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Summary: A book misunderstood by non-scholars (and a lot of them)...
Review: Lomborg was brave enugh to say " The King is naked"!
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Summary: Putting an author down the Memory Hole
Review: The facts are laid out by the author in superb and conversational style are impressive and well researched. More frighting is the reviews that just "happen" to have appeared since Jan 7th. This Author is being attacked by people with the lowest of brows. The book itself abounds with fascinating material on almost every page. For instance, how wonderful were primitive societies, extolled by environmentalists who constantly carp about industrialism? About half the children died before age 5. Stone Age skeletons from Africa suggest that life expectancy was about 21 years. Politically-correct types have long viewed India as morally superior to the West, yet in India, as recently as 1906, life expectancy was just 25 years! Even later, in 1930, life expectancy in China was only 24. Communism was a catastrophe in which more than 30 million starved to death, but since economic liberalization, Chinese food production soared, and as Lomborg notes, about half has come from comparatively small private plots.
These facts, along with cleaner water, less diseases, greater medicine, better understanding of the universe, greater comfort, and fuller lives which a modern industrial provides for man. Life is better, not worse, in every measureable catagory. The Chicken Littles can't STAND it!
Rating:
Summary: Reality Check
Review: Lomborg set out to prove that the environment was getting worse, as all the environmentalists say it is, and found that maybe it wasn't. This book presents the part of the story that environmentalists don't talk about. Read it to get a reality check, noting that Lomborg does not present the whole story either. The truth in cases like this is usually somewhere in the middle, so google up lots of reviews of it and make your own decision. Better, pick a couple of sample cases in the book and investigate the scientific literature on them.My take on this issue is that there are scientists crying "Wolf!", some of whom are correct and others who are not. It is unfortunate that the latter exist, but that does not mean the former don't. So much depends, for example, on what environment model and simulation parameters you use, and testing them empirically isn't always immediately possible. Individual cases are just going to have to be treated as such, but it is difficult to do so when Environmentalism becomes just as much a religion as Anti-Environmentalism or Capitalism. I give this book 5 stars for stirring up a necessary debate, not for presenting a comprehensive view.
Rating: 
Summary: Read the book, not the press releases
Review: It is unfortunate people are writing reviews for a book they have apparently not read. Instead, they have read the reactions including the shallow responses in the Scientific American and the findings Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (a group that sounds a bit Orwellian to me). For all the sturm und drang, Lomborg basically extends the arguments made by economist Julian Simon and others. Ironically, Lomborg began his work interested in refuting Simon. His analysis of the information led him to question the claims made by the environmental orthodoxy. The book itself is rather dry. Lomborg is a statistician by training and trade. The book (and the subsequent outcry by environmentalists), however, have become required reading for those interested in environmental science (as opposed to the post modern worship of Gaia, the planet earth). Lomborg basically uses existing data from established sources to make his case. While Lomborg falls short of making a case for a pollyanna view of the environment, he does present enough interesting data to raise some questions about some of the environmental community's articles of faith. The problem here is less Lomborg's data and methods, but a readership thoroughly convinced he is wrong before actually opening the book. Since the 1960s, there has been a steady beat on the drum of environmental doom. Most people find it difficult (if not impossible) to believe the air and water (at least in America) are actually cleaner today than in the recent past. Like any tome that challenges an orthodoxy, Lomborg is probably best read by those few remaining souls who are willing to keep an open mind. If nothing else the work of Lomborg, Simon and others demonstrate that debates over the environment are far from settled... much to the chagrin of some.
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Summary: Could something so wrong warrant so much attention?
Review: It is true this book has been highly criticized and condemned by world leading environmental scientists. What makes this book so interesting to me is that the criticisms and condemnations keep coming over a year after publication. To me, that's a sign the author is saying something very important and very controversial, and well worthy of my time to read it. **Please note that you can go to the author's website where he has rebuked every criticism made against him in the media.*** In the end I highly recommend this book, it is something guaranteed to be fought and debated over for decades to come and it will not go away as many commentators seem to wish so desparately for.
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Summary: They Can't Handle The Truth: Smear Campaign against Lomborg
Review: In a little over a year, a global smear campaign has attempted to discredit the Danish academic who had the audacity to question the hysterics and distortions of the modern day environmental movement. So threatened were the professional environmental pessimists in academia, NGOs and think tanks by Lomborg's arguments and ideas, they lashed out and viciously attacked him, seeking to destroy his credibility. The attack included a one-sided smear in the pages of Scientific American, protesters throwing pies at him at speaking engagements, and a website ... devoted to discrediting him.
