| A lie on page 25 of The Skeptical Environmentalist about what David Pimentel said about tobacco smoke |
| This page was created by me, Jeff Opal, on 15-FEB-2004 and was last updated 15-FEB-2004 |
| On page 25 Lomborg misquotes David Pimentel severely, regarding tobacco smoke, in a way obviously intended to make Pimentel appear crazy or dishonest. I decided that this misquoting is surely a lie because the difference between Lomborg's quote and the quote at the source is so big and blatant. This is what Lomborg says: |
| In an interview, Pimentel makes it clear that tobacco is really "smoke from various sources such as tobacco and wood fuels."203 |
| Lomborg's source information begins with his note on page 358 of TSE: |
| 203. Henderson 2000. |
| The corresponding bibliography entry says this: |
| Henderson, C. W. 2000 "Death by global warming? Climate change, pollution, and malnutrition." World Disease Weekly 12 March 2000, pp. 13-14. Can be read at http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Feb00/ AAAS.Pimentel.hrs.html (uncredited). |
| --Today, infectious disease causes approximately 37 percent of all deaths worldwide, but the estimated number of deaths due to a variety of environmental factors is higher and still growing. "Environmental diseases," he said, are attributed especially to organic and chemical pollutants, including smoke from various sources such as tobacco and wood fuels. |
| One can see by looking over the source article (the web page) that Pimentel's only mention of tobacco in the entire article is in this bullet item: |
| The words "smoke from various sources such as tobacco and wood fuels" is found here, but what Lomborg wrote is the subject of the preceding words is totally different. The actual statement is reasonable, and the misquote by Lomborg is crazy. I believe Lomborg chose to make this misquote as a means to undercut Pimentel's claims about how many deaths worldwide are caused by wood smoke. Pimentel's claims about this surprized me, because I've never before seen any estimate for the number of such deaths worldwide, and his numbers are quite large (e.g., 4 million children die from this cause every year he says). An interesting question arises: Why did Lomborg make this lie, which is so easy to detect? Accessing the web page is trivially easy. Lomborg surely deduced that many readers would react in a similar way to such a novel estimate, and decided to take an extraordinary risk when undercutting it with a misquote. |