Tweet

If the “skeptical” Dane Bjorn Lomborg had any standing with the White House it will quickly evaporate with the incoming Obama administration.

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen John P. Holdren as his science advisor - a man who was one of the most vocal critics of Lomborg’s famously inaccurate book The Skeptical Environmentalist”.

“The Skeptical Environmentalist” was so offensive to the scientific community that Scientific American published a ten-page evisceration authoured by four actual researchers, including Holdren.

Tweet

It must be sad for professional contrarians like Bjorn Lomborg when their well worn speaking points become more laughably wrong with each emerging study on the dangers of climate change.

That of course does not stop Lomborg from holding forth his increasingly loopy opinions at every opportunity - most recently in the Australian, where Lomborg hectors incoming President Obama for his shoddy understanding of climate science. (By the way, Lomborg’s training is in political science)

Lets get stared on pulling apart this polemic and the laundry list of errors and misinformation.

Lomborg starts by calling into question the link between tropical cyclones and climate change. The doubting Dane intones:

“It is simply wrong to say that storms are growing stronger every hurricane season… hurricanes across the world for the past year have been about as inactive as at any time since records began to be kept.”

Strange. That’s not what scientific community thinks.