Master misinformers like Bjorn Lomborg are expert at feeding the plausible-sounding rationalizations people use to justify inaction.
Given how extensively Lomborg has been debunked (see here), though, you’d think that Huffington post would be the last place to publish somebody duped by Lomborg’s razzle-dazzle. But on Saturday, Mark Joseph — “producer, author, talk show host and editor of Bullypulpit.com” — posted a remarkable ‘review’ of the movie.
I’ll go through the whole thing since it sheds a great deal of light on the science illiteracy rampant in this country, the rationalizations that even smart people glom onto, and the mischief that Lomborg makes in his movie:
[Warning: Please put your head in a vise before reading further.]
Unlike schoolchildren around the world who take crayon to paper and draw horrible pictures of a world in which climate change has ruined our cities, I don’t spend too much time thinking about the issue of global warming.
That’s a nice red herring to draw the reader in — those mean scientists, scaring our children. But I’m pretty certain there isn’t an epidemic of schoolchildren writing horrible pictures based on, what, their parents scaring them about global warming? Lord knows you won’t find the media doing much to paint a realistic picture of what’s to come. I’m very certain children get worried about almost anything. My nearly-4-year-old daughter came running into our bedroom last night right after midnight saying there was a crab in her room. I guess I should stop taking her to the invertebrates exhibit at the National Zoo. Call child welfare. But I digress. Joseph continues:
Not because I don’t believe in science mind you, but precisely because I do believe in science, and its dynamic nature which often means that the things we worry about today either aren’t true at all or turn out to be not as bad as we thought, as new science is introduced.
There are so many misconceptions about science packed in that sentence it’s hard to know where to start. For instance, what about all those things that turned out to be much worse than we first thought, like, say, cigarette smoking or lead in gasoline or burning fossil fuels? Joseph seems to think that science is random, rather than a progression toward more understanding. Interestingly, he makes the exact same argument that George Will and Walter Russell Mead use in their risible anti-science revisionism: “Experts said margarine was the healthy alternative to butter “” until they said its trans fats made it harmful.”
They are actively arguing that because health research grew more sophisticated over time, we can ignore the increasingly dire warnings in the scientific literature (detailed here: “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice“). Of course they don’t know, or don’t care, that our scientific understanding of climate is based on vastly more data and research and analysis than any of those early studies of, say, trans fat. But it gets even better, which is to say, worse, as Joseph continues:
Take kids and sugar for instance. I thought it was settled long ago in a laboratory somewhere that sugar made kids act crazy. Turns out, according to the L.A. Times, that it has no such effect, that the hyperactivity parents like me associate with the sugar that kids ingest is really associated with the excitement of events that sugar is often associated with.
Here’s what kills me — or at least much of land- and sea-based life. If you actually read the LAT story in Joseph’s link, something he apparently didn’t do, it makes the exact opposite point. The point of the story is that, “In fact, science has shot down most of the food-mood links accepted as conventional wisdom and perpetuated by self-proclaimed nutrition experts.” Doh!
Yes, because science shot down one of Joseph’s misconceptions (which he thought was some sort of scientifically-established fact), he now rejects vastly more scientific evidence that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases pose a grave and growing threat to humanity! And so we come to my favorite sentence in his review:
All that to say that people like me are the perfect target for works like Cool It, which releases this weekend, because I wouldn’t fit neatly into either camp on the issue of global warming.
Bjorn Lomborg, the author of several books, fancies himself a “skeptical environmentalist” and that sounds about right to me. His film is witty, fast-paced and above all else full of common sense.
Yes, people like Joseph are the perfect target for Lomborg! Seriously.
Lomborg counts on people not paying close attention to what he’s saying, not having any interest in hearing what actual climate scientists have to say, and, frankly, not even being interested in using Google for, say, one minute to learn that Lomborg is full of something, but it ain’t common sense (see “The Bjorn Irrelevancy: Duke dean disses Danish delayer” and “Lomborg’s main argument has collapsed” and the book, The Lomborg Deception).
