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The plan we are most likely to adopt to address climate change will cost far too much and do next to nothing. The fight over the science of warming is over, yes. But the debate over the solution to global warming hasn't even begun. I. A False Choice On a family visit to Kenya long before he became president of the United States, Barack Obama declared that he wanted to go on safari. His Kenyan half sister, Auma, chided him for being a neocolonialist."Why should all that land be set aside for tourists," she asked, "when it could be used...

One of the tricks in the global warming alarmist playbook over the years has been to show how global warming will cause sea levels to rise and flood the low-lying coastal areas where population centers happen to be, specifically lower Manhattan in New York City. However, the imagery used by Al Gore in his "An Inconvenient Truth" and by various other global warming made-for-television specials isn't scientifically accurate according to Bjørn Lomborg, author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming." Lomborg was asked by Gene Epstein in the May 18 issue of Barron's if it would be...

In one of his first public policy statements as America’s president-elect, Barack Obama focused on climate change, and clearly stated both his priori ties and the facts on which these priorities rest. Unfortunately, both are weak, or even wrong. According to Obama, “few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change.” Such a statement is now commonplace for most political leaders around the world, even though it neglects to address the question of how much we can do to help America and the world through climate policies versus other policies. Consider, for example, hurricanes in...

Want to save the polar bear? According to one expert, don’t think you’re going to do it by making significant lifestyle changes in order to reduce your carbon footprint. In May, the Interior Department listed the polar on its threatened species list because of the risks of shrinking sea ice. But Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish author and professor at the Copenhagen Business School, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on June 25 that the threat is exaggerated and wouldn’t go away even if every country in the world signed and followed the Kyoto Protocol. Lomborg, author of “Cool It: The...

May 14, 2008, 7:20 a.m. Don’t Freak OutBjørn Lomborg speaks climate sense to nonsense. An NRO Q&A We need to “cool our conversation, rein in the exaggerations, and start focusing where we can do the most good.” So Bjørn Lomborg writes in his recent book, Cool It!: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. This Danish statistician and “skeptical environmentalist” (the title of his earlier book) was recently named one of the “50 people who could save the planet” by the Guardian. Impatient with the overheated rhetoric and hyper-pessimism of conventional climate politics, Lomborg takes a cold, hard look...

By focusing exclusively on future warming, Live Earth does a disservice to development and disease prevention in the here and now. _______________________________ The Live Earth concerts will hopefully be a lot of fun for those who get the chance to see them live or watch them on television. But I think the organisers are wrong when they say that climate change is the most pressing issue facing mankind. If you ask the 15million people who are going to die from easily curable infectious diseases next year, the idea that climate change is our top priority seems to be massively overblown....