Freethought & Rationalism Archive

nogods4me · 03-04-2003, 10:52 AM

No too long ago a well known scientist who was a leader among those who deny "global warming" was reprimanded by the national board of scientists in his home country, Sweden I think.
Could someone here give me his name and/or a link to a relevent strory about his reprimand?

Thanks in advance, you guys and gals are the best.

Jesse · 03-04-2003, 10:58 AM

I think you're talking about Bjorn Lomborg, who's not a scientist at all (edit: he may actually be some kind of statistician, but he's not an earth scientist), just the author of a popular book called "The Skeptical Environmentalist"...here's a link to a story about his reprimand by something called "The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty":

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science...nvironment.ap/

This decision was based partly on a long critique by Scientific American which is not available on the web, but you can read Lomborg's response to the critique here, and Scientific American's counter-response here.

I also found some of the debate on the slashdot story about this to be pretty interesting, like this comment near the bottom of the page:

Quote:

I thought that S.E. was a funny mix of two things. For many of the chapters (Measuring human welfare, Life expectancy and health, Food and hunger, Prosperity... basically all of Part II, and parts of Part III and IV) he makes good arguments. But they're not new, and he's setting up straw men to knock them down--no scientists, for example, are out there arguing that we're running out of space to store our garbage. So he picks on groups like WorldWatch Institute. Fair enough, in my opinion--there's no question that many environmental groups, like any dependent on direct mail and memberships contribubtions, tend to benefit from a sense of crisis. But this argument has been made before, and much more eloquently, by Greg Easterbrook in his book "The Skeptical Environmentalist." If you haven't read it, do; it's much more readable than Mr. Lomborg's tome and its 3000 footnotes.

However, in a number of the chapters, S.E. is totally different. It has to be: while issues like biodiversity and global warming are tricky and complex, there *is* a scientific consensus here that is at odds with Mr. Lomborg's thesis (the Julian Simon most-people-are-getting-better-most-of-the-time one, extended to these topics). So he changes tactics, and the book becomes much more deceptive, in my opinion. Given that there is a broad scientific consensus (e.g., IPCC 2001 for global climate change), Lomborg has to become much more highly selective in his sources and assumptions; it's this selectivity that was noted most frequently by those critics in Scientific American.

One final note: the Economist is an excellent magazine, but it's not unbiased. I was surprised to read their claim that no evidence has been adduced against the book. Well, no, no one that I've read has found that S.E. said 1 when in reallity it's 2; but again, selectivity of sources and presentation is everything.

nogods4me · 03-04-2003, 11:02 AM

that's it, thank you very much.

03-04-2003, 10:52 AM	#1
nogods4me Contributor Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Baltimore, MD USA Posts: 17,432	A little help please...... No too long ago a well known scientist who was a leader among those who deny "global warming" was reprimanded by the national board of scientists in his home country, Sweden I think. Could someone here give me his name and/or a link to a relevent strory about his reprimand? Thanks in advance, you guys and gals are the best.

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03-04-2003, 11:02 AM	#3
nogods4me Contributor Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: Baltimore, MD USA Posts: 17,432	that's it, thank you very much.

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