by creating new innovations, jobs, and by collecting new taxes that can again be injected to R&D. Their final press release lists 6 different key messages from the conferene. The language is clear, and include a little of the typical cautiousness of scientists. They are serious, and want the messages to be heard loud and clear: Global warming is proceeding faster than we previously thought, and time is running out!

This would be exactly the kind of language that Bjorn Lomborg's book blamed as creating mass hysteria. Kevin Anderson, one of the researchers taking part in the conference said "Scientists have lost patience with carefully constructed messages being lost in the political noise. We are now prepared to stand up and say enough is enough".

One of the people who Lomborg attacked in his book, was Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern Review. Lomborg's book states that the Stern report is "massively exaggerated",  "consistently biased and selective", and "heavily tilted towards unwarranted alarm". Lomborg also says that calculations for climate change damages in Stern's reports are "vastly inflated", and costs of actions "vastly underrestimated, continuing a well-known appraisal optimism". Stern is the formed Chief Economist in World Bank. Lomborg didn't show any evidence to his own claims, which is why I was disappointed with the book.

Funnily enough, Friday's The Daily Telegraph quotes both gentlemen. Stern was speaking at the Copenhagen conference, saying that increases in the average world temperature of 6 degrees by the end of 2100 is an increasing possibility, which will result southern Europe to look like Sahara. Stern commented that politicians continue to underrestimate the impact of climate change, and that scientists need to redouble their efforst to get them understand. "We're less than 100 months away from saving the planet".

The same newspaper gave space to Bjorn Lomborg for presenting his theory on how global warming actually saves lives. I told about this theory in the book review earlier. In short, Lombrog claims that cold kills more people than heat, therefore global warming will save lives.

I would be surprised why a respected newspaper would print such nonsense, but since starting to read an interesting book on how the global media works, this makes sense. Newspapers don't want to be seen partial, this is why they  always try to seek a counterbalancing comment. Global warming was an example case in this book, called Flat Earth News. I will report more on this wonderful book once I've finished reading.

Sources: All links from this entry, The Independent March 11&12, The Daily Telegraph March 13. Bjorn Lomborg: Cool it pp 135-137.