Slashdot Mirror
Skeptical Environmentalist Saga Continues
"The Ministry critique holds that the Committee's procedure was unfair. It does not address the scientific issues. Lomborg's book caused outrage among many environmentalists and scientists, while right-wing organizations such as the Cato Institute have defended Lomborg. Scientific American devoted eleven pages of its January 2002 issue to a critique of Lomborg. Lomborg was only allowed to publish a one-page rebuttal, to which Scientific American replied here. When Lomborg defended himself by posting the Scientific American critique on his web site and that of Greenspirit with his commentary [PDF file] interspersed, Scientific American threatened to sue and both sites took it down. It is, however, still available at the iGreens web site."
(Slashdot ran a review of Lomborg's book early last year.)
People trying to win ideological points will be disappointed to have to face the reality that science is not just another arm of politics... it actually a real discipline of proof and justification toward the evaluation of evidence. Whether you "think" there is global warming or not, higher degrees of scientific analysis should not be tossed aside on the basis of scatalogical arguments. Long live scientific inquiry and the scientific method (it's been on the ropes quite a bit these past years... starting with Cold Fusion... look at the junk reported in the mainstream press and it's nearly always slightly wrong, misguided, or flat-out incorrect).
Anyway, back to Lomborg -- I call myself an environmentalist and I'm certainly concerned about the possibility of a human effect on climate change, but the more the issue gets turned into a matter of theology they may not be questioned, the more skeptical I get about the whole thing. This simply is not the way science is supposed to work.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Well the upper atmosphere is warming, but that can be easily explained by the weakening of the magnetic field which causes more radiation to hit the atmosphere in turn increasing the temperature in that region.
As for the ground data, Urban heat islands are the cause. The material used to build Urban areas retains the heat from the day, and radiates it at night. If you take the urban heat island data out of the ground temperature data, there is almost a zero increases in surface temperature.
No need for CO2 in the equation at all, though, Green house effect and what I outlined above both have an equally strong base of evidence (each is a hypothesis to climatology). I think that the hypothesis outlined above makes more sense personally.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
"I call myself an environmentalist and I'm certainly concerned about the possibility of a human effect on climate change, but the more the issue gets turned into a matter of theology they may not be questioned, the more skeptical I get about the whole thing. "
In this case there are billons of dollars at stake. If global warming is real then entire industries will have to change the way they function. None of these people want to spend one more dime then they have to so its in their interest to turn this issue into a theological/idelogical war.
It is inevitable that the global warming issue will be turned into a matter theology. In a way it strikes at the soft underbelly of the theory of capitalism. That being the environmental impact of large scale economic growth. The founders of capitalism never took into account the impact of their theories would have on the global environment because they presumed there would be an infinate aount of trees, energy, clean water, air etc.
The stakes are huge and the war will be bloody however it is also inevitable. This war will be fought whether we like it not. Nobody knows who is going to win but there will be many losers. As in any war however the truth will be the first casualty.
War is necrophilia.
on Monday, an earthquake shook the foundations of Diablo Canyon nuclear power station in California. This plant, if it had been built as originally planned, would likely have failed on Monday, likely contaminating hundreds of miles of pacific coastline with deadly radiation.
Thank GOD the environmentallist wackos were there, in the 1970's, to halt construction on this plant, and force PG&E to redesign the plant so that it could withstand a 7.0 direct on it's location. The magnatude of the San Simeon quake was estimated to be in the 5.5 to 6.0 range on the site of Diablo Canyon.
I personally don't mind having a nuclear power station in my "backyard". But that's because I've toured it, and I *know* they built it right.
For all those who blamed the 2000 blackouts on environmentalist wackos - screw you. It was fradulent enerygy trading practices.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"Crichton claims that the public believes in things like Global Warming and Nuclear Winter for the same reasons that it believes in little green men."
