7 ms·

Book Review: The Lomborg Deception

27 points by sleepingbot 17y ago

glymor 17y ago
Pitting a political scientist vs a pro-palestinian writer tells us nothing much at all. Except that they both know what topic to go to to sell copy. What state have we reached where replacing science with the truth finding abilities of partisan politics seems in some way sensible.
- gjm11 17y ago
  Lomborg purports to be approaching the matter scientifically rather than through partisan politics. He's been taken at face value in some quarters. If indeed he's now been shown not to be engaged in honest scholarship, then that seems to me to be "worth much". Why the fact that someone has co-authored a couple of books about newspaper reporting of the Israel-Palestine conflict should make it appropriate to describe that person in a totally different context as "a Pro-Palestine writer" is beyond me, by the way. If you happened to know Friel's political allegiance, would you have written "Pitting a political scientist vs a Democrat ..." or "Pitting a political scientist vs a Republican ..." or whatever?
  - glymor 17y ago
    Lomborg work was criticized as scientifically dishonest by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Committees_on_Scientific_Dishonesty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Committees_on_Scientific... in 2003 and by others before and after that. Friel is not blazing new ground here. Friel writes wholly one-sidely. I don't know if it's his personal inclination or not (it's generally a good tactic for a niche writer). Pro-Palestinian seemed a short way of characterizing him; perhaps too short but not undeserved.
djcjr 17y ago
I'm confused. Skeptics don't make claims, they doubt claims. How has the burden of proof for climate-change claims shifted to a skeptic? Renaming doubt as "claims" and then "debunking" the doubt reminds of straw man, no? Labeling a climate-change skeptic as "pretending-to-be serious" reminds of ad hominem, no?
- gjm11 17y ago
  Lomborg makes plenty of claims. The burden of proof is not determined by whether one is claiming or doubting. Someone saying "I think there's some room for doubt about geocentrism" would bear the burden of proof, for instance. "Debunking the claims" is straight from the original article title. It seems to be pretty well justified by the article itself; someone has gone through the references in one of Lomborg's books and found them full of junk. (Of course it might turn out that the new book is itself all lies or something, but the mere possibility of that doesn't justify complaining about the word "debunking".) A straw man is a position falsely ascribed to one's opponents to make them easier to debunk. What false position do you think is being ascribed to Lomborg to make him easier to debunk?
  - cwan 17y ago
    Have you bothered to read Lomborg's rebuttal? It thoroughly addresses each of the claims that Friel makes [at least in the book review]. (as linked by Luyt: http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20reply%20to%20Howard%20Friel.pdf http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20r...) Did you even read Begley's screed? As WindsofChange notes: http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_credibility.html http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_c..., Newsweek discredits itself in its opening paragraph. Since when is "fact checking" so distasteful so as to be considered to be one of the worst jobs by Newsweek? I mean isn't that supposed to be sort of their job? And they wonder why circulation continues to freefall (falling from 2.6M to 1.5M http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-washington-post-company-reports-2009-and-fourth-quarter-earnings-2010-02-24?reflink=MW_news_stmp http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-washington-post-company...) in one year alone! There was no "debunking" here. What exists, appears a desperate editor watching her circulation plunge while she attempts to hype a made up controversy to plug the hole. There's a journalistic dictum if I recall that goes something like: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" [Thanks sailormoon for the correction]. The evidence from both Begley and Friel do not rise to this level especially as Begley attempts to trash not only Lomborg, casting aspersions on both the reviewers of Lomborg's work and Lomborg himself. What is particularly galling is how profoundly unskeptical Newsweek was of Friel's claims and the remarkably anti-intellectual stance they've taken.
Luyt 17y ago
And Lomborg's response, debunking Howard Friel’s claims in return, is here: http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20reply%20to%20Howard%20Friel.pdf http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20r...
- cwan 17y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvotes for this. Lomborg's defense directly addresses Friel's rather serious claims (the same cannot be said for Friel). On the other hand, at least as this blog notes: http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_credibility.html http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_c..., we now know quite clearly where Newsweek stands on the issue especially as they outsource their skepticism to foreign news services despite recent challenges to the "gold-standard" IPCC reports.
zzzmarcus 17y ago
After climategate I have a hard time giving much creedence to studies on either side of the anthropomorphic global warming issue. It seems like the right answer is "we don't know." That having been said, articles and books like this seem like not much more than a desperate attempt at staying relevant.
- Retric 17y ago
  I suspect that "climategate" did not change your stance from agreeing with climate change to disagreeing with it. However, if honestly changed your mind I must ask you why?
