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Updated to correct source of research

Bjorn Lomborg, the Disingenuous Environmentalist is at it again, taking advantage of the delusionist tendencies of the Washington Post’s opinion page editors to argue that climate change is no worries and that coal is the key to our long-term health and prosperity.

Lomborg bases this particular example of economics fiction (a less rigorous form of science fiction) on the work of the economist Richard Tol, whose previous machinations have made it obvious that he is happy to take Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Center funding and feed back the conclusions Lomborg would like.

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The most successful Libertarian politician in Canadian history, Globe and Mail columnist Neil Reynolds, has joined the campaign to do nothing about climate change, basing his argument (A Net-Benefit Greenhouse Gas Plan - Less is Really More) not on the work of anyone who actually studies climate science, but rather on two economists with a track record of trying to discourage action.

Most famous of these is Bjorn Lomborg, the Disingenuous Environmentalist and director of a Danish think tank that specialilzes in understating the costs of climate change and overestimating the costs of taking preventative action.

In the run-up to the United Nations meeting scheduled for his hometown in December, Lomborg’s Copenhagen Concensus Center has commissioned 21 reports “to examine the costs and
benefits of different solutions to global warming.” The most recent result, a paper by the economist Richard Tol (inset), gives a good indication of how agenda-driven and, in some regards, surprisingly unprofessional, those papers might be.

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Economists no longer debate the realities of anthropomorphic climate change—that's so 1993!

Instead, they squabble over how much we should be spending today to lessen the sting of the much bigger invoices that will inevitably come due tomorrow, should we insist on carrying on with all this fossil-fuel nonsense.

Note: see our welcome to DeSmog's latest writer James Glave - this is his first post so be gentle!

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We nearly missed the second in the National Post series on The Deniers, a cherry-picking exercise in which the libertarian Larry Solomon tries to suggest that there are credible scientists standing up against the global scientific consensus that climate change is real, is caused by human activity and is urgently in need of attention.

Solomon's latest example of an admirable denier is Dr. Richard Tol (whose photo, inset, was taken from Tol's own website). It turns out that Tol has quibbled with the way the scientific and political community measure and predict the effects of climate change, as in this, his most recent scientific article. But, oddly enough, in their campaign of climate change denial, Solomon and the National Post neglect to include Tol's own final position:

This conclusion, however, does not necessarily undermine the ethical and political economic reasons for supporting international collective action on climate change.