Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist,” has always bugged me as a rather shady character. Now Howard Friel started fact-checking Lomborg’s footnotes, and found them to be wanting.
But when Friel began checking Lomborg’s sources, “I found problems,” he says. “As an experiment, I looked up one of his footnotes, found that it didn’t support what he said, and then did another, and kept going, finding the same pattern.” He therefore took on the Augean stables undertaking of checking every one of the hundreds of citations in Cool It. Friel’s conclusion, as per his book’s title, is that Lomborg is “a performance artist disguised as an academic.”
Read the rest. He seems to have had the habit of citing his sources as saying the exact opposite of what they actually said.
“Read the rest. He seems to have had the habit of citing his sources as saying the exact opposite of what they actually said.”
Hmmmmm…. now where have we seen this before?
You know…I should really write a book. Quite literally about anything I want, and bollocks to academic integrity. I mean, if people like this guys and Ann Coulter can do it, goddammit why can’t I.
Begley shows that Friel went a bit too far in some of his criticisms of Lomborg:
I’ve been ignoring Lomborg simply because he does not make sense; I would never have considered investigating his claims for facts.
“Read the rest. He seems to have had the habit of citing his sources as saying the exact opposite of what they actually said.”
Hmmmmm…. now where have we seen this before?
You see much the same tactics and techniques in any form of pseudoscience, fringe science, and pseudo and fringe history. I’ve certainly seen this one in the one I critique.
anthrosciguy (aka QrazyQat… in the process of changing over names for commenting)
Why is sloppiness in citing sources excusable? Obviously not so serious a charge as, y’know, making shit up, and I can see that it would make for a boring book, but shit like that is entirely legitimite criticism of a work of alleged scholarship.
There are two reasons that sloppiness in citing is bad: one is that it makes it hard to chase down the refs, and that makes it harder for people to critique you. The other, of course, is that it shows what kind of researcher one is, and a sloppy researcher is not a good researcher.
Lomborg is a shill, in an army of shills that protects corporate mafeasance with lies, mis/disinformation and supposed scientific writings that are in fact misleading garbage.
Naturally he is widely featured in the ‘liberal media’.
Thank goodness for dedicated men like Mr Shiel who expose and debunk Lomborg’s trash.
Much like many creationists.
sorry…Friel…malfeasance..and I can’t even blame Haloscan…
I took notice of the same thing as
‘Tis Himself, OM @ 3
Thing is, if there is all that much of this type of thing, it shows that Lomborg is pathologically sloppy (bad enough), or perhaps even systematically “sloppy”.
Either Lomborg is so clueless he can’t even cite papers that don’t even back him up properly, or he is doing it on purpose in attempt to confuse anyone referring to his cited sources.
If there is that much of a pattern of this “sloppiness”, I submit that it is significant. But perhaps Friel could have treated this separately or differently.
‘Tis Himself is right. You don’t need to exaggerate Lomborgs errors. His poor scholarship stands on its own. The really sad thing is that he’s about as good as the inactivist (he’s not a denialist) side can muster.
I don’t know, rather than a deceptive creationist, I’ve always considered Lomborg to be more like the the guy in xkcd #470.
That xkcd cartoon isn’t that funny if you’ve been to any marches in San Francisco where there is always a random component, like “Latinos for the metric system.” My sister observed that they turn everything into Halloween, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Lomborg may not be a denialist, but he’s giving aid and comfort to the other side.
Hmmmmm…. now where have we seen this before?
I have to confess that I have not acquainted myself with the details of the science of the global-warming debate. I am aware that the consensus of climatologists is 1) the climate is warming, 2) we are doing it and 3) we won’t like the results; but my opinion is therefore second-hand, so to speak, rather based on my own understanding. This is unlike my involvement in the creation/evolution fracas, where I know a great about both the science, and the debate — which is a bit negligent on my part, as acting on AGW is arguably of greater immediate import than squelching creationism.
However, lately I’m becoming more convinced of the reality of AGW, based largely on the fact that the tactics of the anti-AGW side look just so damn much like the creationists (with whom, of course, there is considerable overlap). Different animal, but the shit smells about the same.
Why would you trust anyone with “borg” in their last name?
You’re just asking to be assimilated.
“He seems to have had the habit of citing his sources as saying the exact opposite of what they actually said.”
Ann Coulter does that over and over again. It’s quite common with the new breed of sloppy conservative writers. Instead of William F. Buckley, who got where he landed on merit, we now have Jonah Goldberg, who got where he is because his mother was a key part of the cabal to try and take down Bill Clinton.
“Read the rest. He seems to have had the habit of citing his sources as saying the exact opposite of what they actually said.”
Hmmmmm…. now where have we seen this before?
Unfortunately, Friel gets shredded in Lomborg’s response:
http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20reply%20to%20Howard%20Friel.pdf
I loved the bit about Friel referencing (no less than 3 times) the now discredited IPCC claim regarding the Himalayan glaciers.
Unfortunately, Friel gets shredded in Lomborg’s response:
what?
don’t know what YOU were reading, but all i saw was a lot of spin from Lomborg, and he didn’t address the substantive original misuse claims at all.
instead, he created his own personal rationalizations for them.
I bet you are one of those “last read – last remembered” people?
I’m sure you would be saying exactly the opposite if Friel makes a rebuttal to Lomborg’s response.
I would highly, highly recommend anyone interested in Lomborg’s strategy read Lomborg and Playing the Long Game, by John Mashey.
It looks at Lomborg’s arguments and his actions, and points out why several right-wing think tanks fully support him when he suggests not-very-right-wing actions. The goal is not to convince people to do something, it’s to distract people from doing something else.
That’s exactly why I use the word inactivist for people like Lomborg.
(By the way, Friel isn’t the first to do this. Kare Fog did it first. It’d be interesting to see their overlap, since Friel appears to be doing it independently.)
“don’t know what YOU were reading, but all i saw was a lot of spin from Lomborg, and he didn’t address the substantive original misuse claims at all.”
I saw a lot of substantive answers from Lomborg. And I saw Friel being shown up for referencing WWF handouts as primary research literature! Friel is paying the price of publishing in hard-form, and getting caught out by the recent IPCC exposures. He is looking like a joke.
I haven’t read the original book but it was one of nine books that was presented for a human ecology class I took last year. I email the professor and now I am wondering if it will be appearing next year or if it still appears since I took it 3 semesters ago now.
lately I’m becoming more convinced of the reality of AGW, based largely on the fact that the tactics of the anti-AGW side look just so damn much like the creationists
That’s a piss-poor reason to be convinced of anything, especially when compared to “the consensus of climatologists”, which is a very good reason (if you understand how science is done and what it takes to achieve such a consensus).
He is looking like a joke
Actually, you are, by ignoring Ichthyic’s point. Friel points out Lomborg’s pervasive misuse of citations to support erroneous claims about very substantive matters such as polar bear decline, and Lomborg has nothing to say in response.
Except that he has:
http://www.lomborg.com/dyn/files/basic_items/118-file/BL%20reply%20to%20Howard%20Friel.pdf
Twenty-seven page detailed response demolishing Friel’s piffle.
So much for that attempt. Is it too much to ask that people spend the thirty seconds checking to see if Friel is up to snuff?
For crying out loud – Lomborg is the person about which it was found that it could not be proven that he was competent enough in the area to be considered scientific dishonest. Why are anyone still taking him serious in any way?
Except, Kristjan, no one has proved anything of the sort. See previous post.
This is indeed a most interesting and important issue. I only know Lomborg via Penn & Teller’s ‘Bullshit’ show. In any case I don’t possess enough experience in this topic to defend or attack anybody.
I wonder, though, if anyone will bother to read Lomborg’s response (linked above)? The attitude here towards Lomborg is too dismissive and that makes me suspicious (on academic grounds, not factual ones).
It’s a bit annoying that you’re using a google account, so I can’t address you by your handle, but anyway – you are a moron.
I did not refer to Friel. I referred to the ruling by Udvalgene Vedrørende Videnskablig Uredelighed, which at the time was the Danish arbitrators whether a scientist had committed scientific dishonesty. They evaluated The Skeptical Environmentalist, and found that while the book in itself could be considered scientific dishonest, it could not be proven that Lomborg was competent enough to understand the science, so it could not be ruled that he, himself, had been dishonest.
In other words, they found Lomborg not guilty of scientific dishonesty, due to the lack of proof of his competence in the areas he was writing about. Had it been possible to prove that he actually understood the related science, he would have been found scientific dishonest.
Would you say the same of our attitude towards e.g. Kent Hovind or Ken Ham? Both of those are as qualified to write about their chosen subject as Bjørn Lomborg, and they use similar tactics (except that Hovind and Ham are actually more honest about their stance than Lomborg)
Bjørn Lomborg and Anders Fogh Rasmussen are two of the worst stains on the image of Denmark. I’m so embarrassed we couldn’t at least keep those two morons inside the country and away from the rest of you.
These deceptive tactics remind me of the Homeopathic FRAUDS.
Except that that ruling was rescinded because it was a load of crap. BTW, cool use of the original language to try and prevent us from finding the original rulling, Kristjan, but that won’t help you. The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and innovation completely overturned the ruling on the grounds that:
Sorry, who’s the moron? Who’s the one who can’t even spend a few seconds googling to find this out? Why, I do believe it’s you, Kristjan.
Going to have to do better than that.
Actually, no, they didn’t. Your lack of knowledge shows. Unlike you, I actually followed the case at the time, and actually read the original ruling, as well as the related bulletins from the ministry.
I used the original language, because that’s the real name of the committees involved. Anyone interested in more info could just c&p what I had written into Google. I hold the average Pharyngula reader in high enough regard to expect them to be able to do that – especially not when I had made the connection to Denmark.
And now back to your nonsense. What the ministry did, was to tell the committees to re-examine the evidence, and make a new verdict, without the condemning language.
