Climate Change Skeptic Changes Position
Bjorn Lomborg, a noted climate change skeptic, has changed his position and is now in favor of a comprehensive approach to try and address the problem:
Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist who found fame as the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” has completed a study of the best ways to address the warming of the planet.
His chief finding: the most cost-effective and technically feasible approach is through geoengineering, the use of technology to deliberately alter the earth’s climate.
Specifically, Mr. Lomborg, along with the scientists and economists he has assembled, found that the most promising avenue is to invest $9 billion in accelerated research on so-called marine cloud whitening technology.
The idea is to create vast fleets of robot ships to pump seawater droplets into the clouds above the oceans to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Mr. Lomborg said he was relying on a paper, “An Analysis of Climate Engineering as a Response to Climate Change,” by J. Eric Bickel of the University of Texas, Austin, and Lee Lane of the American Enterprise Institute, for his conclusions.
He acknowledges that this sounds a bit like a salt-spray-in-the-sky solution to a vastly complex problem, but he is convinced that it holds more promise than the policies discussed or tried so far, including carbon taxes, global cap-and-trade programs and large-scale deployment of existing technologies like so-called clean diesel cars.
He also admits that any climate-altering plan could have dangerous unforeseen consequences.
“What we’re proposing is research to make sure that all the concerns are addressed,” Mr. Lomborg, who looks a bit like a surfer and talks like a television evangelist, said in an interview today in Washington. “There is good reason to believe this works — and it’s 1,000 times better than what we’re proposing to do now.”
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