Nice one on the pie in the eye, but can any one explain the reasons behind it. By that I mean detail where he is going wrong , and at the same time how he fits into the corporate PR structure. It's all very well slagging him off and pulling publicity stunts, they are good at focusing attention. Ok now you have the attention give us some facts.

thanx ...

Nice one, Mark - I'm only surprised it has taken so long!

As for the Coke bottle - I suppose everyone's already seen what Coke are being accused of in Colombia?

Here is a website with varied scientists putting forward some of the reasons that this guy is wrong on climate chance, acid rain etc.

www.au.dk/~cesamat/debate.html

Matt

I am very sorry - I forgot to put this website on the original email

www.anti-lomborg.com

have fun!

in what sense is this bloke an anti-environmentalist? as I understand it all he is doing is looking at the stats relating to environmental issues and trying to understand what they prove. he also claims to be a leftie.
fair play for the pie in the face - he is obviously trying to make cash out of his book. but the knee-jerk 'he is questioning our beliefs so he must be wrong' approach is no good. the anti-capitalist movement does not have a monopoly on truth, a bit of internal criticism is a good thing.

lomborg is a scholar of statistics not environmental science.

This guy has a fair point in some ways, there is no certainty in science, there is only the disproving of hypothesis, etc etc.

But we have to remember pascals wager, although I don't know who he was originaly, basically, if you believe in god and he really exists then thats great, if on the other hand he doesn't then, according to 'pascal', you have still lost nothing.

Apply this to most things and you come up trumps, reduce pollution for global warming, if global warming is not caused by CO2, then at least the cities don't smell of shite, etc etc.

Does this make sense?

Oh well.

 http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/document_details.asp?CatID=94&DocID=609

i would suggest that the sinister clown loves this sort of stuff. it aint funny and doesnt forward any useful debate.

Lomborg devotes a lot of space to climate change in his book, and there is a lot to object to. As Friends of the Earth have pointed out, his position is consistent with the changes in the arguments of climate skeptics over the last few years. Having moved from saying that climate change isn't happening at all, they now agree that it is happening, but argue that there are still too many uncertainties to do anything about it. Lomborg's arguments are slightly more sophisticated in that he presents a cost-benefit analysis justification as to why we ought not to cut emissions significantly, but this presents more problems than it solves.

Firstly, the model he is using, developed by William Nordhaus of Yale University, has been criticised for exaggerating the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by ignoring the economic potential for conversion to cleaner energy sources - in the model, cuts are simply cuts. So rather than using a wind turbine, you have to switch the lights off.

Lomborg goes on to calculate, using this flawed model, that the cost of stabilising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is twice the cost of adapting to global warming. This is clearly absurd, because it assumes that the current state of scientific knowledge provides a certain enough base on which to judge these kinds of decisions. Yet the IPCC makes no such claims, pointing out over and over again the uncertainties. It also ignores the costs which can't be dollarized - such as effects on other ecosystems. So while it might be a 'benefit' if you can grow maize in interior Alaska, what is the 'cost' of polar bears becoming extinct because sea ice no longer exists in the summer?

Hence the precautionary principle, which has been agreed internationally, and is intended to deal with just such uncertainties. We don't know, for example, what magnitude of warming will trigger the release of methane hydrates from deep oceans, massively increasing global warming. We don't know either, how long it will be before Amazonia dies back and becomes desert (although one model by the Hadley Centre predicts that process begins around 2050) - although Lomborg probably counts this cost as relatively tiny because so few people live in Amazonia, even though it would play havoc with the world's weather and decimate biodiversity. So we should play it safe, and take measures to prevent these kinds of ocurrences, even if their likelihood initially appears quite small. You shouldn't play Russian Roulette with the entire Earth's climate, whatever the superficial economic costs to this current generation of human beings.

Specifically with regard to Kyoto, Lomborg makes great play of the fact that if implemented the cuts it mandates in CO2 emissions will have almost no effect on the climate. Well, we all knew that already, which is why many people (including myself) have criticised it as being inadequate. Since greater cuts, involving more countries, are likely to be agreed to take effect during the 'second compliance period' after 2012, Lomborg's exercise of calculating Kyoto's effect on the climate by 2100 is at best irrelevant and at worst intentionally misleading. In fact this is one of his central problems - in consistently choosing facts and figures which support his arguments, and ignoring those which don't, his claim to be a neutral statistician investigating the 'real state of the world' is shown to be laughable. In fact, Lomborg's clearly on a political exercise, producing an anti-environment polemic not entirely different from the kinds of statements emanating from the current Bush White House - just with more footnotes.

Lomborg specialises in presenting the reader with false choices - such as the assertion that money not spent on preventing climate change could be spent on bringing clean water to the developing world, thereby saving more lives per dollar of expenditure. Of course, in the real world, these are not the kind of choices we are faced with. Why not take the $60 billion from George Bush's stupid Son of Star Wars program and use that cash to save lives in Ethiopia? Because in a world where political choices are not made democratically at a global level, but by a small number of rich countries and corporations, the poor and the environment are never going to be a priority. I would argue that the only way we can live in a fair and sustainable way in the future is to spend resources both on stopping climate change and other environmental problems. There is plenty of money available - it just needs to be accessed by reducing inequalities between the rich and poor. So the choice which Lomborg presents us with, of whether to save a drowning Tuvaluan (climate change) or a dying Somalian (water and sanitation) is not a choice at all - in fact we need to do both, and not least because one is unlikely to be successful without the other.