UK economist rubbishes green sceptic

[Karmadillo]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/famine/story/0,12128,985550,00.html

Data used by the "sceptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg to show that problems such as global warming, deforestation and malnutrition have been exaggerated just doesn't add up, a British economist argues today.

Matthew Cole, of Birmingham University, performs a devastating demolition job on the controversial Danish author, accusing him of selective use of data, asking the wrong questions and lack of objectivity.

In his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist - the Real State of the World, Lomborg criticised the "litany" of gloomy predictions about the state of the planet and argued that environmental problems were in fact improving.

For example he concluded that "basically .....our forests are not under threat," that "humankind is better nourished ...on practically every count" and that the so-called green revolution has been "victorious".

But in this month's Economic Journal, Cole analyses Lomborg's figures and undermines these optimistic conclusions. In his analysis of malnutrition, for example, Lomborg uses highly aggregated data from the developing world as a whole, reporting the proportion of regional populations classed as undernourished. Cole shows that over the past 20 years the absolute number of undernourished people has grown rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa and has stayed around the same in Latin America. It has however fallen in Asia and this enables Lomborg, in Cole's view, to come to a "misleading" conclusion.

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[lazarus]

1. How many

Times does this guy have to be debunked before he just goes away?

[roughsatori]

2. Thank you--it seems once a month for that last few years

I have been reading debunkings of this publicity hounds "findings>"