An embarassing review of Lomborg's book in the Globe & Mail...

Well, at least Margaret Wente loved the book earlier this week...but this review by Alanna Mitchell is just ridiculous...

The first book made him the darling of the North American anti-environment movement, which licked its substantial chops at the spectacle of a purported environmentalist eating his own.

The anti-environment movement???? I never knew there was such a thing. Right here, the reviewer loses credibility in my mind. What Lomborg did in the Skeptical Environmentalist was to make the strong case that we should focus on true environmental problems.

It also earned him sharp censure from the international scientific community, which accused him of deliberately cherry-picking their studies and skewing their findings to make his weird and intellectually weak case.

Mitchell seems to be saying that there is just one scientific community and that they speak with a monolithic voice. Not true. Of course, many people were upset with his first book - how could they not be???? But, many scientists loved his book. And, I doubt that Mitchell has read Lomborg's responses to his critics.

In fact, Lomborg is a statistician. He's not a scientist, and the book of science, alas, is closed to him. His work betrays, embarrassingly, that he doesn't understand biology or how living systems work or any of the basic principles of scientific inquiry.

Shocking. He's a statistician! Gee, aren't they scientists, too? Would be nice for the reviewer to give us some concrete examples of his errors. But, nothing in this review except her opinion. The plain fact of the matter is that Lomborg's book is a masterpiece. Check out his first 50 pages - he goes to show how a variety of environmental groups have misused statistics to scare the public.

Except he's left out that climate change is expected to have other effects, too, such as more drought, more intense and dangerous storms, more ferocious hurricanes, less available fresh water and arable land, more species going extinct, with unknown consequences for humanity, more acidic oceans, fewer plankton delivering oxygen to the atmosphere, possibly more wars over scarcer resources, millions of environmental refugees forced to leave their lands and homes. And on and on.

Is there nothing more she can lump in here to scare people??? We all know the incredible predictive power of environmentalists in the past (Club of Rome, Ehrlich on population growth, etc). You'd think they'd be a little more humble in their predictions.

I remember wondering, after I interviewed Lomborg, whether he was intellectually dishonest or just not very bright. Cool It has convinced me that it doesn't matter. Lomborg has now proved beyond a doubt that he is incapable of contributing anything of merit to scientific discourse.

Again, the typical environmental dismissal. Waste of time talking to people like Lomborg. Nothing of merit? Absolutely nothing????