How 'bout you answer your own question. You seem to think that our economy
owes a few tech guys getting artificially high salaries a living at the expense
of everyone who pays more for groceries and other goods to pay those salaries.
I argue that the economy is `for' everyone, and tends to benefit everyone when
not prevented from doing so by artificial barriers to trade.
Not really -- there are a lot of costs involved with outsourcing work, and the
growth of high-tech mwans that a relatively high level of skill is needed in order
to compete for those jobs. On the other hand, it's clear that artificially inflated salaries
are also hurting working people by making them pay more for products, and
that competition will tend to find a balance.
After all, this is just what people predicted would happen when automation came
along -- all the pundits frowned darkly, and wrote long books, such as Norbert
Weiner's The Human Use of Human Beings, or Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano
which predicted just such a `spiral to the bottom' as fewer employees were needed
to do the same work.
You know what? They were exactly wrong. Automation improved the lives of
working people by making a vastly superior standard of living available for less
money (and work) than it took to stay afloat before, while new fields of work (including
IT work) employed millions. This type of evolution is normal and improves everyone's
life, and trying to prevent it with artificial trade barriers is no more useful than
attempting to force people to keep using horses instead of automobiles so that blacksmiths
would not go out of business would have been.
I think you're missing the point here. You're defending your `right' to do your
job at an artificially high salary, at the expense of everyone who holds stock in
your company, or who would benefit from the products you make being cheaper.
In this sense, you're no different from those in 1920 who demanded their `right'
to keep being paid to work shoing horses, even as the automobile pushed their
profession nearly out of existance.
Old joke: ``Old man Smith worked down at the county courthouse, polishing the brass
cannons on the courthouse steps. Each morning, he would get up, take his bucket and
rag, and shine them until the gleamed. Then he would take his paycheck, and go home.
Finally, after many years, he came in and announced that he was quiting.
`What are you going to do now?' I asked him.
`Well,' he said, `I've saved my money, day by day, and I finally have enough that I'm
going to buy two brass cannons of my own, and go into business for myself!' and left.''
The main ways they do so are through stock value, however, which in the
normal case (read: when they're not pumping the stock through illicit means
in order to dump it before it crashes leaving the company backrupt) means
that the quickest way for them to get rich is to benefit the shareholders.
For the small percentage of cases where they are pumping and dumping, we have
prisons and shareholder suits for breach of fiduciary duty. The reason you've
heard of the Enron's and Worldcom's, after all, is that people who do these things
too blatantly do get caught.
That's not the point -- you're defending your `right' to be paid more
for a job than someone else is willing to do it for at the expense
of everyone who has a 401k or who would benefit from the product
you make being cheaper...
AFAIK, all grenade launchers are actually shells, designed for indirect fire. (To not
be, it would have to either use a seperate launch mechanism (a spring or some such), or
be like the WWII-era rifle grenades.
This is a particularly nice implementation, though, yes.:-) For more on it, see
here.
About those anti-personel rocket launchers, we're closer than you may think. The OICW (the next-generation
combat weapon being tested for deployment throughout the armed services) includes a computer-aimed grenade launcher which is smart enough to compute
a perfect air-burst over a designated target, and which can handle a range of ammunition types.
Actually, the shareholders are the ones who win when a company does well , and that means anyone with investments stands to benefit
(and as I mentioned above, that's seventy percent of Americans these days, including anyone
with a pension, 401k, or other invested retirement plan.
Umm, at the risk of spoiling your conspiracy theory, if what we wanted was cheap
oil, we would lift the sanctions, or do what the French did (sign an oil
deal with Saddam in contravention of the UN sanctions and resolutions). Or do any
of a hundred other deals which would allow us to get that oil cheap without the expense
of a war, but wouldn't liberate the people of Iraq or end the threat of WMD.
At any rate, we only get about 17% of our oil from the entire Middle East, so your
black-helicopter cliams just don't hold up...
