05 August 2008

Archive: Bjorn Lomborg sets priorities for saving the planet

For the next two weeks, we're presenting some of our favorite TEDTalks from among the 270+ talks and performances we've posted since June 2006. Look for brand-new TEDTalks starting August 18. Until then, enjoy these gems -- and suggest your own by writing to contact@ted.com or joining the conversation on TED.com.

Given $50 billion to spend, which would you solve first, AIDS or global warming? Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg comes up with surprising answers. Whether or not you agree with his results (and many TED.com commenters do not), it's an invigorating argument, and a new lens on some global problems that might otherwise seem too big to comprehend. (Recorded February 2005 in Monterey, California. Duration: 16:53)

Watch Bjorn Lomborg's 2005 talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

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01 May 2008

Vote for your favorite public intellectuals

Not to be outdone by the Time 100, the journals Foreign Policy and Prospect have together released a list of the Top 100 public intellectuals -- with voting. Many TEDTalks favorites appear on the list, and you can help choose the eventual top 20 by voting for your very own top 5. From Foreign Policy's site:

Although the men and women on this list are some of the world’s most sophisticated thinkers, the criteria to make the list could not be more simple. Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.

TEDTalks speakers on this top 100 list include George Ayittey, Steven Pinker, Neil Gershenfeld, Malcolm Gladwell, Craig Venter, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Larry Lessig, Steven Levitt, E.O. Wilson, Dan Dennett and Bjorn Lomborg -- and look for upcoming TEDTalks from others on this list, including Paul Collier, who spoke at TED2008 about "the bottom billion."

See the full list of 100 >>

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12 August 2007

Wired's Anderson on Lomborg's "Cool It"

Wired editor Chris Anderson got an advance copy of Bjorn Lomborg's upcoming book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, and his summary is: read it, but don't follow his advice.

Lomborg (watch his TED2005 speech) argues that although global warming is clearly happening and is human-caused, the debate over what to do about it has been polluted by way too much bad science, non-science, inflamed rhetoric and outright fibs.

In the book, the Danish political scientist offers numerous examples of how much of the rhetoric over the effects of climate change doesn't stand up to scrutiny (for example: the most likely effect of climate change would be to increase, not decrease, the amount of ice in Antarctica).

"It's time to put the debate over whether human-driven climate change is happening behind us and instead focus on technologies to decarbonize the economy," writes Anderson. But climate change is only one of three strong reasons to do this, he adds: the others are economics (rising direct and indirect costs of oil and carbon fuels) and geopolitics (oil revenues prop up bad governments around the world).

There is a fourth reason that Anderson forgets, and which has been convincingly put forth by Al Gore in his TED2006 speech: it's a moral imperative.

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20 January 2007

Bjorn Lomborg on TED.com

Given $50 billion to spend, which would you solve first, AIDS or global warming? Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg comes up with surprising answers.

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06 December 2005

On Global Warming: Bjorn Lomborg begs to differ

With climate change very much in the news, Bjorn Lomborg too has stepped back in the spotlight. Lomborg first courted controversy with his 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. And his provocative new essay, The Relative Unimportance of Global Warming, appears today in the Phillipine Daily Inquirer -- after running Friday in the Taipei Times and Korea Herald.

Lomborg doesn't dispute the science of global warming, but he believes Kyoto-style attempts to cut carbon-dioxide emissions are misguided, and that funds are best invested elsewhere: both in solvable problems (HIV/AIDS, hunger, Malaria) and in research toward alternative energy. As he told us at TED2005, we must prioritize the world's problems, if we're going to solve them. And we should prioritize based on the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The Kyoto Protocol is inefficient and expensive, he says (and the Copenhagen Consensus -- a group of top economists, including 4 Nobel laureates -- backs him up).

You can definitely argue with the conclusions, but don't dismiss this provocateur as reactionary or ill-informed. Those who attended TED2005 have learned: The articulate, left-leaning, vegetarian Dane is not so easily categorized.

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18 October 2005

Some strange choices on this list...

Here's a quirky line-up of "the world's top 20 public intellectuals" published by a couple of magazines after a widely-promoted internet vote.

1 Noam Chomsky
2 Umberto Eco
3 Richard Dawkins
4 Václav Havel
5 Christopher Hitchens
6 Paul Krugman
7 Jürgen Habermas
8 Amartya Sen
9 Jared Diamond
10 Salman Rushdie
11 Naomi Klein
12 Shirin Ebadi
13 Hernando de Soto
14 Bjørn Lomborg
15 Abdolkarim Soroush
16 Thomas Friedman
17 Pope Benedict XVI
18 Eric Hobsbawm
19 Paul Wolfowitz
20 Camille Paglia

Looks like there are three criteria to make the list. 1) Be really smart. 2) Write a best-selling book.  3) Have your supporters organize an Internet voting campaign.  Here's the inside scoop.

Our congrats to TED speakers Dawkins, Diamond and Lomborg.

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