As there had come no new evidence to light, the committees denied this request, as they were required to, by law, and let their original findings of non-guilt stand. There was no “overturning” of the original ruling, as the ministry did not have the authority to do so. Any claims to the contrary shows a lack of understanding of Danish law in this regard (the courts have the authority to overturn the ruling, not the ministry).
Regarding the Dutch group of scientists, they had nothing to do with this, and whatever they claim, their findings have no impact of the ruling of Udvalgende Vedrørende Videnskabelig Uredelighed
Lomborg shill@34,
I see you give no source for your quotes, nor do you identify the “independent Dutch group of scientists”. Now why might that be?
There is an English summary of the response of the Danish ministry athttp://www.lomborg-errors.dk/minissumm.htm . This is, however, by Kåre Fog, who was among those who complained about Lomborg to the UVVU.
I know a creationist online who does this all the time- “Evolution has been destroyed! Organisms consciously change their genes in response to the envrionment!” And then his source is a sciencedaily article about epigenetics.
I would like to know how your words fit in with the following quotes from the ministry:
Yeah, I always go to the Economist and the FT for my scientific critiques, and I always rely on political complaints from ministries rather than the judgement of experts.
If you look at that quote, it says nothing about overturning the verdict. Again, as I said, that’s hardly surprisingly, as it is not possible for the ministry to do so according to Danish law.
Regarding the lack of new evidence, the committees made a ruling which found Lomborg not guilty of scientific dishonesty. According to the rules, the committees can only reopen a case if new evidence had come to light. The ignorant complains of some employees in a ministry (or even a Minister) doesn’t not constitute new evidence, so the request to reopen the case was dismissed entirely accordingly to law.
Unlike the uninformed opinions of politically appointed people in the ministries, the committees actually did present a large body of evidence for the problems with Lomborg’s book. This evidence was based upon the work of others, which is entirely as it should be, but that doesn’t remove the existence of it in their final report.
Given the fact that they found Lomborg not guilty, it’s rather interesting that people are complaining that they didn’t spend enough time on explaining the problems with his so-called research. Why would they do that? Others had done that work, and the committees only needed to evaluate whether this constituted scientific dishonesty – something they found not proven.
This is similar to the claims of the Discovery Institute that Judge Jones plagiarized the work of ACLU in his final ruling in the Kitzmiller trial.
Those of you who label Lomborg „inactive” must have never read anything he wrote. He is calling for action! Not endless and fruitless discussions about cutting of emissions, not a kind of action which makes you feel virtuous and contributing to the saving of Earth – like changing your bulb to a less energy consuming one, but to a real action: decision about higher spending on R&D in new energy sources, help to people most affected by global warming in form of economic development, better health service, better roads, etc. Nothing glorious, but very practical and with a higher chance to help more people. His idea is that by having different energy sources, by having economic incentives the amount of carbon in the atmosphere will more surely go down than by having an international agreement about carbon cuts which either will not be implemented or will cost horrendous amount and give almost nothing in return in terms of quality of life of those who are in desperate situation now.
Some of you remind me about an old cartoon in a Swedish paper: A pampered dog is sitting in front of an empty bowl and saying: I am fasting for peace, what are you doing?
Market worship got us into this mess. More market worship won’t get us out.
Are we supposed to believe that we can’t do R&D on new energy sources AND reduce our energy waste and our emissions?
If it takes you 30 seconds to read and analyse 27 pages, then no wonder you come up defending Lomborg. It’s quite clear that you’ve already decided beforehand what your conclusion is.
A climate-change denialist who quotes sources as saying the opposite of what they really say. Imagine that :p
Malgorzata is just more evidence that Lomborg succesfully confuses even progressives :
I really wonder where you get that from Lomborg’s priority list and his Copenaguen
ConsensusjokeIt’s quite clear from this that Lomborg’s goal is to advocate for a conservative/right wing think tank agenda under the disguise of a few progressive looking optical illusions.
I refuse to even call him an inactivist, that’s just adding more confusion : he’s just another denialist shill for far right conservatives.
His idea is that by having different energy sources, by having economic incentives the amount of carbon in the atmosphere will more surely go down than by having an international agreement about carbon cuts which either will not be implemented or will cost horrendous amount and give almost nothing in return in terms of quality of life of those who are in desperate situation now. – Malgorzata
Yes, quite, like the way the Montreal Protocol totally failed to reduce emissions of ozone-destroying chemicals.
Oh, wait…
Lomborg is a shill for the fossil fuel lobby and far-right think tanks. I suspect he doesn’t believe the crap he spouts, he’s just making a very good living out of it. He tells lies about the most elementary facts about his own biography: he was never a Greenpeace activist, never a leftist, is not a trained statistician…
Kristjan #31:
I would if you never actually addressed their arguements. I don’t discount anybody until I have some kind of reason to do so. I have investigated Ham, Hovind, Cameron, Comfort etc. They are severely in error. But if they make a claim which might make sense, I’ll investigate. If I find yet more failure, so be it. I’m not going to cry about a little lost time.
So… you have not read Lomborg’s defence, then? If not, will you in future?
Upon reading more comments, my suspicion grows stronger that PZ, in this case, and those who agree with him, do not want any angle except their own to have prominence.
Maybe Lomborg is wrong. I don’t yet have a good understanding of either Lomborg’s books or Friels’ rebuttals (I haven’t read them). But I do suspect that there is much self-righteousness evident, on the part of PZ and some of those who left comments above.
Amunium #32:
So you’ve read Friels’ book and Lomborg’s response already? And cross-checked them both? And have formed a reasoned POV? Gosh. I’m impressed!
@48: do you imagine that people’s opinion of Lomberg must be based only and solely on Friel’s comments and Lomberg’s defence? Wow, that’s dumb. Lomberg has been pushing this crap for years.
Malgorzata,
it’s quite clear that when you get someone such as far-right-nutcase Sen.J.Inhofe to write this :
… you understand better what is the political impact of B.Lomborg.
Lomborg is a (clever) political analyst : he knows that arguing for something (with no practical intention to solving it) is a clever tactic to avoid doing something about something else. That diversion tactic is about as old as civilizations on this earth.
Too bad you are living proof that it is still efficient.
? We were talking about pointing out additional (if minor) errors, not “exaggerating” anything.
Pikemann Urge, some of us are basing our opinion of Lomborg on much more than Friels’ book (or in my case much else than Friels’ book, since I haven’t read it).
Lomborg has demonstrated again and again that he is incompetent1 and that he cherrypicks and misrepresents results.
1E.g. his leadership of the Environmental Assessment Institute – an institute which has been found to be a complete waste of money, since their assessments have been flawed and wrong in just about any cases, most famously when they evaluated the environmental impact of allowing cans to be used for soft drinks and beer in Denmark, and said that the cans could be burned for heating in complete contradiction to the information they had received.
Maybe? Proven idjit Liar for Money™. Start with the truth.
I completely follow the consensus that global warming is happening, and that it is anthropological.
Anyone challenging the consensus, better have a relevant science education, and the data to back up their criticism. The thing is that Lomborg doesn’t challenge the consensus on AGW, but mainly the politics involved.
I have seen several public debates here in Denmark between Lomborg and others, as well as climate debates between other people. Lomborg has stricken me as more intellectually honest than most of his opponents. I have heard him acknowledge mistakes he has made, pointed out by the opponent, which most of his opponents wouldn’t in the same situation.
He is trying to “cool” the public opinion down, and not get hysterical, without saying that global warming isn’t a problem. E.g. he says that if we want to save the polar bears, it would be more effective to prevent people from shooting them, than reducing CO2 emissions.
People are causing the polar bears to go extinct regardless of the carbon emissions, in a much worse way by shooting them, so stop making them the mascots of global warming.
Again I’m not a disguised denier. AGW is real, and it is happening, but the politics involved is sometimes based on science with larger statistical errors than the effect it is trying to measure.
Again read his reply.
And comparing Lomborg to Ann Coulter, is like comparing James Randi to Ann Coulter, after he made some controversial (and wrong imo) statements on AGW.
Pikemann Urge,
are you the same moron who wrote comment #26 ?
To negentropyeater: You wonder where did I get this Lomborg’s priorority list. Well, I read every one of his books, inclusive Global Crises, Global Solutions, I do not regard Copenhagen Consensus to be a joke – there are too many real scientists working with him, inclusive some Nobel Prize Winners. Those people have a very sound ideas and not one of them (inclusive Lomborg) is a “denialist”. I read a lot of his articles and even translated some into Polish. I am much more suspicious when I hear Al Gore talking about a “mission for our generation” and other embarking on a quest to save the planet, because real living people usually get lost in such lofty endavours. And just to allay your suspicions: nobody payed me for those translations, neither Lomborg nor any shady industrial organization, like nobody is paying me for translating PZ.
The problems with Lomborg’s list of priorities are twofold:
1) It’s not a complete list. Where is e.g. military spending on the list?
2) It ignores the fact that many of the items on the list are inter-connected. I.e. if we don’t do something about AGW, hunger will worsen.
Then there is also the whole problem of the list being the opinion of a select crowd of people, sharing Lomborg’s perspective (that global warming is not as bad as the scientists claim). These select people were asked to prioritize between several items, without looking at a) the cost, and b) the plausibility.
All in all, the Copenhagen Consensus is just one big media stunt, aimed at getting people to think that it’s OK to not do anything as there are other, more important things to do something about – ignoring the fact that we are not doing anything about those other things either.
Lomborg has moved away from being a global warming denier (which he has 10 years ago), to being an inactivist, saying that we should do anything. Listening to Lomborg either back then or now will result in the same thing: no action on global warming.
The rest of us are all aware that we need several approaches – we need alternative energy sources,, but we also need to cut down on our current usage.
Another confused by Lomborg at #54,
No because unlike Lomborg (and Ann Coulter), James Randi is no activist against doing something about Climate Change.
He just wrote an opinion piece, and got nicely straightened up for talking from ignorance.
Lomborg never stopped.