Hmmm, let's see now -- people didn't vote for a guy who wanted to cripple the local economy,
thus making employers (and by extension jobs) move elsewhere, and you see this as hurting people
who work? As for towing their part of the load, I would remind you that the top 25% of society
pay 75% (!!!) of all income taxes. Sounds like more than a fair share to me...
Where's your evidence for your claims about who did and didn't vote, anyway?
So let's get this straight -- you didn't actually `have time to finish' the chapter on energy, so in
fact you've read one eight page chapter of Mr. Lomborg's book, and it is on those eight
pages that you base your criticisms? Forgive me if I'm not very impressed (and I doubt the other
readers of this thread are either).
Now, on to your specific claims:
As to whether you have even read Mr. Lomborg's work, you began
here by saying `I admit that I have not read the entire thing',
which you then downgraded here and
here to your having read `parts of the book'. Now
you admit that you read one eight-page chapter, and skimmed another one.
Likewise, here you assert that Mr. Lomborg
has (in the eight-page chapter which you have read) not `brought in any hard data', when in fact he cites just about
every publicly available long-term forestation survey ever done in the eighty-seven footnotes to that chapter,
including the FAO series on which the claims he is contesting are almost uniformly based. Likewise, you claim that
his cites are not `full' cites because in your very limited reading of the book, you missed the fact that they reference
the bibliography included on pages 375-378 of the paperback edition.
And now you attempt to excuse your shoddiness how? By pointing us to the fact that you haven't read any of Mr. Lomborg's
book but a random sample, and thus admittedly have no knowledge on the book as a whole, and by claiming that you haven't
`time' to do a better job.
Spare us. If you have no time to read Mr. Lomborg's work before smearing it, or to provide actual criticisms (show us what
data you claim would change Mr. Lomborg's projections and that it does so, don't simply assert that such data exist, for example)
why should you be taken seriously?
Including an extra sentence, or an extra paragraph, or the entire interview does
not change what Schneider is admitting to -- that his science serves a political,
as well as scientific end, and that in the interest of this political end, he has
exaggerated his findings, swept doubts about his data under the rug, and generally
misrepresented his work in a quest for media attention.
So what if he `tries to do both'? Are we to take it as scientific honesty that Mr.
Schneider's idea of the right balance of lying for media attention and being scientifically
objective includes a little of each? Come now, that's hardly the standard you are
applying to Mr. Lomborg, whose work you declare `dishonest' because you don't like his
choice of climate model, even though he discusses that choice at length, and even though
he chose it for its conformance to the UNEP and IPCC estimates which are the basis for
most of the ongoing discussion of global warming.
Face it -- your consistent defense of Schneider in the face of his open admissions of
gaming the media by misrepresenting his data, and your refusal to call SciAm's attempts
to use the courts to silence rebuttals to their smear campaign against Lomborg dishonest,
despite being given three opportunities to do so, coupled with your bizarre charges against
Lomborg, unbacked by any data, show that you are applying a purely dogmatic standard of
`scientific honesty' here.
I trust that the readers of this thread are taking your attacks on Lomborg in that context.
Good day.
Umm, no, you didn't read what I posted (and your argument is specious as well -- more on that later).
Lomborg specifically addresses his choice of Nordhaus/Boyer both in TSE itself and at greater length in
his rebuttal to the SciAm smear piece. If you had read either, you would be aware of this. While it
is, perhaps, understandable that you have not read the latter, as SciAm went to great lengths to silence
it (something you mysteriously consider acceptable, showing just how elastic your idea of `scientific
dishonesty' really is), you should do so before making false statements about its content -- it can be found
here.
In any case, your accusation is what exactly? That you don't like the model Lomborg chose, a model he chose
because it conforms to the studies released by the UNEP and the IPCC which are the basis for much discussion
of global warming? This, you would have called `scientific dishonesty', while you excuse Schneider's open
admission that he exaggerates his findings and hides doubts about his data for political ends simply because
Schneider is on the `right' side?
As I've said elsewhere in this debate, I expect that readers of this thread will take your attacks on Lomborg in
the context of this consistent dogmatism and application of double standards on your part. Good day.