Why don’t we paint all of our roofs and roads white? Why don’t we derive energy from waves that hit our shores? Why don’t we work to make nuclear energy, so obviously effective, safer? And why didn’t I know that a number of multi-national corporations supported the Kyoto Treaty because they stood to make billions of dollars were it to take effect?
These are the kinds of questions that an agnostic on the issue of climate change like me, leaves the theater with after watching Cool It.
Why don’t we paint all of our roofs and roads white? Well, I’ll tell you why the U.S. doesn’t. The Gingrich Congress zeroed out the budget for “Cool Communities” aka urban heat island mitigation in the mid-1990s. Why? Because it was part of Clinton’s “Climate Change Action Plan” and Gingrich’s band of anti-science extremists, like today’s, deny mainstream science and attempted to kill any Department of Energy program that was linked to global warming and/or involved deploying technology (as opposed to R&D).
Why don’t we derive energy from waves? Well, of course, President Reagan gutted Carter’s renewable energy budget, which set the United States back at least a decade. The Gingrich Congress probably cost us another decade. But the main reason one would have to say is that wave energy is more expensive than other forms of energy, particularly fossil fuel energy. And, of course, Republicans in Congress, like Joseph’s hero Lomborg, oppose aggressive effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The climate bill would have set a rising price on carbon that would have made all low carbon forms of energy more competitive.
And, of course, the biggest reason we don’t have more nuclear power with nuclear is cost, which, again, could only be addressed by solved by policies that Lomborg has helped kill with his disinformation.
And, of course, the Kyoto Treaty did take effect. If Joseph didn’t know that some companies would make money from it, if he thinks it’s somehow a bad thing that companies make money from reducing pollution, why is he touting white roofs, renewable energy, and nuclear power — all of which will enrich some companies.
In short, the reason we don’t have the solutions Lomborg supposedly embraces is because of people like Lomborg — and because of all those folks like Joseph who don’t spend too much time thinking about the issue of global warming.
Joseph ends with this head exploder:
If Lomborg’s goal was to make people like me even more skeptical about what’s been going on over the last decade by those forces of fear who inspire our children to take crayon to paper, than he has succeeded.
Yes, Lomborg’s goal was to make more complacent those who aren’t paying close attention, those who have no interest in investigating the science for themselves, those who refuse to check simple facts online. I just don’t think it’s anything worth bragging about.
I’ll end by excerpting Matt McCormick (h/t Tobis):
Geoffrey Munro of Towson University recently showed that when we are confronted with scientific, empirical evidence that challenges a position we favor, we are more likely to reject science altogether and claim that it cannot be employed to address questions of that type at all. The Scientific Impotence Excuse: Discounting Belief-Threatening Scientific Abstracts. Munro took test subjects with views about stereotypes, such as homosexuality. Subjects were tested beforehand to determine what views they held. Then they were given fake abstracts of scientific studies that purported to either prove or disconfirm the stereotype. So some studies indicated that homosexuals had a higher rate of mental illness, for example, while others indicated that their rate of mental illness was lower. Not surprisingly, the subjects who read abstracts that supported their preconceived views concluded that their views had been vindicated. But something remarkable happened with the the subjects who had their prior views challenged. Rather than acknowledge that they were mistaken and change their minds, these subjects were much more likely to conclude that proving (or disproving) the thesis simply couldn’t be done by science. They rejected science itself, rather than give up their cherished idea.
The climate rapid response team has their work cut out for them.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
And it’s sponsored by an animated popup ad from Chevron??
Lomborg, the dubious environmentalist, visited Morning Joe today and both Mika and Joe were very impressed with what he had to say and they both look forward to seeing his movie. His message is very appealing and you are absolutely right Joe, “[He] counts on people not paying close attention to what he’s saying, [and] not having any interest in hearing what actual climate scientists have to say.”
Lomborg is a shill, a trickster.
Not an honorable profession, methinks.
