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The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming Howard Friel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010, 272 pp. $20 (pb)
As the title suggests, Howard Friel's book is a severely negative criticism of the work of Bjorn Lomborg, particularly of Lomborg's two books: The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (2001) and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (2007). Lomborg does not contest the establishment view that global warming is taking place nor that it is caused in part by man's misuse of the environment, but he does not believe that global warming will result in great catastrophe for mankind. He feels that establishment scholars, and some political leaders, have greatly exaggerated potential harmful effects of global warming.
Friel directs particular attention to numerous errors in the footnotes in the books leading to larger criticisms of Lomborg's standards and quality of scholarship. In Chapter 14, "How Wrong Was Lomborg?" Friel concludes that Lomborg's work on climate change is an "assault on science" (p. 204), and that the success and acclaim that his books have achieved are an "assault on reason" (p. 204).
Corrections of error should be welcome throughout academia, and in this regard whatever corrections Friel has made are important contributions to scholarship. (In an Internet item with the title, "A Response by Bjorn Lomborg to Howard Friel's The Lomborg Deception," Lomborg presents a 27 page rebuttal, accusing Friel of making the...