Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic

DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."

Comments

faster than intended?

[Jorgandar]

This statement concerns me: "But its chairman, Josef Fendt, said later that the track was far faster than its designers ever intended it to be." How could designers NOT be aware of how fast a person would be flying down the track? Do they not have rudimentary knowledge of physics?

Re:faster than intended?

[Tsunamio]

"It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see."

I for one am sick of every open medium being censored in the hopes of keeping kids from learning about the naughty bits. Couldn't they just keep these in a separate, awesome part of the app store?

Politics, Politics, Politics

[Dthief]

If you read through the article you realize that both sides are whiney little children. As a scientist I'm offended by all of this.

Re:Absence of Evidence

[WegianWarrior]

Going on a tangent, but it just occured to me how so many of the climate change deniers arguments echoes those of creationists. It would be interesting to know what the overlap between the two groups are - they certainly seems to share more than a few traits IMNSHO