

Book Review: The Lomborg Deception - sleepingbot
http://www.newsweek.com/id/233942?

======
Luyt
And Lomborg's response, debunking Howard Friel’s claims in return, is here:
[http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20r...](http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20reply%20to%20Howard%20Friel.pdf)

~~~
cwan
Not sure why you're getting downvotes for this. Lomborg's defense directly
addresses Friel's rather serious claims (the same cannot be said for Friel).
On the other hand, at least as this blog notes:
[http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_c...](http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_credibility.html),
we now know quite clearly where Newsweek stands on the issue especially as
they outsource their skepticism to foreign news services despite recent
challenges to the "gold-standard" IPCC reports.

------
arvinjoar
Newsweek makes the mistake that they accuse Lomborg of doing. "As Friel shows,
Lomborg sourced that to a blog post and to a study that never mentioned polar
bears."

Here is the blog post: <http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=2888>

It tries to debunk a WWF claim on the polar bears. After I found this out, I
was not going to bother to read the rest of the article, I have a low
tolerance for plain lying, and would flip out for something like this IRL.

EDIT: Actually, the quote is tricky, is it saying that the blog post doesn't
cover polar bears or that the study does not? Anyway, the link they provide to
the study doesn't work. So it's hard to check _their_ sources. Also, the study
doesn't have to cover polar bears, Lomborg could just have been fact-checking
the blog post, making it a more legitimate source (hey, it's Cato, a think
tank, not that there's anything wrong with being biased, as long as you stick
to the truth.).

 __Conclusion: __The Newsweek article is just sloppy journalism, I didn't even
finish past the quote I provided, and they made too many errors before then to
be taken seriously. MSM shouldn't get away with sloppy journalism.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I think what that line means is:

There are two sources. Source 1 is a blog post (implication is this isn't
serious science or worthy of a footnote, and reading it I'd agree), source 2
doesn't mention polar bears.

------
djcjr
I'm confused.

Skeptics don't make claims, they doubt claims. How has the burden of proof for
climate-change claims shifted to a skeptic?

Renaming doubt as "claims" and then "debunking" the doubt reminds of straw
man, no?

Labeling a climate-change skeptic as "pretending-to-be serious" reminds of ad
hominem, no?

~~~
gjm11
Lomborg makes plenty of claims.

The burden of proof is not determined by whether one is claiming or doubting.
Someone saying "I think there's some room for doubt about geocentrism" would
bear the burden of proof, for instance.

"Debunking the claims" is straight from the original article title. It seems
to be pretty well justified by the article itself; someone has gone through
the references in one of Lomborg's books and found them full of junk. (Of
course it might turn out that the new book is itself all lies or something,
but the mere possibility of that doesn't justify complaining about the word
"debunking".)

A straw man is a position falsely ascribed to one's opponents to make them
easier to debunk. What false position do you think is being ascribed to
Lomborg to make him easier to debunk?

~~~
cwan
Have you bothered to read Lomborg's rebuttal? It thoroughly addresses each of
the claims that Friel makes [at least in the book review]. (as linked by Luyt:
[http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20r...](http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20reply%20to%20Howard%20Friel.pdf))

Did you even read Begley's screed? As WindsofChange notes:
[http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_c...](http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_credibility.html),
Newsweek discredits itself in its opening paragraph. Since when is "fact
checking" so distasteful so as to be considered to be one of the worst jobs by
Newsweek? I mean isn't that supposed to be sort of their job? And they wonder
why circulation continues to freefall (falling from 2.6M to 1.5M
[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-washington-post-
company...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-washington-post-company-
reports-2009-and-fourth-quarter-earnings-2010-02-24?reflink=MW_news_stmp)) in
one year alone!

There was no "debunking" here. What exists, appears a desperate editor
watching her circulation plunge while she attempts to hype a made up
controversy to plug the hole.

There's a journalistic dictum if I recall that goes something like:
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" [Thanks sailormoon for
the correction]. The evidence from both Begley and Friel do not rise to this
level especially as Begley attempts to trash not only Lomborg, casting
aspersions on both the reviewers of Lomborg's work and Lomborg himself. What
is particularly galling is how profoundly unskeptical Newsweek was of Friel's
claims and the remarkably anti-intellectual stance they've taken.

