Review: Howard Friel - The Lomborg Deception

The Lomborg Deception:Setting the Record Straight
About GlobalWarming By Howard Friel
Yale University Press, A$47.95

Bjørn Lomborg has come to prominence as the author of several books such as The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, which claim to give a calm and clear account of the state of the environment in contrast to the outrageous and exaggerated claims of environmentalists.  While many biologists and environmental scientists have been fairly dismissive of his claims, few rigorous counterarguments have been published. Howard Friel set out to follow the paper trail of Lomborg’s sources and has published his results in The Lomborg Deception.

The dust jacket describes Howard Friel as an “independent scholar” who has previously written works analysing the New York Times’ biased analysis of the Israel Palestine conflict and US foreign policy. This gives us some idea of what to expect with the current effort. At 270 pages, The Lomborg Deception is notably brief in comparison to the Lomborg corpus that Friel is trying to analyse.  At the outset it should be said that Friel has confined himself to a very narrow review of Lomborg’s work. Lomborg’s econometric efforts such as Global Crises, Global Solutions and Solutions for the World’s Biggest Problems: Costs and Benefits are totally ignored. Surprisingly, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World receives only a twenty page analysis. The rest of the book is exclusively concerned with Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming.  Friel has done an adequate job of following the citations in Cool It and reveals a fairly predictable structure to Lomborg’s approach. Lomborg will quote a news grabbing article in the popular press or well-publicised claims of environmentalists and then cite some scholarly research before drawing a contrary conclusion. By searching through Lomborg’s scholarly sources, Friel reveals a trend where Lomborg’s optimistic conclusions have been constructed from a collage of carefully selected quotes.

Friel indulges himself in some annoying forms of pedantry. Lomborg is criticised for describing some polar bear colonies as being “stable” when his source describes them as “stationary” (p26). Likewise we learn that a food security report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation uses the terminology “undernourished” and “malnourished”, but Lomborg uses “starving” (p56). This finicky obsession leads itself to absurdity when Friel begins a lengthy attack on Lomborg for referring to a diagram in the 4th IPCC report as “Figure 10.6.1” when in fact he was referring to Figure 10.61 of Section 10.6.1 (p117).

While this superficial approach does produce many examples of Lomborg’s selective quote mining, Friel’s lengthy excursions into the minutiae of academic referencing comes with a failure to refute the broader economic, statistical and ecological arguments that Lomborg is making.  A case in point is Friel’s treatment of a section of Cool It called “Death in Europe” (Lomborg, p15). While 35,000 West Europeans died in the August 2003 heatwave, Lomborg leads us to believe that media attention is ignoring a significantly larger number of deaths per year due to cold weather. Lomborg tells us in an end note that there are 207,000 heat related deaths in Europe per year in contrast with 1,480,000 cold related deaths. Friel’s only comment on this remarkable claim is to say that Lomborg’s reference, a report from the World Health Organisation, didn’t make mention of heat or cold related deaths. What should be obvious from Lomborg’s end note is that Lomborg has taken a mortality study of a small number of European sites (Keatinge: 2000) and estimated a European
figure based on the WHO report’s population figure. Keatinge et al. studied temperature and mortality statistics for a small number of European regions and compared fluctuations of the mortality rate. For each locale they obtained an ‘optimal temperature’ which corresponded to the temperature with the fewest deaths. Essentially, deaths that occurred on hotter days were classed as ‘heat related deaths’ and deaths that occurred on colder days were classed as ‘cold related deaths’.  The difficulty with this article is that it conflates seasonal mortality factors with temperature. There was a similar distribution of deaths in northern and southern Europe. There was nothing to suggest that cold weather was causing the deaths in the study, rather than seasonal factors such as seasonal illnesses, changes in diet, excessive alcohol consumption that are generally associated with heightened winter mortality. Lomborg accepts this uncritically and extrapolates that “in the past decade, Europe has lost about 15 million people to the cold” (Lomborg 2007: p17), but Friel fails to detect anything dubious in the argument.

While Friel raises some reasonable criticisms of Lomborg’s work, his underlying hostility against Lomborg and penchant for pedantic digressions won’t endear his work to Lomborg’s readers who are deeply suspicious of environmentalist apologetics. Friel’s fleeting discussion of The Skeptical Environmentalist and his failure to address Lomborg’s other econometric works give The Lomborg Deception an unfinished feel. Anyone looking for a comprehensive critique of Lomborg’s work would be better served by visiting the Lomborg Errors website.

References
Lomborg Errors: http://www.lomborg-errors.dk
Keatinge WR, Donaldson GC, Cordioli EA, Martinelli M, Kunst AE Mackenbach JP et al. (2000) Heat related mortality in warm and cold regions of Europe: observational study. British Medical Journal ;321(7262):670 (16 September), http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/321/7262/670
Bjørn Lomborg, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (New York, Knopf, 2007)

(https://www.skeptics.com.au/wp-content/uploads/magazine/The Skeptic Volume 30 (2010) No 3.pdf)