Posted on 01/12/2002 7:18:26 PM PST by jojo123
| THE scientist who dared to challenge the establishment view on climate change has been subjected to a campaign of personal abuse, professional vilification and threats to his safety. Last year Bjorn Lomborg claimed in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist that many of mankind’s worst fears — such as mass extinction of species, climate change and population growth — were largely unfounded. The book has provoked scientists and environmental groups into producing articles, websites and pamphlets rubbishing its author and his work. One of the most hostile, in Nature magazine, likens him to apologists for the Nazis. He has been physically attacked and has had to employ bodyguards. This weekend Lomborg repeated his claims. “My book seems to have hit a raw nerve. For years we have been hearing how the world is deteriorating. I thought that too and then I looked for the evidence and it just isn’t there. In fact, the history of the world is that things are getting better,” he said. Lomborg, a Danish statistician and former Greenpeace member, thought the book was a controversial but academic work that might do well to sell a few thousand copies. Instead it has become a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. His arguments range across almost every area of environmental concern. They include claims that there is no evidence for the wholesale loss of species and that the world’s forest cover is increasing. His arguments on climate change, however, have sparked the greatest reaction. Lomborg, a professor at Aarhus University, accepts that the world is getting warmer but says it would cost so much to stop that it is simply not worthwhile. “It would cost the world trillions of dollars a year, money which could be spent on helping the developing world to improve education and hospitals,” he said. The book was published by Cambridge University Press. Last autumn it sent Lomborg on a promotional tour of Britain and America, little realising the reaction that was building up. It began when Lomborg was heckled and booed at a book-signing at Borders bookshop in Oxford. As he was speaking, one of the crowd rushed forward and pushed a cream-laden baked Alaska pie into his face. Last week the protester, Mark Lynas, an environmentalist campaigning to save the Arctic from the effects of climate change, admitted the attack and said: “Hitting him with a baked Alaska seemed appropriate. Global warming is destroying one of the Earth’s last wildernesses and Lomborg is trying to pretend it doesn’t matter.” Even respectable scientific venues are not safe for Lomborg. When he recently gave a lecture at London’s Royal Institution he was protected by four bodyguards, and threats were made against him when he addressed the London School of Economics. The biggest shock came when Nature, the usually restrained scientific journal, printed a review comparing Lomborg to maverick academics who deny the Holocaust. The reviewers said Lomborg’s text “employs the strategy of those who argue that gay men are not dying of Aids, that Jews weren’t singled out by the Nazis and so on”. Last week Scientific American, a respected popular science journal, devoted 11 pages to an attack in which Lomborg is accused of “egregious distortions” and of being “ignorant” and “muddled”. Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, said: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Some of the most powerful vitriol is on websites. On www.anti-Lomborg.com there is a picture of Lomborg that was taken as he was hit with a pie. Lomborg has also clashed with Tom Burke, the former aide to John Gummer when he was environment secretary, at a presentation in Paris to finance ministers at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Burke, who spoke against him and is the author of a pamphlet attacking his work, said: “He is a cunning manipulator and a good communicator. He has a weak case but presents it so well that everyone switches off their crap detectors.” |
I will be cancelling my subscription to "Scientific" "American" because of their hit piece in this month's issue. Actually their socialist editorial policy has been p****ing me off for some time.
One of the authors of the SciAm hit piece mentioned he was a collaborator of Paul Ehrlich - one of the true charlatans of our time.
Scientific American used to be a respectable science magazine. It is sad to see it fall before the altar of Political Correctness Stalinism.
This declaration, right from the horse’s mouth, the Marxist handbook, illustrates exactly what were up against:
“Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascist, or Nazi or anti-Semitic…The association will, after enough repetition, become ‘fact’ in the public mind.”
I cancelled mine years ago when they fired a writer because he was a Christian. I pick up a copy or so every year and am amazed at how much of the magazine is overt liberal propaganda.
There's a good book you can read. Try The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Why not make it #1 on the NYT best seller list?
Trashing the Planet by the late Dixy Lee Ray is another good one.
The magazine is simply not what it used to be.
Paul Ehrlich's predicitons were completely wrong. And the environmentalists love him.
Bjorn Lomborg verified Julian Simon's proof that Ehrlich was wrong. And environmentalists hate Simon just as much as they hate Lomborg.
The reason that the environmentalists hate Lomborg and Simon is because Lomborg and Simon are telling the truth. Having people find out the truth is the biggest fear of the environmentalists.
I urge everyone here to read Lomborg's book, and to post a review of it at amazon.com
The people who hate Lomborg the most are waging personal and physical attacks on him, because they can't come up with reasonable arguments against his ideas, and because they are a bunch of savages who hate real debate and free speech. The people who scream the loudest about being in favor of "diversity" are, in fact, the very same ones who try to silence any diversity of opinions.
Paul Ehrlich said that before the year 2000, 90% of U.S. citizens would have starved to death. Simon predicted obesity rates in the U.S. would get higher and higher. Clearly, Ehrlich was totally wrong, and Simon was totally right. But the environmentalists love Ehrlich, and they hate Simon. That just proves how irratioanl the environmentalists are, and how much they hate facts, evidence, and the truth. Their attack on Lomborg is happening because they are afraid of the truth.
The article also mentioned Lester Brown. He's been proven just as wrong as Paul Ehrlich.
Clearly, these so-called "scientific" journals are not interested in science.
Sadly, this orthodoxy will be with us for a while. The way things work in bureaucratized academics is that you have to wait for one generation of entrenched intellectuals to die off/retire and be replaced with a younger crop, before orthodox "truths" accepted on faith can be truly re-examined by fresh, skeptical eyes. The tenured intelligentsia do not want to admit that they are fallible, and there is very little incentive for them to do so. In a way this is all good news though, because it means that there is hope as long as some future generation becomes sufficiently skeptical. It may take a while though.
It's interesting how the roles have changed but groupthink remains the same forever. Galileo was persecuted by the religious groupthink of the Inquisition for practicing science. Now the Environmental Inquisition, a Gaia religion posing as science, is again persecuting an independent thinker for practicing science. What the hell IS it with human beings?
Nature & Scientific American have become TABLOID PSEUDO-SCIENCE TRASH! Their former impecabile standards have become enough to gag a maggot in a manure pile!
One of our own, Carry_Okie has a book that is every bit as concise and true about the environment and how humans should interact with it as a part of it. (www.naturalprocess.net)
That one guy, toward the end of the article, talking about "Crap Detector" has his inverted! What a crude, intolerant bastard!!!
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