You need to start counting how many posts include the phrase “put your head in a vise before reading further”. It could serves as a barometer of how much disinformation is out there. The lower the monthly number the better the pro-science movement is doing.
For more on Cool It, see Kare Fog’s Lomborg-errors website
http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/
Most people aren’t very good at critical thinking.
That’s what makes guys like Lomborg dangerous.
But in this case it is likely to kill people…so why can’t we hold him and people like him accountable for that? Isn’t he capitalizing on people who feel their beliefs trump science for his personal financial gain?
Hello Joe,
Let me tell you that Bjorn Lomborg come to Colombia this year to make a presentation about his theories in front of the most important business man of Colombia.
A lot of this business man now believes because of him, that climate change is not just a big deal.
The sad part is to know this kind of news:
1) Climate progress: Colombia had its hottest reliably measured temperature in history on January 24, 2010, when Puerto Salgar hit 42.3°C (108°F).
2) Bogota, Nov 10 (EFE): The death toll from heavy rains that have battered Colombia since January and intensified further in recent months has climbed to 113, emergency management officials said Wednesday.
More than 1.1 million people have been affected nationwide by the downpours, which have caused damage in 533 of the country’s 1,120 provinces and sparked hundreds of emergencies, the Interior and Justice Ministry’s Risk Management Department said.
So this is the country were Lomborg says climate change is just not a big deal…sad.
Lomborg is playing one of the oldest cons in the business. Like the snake oil salesmen, that predate him, he points to his listeners bothersome troubles and with proper eloquence promises that buying just one bottle of his famous elixir will cure all. It’s so easy and just what they want to hear. After all those nasty scientists just want to take the punch bowl away for their own party. Even so, in the end there is always somebody there to catch you, isn’t there?
Have you submitted a response to Huffington Post, Joe?
Bjorn is a born bullshitter, and I’m amazed he keeps finding suckers.
What is the difference between a Holocaust Denier and skeptics like Lomborg?
> …you’d think that Huffington post would be the last place to publish somebody duped by Lomborg’s razzle-dazzle.
HuffPo has a long and execrable history of publishing anti-science drivel, most notably a long line of anti-vaccination idiocy. Little surprise that they’d swallow Lomborg-inspired Koolaid.
Prokaryotes — I dunno, what is the difference?
David B. Benson, that Holocaust deniers deny a past event and Skeptics like Lomborg a future event.
Ofc if you compare the magnitude of the human suffering, climate change targets our entire species and almost any other living thing on this blue marble.
Prokaryotes — The question was rhetorical.
T%he good looking blonde guy makes it pleasant to do nothing and somehow feel like one is doing something, because he is saying to do nothing.
But Mark’s a published author! “Wild Card: The Promise and Peril of Sarah Palin” and “The Lion, The Professor And The Movies: Narnia’s Journey To The Big Screen”. I think you’re just envious of his achievements…
OT, but just wanted to make sure that Dr. Romm doesn’t miss this:
Linky: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-climate-financiers-20101117,0,6204171.story
My take on this article is that these folks are scared s**tless about global-warming, and they control 15 trillion dollars in assets. Let’s leverage this asset, **big time**.
This bares reposting :
Reporting from Washington —
A group of international investors responsible for more than $15 trillion in assets called Tuesday for the world’s nations, particularly the United States, to move decisively to combat climate change or face economic disruptions worse than the global recession of the last two years.
The statement, signed by 259 asset managers and asset owners whose holdings account for one-quarter of global capitalization, was aimed at world leaders who will meet in two weeks in Cancun, Mexico, for a United Nations conference on climate change.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-climate-financiers-20101117,0,6204171.story
Marine National Parks Have Experienced Vast Losses of Coral Reefs to Bleaching and Disease
Decades of “bleaching” events and diseases have been devastating to coral reefs surrounding national parks in the Caribbean and off South Florida, so much so that the losses are akin to “losing the Redwoods.”
