blatham wrote:Now, let's acknowledge in this discussion that there has been a large and very well funded campaign established and run by industry interests to denigrate climate change as a 'hoax', or as reflecting the views of 'radicals', or as a set of theories which have 'no consensus' in the science community, or as 'junk science', etc. Each of those claims is a lie, or at the very least, a serious misrepresentation (see data above).
Yes. But there was an equally well-organized campaign of environmentalist volunteers who grossly exaggerated the state of peer-reviewed science in the other direction, usually by a larger margin than the industrial lobbyists did. I guess, without being able to prove it, that this campaign isn't much less well funded than the other one if you count the market value of the volunteer's labor as funding. And it is their version, not the industrial lobby's, that is reflected in today's conventional wisdom about global warming. I reject your implied notion that the junk science peddled in
The Day after Tomorrow is somehow more acceptable than the industrial lobby's version. And it is the environmentalists' exaggerations, not the industry lobbyists, which have become the common wisdom about global warming.
blatham wrote:Finally, let's acknowledge that the publication of Lomborg's book was followed by Science Journal, Nature Journal, and Scientific American ALL releasing special editions presenting the problems and errors in Lomborg's analyses. For both of these scientific journals, the most significant science journals published in English, such a special edition on a single contemporary issue, was unprecedented.
I think it still
is unprecedented, because it didn't happen. As best I recall, your account of what these journals did is simply false, and none of them ever released any special editions in this matter. Is it possible that they sold reprints of their anti-Lomborg articles, and your source mistook them for special editions? Selling reprints is an everyday routine in academic publishing, including the publishing of
Nature,
Science, and
Scientific American.
As I recall the debate,
Scientific American released four articles -- a total of about 15 pages -- all of which disapproved of Lomborg's book, but none of which refuted any important substantial claim he made. (One of them, John Holdren, discovered two minor errors, and Lomborg immediately posted corrections
on his website.) Two of the four authors had seen their own work criticized in Lomborg's book, so weren't impartial judges in the matter. (In a later issue of
Scientific American, Lomborg was given one page to reply.) The
Scientific American used to have a point-counterpoint account of the debate on its webpage, but it appears to be gone.
In the case of
Nature and
Science, the debate happened in the book review section and the "letters to the editor" section of those journals. These sections are not peer-reviewed -- unlike the original research articles published in other sections, which give these magazines their reputation, and unlike
The Skeptical Environmentalist itself, which was peer reviewed in the process of being published by Cambridge University Press. Hence, your description of
Nature's and
Science's involvement in the matter is not literally false. But it misleads your readers into overestimating the scientific authority of the anti-Lomborg arguments published there.
All of this can be followed on
www.lomborg.com as well as
www.anti-lomborg.com . You may well be interested in reading it, blatham. The mistakes in your account of the facts, and the way they systematically end up being anti-Lomborg, look to me as if you have never read
The Skeptical Environmentalist. It also looks as if you have never followed the debate about the book anywhere but from second- and third-hand accounts, published by somebody on the anti-Lomborg side.
(And, for Gaia's sake: I just quoted to him for a
citation in his book! Nobody ever accused Lomborg of manufacturing bogus quotes!
)
-- and the title of the follow-up book was Beyond the Limits, not Limits of Growth revisited as I originally thought.)
)