Really? What an odd claim to make. There is lots of evidence for global warming and many studies have been done on it. Maybe the evidence is not conclusive but it exists and is widespread.
Lumping global warming with little green men seems like the stupidest thing I have heard in a long time.
BTW over 90% of americans believe in god. If that's not a failure of science to act as a candle in the dark I don't know what is.
War is necrophilia.
"Of course, even the best of us only use 10% of our brains...looking at that simple fact most people would realize the junk science that's being put forward here..."
Heh. The irony is intentional, correct?
Anybody who would call the Cato Institute a "right wing" group is terribly, terribly ignorant. Cato is very pro-individual rights. On economic issues, they tend to agree with conservatives. On social issues, they tend to agree with liberals.
Contrary to what some people believe, it's possible to have positions other than what most people understand to be left wing or right wing. That two-dimensional scale is terribly inadequate for explaining the range of possible political positions. See the following quiz from Advocates for Self Government for a more useful way to look at the choices:
http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
In defense of the other side, I point out that heat transfer away from the surface of the earth relies more on convection, which is not affected by the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, than on radiation, which is where the "greenhouse effect" comes in. I also point out that water molecules are, on a molecule-by-molecule basis, at least as efficient at blocking infrared radiation as carbon dioxide, and that there are two orders of magnitude more of them in a typical sample of air than there are of carbon dioxide molecules. That means that the most important greenhouse "gas" in the atmosphere isn't a gas at all, it's water vapor. Indeed, that can be seen in the recorded experiences of people in the desert from the Roman legions onward.
So, why is a trace element supposed to cause the bulk of the effect? Perhaps there is a simple explanation. Do you know what it is?
Really, SciAm's response was quite fair, and they rebutted the critiques of his rebuts by offering him as much space as he wanted on their web site.
I read the whole mess. I'm not an expert, but I am a physicist and competent to review the work at a high level. My personal opinion is what follows:
1) Lomborg's reasoning is specious and poorly connected. He extracts details out of context and puts them together to tell a rosy environmental picture that ends up being in diametric opposition to the best data. That is he builds up a lot of small anomalies in the data and ends up with an answer that a first order check against big picture data shows is false. He uses the specious conclusion to attack the first order results, which is anti-scientific.
2) The political argument is that "environmentalists" somehow benefit from being alarmist, and are therefore all suspect. I have yet to figure out the reward mechanism for tilting against big business. The contrary position, engaging in research the findings of which support the activities of the wealthiest corporations on earth, has a direct and well documented fiscal reward system.
3) The vast majority of environmental scientists have found data which supports the contrary argument, and present their data, both raw and refined, in support of those conclusions over many years, and to extensive review, both researchers in all fields.. Lombard has done no such research and merely picks and chooses among the data which supports his arguments and dismisses the majority that doesn't as false to support his alarmist argument that environmental regulations will be the ruination of us all.
He does make some good economic arguments though - as much as his environmental science is as weak as one would expect from a young and inexperienced economist with no background in science, his economic arguments are both sensible and deserving of consideration.
The argument of his that I find most persuasive, after the veil of poor science is brushed away, is that given finite resources, and given some calculation of risk*consequence (that is the statistically weighted risk of some particular outcome) it is not rational to squander finite resources on low risk outcomes. More precisely, the best answer is to carefully consider consequences and probabilities and rationally allocate resources to optimize future survivability.
SciAm did not attack that foundation or reasoning, though they did fail to give it proper credit in their response to Lombard's science. Indeed, SciAm supports such rationalist arguments as they did in suggesting that asteroid monitoring is under funded due to the relatively low cost of doing so, and the high risk*result value of a very low risk, but catastrophic cost of a potential impact.
