I love Dilbert. But after reading Dilbert creator Scott Adams' recent blog entry on Lomborg, I can see that Adams doesn't necessarily share Dilbert's wonderful skepticism when it comes to evaluating a salesman like Lomborg.
Adams saw Lomborg on Bill Maher's show, where Lomborg was appearing via satellite (Maher show transcript here). As per usual, Lomborg ran through his grossly misleading arguments about polar bears, and the like, all the while insisting that he brought "a sense of proportion" to the debate over climate change:
"And I'm saying climate change has good and bad things happening. Overall, there'll be more bad things than good things. But we both need to get a sense of proportion." [Click here for more on the fallacy of the Mythical Middle.]
Writing on the Dilbert blog, Adams finds Lomborg entirely reasonable, swallowing the Mythical Middle argument hook, line, and sinker:
"The Danish economist's argument doesn't fall into the established views about global warming. He wasn't denying it is happening, or denying humans are a major cause. But he also wasn't saying we should drive hybrid cars, since he thinks it won't be enough to help."
Notice how easily Adams slips into equating climate change deniers with people who promote driving hybrid cars, as if both groups were equally extreme, while Lomborg's analysis places him above this ignorant clash of armies in the night.
Since Dilbert the comic character usually keeps his wits about him, I can only conclude that, in one of those obscure signs of the true glory of human creativity, it's possible for a comic character to sometimes be smarter than his own creator.
Comments
Duh!
Gah!
Did you read the Dilbert article?
Did you watch the Lomberg interview?
If anyone is falling into traps it is you.
You are clearly misunderstanding the arguments and the positions of Lomberg and Adams.
You cannot actually ascertain Adam's stance on this topic from his comments - he is commenting on those commenting on Lomberg!
Either you misunderstand through ignorance, and are therefore a fool, or you misunderstand deliberately and are just another part of the Green Mafia!
Adams Did Not Understand Lomborg's Deceit
Ghaynes, I read the Dilbert article, and I read the transcript of the interview. Here's the problem with Adams' description of the interview: Adams adopts a position which unintentionally leaves the reader with a false understanding of the nature of the scientific debate about global warming. The reason I use the term "false" is because Adams (and Lomborg) presents the debate as if there were two more or less equal sides, when there are not:
Here's the quote from Adams' thoughts on the Lomborg interview on the Maher show, with the "equal side" phrase in bold:
There is only one popular camp, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yes, there are climate scientists who disagree with the conclusions of the IPCC. But from the early 1990s on, the scientific consensus that global warming was happening, and that human activities were driving global warming, has only strengthened as more research has come in. If anything, the IPCC's positions are conservative precisely because these positions represent a consensus that is based on the peer-reviewed work of a horde of scientists from many disciplines, a process which by definition excludes more extreme but less well supported findings.
So to present Lomborg's views in a realistic context, Adams, and many other reporters and reviewers, should have noted that Lomborg, a statistician who has no credentials in any of the major scientific disciplines which bear on climate change, strongly disagrees with the findings of the IPCC that global warming is an extremely serious problem which humanity needs to deal with on an urgent basis.
With such an introduction, we might then reasonably ask why Lomborg is uniquely qualified to dismiss the work of the most collaborative global scientific research project that has ever been done. Yes, it's possible that all those scientists could be wrong and Lomborg could be right. Sometimes a single individual can overturn our understanding of some phenomenon. But the climate change debate is taking place in the most open, most transparent manner possible. And Lomborg is not participating in this peer-review process. His claims are made in a popular press book which has not been subject to the intense scrutiny that falls on the work produced by the IPCC.
For an example of why peer review matters, take a look at this section of an interview that journalist Kevin Berger did in Salon. Berger did his own literature review of Lomborg's "killer" claim in the opening chapter of the book that polar bears are not in trouble. What Berger did was what is normal procedure in the scientific peer review process, a thorough review of the scientific literature to see if there is other research that supports or undercuts the claim Lomborg was making.
Berger discovered that contrary to Lomborg's claim, there were a number of findings which Lomborg had access to that severely undercut Lomborg's claim. Berger even shows how Lomborg edited a quote from one of these publications in such a way as to eliminate a phrase that would have damaged Lomborg's claim. With his own peer review research in hand, Berger bears down on Lomborg in a way that Bill Maher and his equally ill-informed panelists were incapable of doing. Lomborg is distinctly uncomfortable responding to these questions, and his answers as to why he made the editorial decisions he did are unsatisfactory.(You can read the full Berger interview here.)
I challenge anyone to read this Berger-Lomborg exchange and not come away understanding that Lomborg's claim was, from a scientific point of view, deceitful, and consciously so, given the edited quote. By supposedly vanquishing the myth of the endangered polar bears in the opening chapter of his book, Lomborg sought to frame the rest of the arguments in his book with a "well, they were wrong about polar bears, and Lomborg showed us they were wrong, so when Lomborg says they are also wrong about (fill in the blank), Lomborg must be right again."
But now that we know, thanks to Berger's excellent research and persistent questioning, that Lomborg ignored evidence and twisted the words of evidence that contradicted his claim, we have reason to question every other claim in the book. Lomborg may very well be right about some of the other claims he makes, but the readers of a book that is allegedly based on science should not be expected to have to go to the original sources to find out whether the author is telling them the truth or not.
The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, should be ashamed for inflicting such a shoddy piece of work on the American people, for putting into print a book that even a few hours of Googling would have exposed as deeply flawed, for not ensuring that a book on such a critical topic was not written in such a way as to confuse and sully the debate, with the readers none the wiser.
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