Too hot to handle?

Bjorn Lomborg with Al Gore at a Washington climate-change hearing in 2007. Photo: AFP

They lived on opposite sides of the globe – one a man, the other a boy – but long before Tony Abbott quoted climate contrarian Bjørn Lomborg in his 2009 autobiography, Battlelines, the pair shared a sobriquet: critics dubbed Abbott the “Mad Monk” because of an early period spent studying for the priesthood; Lomborg, a one-time altar boy in Denmark’s Liberal Catholic Church, was also known as “the monk” by his schoolmates – his adult detractors prefer to assail him with more trenchant and, possibly, less alliterative epithets than merely “mad”.

Abbott, who told a 2009 meeting in western Victoria that the science of human-induced climate change was “absolute crap”, later came to office chanting “Axe the [carbon] tax.” These days, he’s a whipping boy for Washington and Beijing for dragging his heels on the formulation of policy to counter climate change, particularly on the vexed issue of cutting carbon emissions. Lomborg is a former Greenpeace member who made an explosive entry into the climate debate in 2001 with the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist (TSE), in which he argues that much of the fight for the planet is bogus: that policies to counter global warming are a great waste of money and that the alarmist predictions on which they’re based are driven by a self-serving hunger for research grants among scientists.

In 2002, John Rennie, then editor-in-chief at Scientific American magazine, led a withering condemnation. “[This is the story] of a political scientist who wades into the vastly complex, unsettled literature of environmental science, scrutinises a fraction of what is to be found there and emerges confident that the simple summary he has developed is a fair and accurate representation of the science, notwithstanding the warnings of experts in the disciplines he skims that he is mistaken,” he wrote in his magazine’s demolition of the newcomer, the central component of which was an 11-page critique of TSE by four prominent scientists.

Showtime: Lomborg performs in 2005. Photo: Getty Images

Yet the Abbott government has summoned Lomborg, not once but twice this year, to the frontline of Australia’s policy wars. In March, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop appointed him to her new, 14-strong InnovationXchange, an advisory panel on getting the best return on Australia’s foreign-aid investment. And in April it was revealed that Canberra would contribute $4 million to the running of a branch of Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Centre (CCC) – the Australia Consensus Centre – at the University of Western Australia (UWA). On May 8, however, in a spectacular turnaround, the UWA announced its decision to pull out of the agreement. A chastened vice chancellor Paul Johnson said: “The [academic protests] of the past few weeks place the centre in an untenable position as it lacks the support needed across the university and the broader academic community.”

The inside story behind the UWA gambit is yet to emerge. The initiative was reportedly driven by the prime minister’s office, but Abbott has remained silent on the subject. Ever loquacious in his advice to the world, Lomborg himself stonewalled: “It’s part of my job to not talk about what was said,” he said.

At 50, Bjørn Lomborg is quite the modern ascetic. He doesn’t drive, drink or smoke. He’s gay and a vegetarian. There’s a boyish charm: the eyes are a piercing blue, the mop of blond hair fashionably clipped. He totes a backpack and usually steps out in a close-fitting black T-shirt, denim jeans and brightly coloured sneakers. He thinks there probably is a God, which makes him something of an outlier among his fellow Danes.

At 50, Bjørn Lomborg is quite the modern ascetic. Photo: Nicky Bonne/Redux/Headpress

Lomborg’s stepfather was a musician and priest in the Liberal Catholic Church, which Lomborg describes as a mix of Christianity and Buddhism. His father, a florist, died when he was a toddler. His mother was a primary school teacher and it is to her that he attributes his curiosity and a hunger for learning. Mocked at school for his church attendance, he came to understand that “You don’t have to be liked all the time,” he tells me when we meet in Boston in April.

Lomborg was the first in his family to graduate from university – from the University of Aarhus in 1991 with an MA in political science; he also has a PhD from the University of Copenhagen. He has lived most of his life in Denmark, but cleared out in 2012 when an incoming government axed the $2 million-a-year funding for his research centre in Copenhagen. Exiling himself to an apartment in Prague, Lomborg huffily told a reporter, “I’m not going to stay in a country that doesn’t want me.”

In the 2010 documentary Cool It, by Ondi Timoner, based on Lomborg’s second book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007), the camera follows him around the world: cycling through Copenhagen’s cobbled streets; distributing food in the slums of Nairobi; appearing before the US Congress, one black T-shirt in a sea of suits. But for a few minutes, the footage becomes intensely personal as the viewer follows him into a home for the aged in Denmark. He is visiting his mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease.

Lomborg’s stepfather was a musician and priest in the Liberal Catholic Church. Photo: Nicky Bonne/Redux

Talking over loving scenes of mother and son in a lingering embrace, going for a walk and having a meal out together, Lomborg explains that his mother knows who he is but has difficulty recalling what happened five minutes earlier. He says, “The reason I’m able to say stuff that makes me deeply unpopular with some people is that I feel secure in the world, that fundamentally someone loves me. That comes from my mom.”