Oh, and I fixed this for you:
Malgorzata,
Then you didn’t read what Gary Yohe wrote about it:
Fruitbat, please point me to where I suggested (or even implied) that someone was paying you ?
@negentropyeater
Still, if you compare Ann Coulter to Bjørn Lomborg, you don’t know what you are talking about. You CANNOT compare these two persons. Ann Coulter can’t even spell science.
And he is not trying to confuse the public opinion more than Al Gore is.
Stephen, I was referencing a quote of the ministry in question. Now, are you going to claim that two major newspapers misquoted the ministry and did so in an identical manner? Or were you just being tiresome?
Kristjan, your argument, such as it is, seems to rest first on quibbling about terms. Regardless of how you want to phrase it, it is clear that the Ministry tossed the criticism out as a load of emotionally motivated crap. In other words, its criticisms of Lomborg are worthless.
Then you state that the group that agrees with you does good, stern, sober research, while one that disagrees with you is the uninformed opinion of politically appointed people. Uh-huh. Right.
Hey, if we’re going to toss out people who are politically appointed, I’ve got a list for you: Al Gore. The IPCC. Any environment ministry anywhere. Oh, and you could also add the DCSD to that list. It is, after all, under the ministry you’re dismissing.
Then there are all these accusations about motive, being put forth by people like Nerd. To use a word accurately for once, replacing the discussion of facts with a discussion of motive is a Stalinist technique. Watch how easily it can be turned around: “Well, of course there’s this big AGW consensus. People wouldn’t want their research grants threatened by speaking out, now would they? What about Al Gore – think he could finance that Terawatt house of his and his private jet with honest work?” And so on. So drop this nonsense. You sound like idiots, and obnoxious idiots when you do so.
Ah, before I forget to attribute that point, it comes from Hannah Arendt who said the great genius of Stalin was to have replaced all discussions of policy and all arguments about policy with discussions about motive.
Just to finish off, I think that Lomborg suffers from the tragedy described by Don Marquis, to whit:
“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”
So… you have not read Lomborg’s defence, then? If not, will you in future? – Pikemann Urge
No, any more than I’ll waste time reading Ken Ham’s latest burblings. Lomborg has been thoroughly taken apart long before Friel, and is a proven liar.
Knockgoats, thank you for illustrating my point so amply.
Arendt was a very smart woman.
The fact that DevonHartigan, and the Lomborg-shill with the google account, both compare Lomborg to Al Gore is extremely telling. Like Al Gore, Lomborg has no relevant qualifications or scientific expertise in the area of climate change and its likely impact. Unlike Lomborg, Gore bases his views on the findings of the overwhelming majority of those who do.
I’ll just repeat what I wrote, which you didn’t seem to understand :
I don’t think I mentionned Lomborg or Coulter’s scientific competence (or absence thereof).
You don’t seem to understand that both Lomborg and Coulter are political commentators.
No scientists, why should I compare them on their scientific competence ?
Once again, what is it with this inability to do ten seconds of research? P.Z. seems to suffer from it, and so do so many here. Take negentrope, the article he cites is rebutted directly after that:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/27/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange
Another in depth rebuttal with extensive reference.
Seriously, what is it with this failure to even check if there’s a response? I can’t get away from this phrase that keeps coming back to me:
Emphasis added
Lomborg shill,
Do you waste your time reading Ken Ham? Or the Scinetologists’ defence of their methods and esteemed founder? Of Mormon apologists for the accuracy of their scriptures? Or David Irving’s defence against claims that he is an antisemitic liar? Like all these, Lomborg is a proven liar, as well as being completely incompetent in the areas where he pretends to expertise (more so than Irving, in fact). Hannah Arendt was indeed a smart woman: she’d have despised both you and your hero.
Anyone who follows Lomborg-shill’s link@68 should also look at the article it is a “response” to; they will see that as is his frequent habit, Lomborg does not respond to the charges actually made. Moreover, Lomborg-shill is lying when he says this is an “in-depth rebuttal with extensive references”. I can’t understand why, since anyone who looks can see that it is no such thing. I begin to suspect that Lomborg-shill is Lomborg himself.
Isn’t it funny how the troll keeps telling us that “The Ministry tossed out the criticism”, and then quotes Orwell at us? Irony is dead.
Expert committee points out Lomberg’s well-documented errors. Ministry demands a rethink. Ministry doesn’t get it because they have nothing to justify a rethink except that they didn’t like the first conclusions. Usual whining.
Hey shitheaded concern troll. Take your concern, your idjit analysis, your lack of scientific understanding, your lack of cogency, and shove it where the sun don’t shine. We have Lomborg’s number, your number, and the other apolgists number. Liars and bullshitters all. You sow confusion, not truth. We know better.
According to you. But by your own admission, you’ve not done any independent assessing, simply accepted someone else’s word for it.
I can trump your silly little questions easily. I’ve read my share of creationist tracts, some of the mustier works on eugenics, and some of the defenses of slavery. I haven’t read Irving, but I should, given that his studies of Goebbels are considered invaluable.
In all of these instances, I’ve at the very least sharpened my claws, and sometimes even learned something. To give one example, I learned more about human and hominid migrations and evolution from Race, Evolution and Behaviour than from my years as an undergraduate, despite these facts being put to uses I find repellant. I remember Christopher Hitchens pointing out that Irving was the one who showed that Mosley’s blackshirts were in direct receipt of Nazi funds.
The question really is whether or not you’re big enough to do the reading and thinking for yourself, and keep your own books, or if you feel the need to be protected from any nasty heresy.
*shrugs* And there we have it. To repeat Don MarquisYou sow confusion, not truth. We know better.
Fortunately, I don’t find the mark of Heretic and Freethinker a difficult one to wear.
Blast. Problem with the HTML tag. I can’t edit that, so I’ll just fix it here:
And there we have it. To repeat Don Marquis “If you make people think they’re thinking…”
This is supposed to be scientific thought? This is supposed to be rational argument? This mindless, herd bleating and cursing and vituperation? What a disgrace. I mean, look at this:
Fortunately, I don’t find the mark of Heretic and Freethinker a difficult one to wear.
Ah yes, the “they laughed at Galileo” and “mindless herd” gambits. Anyone have troll bingo yet?
I’d also add that none of this is taking up my point. Neither P.Z., nor the brave Defenders of Truth Against the Sowers of Discord (should put that last bit on my business card) ever bother to do a few minutes of googling to check whether there’s a rebuttal out there, or a criticism of any kind.
Ah, you admit you are a delusional fool without conclusive evidence. Take your concern trolling (a bannable offence) on the road. As if we care about anything you have to say, especially as a delusional fool. Delusional fools like you never say anything interesting, but never shut up either. Must be a mental problem.
Stephen, as before, you miss the point. I am firmly convinced that the question isn’t what you think so much as how you think, that a single mistake made under your own effort is better than ten truths accepted on faith.
That’s the question here. What I’m seeing here isn’t reason. There’s no attempt at doing the hard, slow work of piling up the data, reading all the matter in question, or forming an independent conclusion.
That’s the criterion. That’s what’s failing here.
Fortunately, I don’t find the mark of Heretic and Freethinker a difficult one to wear. – Lomborg shill
Exactly what liars and denialists of all stripes say.
I’m shivering in my boots. Yes, can’t have the Sowers of Confusion running around – who knows, people might start to do their own thinking! People might need to start doing their own work! The whole system would come crashing down.
These criticisms of you would still stand even if Lomborg was 100% wrong. Because that is unknowable from any reasoned argument put forward here. Because those are few on the ground. And, for the record, a reasoned argument isn’t one that looks semi-reasonable, but has the writer erupting into hysterical rage when it’s challenged or questioned.
A much better review of Lomborg.
numbcake #79
compare with what he wrote #26
So which one is it, the hard slow work or the 30s check ?
googlified unweildy-named commenter:
I know you feel like you are a clever “free-thinker”, but you really are quite transparent in your “start with a conclusion and make the evidence fit” tactics.
Stop shifting goalposts and try to stay on topic re the post:
Lomborg mis-used and mis-represented his citations to claim they said things they did not… he also practiced very sloppy research and referencing methods. Friel called him out on this, and Lomborg’s response does not in any way address those criticisms. It’s plainly clear to anyone capable of reading that this is the case, even if you know almost nothing of the AGW science or debate.
Do you deny this? Or will you keep trying to make yourself into a self appointed skeptical hero and make this about something else?
Yet another ignorant simonist steals a page from the creationist playbook.
Believing myths != thinking for yourself.
Celtic,
I’ve read Lomborg’s response to Friel, and, as I said previously, I find if persuasive. Ditto his response to Yohe. What I also find persuasive is the description of DCSD as producing vacuous arguments, driven by emotion since it is so reminiscent of the kind of arguments found – well, here, amongst other places.
I’m hardly moving the goalposts. Right from the outset I’ve been astonished by the unwillingness to do reading that might run counter to their already held beliefs. Witness the goats, for example. This is equal parts of ridiculous and pathetic.
To respond to negen‘s hairsplitting, what he sees as contradiction isn’t one. If you don’t have the time to do the extensive reading, there’s still no excuse for not doing the thirty second google search and mentioning the rebuttals that exist.
I generally find that self described “free thinkers” tend to be dogmatic. Often glibertarian or wingnut. And arrogant as all get out. And stupid as a fence post. Yep, you fit the bill.
And now you’re not answering my question… you are evading with obfuscatory language. I’m quite sure you found his response persuasive. It’s easy to be persuaded to a point of view you already hold.
Plainly answer: Does Lomborg’s response specifically and accurately refute Friel’s criticisms of citation mis-representation and misuse? Please provide an example.