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    I changed my stance on historical climate data as a result of climategate [1]. I previously accepted it as more or less correct, but now I'm very skeptical. The fact is, a big chunk of it cannot be reproduced. A big chunk of historical climate data was was created by the CRU group. The CRU folks are revealed to have an agenda which they are willing to push by subverting the scientific process. Perhaps other groups are better, or perhaps they just haven't had their email hacked. But the field of historical climate is small enough that there isn't much redundancy (only 4 or 5 major groups, AFAIK). In an experimental field this would be less of an issue, since experiments provide a reality check. But in a purely analytical field, it's murder. Furthermore, even works produced by completely honest and accurate groups may depend on flawed results coming out of the CRU group. Until we carefully audit the field, it's hard to be sure anything is legitimate. Furthermore, in the wake of climategate, I've become more educated on their data analysis techniques. Consider the "trick" used to "hide the decline": tree ring data agrees with temperature for the first half of the calibration period, but not the second. Therefore, we discard the second half, and assume the correlations in the first half of the training data always applied. This isn't fraud, since it's well documented what is being done. This is worse. This means that there are so few good proxy measurements that they are forced to use proxies which only match half the training data! I'm not saying this is necessarily bad science; it might be the best that can be done with the available data. Best possible != good, and in this case it looks like best possible might be very poor. [1] Full disclosure: I was previously skeptical of the claims made by climate modeling. If you wish to claim this is equivalent to "did not change your stance", feel free.
arvinjoar 17y ago
Newsweek makes the mistake that they accuse Lomborg of doing. "As Friel shows, Lomborg sourced that to a blog post and to a study that never mentioned polar bears." Here is the blog post: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=2888 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=2888 It tries to debunk a WWF claim on the polar bears. After I found this out, I was not going to bother to read the rest of the article, I have a low tolerance for plain lying, and would flip out for something like this IRL. EDIT: Actually, the quote is tricky, is it saying that the blog post doesn't cover polar bears or that the study does not? Anyway, the link they provide to the study doesn't work. So it's hard to check their sources. Also, the study doesn't have to cover polar bears, Lomborg could just have been fact-checking the blog post, making it a more legitimate source (hey, it's Cato, a think tank, not that there's anything wrong with being biased, as long as you stick to the truth.). Conclusion: The Newsweek article is just sloppy journalism, I didn't even finish past the quote I provided, and they made too many errors before then to be taken seriously. MSM shouldn't get away with sloppy journalism.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  I think what that line means is: There are two sources. Source 1 is a blog post (implication is this isn't serious science or worthy of a footnote, and reading it I'd agree), source 2 doesn't mention polar bears.
Nwallins 17y ago
This article contains some disturbing appeals to authority: > As the final arbiter, let's go to Ian Stirling, one of the world's foremost experts on polar bears. Lomborg, Stirling says, used "inaccurate and utterly inadequate arguments" to "erroneously suggest climate warming will have little negative effect on" the bears. As the truly final arbiter, I asked my cat, who said "Meow, Lomborg is wrong." > Overall, since the mid-1980s polar-bear numbers have fallen, which experts attribute to global warming. The source is thus not exactly the solid endorsement of Lomborg's claim about thriving polar bears that one might assume. The author would do better to show Lombard's claim, his citation, and show exactly why the citation is fraudulent or mistaken, rather than rely on assumption of general endorsement of a specific claim.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
Let's see if I understand this correctly. Scientist A finds fault with the majority view on a certain issue. So he publishes a book for popular consumption that takes to task various points of the majority's opinion. In response, some other scientist writes a book that takes to task Scientist A. Scientist A writes a rebuttal to the critique. Newsweek comes along, cherry-picks a couple of arguments, resolves them by appeal to authority, doesn't look at the rebuttal, and seems to conclude that Scientist A is a shoddy charlatan unworthy of our trust. As I understand this discussion, there are a bout five hoops we need to jump through from positing a theory (Earth's climate is changing) to advocating action (We must do something). I won't list them all here -- they're all just common sense. Attack along any of these lines is fair game and should be encouraged -- especially with such a serious topic. Instead of impeaching the scientist and basically trying to impugn any work he does in the future, why not list each claim, critique, and rebuttal? Heck, you could do it in chart format with sources. Then we could be talking ideas instead of generalizations and personalities. I'd much rather have the scientific discussion than the political one. Lumborg may abuse puppies when he goes home from work, but his ideas deserve our attention because bad ideas can come from good people and good ideas can come from bad people We're all grown-ups: show us the claims, counter-claims and citations and we can have a much higher-quality conversation.
- Tichy 17y ago
  "Instead of impeaching the scientist and basically trying to impugn any work he does in the future, why not list each claim, critique, and rebuttal?" Problem is, we still wouldn't be any wiser - how would we know whether to trust the claim, the critique, or the rebuttal? And wouldn't it be more fair to also allow a rebuttal to the rebuttal? Why should Lumborg have the last word?
oconnore 17y ago
Well, this seems like as good a place as any to ask: Can someone point me to a paper that provides a reproducible experiment that measures both the accuracy and precision of the latest climate models? I suppose I am one of those illiterate, flat-earth "denier's". However, if such a paper exists, I would have no further doubts. And until such a paper exists (assuming it currently does not), my only claims are that the science is unfinished, and that clean energy is probably a good idea anyways.
- Tichy 17y ago
  Well how can you claim science is unfinished without even having checked for the state of the science? I can not understand this attitude. And no, I can not link to such a paper, but I am also not making any claims.
  - oconnore 17y ago
    Tichy, I have checked. I'm almost positive it doesn't exist, but I welcome others to prove me wrong. I don't see how you made the logical conclusion that I was asking questions without doing any research at all?
    - Tichy 17y ago
      It sounded like that, because you wrote "you assume". I am not sure your request even makes much sense, to be honest.
- gjm11 17y ago
  Science is always unfinished. That's how it works.

