Tackling global warming is pointless, believes Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg - it's time to shift focus, he tells Paul Cullen.
He is one of the best-known Danes in the world, one of the most renowned statisticians globally, and certainly the only Danish statistician you are ever likely to hear of.
Bjorn Lomborg comes to Ireland for the first time next week trailing years of controversy from his challenging dissection of the environmental lobby and its doomsday claims for our world.
To critics he is a "professional contrarian" but Lomborg styles himself "the sceptical environmentalist", constantly challenging and analysing scientific data to assess "the real state of the world". It was his book of the same name that launched Lomborg onto the world stage. Born out of a challenge he set for his students at the University of Aarhus - to critically evaluate our knowledge of the environment - it was originally published in Danish in 1998.
An English translation followed three years later and prompted an academic storm. The book's two main tenets - that by and large the world's environment was getting better, not worse, together with a claim that green lobbyists had deliberately exaggerated the problems we face - caused widespread gnashing of teeth in the environmental and scientific communities.
There followed a lengthy inquisition of Galileo-like proportions (well, not quite). Scientific American published a lengthy attack on Lomborg's findings. The scary-sounding Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty declared that his work was "objectively dishonest", but this finding was later repudiated by the Danish science ministry.
What really got up the nose of many critics was that Lomborg was no right-wing ideologue. A vegetarian, bike-riding 40-year-old, he calls himself a "left-wing environmental" and turns up for television appearances in a T-shirt and jeans rather than a sober suit.
"All I do is to try to make some simple, academically obvious points about the global environment," he told The Irish Times this week. "We don't properly consider priorities and trade-offs. We can't do everything, so we should do the best things that improve our world first. We've been led by the myth that everything is getting worse and worse, when all the data indicates that, for the rich part of the world at least, we have cleaned up our act."
Now Lomborg has turned his statistician's eye to the problem of world poverty. Last year he brought eight of the world's top economists to Denmark and set them a challenge: how best to spend $50 billion (€41 billion) to change the world for the better. Top of the list of priorities to emerge was the control of HIV/Aids. Spending $27 billion (€22 billion) on measures to restrict the spread of the disease would reduce infections from 45 million to 17 million over an eight-year period, the group found.
Attacking malnutrition came next, followed by the elimination of trade tariffs and agricultural subsidies and fighting malaria. Bottom of the list came climate change - implementing the Kyoto Protocol and levying carbon taxes.
"Global warming is real, and it will have serious consequences, especially for Third World countries. But we can only do very little about it, at a very high cost." Lomborg claims the cost of living up to the Kyoto Protocol objective of reducing carbon emissions will be $150 billion (€123 billion) a year, and that even this massive expenditure will only postpone the effects of global warming by six years.
"So the farmer in Bangladesh will have his house flooded in 2106, not 2100. Yet for half the amount we propose to spend here, we could solve all the main global challenges in the world - providing clean sanitation, healthcare, food and education for every human being on the planet. The question then is whether we should spend this money doing very little good, or half this sum doing an immense amount of good."
He says we tend to "worry about things that look worrying on television", citing the recent tsunami in south-east Asia, which killed about 300,000 people, or the equivalent of three weeks of deaths from "easily curable communicable diseases" in the region. Plans are afoot to install expensive sensors to detect a future tsunami, even though events of such magnitude only occur once every 100 years or more.
"So wouldn't it be more efficient to distribute mosquito nets to stop the spread of disease instead of fitting sensors that won't be used?"
With Ireland now spending €500 million a year on overseas aid, Lomborg's emphasis on priority-setting is relevant. His address to next Wednesday's conference at the Institute for International Integration Studies in Trinity College Dublin will focus on what Ireland's aid and trade priorities should be.
"Ireland is no different from any other country; it has to make strategic decisions. Most countries care 99 per cent about themselves - I'm afraid this is a nasty but true fact. But insofar as we want to help Africa through aid, let's spend the money in the best possible way. It's about making smart choices - not feeling good, but doing good."