The smear has now reached a new low, with the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) playing the 17th Century Catholic Church to Lomborg's heretical Galileo. The DCSD has written a 16-page book report denouncing the Dane for publishing a book that they say falls "within the concept of scientific dishonesty." But the Committees' report is nothing more than a rehashing of the complaints already lodged against Lomborg, complaints that are largely without merit or that he has refuted. For example, the Committees rely heavily on Stephen Schneider's complaint about Lomborg's treatment of climate science in The Skeptical Environmentalist. The Committees describe Schneider as "a particularly respected researcher who has been discussing these problems for 30 years." But Schneider is hardly always a paragon of scientific integrity. In a now famous interview with Discover magazine, Schneider showed his true colors: "On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people, we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. ... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." Would the Committees deem that admission within "the standards of good scientific practice"? It is those "scary scenarios ... simplified, dramatic statements" that Lomborg sought to address in his book. But what the Committees and others who perpetuate the smear against Lomborg don't realize just yet is they have a bigger problem on their hands. The extreme pessimism of the environmental movement doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and more and more scientists who refuse to be cowed by academic bullies and their lapdogs in the press are speaking out.
This April, Jack Hollander, the distinguished emeritus professor at Berkeley, is publishing a new book "The Real Environmental Crisis: How Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment's Number One Enemy." An early draft of the book shows it deepens our understanding of many of the same themes Lomborg discussed in The Skeptical Environmentalist and denounces in convincing fashion the extreme pessimism of the environmental movement typified by Schneider and others who have attacked Lomborg. In the meantime, in the effort "to capture the public's imagination," as Schneider so honestly put it, the smears against Lomborg and others will no doubt continue.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Book
Review: Interesting to read that Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) was unable (and unwilling,) to find any fault whatsoever on the basis of reason or (gasp), as their name might suggest, "science".
Many have dismissed this work as illogical, yet none can contest the merits of its arguments and its sources. It has not been effectively debunked, save for shallow, ad hominem attacks against Lomborg himself. Does this book claim that those proffessing upon the perils of the ecology are entirely without base? Of course not, but it does make coherent arguments against shameful and exaggerative scare tactics. How strange that so many who deem themselves "scientists" would not welcome such an articulate voice in what is doubtless to become an important debate as we enter the next century.
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Summary: In Defense of Lomborg
Review: In the interest of balance (and also in response to the anti-Lomborg crowd who couldn't wait to dutifully and delightfully report on the Denmark Committee's baseless charge of scientific dishonesty), here's an assessment from the Jan 9th edition of The Economist which dismisses the panel's ruling as 'incompetent and shameful': The Skeptical Environmentalist" is explicitly not concerned with conducting scientific research. Rather, it measures the "litany" of environmental alarm that is constantly fed to the public against a range of largely uncontested data about the state of the planet. The litany comes off very badly from the comparison. The environmental movement was right to find the book a severe embarrassment. But since the book was not conducting scientific research, what business is it of a panel concerned with scientific dishonesty? One might expect to find the answer to this question in the arguments and data supporting the ruling-but there aren't any. The material assembled by the panel consists almost entirely of a synopsis of four articles published by Scientific American last year. (We criticised those articles and the editorial that ran with them in our issue of February 2nd 2002.) The panel seems to regard these pieces as disinterested science, rather than counter-advocacy from committed environmentalists. Incredibly, the complaints of these self-interested parties are blandly accepted at face value. Mr Lomborg's line-by-line replies to the criticisms are not reported. On its own behalf, the panel offers not one instance of inaccuracy or distortion in Mr Lomborg's book: not its job, it says. On this basis it finds Mr Lomborg guilty of dishonesty. The panel's ruling-objectively speaking-is incompetent and shameful.
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Summary: Witch hunt
Review: Come on people. This Scientific Dishonesty Committee action is part of an ideologically motivated witch hunt against someone who refuses to parrot the extremist environmentalist line. Lomborg has responded to his critics and refuted them line-by-line, but the Danish Inquisition didn't take his responses into consideration. Scientific American allowed him 1 page in print to respond to 11 pages of attacks. The Danish Committee failed to cite a single specific example to support their claim of bias. Apparently one of the criticisms is that he was too diligent in citing his sources. As a scientist myself, it is frightening to see this attempt to silence someone who challenges a popular myth. The Church (and his fellow scientists) did the same to Galileo in the 17th century. When the Danish Committee also scrutinizes Al Gore's ridiculous Earth in the Balance book for scientific dishonesty, then I'll believe they have some objectivity in the matter.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Review: Great book!! Though Mr. Lomborg is under vicious attack from the leftist idealogues who I am sure did not even bother to read the book, this is a great read. It opens your eyes to the misinformation currently going on in the environmental movement. Though the book concedes the existence of global warming, it does not agree that the threat is as severe as prophecied by the leftist enviro-religious fanatics. Whether you agree with Mr. Lomborg or not, the arguments and data supporting them present a convincing and devastating case against Kyoto.
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