The legacy of the confusion and misinformation spread by Bjorn Lomborg and Ruport Murduch’s Wall Street Journal is delay. In this case, it’s a potentially fatal delay in responding to a purely preventable, but nonetheless existential threat to modern civilization, a betrayal of “our children and future generations,” as Obama put it — JR.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and bête noire of climate change activists around the world, has been told that the incoming Danish government will cut off his £1m a year funding.

It’s not been a good 12 months for the Danish delayer.

About a year ago he flip-flopped his core belief, asserting “Climate change is undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today.” Presumably  he did that to widen his appeal before  the launch of his big effort at mass miscommunication, Cool It.

But the documentary still went down as one of the great box office bombs.  According to Box Office Mojo, after grossing a whopping $58,179 in its debut month of December, it grossed $4, 534 from 12/1 to 12/24 before it was pulled from theaters.  That would be $189 per day, or roughly $24 per theater.

Ouch!  You don’t have to be a statistician like Lomborg to figure out that nobody watched and somebody has lost a bundle of money.  Still, it managed to be the 435th highest grossing documentary of all time, edging out such classics as “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” (444) and “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front” (439).  Hmm.  If a documentary film is made and nobody watches it, does it make a sound?

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— A Media Matters cross-post

On his Fox Business show [Monday] Stuart Varney hosted Bjorn Lomborg to denounce the 2007 light bulb efficiency standards, which House Republicans are currently attempting to repeal. Varney introduced Lomborg as “our favorite rational environmentalist and a real scientist.” Moments later, Varney added: “You’re a scientist. What do you make of this?”

But Lomborg, who is known for opposing large-scale efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is not a scientist but [an adjunct] business school professor with a PhD in political science.

[Joe Romm: Lomborg and Varney also repeat the myth (aka "the lie") that the Light Bulb Efficiency Standard the GOP wanted to repeal would ban incandescents.  But that is par for the course for the anti-scientific Lomborg and Fox News.]

It appears the mistaken notion that Lomborg is a scientist is widely held among conservative media figures. In 2007 Glenn Beck hosted Lomborg on his HLN show to discuss climate change and introduced him by stating: “Bjorn Lomborg, he is a scientist”:
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The Wonk Room will be covering the United Nations climate talks in Cancun, Mexico for their duration, with on-the-ground reports beginning later this week.

At a Heritage Foundation event last month, the head of the Koch Industries front group Americans For Prosperity unveiled a new, focus-group-tested messaging strategy to attack climate science and policy. In a wide-ranging discussion with conservative bloggers, AFP president Tim Phillips said that it was now safe to smear climate scientists “because of the UK email scandals,” and that “the other thing that we’re really pushing with allies is the myth of green jobs.”

With the onset of the Cancun climate talks, hosts and guests on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Fox Business Network are implementing a furious assault against climate action, using the Americans For Prosperity playbook. On Fox Business Network on Sunday, six panelists agreed that supporters of climate policy are trying to dismantle capitalism, citing the “Marxist” Van Jones and arguing that there isn’t a “single free-market capitalist” that wants to fight global warming (other than Bill Gates, Richard Branson, the members of USCAP, BICEP, BELC, BusinessEurope, and so on):

Global warming “hysteria” is “crap,” Greg Gutfield argued this Sunday on Fox News, calling anyone who disagrees a “racist, homophobic globalphobe.” (On the other hand, comedian Amy Schumer compares global warming denial to ignoring warnings about obesity and drunkenness.) He and his guests cited “Climategate” to dismiss the threat of global warming pollution:

On Monday, right-wing contrarian Bjorn Lomborg agreed with Fox Business Network’s David Asman that “Climategate” delegitimized climate scientists, and argued that we have “twenty to forty years” to spend on researching new technology for global warming:

On Monday, Fox News’s Neil Cavuto hosted stunt climate denier Phelim McAleer, who was upset that he wasn’t allowed to practice “journalism” at the Cancun talks by dressing up in a dog suit:

Meanwhile, extreme storms are leaving a path of destruction from Mississippi to Virginia, and Perth, Australia, has had its hottest spring ever, with its “first November heat wave for 32 years.”

