Science Quote by Bjorn Lomborg

Lomborg’s phrasing is engineered to sound like the voice of method itself: calm, reasonable, allergic to overstatement. “There is no doubt” is a savvy preemptive move, signaling he’s not a denialist while staking a claim to scientific open-mindedness. Then comes the rhetorical pivot: if temperatures have risen since 1975, “it is important to know to what extent” the sun versus carbon dioxide is responsible. That “to what extent” carries the real payload. It invites the listener to treat causal attribution as an unsolved suspense story, even though mainstream climate science has spent decades quantifying those contributions with increasingly tight error bars.

The subtext is less about solar physics than about burden-shifting. By centering solar radiation as a major question mark, the quote nudges audiences toward policy caution: don’t rush into carbon cuts if a natural driver might be doing the heavy lifting. It’s a familiar strategy in contested science debates: emphasize complexity to imply uncertainty, then let that uncertainty metastasize into delay.

The context matters: 1975 is not a neutral timestamp. It marks the period when greenhouse-gas forcing began to dominate the modern warming signal while solar irradiance trends flatten or cycle. Lomborg’s line also performs a cultural role: it flatters the public’s self-image as rational skeptics who refuse “simple” narratives. The irony is that the sentence’s posture of curiosity can function as a substitute for engagement with what the evidence already indicates, keeping the argument perpetually parked at the threshold of action.