Bjorn Lomborg - behaving badly

Danish environmental superstar (contrarian/denialist/selfpromoter) Bjorn Lomborg says

Global warming will harm people in 100 years when there will be far fewer poor people. The best thing you can do is make people rich.

... hmmmm.
Lomborg and which army claims this? The bright eyed boy would have you believe that he is supported by a panel of eight well reputed economists - "Bring me my Nobel Laureates!" - who met earlier this year in Copenhagen to engage in a little cost/benefit analysis of some of the world's current problems. In fact, they specifically addressed themselves to consideration of certain current, quantifiable problems and made it clear that, while they believe the world faces many other, serious, problems, none which were not quantifiable were tackled by them this time. Fair enough, and the idea of asking them wasn't bad. It's just a shame Lomborg doesn't do his own economists the courtesy of representing their conclusions (pdf) accurately. What they actually said was

"The panel recognised that global warming must be addressed, but agreed that approaches based on too abrupt a shift toward lower emissions of carbon are needlessly expensive. The experts expressed an interest in an alternative, proposed in one of the opponent papers, that envisaged a carbon tax much lower in the first years of implementation than the figures called for in the challenge paper, rising gradually in later years. Such a proposal however was not examined in detail in the presentations put to the panel, and so was not ranked. The panel urged increased funding for research into more affordable carbon-abatement technologies."

The economists have acquitted themselves with dignity, it would seem, so much so that Lomborg is forced to misrepresent their views or risk derailing his anti-environmentalist bandwagon. This he unfortunately does, proving himself an anti-Green zealot and ideologue, not scientist or scholar.