Cool It

Ron 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…

I'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…