He talks about his childhood – of becoming a vegetarian at the age of 11 because he didn’t want animals to die and of how he became so fired up by the campaigns against nuclear power and fossil fuels that he tried to build a windmill. “We had dug up half of the garden when my stepfather brought the project to a halt,” he says.

Lomborg played the tuba at school and later the piano, which he still enjoys. Carol Anne Oxborrow, a British physicist based in Copenhagen, remembers hearing him practise when she occupied the apartment below his: “He’s deeply classical,” she says, “and a big fan of opera.”

Lomborg at a business forum in Canada in 2013.Photo: AAP

Next to the grand piano in his apartment was a large screen on which he indulged his passion for computer games. Lars Norgaard, who has known Lomborg since 1980, describes his friend’s consuming interests as “child-like”. “He loves candy, Coca-Cola and ice-cream,” he says, “though I think he’s been trying to quit since he hit 50. We were a heavy-drinking team of high-school boys and Bjørn was the only one who didn’t drink, but with his self-confidence it was never a problem for him or anybody else. We worried about how soon we could get our driver’s licences: he worried about the plight of the world.”

Norgaard, a specialist in chemometrics, describes the 15-year-old Lomborg as a precocious student at their Aalborghus high school in the far north of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. “Bjørn always had his hand up, even before he knew what the teacher’s next question would be. In our monthly maths assignments, we’d all take 10 pages to set out our [working], but he was always so confident of the maths that he used to get the whole thing on a single page. He was far ahead of the rest of us, but always ready to help. He came back from a study year in the US fixed on political science: he believed this was a way to help people.”

When I meet Lomborg in Boston, he explains, “I’ve been a vegetarian for 39 years and I’ve never owned a car. These are choices that are right for me because of my personal views about nature and the environment. Even my detractors agree I’m a passionate and fierce advocate for the policies I believe will best help the planet.”

A drawing of marine cloud whitening technology.Photo: Supplied

When Britain’s New Statesman magazine asked him in 2010 if his sexuality affected his career, he replied: “I didn’t want to be the gay guy who talks about the environment. I wanted to be the guy who talks about the environment who happens to be gay.” He tells me, “I only say ‘Yes’ [to interview requests] to get to what’s interesting. I want to talk about substance.” A pause. “It’s why I don’t doDancing With the Stars.”

After hours of back and forth, I get Lomborg to reduce his core climatic credo to a single paragraph. “Global warming is real,” he tells me. “It is mostly caused by humanity. Elaborate, expensive climate change policies have failed for two decades. They cost much more than the good they will do, and will have little impact on temperatures, even in 100 years. Germany, for example, spends $130 billion on solar subsidies that will postpone warming by 37 hours. To fix global warming, we need to invest in R&D. And we need to remember that for the vast majority of people, there are much more important concerns: poverty, lack of food and access to health. There are smart policies to fix these global challenges today and, in doing so, make a truly meaningful change for the world’s most vulnerable citizens.” So speaks a contrarian on the complex science, politics and economics of climate.

The British environment writer Charles Moore was politic when he reportedly observed: “There’s definitely a glint in his eye – either madness or mischief, depending on your point of view.” And Lomborg enjoys stirring the pot, telling me: “The climate deniers underplay, and the alarmists overplay, the impact of climatic change. Unfortunately, the middle ground has been abandoned; the debate’s become more about allegiance to a point of view than to the facts.”

As revealed in the increasingly strident reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), from which the UN takes critical scientific advice, the debate among scientists is over. By one count, 97 per cent of about 2000 peer-reviewed papers published in the past 20 years affirm that humans cause global warming. Dozens of national and international scientific bodies agree. But if the scientists have consensus, corporations and politicians don’t.

At one time, Lomborg, self-described as liberal and left, was with the scientists. He accepted all the warnings, embraced all the proposed solutions; he’d argue that in the absence of a major response, the world would collapse through air pollution, the extinction of species, over-population and the depletion of natural resources.

But in 1997, life changed forever for the then 32-year-old, who thought he’d settled into a career as an associate professor teaching statistics at his alma mater, Aarhus University. Flipping through a copy of Wired magazine in a LA bookshop, he became fixated on an interview with the contrarian American economist Julian Simon. Back in Aarhus, Lomborg assembled a team of his brightest students: their task was to research all of Simon’s controversial claims on climate and the environment so that they could explode his arguments using mass statistics. “But we found that much of what Simon said was true,” says Lomborg.

