A review was published in Nature, very scathing, essentially calling me incompetent, though they didn't use that word. I am putting a reply on my Web site in a few days, where I go through their arguments, paragraph by paragraph.
All the models agree about this, that Kyoto is going to cut warming by perhaps 10 per cent in 2100, or to put it more clearly, it's simply going to postpone warming for about six years in 2100. Warming that we would otherwise have had in 2100 will now be postponed by Kyoto to 2106.
But this is an occupational hazard of being a scientist. You say this is the best information I have and then you realize that not everyone is going to read the footnotes or the whole book, so people are going to get the wrong impression.
Even if I was a bad right wing guy, to the extent of whether my arguments are right or wrong, they're right or wrong independently if I'm right or left.
Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tells us that many of the temperate countries are going to have a small benefit from warming, whereas tropical countries, which is where most developing countries are, will have severe problems.
I certainly worry and feel uncomfortable that people I have very little in common with politically will be able to use my arguments.
I really have to stress, I don't have a positive view. I'm not here to cheer people up. If the bottom line was negative, that is what we should say.
I really try to say things as they basically are and it so happens that it is a good message that things are getting better, but there are still problems.
I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.
I'm an old Greenpeace guy, and my first reaction was exactly the same thing as I see most other people reacting to what I say.
In the same way, we have to investigate the solar mechanism, but right now, the IPC claims that it's probably not the main cause.
It seems incontrovertible to me that there is a global warming effect and that it is going to be serious, probably not in the amount of, say, six degrees warming, but it's likely that we'll get two to three degrees warming and that will be serious enough.
Just because there is a problem doesn't mean that we have to solve it, if the cure is going to be more expensive than the original ailment.
More important are the changes in agriculture and infrastructure, and to a large extent it's going to be a loss of production, simply because it's going to be so hot that you will have lower yields than you would otherwise have had, for a vast number of different agricultural products.
My suggestion is that we should first work to ensure the Third World has clean drinking water and sanitation.
Obviously any group that has to have funding also needs to get attention to their issues.
Of course, the world is full of problems. But on the other hand it's important to get the sense... are we generally moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?
On average, global warming is not going to harm the developing world.
So it's mainly a question of helping the Third World overcome the effects of global warming.
The fact that we're catching more fish per person than we've ever done before doesn't mean that there are not particular places where we've managed fisheries badly.
The Kyoto treaty has an estimated cost of between US$150 and $350 billion a year, starting in 2010.
The obvious issue is providing clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth at the cost of little more than one year of the Kyoto treaty.
The people who are still starving today are not starving because we can't feed them, but because they don't have money enough to buy food.
The second thing is, if you want to do something about global warming, you have to think much more long-term. There is something wrong with saying we should start using renewables now, while they are still incredibly expensive.
There are so many other things we can do that will do so much more good, that will help people in need now, much better and much more efficiently.
There is no doubt that we should take solar radiation into account. We have seen ground temperatures rising since 1975, and it is important to know to what extent that has been caused by the sun or by carbon dioxide.
Think on a 50-year scale, which is a much more natural time-scale for global warming. The US is right now spending about 200 million dollars annually on research into renewable energy.
We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we'll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports.
We're talking about probably five to eight trillion dollars on the total cost of global warming, and we'd much rather not have that.
When a business group tells us there is nothing wrong with the environment, naturally they may have good arguments, but we are also sceptical, because we know that they have an interest in these things.
Bj?rn Lomborg is an associate professor of statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus. In 1998 he published four lengthy articles about the state of our environment in the leading Danish newspaper, which resulted in a firestorm debate spanning over 400 articles in major metropolitan newspapers.
From February 2002 to July 2004 Lomborg was director of Denmark's national Environmental Assessment Institute.
In April 2004, Lomborg was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time Magazine.
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