Global Lunatics?

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — The head of the U.N. panel on climate change compared him to Hitler. Another leading scientist called him a parasite. A third described his latest book as a "stealth attack" on mankind. The list of allegations against Bjoern Lomborg, one of the world's leading climate change skeptics, almost reads like an indictment for war crimes. As Al Gore shows off his Nobel Peace Prize and world policymakers hammer out a new strategy for saving the planet, climate change contrarians say they have been elbowed out of the debate. They say mainstream scientists have stifled healthy intellectual discourse by demonizing dissenters as oil industry lobbyists or lunatics.

"I really think it reflects entirely on them," said Lomborg, a mild-mannered Danish statistician who says global warming isn't a big threat and that international treaties requiring sharp and immediate cuts in carbon emissions would cost a lot but do little good. Angry words and table-pounding, he said, only show "that your argument is not that strong." Lomborg accepts that the Earth is warming because of man, but says a changing climate, including the threat posed by rising sea levels to small island nations, is a less urgent problem than, for example, AIDS or malnutrition. His newly released book on climate change, Cool It, has also met sharp criticism. In a review in the Washington Post, Australian scientist Tim Flannery called it "a stealth attack on humanity's future."

Climate change experts counter that the contrarians are no longer relevant because the evidence now is overwhelming that man-made warming will have dangerous consequences if left unchecked. "Their claim that debate is being stifled has the same credibility as members of the Flat Earth Society complaining about the round Earth mafia," said NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt.That the planet is getting warmer is well-documented by scientific data, so skeptics now mainly challenge the majority view on the scope of the problem.

• JJ Commentary: Even this “balanced” article misses the main point. Is the warming human caused or a natural cycle. We have had ice ages and warm periods in the past well before humans started emitting “greenhouse” gases. Regardless of the cause, it certainly fulfills Biblical end-time prophecies.