Environmental Engineering Reference
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to support his presumptions. For instance,
The Skeptical Environmentalist:
Measuring the Real State of the World
supports his premise that the environment is
not under threat and that environmentalists exaggerate by means of 2,930 endnotes.
It might be calculated to convince readers that someone with so many facts at his
fi nger tips must be very knowledgeable. However, Friel (
2010
: 46-65) undertaking
the laborious task of checking their validity found that many were either irrelevant
or did nothing to substantiate Lomborg's thesis. In the
Cool It
topic (Lomborg
2008
), which deals explicitly with climate change, this is even more diffi cult: the
system might well have been designed to confuse the reader. To give an example of
the endnote organisation, nine notes refer to the statement: 'Several coalitions of
states have set up regional climate-change initiatives, and …' . The endnote page in
question repeats the phrase 'several coalitions of states have set up', followed by
two source references in brackets (AP 2006a; Pew Research Center 2006) without
any further clarifi cation. Due to the profusion of notes, the system used obscures the
fact that certain assertions are unsupported.
The claim that 'Statements about the strong, ominous, and immediate conse-
quences of global warming are often wildly exaggerated, …' on page 8 of
Cool It
,
comes unsupported. It is no more than an unsubstantiated assertion. Earlier, he drew
attention to the fact that authors such as Al Gore as well as those of 'a raft of book
titles' are sincerely worried but, as he assures the reader, unnecessarily so (2008: 4).
The next paragraph adds that 'pundits [are] aiming to surpass each other in suggest-
ing that “we face societal collapse in just forty years” unless we “make massive and
draconian changes to the way we live”'. Notice that the sequence of these rather
emotive expressions, 'pundits', 'surpass', 'societal collapse' and culminating with
'draconian measures', builds up to the impression of an assault on people's daily
lives. He then followed this with the comment that
Time
did a special report on
global warming in 2006 with the 'scare story' on the front cover. These two words
serve to defl ate the menace implied by the accounts, creating the impression that the
threat of climate change is not real, no more than an exaggeration which can legiti-
mately be dismissed.
An instance where Lomborg sought to discredit Al Gore's comments regarding
the warming of Antarctica (2008: 65), concerns a reference to Pudsey et al. (
2006
):
Studies show that in the middle of our present interglacial age the Larsen area saw “wide-
spread ice shelf breakup”.
This quote is disingenuous, as Pudsey et al. wrote 'northern shelf area'. Originally,
the Larsen ice shelf consisted of a series of shelves which occupied three distinct
embayments along the coast. Larsen A, the smallest and most northern one, broke
up in 1995; then about a 100 km further south, the Larsen B ice shelf, which col-
lapsed most spectacularly in 2002; and another hundred and ten or so km further
south, the Larsen C and D, which are still intact. Now, the Larsen A shelf had been
ice-free some 4,000 years ago, but the Larsen B had been stable for the last
12,000 years. 'Collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf is unprecedented during the
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