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The ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’
-- Andrew Snow -- 04/17/2008
Last night, at Iowa State’s Memorial Union, I had the opportunity to listen to a lecture by the self-proclaimed ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg. Lomborg is best known among climate activists (and opponents) as the author of such books as ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming’ - a book that has created a great deal of controversy in the scientific community. A community, it’s worth noting, that Lomborg isn’t a member of - he’s not actually a scientist. The controversy has included the following, as noted by the New York Times:
The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, after a six-month review following several complaints filed by scientists, issued a 17-page report yesterday concluding that the book displayed ‘systematic one-sidedness’. ‘’Objectively speaking,’’ the committees found, ‘’the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty,’’ as defined by Danish rules for scientific integrity.
Overall, that’s the impression that I took away from yesterday’s lecture, too - that the basic facts in his arguments that are true, but are used poorly enough to be essentially dishonest. It’s not an accurate reflection of what’s going on with the environmental/climate change community to use the 1997 Kyoto Protocol as the basis for all your arguments about what it means to fight global warming. Nor is it accurate to assume that renewable energy sources such as solar are always going to be expensive, that wind isn’t getting more efficient, and that coal and oil are going to remain plentiful and cheap.
Apparently, however, there is one thing that’s changing very rapidly, and becoming more accurate with every new evolution - the ‘skeptical’ arguments about global warming. "It’s not happening" becomes "It’s not manmade", which is now morphing into "It’s real, it’s manmade, so what? We’ve got other things to worry about". Hopefully, the next step will be for them to become a little more skeptical about the wisdom of doing nothing.
My favorite clip from the lecture can be found here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=L2EuvMCga0U
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by Andrew Snow