Bjorn Lomborg Quotes

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Bjorn Lomborg

Profession : Scientist

Birth : January 6, 1965

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

Bjorn Lomborg

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

I tentatively believe in a god. I was brought up in a fairly religious home. I think the world is compatible with reincarnation, karma, all that stuff.

Bjorn Lomborg

Think on a 50-year scale, which is a much more natural time-scale for global warming. The US is right now spending about 200 million dollars annually on research into renewable energy.

Bjorn Lomborg

Just because there is a problem doesn't mean that we have to solve it, if the cure is going to be more expensive than the original ailment.

Bjorn Lomborg

The fact that we're catching more fish per person than we've ever done before doesn't mean that there are not particular places where we've managed fisheries badly.

Bjorn Lomborg

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

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

Bjorn Lomborg

The Kyoto treaty has an estimated cost of between US$150 and $350 billion a year, starting in 2010.

Bjorn Lomborg

Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues.

Bjorn Lomborg

Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it's important to get the sense... are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?

Bjorn Lomborg

My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.

Bjorn Lomborg

Even if I was a bad right wing guy, to the extent of whether my arguments are right or wrong, they're right or wrong independently if I'm right or left.

Bjorn Lomborg

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

Bjorn Lomborg

We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we'll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports.

Bjorn Lomborg

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.

Bjorn Lomborg

On average, global warming is not going to harm the developing world.

Bjorn Lomborg