We've been over this before -- I'm hardly going to reprint the entire interview
here, and adding a sentence, or a paragraph, or a page on either side of the quote
doesn't change what Schneider is discussing. He is openly owning up to misrepresenting
his findings and to sweeping doubts about his data under the rug in an attempt to
make his stories seem more frightening, something he admits he is doing for political
ends.
Now that's scientific dishonesty, and a man like that is no scientist, and has
no place attacking Lomborg. As I said, your insistence on a double standard by which
Schneider's admittance of dishonesty is acceptable because he is on the `right' side
while any baseless claim against Lomborg is to be taken as justified because he is not
shows that you are no scientist either, and likewise have no credibility in attacking Mr. Lomborg's
work.
Come out and admit that Schneider is dishonest, and that SciAm's attempts to use the courts
to silence Mr. Lomborg's rebuttal of their smear campaign was likewise dishonest and
unscientific, and then maybe we have a discussion here. Otherwise, you are transparently
dogmatic.
Again, you're the one making accusations here, so start backing them up.
So Quiggin has doubts about Nordhaus/Boyer. And? How does this get you closer
to your attacks on Lomborg? Is Mr. Lomborg misrepresenting what Nordhaus/Boyer is?
No. Is he deriving conclusions from it incorrectly? No. What he says is (to paraphrase)`here
is one widely used model, which is broadly consistent with estimates from the UNEP and
the IPCC. These estimates are often used (as per Schneider) to make wild claims about
global warming. But here's the actual scope and context of these estimates.'
All of this is discussed at length in Lomborg's rebuttal of the SciAm smear job, which can be
read here. This rebuttal has not been discussed
or answered by SciAm, and indeed they have threatened lawsuits in an attempt to have it removed
from the web. Now that's scientific dishonesty -- don't you agree?
Your idea of `science' is even more elastic than I had imagined. So now, if Schneider admits
to misrepresenting his own work to the media, and brushing doubts and counter-evidence under
the rug in order to create scares, this is not scientific dishonesty, but if I quote
him saying so, I'm committing `dishonesty and unscientific behavior'.
This is very important in the context at hand. You have just demonstrated handily what I've been saying
all along -- that in your vocabulary `unscientific behavior' means presenting inconvenient facts or taking unpopular positions,
while even direct dishonesty such Mr. Schneider's does not count as such in your book because
he is on the `right side'. Likewise, you seek a `serious' scientist's opinion, where `serious'
means agreeing with you, and even the most highly respected figures are `activists' or `dishonest'
if they do not.
I would invite the readers of this thread to view your criticisms of Lomborg in this context. Good day.
On the contrary, this in no way changes Mr. Schneider's meaning -- he is saying outright
that his science serves a political goal, and in that interest he is exaggerating scary
scenarios, over-simplifying things to induce fright, and sweeping doubts he has about
the accuracy of his work under the carpet.
And you're trying to tell us that these things are OK because Mr. Schneider feels that they
he can do them while still being honest? That the `right balance' between lying and honesty
involves some of each?
Face it. With or without your added sentence, Mr. Schneider is owning up to exactly the
type of politically-motivated misrepresentation of science that you (and he) accuse Mr. Lomborg
of, and is admitting that his ends are pre-ordained when he sets out to do research.
Why the double standard? How are we to believe that you accuse Lomborg of such things (without backing up your claims) but
excuse them in Schneider (when he himself admits them), unless you do so because Schneider's politics
are closer to your own?
And you claim that I'm the ideological one here? That merits a +5 Funny...
In the meantime, you bring us critiques from `scientists' such as Steven Schneider, who famously told an interviewer from Discover magazine:
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people, we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.
Now that's dishonesty and unscientific behavior. And to think that a man like that is accusing Lomborg...
Here's Schneider, in an interview with Discover magazine:
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people, we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.
Obviously, these are not the words of someone with any scientific integrity, nor of someone who can possibly be trusted to critique Lomborg's book. And to think that these
people are accusing Lomborg of misrepresentation in the name of politics...