He offered to write a series of articles for Denmark’s centre-left Politiken newspaper and they caused an uproar. In 1998, longer versions of these became a Danish book, which created further uproar. And in 2001, he expanded the material even further and Cambridge University Press published TSE. It met with collective apoplexy. In it, Lomborg laid out for a global audience his newly minted insistence on cost-benefit analysis as a tool to prioritise public policy options. If the First World wanted to play futile climate games, he said, millions would remain sick and starving – or die – in the developing world.

Here was a former member of Greenpeace accusing environmentalists and scientists of exaggerating the data on global warming, overpopulation, energy, deforestation, species loss, water shortages and more. After interviewing him in 2001, Stuart Wavell wrote in London’sSunday Times: “A pending fuel crisis? Forget it: we are not running out of energy or natural resources, Lomborg claims. World hunger? Baloney: food is increasing per head of population. Extinction of species? Rubbish: the world’s species are not vanishing at an alarming rate. Disappearing forests? Tosh: forest cover has increased. In fact, nearly every indicator demonstrates man’s lot has vastly improved, he proclaims.”

Previously, the climate debate had been cast in scary global outcomes. Now there was a move to cast it in scary financial outgoings, with Lomborg claiming the statistical high ground, putting seemingly prohibitive price tags – tens and hundreds of trillions of dollars – on proposed climate fixes, such as cutting carbon emissions. In doing so, he placed the scientific cause in jeopardy: stratospheric figures would simply drive industrialists and politicians towards delay and denial. And that, argued the scientists, could endanger us all.

His critics accused him of bias; the over-simplification of complex issues; the misuse, misrepresentation and misinterpretation of data; flawed logic; and wilful ignorance. He achieved the rare feat of being likened simultaneously to Adolf Hitler and Holocaust deniers.

Complaints piled up at the door of the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, which, in 2003, issued the following pretzel-like ruling: yes, TSE displayed “systematic one-sidedness” and “fell within the concept of scientific dishonesty”, but because it stopped short of declaring Lomborg to have been grossly negligent, the committee found that no, he could not be deemed to have been scientifically dishonest. There was no evidence that Lomborg had deliberately tried to mislead, but TSE was “clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice”.

“It was the worst day of my life,” says Lomborg. “I didn’t know if I could hold my ground.”

Months later, however, in December 2003, he claimed vindication when the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovations upended the committees’ decision, citing its “significant neglect” in not identifying particular areas of dishonesty by Lomborg; in being “clearly wrong” in relying on criticism of the book by others and in not allowing Lomborg to respond to its findings before their publication.

He did not become an international pariah. Indeed, the telegenic Lomborg is a persistent and persuasive frontman for his Copenhagen Consensus Centre, which has become prodigious in publishing reports that, in turn, generate a whirlwind of speaking engagements: he is on the road 200 days a year. He regularly writes opinion pieces, many for The Wall Street Journal. The Economist hosts some of his forums. And he has been ushered into the pantheon of the wise: Lomborg is on Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in the world; Esquire‘s 75 most influential; and Business Week‘s 50 Stars of Europe. Even the UK’s left-leaning Guardian sanctifies him as one of 50 who can save the planet.

Lomborg oozes confidence that is, in equal parts, fierce and casual. On stage in a lecture theatre at Harvard University, in Boston’s suburban Cambridge, he moves to and from the lectern, palming a remote that seamlessly matches Power Point slides with his easy delivery. His seeming youth and his casual garb messages to students that he is one of them.

He’s on campus to talk about his “smart solutions” project. The UN is on the verge of finalising a 15-year program of global development goals that will kick in next year. Currently, it is wrestling with an unwieldy 169 targets, many of them hard-core, others nebulous, that range from trade and social issues to energy and climate. “Trillions of dollars are at stake,” Lomborg tells his audience. “But no one wants to talk about it. The UN wants to promise everything, but that’s no way to spend money. We need to prioritise.

“If we can just cut the 169 targets down to 40, we’ll triple the impact on global development,” Lomborg explains, in a Scandinavian nuanced with an American twang. But to achieve that outcome, he says, the world body will need to raid the climate-control kitty.

Each member of the 78-strong audience is given a free copy of Lomborg’s latest book, The Nobel Laureates’ Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World. He directs them to a double-page spread of bar graphs, the length and colour of each bar dictated by the cost-benefit brainstorming of his CCC’s economic panels: each bar expresses a dollar-return for every dollar invested.

Rated as “phenomenal” or “good”, depending on their particular shade of green are, among others: success in the Doha round of trade liberalisation talks ($2011) and freer Asian-Pacific trade ($1299); a range of bolder, health programs, including contraception ($120), aspirin heart-attack therapy ($63), immunisation ($60), nutrition ($45), tuberculosis ($43) and male circumcision to counter AIDS ($28); more mobile broadband in the developing world ($17); the phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies ($17).

