Lomborg on Warming

Bjorn Lomborg writes in the Sunday Telegraph (UK). He says global warming is both real and man-made (I think the jury out on the later point), but:

[T]he climate models show we can do very little about the warming. Even if everyone (including the United States) did Kyoto and stuck to it throughout the century, the change would be almost immeasurable, postponing warming by just six years in 2100.

Likewise, the economic models tell us that the cost is substantial. The cost of Kyoto compliance is at least $150 billion a year. For comparison, the UN estimates that half that amount could permanently solve the most pressing humanitarian problems in the world: it could buy clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education to every single person in the world. . .

So action on global warming is basically a very costly way of doing very little for much richer people far into the future. We need to ask ourselves if this indeed should be our first priority.

My view's closer to Steven Den Beste's:

[I]t is by no means proved that it's caused by CO2. There is strong evidence that the current warming cycle is primarily driven by changes in the output of the Sun, which should peak in about a hundred years and begin to cool again.

(via Daily Pundit)

More:

Reason Magazine's Ron Bailey agrees in TechCentralStation that Kyoto compliance is wasteful and proposes to help the developing world "the old-fashioned way by encouraging economic growth and free trade to alleviate poverty, illiteracy, maternal and infant mortality, and so forth." Bailey also reviews Michael Crichton's new eco-thriller State of Fear. A far less positive review appears in the NY Times.