27 points by sleepingbot 17y ago

Pitting a political scientist vs a pro-palestinian writer tells us nothing much at all. Except that they both know what topic to go to to sell copy. What state have we reached where replacing science with the truth finding abilities of partisan politics seems in some way sensible.

gjm11 17y ago
Lomborg purports to be approaching the matter scientifically rather than through partisan politics. He's been taken at face value in some quarters. If indeed he's now been shown not to be engaged in honest scholarship, then that seems to me to be "worth much". Why the fact that someone has co-authored a couple of books about newspaper reporting of the Israel-Palestine conflict should make it appropriate to describe that person in a totally different context as "a Pro-Palestine writer" is beyond me, by the way. If you happened to know Friel's political allegiance, would you have written "Pitting a political scientist vs a Democrat ..." or "Pitting a political scientist vs a Republican ..." or whatever?
- glymor 17y ago
  Lomborg work was criticized as scientifically dishonest by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Committees_on_Scientific_Dishonesty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Committees_on_Scientific... in 2003 and by others before and after that. Friel is not blazing new ground here. Friel writes wholly one-sidely. I don't know if it's his personal inclination or not (it's generally a good tactic for a niche writer). Pro-Palestinian seemed a short way of characterizing him; perhaps too short but not undeserved.

djcjr 17y ago

I'm confused. Skeptics don't make claims, they doubt claims. How has the burden of proof for climate-change claims shifted to a skeptic? Renaming doubt as "claims" and then "debunking" the doubt reminds of straw man, no? Labeling a climate-change skeptic as "pretending-to-be serious" reminds of ad hominem, no?

