Bjorn Lomborg: Obama and global warming

COPENHAGEN - In one of his first public policy statements as America's president-elect, Barack Obama focused on climate change and clearly stated both his priorities and the facts on which these priorities rest. Unfortunately, both are weak, or even wrong.

Flat, unexciting 'Earth Stood Still' lacks big thrills

Now that the Cold War has practically receded from public memory, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” takes up the cause of climate change. Keanu Reeves’ Klaatu is, in fact, a global warming alarmist and probably a card-carrying member of Greenpeace.

To this end while holding negative views of humanity, the self-righteous Klaatu exclaims that mankind is killing the planet, and so he’s just going to have to destroy mankind. His perverse, twisted logic wears thin after awhile, and you find yourself hoping that a few Sidewinder missiles might get the job done. OK, maybe it’s just me wanting to see this annoying alien wasted, but by the movie’s end you may come around to my point of view.

Cold Feet « Talking About The Weather

It is a shame that Gore has such a knack for fear-mongering. It’s unfair, too. Life is hard enough without well-intentioned members of the public being told that now is the worst time, in terms of Earth’s crumbling environment, to be alive, that it didn’t used to flood this way, it didn’t used to get hot this way, there didn’t used to be hurricanes like Katrina. Using still and video images of extreme weather events, Gore and his brethren have PowerPointed the credulous into submission. If, just for the sake of argument, one could travel back in time with a camera, there is no era in Earth’s history from which one could not draw terrifying spectacles for use in this kind of eco-terrorism. In fact, the late Holocene, as the interglacial period in which we live is known, is considered to be among the most optimal for human habitat that the planet has served up. One of the most important reasons that we have flourished on so many levels during the last few thousand years, in terms of population, culture, and technology, is precisely that the climate has favored us!

By definition, now is not the worst time to be alive as a citizen of the Earth. A worse time than now, as I’ll discuss in my next entry, was the Little Ice Age.