A conversation with Bjorn Lomborg.

DDT is not dangerous to humans, but it is dangerous to some animals. So if you're in a rich country where you have malaria under control, clearly you should ban DDT or severely restrict its use.

But our concern about DDT in the early 70s basically meant that most of the developing world restricted their use as well. That was probably an immensely bad judgement because yes, it harms animals like birds, but it also saves human lives. These actions undoubtedly led to many millions of lives lost. So that is one example of where we need to be very careful about what we do.

But I think we are doing a little bit the same thing with climate change discussions right now. We have spent so much time over the last 10 years trying to do something about climate change. We have a treaty that will essentially do nothing whatsoever about climate change and it will still end up costing us quite a bit. And you've got to ask yourself, couldn't we have spent that amount of time and effort and consideration on addressing some of the issues in the world where we could have done an enormous amount of good?

I'm starting to lump the Global Warming crowd into the "If I keep saying it, soon it will be true." group. Average mean temp hasn't changed a wit in the last hundred years measured on US shores (the most reliable and consistent data). If we start talking more about asteroid collisions, will we write more books and have Algore movies too? Maybe Al will show us the aftermath of getting sideswiped on the freeway by extrasolar objects.

I completely think that global warming activists overstate the case for global warming. I wholeheartedly endorse a report I read a while back by some economists that tried to think about what would be useful to spend money fixing. Things like malaria, aids, access to fresh water, etc. were what came up as the best "bang for the buck" in helping the people of the world; spending money fighting global warming was extremely low on the totem pole.

I also remember being in school in the late 70's being told how we would run out of oil in 30-40 years. Guess what? These doom sayers think we're idiots with no memory. They scared me when I was 8, and they scare me no more.

However; I actually was under the impression that there is in fact a warming trend that's been going on over the past 100 years or so, it's simply that attributing it to man's activities is silly. Is that not the case? Is there in fact no warming trend?

Not commenting on global warming, but Bjorn Lomborg has written some incredibly stupid things on, say, forest conservation, just falsehoods and statistical mistakes. That was dissected in Nature years ago.

But of course the economists love him and continue to quote him.

Or then again, was it Science, don't remember anymore exactly...

Jeff says: Is that not the case? Is there in fact no warming trend?

I read a study supplied in this forum that stated that the average mean temperature has been measured worldwide for the past hundred years or so. The most reliable data of course is from the USA, with the least amount of strife to cause the data to not be collected. Worldwide, the avg mean temp rose .6 degrees F during that time, however, the avg mean temp in the USA has not changed in the past 100 years. Keep in mind, its an average so we go up and down. That's pretty open and shut for me...Its also good to remember that in the mid-eighties, the concern was the absolute danger of global cooling...

I remember a program called "In Search Of..." with Leonard Nimoy narrating, back in the late 70's or early 80's. I remember being frightened by one about the return of the ice age. Then (at the time) I remembered hearing something about the world getting scarily hot, maybe even on a different "In Search Of..."

I also remember being scared about the encroachment of killer bees, based on some documentary I saw.

Some scary things are clearly real. But I got all worn out of "you should be scared about this!" when I was a child.

Average mean temp hasn't changed a wit in the last hundred years measured on US shores

I'm happy to give them the IPCC figure of 0.9C.

But considering that we've been coming out of the Little Ice Age, I'm most certainly not prepared to accept that it's all or even mostly anthropogenic based on the evidence of non-regression tested computer models.