At the National Park Service’s South Florida/Caribbean Network, Matt Patterson said Monday that today’s expanse of live coral reefs in that region is but a fraction of what it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when live organisms inhabited roughly 60-80 percent of the region’s reefs. In some places today reefs have as little as 10 percent or less of the live stony corals, the principal reef builder required for reef success, the marine scientist said.
“Reefs that people visit now are graveyards, are just skeletons,” Mr. Patterson said.
http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2010/11/marine-national-parks-have-experienced-vast-losses-coral-reefs-bleaching-and-disease7227
Russia, famed for its freezing temperatures, is breaking records for abnormally warm November weather with temperatures in Altai hovering around 5 degrees Celsius (41 Fahrenheit). In other parts of the country, there have been reports of bears and hedgehogs who had delayed hibernation.
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre6af3y2-us-russia-climate-pelicans/
mike roddy says:
November 16, 2010 at 9:15 pm “Bjorn is a born bullshitter, and I’m amazed he keeps finding suckers.”
Lomborg’s wafer thin veneer of plausibility is in telling people what they want to hear.It’s like going to the doctors with a terminal disease and being told to go away, take and asprin and it’ll be fine…palliative care for the willfully ignorant.
Hello Joe,
I’ll say it again, because it seems just tooo coincidental: how is it that the Economist, Lomborg’s film, and the Atlantic Monthly all come out with pro-coal, pro-geoengineering slants, all in the same month?
To be fair to Mark Joseph he seems to have grasped exactly what the film is about:
“People like me are the perfect target for works like Cool It”
“If Lomborg’s goal was to make people like me even more sceptical… then he has succeeded.”
Joseph displays a remarkable, though shameless, self-awareness. A pity he seems so short on awareness of wider reality.
Joe, it’s another head-in-vise day on the op-ed page of the WaPo. Don’t worry, buy white paint and be happy!
[JR: It on my list....]
Where did this rube get the money to make a movie?
I’m not suprised it appeared on Huffpo just because they’re lefty doesn’t mean they are rational. They are big advancers of all kinds of quckery, some of it a hairs breadth away from Scientology. Just check out their “Living” section, it’s loaded with rubbish cross dressing as science.
G’day,
We need to build our own world, economy and culture to out compete this line of thinking with the status quo. We cannot reform the deniers and fossil fuel industry and playing their rigged games with their rigged media that they own, we can only get partial victories. As we’ve seen with countless examples, doing it 1/2 way isn’t going to cut it.
Citizens are without power to a large extent. It is the battles between corporate interests that gain any attention at all. Reforming voting rights and campaign funding and citizen protections and all that is probably too much to do all at once considering the immediacy of the problem.
The Wind Lobby and the Solar Lobby will have to out-PR, outspend, and out-do the fossil fuel lobby. That $15 trillion in capital who signed that treaty are in it for the free government cash, they’re waiting for subisdies and incentives before they act.
If we want to be different, then we must act different.
Microfinance of the green movement with community owned co-operative wind farms and solar arrays financed by us through microloans could create a wedge or two and build the economic and political foundations for the rest of them.
Cheers,
Spiritkas
Thanks for posting on the Lomborg film. I’ve seen positive reviews for it by people who don’t want to know better. This morning here in Tucson AZ I’ve read the NYT special section “Energy” with articles entitled “There Will Be Fuel” (p.1) and the turnover, “There Will Be Fuel, for Decades to Come”, and another, “In the Heartland, Still Investing in Coal”. Nothing about the environmental costs, let alone the time gap between running out of affordable coal and oil and whatever wonderful technologies will replace them.
And on Tucson’s Arizona Star front page: “How Low Can Lake Mead Go?” with a quote from the turnover, p.A4, “It’s possible the outlook this decade for the lake levels and the water project could be worse than the bureau predicts, if climate change is a factor underlying the current drought, a question for which there is no scientific agreement today.”
And the beat goes on.
