The famed Danish statistian Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book Skeptical Environmentalist, and godsend to environmental dissidents the world over, has been rebuked by a team of Danish scientists who criticize his methods. More
Are they legit? Is Lomborg at fault? Or is there something more behind this? Are Lomborg’s conclusions rational?
He actually has a link to the decision on his web site. He also offers a brief response. His claim is that the oraganization considered only the Scientific American critique of him without considering his rebuttal. I’ve been wondering about the validity of Lomborg’s claims–his econ is good, as are his stastical techniques, but I haven’t been able to verify the facts. It’s interesting that a co-founder of Greenpeace is posting Lomborg’s rebuttal to S.A. I skimmed the decision and it looked a bit sketchy. They seem to have had trouble deciding whether Lomborg’s book is a scientific tract or a book designed to inspire debate. They make no claim that his facts or analysis are faulty, only that he doesn’t sufficiently present both sides of the argument (given that it is indeed a scientific tract). For example it says that “In his replies, BL dismisses practically all the counts on which he offers his position, but as with the discussion in Scientific American, his rebuttals are not accepted by the complainants.” What the hell is that supposed to mean?! The complainants do not accept the rebuttal? Interestingly, the body in question, “has reached the conclusion that new experts would scarcely be able to add new dimensions to the case.” In other words, they looked to no impartial third party of experts to offer an opinion on the matter. They merely took a side in a finger pointing exercise, evidently, which doesn’t sound very compelling to me.
Um, I meant “statistical”.
The Economist agreed that that the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty based their statement essentially on the Scientific American critique
Reason magazine called the panel’s report “Lysenkoism” and compares it to McCarthyism.
Tech Central Station says it was a predictable smear.
Damn! Lysenkoism and McCarthyism?! That’s like…does a simile even exist for that?
Seriously, though, I’ve been trying to get the straight dope on that damn book ever since Lomborg was invited to give a guest editorial in The Economist. Since his detractors so frequently use extremely malignant ad hominems, such as comparing him to holocaust deniers, I’ve decided that they can be discounted. Yet those who praise never get into whether his facts are actually correct. (Exception being the review by the Royal Chemical Society linked on his site.) Do you know of anyone who has done a comprehensive fact check?
I actually bought the book, but only read the first few pages. The level of specificity and detail is stupendous, more than I wanted to know. It appears to be a compendium of columns he wrote over a long period of time.
The book is over 500 pages long, and it’s densely packed with information. There are 173 figures. The bibliography is 71 pages long and includes about 1,500 works. Many of the 3,190 footnotes include additional details as well as citing the references. Doing a comprehensive fact check would be a labor of Hercules.
But plenty of people HAVE fact-checked it. The book is a lightning rod. Thousands of environmentalists and scientists have poured through that book trying to find a ‘smoking gun’ they could use to discredit it.
I don’t know of any factual criticisms of the main points in the book. Lomborg did an excellent job of rebutting the hatchet-job Scientific American posted. Too bad Scientific American refused to publish his rebuttal. Then tried to sue him when he posted his rebuttal along with excerpts from the articles on his web site.
This is definitely a witch hunt. Lomborg is calm rational, and provides facts and footnotes for every fact he provides. His enemies just repeat big lies and smears. It’s shameful.
Bahh…That is one person’s interpretation. In other views, it is Lomborg who throws around the lies and smears.
At any rate, as far as I know, every reputable scientific publication that has had a review of the book (Science, Nature, and Scientific American…the latter admittedly not on par in stature with the other two) has found it severely wanting scientifically. It is a one-sided polemic masquerading as science.
And, this is yet another example of how conservatives seem to be increasingly marginalizing themselves in the scientific debates by pushing the views of a few pet believers over the views of the peer-reviewed scientific community. I’ll admit that it used to be some liberals who played fast and lose with science (okay, and some still do), but now more and more it is the conservatives, as the science doesn’t turn out the way they want it to.
Increasingly, conservatives are discounting views the work of the IPCC, the NAS, and papers that appear in Science and Nature in favor of largely unpublished (in the peer-reviewed literature) views. The Wall Street Journal editorial page seems to think that science is just like any other commodity…You buy the views that you want and throw away the rest even if the “rest” is the community at large and what you want is the views of a few industry-funded scientists who are barely published in the peer-reviewed literature.
Lomborg agrees that Global Warming is occuring and manmade, Jshore.
I’m not familiar with the criticisms of the book in Nature or Science. Can you point me to any online resources describing this?
I HAVE read the Scientific American criticisms, and I thought they were a hatchet job.
I don’t disagree with the IPCC at all, as you know. We’ve had this discussion several times. What I disagree with are the political policies that come out of it, the lack of cost-benefit analyses of those policies, and the twisting of the IPCC’s own conclusions by the bureaucrats who wrote the summary for lawmakers.