Again, you're making two very broad accusations here -- first suggesting that Lomborg
ignores sources which disagree with his conclusions, and second suggesting that he ignores
weaknesses of the statistical model he is using. You haven't even come close to backing
up either of these claims -- indeed, you haven't even started to.
If Mr. Lomborg is ignoring sources which would contradict his claims, what are those sources?
If weaknesses of the models he uses would change his results, what are those weaknesses, and
what changes would they cause in his results?
You haven't answered these questions, and no one you point to has. Instead, they go on with
your third (and real) complaint -- that Mr. Lomborg is disagreeing with what others in the
field have claimed. And here is where your true colors show. Faulting someone because he
reaches a new conclusion is not science, it's dogma, and it does you no credit to do so.
On the contrary, as is common in such works (you don't read much, do you?), Mr. Lomborg's footnotes reference
his extensive (seventy-one page) bibliography, where full cites for each work are provided. But now we see
that your accusation has already changed drastically -- two posts ago, you were alleging that Mr. Lomborg
was not providing enough references, and now you have changed course 180% and are alleging that he has provided
too many sources, and that this is `because he doesn't want his sources checked'.
Is it possible that you say these things without feeling ridiculous?
Then, you continue your practice of making broad accusations (now that he introduces estimates which do not come
from data he has presented) which you will no doubt back away from, sheepishly in your next post (just as you
backed down from claiming to have read the whole book to now claiming to have read two eight-page chapters, and
backed down from accusing Mr. Lomborg of providing false data)).
Absurd, through and through -- and your last complaint, in faulting Mr. Lomborg for not moving from statistics (his
field) into a discourse on Mideast peace strategies (neither his field, nor, apparently, yours) moves from the
absurd into the surreal.
Face it. Your objections to Lomborg are dogmatic, not scientific, or you would be producing examples to back up
your claims.
I'll give you some more in the morning (or you could follow the link others have posted to Glen Reynolds' list of links on the subject), but here are a few from the bn.com page for Mr. Lomborg's book:
Bjorn Lomborg is an outstanding representative of the new breed of political scientists-mathematically-skilled and computer-adept. In this book he shows himself also to be a hard-headed, empirically-oriented analyst. Surveying a vast amount of data and taking account of a wide range of more and less informed opinion about environmental threats facing the planet, he comes to a balanced assessment of which ones are real and which over-hyped.
-- Professor Jack Hirshleifer, Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles
At last a book that gives the environment the scientific analysis it deserves, and provides understanding of the problem, the risks and the solutions. Essential reading.
-- Professor Lewis Wolpert, Department of Anatomy and Biology, University College London
When Lomborg concludes that'...the loss of the world's rainforests, of fertile agricultural land, the ozone layer and of the climate balance are terrible..'I agree. But we also need debate, and this book provides us with that in generous amounts, including 2,428 footnotes. If you, like I do, belong to the people who dare to think the world is making some progress, but always with mistakes to be corrected, this book makes important reading.
-- Professor Lars Kristoferson, Secretary Genral, WWF Sweden
Actually, Lomborg's work is firmly seated in his own field -- he's
a statistician, not an earth scientist, so he takes for granted the
numbers already being used in the field, and applies statistical
analysis to them. For this reason, no one is questioning the data
he is working from, and no one has yet shown that his statistical
methods (and that is his field, remember) are flawed either.
As for scientific backing, you can start with Cambridge Press reviewing the work
and choosing to publish it (they're not exactly lightweights in the
academic world, you know, and Lomborg has published plenty before,
including a semi-well-known analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
You should also read some of the responses various figures have made
to the SciAm smear job (though atypically, SciAm was too cowardly
to accept letters to the editor on this one, perhaps because they knew
their piece was weak).
I wouldn't necessarily call those questioning him the height of
the field either -- as the Economist was quick to point out, those
objecting to his work are mostly the same crowd of doubtful
prognosticians who brought us global cooling theory right up
through the mid-eighties, before jumping on the global warming
bandwagon.
