By Bjom Lomborg

All eyes are on Greenland’s melting glaciers as alarm about global warming spreads. This year, delegations of U.S. and European politicians have made pilgrimages to the fastest-moving glacier at Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes.
Curiously, something that’s rarely mentioned is that temperatures in Greenland were higher in 1941 than they are today. Or that melt rates around Ilulissat were faster in the early part of the past century, according to a new study. And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat—perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

I point this out not to challenge the reality of global warming or the fact that it’s caused in large part by humans, but because the discussion about climate change has turned into a nasty dustup, with one side arguing that we’re headed for catastrophe and the other maintaining that it’s all a hoax. I say that neither is right. It’s wrong to deny the obvious: The Earth is warming, and we’re causing it. But that’s not the whole story, and predictions of impending disaster just don’t stack up.

We have to rediscover the middle ground, where we can have a sensible conversation. We shouldn’t ignore climate change or the policies that could attack it. But we should be honest about the shortcomings and costs of those policies, as well as the benefits.

Environmental groups say that the only way to deal with the effects of global warming is to make drastic cuts in carbon emissions—a project that will cost the world trillions (the Kyoto Protocol alone would cost $180 billion annually). The research I’ve done over the last decade, beginning with my first book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” has convinced me that this approach is unsound; it means spending an awful lot to achieve very little. Instead, we should be thinking creatively and pragmatically about how we could combat the much larger challenges facing our planet.  Read full story here

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Political Correctness: The front-runners for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize are a couple of global warming alarmists. With dozens of wars raging, the committee couldn’t find a single person laboring honorably for peace?

Once a symbol of distinction, this honor has plumbed shameful depths in recent years. A county fair blue ribbon has more significance. Since 1990, winners include terrorist Yasser Arafat, fraud Rigoberto Menchu, foreign-policy incompetents Jimmy Carter and Kofi Annan, unreconstructed communist Mikhail Gorbachev and the useless Mohamed ElBaradei.

Each year, the Peace Prize committee has a chance to redeem itself, yet it never seems up to the task. It looks like 2007 will be no exception. Later this week, say reports, it will name as this year’s co-winners Al Gore and Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Canadian who has drawn attention to what she believes are climate change’s effects on Arctic communities.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Steve Huntley noted “...earlier this year Gore “canceled an interview with Denmark’s largest newspaper when he learned it would include questions from Bjorn Lomborg, respected author of ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist.’ “

Does Gore know what so many have missed in their environmental zealotry — that his theory’s many flaws cannot be defended? Is he aware that the errors of his global warming ideas would be quite easily exposed by a knowledgeable skeptic?

Just what the Nobel committee really needs — another fraud in its pantheon of laureates. If Gore wins the prize as expected, it will mark another step in the long, politicized decline of a once highly regarded international award. How sad. Read more here.

By Steve Huntley, Chicago Sun Times

Seven hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money to spend to try to get someone to talk to you and not get an answer.That’s how much the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based libertarian think tank, has forked over in six months for advertisements in national newspapers trying to persuade Al Gore to debate one of its experts on global warming issues. “We have tried, repeatedly, to contact Gore directly, with registered letters and calls to his office, and have never received a reply,” says Joseph Bast, Heartland president. A spokeswoman for Gore told me by e-mail that Heartland is an oil-company-funded group that denies that global warming is real and caused by human activities. “The debate has shifted to how to solve the climate crisis, not if there is one,” said Kalee Kreider. “It does not make sense for him to engage in a dialogue with them at this time.”

The issue is a bit more complicated than that. What Bast wants is for Gore to debate one of three authorities who dispute the former vice president’s assertion that global warming is a crisis that requires an immediate, hugely expensive response potentially damaging to the U.S. and world economies. One of the Heartland experts is Dennis Avery, an economist, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and co-author, with Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia, of the book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years. As you might guess from that title, Avery sees global warming as a natural phenomenon in which “there may be a human factor but if so it’s small.” He describes the warming as “moderate” and says there’s been no warming since 1998. “Where’s the crisis?”

The Heartland case is not the first time Gore has ducked a forum. Earlier this year he canceled an interview with Denmark’s largest newspaper when he learned it would include questions from Bjorn Lomborg, respected author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. “Gore’s sermon is not one that will stand scrutiny,” says Christopher C. Horner, another one of Heartland’s debate candidates, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism.

But the point is that Gore and his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” aren’t the last word. In March, the New York Times reported that while they praise Gore for raising awareness about warming, a number of scientists see exaggerations and errors in some of his assertions. “They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism,” the Times wrote. For example, Gore forecasts sea levels rising up to 20 feet, flooding parts of New York and Florida. But the U.N. panel’s actual estimate is that seas will rise 7 to 23 inches in this century. Read more here.