Book Review: The Lomborg Deception(newsweek.com)
newsweek.com
Book Review: The Lomborg Deception
http://www.newsweek.com/id/233942?
31 comments
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...
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..., 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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?
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...)
Did you even read Begley's screed? As WindsofChange notes: http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_c..., 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...) 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.
Did you even read Begley's screed? As WindsofChange notes: http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/where_tone_torpedoes_c..., 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...) 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.
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?
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?
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".
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".
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.
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.
I'd just like to note that the words "at least in the book review" were not present in cwan's comment when I made the above reply.
It's "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
And no, I can not link to such a paper, but I am also not making any claims.
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?
I don't see how you made the logical conclusion that I was asking questions without doing any research at all?
It sounded like that, because you wrote "you assume". I am not sure your request even makes much sense, to be honest.
Science is always unfinished. That's how it works.
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.
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.
"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?
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?
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.
That having been said, articles and books like this seem like not much more than a desperate attempt at staying relevant.
If you think that "climategate" throws much doubt on the main claims of anthropogenic global warming, then either you've been misinformed about what's in the emails or I have. (I think the "climategate" emails establish that some climate scientists aren't very nice people sometimes, that some software written by research scientists is a bit of a mess, and that if you cherry-pick the worst-sounding bits from hundreds of emails you can make things sound worse than they really are. Not much more than that.)
I don't understand. Friel hasn't been particularly associated with global warming in the past; why would he be writing a book like this as "a desperate attempt at staying relevant"?
Lomborg gets plenty of attention for his work. If, as Friel claims, it's full of dishonest pseudo-scholarship, isn't that worth drawing attention to?
I don't understand. Friel hasn't been particularly associated with global warming in the past; why would he be writing a book like this as "a desperate attempt at staying relevant"?
Lomborg gets plenty of attention for his work. If, as Friel claims, it's full of dishonest pseudo-scholarship, isn't that worth drawing attention to?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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?
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.
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.
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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.
What state have we reached where replacing science with the truth finding abilities of partisan politics seems in some way sensible.
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?
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?
Lomborg work was criticized as scientifically dishonest by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Committees_on_Scientific... 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.
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.