An excerpt (the bold font is mine):
Climate change is a real and serious problem. But the problem with the recent media frenzy is that some seem to believe no new report or development is enough if it doesn't reveal more serious consequences.A biography of Lomborg is here.
Indeed, this media frenzy has little or no scientific backing. One of England's foremost climatologists, Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, points out that green militancy and megaphone journalism use "catastrophe and chaos as unguided weapons with which forlornly to threaten society into behavioral change."
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4 comments:
By referring to Bjorn Lomborg as an "environmentalist" you have fallen for his own hype. Lomborg is a statistician, and not a very good one, apparently, as he has been widely excoriated by members of the scientific community, including his own colleagues at the University of Aarhus in Sweden. As a sampling of the criticisms that Lomborg's work has received see here (and note the links, here, and here.
I'll close with this quote from one of Lomborg's notable critics:
My greatest regret about the Lomborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expended to combat it in the media. We will always have contrarians like Lomborg whose sallies are characterized by willful ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication with genuine experts, and destructive compaigning to attract the attention of the media rather than scientists. They are the parasite load on scholars who earn success through the slow process of peer review and approval. The question is: How much load should be tolerated before a response is necessary? Lomborg is evidently over the threshold. (E. O. Wilson 2001)
Thanks for the comment, John.
In "An Inconvenient Truth", much is made of a scenario where sea levels rise *20* feet or more by 2100, with the potential of "a hundred million or more" refugees.
Lomborg points out that the IPCC is now predicting a sea level rise of roughly *one* foot by 2100.
On the very key issue of projected sea level rise between now and 2100, who has more backing by the scientific community: Lomborg or Gore?
Bjorn Lomborg has made an even more successful career out of being an environmental sceptic, than you have from being an Ivory-bill sceptic;-) and therefore anything he writes should be viewed whilst baring in mind what his agenda is likely to be. I went to see him give a talk at the University of East Anglia about a year or two ago. He talked, quite convincingly about many of the problems facing the planet and how climate change is quite low down on the list of priorities – he was trying to sell his Copenhagen Consensus work. One of the things he failed to address properly, even when pressed by members of the audience (which included most of the Tyndall and Climatic Research Unit staff, including Mike Hulme), is how uncertainty should be incorporated. All is work for the Copenhagen Consensus is based on best-guesses. In the case of climate change, there is a great deal of uncertainty and projections range from virtually nothing happening, to a catastrophic rise in sea-level if the Greenland ice sheet were to collapse. Integrated across all possible scenarios, but taking into account the likelihood of each occurring, climate change comes a lot further up the agenda than Bjorn’s work would suggest.
On a separate note, but not entirely unrelated, I think most scientists and policy makers recognise that a sea-level rise of 20 feet, as suggested by Al Gore is highly unlikely. I’m not sure entirely what you’re getting at by comparing the credibility of Al Gore to Bjorn Lomberg, but I don’t really think it lends any weight to the argument that climate scientists should be discredited as alarmists.
"I don’t really think it lends any weight to the argument that climate scientists should be discredited as alarmists."
I'm not making that argument.
There are plenty of climate scientists that are not global warming alarmists. Remember, even the latest IPCC summary predicts a sea-level rise this century of roughly one foot. Against a historical backdrop of sea levels rising hundreds of feet over thousands of years, a prediction of one more foot in a century shouldn't sound all that alarming.
I think much of the global warming hysteria is fomented by people who are NOT climate scientists.
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