Lombard's book got undeserved attention because it fits so well with the needs of polluting industries to refute the obvious damage done. It's really not his fault - he's got a limited education in science and he overstepped his expertise. This isn't new, and as pointed out over and over again in the response to this article, almost inescapable in popular science writing. Why he got unfairly crucified is because he was unreasonably lionized, and it all had little do with the content or lack thereof of his book. A more reasonable answer would have been a clear review of his scientific failings and a pat on the back for a nice first try, and an open hand from the scientific community offering to teach an obviously bright guy the basics of environmental and atmospheric science so he could give it a better go next time.
Oh well.
I also think most polls on religion fail to capture realistic world views. Think about it - the cost of professing belief in God is very low. The cost of leading a lifestyle strictly in accordance with biblical tenets is very high. If there is no God, your professed belief in life certainly won't make a hoot of a difference after you are dead and gone, but if there is, perhaps it will matter to him (in particular with the Christian conception of God). Thus many Americans will tell you they believe in God. Quite a few (though far, far fewer) might even tell you they believe the Bible is literally true. And yet these same people will almost without exception not lead very Godly devout lives. The real nutters, the evolution deniers, Bible thumping science-rejecters - those people constitute closer to 5% of the population than 90%. And most of those people are just too dumb to rectify the inconsistency of all the scientific and technological devices they use in their day-to-day lives with their religious rejection of modern science.
A scientist of course would tell you there's not much evidence to support the existence of "God" in the Judeo-Christian sense. But I've never met a scientist who would tell you that the lack of such proof constitutes a disproof. And any economist would probably give you the explanation I provided above.
After reading through Lomborg's book and the responses to it, I've determined that there is one tested scientific theory inherent in global warming. Unfortunately it has more to do with psychology than earth sciences.
In 1972 a psychologist named Irving Janis developed the concept of groupthink, a theory that postulated that people within a group will think alike, or as he put it:
In other words, when you get a group of people together with a similar worldview and ask them to process some information, they will process that information in such a way as to coincide with their worldview.
The theory of groupthink is a tremendously useful model for analyzing public policy decisionmaking. Many articles have been written that apply this model to everything from the Cuban Missle Crisis (Graham Allison's indispensible Essence of Decision for those who might be interested in foreign-policy decisionmaking theory) to the decisions over the war in Iraq.
Scientists are not immune from groupthink. The consensus in January of this year was that the incident of ice hitting the space shuttle Columbia was not a major issue of concern. Those who did believe otherwise were dissuaded by others. Of course, the consensus was wrong in the issue and the dissenters were correct.
Global warming is more a consequence of groupthink than of sound science. It is pseudo-science to argue that a system as complex and chaotic as the environment can be predicted with any accuracy over long periods of time. We can't even predict the weather over a given chunk of territory with scientifically reproducable accuracy, yet one is to believe that we can say that the Earth's average temperature will rise x number of degrees by 2100?
The fact is that such claims are unverfiable and irreproducable, and rely on computer weather models that would respond as a model would be expected to but could have no relationship with the real world. Yet we're being asked to base our entire way of life based around flimsy assertions that cannot be proven or disproven scientifically.
So why are scientists behaving so unscientifically?
Because they have been given a worldview in which "polluters" should be stopped using science. In essence, the people who grew up watching Captain Planet are now out there either consciously or unconsciously trying to make the evidence fit their preordained worldview.
Those who dissent, like Lomborg, are practically apostates to the prevailing conventional wisdom. Lomborg is instantly assumed to be in the "pockets of big corporations" and trying to "defend the polluters." Lomborg's arguments are being treated as wrong on a prima facie basis and the prevailing conventional wisdom is being upheld - exactly the way in which Janis would describe for a group in the throws of groupthink.
Certainly pollution isn't good, but the way in which critics have attacked Lomborg have shown a shocking willingness to abandon dispassionate and objective science in favor of using science as a tool of public policy. When such an attitude becomes prevalent, real science falls behind. The scientific community deserves a black eye for this, and the way in which global warming is treated as a prima facie truth rather than a flimsy scientific theory is not hard science - it's a function of personal and professional bias on the part of many in the scientific community.
