By Brian Carnell

Tuesday, February 12, 2002

In an article for Tech Central Station, Ronald Bailey hit the nail on the head abuot the campaign to discredit Bjorn Lomberg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. I have not read Lomberg's book and so have no opinion one way or the other, but many of the articles attacking it have been the typical ad hominem-filled attacks that are commonly directed at anyone who dissents from environmentalist orthodoxy.

Bailey uncovers a hilarious example of the hypocrisy of Lomberg's critics. Stuart Pimm was one of the reviewers selcted by Nature to slam Lomberg's book, and Pimm criticized the book for relying on secondary, rather than primary sources. Acording to the Nature review,

. . . Lomberg's text relies heavily on secondary sources. Out of around 2,000 references, about 5% come from news sources and 30% from web downloads . . . A mere 1% are original papers in Nature. . . This bias towards non-peer-reviewed maerial over international reputable journals is sometimes incredible . . .

Fair enough, but how well does Pimm himself meet that standad? Bailey set out to find out by looking at Pimm's recently pulished book, The World Acording to Pimm. Bailey found that at least half of Pimm's sources are from non-peer-reviewed sources, and only 2.5 percent of Pimm's citations are to Nature articles.

In fact, Lomberg actually cites Nature at least 20 times compared to only 10 citations to that journal in Pimm's book. That, my friends, is the fresh smell of hypocrisy.

Source:

Bjorn again! Fundamentalist Greens launch smear campaign. Ronald Bailey, TechCentralStation.Com, November 28, 2001.

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