Instead, we get attacks like this one and the SciAm one, which are long
on outrage that someone would dare question the conventional
wisdom, and short on real objections to his work. That's not science --
that's dogma.
Slashdot Mirror
And no one buys your product? No one who would benefit if your product cost less? Really?
Do you really think you exist in a vacuum?
How 'bout you answer your own question. You seem to think that our economy owes a few tech guys getting artificially high salaries a living at the expense of everyone who pays more for groceries and other goods to pay those salaries.
I argue that the economy is `for' everyone, and tends to benefit everyone when not prevented from doing so by artificial barriers to trade.
Not really -- there are a lot of costs involved with outsourcing work, and the growth of high-tech mwans that a relatively high level of skill is needed in order to compete for those jobs. On the other hand, it's clear that artificially inflated salaries are also hurting working people by making them pay more for products, and that competition will tend to find a balance.
After all, this is just what people predicted would happen when automation came along -- all the pundits frowned darkly, and wrote long books, such as Norbert Weiner's The Human Use of Human Beings, or Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano which predicted just such a `spiral to the bottom' as fewer employees were needed to do the same work.
You know what? They were exactly wrong. Automation improved the lives of working people by making a vastly superior standard of living available for less money (and work) than it took to stay afloat before, while new fields of work (including IT work) employed millions. This type of evolution is normal and improves everyone's life, and trying to prevent it with artificial trade barriers is no more useful than attempting to force people to keep using horses instead of automobiles so that blacksmiths would not go out of business would have been.
I think you're missing the point here. You're defending your `right' to do your job at an artificially high salary, at the expense of everyone who holds stock in your company, or who would benefit from the products you make being cheaper.
In this sense, you're no different from those in 1920 who demanded their `right' to keep being paid to work shoing horses, even as the automobile pushed their profession nearly out of existance.
Old joke: ``Old man Smith worked down at the county courthouse, polishing the brass cannons on the courthouse steps. Each morning, he would get up, take his bucket and rag, and shine them until the gleamed. Then he would take his paycheck, and go home. Finally, after many years, he came in and announced that he was quiting.
`What are you going to do now?' I asked him.
`Well,' he said, `I've saved my money, day by day, and I finally have enough that I'm going to buy two brass cannons of my own, and go into business for myself!' and left.''
The main ways they do so are through stock value, however, which in the normal case (read: when they're not pumping the stock through illicit means in order to dump it before it crashes leaving the company backrupt) means that the quickest way for them to get rich is to benefit the shareholders.
For the small percentage of cases where they are pumping and dumping, we have prisons and shareholder suits for breach of fiduciary duty. The reason you've heard of the Enron's and Worldcom's, after all, is that people who do these things too blatantly do get caught.
That's not the point -- you're defending your `right' to be paid more for a job than someone else is willing to do it for at the expense of everyone who has a 401k or who would benefit from the product you make being cheaper...
AFAIK, all grenade launchers are actually shells, designed for indirect fire. (To not be, it would have to either use a seperate launch mechanism (a spring or some such), or be like the WWII-era rifle grenades.
This is a particularly nice implementation, though, yes. :-) For more on it, see
here.
About those anti-personel rocket launchers, we're closer than you may think. The OICW (the next-generation combat weapon being tested for deployment throughout the armed services) includes a computer-aimed grenade launcher which is smart enough to compute a perfect air-burst over a designated target, and which can handle a range of ammunition types.
Actually, the shareholders are the ones who win when a company does well , and that means anyone with investments stands to benefit (and as I mentioned above, that's seventy percent of Americans these days, including anyone with a pension, 401k, or other invested retirement plan.
Umm, at the risk of spoiling your conspiracy theory, if what we wanted was cheap oil, we would lift the sanctions, or do what the French did (sign an oil deal with Saddam in contravention of the UN sanctions and resolutions). Or do any of a hundred other deals which would allow us to get that oil cheap without the expense of a war, but wouldn't liberate the people of Iraq or end the threat of WMD.
At any rate, we only get about 17% of our oil from the entire Middle East, so your black-helicopter cliams just don't hold up...