The study you mention at the end of the post is fascinating and helps explain a lot about the denier movement. When you understand that a persons proclivity is for denying what they do not agree with it creates a perfect environment for ‘Dunning-Krueger’ experts to come along. These people, like Monckton, Lomborg, etc tell people what they want to hear and are instantly (and uncritically) accepted. Not that we didn’t know this was happening…it’s just seeing someone be able to demonstrate it with a scientific study is remarkable.
Adjust your head vise to maximum torque.
Longboard has a promo piece in the WaPost this morning..op ed page. It should have included show times and ticket prices. All about our misplaced fear and capability to adapt to climate change….so, you got a problem wit dat.
Help is nowhere to be seen now that this low life statistician is in control of our minds.
He’s telling us we struck the iceberg and the iceberg sank.
Even my best friend thinks this weasel is making sense.
John McCormick
The Problem with Bjorn Lomborg and others like him is that they claim to know how to solve a problem–The human desecration of our natural environment–that they don’t acknowledge as being as universally important as it is. The ‘skeptical environmentalist’ claim says it all, this man does not feel an intimate tie to what it is he claims to be trying to protect, so his solutions are human-centered. If all one understands as being worth protecting is humanity, then there is at least some reason to believe that we can muddle-through under some climate change scenarios. But this problem is bigger than humanity’s ability to live in material happiness, even more important is our ability to live in an uncorrupted environment.
This sentiment is common amongst not only disinformers but others who tout ‘green jobs’ and ‘competitiveness’ as the foremost reason to protect our habitat. Until people understand en masse that the solutions to the climate crisis must come from a less human-centered perspective, the behavioural change required to alter the self-destructive path of Western civilization will not be achieved.
David B. Benson wrote: “Lomborg is a shill, a trickster.”
We must be careful not to demonize the deceptive Dane; that would be counter-productive. When I saw your comment I thought of calling him Bjorn “Loki” Lomborg, but that would probably play badly in the Norse countries. They’d have to expect a Baldur, which in modern terms could be interpreted as slandering Lomborg.
http://fanzone50.com/Tales/Nordic-Baldur.html
Mark Joseph’s comment
perfectly captures the modern shift in meaning of the word “skeptical” to something more akin to “dissenting” or even “rebellious.” One important part of our messaging is to remind people of that distortion of meaning.
An institutional investors’ view of climate change risk
http://www.iigcc.org/ . An alternative view to Lomborg’s economics
Jose already mentioned it, but if something scientific appears in the HuffPo, then it is automatically suspect. Orac over at Respectful Insolence refers to the HuffPo as a hive of quackery (among other phrases) which has sunk so low as to publish pretty much anything.
One reason for Lomborg’s appeal is that he tells us something that is intuitively correct: There are BENEFITS to global warming as well as costs. Most of us live in parts of the world that are colder than is pleasant most of the year. Therefore, it seems logical that warming would be a GOOD thing.
I read an article some time ago from a local news reporter trying to grasp the possible impact of global warming. We had had an abnormally long warm weather season that year, and he was talking about how the ski shops were suffering. But he ignored the equally obvious fact that boating was booming. For those of us, including myself, who hate the cold and snow, global warming sounds like the best thing that could possibly happen to us.
So when Lomborg says, “Hey, wait a minute, more people die due to too cold climates than too warm”, it rings obviously true. You guys always talk about doom and gloom, about the disadvantages of global warming, but never admit the other side of the story, that most people prefer warm weather. Do you vacation in Florida or Alaska? Both are beautiful places and yet one is nearly empty and the other is overflowing with people. Clearly warmer weather overall would be PREFERRED by most people.
Take comment #20 above. It says that Russia is now warmer, as though that was a bad thing. Are you nuts? Would you not agree that the average Russian would prefer things as they are, instead of going back to even chillier winters?
I read a long analysis about how a warmer New York City would result in higher electricity costs, even when electricity used for heating and cooling are both counted. This is true since electricity is rarely used for heating! A warmer New York City would mean far lower heating oil bills, and the analysis ignored that completely.