~~~
gjm11
I have no way to assess Lomborg's rebuttal without having a copy of Friel's
book and Lomborg's earlier books to hand. I have a copy of one of Lomborg's
books, but not where I am right now, and don't have Friel's at all. However, I
don't think I believe that Lomborg's 27-page rebuttal can possibly address
every claim made by Friel in a 272-page book, no matter how wrong those claims
might be. (Rebutting claims, even very wrong ones, notoriously takes more
space and time than making them.)

The Newsweek review does not claim that fact checking is a distasteful job. It
claims that _fact checking Lomborg_ is a distasteful job. The two are not
equivalent.

No one is claiming that the Newsweek review does any debunking. It reports on
someone else's alleged debunking.

Just for reference: Have you read Friel's book and checked his analysis of
Lomborg's references?

~~~
cwan
The Lomborg Deception isn't out yet (March 16 is the ship date according to
Amazon). I should have specified that Lomborg addresses each of Friel's claims
made in the book review/editorial and then some.

Why would fact checking anyone, that by Newsweek's own admission has had high
praise from policy makers and any number of publications, be "distasteful"?
Newsweek makes the claim that Friel's book is a debunking and achieves its
task by referencing three of his primary claims. Begley however does not even
bother to thoroughly examine them or take Lomborg's pointed rebuttals into
consideration in her sloppy "analysis".

~~~
gjm11
Why would fact checking anyone be distasteful? Well, for instance, if I'm
understanding correctly what Friel claims, it's something like this: Lomborg
makes lots and lots of citations; their relation to the material they're cited
in support of is often unclear; it often turns out that they don't in fact
support what he's saying. If that's true, then fact-checking him would be a
lot of work because of the many citations, and the vagueness of reference that
would require more work per citation, and the (hypothetical) fact that often
the citations are no good. (Failed searches usually take longer than
successful ones.)

Begley doesn't claim to be offering analysis. It's a book review. Do you
seriously think it would have been appropriate for the review to be twice as
long in order to go into more detail on each claim it mentions?

Anyway. You say Lomborg addresses "each of Friel's claims made in the book
review" (weird way of putting it, btw). OK, let's look at the first one:
what's happening to the population of polar bears. Well, er, the word "bear"
doesn't appear in Lomborg's rebuttal. There's a bit about populations of
penguins; nothing about polar bears. Oh. Next: heat deaths and cold deaths.
There is certainly some discussion of this in Lomborg's rebuttal, but he
doesn't seem to have anything to say about one of the most striking claims
Begley says Friel makes: that Lomborg cites a study from 2006 as showing that
global warming will save 1.4 million lives that would otherwise be lost to
deaths from cold, when in fact the figure claimed in that study is 850k. Next:
stuff about the Larsen B ice shelf. No occurrence of "Larsen" or "shelf" in
Lomborg's rebuttal.

Your claim that Lomborg addresses every claim of Friel's that's found in the
book review appears to be totally false. Did _you_ read Lomborg's rebuttal, or
did you just hope I wouldn't?

Incidentally #1: Why the quotation marks around "distasteful"? That word is
yours, not Begley's (still less Friel's). Begley used a different term.

Incidentally #2: Why the quotation marks around "analysis"? My best guess is
that it's because I used that word. But I used it about Friel's 272-page book,
not Begley's 2ish-page review.

Incidentally #3: Why "book review / editorial"? It says "Book review" at the
top. It is dedicated to describing and evaluating a book. Its author is not an
editor. It's a book review; it's not an editorial.

------
Nwallins
This article contains some disturbing appeals to authority:

> _As the final arbiter, let's go to Ian Stirling, one of the world's foremost
> experts on polar bears. Lomborg, Stirling says, used "inaccurate and utterly
> inadequate arguments" to "erroneously suggest climate warming will have
> little negative effect on" the bears._

As the truly final arbiter, I asked my cat, who said "Meow, Lomborg is wrong."

> _Overall, since the mid-1980s polar-bear numbers have fallen, which experts
> attribute to global warming. The source is thus not exactly the solid
> endorsement of Lomborg's claim about thriving polar bears that one might
> assume._

The author would do better to show Lombard's claim, his citation, and show
exactly why the citation is fraudulent or mistaken, rather than rely on
assumption of general endorsement of a specific claim.

------
oconnore
Well, this seems like as good a place as any to ask:

Can someone point me to a paper that provides a reproducible experiment that
measures both the accuracy and precision of the latest climate models?

