The Skeptical Environmentalist

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1. javajoshFeb 2022
   Agree, and take it further. This insight should be the centerpiece of the next generation of suggestion algorithms! The truly science-minded adult should be actively seeking data that disproves their currently held beliefs. This does not mean, however, that you must endure endless, pointless flat earth screeds; ideally you should be able to take individual claims and mark them "settled", a state that can only be invalidated by the output of a new, concrete experiment.

   I bought the book The Skeptical Environmentalist, for just this reason. I love hearing dissenting opinions from people who aren't a PR firm flunky. Bjørn Lomborg was and is paying a high price for his honest heterodoxy, and the least we can do is listen and not lump him in with the self-serving, lying Koch brother funded PR machine. That effort is driven by the psychological requirement of emotionally manipulating people to your side, not by an intellectually honest questioning of "common sense", and it's a real shame the two get confused.

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2. statquontrarianOct 2020
   I've never created a reading list, so this was a fun exercise.

   Programming:

   * Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ - Gunther

   * The Mythical Man Month - Brooks

   Philosophy:

   * A Journey Around my Room - de Maistre

   * Anger, Mercy, and Revenge - Seneca

   * Schrödinger - What is Life?

   * Man's Search for Meaning - Frankl

   * Essays - Montaigne

   * Ethical Intuitionism - Huemer

   * The Consolations of Philosophy - de Botton

   * A Manual for Living - Epictetus

   * Meditations - Aurelius

   Psychology / Meaning / Purpose / Science:

   * Purpose and Meaning in the Workplace - Dik, Byrne & Steger

   * The Case Against Education - Caplan

   * Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Caplan

   * Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

   * A Confession - Tolstoy

   * Enlightenment Now - Pinker

   * The Better Angels of our Nature - Pinker

   * The Improving State of the World - Goklany

   * The Skeptical Environmentalist - Lomborg

   * Religion for Atheists - de Botton

   * Ending Aging - de Grey

   * Gut Feelings - Gigirenzer

   Fiction:

   * Heart of Darkness - Conrad

   * Candide - Voltaire

   * Brave New World - Huxley

   * Selected Works - Goethe

   * 1984 & Animal Farm - Orwell

   Politics:

   * Obedience to Authority - Milgram

   * The Problem of Political Authority - Huemer

   * The Communist Manifesto - Marx

   * Socialism - von Mises

   * Just One Child - Greenhalgh

   * The God That Failed - Crossman

   * Death by Government - Rummel

   Thought-provoking:

   * Free to Learn - Gray

   * The Beautiful Tree - Tooley

   * Education and the State - West

   * The Machinery of Freedom - Friedman

   * Against Intellectual Monopoly - Boldrine & Levine

   * From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State - Beito

   * The Not So Wild, Wild West - Hill

   * More Guns, Less Crime - Lott

   * Race & Economics - Williams

   * Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men - Hummel

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3. hgaDec 2009
   How important? Look at the arguments of Bjørn Lomborg, "The Skeptical Environmentalist". He says e.g. there are far better ways to spend the world's money to improve lives than e.g. what's being proposed WRT to AGW/CC.
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4. PrrometheusJun 2008
   >I'm stunned by peoples' capacity to be so casual and dismissive about issues of such magnitude.

   Environmentalists have been screaming "we're all going to die!" every 5 years for the last 40. Check out the first chapter of Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Many of the still well-respected names in environmental policy have been drastically, self-servingly disingenuous in the past in order to push a radical environmental agenda that frankly was not backed up by evidence. Anyone who does not carefully filter the hoopla from the fact is blind to history.

   Excuse me if I don't jump every time an environmentalist screams "dance!"

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5. PrrometheusJun 2008
   Global Cooling is only one such dire prediction.

   "We are all familiar with the Litany....Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers....The world's ecosystem is breaking down....We all know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring." Lomborg notes that there is just one problem with the Litany: "It does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence."

   Lomborg then proceeds to demolish the Litany. He shows how, time and again, ideological environmentalists misuse, distort, and ignore the vast reams of data that contradict their dour visions. In the course of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg demonstrates that the environmentalist lobby is just that, a collection of interest groups that must hype doom in order to survive monetarily and politically.

   Lomborg notes, "As the industry and farming organizations have an obvious interest in portraying the environment as just-fine and no-need-to-do-anything, the environmental organizations also have a clear interest in telling us that the environment is in a bad state, and that we need to act now. And the worse they can make this state appear, the easier it is for them to convince us we need to spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, kindergartens, etc. Of course, if we were equally skeptical of both sorts of organization there would be less of a problem. But since we tend to treat environmental organizations with much less skepticism, this might cause a grave bias in our understanding of the state of the world." Lomborg's book amply shows that our understanding of the state of the world is indeed biased."

   http://www.reason.com/news/show/28308.html

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6. defrostJul 2026
   He's better described as a self serving political populist with this being one of several interesting chapters:

     After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was formally accused of scientific dishonesty by a group of environmental scientists, who brought a total of three complaints against him to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MSTI).
   
     In January 2003, the DCSD released a ruling that sent a mixed message, finding the book to be scientifically dishonest through misrepresentation of scientific facts, but Lomborg himself not guilty due to his lack of expertise in the fields in question.
   

   ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg

   ie. He skated on a dishonesty charge as he was deemed to be to inept to know just how badly he was misrepresenting data.

   To be honest I thought he'd faded away, but it's interesting to see his shit still being dragged up to rot in the sun again.

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