Okay, First Things First: stop shooting at us.The threat of man-made climate change looms larger than any other problem facing the planet, so it's no wonder that the discussion about global warming has turned into a kind of choreographed screaming that drowns out the facts.

Science unequivocally tells us that climate change is real and caused by man, but predictions of destruction on an epic scale don’t stack up.

Consider the plight of the polar bear – a pin-up ‘victim’ of global warming. Some campaigners claim polar bears are dying because of warmer temperatures, but the facts don’t support the hysteria.

Since the 1960s, polar bear numbers have actually grown five-fold. Polar bears will eventually be affected by climate change, but many creatures and plants in the Arctic will do better as temperatures rise. That doesn’t make up for waning populations of polar bears, but we need to hear both sides of the story.

Scare stories are based on faulty assumptions about just one declining bear population. For the sake of argument, let's accept those faulty assumptions at face value. That means we are losing 15 bears a year to climate change. This means that – at most – 15 bears could be saved this year if we could stop global warming right now. Of course, we can’t. The Kyoto Protocol will cost $180 billion dollars, yet will not affect temperatures by very much: it would probably save .06 of one bear each year.

There are smarter alternatives. Hunters shoot between 300 and 500 polar bears each year. We can revoke hunting rights and clamp down on poachers. Surely it makes more sense to save 300-500 polar bears at virtually no cost than it does to spend hundreds of billions of dollars saving just one.

Of course, we don’t just care about polar bears, but also about the human toll of climate change. It seems logical to expect more heat waves and therefore more deaths. But though this fact gets much less billing, rising temperatures will also reduce the number of cold spells. And the cold is a much bigger killer than the heat. According to the first complete peer-reviewed survey of climate change's health effects, global warming will actually save lives. It's estimated that by 2050, global warming will cause almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year. But at the same time, 1.8 million fewer people will die from cold.

The Kyoto Protocol, at great expense, is not a sensible way to stop people from dying in future heat waves. At a much lower cost, urban designers and politicians could lower temperatures more effectively by planting trees, adding water features, and reducing the amount of asphalt in at-risk cities. Estimates show that this could reduce the peak temperatures in cities by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Global warming will claim lives in another way: by increasing the number of people at risk of catching malaria by about 3 percent over this century. According to scientific models, implementing the Kyoto Protocol for the rest of this century would reduce the malaria risk by just 0.2 percent.

On the other hand, we could spend $3 billion annually -- 2 percent of the protocol's cost -- on mosquito nets and medication and cut malaria incidence almost in half within a decade. For every dollar we spend saving one person through policies like the Kyoto Protocol, we could save 36,000 through direct intervention.

The world shouldn’t ignore climate change. Rather than throwing trillions of dollars at a treaty that will achieve little, I advocate a dramatic increase in spending on research into low-carbon energy. If every nation took part, this would be much more efficient than Kyoto, yet cost almost ten times less.

We should remember when we respond to the threat of climate change that other huge challenges face the planet:

• 4 million people will die from malnutrition this year
• 3 million from HIV/AIDS
• 2.5 million from indoor and outdoor air pollution
• 2 million from lack of micronutrients (iron, zinc and vitamin A)
• And almost 2 million from lack of clean drinking water.

Climate change policies are not the most effective way of dealing with these issues.

My latest project, Copenhagen Consensus 2008, will look at the world’s biggest challenges and ask some of the world’s top minds to identify the best solutions to them. Four Nobel laureates and four other top economists will weigh up how much good could be achieved by different approaches to world problems, and will identify the most effective ways to make a difference.

There’s more information at Copenhagen Consensus.

Cutting carbon emissions through Kyoto has become the instantaneous answer to any problem, but we could achieve more through simpler policies.

For one thing, we should stop shooting polar bears.

Bjørn Lomborg is the organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus 2008, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and author of Cool It and The Skeptical Environmentalist.

When the SARS epidemic broke out, I was in medical school and taking microbiology. I was, as it happens, studying plasmodium falciparum. P. falciparum is the single-celled parasite that causes malaria, and kills upwards of one million people every year, mostly small children. Fill up the Los Angeles Coliseum with little kids, then drown them in the Santa Monica bay. Repeat ten times. In some years, malaria does worse than that.

Malaria doesn't get a lot of news coverage, but SARS sure did. When it caused its first handful of deaths in Western cities, a nation-wide hysteria broke out, with an advisory against travelling to Toronto, “breaking news” updates on the networks, extensive coverage in the papers, the whole deal. It had the stink of Armageddon about it. My then ninety year-old grandmother, panicked by the news and the images of people wearing HEPA masks in the street, called my mother and reported she was dying of SARS.

SARS ended up killing 813 people in 2003 and 2004, before being eradicated in 2005. That's eight-hours work for malaria.

Of course, it's no mystery why we were so interested in SARS, and so uninterested in malaria. Malaria is generally not a threat to us in the West, and as Darfur demonstrates, the agonizing death of countless children does not necessarily bother us, provided that they're far away, and that they're not being killed by someone we especially dislike. We can live with those deaths. Very comfortably.

Malaria once was a threat to us in the West, however. We overcame that threat by utilizing all the technological tools at our disposal to virtually wipe out P. falciparum anywhere near us. And one of the most important of those tools was dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT. Alas, DDT, when sprayed excessively, allegedly thinned the egg shells of certain species of birds. In the sixties the growing environmental movement made a rallying point of it, and before long DDT was banned by the U.S. and others.

By then it didn't really matter, of course. Our children were no longer dying of malaria. It was just other people's kids who were still dying. And for the past four decades they've continued to do just that.

But over the past few years there's been a serious ratcheting up of the rhetoric in favor of bringing back DDT—as well as some pretty bitter attacks on the environmental movement for fighting against its use in the first place.

In his book State of Fear, Michael Crichton argued that banning DDT caused “...50 million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler". And in a 2003 speech Crichton added that these 50 million deaths “are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.”

Crichton's a mere sci-fi author, but he's hardly alone in feeling this way. A May article at The First Post describes Rachel Carson--the author of Silent Spring, one of the foundational texts of the environmental movement—as “deadlier than Stalin” for her attacks on DDT. That same month, the US government announced it was reversing its policy on DDT as part of President Bush's historic five-year, $1.2 billion plan to fight malaria. And last week, the World Health Organization, after receiving intense criticism from the British medical journal The Lancet for its lackadaisical approach to malaria, finally changed its policy on DDT. It is now encouraging malaria-riddled African nations to use it.

The banning of DDT may very well be, as Crichton says, “one of the most disgraceful episodes of the twentieth century.” It may also be the purest example of how the trendy political causes of the developed world can become weapons of mass destruction when imposed on developing countries.

And it may not yet be over. Though some environmental groups have supported the WHO's change of policy, others are still fighting. Let's hope they lose.