beausoleil

It seemed to me that the criticisms of his work in the rebuttal were entirely reasonable and not answered - selective citation, misuse of figures and so on.

On the other hand, media coverage of future environmental 'disasters' is undoubtedly sensationalist. Media coverage of everything is sensationalist. I suspect Lomborg's book should be seen as part of the media coverage, where it fits, rather than part of the science, where it doesn't.

There is a lot of uncertainty about the causes and likely extent of any climate change. Certainty expressed on either side is suspicious, in my opinion.

cfgauss

Holy shit, Sammi: sarcasm!

Clutch

DT, I have no firm intuitions about the comparative bullshit levels of Lomborg and "eco-warriors"; both, I suppose are off the scale. But beausoleil's hit the nail on the head. Why confuse "eco-warriors" (ie, committed crusaders, media hacks, and the like) with climatologists and scientific ecologists more generally? Lomborg purported to engage the latter, but seems almost exclusively (and carefully) to have engaged the more extreme examples of the former. And even at that, he seems to have cooked the books on his own numbers, some of the most important of which are -- if the criticisms are sound -- produced out of thin air.

The criticisms might be unsound, of course. But that can't be decided via allusions to the feeling one gets when thinking about them. They were persuasively and authoritatively written by genuine scientists with reputations based on peer-reviewed work, and if correct they demolish Lomborg's book.