Top Climate Skeptic Does an About-Face

Bjørn Lomborg is not a popular guy in the halls of climate science—the UN’s climate chief once compared him to Adolf Hitler. But the self-proclaimed “skeptical environmentalist” has suddenly jumped aboard the bandwagon, the Guardian reports. In his new book, the Danish economist says that climate change is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world” and calls for $100 billion a year to combat it.

The book isn’t a complete U-turn, Lomborg argues, because he’s always acknowledged the existence of man-made global warming. “The point I’ve always been making is it’s not the end of the world,” he says. But when he started mulling over the problem, and concluded that the world could solve it by pouring money into R&D for clean technologies and climate engineering. “This is not about 'we have all got to live with less, wear hair-shirts and cut our carbon emissions,’” he says. “It’s about technologies.”