I’ve never really liked Bjorn Lomborg, who shot to fame as supposed former environmentalist w claims that should we attempt to combat warming, we’d waste money that could be used to help the world in other ways. Always struck me as being rather like saying well, the house may be on fire but battling the fire will be tough, and would mean we couldn’t do so much work to re-paint the walls and improve the upholstery – and anyway, some people say the fire won’t be too bad. Strikes me, too, as very self important fellow. Already seen his claims re being former environmentalist even dodgier than Timothy Ball’s re being expert on man-made climate change. Knew of new Lomborg book; haven’t even laid eyes on it. Glad to see review in Globe and Mail that slams the book – tho sadly, the idiots who take comfort in Lomborgism will surely like the book, which can help them continue living in fools’ paradise where can drive SUVs and burn and consume and burn without consequence. From the review:
Reply To: Global warming lies and climate change hysteria
Quote:
In high-school biology class, we used to do an experiment with fruit flies. You put flies and food in a jar, screw the top on tight and wait to see what happens as the flies reproduce like mad. The goal is to see at what point the limits of the jar – air, food, space – begin to affect the ability of the fruit flies to exist. At some point, the jar becomes inhospitable and the flies die en masse. If Bjorn Lomborg, Danish author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, were to write up that high-school experiment, he would focus on the point just before the flies began to hit the limits. He would wax on about how the population of flies had never been stronger, trot out statistics to show how astoundingly well the population had reproduced over time, and gush boyishly about the excellent living conditions in the jar. … he would be correct on carefully selected points of fact, but fatally incorrect about the larger picture, or the meaning of the information he was looking at. This is the trick he plays in Cool It, and it is the same tack he took in The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (2001). … He’s not a scientist, and the book of science, alas, is closed to him. His work betrays, embarrassingly, that he doesn’t understand biology or how living systems work or any of the basic principles of scientific inquiry. … Lomborg has now proved beyond a doubt that he is incapable of contributing anything of merit to scientific discourse.