Amid recent reports that climate change skeptic Patrick Michaels had financial ties to big polluters, Yale University Press author Howard Friel finds himself in a tangle with another big-name climate skeptic, Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg.
Friel's new book, The Lomborg Deception, probes and questions the research underpinning Lomborg's two bestsellers, The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and Cool It (2007), meticulously checking every data point and note to argue that Lomborg employs deceptive analysis and sourcing methods to arrive at faulty conclusions about climate change. Last week, Lomborg responded to Friel's claims with a document posted on his website, lomborg.org. This week, Friel countered with his own response, writing:
Bjørn Lomborg’s comments about my book. . . display all of the features that characterize [his] two books. . . .Before I read Cool It in fall 2007, my experience in the hermeneutics of deception mostly dealt with books and texts that sought to justify war. Lomborg’s books are no worse than those, but they are no better. Perhaps twenty or fifty years from now, if and when the fuller impacts of man-made global warming are more apparent, people might argue that they were worse.
In her recent Newsweek column, Sharon Begley took a closer look at the developing debate by analyzing three of Lomborg's contested claims related to polar bear populations, the effect of global warming on disease, and the breakup of Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf. Through her own fact checking, Begley took issue with a number of Lomborg's citations and found that "Friel pretty much blows [Lomborg's claims] out of the water".
Though her review of The Lomborg Deception is not without its own critiques, Begley's main qualms focus on Friel's tendency to at times exchange "reader-friendliness" for his commitment to thoroughness. Yet, in his concerted search for truth about the climate, we're fairly certain that that's criticism Friel is willing to accept.
