Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's no wonder why this book has gotten such media attention. The story of a bold loner who dares to defy the establishment makes for really great press. Unfortunately, Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist" also makes for really poor science. Thus while Lomborg has mostly gotten rave reviews from newspapers and political commentary journals, the scientific community has exhaustively exposed his fallacies, omissions, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations. You can read scholarly refutations of Lomborg's book in "Science," "Nature," and "Scientific American," among others. I dare not try to cram a summary of all of Lomborg's errors into 1,000 words. One random example: Lomborg claims that ocean productivity has doubled since the 1970s, and thus fears about rampant overfishing are exaggerated. Unfortunately--and inexcusably--he's confused production with consumption. The volume of fish caught has indeed doubled since the 1970s, but this is a far cry from showing that the oceans are actually producing more. Try uprooting a few blades of grass from your lawn with just your bare hands. Then go back over that same patch with a lawnmower. You'll have cut much more grass the second time, and not because your lawn started growing more. If you see the environment as a scientific matter, "The Skeptical Environmentalist" will probably be of little value to you. If you see the environment as a political argument to be won or lost, then you might find it more useful: it sounds convincing and it makes environmentalists look really bad. Sure, it's wrong, but when has that mattered in politics?