Lomborg Makes It Official

Bjørn Lomborg's  assistant emailed me this morning to confirm that Mr. Lomborg no longer wished to have an entry on the Heartland Institute expert list:

Dear M.J.Murphy, 

Thank you for your email pointing out to the affiliation problem. 

As Lomborg is not affiliated with the Heartland Institute, we asked them to take Lomborg off from their list.

On behalf of Bjorn Lomborg
Best wishes,

Zsuzsa Horvath

Personal Assistant
www.lomborg.com
Twitter: @bjornlomborg
Facebook: www.facebook.com/bjornlomborg

Some background here and here, if you haven't been following.

Bjørn Lomborg Disses Deniers?

Although neither the folks at the Heartland Institute nor Mr. Lomborg have confirmed Mr. Lomborg's withdrawal from the institute's Expert List, sometime over the course of the last three or four days his entry was indeed deleted from that list .  This may or may not have been due to my efforts, outlined here and here. Naturally, given Mr. Lomborg's centrality to the AGW debate, I made several attempts to contact him.  Though none of these messages were replied to, he was was certainly made aware of the institute's billboard campaign.

I would note that Mr. Lomborg previously quit the board of Energy and Environment over their stance re global warming.

h/t John Mashey.

Denier Defunded

The much-criticised author and climate policy sceptic Bjorn Lomborg has told the Ecologist he is the victim of a vendetta after his funding was cut by the Danish government.

Bjorn's complaints ring hollow; he has been criticized for several years by players from all across Denmark's political spectrum.

Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen On The E&E Vs. RealClimate Lawsuit

1) Benny is presumably Benny Peiser.
2) The Lomborg ref is to the fact that he quit the E&E editorial Board last year.
3) To those who think Bill Hughes was not threatening legal action in his original email, well I think this shows that he was, doesn't it?
4) Image should look better if you click on it.

PS. Source is ClimateSceptic Mailing List.

Bjørn Lomborg, Jim Skea Quit E&E Over Global Warming

Of course, Energy and Environment is the publication of last-resort for climate change deniers: if you can't place your paper anywhere else, they'll amost certainly take it--peer-reviewed, or not, depending on your preference. Jim Skea is Research Director of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC); Bjorn Lomborg is, well, Bjorn Lomborg , author of "Cool it" and other works sceptical of the claims behind AGW.

Not sceptical enough for E&E, though; it turns out both Lomborg and Skea have recanted their associations with the magazine. From Sonja A Boehmer-Christiansen of the Climatesceptics mailing-list:

Two of my editorial board have resigned over E&E taking too strong a position on the climate science debate (Lomborg and Skea, both with much public exposure...

That message was from back in July. It was confirmed by this slightly more cryptic message from yesterday:

Lomborg has resigned from his (inactive) role as an editorial board member of E&E and explained that he could be closely associated with the sceptics. As far as I know, remembering his old ideas, he represents no real challenge to anybody since his alternative policies neither threaten or encourage anybody..the money is just not forthcoming as there are few links from his policy suggestions to the profit motive, or technological innovation, or political power.

I think this should read "could NOT be closely associated", but the message is clear in any case. Lomborg (and, I suppose, Skea) don't want to be associated with the denialist crowd anymore.

So there you have it.

Bjørn Lomborg To Lose State Funding?

Conservative Party climate spokesman Per Ørum Jørgensen said the government should consider if it was paying for Lomborg to go to Greenland and tell people there that it was fine not to support a climate agreement at the conference in Copenhagen.

Jørgensen was referring to Lomborg’s trip to Greenland in August when he praised the country’s stance that if a climate deal did not allow developing nations to advance industrially it would not support it.

Lomborg has been providing the Denialist community with pseudo-science talking points for years now. My favorite is probably here, where he claims that things will work out fine for the polar bear if it only learns to to evolve backwards.

Bjorn Lomborg Recants AGW Skepticism

And for all the global warming skeptics out there, Lomborg has a message in the FT: “the basic scientific questions [on climate change] have been answered pretty unequivocally,' and he now says of fighting global warming, “It’s incredibly important. We need a global deal on the climate.”

Mind you, he's still pushing crazy geoengineering solutions which (other than my carbopult idea), likely won't work.

In Search Of "The Center" In The Climate Change Debate

Is Lomborg a tool of the Right? Does Newt Gingrich deserve Big Kudos or at most a pat on the bum for acknowledging the existence of AGW? Gristmiller Dave Roberts and N.Y. Times Journalist hash it out.

Sorry, I'm sport's bar blogging and trying to add words to my novel. That's it for now. (Good read through the third link, though)

Lomborg Reviewed

Bjørn Lomborg made his name with The Skeptical Environmentalist, a 2001 book in which he challenged some of the conventional wisdom behind the theory of anthropogenic global warming. Now Lomborg is back with a follow-up entitled "Cool It", which gets an unflattering review here. Elsewhere in Salon, Lomborg is interviewed.

I don't really have time to get into this today, but the interview is pretty tough-minded, especially the parts where interviewer Kevin Berger presses him over the fate of the polar bear and Lomborg's contention that the polar bear can survive by "evolving backwards":

That just seems so shortsighted, Bjørn. The report concludes: "Future challenges for conserving polar bears and their Arctic habitat will be greater than at any time in the past because of the rapid rate at which environmental change appears to be occurring." Now, you write that polar bears "will increasingly take up a lifestyle similar to that of brown bears." Then, in a footnote, you quote from the report: "The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment finds it likely that disappearing ice will make polar bears take up 'a terrestrial summer lifestyle similar to that of brown bears, from which they evolved.'" Are you saying that polar bears will be OK, that the species will survive if they evolve backward?

Yes, that's certainly how I read it.

But you edited the quote. The whole thing goes like this: "It is difficult to envisage the survival of polar bears as a species given a zero summer sea-ice scenario. Their only option would be a terrestrial summer lifestyle similar to that of brown bears, from which they evolved. In such a case, competition, risk of hybridization with brown bears and grizzly bears, and increased interactions with people would then number among the threats to polar bears." That sounds like the species faces much more dire chances to survive, wouldn't you say?

They're saying that it's difficult. Their only option would be this summer lifestyle. So this is what they can do. Yes, this is not going to be easy, but this is exactly what they can do.

Hard times for the polars bears, in other words, and Bjørn wishes 'em luck. Also some good stuff just following where Lomborg denies that comparing Al Gore to the Inquisition is alarmist.