If I were asked to sacrifice, to give up my fancy car and comfortably climate controlled home, just so I could get colder winters, I’d toss the asker right out of my house! And yet that is exactly the argument you guys are making.
Basically, I believe I am being lied to about the potential consequences of global warming. I believe all the negative factors are being considered, but none of the advantages. Personally, I believe that even if the projected temperature increases occur, we will manage to muddle through and still survive just fine. After all, as Lomborg points out, there are people living in every climate in the world, from the desert to Antarctica. To think that we could not adopt to whatever is coming seems to underrate our abilities and level of ingenuity.
I would love to hear an unbiased, truthful summary of the costs AND BENEFITS of warmer climates. Personally, I think the benefits would be greater than the costs. Perhaps if your movement was not led by propagandists like Al Gore, I would be more inclined to believe what is being said. Otherwise, just call me a Skeptical Environmentalist.
David Dennis
[The author has finally given up on cold climates and now lives in Florida, which to him is darn close to Paradise. Why should the USA's climate not be more like Florida's?]
David H. Dennis wrote (#36): “So when Lomborg says, “Hey, wait a minute, more people die due to too cold climates than too warm”, it rings obviously true. You guys always talk about doom and gloom, about the disadvantages of global warming, but never admit the other side of the story, that most people prefer warm weather. Do you vacation in Florida or Alaska? Both are beautiful places and yet one is nearly empty and the other is overflowing with people. Clearly warmer weather overall would be PREFERRED by most people.”
This puts an ironic sidelight on Frank Luntz’s recommendation that climate change is the term preferred over “global warming” because the latter is too fraught with perilous connotations.
It probably is true that more people die of too much cold than too much heat. (I’m using balanced terms here; in my opinion, “cold” and “warmth” do not have equal weight in this context.)
But there are two things to be careful of. That the statement seems intuitively true may not be borne out by actual numbers. Also, for the span of human existence, outside temperatures have been closer to the lower limit of our tolerance than to the upper limit. Already I’ve seen warnings from several sources that a rise of 4°C will stress humans hard and may make the planet unlivable for them.
Personally, if given the choice you present, I would chose Alaska in a heartbeat. However, that is not based on temperature alone. I like mountains. Florida has very few of those. Maybe you should offer a choice between Florida and Nebraska.
But, on a more serious note, I find it is easier to protect myself against cold than against heat. It’s hard to “bundle down” against a torrid day. That’s true for populations as well.
This is not to say that the discussion you ask for is not worth having. It is important, and I haven’t seen much said on the subject.
One thing I would exclude from the discussion is statements like this: “Perhaps if your movement was not led by propagandists like Al Gore, I would be more inclined to believe what is being said.”
Labeling people is easy. If you think what Al Gore has been saying is baseless or mistaken in some way, point out the errors you perceive. Then learn from the way he reacts, as compared to how the Denialists react to correction of their mistakes.
David Dennis, you seem to have a narrow view of the people who are going to be affected by the rising temperatures. Did you ask if the Pakistani’s who experienced record temperatures of some 50C this year were happy with the warming?
The band of comfortable temperate regions is probably moving poleward but my guess is the potential gains in places like Russia will be outweighed by losses in the equatorial regions.
However, what this doesn’t take in to account is the impact of the change itself. Rapid change in any direction is going to have a significant impact on wellbeing, both of the environment and the human societies that rely on it. And continued change and uncertainty is going to prolong that impact.
David Dennis no.37, seems to me the purest expression of the Dunning-Kruger phenomenon that I’ve seen for some time. That plus the usual Rightwing indifference to the fate of those who will suffer intolerable temperatures, protracted drought and torrential deluges and floods (plus the spread of disease, crop failures, social chaos and war etc)while David enjoys his Florida sunshine. If he is young enough, however, I see an unfortunate inundation coming his way as Florida disappears beneath the rising waters. Stiff cheese!