In a Sept. 15 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Lomborg accused the Guardian of taking his comments out of context.

So, to clear things up, here’s what Lomborg believes: cutting greenhouse gas emissions through some kind of cap on carbon emissions is “woefully ineffective” in terms of economics. “[W]hile every dollar spent on fighting malnutrition would yield nearly $20 in benefits, every dollar spent on cutting carbon would avoid much less than a dollar of global warming damage,” Lomborg said in the op-ed.

Instead, he said, the best option is to invest in green technology, or as Lomborg puts it, “making green energy so cheap everyone wants it.” Lomborg says that’s where the Guardian got it wrong:

What happened next was startling. The Guardian reported my commonplace observation as evidence of “an apparent U-turn” by “the world’s most high-profile climate change skeptic.” This set off a media stampede; news organizations around the world scrambled to report my so-called change of heart.

I tried to explain that I had always considered climate change to be a problem. The only thing that had changed was that we finally had some good solutions to consider. Some people took the point, but just as many didn’t. As far as the latter group was concerned, I had finally seen the light, and that was that.

“One of the most sensitive areas has been what we do in friendly countries that don’t want to cooperate or maybe we don’t have enough confidence to entrust them with information. If you have an al-Qaida guy wandering around certain bits of the world we might decide that we need to deal with that ourselves, directly, without making a lot of noise,” he said. “There was a plan to deal with that. It was much talked about in the CIA and the military had its own operation.”

My quest to elaborate on this took a revealing turn when I asked a currently-serving intelligence official whether the Guardian had it right. “This effort has been briefed to the Congress,” the official replied. “They know what this was and what it wasn’t.” So I asked a congressional staffer, who answered, “Like Congress can talk about it.” This is what it’s like reporting this story, folks.

In addition, The Guardian has written the British High Court requesting that it disclose the photographs “in the interest of open justice and freedom of expression.” Mohamed’s lawyer, Stafford Smith, expressed discontent with the Obama administration, largely in line with transparency advocates concerned with the torture of detainees: “It is difficult to understand the continuing policy of the Obama administration. Surely the public has the right to know the crimes committed by US personnel against a British resident like Binyam Mohamed.”

Also, the Twitter hashtag for election updates is #iranelections. Some recent tweets are speculating that the reported high turnout figures are a ruse by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to make Moussavi voters feel like they don’t need to vote.