BJORN LOMBORG

President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, repeatedly ranked among the world's 100 most influential people


  • Visiting Professor - Copenhagen Business School & Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
  • Repeatedly one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s "Top Global 100 Thinkers"
  • Best-selling author, "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (2001), "Cool It" (2007), and "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet" (2020)
  • Heads the Copenhagen Consensus, a think-tank that researches the smartest ways to do good
  • He challenges mainstream concerns about development and the environment and points out that we need to focus attention on the smartest solutions first
  • TIME Magazine ranked Lomborg among the world's 100 most influential people 
  • Esquire named him "one of the world's 75 most influential people of the 21st century."

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School. The Copenhagen Consensus Center is a think-tank that researches the smartest ways to do good. For this work, Lomborg was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. His numerous books include "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet", "The Skeptical Environmentalist", "Cool It", "How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place", "The Nobel Laureates' Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World 2016-2030" and "Prioritizing Development: A Cost Benefit Analysis of the UN's SDGs". 

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg is an academic and the author of the best-selling "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet", "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and "Cool It". He challenges mainstream concerns about development and the environment and points out that we need to focus attention on the smartest solutions first. He is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School, and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center which brings together many of the world's top economists, including seven Nobel Laureates, to set priorities for the world. The University of Pennsylvania asked almost 7,000 think tanks and thousands of journalists, public and private donors, and policymakers from around the world to nominate and rank the world's best think tanks. Copenhagen Consensus Center's advocacy for data-driven smart solutions to global challenges were voted into the top 20 among NGOs with up to 100 times' larger budget. The Economist said “Copenhagen Consensus is an outstanding, visionary idea and deserves global coverage.”

Lomborg is a frequent participant in public debates on policy issues. His analysis and commentaries have appeared regularly in such prestigious publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Economist, Washington Post, Forbes Magazine, Globe & Mail, The Guardian, The Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Times, The Australian, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and Der Spiegel. Lomborg’s monthly column appears in multiple languages in influential newspapers across all continents. He is a television commentator on CNN, FOX, MSNBC and the BBC, among others, on shows such as “Newsnight”, “20/20”, “60 Minutes”, “The Late Show with David Letterman”, and “Larry King Live”. He was featured in the movie “Cool It”, by Sundance Award winning director Ondi Timoner.

In 2011 and 2012, Lomborg was named Top 100 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy "for looking more right than ever on the politics of climate change". TIME Magazine ranked Lomborg among the world's 100 most influential people in 2004. In 2008 he was named "one of the 50 people who could save the planet" by the UK Guardian. In 2005 and 2008, Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine called him "one of the top 100 public intellectuals", and in 2008 Esquire named him "one of the world's 75 most influential people of the 21st century."
 

Professor Lomborg tailors each presentation to the needs of his audience and is not limited to the topics we have listed below:

  • Environment
  • The Truth About Global Warming
  • How to Make Your Efforts Count: Feeling Good vs. Doing Good
  • Sustainable development
  • Climate change
  • World poverty

 

False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

Hurricanes batter our coasts. Wildfires rage across the American West. Glaciers collapse in the Artic. Politicians, activists, and the media espouse a common message: climate change is destroying the planet, and we must take drastic action immediately to stop it. Children panic about their future, and adults wonder if it is even ethical to bring new life into the world.

Enough, argues bestselling author Bjorn Lomborg. Climate change is real, but it’s not the apocalyptic threat that we’ve been told it is. Projections of Earth’s imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive but largely ineffective policies that hamper growth and crowd out more pressing investments in human capital, from immunization to education.

False Alarm will convince you that everything you think about climate change is wrong — and points the way toward making the world a vastly better, if slightly warmer, place for us all.

Cool it

Cool It is a groundbreaking book that transforms the debate about global warming by offering a fresh perspective based on human needs as well as environmental concerns. Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns and asks why the debate over climate change has stifled rational dialogue and killed meaningful dissent.

The Skeptical Environmentalist

In The Skeptical Environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg challenges widely held beliefs that the global environment is progressively getting worse. Using statistical information from internationally recognized research institutes, Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental issues and documents that the global environment has actually improved. 

This is one of the most valuable books on public policy - not merely on environmental policy - to have been written for the intelligent general reader in the past ten years. ...The Skeptical Environmentalist is a triumph.
The Economist, June 9, 2001
 

  • President - Copenhagen Consensus Center
  • Visiting Professor - Copenhagen Business School
  • Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
  • Subject of the movie Cool It
  • Author - The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It
  • One of the 100 Top Global Thinkers - Foreign Policy, 2011
  • Thought Leader - Bloomberg Summit 2011
  • One of the 100 Top Global Thinkers - Foreign Policy, 2010
  • One of the world's 75 most influential people of the 21st century - Esquire, 2008
  • One of the "50 people who could save the planet" - UK Guardian, 2008
  • One of the top 100 public intellectuals, Foreign Policy & Prospect Magazine, 2008
  • One of the top 100 public intellectuals, Foreign Policy & Prospect Magazine, 2005
  • One of the world's 100 most influential people - Time Magazine, 2004