I would be more than interested if you could provide a cite that shows that Lomborg’s essentially thesis is demonstrably wrong. I believe a few people have accurately found a few nits to pick with the work. Lomborg himself admits that and has corrections on his web site. But those errors are small and don’t change the fundamental point he’s making in any way.
But maybe you have better evidence of his inaccuracy. Please share it with us.
Go to his site. He has links to myriad reviews, including many negative ones. Specifically, I think the Science & Nature ones are there.
jshore, honest question: was the review in S.A. itself peer reviewed? Not everything in peer review journals is, in fact, peer reviewed. I just recalled that fact. Do you know regarding the S.A. (& Nature) reviews?
First off, I think we should recognize the limitations of what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call ecological science. The concept didn’t even exist until a few years ago. It is still rather a hodgepodge of chemistry, bio-chemistry, meteorology, etc. Has anyone yet created a standard syllabus for the study of “ecology”?
Secondly, like meteorology, ecology must, by definition, be very susceptible to “chaos theory”. A blithering array of factors go into it, right down to the very butterfly wing.
That said, I don’t think it is entirely necessary to lean on scientific verification for the flamingly obvious. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, you don’t need an ecologist to tell you the air stinks.
This sounds like an interesting subject into which to look, and I have no definite opinions based on my ignorance of the man’s work.
It should be noted, though, that a defense of any one with unconventional theories that invokes similarities with Galileo makes me highly suspicious. The Galileo analogy is constantly being employed by quacks and junk science promoters to try to stifle criticism (of course Lomborg may have nothing to do with this sort of statement).
Lomborg’s book isn’t about the science. He’s not a scientist. He’s a statistician. His book is a not a critique of the science behind the various environmental problems - it’s a statistical analysis of the state of the world to see if the reality matches the rhetoric.
Lomborg is an environmentalist, and a member of Greenpeace. He originally started this research because he heard that Economist Julian Simon had claimed that the Earth was getting healthier and he wanted to prove him wrong. When he found out that Simon was essentially right, he had the personal integrity to change his position and write The Skeptical Environmentalist.
js_africanus: Thanks for pointing out the articles on his site. I hadn’t been there for a while, and I don’t think they were there the last time I visited.
I just read the Science review, and it didn’t refute a single thing he said. Instead, the reviewer chose to attack him on some pretty strange grounds. He admits that the statistics are accurate, but complains that Lomborg didn’t cover EVERY environmental problem? Lomborg uses statistics to dismantle the tired old argument that acid rain caused huge problems in North America. The rebuttal agrees that he’s right, but criticises him for not acknowledging the problems with Scandanavian lakes? I don’t think Lomborg would claim that there are NO environmental problems, so I have a hard time seeing how showing that some exist invalidates the book.
Then the reviewer says that Lomborg makes light of Global Warming, and has a ‘rich northerner’ bias about whether or not it will hurt us. But in the book, Lomborg says,
That sounds like a reasonably accurate assessment to me, and it’s taken straight from the IPCC report.
Lomborg’s rebuttal to the article (which Science refused to print) also says that the review was factually wrong in at least several major ways. Yet, Science’s reason for not publishing his letter is that there was no ‘egregious misrepresentation’ of his work. Frankly, this sounds like exactly the same kind of strange smear that Scientific American engaged in.
As for the World Wildlife Fund’s criticism, I would just refer everyone to Lomborg’s rebuttal, which reprints the criticism and offers point-by-point refutation. Then make up your own mind.
I still say that the best critique of this book is Alex Kirby’s in a BBC Online article where he says,
Honestly, being reasonable is what riles this guy? Suppose instead it had been level-headed?! What a disaster that would have been. Can you imagine if it had been rationally prudent? Kirby would probably have had to shoot somebody. Good thing its hard to get guns in Britian. Kirby goes on to say,
That makes perfect sense. Instead of attempting to approach problems sensibly, attack the most pressing first, and get the best bang for the buck, we should embrace the panic and hit the problems pell-mell. That should definately make the world a better place.:rolleyes: What a twit. It reminds me of Marx predicting violent class conflict and a dictatorship of the proletariat and, instead of seeking a way to advance while avoiding such disasters, embracing them. “Bring 'em on, bitch! What’s a little dictatorship between friends, eh?”
Of course Kirby doesn’t stop there,
Then why the hell is he reviewing the book? “Oh yeah, I’ve read the Quran in Arabic–it’s full of holes. Of course, I can’t actually read a word of Arabic, but my opinion still matters.” For a book of statistical facts and time series data, being a statistician, or at least statistically literate, is a key criterion to having an opinion. Duh.
Oh well, thanks for letting me rant.
First, let me be the first to admit that I am far from an expert on the content of Lomborg’s book and the debate over it. But, as I understand it, Lomberg does a variety of things:
(1) He chooses the problems he looks at selectively to paint a picture rosier than it is.
