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by hackuser 4011 days ago
The Economist, which I read, unfortunately pushes propaganda about climate change (as they do about some other issues too).

For example, many years ago they published an article[1] saying that a recent conference led by John Bolton[2] came to the same climate-denying conclusion as an earlier conference led by Bjorn Lomborg.[3] The Economist claimed that Bolton's results were independent corroboration for Lomborg's, saying the "conclusions were strikingly similar".

The Economist omitted a few things that made the similarity less striking: 1) The Economist co-sponsored Lomborg's conference; 2) Lomborg co-chaired Bolton's conference; 3) Bolton's conference was in fact marketed as the sequal to Lomborg's (Lomborg's was "Copenhagen Consensus 2004", Bolton's was "Copenhagen Consensus 2006", and a third was planned); 4) Former Economist writer Clive Crook co-chaired Bolton's conference.

I pulled those details from an email I sent to The Economist at the time. The article author responded professionally, but dismissed my concerns.

[1] "How to save the world: Bolton v Gore", June 22nd 2006 http://www.economist.com/node/7086861

[2] Bolton is a prominent US diplomat, whose career included being Ambassador to the United Nations, and a very outspoken neo-conservative.

[3] Lomborg is a leading climate denier, trotted out as a academic expert. His PhD is in political science and, at least at one point, he taught statistics at a business school. (My anecdotal observation is that few climate deniers have expertise in climate science.)

1 comments

Lomborg has openly stated multiple times that he believes in anthropogenic climate change. How is he a "climate denier"?

This post looks like a cut-and-paste from a political blog.

More correct would be to say, at the time (2006), Lomborg was a denier. He only recently turned around (although first by saying that climate change is not a serious problem), which is to his credit. Still in retrospect, people shouldn't have listened to him, he was wrong.
This is false. The introduction to the section on climate change in The Skeptical Environmentalist (published in 2001) states "This chapter accepts the reality of man-made global warming" (p259).