Bill McKibben takes Cool It apart in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. (The article was online earlier by special permission of the NYR on Grist. Thank the editor of the NYR for letting Grist rush this article into print. Also note that you can leave questions until September 28th for McKibben to answer on the NYR site here.)
McKibben, who debated Lomborg last May, does not think much of Lomborg's work, from The Skeptical Environmentalist on. Lomborg's arguments are:
"...tendentious and partisan in particularly narrow ways....Lomborg's actual arguments turn out to be weak, a farrago of straw men and carefully selected, shopworn data that holds up poorly in light of the most recent research, both scientific and economic."
McKibben notes Lomborg's frequent appearances on right-wing radio and TV programs, and his appearance before Congress as a rebuttal to Al Gore earlier this year, an appearance arranged by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), best known for his claim that "global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
McKibben is especially good at showing how the most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "eviscerates Lomborg's argument " that there's not much we can do about global warming and doing anything would cost too much.
I love McKibben's use of language. "Eviscerate" doesn't leave much to the imagination, does it?
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