Climate denialist Lomborg changes his mind

This video from Australia says about itself:

23 April 2012

Naomi Oreskes explains with great clarity the driving force behind climate denial – aversion to the political and economic implications of climate change.

UPDATE: Some commenters are asking about evidence that humans are causing global warming. A summary is provided at http://sks.to/evidence and http://sks.to/agw with links to the many peer-reviewed papers that provide empirical evidence for human caused global warming.

Many thanks to the producers of I Can Change Your Mind about Climate for granting permission to repost this footage, which didn’t make the final cut of the documentary. More info about the film is available at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/changeyourmind/.

This video says about itself:

The Denial Machine

In the past few years, a hurricane has engulfed the debate about global warming. This scientific issue has become a rhetorical firestorm with science pitted against spin and inflammatory words on both sides. This documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences.

It shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those willing to question the science behind climate change, providing funding for some of them, their organizations and their studies.

From British daily The Guardian:

Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change

Exclusive ‘Sceptical environmentalist’

This is how Lomborg describes himself. However, he is (or now: used to be??) neither a real sceptic nor a real environmentalist. I’d say that the word “sceptic” should be reserved for critics of pseudo-science like astrology or creationism or Holocaust denial; not for people who attack evidence based science like meteorology or environmental biology; while being, like in Lomborg’s case, qualified in neither of those, but a statistician.

The word “environmentalist” may mean:

a) environmental scientist, which Lomborg is not.

b) advocate for more pro environment measures, which Lomborg so far has not been, quite the contrary; but which may change now.

and critic of climate scientists to declare global warming a chief concern facing world

Monday 30 August 2010 20.17 BST

The world’s most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and “a challenge humanity must confront”, in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby. …

Despite his change of tack, however, Lomborg is likely to continue to have trenchant critics. Writing for today’s Guardian, Howard Friel, author of the book The Lomborg Deception, said: “If Lomborg were really looking for smart solutions, he would push for an end to perpetual and brutal war, which diverts scarce resources from nearly everything that Lomborg legitimately says needs more money.”

See also here.

From a Lomborg interview:

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.

The climate deniers of the left (Cockburn etc.): here.

Out-of-State Billionaire Oil Barons Pour Seven Figures into California’s Climate-Killing Prop 23: here.

Robert Benson, Miller-McCune: “You’ve got to go back to the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 for a precedent to the anti-science mania that is currently sweeping the GOP. Then, the issue was teaching Darwin’s work on evolution in the schools. Today, the issue is global warming. Then, as now, large numbers of politicians tapped into the stratum of popular culture that simply rejects science as the basis for public or personal decisions… We are in Tennessee again, 1925, in the grip of the anti-scientists and their politicians. We will lose a generation in dealing with greenhouse gases. Yet the science says we have only a few years”: here.

Conservative donors pump nearly $1 BILLION a year into climate denying groups, according to a new study: here.