| Bjorn Lomborg |
| This author has recently been given a lot of worldwide (I presume) attention, due to unusal claims in a book he has recently had published, titled, The Skeptical Environmentalist. I first learned about this book and the controversy sparked by it from an article published in The New York Times. The article described Lomborg's having been publically denounced by the "Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty". The article got me very interested in Lomborg's claims, so I quickly obtained a copy of his book, and examined its claims very carefully. I was amazed to see numerous dirty-looking tactics in the book, such as: --giving more than one source in entries in the bibliography. In my experience, when an author gives more than one source per-entry in the bibliography, something is wrong. Note: one of the customer reviews for this book at the amazon.com site mentioned this tactic. The review-author bitterly complained about it, explaining that it made investigating the accuracy of Lomborg's references more difficult. Each number in the main text should have one, and only one, source given in its corresponding entry in the bibliography. In my experience, when more than one source is given in a bibliographic entry to support a claim in the main text, the author has lied about what is at one of the sources. --giving web pages as sources, and without giving the date Lomborg saw the information on the page. Anyone even casually familiar with the internet knows that web pages are like chalkboards that can be easily changed. Citing a web page as a source is exactly like citing a chalkboard at a university as a source. --using large numbers of ambiguous statements that employ blatantly-ambigous wording |
| Lomborg lies about Al Gore |
| This page was created by me, Jeff Opal, on 19-JUN-2003, and was last updated 19-FEB-2004 |
| I've found so many flaws in this book (mainly: lies and blatant fallacies) that I've decided to methodically index them, using the same organization of the book itself. The following index uses the same organization of the book given in its table of contents: 25 chapters divided into six parts: |
| Part I: The Litany Chapter 1: Things are getting better (p 13: a misquoting of a FAO publication) (p 19: 5 misquotings of the Worldwatch Institute) (p 21: a prediction falsely attributed to Peter H. Gleick) (this page UNFINISHED) (pp 22-3: lies about D Pimentel's estimates for tuberculosis death rates) (p 25: a misquoting of what D Pimentel's said about tobacco) Chapter 2: Why do we hear so much bad news? Part II: Human Welfare Chapter 3: Measuring human welfare Chapter 4: Life expectancy and health Chapter 5: Food and hunger Chapter 6: Prosperity Chapter 7: Conclusion to Part II: unprecedented human prosperity Part III: Can human prosperity continue? Chapter 8: Are we living on borrowed time? Chapter 9: Will we have enough food? Chapter 10: Forests: are we losing them? Chapter 11: Energy Chapter 12: Non-energy resources Chapter 13: Water Chapter 14: Conclusion to Part III: continued prosperity Part IV: Pollution: does it undercut human prosperity? Chapter 15: Air pollution Chapter 16: Acid rain and forest death Chapter 17: Indoor air pollution Chapter 18: Allergies and asthma Chapter 19: Water pollution Chapter 20: Waste: running out of space? Chapter 21: Conclusion to Part IV: the pollution burden has diminished Part V: Tomorrow's problems Chapter 22: Our chemical fears (p 216: a lie about David Pimentel's paper "The Ecology of Increasing Disease") Chapter 23: Biodiversity (pp 254-5: 4 misquotings, of E.O.Wilson and P Colinvaux.) (p 257: 2 misquotings that serve to defame E.O. Wilson and Paul Ehrlich) Chapter 24: Global warming Part VI: The Real State of the World Chapter 25: Predicament or progress? Notes: (p.355, note 66: a misquoting of philosopher Peter Singer) (p. 359, note 244: a misquoting of Paul Ehrlich.) (p. 32, note 248: a lie about Al Gore) Bibliography |
| Welcome to the home page of the LomborgDebate eGroup. All views, pro-Lomborg and anti-Lomborg, are welcome. Fill out the questionaire at this yahoo home page and you will be joined automatically: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LomborgDebate |
| 18 lies documented on this pages so far (14-FEB-2004). My goal is to document 100. |
| For a great listing of errors in Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist see this site: www.lomborg-errors.dk |