Bjorn Lomborg - Performance Artist - Energy Bulletin

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GET ME CENTRAL CASTING: For those of you who weren’t there at the beginning, a little historical context: back in the summer of 2001, a heretofore unknown and little-published Danish statistician made a huge media splash with the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. The author, Bjorn Lomborg, was as mediagenic as he could be: , a good-looking, tall, blond, politically-left, gay, vegetarian, and to top it all off, a self-described former member of Greenpeace. Lomborg argued that we had been misled by the scientific community and environmental organizations into thinking that the threats to the global environment were far worse than the “facts” justified. His critique was especially aimed at the ever-growing consensus about the dangers posed by global warming. He never flat-out denied the existence of global warming, but the media were quick to anoint him as the leading global warming skeptic because he claimed that there were far more urgent environmental problems than global warming.

IT’S ALL IN THE FRAME: How you frame a story makes a great deal of difference in how successful you can be in getting the media to pick up your story and repeat it. Lomborg played to one of the classical frames in the environmental arena, the former environmentalist who had “seen the light,” going through a conversion experience to become a truth-teller whom we should trust even more. (The ur-model for this frame is Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.)

Lomborg claimed to have been a supporter of Greenpeace, although he has never documented this claim. Nonetheless, the claim positioned Lomborg to execute his first back-flip, joining a small group of similar apostates who had parlayed experience in the environmental world as a credential for attacking their former colleagues and organizations. (Greenpeace has been an especially potent starting-point. Patrick Moore, who was with Greenpeace Canada. in the early 1970s, was one of the first to demonstrate the value of executing the back-flip, becoming a well-paid consultant for the nuclear power industry and the timber industry..)

The scientific community has long struggled with how to handle attacks in the media on scientific findings, a weakness that the oil and coal industries have exploited to the hilt since the early 1990s. And in 2001, it took months for the scientific community to respond to the media onslaught which Lomborg unleashed, but when it came, the criticism was harsh and unrelenting. Scientific American weighed in with 4 major articles. on Lomborg’s errors, mistakes, and omissions on global warming, energy, population, and bioidiversity, entitled “Misleading Math about the Earth: Science defends itself against The Skeptical Inquirer.” Nature published an editorial. criticizing the book.

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http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-09-03/bjorn-lomborg-performance-artist-extraordinaire

the title of one of SI's articles, referring to the Skeptical Enquirer, whereas the article cited uses the term "skeptical environmentalist". The Skeptical Enquirer is a magazine devoted to debunking claims of para-normal events (haunts, if you will), and being reality based, accepts the science on climate change.