(2) He argues against straw men a lot…E.g., he sometimes argues against things that are already known to be wrong and are not part of the current scientific understanding.
(3) When he does point out things that have gotten better, such as air pollution in various parts of the world, he fails to mention or account for the laws that may have been important in helping it to get better. I.e., his message of “things are getting better so we can be complacent” belies the fact that it is a lack of complacency that is responsible for much of the improvements that have been made.
Finally, in the end, what we have here is a belief that there is a smear campaign on Lomborg that now includes Science, Nature, Scientific American, a Danish scientific committee, and colleagues of Lomborg at the university where he worked. So, who does one believe, lots of eminent scientists who have published a lot of peer-reviewed work in the research areas that Lomborg discusses in his book, or Lomborg who has not, to my knowledge, published anything in a peer-reviewed journal in any of these areas. My belief is that that is where science should really be hashed out.
Do you have evidence that the summary for policymakers was written by bureaucrats? My impression was it was written by members of the respective working group, with some feedback from political folk (including countries that have a high stake in fossil fuels!) Also, the NAS report, while having a few constructive criticisms of the summaries (e.g., they should have explained more how they estimated uncertainties), generally felt that they were an accurate reflection of the full report. Finally, if you go to the IPCC website then you can look at the summaries for policymakers, the technical summaries, and even the full report now I believe.
Well, again, with the caveat that I haven’t read the book, as I understand it the book is not a statistical treatise by any means. It is not like Lomberg has come along and used complicated statistical methods to show that these people in other fields are wrong. [And, other reviewers with a stronger statistical background have, I believe, pointed out faults with some of the statistical reasoning he does employ.]
Yes, it is upsetting to think that all these institutions could have become so politicized as to be unreliable on this particular topic. You’re a scientist, aren’t you jshore? My wife is one, and I once hoped to be one. My wife get’s Sigma Xi’s wonderful magazine, The American Scientist, which had similar criticisms, although less strident. I would like to believe the best of our scientific institutions.
OTOH The Economist, which used the adjective Orwellian, is also a respected, down-the-middle magazine. As Sam Stone says, one can make one’s own evaluation from the cites provided. IMHO the WWF criticism and Lomborg’s reponse, are pretty telling. The huge number of mistakes made by the critics dwarfs the few mistakes they were able to find in Lomborg’s tomb.
After reading Lomborg’s response to WWF, you could practically write a response to The American Scientist, because the critics pretty much focused on identical points. One has the impression that the critics spent more time reading each other’s criticism than reading Lomborg’s book.
Nobody disputes that science should be hashed out in peer-reviewed journals. Lomborg’s criticism mostly involves exaggeration or misrepresentation of the peer-reviewed results, not the results themselves. So, one doesn’t need to be smarter than the peer-reviewed scientists; one only needs to look at who describe the scientists’ results more accurately, Lomborg or his critics.
**
If the man is guilty of nothing else, please let him be guilty of this.
I have little respect for enivironmentalists which ascribe to the view that one of his main detractors seems to hold.
From Tech Central Station.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/envirowrapper.jsp?PID=1051-450&CID=1051-010803F
**
It is worth noting that Scientific American is now letting Lomborg submit a rebuttal, if they had done anything less one might think their credibility was at stake.
Gee, I just read that rebuttal, and Sci-am’s rebuttal to his rebuttal. Man, that was weak. First, they give Lomborg a fraction of the space, then they use up an equal amount of space to avoid giving him the last word. But their rebuttal to his is just bizarre. Again, they don’t take any issue with the facts, and their argument boils down to, “Well, other people are saying the same thing.”
He criticizes Kyoto because it has no effect, and they say that Lomborg is wrong for saying this, because Kyoto is just a start? Huh? That invalidates the criticisms of Kyoto? It’s an incoherent response. If you want to talk about non-Kyoto attempts to stop warming, talk about them. Including showing us how to do it and how much it will cost. Repudiating substantive arguments against Kyoto by simply saying, “But it’s a start!” is meaningless.
And then they end the rebuttall with a bizarre comparison between species extinction and the death of 3 million Africans. This is their way of saying that he’s not looking at ‘context’. Amazing.
Oops. Should have said “Kyoto has LITTLE effect”. Not “NO effect”.
Speaking of the effects of Kyoto, on a more personal note - my brother just lost his job because Canada signed the Kyoto treaty. He’s a relatively poor guy, and he was promised work on an oil project if he upgraded his certifications. So he borrowed $4000 to upgrade, finished, was hired - and then the project was killed when Chretien signed Kyoto. Now he’s even more broke, and more in debt. He’s only one of dozens of people in my home town in the same situation, and that will be repeated all through the country, and all over the world. And in the end, it will wind up hurting us more than it helps.