His green bars indicate 50 worthwhile initiatives: he has a target of only 40. “Voted off the island,” as he puts it, are: higher secondary school completion; more biodiversity protection areas; better disaster resilience for poorer communities; greater efforts to double energy efficiency. Cutting carbon emissions to keep global temperature hikes to less than 2ºC is also gone.

Unfussed, Lomborg offers counter arguments. One: climate change was rated as least important among 16 global challenges put to more than 8 million people in an online poll for the UN launched in 2013. Two: despite efforts to date, carbon emissions continue to rise dramatically. And three: the 2ºC target, likely to cost as much as $100 trillion, is unrealistic and a dud investment that would return less than its cost.

Lomborg has signed up 100 or more economists from around the world – seven of them Nobel laureates – who he assigns in teams to crunch the numbers on each policy. Pitted against them is the UN’s IPCC, a brains trust of about 2500 scientists from more than 130 countries who collectively shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore. “I accept pretty much all of the IPCC conclusions,” Lomborg tells me. That doesn’t mean, however, that he accepts how scientists want to respond to them.

Last year, when the IPCC published a clutch of weighty documents, known as the panel’s Fifth Assessment Report, he went into contrarian overdrive. Ice caps were melting, it said; heat waves and heavy rain intensifying; coral reefs dying; fish and other creatures migrating to the poles, with some species becoming extinct. Predicting possible wars over land, water and other scarce resources, the report sounded the grimmest climate-change warning for the 21st century.

Lomborg’s response was to accuse politicians and the media of burying the good news: there was, he claimed, in the IPCC’s 4000-plus pages, proof that global warming had dramatically slowed or entirely stopped over the past 15 years. “Almost all climate models are running far too hot,” he insisted, “meaning that the real challenge of global warming has been exaggerated.”

On his reading, updates of the IPCC reports over more than 20 years had found that the economic cost of dealing with rising temperatures in the second half of this century would be from 0.2 per cent to 2 per cent of global GDP – “the equivalent of less than one year of [global economic] recession”. He told a US Senate hearing: “[It’s] not trivial, but by no means [does it] support the often apocalyptic conversation on climate change.”

Recently, he has articulated support for a carbon tax, but only to raise funds for R&D. He still warns that as a device to rein in rising temperatures, a tax is of limited use: if it’s too low, its impact is minimal; too high and it punishes the developing world. Likewise, subsidies for existing renewable energy – solar, wind – waste funds that ought to be directed to research, he says. To this end, it seems, Lomborg is ready to leap into the unknown.

His preparedness to entertain solutions to global warming that for many reside firmly in the realm of sci-fi is striking. He seriously wants the world to experiment with a technology known as “marine cloud whitening”, which calls for huge fleets of wind-powered ships to ply the world’s oceans and spray great volumes of seawater into the atmosphere, thereby creating clouds that would harmlessly reflect the sun’s energy back into space. “We’d be spending hundreds of billions of dollars instead of tens of trillions,” he says. “This kind of geo-engineering is relatively cheap. A single country or just one billionaire could do something like this.”

One challenge that so far defies Lomborg is distancing himself from climate-change sceptics. As he confessed to Critique magazine: “I certainly worry and feel uncomfortable that people I have very little in common with politically will be able to use my arguments.”

He refers me to a piece published in April in Canada’s Globe and Mail. It is Lomborg’s unqualified demand that all governments abandon their subsidies for fossil fuels and that the money saved – $US548 billion a year globally – would be better redirected to health, nutrition, the environment and education. “We need to speak the truth and go where the research takes us, rather than blinkering ourselves by asking first, ‘Who will be helped or hindered by our findings?’ ” he says. “I point out uncomfortable truths in the climate conversation – like, for instance, that the current climate policies have failed spectacularly over the past 20 years; and that continuing a failed strategy is a poor way to help the climate. Should I not do that because it is uncomfortable for some?

“That’s the way it is with heresy. There’s no middle ground. Either you believe global warming is the worst problem mankind has ever faced and that cutting carbon is the only solution, or you are an anti-scientific ignoramus who thinks the earth is flat.”

Lomborg is defiant in the face of the UWA reversal. “I’d seen enough [of the Australian debate] to realise it had turned into something quite vicious – and with no regard for the facts,” he says. “What opens doors with philanthropists and governments is the fact [the CCC] produces credible research. [This decision] says something very sad about the narrow-minded approach to research and debate in some quarters.” When Education Minister Christopher Pyne says the search is now on for an alternative site, Lomborg complains that “the facts [have] been drowned out. The UWA vice chancellor found himself in an impossible position [because] the Centre was used as a political football.”

The setback bodes ill for his fiercely competitive standoff with the scientific and environmental lobbies – and with Al Gore. Lomborg’s Cool It may have been a direct challenge to the American’s dire warnings contained in his 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, but measured in the celebrity currency of our time, it’s Gore who is winning the argument. Gore’s film won an Oscar and he has a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. â– 

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