Stephen Hawking asserts that God isn’t needed in explaining the universe. Bjorn Lomborg advocates for a carbon tax to combat global warming. With all this drama, who said book publishing was dead!

We’ll leave Hawking to others, and instead spend a few moments on Lomborg, the Danish author and academic frequently identified as the world’s most widely recognized climate contrarian.

For several years, Lomborg clearly has been a top voice for skeptics of climate change science, as well as those who’d rather adapt than fight. This, even though Lomborg has long acknowledged the mainstream scientific view that climate change is happening and is driven primarily by human activity.

Where Lomborg parted ways with many researchers was in his opposition to devoting resources to slow or reverse climate change, rather than spending money on other pressing challenges, such as health care and clean water.

His 2001 book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” has been the standard-bearer for an alternative view that trying to combat the unrelenting rise in global carbon dioxide emissions is basically a waste of talent and resources.

In his new book, “Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits,” Lomborg acknowledges the looming environmental changes expected to result from continued warming and asserts that they’re worth fighting.

He proposes spending $100 billion a year to develop clean energy technology for wind, wave, solar, and nuclear power, and also for climate engineering ideas such as whitening clouds to increase their reflectivity. The money would also be used to help society adapt to inevitable changes, such as rising seas, and global health care problems.

He proposes funding such work with a global tax on carbon emissions.

In an article in The Guardian, Lomborg said the evolution in his thinking came during talks associated with the Copenhagen Consensus project, in which a group of economists were asked to consider how to best spend $50 billion.

“The first results, in 2004, put global warming near the bottom of the list, arguing instead for policies such as fighting malaria and HIV/Aids,” The Guardian wrote. “But a repeat analysis in 2008 included new ideas for reducing the temperature rise, some of which emerged about halfway up the ranking. Lomborg said he then decided to consider a much wider variety of policies to reduce global warming, ‘so it wouldn’t end up at the bottom’.”

“The point I’ve always been making is, it’s not the end of the world,” he told The Guardian in another article. “That is why … we should be spending our money well.”

“If we care about the environment and about leaving this planet and its inhabitants with the best possible future,” he said in the same story, “we actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming.”

For whatever reasons, climate skeptic-extraordinaire Marc Morano, over at his climatedepot site, has yet to put out one of his frequent “BREAKING NEWS” e-mail blasts trumpeting the new and improved Lomborg.