- #1
damgo
Does anyone have opinions on this controversy?
A guy named Bjorn Lomborg published this popular book two years ago, suggesting that some environmental problems -- global warming, deforestation, etc -- were not as bad as commonly suggested. He's a statistics professor, the book was heavily referenced, and the book seems far above the typical 'there is no such thing as an environmental problem' junk written by some apologists.
Environmentalists immediately jumped on it as misleading and inaccurate, Nature and Science reviewed it unfavourably, and Scientific American devoted a lot of pages to debunking it. Normally this would be enough for me to dismiss it, but a lot of intelligent science-minded people I know seem to think Lomberg has a point and is generally being unjustly criticised because of the political implications of his views, especially from an increasingly-political SciAm. These are generally not people I would expect to take an anti-environmental stance for political/wordlview reasons. Lomborg responded in detail and SciAm published a long chain of letters and articles wrangling back and forth.
Usually I find it pretty easy to tell where the science lies in these disputes, and whether one of the parties is distorting and misrepresenting the facts, but I haven't been able to hear.
So anyone here know anything? Any good refs to suggest?
Here is the whole SciAm stuff: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00000B96-9517-1CDA-B4A8809EC588EEDF
The Economist has articles at:
http://www.phoenix.liu.edu/~uroy/eco54/lomborg/lomborg013102-2.html [Broken]
http://www.phoenix.liu.edu/~uroy/eco54/lomborg/lomborg013102-1.html [Broken]
A guy named Bjorn Lomborg published this popular book two years ago, suggesting that some environmental problems -- global warming, deforestation, etc -- were not as bad as commonly suggested. He's a statistics professor, the book was heavily referenced, and the book seems far above the typical 'there is no such thing as an environmental problem' junk written by some apologists.
Environmentalists immediately jumped on it as misleading and inaccurate, Nature and Science reviewed it unfavourably, and Scientific American devoted a lot of pages to debunking it. Normally this would be enough for me to dismiss it, but a lot of intelligent science-minded people I know seem to think Lomberg has a point and is generally being unjustly criticised because of the political implications of his views, especially from an increasingly-political SciAm. These are generally not people I would expect to take an anti-environmental stance for political/wordlview reasons. Lomborg responded in detail and SciAm published a long chain of letters and articles wrangling back and forth.
Usually I find it pretty easy to tell where the science lies in these disputes, and whether one of the parties is distorting and misrepresenting the facts, but I haven't been able to hear.
So anyone here know anything? Any good refs to suggest?
Here is the whole SciAm stuff: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00000B96-9517-1CDA-B4A8809EC588EEDF
The Economist has articles at:
http://www.phoenix.liu.edu/~uroy/eco54/lomborg/lomborg013102-2.html [Broken]
http://www.phoenix.liu.edu/~uroy/eco54/lomborg/lomborg013102-1.html [Broken]
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