I’ve gotten more than a few polite, intelligent and quite lengthy emails from people telling me that I’m wrong about Lomborg. Quite a few others are just plain nasty. None of them make the statistical or scientific arguments themselves, but instead point me to Science magazine, or one review or another. That’s fine. I’m hardly quipped to defend Lomborg on my own either. Rather, the people I trust have persuaded me that the attack on Lomborg is unfair. That is not to say he didn’t make mistakes. I’ve yet to hear of a major book of this kind not having errors. Lomborg has addressed them. I guess the only thing I would point out is that when Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown, Jeremy Rifkin, Carl Sagan and numerous other celebrity science types offered massive, collosal exaggerations or spine-bending lies, the scientific community didn’t launch a witch hunt for them. Some may roll their eyes at Lester Brown, but they do it away from the cameras. Ehrlich is still respectfully quoted in the media and he’s been wrong about pretty much everything (that is unless I missed the 60 or so million Americans who died from starvation in the 1980s that he predicted). It seems to me that a scientist can be sloppy, deceitful and grossly self-serving and get into almost no trouble if he confirms the conventional wisdom. But if he defies the conventional wisdom and fails to cross a “T” he’s toast.