bjorn lomborg
gregladen | August 31, 2015I don't care that the director or CEO of an advocacy organization concerned with poverty is an active academic. Indeed, my view of active academics is that many are largely incompetent in areas of life other than their specialized field. If that. So really, if you told me there is this great advocacy organization out there run by a well established active academic I'd figure you had that wrong, or I'd worry a little about the organization. On the other hand, everyone should care that university positions be given to active academics with credentials. So, when the University of Western…
gregladen | May 14, 2015Bjorn Lomborg has written an Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal lamenting the decision of the University of Western Australia (UWA) to nix previously developed plans to accept a $4 million dollar payment from the conservative Australian government, to be matched by university money, to implement a version of Lomborg’s Copenhagen Institute there, to be known as Australia Consensus.
See: Bjorn Lomborg Is Wrong About Bangladesh And Sea Level Rise
See: Bjørn Lomborg WSJ Op Ed Is Stunningly Wrong
See: Are electric cars any good? Lomborg says no, but he’s wrong.
Lomborg’s scholarship in the area of…
gregladen | May 8, 2015Over the last several weeks we've seen the University of Western Australia accept a $4 million dollar Federal grant to develop a "Consensus Centre" in the mold of Bjorn Lomborg's non profit, with Lomborg as a key player. Lomborg has been heavily criticized for his lack of scholarship and seemingly biased policy related to climate change and related issues. There was heavy opposition in the Australian academic community to this project. Under pressure from peers and colleagues, Vice Chancellor Paul Johnson has announced that the project is cancelled. In a message published on the UWA…
gregladen | April 23, 2015I've written here about some of Bjorn Lomborg's work, generally critical of it. But the Abbot Government in Australia apparently likes what Lomborg is doing well enough to have earmarked $4 million (in some currency or another) to ensconce a version of his academically questionable enterprise right in the middle of Australian academics.
I would like to write this up for you so you can learn all you need to learn about it, but Graham Readfearn has already done an excellent job reporting this. I strongly urge you to go and read: Australian taxpayers funding climate contrarian's methods with $4m…
gregladen | March 12, 2015Human caused greenhouse gas pollution is heating the Earth and causing the planet’s polar ice caps and other glacial ice to melt. This, along with simply heating the ocean, has caused measurable sea level rise. Even more worrisome is this: the current elevated level of CO2 in the atmosphere was associated in the past with sea levels several meters higher than they are today. Even if we slow down Carbon pollution very quickly, we can expect sea levels to be at least 8 meters higher, eventually. How soon? Nobody knows, nobody can give you a time frame on this because the rate of melting of the…
gregladen | February 2, 2015Bjørn Lomborg wrote an opinion piece that is offensively wrong
Bjørn Lomborg is the director of the conservative Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is author of two books that seem to recommend inaction in the face of climate change, Cool It, which appears to be both a book and a movie, and “The Skeptical Environmentalist.”
This is apparently the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Copenhagen Consensus Center USA, 262 Middlesex St, Lowell MA .
He is well known as a climate contrarian, though I don’t subscribe to the subcategories that are often used to divide up the denialists. Let’s just say that…
hrynyshyn | August 31, 2010Much is being and will be written about Bjorn Lomborg's volte face on climate change. After a decade of denial -- not of the reality of anthropogenic warming, but of the threat it poses to civiliation -- the Skeptical Environmentalist now says:
"If we care about the environment and about leaving this planet and its inhabitants with the best possible future, we actually have only one option: we all need to start seriously focusing, right now, on the most effective ways to fix global warming."
Is this worthy of a blog post? In a perfect world, no. But then, in a perfect world, I would be…
tlambert | June 4, 2010Howard Friel was interviewed on the Science Show
about his book The Lomborg Deception
So Lomborg was very clever to present himself as a centrist, but when you get into the details of his book he's hardly a centrist. I think he would be fairly classified as a climate denier. He takes almost every climate related issue from polar bears to melting glaciers to rising sea levels, and in my view very problematically downplays the significance of the impact of global warming on these areas. So people would classify him as a sceptic that is one notch above a denier, but I would not do that, I think…
tlambert | February 25, 2010Ron Bailey reflexively jumps to the defence of Bjorn Lomborg:
Begley cites three examples from Friel about Lomborg's errors, e.g., polar bear population trends and climate change, human deaths from heat versus cold, and the implications of Antarctic ice shelf disintegration. You can read Begley's reporting and judge for yourself. (With regard to polar bears, let's assume that Begley's reporting of Friel's analysis is accurate and that Lomborg's sourcing is, how should one put it, thin and misleading. However, I do note in passing that a 2009 review article in the journal Environmental Reviews…
tlambert | February 22, 2010I've noted before that Bjorn Lomborg systematically misrepresents the science. Sharon Begley has reviewed Howard Friel's book The Lomborg Deception:
But when Friel began checking Lomborg's sources, "I found problems," he says. "As an experiment, I looked up one of his footnotes, found that it didn't support what he said, and then did another, and kept going, finding the same pattern." He therefore took on the Augean stables undertaking of checking every one of the hundreds of citations in Cool It. Friel's conclusion, as per his book's title, is that Lomborg is "a performance artist disguised…