Science Quote by Bjorn Lomborg

Lomborg’s rhetorical move here is to concede the core reality of climate change while quietly narrowing the emotional bandwidth of the crisis. “Incontrovertible” is the credibility stake in the ground: he’s not doing denial, he’s doing triage. That opening inoculates him against the most obvious critique (that he’s minimizing), then pivots to the real work of the sentence: downgrading the most catastrophic framings without sounding cavalier.

The key phrase is “probably not... six degrees,” a soft dismissal of worst-case headlines that have long powered climate advocacy. He doesn’t argue against them with data in this line; he simply marks them as rhetorically excessive, the climate equivalent of a scare statistic. By offering “two to three degrees” as the likelier range, he positions himself as the adult in the room: neither apocalyptic nor complacent, but “serious enough.” That final clause is doing double duty. It acknowledges harm to retain moral standing, while setting up a policy debate about proportional response: adaptation, cost-benefit tradeoffs, and the implicit claim that panic is a bad basis for governance.

The subtext is less about physics than about persuasion. Lomborg has built a public profile arguing that resources are finite and climate action should be weighed against other global priorities. In that context, this quote reads like strategic calibration: accept the consensus, reject the maximalist narrative, and invite an audience fatigued by catastrophe to re-enter the conversation without feeling guilt-tripped. It’s an argument for climate seriousness without climate absolutism, crafted to shift the battleground from “is it real?” to “how much should we pay, and for what kind of fix?”