The Lomborg Deception
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Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming
Howard Friel; Foreword by Thomas E. Lovejoy
Click here to read the author's response to comments from Bjorn Lomborg about The Lomborg Deception.
A compelling exposé of the highly problematic scholarship of Bjørn Lomborg, the world’s leading global warming skeptic
In this major assessment of leading climate-change skeptic Bjørn Lomborg, Howard Friel meticulously deconstructs the Danish statistician’s claim that global warming is “no catastrophe” by exposing the systematic misrepresentations and partial accounting that are at the core of climate skepticism. His detailed analysis serves not only as a guide to reading the global warming skeptics, but also as a model for assessing the state of climate science. With attention to the complexities of climate-related phenomena across a range of areas—from Arctic sea ice to the Antarctic ice sheet—The Lomborg Deception also offers readers an enlightening review of some of today’s most urgent climate concerns.
Friel’s book is the first to respond directly to Lomborg’s controversial research as published in The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (2007). His close reading of Lomborg’s textual claims and supporting footnotes reveals a lengthy list of findings that will rock climate skeptics and their allies in the government and news media, demonstrating that the published peer-reviewed climate science, as assessed mainly by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has had it mostly right—even if somewhat conservatively right—all along. Friel’s able defense of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth against Lomborg’s repeated attacks is by itself worth an attentive reading.
"For nearly a decade, Bjorn Lomborg’s climate-science rejectionism has helped block serious political action on greenhouse emissions. We are now nearly out of time to act to prevent the worst impacts of global warming. I hope that Howard Friel’s remarkably valuable and highly enlightening analysis in Lomborg’s Deception will finally clear Lomborg and his supporters out of the path to such action."—James Gustave Speth, author of Red Sky at Morning and The Bridge at the Edge of the World
“Compelling. . . . Anyone who picks up Cool It. . . should have Lomborg Deception within reach to decide for themselves whether Lomborg's main claim to authority—that environmentalists make it up while he provides accurate facts—is so much hot air."--Sharon Begley, Newsweek
‘Friel uses a detailed analysis of the systematic misrepresentations and partial accounting that are at the core of climatic scepticism to reveal an enlightening pole-to-pole review of some of today’s most urgent climate concerns.’ — The Environmentalist
“Bjurn Lomborg, the world’s leading global warming skeptic, is the darling of like-minded individuals…This exposè is a must for undergraduates as well as graduate students and professionals to understand how not to conduct research.” —E.J Kormondy, Choice
Publication Date: April 26, 2011