Global warming: the Skeptical Environmentalist 3

[epoisses]

This book by Bjorn Lomborg is a Masterpiece with a capital M. Lomborg analyses the world's biggest problems like Gordon Ramsey would cut an onion: quickly, beautifully and effortlessly. If anybody can point me to a more informative and objective book about global warming, please stand up! (btw the book also treats hunger, poverty, pollution, deforestation...). This is not a looney author who tries to brainwash you. This is an associate professor of statistics at a department of political science, who gathered huge lots of data (the author almost apologizes for his 3000 footnotes) and analyses them with an open mind. The reader is left free to disagree. The author uses widely recognized sources as much as possible (IPCC, UN, ...), many of which can be consulted on the internet.

I do not want to commit plagiarism, heck I don't even pretend I understood everything. I just wish Lomborg insanely high book sales and I wish the world to be well-informed. So with a few postings I will try to raise everyone's curiosity.

 

[moltenmetal]

dcasto: the fact is, most women who give birth to babies are not sick, other than perhaps to their stomachs for the first trimester, or perhaps with their choice of spouse. And it doesn't take a doctor to deliver a healthy baby- a midwife can do it admirably, often with a better outcome for both mother and child. Co-locating newborn babies and birthing mothers in hospitals with infectious people is a matter of expediency rather than one of good sense. Having medical staff and modern technology on hand to monitor the process and care for the newborns and delivering mothers is another matter entirely. So your argument is just as flawed as theirs is!

Yes, life expectancies are longer today than they were 100 years ago- principally due to engineers and their work with sanitation and water- and wastewater treatment. Engineers have saved more people's lives than doctors could EVER claim. But without an atmosphere, a source of fresh water, a biosphere to maintain it all etc., we're all toast. Fouling our own nests is idiocy. Global warming is only one more risk of harm to add to an enormous list of known harms resulting from the excesses of "modern" consumption in the developed world. It's incumbent on all of us, but particularly we engineers, to avoid wasting the earth's precious resources.

 

[jmw]

The book is reviewed on the number watch website (

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/lomborg.htm)

It would seem that there are any number of publications on both sides of the debate and those not by climatologists seem all to be flawed in some respect or another, but those flaws do not necessarily detract from the nature of the message they bring but do provide opportunities for the opponents of those views to damage the author or his views.

One of the things experience teaches us is to be critical.
In my youth (when God were nowt but a lad) I read all sorts of books from "Silent Spring" to "The Jupiter Effect" by way of "The Club of Rome Report" and so on. I was never convinced by Von Daniken but some of the others appealed and remained influential in some way or other. Age should make you less gullible than before (though I am not yet fully cured: I wouldn't buy Tower Bridge from anyone though someone actually did buy London Bridge which means you do have to listen to even the craziest suggestions sometimes)

Finding the truth is a bit like discovering a new planet by its gravitational influence, and when trying to evaluate each of the commentators one is minded of the saying that you can know a man by his enemies. That means not only should we read Blomberg but we should also read what his critics have to say.

The Global Warming issue is, to me, a bit like Lysenkoism (

http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/lysenkoism.shtml)

but with computer modelling (The computer model is the new philosophers stone).

The link is well worth following. The author cites Lysenkoism as a natural product of Stalinism. I find some disturbing parallels with the treatment of many sceptical scientists (and climate change sceptics in general) and that is disturbing indeed.

The attacks on Blomberg are mainly attempts to discredit and silence the man, not to answer the arguments he puts forward.





JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[ewh]

Very interesting link, JMW. Unfortunately, by it's very nature, it won't be widely read by the general population.

 

[dcasto]

As I was doing my taxes I thought about setting up the Church of The Global Cooling. As a religion, I could give a chunk of money to fund my kids through school to prove the existance that man is evil and has brought on global warming. I would preach the good of walking and condem drivers. I'd have all the markings of a church, followers, a "faith" that ther is a good and evil.

As I filed to pay my $500, I decided give the money and that some how I'd lose the fight with the IRS.