Global warming could save lives: skeptic

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming could save lives, a self-styled "Skeptical Environmentalist" said on Thursday.

Clashing with the U.N. health agency, Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg told the Reuters Environment summit the world should not overlook benefits of climate change such as the fall in the number of deaths from icy winters.

"You see a lot about deaths from heatwaves, much less on avoided deaths," Lomborg said.

He estimated that about 200,000 fewer people were dying every year worldwide because of global warming -- many more people survive because winters are less chill than die from heatwaves and other effects.

The U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO), targeted for criticism in a new book by Lomborg entitled "Cool It", stuck by a 2003 estimate that 150,000 people died overall from climate change in 2000.

That study said the main factors for the rising toll were malnutrition, malaria and diarrhoea in developing countries.

"Lomborg is guilty of the bias in selection of evidence of which he accuses others," said Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, a senior WHO scientist and an author of the study.

He told Reuters that Lomborg's research was "academically sloppy" because it failed to credit the WHO with estimating temperature effects.