The complexity of a truly logical approach can be illustrated by looking at ETI. Let's break it question up into three parts. First, do they exists. Second, do they exist now. Third, will we meet them. Given the current scientific knowledge and a few reasonable assumptions, we can come up with an answer. The first assumption, of course, is the life is as is most common on earth, carbon based, and would require a sun like star and a earth like planet.
To the first we note that some scientist have looked at the number of suitable suns, waved their hands to figure out how many might contain planets(lately the hand waving has become more systematic) and the probability that the planet might develop life. The answer seems to be that it is not inconceivable that life like us might appear somewhere.
To the second we note the life of universe, the probably short life span of intelligent life if they cannot colonize other sun systems. Current physics makes it hard to move large numbers of people to other systems. Given these assumptions, the probability that life exist now seems vanishingly small.
To the third we have to look at physics as we know it, the size of the universe, and exceedingly small probability that life exists contemporaneously with us. Given these assumption, it is probably more likely that I would tunnel through my chair than an ETI would appear on our planet.
Obviously the conclusions change with the assumptions. Obviously modification to current theories might change the conclusions. But what we have now is we do not believe people when they say the meet ETI's, just like we don't believe in perpetual motion machines.
So, what did I just say? That ETIs do not exist or that they don't. It would be very easy for an agent of confusion to mince my words and make me look silly. in fact, an average person, with limited understanding of physics and probability, might think I was bonkers. And this is what is happening. It happened with cigarettes, even though research on their dangers go back one hundred years. It happens with food products, even though the reasonable balanced diet is well known and the consensus is that nothing beats consuming a reasonable number of calories with moderate exercise.
Global warming is probably happening. Not all observed effects can be attributed to non-human causes. There is a demonstrable mechanism by which humans might significantly effect the climate of the planet. Technology exists to halt those human generated mechanisms. It may turn out that spending on such technology is not necessary. OTOH, we put our children in the back seat and make them sleep in certain positions, and in the USA we take huge amounts of likely unnecessary supplements, and buy alarms for our houses and cars even though we live in safe neighborhoods. So why not try to do some minimal stuff to that might make our lives and our future better.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
1) Actually, Lomborg's reasoning is quite sound and not hard to follow, and is mostly based on dismantling the assumptions made in the horribly bad "science" of Global Warming.
2) There are thousands of environmental researchers out there in the world right now studying climate change, and many of them would have no jobs in the environmental field if they weren't working on GW. Add in the hundreds to thousands of people who are getting quite healthy paychecks running things like the Kyoto Treaty effort, and you're going to find literally *billions* in paychecks going to "research and fight" Global Warming. This is very different from when I was in environmental science back in the late 1970s, when you had to search long and hard to find any job at all.
3) Lomborg's work was in analyzing the material put forward by environmental researchers to support GW, and he found large, gaping holes in it in many places. It's not the meta-analysis so popular in a lot of fields, it's direct commentary on bad science, very similar to the theoretical physics work done to dismantle cold fusion.
The big problem with Lomborg's "science" is that the work done by the GW researchers that was so flawed. Look at the recent scientific collapse of the "hockey stick" graph in the IPCC report.
It's also very funny that you, as a physicist, complain about an economist working outside of his field when you're also doing the same thing in analyzing his work...
Uhh... you might want to look at this data from NASA before you say that.
http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/msusci.html
Am I blind? Because all I see is noise?
To see a trend that is below the noise and then say that it's correlation with increase of CO2 (0.06% increase) is causing more of an effect than the increase in H2O vapor (almost 5%) is not science. Two trends being in the same direction have a 50% probability of being true. Also, a correlation does not show cause and effect.
Is the 0.06% increase in CO2 the cause of the increase in brest cancer?
Sigh. This is exactly what Crighton is talking about. Did you RTFA? You cannot simply say, "well, a lot of smart people say it is true, so it must be true." Science is about making testable hypotheses and then demonstrating the truth or falsehood of those hypotheses.
