Mr Lomborg defends these positions on the basis of official data and published science.
Dr Lomborg argues that such losses, seen in a long-term perspective, do not matter much.
Mr Lomborg, it is important to note, does not say that all is well with the world.
He accepts Dr Lomborg's optimistic assessment of the environment, but says it holds only for the developed world.
And The Economist for that matter does not say that Mr Lomborg is right about every issue he addresses.
Mr Lomborg reckons that the benefits of implementing the Kyoto protocol would probably outweigh the costs, but not until 2100.
Dr Lomborg explains that the proposals on climate change fared poorly because they offered the lowest benefits for the costs incurred.
ECONOMIST: The debate over global warming is getting rancorous
As environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg notes, manufacturing and charging electric cars over their life cycle can produce more carbon than small, gas-powered vehicles.
Mr Lomborg diligently piles on the footnotes (2, 930 of them) so there is no dispute about where his numbers have come from.
Mr. Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Washington, D.
Dr Lomborg insists that that was not at all the case.
ECONOMIST: The debate over global warming is getting rancorous
Lomborg, author of the book "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, " believes the cap-and-trade approach favored by Flannery and others is doomed to failure.
We would, essentially, be in the Lomborg world, where solar (and others, perhaps fuel cells) become cheaper than fossil fuels long before climate change itself is a serious probloem.
FORBES: Maybe Climate Change Just Really Isn't A Problem After All?
Denmark's free-market government named Bjorn Lomborg , reviled by greens worldwide for not believing that global eco-disaster is round the corner, to head a new office of environmental assessment.
Bizarrely, one of Dr Lomborg's critics in Scientific American criticises as an affectation the book's insistence on documenting every statistic and every quotation with a reference to a published source.
Of course, greens howled in protest at the dismissal of climate change, and pointed to some sort of stitch up: after all, some argued, Dr Lomborg is well known for his opposition to the Kyoto treaty.
ECONOMIST: The debate over global warming is getting rancorous
Dr Lomborg agrees that there are local and regional environmental pressures, and that these matter a lot, but it is fair to point out that the book has little to say about them, except to argue that rising incomes will help.
We do believe, however, that he is right on his main points, that his critique of much green activism and its reporting in the media is just, and, above all, that where there is room for disagreement, Mr Lomborg invites and facilitates discussion, rather than seeking to silence it.
The Copenhagen Consensus, a project led by Bjorn Lomborg, a professor at the University of Aarhus, in Denmark, and publicised by this newspaper, made something of a splash a few months ago by ranking climate change at the bottom of a list of pressing global problems (see articles).
ECONOMIST: The debate over global warming is getting rancorous
Environmentalists typically use the same sources, but, as Mr Lomborg lays bare, are much less scrupulous about setting short runs of data in their long-term context, for instance, or about quoting ranges of data, where that is appropriate, rather than whatever extreme of any given range best suits their case.
应用推荐