Science Quote by Bjorn Lomborg

Lomborg’s line lands like a spreadsheet dressed up as reassurance: “on average” does the heavy lifting, smoothing human calamity into a single, digestible mean. It’s a classic technocratic move, not overtly cruel but quietly anesthetizing. The developing world becomes a statistical category rather than a set of places where heat, flood, and crop failure arrive unevenly and politically.

The intent is clear: downgrade urgency, redirect attention toward cost-benefit calculations, and argue that adaptation and growth may matter more than aggressive emissions cuts. Lomborg’s broader brand has long been contrarian pragmatism - treating climate policy as an allocation problem, where money spent on mitigation might be “better” spent on health or education. In that frame, “not going to harm” is less a forecast than a positioning statement: calm down, prioritize differently, don’t let climate dominate the agenda.

The subtext is where it bites. “On average” doesn’t just summarize; it absolves. Averages can hide distributional brutality: a modest net global GDP shift can coexist with lethal heatwaves, failed monsoons, coastal displacement, and price spikes that punish households already living close to the edge. The phrase also smuggles in a baseline assumption that development continues smoothly enough for adaptation to be affordable - an assumption climate shocks can directly undermine.

Context matters: this is the rhetorical posture of late-20th/early-21st-century climate debate, when skepticism often took the form of “lukewarm” impact-minimizing claims rather than outright denial. Lomborg’s sentence works because it borrows the authority of science while leaning on a moral sleight of hand: if the aggregate looks tolerable, the outliers can be treated as acceptable collateral.