Howard Friel
tlambert | June 4, 2010Howard Friel was interviewed on the Science Show
about his book The Lomborg Deception
So Lomborg was very clever to present himself as a centrist, but when you get into the details of his book he's hardly a centrist. I think he would be fairly classified as a climate denier. He takes almost every climate related issue from polar bears to melting glaciers to rising sea levels, and in my view very problematically downplays the significance of the impact of global warming on these areas. So people would classify him as a sceptic that is one notch above a denier, but I would not do that, I think…
tlambert | February 25, 2010Ron Bailey reflexively jumps to the defence of Bjorn Lomborg:
Begley cites three examples from Friel about Lomborg's errors, e.g., polar bear population trends and climate change, human deaths from heat versus cold, and the implications of Antarctic ice shelf disintegration. You can read Begley's reporting and judge for yourself. (With regard to polar bears, let's assume that Begley's reporting of Friel's analysis is accurate and that Lomborg's sourcing is, how should one put it, thin and misleading. However, I do note in passing that a 2009 review article in the journal Environmental Reviews…
tlambert | February 22, 2010I've noted before that Bjorn Lomborg systematically misrepresents the science. Sharon Begley has reviewed Howard Friel's book The Lomborg Deception:
But when Friel began checking Lomborg's sources, "I found problems," he says. "As an experiment, I looked up one of his footnotes, found that it didn't support what he said, and then did another, and kept going, finding the same pattern." He therefore took on the Augean stables undertaking of checking every one of the hundreds of citations in Cool It. Friel's conclusion, as per his book's title, is that Lomborg is "a performance artist disguised…