Hint: providing a defense of why he decided to “interpret” things the way he did doesn’t count… the sources state what they state. And they don’t state what Lomborg claims they do. Please provide an example of where they do, that Friel claims they do not.
llewelly, you are deliberately missing the point, as so many are. It’s not what you think, it’s how you think. Hysterical adherence to orthodoxy is bad even if the orthodoxy is correct . In fact, it can be argued that it’s worse than it’s right. It’s always worth listening to what the other side has to say, even if they were, say, creationists (and Lomborg isn’t to be mentioned in the same breath). At the very least, you maintain your ability to argue in terms of facts and reason.
Now here we have people like Knockgoats saying proudly that they don’t need to read, they don’t need to listen, someone else has done their thinking for them and that’s fine, thank you very much. I find that attitude contemptible.
Clearly what this troll “finds persuasive” is the ultimate criterion of rational judgement. Pffffft.
*shrugs* Again. Not a word of rational argument. Not a lone fact. Not a single syllogism. Just a hysterical outburst. That’s what I find contemptible.
And skepticism without solid, evidence-based basis for the sake of skepticism itself is no better… you’re not a free-thinking hero, dude… you’re a self-rationalizing denialist. It’s easy to confuse the two, internally.
Going around telling people the world is flat because “you’re a skeptic and a free-thinker” just makes you an idiot, not a hero.
numbcake #86
Don’t you actually read the rebuttal before mentioning it (27 pages in this case)? So if it’s just a big pile of crap you still mention it just for the sake of it ?
Ooh, “hysterical”! I get bingo!
Easily done, my dear:
And so on. It’s really an excellent example of rational argumentation with direct quotation and reference to primary sources. Even if they absolutely, 100% disagree with all of Lomborg’s writings, the members of this board could learn a great deal from his method of argumentation.
@93: It reminds me of the famous Generic Proof of X, which can be used to prove any theorem:
If a proof of X exists, X is true.
This is a proof of X.
Therefore X is true,
Similarly, we have the Generic Rebuttal, in use by our tame heretical freethinking hero:
If a rebuttal of X exists, X is not true.
This is a rebuttal of X.
Therefore X is not true.
Now here we have people like Knockgoats saying proudly that they don’t need to read, they don’t need to listen, someone else has done their thinking for them and that’s fine, thank you very much. I find that attitude contemptible.,/i> – Lomborg shill
You’re a liar, Lomborg shill, as I said no such thing. When The Sceptical Environmentalist came out, I read as much of it as I could stand – about half, IIRC. I also read some critiques of it. I don’t need to read everything a proven liar and incompentent produces to know he’s likely to be lying incompetently again. I’m very grateful to the likes of Fog and Friel, who have waded through Lomborg’s sewage to document this fully.
Which is not what you said in your post, in the post that I was referring to, Knock. The one where you said that you hadn’t read his response, had no intention of doing so.
Stephen, for your critique to have any sort of value, I would have had to be faced with more than the profanity and viciousness I’ve met here, with some actual facts and reason. Read over this thread. Try to honestly tell me this is the behaviour of rational beings.
Anyone who looks at Keatinge et al. can see that it provides no basis whatever for Lomborg’s claim. Massive fail, Lomborg shill.
Even if so KG this is the first time you’ve come up with an actual fact, instead of throwing a tantrum. Like I say, it isn’t what you think but how you think, and on that latter criterion, my dear, you fail.
Funny how the “free thinker” doesn’t approve of us doing our own thinking, he must do it for us. Only one word describes that. Hypocricy. What an irrelevant shit for brains, bringing everything he says into question…
Ooh, and it’s a tone troll now as well- we really are going for the full house.
Nerd, that’s a claim that you can’t substantiate, not in a million years. I would be very happy to see some thinking going on, but there isn’t much. There’s a great deal of abuse, but little thinking. Little fact. Little reason.
Sven@#6
I don’t know…maybe worse than just making something up. It is fabrication with an intent to attribute the fabrication to someone else. It is the act of bus-rider who emits flatus and then glances sidewise with a pinched expression to cast blame (with varying degrees of subtlety) upon his neighbor. Or some other metaphor.
The one where you said that you hadn’t read his response, had no intention of doing so.
Indeed, Lomborg shill, but I did not say, nor imply, what you lyingly claimed I did. I explained in general terms why I was not going to waste time on his latest lies.
Except that if you actually read Keatinge, (which I’m guessing Lomborg is hoping most laypersons will not, or will not understand it and just take his word for it) it still does not say what he is claiming it says in his rebuttal. That is the point… even in his rebuttal he mis-represents his citations.
So where is that long and arduous citation checking, research verifying process that you were so find of quoting earlier in this response of yours? You didn’t check to see if he was right, you just copy-pasted one of his refutations as fact and expected us to swallow it. Who’s the hysterical adherent to ideology, here?
@big google name, #95:
In your example, Lomborg does clearly quote a paper. However, this paper doesn’t mention 1.5 million europeans dying of cold. It does mention about 2003 people per million inhabitants dying of cold annually in the seven regions it discusses, and these are all people in the range of 65-74 years old. Mainly, the paper finds that there are bands of temperature in which the fewest people in the age bracket die per year, and that this temperature band varies per region.
However I turn this, the paper doesn’t support what Lomborg says it does.
SW @96, unfortunately, most of the argument in this thread seems to be based exactly on that proof:
PZ has declared Lomborg a fraud
Lomborg is a fraud.
Climate modeling is so hard to get right, I’m surprised how many people are convinced they know the facts, let alone “the truth”.
In fact, let me give you an example of what I mean. KG claims that Keatinge et al says the opposite of what Lomborg says it does. I wonder how this squares with the following bit listed in “Conclusions”:
But that’s secondary. The point is this is an actual assertion about actual facts that one can debate. One’ll be wrong, the other’ll be right – but it is a matter of rational debate. The hysteria, the swearing, the vituperation, the sneering – these are not the marks of reason. They are the marks of blind faith.
And let me ask you again, lying Lomborg shill, since you chose not to answer earlier, do you read the outpourings of Ken Ham, or apologists for the Mormon and Scientology scriptures? Have you read David Icke’s profound works, in which he proves to his own satisfaction that the world is controlled by shape-shifting alien lizards? Or maybe you think that the truly sceptical person must reserve judgement on all these matters? Why won’t you tell us?
Another example for you: have you read Peter Duesberg’s piffle, claiming the HIV does not cause AIDS? Duesberg is a professional virologist, once highly respected, and so is much better qualified in that area than Lomborg is on climate change impact, let alone the vast canvas he chose in TSE. Or maybe you think we should suspend all judgment there, and stop giving those infected with HIV HAART?
Ah, the shit-for-brains apologist is still not letting us do our own thinking. That starts with him STFU. He has had his say. We reject what he says. Now what? Whining forever because we don’t think for ourselves?
@ googlynames. #109:
your first assertion was that Lomborg cited the paper in support of his number of 1.5 million cold related deaths per year in Europe. Please direct me where the paper said that.
KG claims that Keatinge et al says the opposite of what Lomborg says it does. – Lomborg shill
You are lying again: I did not say that. Here is what I said, in full:
“Anyone who looks at Keatinge et al. can see that it provides no basis whatever for Lomborg’s claim. Massive fail, Lomborg shill.”
As, indeed, it does not. The main point of the paper is that both heat and cold deaths depend on the institutional and behavioural response of the population, and the facilities they have for keeping themselves cool or warm respectively. There is no sign whatever of any calculation of what the net change due to a rise in temperature would be, indeed it clearly indicates that any such figure would mean very little as it would strongly depend on what action is taken – yet it is his unsupported figure of 1.5 million net deaths saved that Lomborg claims it supports. He’s a liar, and so are you, as you’ve proved twice just in relation to me.
The hysteria, the swearing, the vituperation, the sneering – these are not the marks of reason. They are the marks of blind faith. – Lomborg shill
Whining about tone is the mark of one who has lost the argument.
From Keating et al. 2000 p.672 we get :
. annual cold related deaths averaged 2003 per million in people aged 65-74
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_Union
we get
population 65 and older = 76 million
76×2003 = approx. 150,000
compare with Lomborg’s claim that 1.5 million Europeans die annually from excess cold “Based on the summary of the biggest European heat and cold study (Keatinge, et al., 2000, p. 672).”
Just a factor 10 error.
Nice of you, negen to, for once, try the whole rational argumentation and reasoned debate thing. Stick with it. It’ll do you good.
Well, Lomborg shill, why didn’t you think to check what neg did? You’re the one who has been preaching the benefits of close scrutiny of all relevant materials – but as you’ve shown, you can’t even tell the truth about what’s right in front of you, let alone check whether Lomborg’s “rebuttal” was correct. Let’s remember, this was the example you chose yourself. You’ve been completely pwnd, yet you still have the gall to condescend to the one who pwnd you.
numbcake #116,
the first rule of reasoned debate is to at least acknowledge one’s errors and inconsistencies. I’ve just pointed out two to you in the last hour or so (one at #115, another at #93).
Instead of acknowledging this, you’re writing this pathetic comment.
I’m all for rational argumentation and reasoned debate, but you don’t seem to appreciate what that entails.
Wow the commenting here is ridiculous. Instead of conducting a civil debate, people are just calling everyone who doesn’t agree with them as being shills.
What a nice way to debate. That actually prevents you from actually making any arguments. Just like alternative woo-followers calling people who disagrees with them for Big Pharma shills.
If you are not going to keep it civil, then why even debate, because no one listens to you if your only method of argument is namecalling.
Again, Lomborg is no AGW denier, and it’s he do tend to cherrypick, but he is not a cook, and have way more valid points than Al Gore. Anyone who has seen him in live debates would know that he very much respects the scientific method, and is a contemplative person.
The main reason why I don’t disregard Lomborg, is because he raises some interesting points on the politics involved in the Global Warming issue.
What to do about AGW? How much is reasonable to do about AGW? To what extend should we do it? Are mainly political questions, which of course should have its basis in science, but nonetheless are in the end, very value based decisions, and some utilitarian principles is not a bad idea to apply, since agreeing on values is impossible.
