Bjørn Lomborg, a guru of climate change research, shares his take on global warming and what stands behind it
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By: Yekaterina Kudashkina, Please, tell me, do you think that there really is a connection between the growing number of natural disasters and the global warming process as such? Well, first of all global warming is real, it is men-made and it is an important problem. But the way it is often being portrayed as the cause of the vast majority of extreme weather incidents is simply unfounded. If we look at a lot of the catastrophes that we’ve seen over the last years and that have been very well published, they are by far mostly driven by social factors. If you look for instance at hurricanes – the reason why we have ever more damage from hurricanes is because many more people live on coastlines and typically with more and more wealth. If you actually correct that, and we have the best data for the US, you’ll see no change in incidents whatsoever. And there is purely radical reason to believe that by the end of the century we will probably see slightly stronger hurricanes, probably also slightly fewer, but this is really not what we are seeing right now. What we are seeing right is that we have increasing social vulnerability because of more people and more stuff. Sir, when I was looking at various figures,...
