What Is The Copenhagen Consensus As It Relates To Global Warming, Etc.?

Links About The Copenhagen Consensus 

Copenhagen Consensus Center

The Copenhagen Consensus Center analyzes the world's greatest challenges and identifies cost efficient solutions to meeting these challenges. The Center works with multilateral organizations, governments and other entities concerned with mitigating the consequences of the challenges which the world is facing.

With the process of prioritization, the center aims to establish a framework in which solutions to problems are prioritized according to efficiency based upon economic and scientific analysis of distinct subjects.

WORLD Magazine: Cool Headed

Lomborg argued that the high economic costs of emissions-cutting proposals would deliver meager global benefits compared to what such funds could accomplish elsewhere. He cited his organization's global priority list (see table), a ranking of the world's most cost-effective opportunities to improve the human situation. A panel of top-tier economists, including four Nobel Laureates, constructed the table in 2004 based on their analysis of areas where the most good could result from the least economic harm.

The panel ranked various measures to control the spread of disease and alleviate food and water shortages as top priorities. Climate-change solutions, such as carbon taxes or the Kyoto Protocol, scored at the very bottom, delivering minimal gains relative to their costs.

Still, Lomborg does not advocate that nations ignore the problem of global warming. He wants smarter solutions, those that deliver significant bang for the buck-and he wants to see those develop, instead of settling for inferior choices. Research and development into new technologies offer far greater promise for a comprehensive and effective long-term strategy.

Esquire: The Heretic's New Book

In 2001, Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg published to great controversy The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he examined whether proposed solutions to environmental damage could actually be worse than the damage itself. The book served as both an earnest appeal to save the environment and a bracing rejection of the rhetorical excesses and some of the dire prognostications of the environmental movement.

This March, on the same day that Al Gore testified before House and Senate committees on climate change, Lomborg also testified, cast in the villain's role. Although he agrees with the broad scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made, he does not agree with many of the solutions Gore and others call for, dismissing them as needlessly extreme and not cost-efficient. For this, he has been called a heretic and a stooge for the oil companies. Now comes Lomborg's new book, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. He has written it, he tells Esquire, because "there is a lot of well-intentioned passion in this discussion, but campaigners on both sides spend so much time lobbing bitter arguments at each other that their debate has scorched the middle ground where policy makers should find ideas and inspiration." The book is a reasoned addition to the debate about what to do about climate change. And it is sure to provoke just as much controversy as his last book...

Al Gore's Inconvenient Peace Prize

Gore has helped the world to worry. Unfortunately, our attention is diverted from where it matters. Climate change is not the only problem facing the globe. Our blinkered focus on it _ to the detriment of other planetary challenges _ will only be heightened by the attention generated by Gore's Nobel Peace Prize.

Gore concentrates above all else on his call for world leaders to cut CO2 emissions, yet there are other policies that would do much more for the planet.