I am full of genuine admiration for the person signing himself/herself with impossible to remember signature. He/she is the one who can calmly and sensibly reason even with a real troll, “Knockgoats”. And if “Knockgoats” feels offended, he/she fulfils perfectly the definition of troll in my dictionary. But for me, life is too interesting to spend time discussing with people who, no matter what you say, are just shouting abuse. So I would better translate another article of this real statistician, real professor, real scientist Lomborg in order to give Poles without any knowledge of English a possibility to read another view on the matter.
Malgorzata,
Will you please also translate for the Poles that Lomborg misrepresented the results of Keating et al by a factor 10 as evidenced in the last few comments ?
Did you actually cross check any of Lomborg’s claims, or are you just another true believer who drinks all he writes like Kool-Aid ?
Please don’t tell me you are interested in Science.
Thank you, Malgorzata. I don’t have a problem with people who disagree with me, and I really don’t mind being proven wrong. What I mind is the hysterics who throw all reason out the window in favor of the venom and insult and stupidity.
Hey, we have two more tone-trolls with nothing substantive to contribute. Malgorzata, Lomborg shill has twice lied about what I’ve said on this very thread. He’s failed to admit it when his errors have been pointed out by negentropyeater. Lomborg has no qualifications as a statistician, AFAIK no peer-reviewed publications in statistics, and as has been noted by Kåre Foghttp://www.lomborg-errors.dk/misunderstandings.htm , demonstrates ignorance or contempt for elementary statistical methodology.
DevonHartigan, do you really not see how stupid you make yourself look by comparing Lomborg with Al Gore, rather than with the natural and social scientists whose work he rubbishes?
BTW, Malgorzata, I seldom take offence at what idiots like you call me – indeed, I rather take such insults as compliments.
Hey “free thinker”, when do we get to think for ourselves? And you are wrong. Check the peer reviewed scientific literature. But then, that requires actual training in science, knowledge of what to look for, and true free thinking.
sigh…
Have we yet come up with a name for this all-too-common phenomenon we get here just like we have in this thread? You know, the one where a person makes assertions or defends assertions others have made, can’t back them up factually, and then inevitably starts complaining about tone and how mean we all are?
Something more interesting than “tone-trolling” or “concern-trolling”.
I mean FFS, the entire conversation has been attempted to be conveniently shifted from the veracity of the criticism of Lomborg’s work to how we’re mean and can’t think for ourselves because we have the audacity to accept the data published in thousands of independent papers and accepted by a vast majority of scientists who actually do any real work in the field of climatology.
I have no fucking patience for self-important contrarians with a free-thought hero complex.
I’m looking at you, googlewhatthefuck…
Not spent much time around here have you ?
If you had you would be aware of KG’s commenting record, and not make such a stupid comment.
Now, is it simply ignorance on your part or is there a deeper hostility coming out ?
What a comedian. The “free thinker” is pure dogmatic idjit troll, and Knockgoats has been here refuting such nonsense for years. It is obvious “free thinker” is an oxymoron. Emphasis on the hypocritical moron.
https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawnpjdSIqETipg-GHj9rp-MUzT74WDT5T0c Page | February 23, 2010 10:21 AM:
Your point is to strut around pretending nobody but you has read Lomborg’s books. Well, some us of have.
I recommend this site for information on Lomborg.
There are not enough hours in the day to read the thousands of anti-science books that are published. Having read The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, and Lomborg’s 27-page rebuttal of Friel’s book (but not having read Friel’s book), I don’t think Knockgoats is missing much, although he underestimates the care and skill with which Lomborg’s pseudoscience is presented. Lomborg is unlike Ken Ham in that Lomborg is quite capable of misleading people who have a better understanding of the science than the average layperson.
It is a great deal of work to thoroughly check the correctness of a book, and when people like E.O Wilson, Jeff Harvey, and other more qualified folk have already done that analysis, it’s not unreasonable to conclude you don’t need to repeat their work. Everyone must make decisions about what thinking they must do for themselves, and what thinking they must rely on others for. Since the computing power of many people necessarily outweighs the computing power of an individual, everyone necessarily relies on the thinking of others more often than they re-think everything on their own.
Re-inventing wheels is not necessarily a virtue.
DevonHartigan –
This is a long-term problem. The longer we take to deal with it, the harder it will be to deal with. It appears that a lot of of folks who have a vested interest in not dealing with the problem have found folks to be their fifth columnists, their witting or unwitting dupes. The oil, gas and coal industries don’t care how delays happen, they just care that they do happen.
I’m quite willing to entertain any proposed solution for dealing with the effects of anthropogenic climate change, but if the person who is offering their original solution offers one that does not actually deal with what is expected from the way our climate has been changing, there’s no reason to listen. So, why should I listen to someone who you say accepts AGW but doesn’t offer a solution?
Marshal Pétain was no Nazi either.
DevonHartigan, anyone who points at Al Gore as an expert to be discredited is only interested in gain ideological points.
DevonHartigan | February 23, 2010 11:40 AM:
A comparison of Al Gore to Lomborg:
Celtic_Evolution | February 23, 2010 12:11 PM:
The thesis of Expelled was that rejecting scientists was the right way to think for yourself. Perhaps we should call it Steinism.
So, https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawnpjdSIqETipg-GHj9rp-MUzT74WDT5T0c, why haven’t you acknowledged that Lomborg was wrong about excess deaths in his original claim and his unreliable attempt to save his reputation with a 27-page ‘rebuttal’?
Why did you condescend to someone who pointed out how completely mistaken Lomborg was rather than thank him for pointing out this repetition falsehood?
Will we find out that Lomborg was equally inaccurate in the rest of his ‘rebuttal’?
That would properly reflect what they have done to their brains.
(I’ve been following the comments back and forth with the impossible-to-reference-long-name troll, and as a side point I have to congratulate Pharyngula on one thing – here people are allowed to actually point out the lying of trolls and accurately call it “lying”. In most other online forums and comment blogs I’ve seen, accusations of lying are grounds for moderator action (suspension, dismissal, etc). It is this reason I no longer bother with Richard Dawkins’ site’s forums, where the moderation rules enforced slavishly by volunteers who aren’t allowed to deviate from the script actually disallow the exact same arguments Richard himself makes publicly when those arguments involve accurately identifying where his opponents are being dishonest. There were a few lying concern trolls hanging out there that never, ever got stopped by the moderators but the people who dared to take them on and counter their bullshit did. Around here, we’re actually allowed to call liars liars. It’s a refreshing breath of honest fresh air to see Knockgoats be allowed to call out the troll as a liar and not get banned for it.)
This problem exists on many online fora and it’s surprising how the people making the moderation rules don’t quite get it. They think they’re cutting down on trolling by disallowing accusations of lying (under the notion that they constitute personal attacks), but they don’t seem to realize that such a rule is actually to the trolls’ benefit and has the opposite of the intended effect. Once you can’t be called a liar, then you get to make up whatever bullshit you like and people have to react to your strawmanning of your opponents as if you were making honest statements.
There’s not enough swear words in the world to express how I feel about people who clearly don’t have any moral qualms about using that sort of lying as a (they think) legitimate argument tactic.
Good on you, Knockgoats, for not giving this troller any undeserved respect.
Honestly, I think “Concern Trolls” works fine. People come in with a ludicrous position, people tell them it is dumb, they troll for a few hundred responses about how mean we all are. That’s how Concern Trolling works. It doesn’t need a new name.
No; that’s completely wrong.
I also like DKV (Dunning-Kruger Vicitm) : people like the google numbcake above or Malgorzata who suffer from illusory superiority, “reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”.
That’s why I don’t like to call them liars or dishonest, they simply lack insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. When you point this out to them in one form or another, they’ll invariably complain about how you’re mean and disrespectful.
You can call it whatever you want, but in the end, they’re just dumb and unaware of it.
I can verify that Friel’s premise applies to The Skeptical Environmentalist as well. Back in 2002, I had a group of undergraduates fact-check Lomborg’s footnotes as a class project, just to see if the numbers he used were actually in the footnotes he cited.
The upshot: in analysis of over 600 footnotes, over half had a serious problem. In some cases, the number Lomborg cited in his book was not found in his sources. At best, he sloppily miscited his source; at worst, the data were just made up.
Malgorzata, I don’t know how it is in Poland, but in Denmark, titles actually have some kind of meaning, and of the three titles you bestowed upon Lomborg, none of them fit.
Lomborg is a political scientist – not a statistician (a specific education or a specific job title), a professor (a specific job title), nor a scientist (unless you consider social science science – something which it isn’t generally considered in Denmark).
OK, I’ll perhaps grant you professor, since he is an adjunct professor, though those two titles are not equivalent in Denmark. Of course, he is an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School, which doesn’t teach science.
A suggestion to the question you are all pondering: how about acting like actual adults, providing reasoned discussion, and not swearing and screaming and stamping your little feet when someone disagrees?
Let me show you how irritating this is. In his attempt at a rational argument negen links to a wikipedia entry about the demographics of the European Union. However, Lomborg is talking about Europe. A bit bigger. For a start the WHO report Lomborg uses includes Russia & the East block. Further, he’s talking about all Europeans, not just the elderly.
But it get’s better. People keep saying that Keatinge doesn’t support Lomborg’s claim that higher temperatures mean far fewer cold deaths and no where near as great an increase in heat deaths. That’s in the report, plain and simple.
Now the worst, on this basis, you could convict Lomborg of is that scaling the Keatinge paper to all Europeans. But what, by your standards, could I convict you of? Well, by your standards you’re liars and idiots and morons and trolls, probably in the pay of Al Gore, utterly irredemable.
By your standards, such as they are. Not by mine.
That’s been my point all along; even if every one of the assertions that you grudgingly throw out at random were 100% accurate – and we have just seen this isn’t so – it would not make a damn bit of difference; you’d still not be arguing as rational human beings, but as fearful zealots.
