Listening to Lomborg on Global Warming Means Going the Way of the Dinosaurs
Suppose one man publishes a book that claims dinosaurs still roam the Earth today. You would probably check such information against respected scholarship and find that most scholars agree that each and every dinosaur has been dead as a doornail for many, many moons. (You might concede that birds and reptiles evolved from dinosaurs if you felt like being kind to the rather confused man, but you would not rush to buy that excellent survival guide, Jurassic Park.)
Moving away from the ridiculous (but only slightly): if a group of a scientist’s colleagues started an entire website to warn the world, especially the scientific community, about “the flaws in his work” before the scientist even published a book, you might be at least a little skeptical when his book was finally published. Furthermore, you would probably be skeptical of a lone man’s claims that entirely contradicted “the vast majority of respected scholarship on” his subject. Finally, if you found out that the bulk of the scientist’s footnotes were taken out of context, missing, or even blatantly incorrect, you would be horrified to find out that your government was using the book as a basis for policy-making.
Unfortunately, in 2001 this is exactly what happened. When leading climate-change skeptic Bjørn Lomborg published The Skeptical Environmentalist, it seemed as though he had handed other skeptics hard evidence to support their policies. Such policies have largely been ones of ignoring all other studies, which affirm and even enumerate the existence of global warming, melting ice caps, species endangerment and extinction, and greenhouse emissions. Although Lomborg’s fellow faculty members did indeed try to explain to the public that Stephen Spielberg uses better science than Lomborg, too many people embraced the work as factual.
Howard Friel has finally done what should have been done a decade ago, as he points out, in the publishing house: fact-checking. In The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming, all Friel has to do is comb through the endnotes and compare them with their sources to find gaping holes more terrifying than a velociraptor. The Skeptical Environmentalist makes important claims—“that fewer people are starving…the threat of global warming is exaggerating, cutting fossil fuel consumption would be worse than the effects of global warming…acid rain is not harmful”—without any data at all. Making up facts is fun for the movies but in real life, as Friel points out, it is extremely dangerous. When the Bush administration listed polar bears as endangered in 2008, somebody should have realized Lomborg’s research was shaky, but now there is precise, careful scholarship to prove just how worryingly off he was.