I suppose I am one of those illiterate, flat-earth "denier's". However, if
such a paper exists, I would have no further doubts. And until such a paper
exists (assuming it currently does not), my only claims are that the science
is unfinished, and that clean energy is probably a good idea anyways.

~~~
Tichy
Well how can you claim science is unfinished without even having checked for
the state of the science? I can not understand this attitude.

And no, I can not link to such a paper, but I am also not making any claims.

~~~
oconnore
Tichy, I have checked. I'm almost positive it doesn't exist, but I welcome
others to prove me wrong.

I don't see how you made the logical conclusion that I was asking questions
without doing any research at all?

~~~
Tichy
It sounded like that, because you wrote "you assume". I am not sure your
request even makes much sense, to be honest.

------
DanielBMarkham
Let's see if I understand this correctly.

Scientist A finds fault with the majority view on a certain issue. So he
publishes a book for popular consumption that takes to task various points of
the majority's opinion. In response, some other scientist writes a book that
takes to task Scientist A. Scientist A writes a rebuttal to the critique.

Newsweek comes along, cherry-picks a couple of arguments, resolves them by
appeal to authority, doesn't look at the rebuttal, and seems to conclude that
Scientist A is a shoddy charlatan unworthy of our trust.

As I understand this discussion, there are a bout five hoops we need to jump
through from positing a theory (Earth's climate is changing) to advocating
action (We must do something). I won't list them all here -- they're all just
common sense. Attack along any of these lines is fair game and should be
encouraged -- especially with such a serious topic.

Instead of impeaching the scientist and basically trying to impugn any work he
does in the future, why not list each claim, critique, and rebuttal? Heck, you
could do it in chart format with sources. Then we could be talking ideas
instead of generalizations and personalities.

I'd much rather have the scientific discussion than the political one. Lumborg
may abuse puppies when he goes home from work, but his ideas deserve our
attention because _bad ideas can come from good people and good ideas can come
from bad people_ We're all grown-ups: show us the claims, counter-claims and
citations and we can have a much higher-quality conversation.

~~~
Tichy
"Instead of impeaching the scientist and basically trying to impugn any work
he does in the future, why not list each claim, critique, and rebuttal?"

Problem is, we still wouldn't be any wiser - how would we know whether to
trust the claim, the critique, or the rebuttal? And wouldn't it be more fair
to also allow a rebuttal to the rebuttal? Why should Lumborg have the last
word?

------
zzzmarcus
After climategate I have a hard time giving much creedence to studies on
either side of the anthropomorphic global warming issue. It seems like the
right answer is "we don't know."

That having been said, articles and books like this seem like not much more
than a desperate attempt at staying relevant.

~~~
Retric
I suspect that "climategate" did not change your stance from agreeing with
climate change to disagreeing with it. However, if honestly changed your mind
I must ask you why?

~~~
yummyfajitas
I changed my stance on historical climate data as a result of climategate [1].
I previously accepted it as more or less correct, but now I'm very skeptical.

The fact is, a big chunk of it cannot be reproduced. A big chunk of historical
climate data was was created by the CRU group. The CRU folks are revealed to
have an agenda which they are willing to push by subverting the scientific
process.

Perhaps other groups are better, or perhaps they just haven't had their email
hacked. But the field of historical climate is small enough that there isn't
much redundancy (only 4 or 5 major groups, AFAIK). In an experimental field
this would be less of an issue, since experiments provide a reality check. But
in a purely analytical field, it's murder. Furthermore, even works produced by
completely honest and accurate groups may depend on flawed results coming out
of the CRU group. Until we carefully audit the field, it's hard to be sure
anything is legitimate.

Furthermore, in the wake of climategate, I've become more educated on their
data analysis techniques. Consider the "trick" used to "hide the decline":
tree ring data agrees with temperature for the first half of the calibration
period, but not the second. Therefore, we discard the second half, and
_assume_ the correlations in the first half of the training data always
applied.

This isn't fraud, since it's well documented what is being done. This is
worse. This means that there are so few good proxy measurements that they are
forced to use proxies which only match half the training data! I'm not saying
this is necessarily bad science; it might be the best that can be done with
the available data. Best possible != good, and in this case it looks like best
possible might be very poor.