In the case of global warming, it is scientifically impossible to assign any cause to a past trend in global temperature. In order to do so, you would need to have a controlled experiment, where you take two identical Earths, remove a hypothetical cause of global warming from one, and then observe the long-term climate change in each. At the end of the experiment, you could say whether or not the difference in initial conditions between the two Earths was the cause of global warming. That is science. The theory that human activity is causing global warming is an untestable hypothesis and is therefore outside the bounds of science and strictly a matter of faith.
You can also scientifically address the question of climate change by applying a model: a collection of emperical observations about the components of a system that predict the behavior of the system as a whole. But the uncertainties involved in modeling future climate change are huge. I can say, "It will rain in Los Angeles on February 15, 2051," and I might even be right! Even if my prediction were true, it would not be science. It is possible to predict future climate scientifically, but not with much precision. A good scientist should understand that, and many, probably most, of the scientists who study climate change do. Unfortunately fear, not good science, generates headlines (and sadly, research grants) and so the public has a skewed view of what the scientific evidence really is.
Crighton isn't saying that global warming or little green men don't exist. He's saying that a lot of people can make a some noise, use pseudoscience to back it up, and nobody speaks out to defend what true science is.
I'm not sure if your last comment about belief in God is sarcastic or not, but the existence or nonexsistence of God is also an untestable hypothesis and therefore outside the bounds of science. Science is not a rejection of belief in God or any other spiritual belief. Put another way, there is no scientific evidence to support the hypothesis that there is no God.
Why is that, precisely? What makes "faith" such a special way of knowing things that common reason no longer applies to it?
The answer is, nothing. "Faith" is simply belief in a proposition which is not commensurate with the evidence. It makes no sense to have faith in a proposition when there is ample evidence that the proposition is true.
When someone says, "I believe X," and their response to a request for evidence is "I have faith," they've merely restated the original point: They believe X.
I have to agree with the grandparent post here: If people were more inclined towards reason and the scientific method, they would not believe things only insofar as the evidence justifies such belief. Since most religious people will admit that there is no direct evidence for God, belief in God would decline drastically.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Except guess what: that money won't get spent on any environmental initiatives otherwise. It will mostly go into the pockets of executives, or possibly towards more pollution.
You have no point. This cynicism is not based on a logical conclusion from the original propositions.
Where do you conclude that if the money budgeted for Kyoto does not go toward Kyoto that it will invariably go to executives and pollution. My own skepticism would say that I would not be surprised if the money ended up into some OTHER pork barrel spending, but I can't agree that the only two places that a government spends money are: 1) Kyoto 2) executives. Sound stupid? Well you said it.
In the case of global warming, it is scientifically impossible to assign any cause to a past trend in global temperature. In order to do so, you would need to have a controlled experiment, where you take two identical Earths, remove a hypothetical cause of global warming from one, and then observe the long-term climate change in each. At the end of the experiment, you could say whether or not the difference in initial conditions between the two Earths was the cause of global warming. That is science.
Actually, I think you and Crighton (and the public) are missing a subtle distinction here. What you are describing is the second half of science. The first half is coming up with the hypothesis.
In the old days, people would dream up whatever hypotheses came to mind. Birds have wings, birds can fly, ergo if you put wings on man, man can fly. If they were a Newton, they could make an instinctive good guess at what a correct hypothesis should be. If they were a Galileo, their instincts weren't quite so good so they relied on experiments to provide them with numerical data, which they could then use to create a fine-tuned hypothesis. That hypothesis could then be tested with similar but slightly different experiments for verification.