Incidentally, I don’t think of myself as any sort of “freethinking hero”. I’m simply a man who enjoys doing his own thinking, and prefers one mistake made on his own to a hundred truths taken on faith, because I can still correct the former, whereas the latter destroys your ability to distinguish.
I would say in this case that the false flag definition for concern trolling totally applies to these kinds of drive by trollings. The Lomborg shills are going on about how they are the rational ones, and we are zealots. So basically, they are claiming that they are rationalists and “have concerns.” It’s concern trolling, always has been.
And yeah, we aren’t exactly new to Lomborg’s crazy hat lies. For example, we have Lomborg vs. Krugman:
http://vodpod.com/watch/2692022-lomborg-vs-krugman
Lomborg is a total joke. And his shills are just as pathetic. They are “rationalists” and they are “very concerned.”
Wow. This sounds so familiar.
What Howard Friel did with Lomborg’s references is exactly what World War II historian Richard J. Evans did with Holocaust denier David Irving’s references as an expert witness for the defense of Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt against David Irving’s libel lawsuit in London. Evans found exactly the same thing for Irving as Friel did for Lomborg, namely that most references were either misrepresented or didn’t support what Irving claimed or that Irving left critical qualifiers out:
http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.com/en/trial/defense/evans
I guess cranks of all stripes use the same sorts of tactics when evaluating the relevant scholarly literature. (No, I’m not saying that Lomborg is a Holocaust denier or Nazi sympathizer, only that he uses the same deceptive tactics as David Irving to evaluate the scientific literature.)
In any case, that’s how Deborah Lipstadt won her libel case against Irving in the U.K.a, by having her experts show clearly a pattern of misrepresenting and cherry picking sources by Irving.
Perhaps you should ponder starting to actually offer any evidence for your claims, instead of just making them? Maybe you should admit when you’re shown to be wrong, and not just keep making the same claims?
A debate is a two-way street, and you haven’t been part of it.
One example – I have repeatedly explained to you that the Danish Ministry of Technology and Science couldn’t overturn the decision of the committees, yet you kept repeating the claim. I even explained to you what had happened, but you still persisted in making the same claims.
How am I supposed to debate with that?
Also, you seem to believe that political appointed people in a ministry are actually better arbitrators of scientific dishonesty than the people appointed to evaluate such – people appointed because of their scientific background, not because of political connections etc.
If you don’t realize the absurdity of this, how are we going to have any sort of meaningful discussion? We can’t.
Unlike your apparent impression, it’s not our job to be nice to your sensitive feelings. If you make absurd claims, answer evasively etc. then we will tell you so, in no uncertain terms.
I suppose I should say what my views are on the whole AGW thing. I accept the science of the IPCC and the journals, though I remain skeptical about models; I’ve seen them go spectacularly wrong too often.
That said, I find the various measures proposed to combat it cretinous, and think that there is no solution outside of more and better technology. Thus worrying about a rise of two point seven degrees in one hundred years seems ludicrous to me on the face of it. For this reason: long before that time we’ll either have the technology to crush the problem with ease, or – which, sadly, is far more likely – we will have been cast back into a new Dark Age of war and strife. In the meantime, as Phillip Stott points out, the environmental problem is two billion people in abject poverty, and future generations will judge us on whether we sorted that problem.
Kristjan, I responded to your claims beforehand. You claimed, without any evidence I can see, that the commitee that attacked Lomborg was careful and scrupulous, while the ministry that set above it it was nothing more than ignorant political appointees.
As regards “overturn”, I still addressed that. The Ministry said that the committee’s findings were a load of crap. You can quibble about whether or not that’s “overturning”, it still stands.
And even if your words were 100% accurate, you would still better address them to the screaming hysterics here.
The people from the ministry which made remarks about the decision of the committee where at the level where they were political appointed.
Have you even read the actual decision? Or have you only read second hand accounts of what it said? It was originally published in both Danish and English, so you are actually able to read it in the original version.
If you had read it, you would have seen that the very points raised by the ministry had been addressed in the report. They explained why they used the work of others, rather than doing their own replicating work.
It was not just some kind of personal attack as claimed by Lomborg’s supporters, repeating the claims of others, without letting Lomborg getting his say. Rather, the committees took a look at what the experts said about Lomborg’s claims, and what Lomborg had said in response. Based upon this material (and other), they made a decision.
Ironically, they found Lomborg not guilty of scientific dishonesty.
Also, the ministry is only set above it technically – they don’t have the jurisdiction to overturn their decisions. Much like the courts are under the Justice Department, yet the Justice Department doesn’t have the jurisdiction to overturn court rulings.
No, you cannot quibble about whether that’s overturning or not, since the ministry doesn’t have the jurisdiction to overturn rulings by the committees! It frequently happens that politicians and politically appointed people criticize court rulings, yet that doesn’t in any way overrule the court ruling.
This is not a trivial difference
And I submit you will be far better served here sticking to the topic, the evidence and the facts (where you are falling woefully short) than bleating about the tone or manor in which you or anyone else is addressed. Otherwise one might question the validity of your argument.
numbcake #142,
just read the Keating et al paper that Lomborg used as reference to make his claim before you write further stupidities :
In any case, including Russia and all age groups is not going to change the fact that Lomborg made a grossly eroneous claim based on the Keating et al paper. That paper gives no data on Russia (a country with a particularly cold winter) nor does it give any data on other age groups (but we can only suppose that cold related mortality is much smaller than for the elderly), so it is really questionable how Lomborg arrives at TEN times the amount of deaths the paper seems to indicate.
This example (which YOU have chosen) is exactly repesentative of the kind of sloppy thinking and misrepresentation of scientific findings which Fiel accuses Lomborg of.
Lomborg’s classic concern trolling is being reflected totally in his shills.
“I’m an environmentalist, but I’m so concerned about [Poverty] that I don’t think we should do anything about the environment!”
“I’m in favor of green energy, but I’m so concerned that we need more research that I don’t think we should set emissions targets or place financial incentives that would provide incentives for private industry to do any of that research!”
As Krugman said with his comical trouncing of Lomborg, this is not sincere. Anyone who genuinely thought that we needed to do more research would be all over Cap-n-Trade like stink on shit in order to leverage the private sector’s considerable research budget into providing some of that needed research. Lomborg’s expression of concern is fake. As in “not genuine.” And it is worth fuck all.
very good…
It’s fine to be skeptical… but to dismiss them altogether would be foolish in the absence of any model that more accurately or better fits the data. Too many models by too many scientists working independently say too much of the same thing, without much in the way of dissenting models that fit the data, to simply dismiss them altogether as a result of a few that can be seen as “questionable”.
.
I’d welcome a debate about the efficacy of currently proposed measures… many of them I disagree with… but a statement that begins with “there is no solution outside of” is discarded by me immediately as myopic and prejudicial. I highly doubt you have the knowledge, background, or competence in the field to assert any solution as singularly and uniquely viable.
And speaking of myopic…
IOW, fuck you all, I’ll be long gone before this has any effect on me.
False dichotomy anyone? You’re just chock full of fallacies, aren’t ya?
Mmmm… I think that’s a pretty baseless assertion… I think it’s just as likely that future generations will be far too consumed with the mass destruction of coastal cities and famine associated with drastic climate change that all this new technology we’ve just been waiting around for never properly addressed…
Yawn, arrogant nameless idjit not gone yet, and repeating himself like the fool he is? Boring. What part of you are wrong don’t you understand? Anything to do with real science from the looks of it.
numcake #146,
1. Incoherence:
2. 100% Dogma, 0% facts:
3. Stupidity AND Dogma, still no evidence based arguments:
4. name dropping AND stupidity, still no evidence based arguments:
Incoherence, dogma, stupidity, name dropping, and zero evidence based arguments : the building blocks of all anti-science opinions.
To take it in reverse order, I’ll start with Celtic – though I’ll skip over his still present moments of stupidity and pointless nastiness.
My so called “false dichotomy” is nothing of the sort. It’s a fact easily verifiable that technological progress isn’t just increasing, but increasing exponentially. In other words the tech difference between year 2001 and 2101 will be far greater than that between 1901 and 2001.
Unless, of course, catastrophe and war throws us back into a new Dark Age. Which is all too likely.
You’re also wrong about famines, btw. Famines are man made, the result of disastrous political policies. The worst famine in human history, the one where thirty million were starved to death was the result of deliberate policy, that of Mao.
As regards my comment that there’s no, that is absolutely no solution outside of technological advance, that is because the alternatives are all political, and – even worse – transnational. But transnational initiatives are a pathetic joke, and everyone knows it. To take it at its most blunt, what conceivable obligation could be more sacred than that of “Never again!” ?
But we all know “never again” is a joke. On average it happens “again” twice a decade. Consider Rwanda. If the international community can’t get a pack of machete wielding savages from violating its most sacred obligation, what are the chances of it getting China to lay off the ol’ carbon emissions?
To ask the question is to answer it.
But new energy techniques, or, even better, some highly efficient way of carbon capture – now that could be developed by smart people anywhere and would benefit all mankind. That’s a possibility I could see happening.
Okay, let me state exactly what I mean by skeptical in this case. I mean that a computer model is nothing more than a hypothesis. A complex hypothesis, a highly specific hypothesis, a hypothesis that could not be so formulated without those tools – but a hypthothesis nonetheless. Nothing more. So I maintain that any model purporting to forecast the weather 100 years from now should have, say, a very good track record of no less than ten years. Of having its predictions fulfilled.
negen it was you, not Keatinge (with an e, btw) who referenced the EU instead of Europe. You did that. Now, as I’ve said, by your standards this failure makes you a liar etc., though not by mine.
Here’s the beautiful, brilliant irony of it all: while you curse and scream at me, you still count on my morality being higher that yours, so that you’ll get away with this.