[1] Full disclosure: I was previously skeptical of the claims made by climate
modeling. If you wish to claim this is equivalent to "did not change your
stance", feel free.

~~~
Retric
Ahh, ok. Yea, tree rings are a horrible proxy for temperature. "Global
cooling"/"Global dimming" (small particulates suspended in the upper
atmosphere) and an increase in pollution etc. has messed with them. I have
long been more skeptical estimates of past global temperatures than our
ability to predict future temperatures. Most of the other proxy’s for historic
temperature are highly dependent on ocean currents and we don’t have a good
proxy for figuring those out prior to accurate temperature measurements. Pluss
we are trying to look further into the past than the future so the number man
made changes to the enviernment (deforistation, urbon areas, the sahara etc)
are even more extream

IMO, the major issue dealing with global temperatures is actually how ocean
currents effected and affect temperatures. You can model changes in gas
concentrations but ocean currents estimates are closer to predicting weather
than climate. Also, we have high quality mesurments over a range of CO2
consentrations, but so far global ocean currents have been fairly steady.

PS: Global Cooling is actually a well accepted part of current clement change
models; the assumption is the effect of particulates suspended in the
atmosphere is not going to increase so while they offset a significant amount
of global warming they are not going to increase anytime soon. However,
looking at the past we need get an accurate estimate of the effects which is
hard.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_"Global cooling"/"Global dimming" (small particulates suspended in the upper
atmosphere) and an increase in pollution etc. has messed with them [tree
rings]._

Actually, we don't know what factor messed up tree rings. If we knew that tree
rings were f(warmth, x), we would simply keep tree ring data for the entire
calibration period and include x in the calculations. The fact is, factor x
might apply in the past. We simply don't know.

I'm curious though; if you are skeptical of our knowledge of past
temperatures, how can you not be skeptical of predictions of future
temperatures? All the climate models are calibrated to past temperature
records, so how can the models give good results if the past records are bad?

A hypothetical: I come to you with a proposed algorithmic trading strategy
which I've validated it against historical data. But _oops_ I'm not that great
at keeping records, and I actually threw away the market data. I also emailed
my employees and told them to delete the data if the SEC ever came asking for
it. And I also ignored some historical periods where the numbers didn't work.
But I kept some stock charts showing exponential growth!

So, you want to invest in my fund?

~~~
Retric
I don't trust any complex trading strategy period. On the other hand I am
perfectly willing to believe that we can make ITER work to design
specifications. And we could scale up the same basic design to a working
fusion reactor. The difference is extrapolating to never before seen physical
reactions is reasonable, while human psychology is not.

As to temperature predictions IMO it's more of the same, I don't trust that we
can build a highly accurate forcast of global temperature, but estimating
temperature change with a +/- 50% accuracy seems vary reasonable.

PS: It's not like we are missing the past 30 years of highly accurate
temperature measurements as we have continued to dump mind bogglingly huge
quantities of CO2 into the air. IMO, predicting 50 years into the future vs
200 years in the past involves far more unknowns, but extrapolating 1,000
years into the past even worse.

------
glymor
Pitting a political scientist vs a pro-palestinian writer tells us nothing
much at all. Except that they both know what topic to go to to sell copy.

What state have we reached where replacing science with the truth finding
abilities of partisan politics seems in some way sensible.

~~~
gjm11
Lomborg purports to be approaching the matter scientifically rather than
through partisan politics. He's been taken at face value in some quarters. If
indeed he's now been shown not to be engaged in honest scholarship, then that
seems to me to be "worth much".

Why the fact that someone has co-authored a couple of books about newspaper
reporting of the Israel-Palestine conflict should make it appropriate to
describe that person in a totally different context as "a Pro-Palestine
writer" is beyond me, by the way. If you happened to know Friel's political
allegiance, would you have written "Pitting a political scientist vs a
Democrat ..." or "Pitting a political scientist vs a Republican ..." or
whatever?

~~~
glymor
Lomborg work was criticized as scientifically dishonest by
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Committees_on_Scientific...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Committees_on_Scientific_Dishonesty)
in 2003 and by others before and after that. Friel is not blazing new ground
here.

Friel writes wholly one-sidely. I don't know if it's his personal inclination
or not (it's generally a good tactic for a niche writer). Pro-Palestinian
seemed a short way of characterizing him; perhaps too short but not
undeserved.

