[cdn-nucl-l] Hal Lewis' resignation from American Physical Society---climate change "incontrovertible"

["Jerry Cuttler" <jerrycuttler@rogers.com>]

Yes I heard about this reversal. 

Is Lomborg a renowed physics scientist? 

I thought he's a political "scientist" and statistics expert.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg

 

Jerry

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Academic career

Lomborg spent a year as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned an M.A. degree in political science at the University of Aarhus in 1991, and a Ph.D. degree in political science at the University of Copenhagen in 1994.

He lectured in statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus as an assistant professor (1994–1996) and associate professor (1997–2005). He left the university in February 2005 and in May of that year became an Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School.

Early in his career his professional areas of interest lay in the simulation of strategies in collective action dilemmas, simulation of party behavior in proportional voting systems, and the use of surveys in public administration. In 1996, Lomborg's paper, "Nucleus and Shield: Evolution of Social Structure in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma", was published in the academic journal, American Sociological Review.^[5]

Later Lomborg's interests shifted to the use of statistics in the environmental arena. His most famous book in this area is The Skeptical Environmentalist, whose English translation was published as a work in environmental economics by Cambridge University Press in 2001. He later edited Global Crises, Global Solutions, which presented the first conclusions of the Copenhagen Consensus, published in 2004 by the Cambridge University Press. In 2007, he authored a book entitled Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming.

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----- Original Message -----

From: Adam McLean

To: 'Canadian Nuclear Discussion List'

Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2010 9:40 AM

Subject: RE: [cdn-nucl-l] Hal Lewis' resignation from American Physical Society---climate change "incontrovertible"

Why didn’t you post this piece of news – another noted anti-climate-change scientist reversing his stance - when it came out, Jerry?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100831/sc_yblog_upshot/noted-anti-global-warming-scientist-reverses-course

 

All the best,

Adam

(Proud APS member)

 

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Noted anti-global-warming scientist reverses course

By Brett Michael Dykes

Tue Aug 31, 2:17 pm ET

 

With scientific data piling up showing that the world has reached its hottest-ever point in recorded history, global-warming skeptics are facing a high-profile defection from their ranks. Bjorn Lomborg, author of the influential tract "The Skeptical Environmentalist," has reversed course on the urgency of global warming, and is now calling for action on "a challenge humanity must confront."

 

Lomborg, a Danish academic, had previously downplayed the risk of acute climate change. A former member of Greenpeace, he was a vocal critic of the Kyoto Protocol -- a global U.N. treaty to cut carbon emissions that the United States refused to ratify -- as well as numerous other environmental causes.

 

"The Skeptical Environmentalist," published in 2001, argued that many key preoccupations of the environmental movement, including pollution control and biodiversity, were either overblown as threats or amenable to relatively simple technological fixes. Lomborg argued that the governments spending billions to curb carbon emissions would be better off diverting those resources to initiatives such as AIDS research, anti-malaria programs and other kinds of humanitarian aid.

 

Lomborg's essential argument was: Yes, global warming is real and human behavior is the main reason for it, but the world has far more important things to worry about.

 

Oh, how times have changed.

 

In a book to be published this year, Lomborg calls global warming "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and calls for the world's governments to invest tens of billions of dollars annually to fight climate change.

 

Lomborg's former foes in the environmental movement are so far unimpressed by news of his conversion. Calling him a "shrewd self-promoter," Grist.org's Jonathan Hiskes marveled at Lomborg's ability to "play the media" in simply "adopting a position already held by millions of sensible people." And Friends of the Earth climate campaigner Mike Childs told the U.K. Guardian, "It appears that the self-styled skeptical environmentalist is beginning to become less skeptical as he enters middle age."