(BTW, when you do include Russia and the rest of it, you do end up with the 1.5 million)
Now, moving on to Kristjan, in reverse order:
I’m sorry, but I am going to have to ask you to provide some evidence for that. The reason is as follows: I’ve reviewed this case in all manner of publications, right down to the official Cambridge Univerity’s comments and The Lancet and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and none of them mention this. On the other hand, it’s a pretty much universal rule of thumb that those who do the appointing are the ones with the final say. Finally, the ministry apparently produced a 70 page report taking the committee apart.
I have read the committee’s decision, and I must say I find it very poor. It routinely uses emotional language, and I can see why plenty of scientists were disgusted by it. I was particularly repulsed by them dragging in any old nonsense – including a nasty screed from Time – to prove their point. Much more importantly, I can say straight up that quite a few of their points have been shown to be nonsense. One is the claim that overpopulation is still a serious problem; in fact, demographic trends have taken a nosedive all over the world, and even the most fecund nations and peoples (e.g. the Islamic world) are seeing a decline. To take another example, the views on oil which – well, I don’t know what to make of the committee’s comments. They say that, yup, there’s a lot of it, and we can get a lot more from sources like shale and tar (there’s more in Canada in this form than in Saudi Arabia) – so why’s Lomborg wrong again? Much more importantly, this all falls under the heading of scientific criticism, not an accusation of dishonesty. Christ, in my own field, I know plenty of top notch researchers who’d get chucked out by these standards.
But, in closing, I’d just like to thank you Kristjan for, at least, providing a rational debate, hugely superior to the rest of this place.
negen, analyzing yourself, are you? Rather masturbatory – stop doing it in public. Meanwhile Nerd the Hysteric is still making unsubstantiated claims and throwing tantrums.
Jeez, Cimourdain, but you are a tedious ass. Every thread you get into, it’s the same obnoxious noise every time.
Ah, I taut I smelt a stoopid liberturd. That explains the arrogance, ignorance, arrogance, inability to grasp the point, arrogance, the need for the last word, and arrogance. Somebody has a ego problem. Seek professional help.
Knockgoats #110:
I know it’s not directed at me, but I have read it. Have you? (As you disagree with it, what is the best refutation of it that you recommend?) What’s more, I agree with it. I’m certainly open to believing otherwise, however, if the evidence is to the point.
Devon #119:
That’s what self-righteousness does to people. And, it seems, there is an orthodoxy in skepticism. The effect is that you aren’t allowed to be a skeptic unless you follow a specific orthodoxy.
By defintion, skepticism encourages questioning, checking, discussion, back and forth. And those who call themselves skeptics actually do that – but it seems that a large minority has formed a dogma. Not unusual if you consider how humans organize themselves. This dogma is not that difficult to dissolve, as long as it’s recognized.
No, we know what the evidence says, and in the absence of new evidence, we don’t continue to re question everything every day. Those whose minds fall for vague and inconclusive evidence are the ones with trouble. Like yourself, if you think Duesberg is anything other than piffle.
Cimourdain,
Only if you are really fucking stupid (such as you and Lomborg apparently) and assume that people of all ages die from cold in the same proportion as the elderly.
No, Keatinge’s paper is based on a study carried out in Finland, Baden-Württemberg, Netherlands, London, north Italy, and Athens. The 2003 death per million average refers to that part of Europe, which is approximately known as the EU. You are the one who assumes the results can be extrapolated to Russia (when Keatinge writes : People in cold regions of Europe take more effective protective measures against a standard degree of cold than people in warm regions,1 and in the cold regions mortality rises less steeply as temperature falls) because you seem to think that it’s going to make the number of death from cold in Europe closer to the ridiculous 1.5 million nonsense from Lomborg.
I’ve had enough of you. You really are dishonest. Goodbye.
Wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts
Why don’t you assholes go over to Deltoid and try to argue there? Afraid?
a little late, but since i keep seeing the same error made in this thread…
back to #22:
I saw a lot of substantive answers from Lomborg.
but you can’t post a single one, for some odd reason.
And I saw Friel being shown up for referencing WWF handouts as primary research literature!
irrelevant.
Friel is paying the price of publishing in hard-form, and getting caught out by the recent IPCC exposures.
again, irrelevant.
why?
What did Friel actually do? He analyzed Lomborgs references and found them misquoted and abused.
Citing, correctly, what the IPCC and WWF had to say at the time has fuck all to do with whether he was wrong in his analysis of Lomborg’s misusages and misquotings.
AGAIN, it does not matter WHAT the findings say, only whether or not they are quoted correctly in context. Lomborg has been show by multiple, (that means many, for you idiot-types) independent sources as having misused references, or even just made shit up on the fly entirely.
All Lomborg has done in his attack on Friel is put up spin and deflection from the FACT that he did indeed misquote many, many sources.
…and you gullible asswipes seem to have fallen for it, hook, line and sinker.
He is looking like a joke.
says the village idiot.
Pikemann Urge,
No, by definition, skepticism is an approach to accepting, rejecting, or suspending judgment on new information that requires the new information to be well supported by argument or evidence.
No, those who call themselves skeptics about AGW are similar to those who call themsselves skeptics about Evolution, or the billion year earth, or heliocentrism, or… just childish ignorant incoherent anti-science nutcases.
And these are not dogmas, but well established facts based on mountains of evidence denied only by victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect (such as yourself) who suffer from illusory superiority.
I’m certainly open to believing otherwise, however, if the evidence is to the point.
I find that hard to believe, given that there are literally thousands of published papers outlining exactly how HiV was isolated as a retrovirus, studied as to how exactly it manages to penetrate the immune system, shown how it causes immune system decay, and to this day, even more papers dealing with the latest attempts to fight the onset of AIDS via things like HiV entry inhibitors:
http://www.aidsrestherapy.com/content/2/1/7
frankly, you’re either very disingenuous, or very lazy, or both.
The effect is that you aren’t allowed to be a skeptic unless you follow a specific orthodoxy.
and yet, I will bet you five dollars that you will not be able to use this thread of evidence of your hypothesis.
because you, like most idiots, just like to pretend you know what you’re talking about.
You need to check yourself for Dunning-Kruger.
The “exponential increase of technology” is not “well documented,” it’s wishful thinking by the Geek Rapture proponents of the singularity.
“Technology” does not come in discreet levels. There is no meaningful numerical assignment possible, and thus no “exponent” can be derived. The Mayans had better concrete and hydraulics than their Spanish conquerors, allowing them to have bigger cities with more people i them. But they didn’t have steel or gunpowder and totally lost the war. Where were they on your technological exponential curve? Better sanitation, better housing, better food distribution, but no iron working and no wheel. Technology clearly does not rise uniformly in any sort of numeric fashion.
Further, technology is subject to hard limits. The speed of light obviously, but also materials science. No material can be denser than Neutronium or have a tensile strength higher than stabilized covalent bond. And even we are struggling within the wiggle room granted by the hard limits of physical reality, there is no guaranty that we will get any closer to those limits in any particular field of study within our lifetimes. Or even within the next thousand lifetimes.
The Standard Theory of physics is pretty good, and we have a lot of very smart people working on a Unified Field Theory. But there is a very real chance that none of them will succeed.
So if you have a looming catastrophe, it is grossly irresponsible to wait for science to come in on a white horse and save the day. Because it is entirely possible that science will not come up with a better solution than what is currently available before the crisis becomes unmanageable. And indeed, it is entirely possible that science will never come up with a better solution.
Vaccine production techniques have advanced a bit, but the basic vaccine administration theory is basically the same today as it was during Salk’s day. Waiting for a better Polio Vaccine to be developed would have condemned a lot of people to paralysis and death for no gain.
§34 of Bekendtgørelse af lov om forskningsrådgivning m.v. states the following:
Or translated into English: the decisions of the committees cannot be brought before another administrative authority.
First, let me as a Dane confirm that the translation of §34 in the comment above is correct.
Second, concerning the whole complaint against Lomborg, and the way it was treated by the ministry, I will refer to this site:
http://www.Lomborg-errors.dk/lomborgstory.htm
Third, concerning the melting of the Himalaya glaciers, it is interesting to note that on page 73 in the British version of Cool it!, Lomborg writes with reference to paragraph 3.4.1 of the 2007 IPCC report, WG II: “the simulations IPCC refers to do not see a complete reduction of glaciers by mid-century but rather a 60 % reduction”. The now infamous quote about the glaciers being gone by 2035 is in paragraph 10.6.2. of the same report. Why was Lomborg interested in quoting IPCC for the statement that only 60 % will be gone by mid-century? Because then he could say that there will be no problems with supplies of fresh water for many years to come. Why does Lomborg today stress the quote about glaciers being gone by 2035? Because then he can say that IPCC is not trustworthy (although he has previuosly used IPCC as a source on just that subject).
Fourth, it is extensively documented on my web site
http://www.Lomborg-errors.dk
that there are at least 500 flaws and errors in Lomborg´s books, which he has not corrected.
Lomborg´s rebuttal of Friel´s claims does not hold up, which will be seen by checking each subject by looking up the relevant pages on the Lomborg-errors web site.
negentropyeater #164
Ichthyic #166
I emphasized the important part of your statement. You aren’t an evidence based thinker, and nothing you have to say is of interest to us. Buzz off asshat.
“I have no doubt that antibiotics are doing a fine job and that we know a bucketload about Yersinia pestis. But does it cause plague? I don’t think so.”
Pikemann Urge,
It’s the precise description of what is happening to you.
Oh, boy, and HIV denialist. Fun times.
Kaare Fog, thanks for the verification of my translation. Also, as a fellow Dane, I’d like to thank you for the great work you’ve done in exposing the bad science of Lomborg.
For the rest of you – are you really surprised that someone who denies global warming is also a HIV denier? It’s classic crank magnetism at work.
Do you think some people mishear “you have a right to your opinion” as “your opinion is right”? That might explain some things.
Not really. What I find amusing is that they think we are interested in their unscientific opinions. Dunning-Kruger at work.
Oh, FFS, I should have known…
Oooh. Ouch. I’d almost care if you’d ever said anything of any real substance or that had any actual basis in fact. But you being you, it’s simply schoolyard blabber. I remain unaffected by your rapier’s wit!