Nowadays, most of the "obvious" science has already been discovered. It takes a brilliant mind to come up with something mindshatteringly new. So most of the science that goes on does things Galileo's way - collecting data to form a basis for a hypothesis, then testing that hypothesis against further data. This is where statistical correlation and computer modeling research comes in. Instead of dreaming up a thousand hypotheses that X_n causes lung cancer (where n ranges from 1 to 1000) and wasting time devising and running a thousand experiments to test for a causal relationship, you do an epidemiological study. Lo and behold, smoking is strongly correlated with lung cancer. So you concentrate on making and testing the hypothesis that smoking causes lung cancer.
The point of harvesting long-term global temperature data, making climatic models, etc. isn't to test the hypothesis that manmade CO2 causes global warming. It's to fine-tune the hypotheses that (1) manmade CO2 is a significant contribution relative to natural sources, and (2) CO2 levels are a causal factor in changes to average global temperatures. Neither of these hypotheses are at the "test to prove/disprove it" stage yet, but it's being reported by the media (and those with an agenda) as if it were and the results already confirmed the hypotheses. The scientists aren't doing anything wrong, it's just that what they're doing is being misrepresented (deliberately or not) to the public.
I agree with Crighton that shunning and gagging those who hold "unpopular" views at the hypothesis-making stage is wrong. But I disagree that anything which doesn't test a hypothesis is pseudo-science. Sometimes the hard part is testing the hypothesis. Sometimes the hard part is coming up with the hypothesis. Sometimes (as with global warming) both parts are hard.
The Danish skeptics are being skeptical about the skeptic. Sounds very fishy. I wonder how the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty. Unfortunately groups like this tend to project what they are doing on to other people. BTW, a skeptic who is pointing out onesidedness on an issue will end up showing one sided data. Lets say group A fudged data 5% of the time. Well, if I were rebutting them them, I would show each of the times they fudged data...hence 100% of my cases would be about fudged data.
The biggest problem is that politically popular ideas rarely get enough rebuttal or public scrutiny. The fact that Dr. Bjorn Lomborg has been actively trying to poke wholes in the global warming argument is good for the debate, even if it is not the absolute best science. There is a lot of "not the best science" that goes on to prove politically popular causes, that rarely get called by Scientific Dishonesty circles.
If 1% of the people who played violent video games turned violent, then we would have a nation crisis. Even 1 in a 1000 would be scary.
The book does not purport to be science, but rather to be a review of the science, the players in the environmental conflict and the claims that are made.
The book was a result of Lomborg attempting to REFUTE a series of claims counter to normal environmental doctrine. He was unable to do so, and in the process concluded, and documented, that a lot of the public statements are misleading. In doing so, he is talking to the public, not publishing in a peer reviewed journal, and he is taking on others who do the same thing.
His level of honesty is far ahead of that of his opponents. That there may be weaknesses in the book is hardly surprising, given the vast area it covers.
I do know that in the area of climatology, his conclusion are more consistent with what my climatologist researcher friends conclude than with what the environmental organizations are saying.
There is no doubt but what he is being attacked for going against the orthodoxy. Many others publish far less carefully researched books that support the orthodoxy, and they are not investigated by committees. Nor does Scientific American devote 14 pages of criticism to those books - 14 pages which attacked BL but were almost entirely full of ad hominem attacks and nit picking of trivial points, but had little to say about the important conclusions.
He is also probably being attacked for showing how the dynamics of the environmental movement work, how they lead to a crisis atmosphere, and how environmental organizations profit from made up or exaggerated crisis.
Environmentalism has become a religion to many. It is no wonder that they want to burn him at the stake.
The only good weather is bad weather.
First and foremost, it is unreasonable to take everyday experience and try to impose the conclusions derived from that limited experience on the universe as a whole.
For example, common sense tells us that time flows at a constant rate, and things happen in a specific, unambiguous order. But the Theory of Special Relativity wreaks havoc with day-to-day experience.
You claim that all effects must have a cause, thus implying a chain of causality leading back to a single source. That's the same sort of appeal to common sense that informs the general belief that we should be able to measure both the position and the velocity of something to an arbitrary level of precision at the same time.