gjm11 17y ago
Lomborg makes plenty of claims. The burden of proof is not determined by whether one is claiming or doubting. Someone saying "I think there's some room for doubt about geocentrism" would bear the burden of proof, for instance. "Debunking the claims" is straight from the original article title. It seems to be pretty well justified by the article itself; someone has gone through the references in one of Lomborg's books and found them full of junk. (Of course it might turn out that the new book is itself all lies or something, but the mere possibility of that doesn't justify complaining about the word "debunking".) A straw man is a position falsely ascribed to one's opponents to make them easier to debunk. What false position do you think is being ascribed to Lomborg to make him easier to debunk?
- cwan 17y ago
  Have you bothered to read Lomborg's rebuttal? It thoroughly addresses each of the claims that Friel makes [at least in the book review]. (as linked by Luyt: http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20reply%20to%20Howard%20Friel.pdf http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20r...) Did you even read Begley's screed? As WindsofChange notes: http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_credibility.html http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_c..., Newsweek discredits itself in its opening paragraph. Since when is "fact checking" so distasteful so as to be considered to be one of the worst jobs by Newsweek? I mean isn't that supposed to be sort of their job? And they wonder why circulation continues to freefall (falling from 2.6M to 1.5M http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-washington-post-company-reports-2009-and-fourth-quarter-earnings-2010-02-24?reflink=MW_news_stmp http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-washington-post-company...) in one year alone! There was no "debunking" here. What exists, appears a desperate editor watching her circulation plunge while she attempts to hype a made up controversy to plug the hole. There's a journalistic dictum if I recall that goes something like: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" [Thanks sailormoon for the correction]. The evidence from both Begley and Friel do not rise to this level especially as Begley attempts to trash not only Lomborg, casting aspersions on both the reviewers of Lomborg's work and Lomborg himself. What is particularly galling is how profoundly unskeptical Newsweek was of Friel's claims and the remarkably anti-intellectual stance they've taken.

Luyt 17y ago

And Lomborg's response, debunking Howard Friel’s claims in return, is here: http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20reply%20to%20Howard%20Friel.pdf http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20r...

cwan 17y ago
Not sure why you're getting downvotes for this. Lomborg's defense directly addresses Friel's rather serious claims (the same cannot be said for Friel). On the other hand, at least as this blog notes: http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_credibility.html http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_c..., we now know quite clearly where Newsweek stands on the issue especially as they outsource their skepticism to foreign news services despite recent challenges to the "gold-standard" IPCC reports.

zzzmarcus 17y ago

After climategate I have a hard time giving much creedence to studies on either side of the anthropomorphic global warming issue. It seems like the right answer is "we don't know." That having been said, articles and books like this seem like not much more than a desperate attempt at staying relevant.

Retric 17y ago
I suspect that "climategate" did not change your stance from agreeing with climate change to disagreeing with it. However, if honestly changed your mind I must ask you why?
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  I changed my stance on historical climate data as a result of climategate [1]. I previously accepted it as more or less correct, but now I'm very skeptical. The fact is, a big chunk of it cannot be reproduced. A big chunk of historical climate data was was created by the CRU group. The CRU folks are revealed to have an agenda which they are willing to push by subverting the scientific process. Perhaps other groups are better, or perhaps they just haven't had their email hacked. But the field of historical climate is small enough that there isn't much redundancy (only 4 or 5 major groups, AFAIK). In an experimental field this would be less of an issue, since experiments provide a reality check. But in a purely analytical field, it's murder. Furthermore, even works produced by completely honest and accurate groups may depend on flawed results coming out of the CRU group. Until we carefully audit the field, it's hard to be sure anything is legitimate. Furthermore, in the wake of climategate, I've become more educated on their data analysis techniques. Consider the "trick" used to "hide the decline": tree ring data agrees with temperature for the first half of the calibration period, but not the second. Therefore, we discard the second half, and assume the correlations in the first half of the training data always applied. This isn't fraud, since it's well documented what is being done. This is worse. This means that there are so few good proxy measurements that they are forced to use proxies which only match half the training data! I'm not saying this is necessarily bad science; it might be the best that can be done with the available data. Best possible != good, and in this case it looks like best possible might be very poor. [1] Full disclosure: I was previously skeptical of the claims made by climate modeling. If you wish to claim this is equivalent to "did not change your stance", feel free.