Do you understand what a false dichotomy is? You presented only two possible outcomes for the future… there are far more possibilities than the simplistic two that you asserted… thus, false dichotomy. That technological progress is increasing has fuck-all to do with it.
Wait… so you provide one (questionable) example of man-made famine and this allows you to assert that all famine is thus man-made? You really can’t be that stupid… can you?
K… I think I’ve seen enough…
As to # 19: “Friel gets shredded in Lomborg´s response.”
I have now, more or less, checked all what Lomborg writes in his 27 page rebuttal. Unfortunately, I do not have Friel´s text, so I am unable to see if Lomborg refers to Friel´s text in a fair way.
In some cases, if Friel is cited correctly,Lomborg´s rebuttal is justified. In other cases, it is not justified.
First, it is not true that Lomborg has debunked the criticism in Scientific American. He has tried to write a rebuttal, but that rebuttal does not prove him right.
Second, it is not true that Lomborg “clearly documents and discusses the 0.7 % figure” on species extinction. See
http://www.Lomborg-errors.dk/chapter23.htm
Friel is right in pointing out that Lomborg tends to extrapolate current trends.
Lomborg´s rebuttal has on page 4: “In fact, all the numbers in this passage have the same source.” That is directly wrong, and what is more, Lomborg merges two data sets so that the trend in Africa appears more positive than it actually is. See
http://www.Lomborg-errors.dk/chapter5.htm
Page 11 of Lomborg´s rebuttal:
The 2003 heat wave was indeed the warmest ever recorded in Europe since 1780, so Lomborg is wrong. See note for page 16 in
http://www.Lomborg-errors.dk/coolitAchap2heat.htm
Lomborg defends himself by reference to Bosello et al. 2006. However, this source suffers from serious flaws, as explained in the link just referred to. In general, the allegations in that paper, and in Lomborg´s book, on the future changes in cold-related deaths, are speculative.
Concerning the melting away on the glacier ice on Kilimanjaro, the only certain fact is that the ice is nearly gone now. The cause for this is disputed, and either Al Gore or Lomborg may be right or wrong. See
http://www.Lomborg-errors.dk/Kilimanjaro.htm
More points could be mentioned where Lomborg is also wrong.
It may be that Friel is incorrect in his criticism on a number of points. I cannot judge that without having seen his book.
On the Lomborg-errors web site, I have listed a total of about 500 flaws and errors in Lomborg´s two books (and it is obvious that more could be found). Lomborg´s attempt to write a rebuttal to Friel does not affect any of these 500 flaws and errors. Therefore, the conclusion is unchanged that Lomborg´s books are full of errors, many of which are demonstrably deliberate.
How come when AGW Denialists respond to something by saying “No it isn’t!” they are “shredding their detractors,” but when their detractors respond to something they said it’s a “baseless accusation?”
THey laughed at Wegener. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
After reading Lomborg’s response I kind of get the impression that Friel didn’t actually read any of his books.
And how can one check the veracity of the footnotes without knowing what the text being cited said? There goes your credibility. Only liars and bullshitters would say something that stoopid. Or did the arrogant liberturd morph again?
I attended a Lomborg presentation a few years ago, and I asked him about his “species extinction is a problem, not a catastrophe” claim and whether he still stood by it. He did. So I asked him about ocean overexploitation, biodiversity loss, and “fishing down the food web,” and he said: “Fishing down the food web just means removing the oldest fish.” That’s when I first saw the living face of Dunning-Kruger.
I have no doubt that HIV inhibitors etc. are doing a fine job. And I have no doubt we know a bucketload about HIV. But does it cause AIDS? No. I don’t think so.
*headesk*
if it didn’t cause AIDS, we would see NO EFFECT of a reduction in HiV penetration ability on the development of AIDS.
we do, so just with that ONE PAPER, it becomes clear you are living in total, utter, denial.
probably too much cognitive dissonance in your diet.
Lomborg´s attempt to write a rebuttal to Friel does not affect any of these 500 flaws and errors.
*applause*
Woot! someone gets it!
Lomborg is doing nothing but hand waving.
“Fishing down the food web just means removing the oldest fish.”
FFS!
he actually said that?
what a fucking maroon.
I wonder if he understands the term “keystone species”.
Kristjan Wager #175
I hope you are not talking about me. What gives you the impression that I am a GW denier? Or even an AGW denier? Where did I say that?
But for the record: yes, I deny that AIDS is caused by a microbial agent, HIV or otherwise.
My guess, and it’s only a guess based upon his track record, is that even if he did understand the term, which is doubtful, he simply doesn’t care.
Also, he probably doesn’t understand “trophic level,” as in: “fishing down the food web means removing entire trophic levels from the ecosystem.”
And it’s clear that he has no interest in learning.
“The oceans are fine,” is what Lomborg told me.
And you scream to a blog about science and rationalism that you are delusional unscientific fool. Not very smart if you want any attention paid to your ideas. You are an acknowledged crank/crackpot.
on what grounds?
Frank T. says, “The “exponential increase of technology” is not “well documented,” it’s wishful thinking by the Geek Rapture proponents of the singularity.”
Bullshit! Whether you take Moore’s Law or the proliferation of materials, chemical compounds, drugs, etc. They all rise exponentially. That has nothing to do with any sort of “signularity” woo.
Take the number of yearly patent applications since 1840–an exponential fit gives a doubling time of about 27 years and an R-squared of .78, not a bad fit for noisy data. So, methinks you are full of beer and beans.
“The oceans are fine,” is what Lomborg told me.
kick him in the shins for me next time you see him, eh?
he can sue me for damages.
Rev. BigDumbChimp: I guess it’s not good form to go too off-topic – but seeing as we already have, I’ll answer, but will try to be as brief as humanly possible:
– Evidence showing problems if HIV is the cause (i.e. a negative ontology)
– Evidence showing that lifestyle is a key factor without resorting to HIV (i.e. a positive ontology which complements the first case)
– Peripheral evidence, showing questionable anecdotes and scientific studies and papers
– Strong evidence showing toxicity of early therapies
– Patient testimonies showing illness after taking treatments, and improving health after stopping treatments; also, more detailed examination of AIDS patients who died
– Circumstantial evidence showing dishonesty among AIDS researchers
I think it’s not a good idea to put detailed notes etc. on someone’s blog comments (I haven’t organized them very well, either). Which is why here is not the place to expand on it.
Next time PZ has an open thread, I’m petitioning for a 500 character limit per post; and every post after the first one must be preceded by posts from at least two other persons.
@195: either support your claims or don’t bother to make them.
Pikemann Urge | February 26, 2010 3:53 AM:
I put your post in a file called “pikeman_urge_500” and used the standard unix utility wc to count the number of characters in it.
It’s somewhat in excess of your proposed limit.
I’ll try to make this brief.
Peter Duesberg? wrong, wrong, wrong.
Even Medical Hypothesis rejects his “work”.
My apologies. I fumbled the name of the journal. It was Medical Hypotheses.
llewelly #197
Which isn’t a problem because there is no limit. Yet.
Oh, and aidstruth.org? I do read bits of it anyway. Not only do I not appreciate the snide tone that site often has, but I wonder about any site or journal with the word ‘truth’ in it. You know, like, the ‘truth’ about Jesus; the ‘real’ Jesus (because only ours is the ‘real’ one); etc.
You mention evidence a lot up there. Could you provide a link to the evidence in those points you mention above. Start with a couple.
Next time PZ has an open thread, I’m petitioning for a 500 character limit per post; and every post after the first one must be preceded by posts from at least two other persons.
I will let other people who have better knowledge about the subject debate you on your points. But, the comment about an open thread? You have not been paying attention to this blog, have you?
As for telling PZ how to operate his blog? Once more, you really do not pay much attention to this blog. PZ does not take kindly to demands.
You don’t like it? Start your own blog.
Yawn, another conspiracy theorist. Dime a dozen. Anecdotal (read worthless) evidence. Unproven lying accusations. Doesn’t matter what topic, if I see such things, I think whackaloon. Because that is invariably the case.
Rev. BigDumbChimp, According to Duesberg, the placebo-controlled trials of AZT were compromised. I am not sure of anywhere (e.g. like Nature or Scientific American) that this has been written about (hence no URL, but see ‘AZT – Cause for Concern’, 1992, by Channel 4 in the UK). But what apparently happened was that placebo patients badly wanted the new drug (for obvious reasons). They could tell, by taste, what the placebos were and what the AZT pills were. So the trial pretty much broke down – despite being reported as successful.
You can look up the origins of AZT. See: Burroughs Wellcome, Jeremy Horwitz (Detroit Cancer Foundation). But this newspaper article makes it all so la-dee-da:
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/20/us/a-failure-led-to-drug-against-aids.html
Further investigation may lead to a different perspective than the one presented in the article.
Janine, I am not sure why you think I am making demands on PZ. However, it’s been a while since I’ve read Pharyngula.
Nerd of Redhead, conspiracies are not required here. Perhaps people abused their connections, but that is not conspiracy.
Then you are referring to impeached testimony. Duesberg has been thoroughly refuted. Don’t mention him again if you wish to be taken seriously. Instead, refer to the peer reviewed scientific literature. Try some real evidence, no cocked up bullshit.
No, you claimed the essence of a conspiracy. Either put up valid and conclusive information, or shut the fuck up as a false conspiracy theorist. Welcome to real science, where bullshitting isn’t allowed.
Suit yourself. You can download that 1992 AZT doco here if it interests you:
http://www.immunity.org.uk/Videos/AZT_Cause_for_Concern.htm
Yawn, what a loser Pikemann Urge is. He doesn’t understand the concept of the peer reviewed scientific literature. What a loser. ’92 is old history. Try something recent…
I’m not sure that AZT is recommended anymore. Secondly, if AZT was toxic in ’92, it’s toxic today.