The crackers broke into the wrong &#%@$! Rec Room?
Hmmm, let's see now -- people didn't vote for a guy who wanted to cripple the local economy, thus making employers (and by extension jobs) move elsewhere, and you see this as hurting people who work? As for towing their part of the load, I would remind you that the top 25% of society pay 75% (!!!) of all income taxes. Sounds like more than a fair share to me...
Where's your evidence for your claims about who did and didn't vote, anyway?
So let's get this straight -- you didn't actually `have time to finish' the chapter on energy, so in fact you've read one eight page chapter of Mr. Lomborg's book, and it is on those eight pages that you base your criticisms? Forgive me if I'm not very impressed (and I doubt the other readers of this thread are either).
Now, on to your specific claims:
As to whether you have even read Mr. Lomborg's work, you began here by saying `I admit that I have not read the entire thing', which you then downgraded here and here to your having read `parts of the book'. Now you admit that you read one eight-page chapter, and skimmed another one.
Likewise, here you assert that Mr. Lomborg has (in the eight-page chapter which you have read) not `brought in any hard data', when in fact he cites just about every publicly available long-term forestation survey ever done in the eighty-seven footnotes to that chapter, including the FAO series on which the claims he is contesting are almost uniformly based. Likewise, you claim that his cites are not `full' cites because in your very limited reading of the book, you missed the fact that they reference the bibliography included on pages 375-378 of the paperback edition.
And now you attempt to excuse your shoddiness how? By pointing us to the fact that you haven't read any of Mr. Lomborg's book but a random sample, and thus admittedly have no knowledge on the book as a whole, and by claiming that you haven't `time' to do a better job.
Spare us. If you have no time to read Mr. Lomborg's work before smearing it, or to provide actual criticisms (show us what data you claim would change Mr. Lomborg's projections and that it does so, don't simply assert that such data exist, for example) why should you be taken seriously?
Including an extra sentence, or an extra paragraph, or the entire interview does not change what Schneider is admitting to -- that his science serves a political, as well as scientific end, and that in the interest of this political end, he has exaggerated his findings, swept doubts about his data under the rug, and generally misrepresented his work in a quest for media attention.
So what if he `tries to do both'? Are we to take it as scientific honesty that Mr. Schneider's idea of the right balance of lying for media attention and being scientifically objective includes a little of each? Come now, that's hardly the standard you are applying to Mr. Lomborg, whose work you declare `dishonest' because you don't like his choice of climate model, even though he discusses that choice at length, and even though he chose it for its conformance to the UNEP and IPCC estimates which are the basis for most of the ongoing discussion of global warming.
Face it -- your consistent defense of Schneider in the face of his open admissions of gaming the media by misrepresenting his data, and your refusal to call SciAm's attempts to use the courts to silence rebuttals to their smear campaign against Lomborg dishonest, despite being given three opportunities to do so, coupled with your bizarre charges against Lomborg, unbacked by any data, show that you are applying a purely dogmatic standard of `scientific honesty' here.
I trust that the readers of this thread are taking your attacks on Lomborg in that context. Good day.
Umm, no, you didn't read what I posted (and your argument is specious as well -- more on that later).
Lomborg specifically addresses his choice of Nordhaus/Boyer both in TSE itself and at greater length in his rebuttal to the SciAm smear piece. If you had read either, you would be aware of this. While it is, perhaps, understandable that you have not read the latter, as SciAm went to great lengths to silence it (something you mysteriously consider acceptable, showing just how elastic your idea of `scientific dishonesty' really is), you should do so before making false statements about its content -- it can be found here.
In any case, your accusation is what exactly? That you don't like the model Lomborg chose, a model he chose because it conforms to the studies released by the UNEP and the IPCC which are the basis for much discussion of global warming? This, you would have called `scientific dishonesty', while you excuse Schneider's open admission that he exaggerates his findings and hides doubts about his data for political ends simply because Schneider is on the `right' side?
