False Alarm

I was initially excited about this book providing a new perspective on how to make the world a better place. I saw some negative reviews but assumed they were written by the same type of idealistic environmentalist types that Lomborg is trying to argue against, and so didn't pay much attention to them.

After reading the book, I tried to learn more about the claims made in the book, and it started to feel more and more like the facts had been misrepresented in order to make Lomborg's argument more compelling. For a summary of some of the issues, you can see http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/ or the complaints to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty.

This was very disappointing to me. I think it is possible there is still a kernel of truth to Lomborg's argument and it is unfortunate if it is lost due to making arguments in bad faith with hidden agendas. If there is some truth to this argument that we are attempting to solve the climate problem in the wrong way, then I hope that someone can do this work in a more intellectually honest way, adapting the argument to take into account criticism/suggestions by other experts. Hopefully Lomborg's style of argument hasn't done too much to destroy the credibility of any similar research.

At this point it's obvious that climate change is as much a political issue as it is an environmental one. If that doesn't sound right, here's some proof. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize in Economics winner wrote a review of False Alarm for the New York Times. He's a smart guy who has written a bunch of books himself. Despite this, his review is dishonest and factually incorrect from beginning to end.

Here's Stiglitz's review: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/books/review/bjorn-lomborg-false-alarm-joseph-stiglitz.html
Here's Lomborg's response: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-york-times-stunningly-false-deceptive-hit-piece-preserve-lomborg/

This isn't petty bickering over decimals between well-intentioned writers with different priorities. It's also not legitimately divergent interpretations of the same data. I get that using an author's own rebuttal to a bad review to show how bad the review is is, by definition, biased. But read them both. There's no way that Stiglitz didn't know what he was doing. He was preaching to the choir, his very specific choir. He knows that most people who read his review will use it to justify not reading False Alarm and write Lomborg off as a climate denier or a quack or worse. Charitably, I suppose you could say that Stiglitz wanted to dismiss Lomborg's book because it could cause people who are already less inclined to worry about climate change to become even more complacent and, as a result, to do less to address the issue. In any case, it's a dishonest and politicized review by a respected economist and it's perfectly illustrative of how the discussion around climate change has devolved into something a non-expert can't possibly be expected to make sense of.

I'm only focusing on Stiglitz's review because of how well it shows why counterpoints like False Alarm are needed. Lomborg's premise is that “global warming is now being used, often explicitly, to advance broader causes in a partisan political environment that shapes the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and much of the world.” Stiglitz is the perfect example of that.

If you've gotten most of what you know about climate change from newspaper and magazine articles, you should read this book. Maybe even read it alongside a more alarmist take on climate change like The Uninhabited Earth. One thing will become clear–while there is a consensus on the reality of climate change and the need to address it, there is nothing even close to a consensus on the scope of the problem or the best way to solve it. False Alarm, if nothing else, puts that fact into perspective.