Environmental Skeptic Offers Fresh Perspective on Global Warming Debate

If you take Al Gore and replace his global warming apocalypticism with a careful pragmatism and his insistence for energy taxes with a love for human innovation, research and creativity, you will end up with someone similar to Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg. At The Heritage Foundation Bloggers Briefing this Tuesday, Lomborg said he considers global warming to be a legitimate threat – one that is exaggerated and can be handled through the power of human ingenuity. Lomborg shows his other way to tackle global warming in his new film Cool It. Forget about onerous cap-and-trade legislation, which Heritage estimates would cost the average family of four $3,000 by 2035. Instead, Lomborg sees solutions in further research and experimentation. One of many possible solutions mentioned in the film is predicated on something Benjamin Franklin discovered when a volcano in Laki, Iceland erupted in 1783. Franklin made a connection between the volcano’s eruption and the change in the climate. His theory was confirmed in 1991 when scientists determined that the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines cooled the earth’s overall temperature by almost one degree Fahrenheit...more