Gregg Easterbrook is an idiot
tlambert | October 15, 2011Andrew Gelman on The most clueless political column ever--I think this Easterbrook dude has the journalistic equivalent of "tenure":
P.P.P.P.S. When I attack someone too hard in a blog post, commenters often have the natural reaction to defend the poor guy. So for strategic reasons I probably should've been super-polite to Easterbrook here and then let the commenters rip him to shreds. But I just don't have the patience right now. This guy's column is just so abysmally bad, it has nothing to offer.
Seems like Easterbrook has that effect on everybody.
tlambert | June 13, 2009Gregg Easterbrook is no longer an expert at Brookings.
Via The Editors who has found yet another subject area that Easterbrook gets wrong:
Most importantly, this proves conclusively my theory that what we think of as "the Universe" is really just a rather over-broad comic novel called "Jackass of All Trades", wherein hilariously inept polymath Gregg Easterbrook - "the DiVinci of incompetence" - rises to the heights of the journalistic and public policy professions, only to be stopped by a deadly asteroid.
tlambert | January 24, 2009Who, who has won the coveted Creamy Baileys No-Bell Peace Prize for Science? I'm not going to give the surprise away, so click here to find out!
tlambert | December 21, 2008The down side of the link exchange between ScienceBlogs and the New York Times is that in the side bar there is now a link to John Tierney's attack on John Holdren, using such stellar authorities as Bjorn Lomborg, Roger Pileke Jr and the Competitiive Enterprise Institute.
Joe Romm has written an excellent post correcting Tierney. Click through to also read Holdren's opinions on global warming.
I must, however, disagree with one of Romm's points:
Tierney is easily the worst science writer at any major media outlet in the country. Pretty much every energy or climate piece he writes is riddled…
tlambert | December 3, 2008Gregg Easterbrook is an idiot who is a science expert at the Brookings Institute.
tlambert | October 25, 2006Obviously anything Gregg Easterbrook writes about the Lancet study is going to be really stupid, and sure enough, he gives us this:
The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to "unknown causes." The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the result as precise. White House officials have…
tlambert | May 27, 2006The Editors on Gregg Easterbrook:
I was going to do a whole thing about how disingenuous Gregg Easterbrook has been about global warming, but I see that Media Matters has already done a very thorough job. I would like to highlight one rather egregious item they missed, which comes from his dramatic announcement that, at long last, the science behind global warming has earned the coveted Gregg Easterbrook Seal of Sound Science:
When global-warming concerns became widespread, many argued that more scientific research was needed before any policy decisions. [sic] This was hardly just the…