Bjorn Lomborg is a sad case. He titled his book The Skeptical Environmentalist and everyone got the message, without reading the book, that he was a climate-change skeptic -- and for the most part labeled him as an "enemy" and rebuffed him. It was just a public relations disaster.

For what it's worth, he's not a "skeptic" in any of the conventional ways. I also remember looking at the IPCC reports once when I was a young physics student and saying, "hey, it's only a couple degrees Celsius over many years?" I was educated enough to realize that you could predict bad storms etc -- what I like to tell people right now is that it's like having a really huge boulder and, right next to it, digging a little ditch, only to cause the boulder to smack you down: the small change in the height of an equilibrium can still have a huge effect if a big enough system is relaxing to the new equilibrium. Someone came up with a memorable name for it: it's less of a concern about "global warming" and more about "global weirding." It took me a while to appreciate that there is a small (but scary) probability that the slope that the boulder is on might have a net incline one or the other way, so that the boulder might not just hit us but roll over us if it gets disturbed far enough from equilibrium. It makes a lot of sense for there to be a big scientific research program about that, even though no IPCC model predicts runaway climate change because the probability is so low and the possible causes are typically unexpected.

With that said: though hurricanes, floods and tornadoes certainly can have a massive economic impact, Bjorn has a good point of "the weather disasters that we know will happen due to the warming that we know is happening are important, but let's figure out how this compares to other things which we can predict really well, and see where our money is best spent: climate-change relief efforts, or climate-change mitigation, or general alleviation of poverty, or what?"

What I think is most missing from all of this is: we're talking about so little money, especially if we compare to governments' military expenditures, going towards the science. What would be great is if a government said, "hey, we're putting forward this huge grant to climate change research just because we think research is intrinsically good and want to support this huge project of, y'know, knowing more."