Climate change & its discontents

The thesis of Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm is simple and simplistic: Activists have been sounding a false alarm about the dangers of climate change. If we listen to them, he says, we will waste trillions of dollars, achieve little and the poor will suffer the most. Science has provided a way to carefully balance costs and benefits, if we would only listen to its clarion call. And, of course, the villain in this “false alarm,” the boogeyman for all of society’s ills, is the hyperventilating media.

As with others in this camp, there’s the pretence in this book of balance