This "evidence" isn't an appeal to a well-understood fact about the universe; it's an appeal to an assumption that many people make about the universe.
To paraphrase and summarize Richard Dawkins: The incredible complexity of life is something that requires an explanation. Evolution via natural selection is that explanation.
If you want to believe that God directed evolution, you may have faith in that idea. But it's a far cry from actual evidence for the proposition. If you want to believe that evolution never happened, then you are simply wrong, and I'm too lazy to educate you on the matter.
Both are simple human perceptions. Actually, they're very complex. But you must first explain how certain things tickle our senses to produce these perceptions, and only then can that explanation be used as evidence for a given worldview.
The mere existence of beauty and ugliness are brute facts requiring an explanation. You must show not only that your theory of a God-driven universe fully explains these perceptions, but also that your theory produces testable conclusions about them.
You can collect a vast, vast library of anecdotes, but the plural of anecdote is not "data." People notice when unusual things happen, especially when those unusual events can be made to conform to their worldview. Until you can find a clever way to factor out this selectivity, all this talk of serendipity is worthless as evidence.
The body of knowledge that constitutes our scientific understanding of the world is far too large to fit in any one brain, but science hasn't thrown up its hands and said, "You have to have faith." "Too complex" is just a cop-out.
Okay, this is wrong on a couple of levels. Scientific assertions are never "proven" per se. They simply survive numerous experiments to try and disprove them. The "truth" of a given assertion is never 100%, even if an experiment has been successfully run millions of times.
This leads to my second point: some experiments are very cheap to replicate, while others are very expensive. It would be prohibitively expensive to create a precise replica of Earth, tweak a few variab
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
"I recall criticisms by authors cited by Lomborg, who say that their work fails to support (or even contradicts) Lomborg's conclusions. To the extent that Lomborg claims their support, they say it is from sections taken out of context. This is hardly the work of an honest academic."
This is a common reaction, and not as much of a problem as you might think. If the man cites data from a valid source, I'll accept it. Conclusions have a context (and we must skeptically evaluate conclusions without bias). Data does not. People are often mad when their data is used to support conclusions with which they do not agee... too bad.
"[... that there is an impending disaster] proves that his "don't worry, be happy" conclusion is bunk."
No, it proves that there is an impending disaster, and one which should be evaluated for possible action.
Let's look at global warming just as an example. There is a wide spectrum of warming activism. On one end you have the folks who would say, "Global warming is a fact; we must act; SUVs should be taken off the roads!" These people are wrong, but that's not terribly surprising, after all they are reactionary extremists. On the other end of the spectrum you have the people who would say, "Global warming is a myth; we must not act; environmentalists are a menace!" Guess what -- yep, wrong too.
So, what is correct? I have no clue, and one of Lomborg's points in his response is that he doesn't either. All anyone can be sure of is that the people who tell you they have all the answers are full of it.
The problem is that of validation and miscommication for the most part. For example, when warming activists are told they are wrong, they run to their thermostats and point, saying that it's warm out! What they often miss is that it was very warm out 1500 years ago when a period of global warming destroyed countless species and wiped out at least one culture. What many scientists have come to question is not, "is it hot", but "why is it hot?" The answer to that MUST start with a better understanding of the sun and how it impacts our climate. For example, this year we have seen the most activity ever recorded on the surface of the sun. If it is abnormally warm next year, we should begin with a simple question, "how does last year's solar activity play into this?"
While there are many theories, interestingly none of them has been proven to the satisfaction if the majority of the community. Hmm... big ball of fusing plasma 8 light minutes away, and we blame SUVs for climate phenomena that have occured before, prior to the advent of the SUV.... interesting.
I don't always agree with Lomborg, but SciAm (which has, IMHO, become a rag in the last 10 years) did its readers a disservice by trying so hard to discredit him, rather than to address the concerns he brings up.