In a recent op-ed in Washington Post, Bjorn Lomborg argued that efforts to reduce global warming pollution can wait, because “coping with climate change is something we know how to do.” To bolster that claim — which goes against the consensus of practically every scientific body in the world — Lomborg cited “the fact that the best research we have – from the United Nations climate panel – says that global sea levels are not likely to rise more than about 20 inches by 2100.” Lomborg concluded that “fears of a supposedly imminent apocalypse threaten to swamp rational debate about climate policy”:

Obviously, whether it involves dikes or buckets of white paint, adaptation is not a long-term solution to global warming. Rather, it will enable us to get by while we figure out the best way to address the root causes of man-made climate change. This may not seem like much, but at a time when fears of a supposedly imminent apocalypse threaten to swamp rational debate about climate policy, it’s worth noting that coping with climate change is something we know how to do.

Because Washington Post editorial editor Fred Hiatt did not bother to fact-check Lomborg’s column, the Wonk Room took on the task. We chose to test the new Climate Science Rapid Response Team, a scientist-run initiative to link top climate scientists with the media officially launched today. After we submitted questions about Lomborg’s claims to the team, we received comprehensive answers from three top climate scientists within 48 hours, even though we made our inquiries before the official launch.

In separate e-mail interviews (the scientists also offered to conduct phone interviews), the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology’s Ken Caldeira, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Josh Willis, and Rutgers University’s Alan Robock independently confirmed that Bjorn Lomborg had misrepresented the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report.

Caldeira, who believes “one meter (or three feet) per century from melting ice sheets is probably in the right ball park” for future sea level rise, explained what Lomborg left out when citing the “20 inches by 2100″ figure:

Like mercury in a thermometer, seawater expands and rises as it heats up. Melting ice also causes sea level rise. The third assessment report considered only thermal expansion of the ocean and not melting glacial ice.

Willis discussed the details of the IPCC report further:

Bjorn’s claim that the IPCC report says that global sea levels are not likely to rise more than about 20 inches by 2100 is incorrect. You have to remember that the sea level projections in the 2007 IPCC report had a big asterisk by them. The report was very clear that the 20 inch projection was probably too low because it did not account for the kinds of dynamic changes in the glaciers and ice sheets that we see today. In fact, the IPCC report was careful to say that they could not place any upper bound on the amount of sea level rise that is likely over the next century.

Robock’s response reaffirmed Willis and Caldeira. Furthermore, when asked the research the IPCC summarized still “the best research we have” on the likely range of sea level rise, Robock said, “Absolutely not”:

Absolutely not. It was the best we had five years ago, but there has been a lot of work since then, including better observations of the rate of melting from Greenland and Antarctica and better models.

Robock also explained that Lomborg mischaracterized the work of the world scientific community when he argued that those who call for the immediate reduction of global warming pollution are relying on “fears of a supposedly imminent apocalypse”:

His choice of words is very alarmist and cherry-picking from other alarmists. The IPCC and the world scientific community do not say “supposedly imminent apocalypse.” They engage in rational debate. He is saying that extremists on one side are much more influential than it seems to me that they are. In fact it is the extremists who argue against any response to global warming who have been much more effective so far.

He is also wrong in asserting that we know how to adapt to climate change. If that were true, nobody would be worried about it. How do we adapt to massive extinctions of natural species? How do we adapt to all the major coastal cities of the world having to deal with flooding from stronger storms and rising sea level? Dikes will not do it.

And there are no geoengineering techniques that have ever even been tested, let alone shown to produce less risks than the risks of global warming.

But I agree that adaptation is not a long-range solution. Mitigation is, but we have to get started immediately.

Of course, none of this is actually news. At Real Climate, top sea-level specialist Stefan Rahmstorf explained the IPCC sea level numbers back in March, 2007. At Climate Progress, Joe Romm debunked Lomborg’s lies about sea level rise back in September, 2007. And climate scientists have been warning the presidents of the United States of the “vast geophysical experiment” of global warming since the 1960s, and calling for reduction in fossil fuel use by the 1970s.