En ubelejlig sandhed om Al Gore

Berlingske Magasin promoverer i sin mandagsudgave Al Gore’s nye film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ om ‘drivhuseffekten’.

På spørgsmålet om, hvad der har ændret sig, siden Bjørn Lomborg var på Time Magazines liste over verdens 100 vigtigste personer, og hvor det nu er Gore der er på listen, svarer Gore (der er kendt for at have udtalt, at det er ham, der har opfundet Internet):

“Jeg vil ikke skabe kontrovers i Danmark, men det tog det videnskabelige miljø et stykke tid rent faktisk at læse og dissekere Lomborgs værk, og da de havde gjort det, var konklusionen, at det er grinagtigt. Det tages ikke længere seriøst.”

Det er interessant, fordi Daily Ablution netop har kommenteret en yderst ensidig artikel i The Independent om Bjørn Lomborg.

Scott Burgess skriver blandt andet:

“However, science writer Matt Ridley, holder of a doctorate in zoology from Oxford, has – and he calls Mr. Lomborg’s work “brilliant and powerful“. Lewis Wolpert – professor of biology at University College London and Fellow of the Royal Society – concurs, calling it “essential reading” which “provides understanding of the problems, the risks and the solutions.”

The Independent påstår, at Bjørn Lomborgs bog ikke er peer-reviewed:
“Yes,  despite Mr. Hari’s smear, the book was itself peer-reviewed by Cambridge University Press, as Chris Harrison of the publishing division confirms (PDF):

“As a University Press, we insist on a peer review process for every book we publish. It has become part of the anti-Lomborg folklore that his book bypassed the usual Cambridge peer review process and was cynically spirited through the system by an ignorant social science editor. This is a charge that has been repeated in many of the public and private attacks on the press, and it is unfounded. Indeed, The Skeptical Environmentalist would never have been published by Cambridge had it not been for peer review.”

As it happens, Cambridge, anticipating controversy, went out of its way to perform an exceptionally rigorous peer review:

“Indeed, of the four referees who looked at the English translation of a substantial part of Lomborg’s original Danish script, three – all from top-ranking environmental studies departments – were chosen from the list used by my colleagues to advise on our environmental science publishing programme rather than from my usual list of social science referees. One was a climate scientist; one was a specialist in biodiversity and sustainable development and one an economist with an expertise on the economics of climate change who was also an IPCC reviewer. Only one of the four reviewers was from a ‘pure’ economics department.”

Either Mr. Hari is ignorant of this, or he’s simply lying. Neither possibility does much for the credibility of his position.”
Det samme kan man vel sige om Gore – enten er han lige så dum, som han tilsyneladende altid har været, eller også lyver han.

Det her er også meget grinagtigt Mr. Gore:

“Mr. Hari seems not to have done so, accusing Mr. Lomborg of “calling for clean drinking water while arguing that we should do nothing about run-away global warming“.Of course, Mr. Lomborg does nothing of the sort. Instead, recognising that there will be tradeoffs in the drive to reduce emissions (i.e., that it will cost an exhorbitant amount to do so), he proposes as optimal a reduction of about 6% of current emissions, increasing to 10% by 2100 (Skeptical Environmentalist, page 307). According to Yale environmental economist William Nordhaus (who arrived at this scenario), this would result in a temperature increase slightly less than that expected under Kyoto.So, far from “junking the whole idea of restraint and opting for climatic anarchy” – as Mr. Hari accuses Mr. Lomborg of doing – the latter is actually advocating something believed to be more effective than the hallowed Kyoto Protocol.”

For mig at se, har Al Gore ikke læst Bjørn Lomborgs bog, og han aner ikke, hvad der står i den, og har end ikke gjort sig den ulejlighed bare at få den refereret. Journalisten, der selv bringer Lomborg på banen, agerer bare som ‘mikrofonholder’, han ved åbenbart selv intet om, hvad Lomborg har skrevet.

Ifølge Daily Ablution vil Bjørn Lomborg svare på artiklen i The Independent. Al Gore virker så useriøs at det ikke kan betale sig med ham.