The Lomborg Deception : Fact-checking Bjørn Lomborg.

[tinrobot]

Book Review: The Lomborg Deception
Debunking the claims of the climate-change skeptic.

In naming roustabout, lumberjack, ironworker, and dairy farmer America's “worst jobs,” CareerCast.com omitted one whose awfulness is counterbalanced only by its public-spiritedness: fact-checking Bjørn Lomborg.

The Danish political scientist 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. "It is a house of cards…Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature" of Lomborg's work.

....

But when Friel began checking Lomborg's sources, "I found problems," he says. "As an experiment, I looked up one of his footnotes, found that it didn't support what he said, and then did another, and kept going, finding the same pattern." He therefore took on the Augean stables undertaking of checking every one of the hundreds of citations in Cool It. Friel's conclusion, as per his book's title, is that Lomborg is "a performance artist disguised as an academic."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/233942?

[kristopher]

1. Thank goodness someone finally published something like this...

I read The Skeptical Environmentalist and almost went ballistic for the same reason...

And this is true word-smithing - "a performance artist disguised as an academic."

Thing is, a whole school of righties have trained on the same kind of argumentation and we see it all the time now.

[unc70]

2. We see a lot of it here at DU on all sorts of topics

All too often you find a thread with lots of replies and lots of recs where a key item linked does not say what is claimed and seems unlikely as an honest mistake. Might even be in the OP.

Eventually, someone may actually read and understand the linked items and inform those of us too lazy or busy to have looked more closely ourselves. By then, the discussion has probably moved on and the pre-correction version may already be the CW.

I will read further on this case a bit later today. I see this type footnoting behavior a lot in areas like nutrition, eating disorders, mental health, and such. It is also the kind of thing Franken called out in his books.

[kristopher]

3. You'll want to read these papers then...

Theory:
Rearguard of Modernity

in the journal Global Environmental Politics

Environmental skepticism denies the reality and importance of mainstream global environmental problems. However, its most important challenges are in its civic claims which receive much less attention. These civic claims defend the basis of ethical authority of the dominant social paradigm. The article explains how political values determine what skeptics count as a problem. One such value described is “deep anthropocentrism,” or the attempt to split human society from non-human nature and reject ecology as a legitimate field of ethical concern. This bias frames what skeptics consider legitimate knowledge. The paper then argues that the contemporary conservative countermovement has marshaled environmental skepticism to function as a rearguard for a maladaptive set of core values that resist public efforts to address global environmental sustainability. As such, the paper normatively argues that environmental skepticism is a significant threat to efforts to achieve sustainability faced by human societies in a globalizing world.

Download here: http://ucf.academia.edu/PeterJacques/Papers/71775/Rearguard-of-Modernity


Study to test theory:
The Organization of Denial: Conservative Think Tanks and Environmental Scepticism

Co-authored with Riley E. Dunlap and Mark Freeman published in the journal Environmental Politics, June 2008

Environmental scepticism denies the seriousness of environmental problems, and self-professed 'sceptics' claim to be unbiased analysts combating 'junk science'. This study quantitatively analyses 141 English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005. We find that over 92 per cent of these books, most published in the US since 1992, are linked to conservative think tanks (CTTs). Further, we analyse CTTs involved with environmental issues and find that 90 per cent of them espouse environmental scepticism. We conclude that scepticism is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.

download here: http://ucf.academia.edu/PeterJacques/Papers

Must read.

[unc70]

4. Much the same with attacks on public education and lots more

Lots of other public policy areas have been "contaminated" by such so-called research. NC has been a "Leader" in such BS going back to the Jesse Helms days in the 1970's. It was one way to counter those liberal elites in Chapel Hill.

[kristopher]

5. But few other areas have the $$ of the fossil fuel industry as a factor...

[unc70]

6. True, but the RW in NC never has a problem with money

Not to imply that there is not overlap among the groups.