As I've said elsewhere in this debate, I expect that readers of this thread will take your attacks on Lomborg in the context of this consistent dogmatism and application of double standards on your part. Good day.
We've been over this before -- I'm hardly going to reprint the entire interview here, and adding a sentence, or a paragraph, or a page on either side of the quote doesn't change what Schneider is discussing. He is openly owning up to misrepresenting his findings and to sweeping doubts about his data under the rug in an attempt to make his stories seem more frightening, something he admits he is doing for political ends.
Now that's scientific dishonesty, and a man like that is no scientist, and has no place attacking Lomborg. As I said, your insistence on a double standard by which Schneider's admittance of dishonesty is acceptable because he is on the `right' side while any baseless claim against Lomborg is to be taken as justified because he is not shows that you are no scientist either, and likewise have no credibility in attacking Mr. Lomborg's work.
Come out and admit that Schneider is dishonest, and that SciAm's attempts to use the courts to silence Mr. Lomborg's rebuttal of their smear campaign was likewise dishonest and unscientific, and then maybe we have a discussion here. Otherwise, you are transparently dogmatic.
Again, you're the one making accusations here, so start backing them up.
So Quiggin has doubts about Nordhaus/Boyer. And? How does this get you closer to your attacks on Lomborg? Is Mr. Lomborg misrepresenting what Nordhaus/Boyer is? No. Is he deriving conclusions from it incorrectly? No. What he says is (to paraphrase)`here is one widely used model, which is broadly consistent with estimates from the UNEP and the IPCC. These estimates are often used (as per Schneider) to make wild claims about global warming. But here's the actual scope and context of these estimates.'
All of this is discussed at length in Lomborg's rebuttal of the SciAm smear job, which can be read here. This rebuttal has not been discussed or answered by SciAm, and indeed they have threatened lawsuits in an attempt to have it removed from the web. Now that's scientific dishonesty -- don't you agree?
Your idea of `science' is even more elastic than I had imagined. So now, if Schneider admits to misrepresenting his own work to the media, and brushing doubts and counter-evidence under the rug in order to create scares, this is not scientific dishonesty, but if I quote him saying so, I'm committing `dishonesty and unscientific behavior'.
This is very important in the context at hand. You have just demonstrated handily what I've been saying all along -- that in your vocabulary `unscientific behavior' means presenting inconvenient facts or taking unpopular positions, while even direct dishonesty such Mr. Schneider's does not count as such in your book because he is on the `right side'. Likewise, you seek a `serious' scientist's opinion, where `serious' means agreeing with you, and even the most highly respected figures are `activists' or `dishonest' if they do not.
I would invite the readers of this thread to view your criticisms of Lomborg in this context. Good day.
On the contrary, this in no way changes Mr. Schneider's meaning -- he is saying outright that his science serves a political goal, and in that interest he is exaggerating scary scenarios, over-simplifying things to induce fright, and sweeping doubts he has about the accuracy of his work under the carpet.
And you're trying to tell us that these things are OK because Mr. Schneider feels that they he can do them while still being honest? That the `right balance' between lying and honesty involves some of each?
Face it. With or without your added sentence, Mr. Schneider is owning up to exactly the type of politically-motivated misrepresentation of science that you (and he) accuse Mr. Lomborg of, and is admitting that his ends are pre-ordained when he sets out to do research.
Why the double standard? How are we to believe that you accuse Lomborg of such things (without backing up your claims) but excuse them in Schneider (when he himself admits them), unless you do so because Schneider's politics are closer to your own?
And you claim that I'm the ideological one here? That merits a +5 Funny...
Just perusing the TechCentralStation link posted above and to Mr. Lomborg's page of links to critiques of his work on his site provides some more:
In the meantime, you bring us critiques from `scientists' such as Steven Schneider, who famously told an interviewer from Discover magazine:
Now that's dishonesty and unscientific behavior. And to think that a man like that is accusing Lomborg...
Here's Schneider, in an interview with Discover magazine:
Obviously, these are not the words of someone with any scientific integrity, nor of someone who can possibly be trusted to critique Lomborg's book. And to think that these people are accusing Lomborg of misrepresentation in the name of politics...