arvinjoar 17y ago

Newsweek makes the mistake that they accuse Lomborg of doing. "As Friel shows, Lomborg sourced that to a blog post and to a study that never mentioned polar bears." Here is the blog post: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=2888 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=2888 It tries to debunk a WWF claim on the polar bears. After I found this out, I was not going to bother to read the rest of the article, I have a low tolerance for plain lying, and would flip out for something like this IRL. EDIT: Actually, the quote is tricky, is it saying that the blog post doesn't cover polar bears or that the study does not? Anyway, the link they provide to the study doesn't work. So it's hard to check their sources. Also, the study doesn't have to cover polar bears, Lomborg could just have been fact-checking the blog post, making it a more legitimate source (hey, it's Cato, a think tank, not that there's anything wrong with being biased, as long as you stick to the truth.). Conclusion: The Newsweek article is just sloppy journalism, I didn't even finish past the quote I provided, and they made too many errors before then to be taken seriously. MSM shouldn't get away with sloppy journalism.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago
I think what that line means is: There are two sources. Source 1 is a blog post (implication is this isn't serious science or worthy of a footnote, and reading it I'd agree), source 2 doesn't mention polar bears.

Nwallins 17y ago

This article contains some disturbing appeals to authority: > As the final arbiter, let's go to Ian Stirling, one of the world's foremost experts on polar bears. Lomborg, Stirling says, used "inaccurate and utterly inadequate arguments" to "erroneously suggest climate warming will have little negative effect on" the bears. As the truly final arbiter, I asked my cat, who said "Meow, Lomborg is wrong." > Overall, since the mid-1980s polar-bear numbers have fallen, which experts attribute to global warming. The source is thus not exactly the solid endorsement of Lomborg's claim about thriving polar bears that one might assume. The author would do better to show Lombard's claim, his citation, and show exactly why the citation is fraudulent or mistaken, rather than rely on assumption of general endorsement of a specific claim.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

Let's see if I understand this correctly. Scientist A finds fault with the majority view on a certain issue. So he publishes a book for popular consumption that takes to task various points of the majority's opinion. In response, some other scientist writes a book that takes to task Scientist A. Scientist A writes a rebuttal to the critique. Newsweek comes along, cherry-picks a couple of arguments, resolves them by appeal to authority, doesn't look at the rebuttal, and seems to conclude that Scientist A is a shoddy charlatan unworthy of our trust. As I understand this discussion, there are a bout five hoops we need to jump through from positing a theory (Earth's climate is changing) to advocating action (We must do something). I won't list them all here -- they're all just common sense. Attack along any of these lines is fair game and should be encouraged -- especially with such a serious topic. Instead of impeaching the scientist and basically trying to impugn any work he does in the future, why not list each claim, critique, and rebuttal? Heck, you could do it in chart format with sources. Then we could be talking ideas instead of generalizations and personalities. I'd much rather have the scientific discussion than the political one. Lumborg may abuse puppies when he goes home from work, but his ideas deserve our attention because bad ideas can come from good people and good ideas can come from bad people We're all grown-ups: show us the claims, counter-claims and citations and we can have a much higher-quality conversation.

Tichy 17y ago
"Instead of impeaching the scientist and basically trying to impugn any work he does in the future, why not list each claim, critique, and rebuttal?" Problem is, we still wouldn't be any wiser - how would we know whether to trust the claim, the critique, or the rebuttal? And wouldn't it be more fair to also allow a rebuttal to the rebuttal? Why should Lumborg have the last word?

oconnore 17y ago

Well, this seems like as good a place as any to ask: Can someone point me to a paper that provides a reproducible experiment that measures both the accuracy and precision of the latest climate models? I suppose I am one of those illiterate, flat-earth "denier's". However, if such a paper exists, I would have no further doubts. And until such a paper exists (assuming it currently does not), my only claims are that the science is unfinished, and that clean energy is probably a good idea anyways.

Tichy 17y ago
Well how can you claim science is unfinished without even having checked for the state of the science? I can not understand this attitude. And no, I can not link to such a paper, but I am also not making any claims.
- oconnore 17y ago
  Tichy, I have checked. I'm almost positive it doesn't exist, but I welcome others to prove me wrong. I don't see how you made the logical conclusion that I was asking questions without doing any research at all?
  - Tichy 17y ago
    It sounded like that, because you wrote "you assume". I am not sure your request even makes much sense, to be honest.
gjm11 17y ago
Science is always unfinished. That's how it works.