How, you ask, can the Washington Post keep hitting new lows all the time? Well, today gives us an example of how they can do it. Here's The American Prospect's Dean Baker rightly ridiculing the Post and its guest op-ed contributor, the "Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg.... Lomborg warns readers not only about the cost of curtailing global warming, relying on an outlier among economists in his estimates of the cost of curtailing emissions and the benefits from doing so, he also warns that the world may suffer from ............ protectionism!For more on Lomborg, who may be "skeptical" but is certainly no "environmentalist," see here:
Lomborg tells readers that the world stands to lose $50 trillion (is that in one year, over a decade, a century, a millennium? This is the Post, who cares?) from protectionism related to global warming. The point is that not only will curtailing warming pose its direct costs, but it will also pose additional costs through protectionism.
Apart from the loon tune numbers this is the granddaddy of all double-counting...
After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was accused of scientific dishonesty. Several environmental scientists brought a total of three complaints against Lomborg to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The charges claimed that The Skeptical Environmentalist contained deliberately misleading data and flawed conclusions. Due to the similarity of the complaints, the DCSD decided to proceed on the three cases under one investigation.That's right, Lomborg's book was declared "scientifically dishonest" but he was declared "not guilty" by reason of his own ignorance and stupidity. So, why would anyone in their right mind listen to this clown (and yes, he is nothing more than a clown - a bad one at that)? More to the point, why would the supposedly "liberal" (yeah, I know, hahahahahahahahahaha) Washington Post print Lomborg's garbage (both in terms of the science and even more on the economics; his writings undoubtedly would have received an "F" in my graduate-level economics classes)? Sure, I'm all for having a diversity of views on the Washington Post editorial page, but can't they find anyone even semi-intelligent to write about arguably the single most important issue facing mankind today? Guess not; back to the business of selling (fewer and fewer and fewer) newspapers! Heh.
DCSD investigation
On January 6, 2003 the DCSD reached a decision on the complaints. The ruling was a mixed message, deciding the book to be scientifically dishonest, but Lomborg himself not guilty because of lack of expertise in the fields in question.
[...]
The DCSD cited The Skeptical Environmentalist for:
Fabrication of data;
Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation);
Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods;
Distorted interpretation of conclusions;
Plagiarism;
Deliberate misinterpretation of others' results.
UPDATE: In stark contrast to the plagiarist/liar in the Washington Post, I strongly recommend Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman's New York Times column, "Cassandras of Climate." Needless to say, given that Krugman has a brain and integrity, he comes to a 180-degree different conclusion than Lomborg, namely: "Even as climate modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the threat is worse than we realized, economic modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the costs of emission control are lower than many feared." Krugman gets an "A+"; Lomborg gets an "F".