Again, you're making two very broad accusations here -- first suggesting that Lomborg ignores sources which disagree with his conclusions, and second suggesting that he ignores weaknesses of the statistical model he is using. You haven't even come close to backing up either of these claims -- indeed, you haven't even started to.
If Mr. Lomborg is ignoring sources which would contradict his claims, what are those sources? If weaknesses of the models he uses would change his results, what are those weaknesses, and what changes would they cause in his results?
You haven't answered these questions, and no one you point to has. Instead, they go on with your third (and real) complaint -- that Mr. Lomborg is disagreeing with what others in the field have claimed. And here is where your true colors show. Faulting someone because he reaches a new conclusion is not science, it's dogma, and it does you no credit to do so.
On the contrary, as is common in such works (you don't read much, do you?), Mr. Lomborg's footnotes reference his extensive (seventy-one page) bibliography, where full cites for each work are provided. But now we see that your accusation has already changed drastically -- two posts ago, you were alleging that Mr. Lomborg was not providing enough references, and now you have changed course 180% and are alleging that he has provided too many sources, and that this is `because he doesn't want his sources checked'.
Is it possible that you say these things without feeling ridiculous?
Then, you continue your practice of making broad accusations (now that he introduces estimates which do not come from data he has presented) which you will no doubt back away from, sheepishly in your next post (just as you backed down from claiming to have read the whole book to now claiming to have read two eight-page chapters, and backed down from accusing Mr. Lomborg of providing false data)).
Absurd, through and through -- and your last complaint, in faulting Mr. Lomborg for not moving from statistics (his field) into a discourse on Mideast peace strategies (neither his field, nor, apparently, yours) moves from the absurd into the surreal.
Face it. Your objections to Lomborg are dogmatic, not scientific, or you would be producing examples to back up your claims.
Bjorn Lomborg is an outstanding representative of the new breed of political scientists-mathematically-skilled and computer-adept. In this book he shows himself also to be a hard-headed, empirically-oriented analyst. Surveying a vast amount of data and taking account of a wide range of more and less informed opinion about environmental threats facing the planet, he comes to a balanced assessment of which ones are real and which over-hyped.
-- Professor Jack Hirshleifer, Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles
At last a book that gives the environment the scientific analysis it deserves, and provides understanding of the problem, the risks and the solutions. Essential reading.
-- Professor Lewis Wolpert, Department of Anatomy and Biology, University College London
When Lomborg concludes that'...the loss of the world's rainforests, of fertile agricultural land, the ozone layer and of the climate balance are terrible..'I agree. But we also need debate, and this book provides us with that in generous amounts, including 2,428 footnotes. If you, like I do, belong to the people who dare to think the world is making some progress, but always with mistakes to be corrected, this book makes important reading.
-- Professor Lars Kristoferson, Secretary Genral, WWF Sweden
Actually, Lomborg's work is firmly seated in his own field -- he's a statistician, not an earth scientist, so he takes for granted the numbers already being used in the field, and applies statistical analysis to them. For this reason, no one is questioning the data he is working from, and no one has yet shown that his statistical methods (and that is his field, remember) are flawed either.
As for scientific backing, you can start with Cambridge Press reviewing the work and choosing to publish it (they're not exactly lightweights in the academic world, you know, and Lomborg has published plenty before, including a semi-well-known analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma. You should also read some of the responses various figures have made to the SciAm smear job (though atypically, SciAm was too cowardly to accept letters to the editor on this one, perhaps because they knew their piece was weak).
I wouldn't necessarily call those questioning him the height of the field either -- as the Economist was quick to point out, those objecting to his work are mostly the same crowd of doubtful prognosticians who brought us global cooling theory right up through the mid-eighties, before jumping on the global warming bandwagon.
Instead, we get attacks like this one and the SciAm one, which are long on outrage that someone would dare question the conventional wisdom, and short on real objections to his work. That's not science -- that's dogma.