a hot topic: Lomborg's "Cool It"

An excerpt from Pete Geddes' review of Bjorn Loomborg's Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming-- two paragraphs detailing the "scientific" response...

The environmental movement has mastered the art of crisis entrepreneurship, and Lomborg's book was a direct assault on this carefully crafted narrative, which has been nurtured over decades, abetted by a compliant media, and digested by a largely scientifically illiterate public. The reaction from the environmental establishment was swift and ugly.

Critics demanded Lomborg's editor at Cambridge University Press be fired and that "all right-thinking scientists … shun the press." The past president of the American Academy of Science wondered how Cambridge could have ever "published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review." (The manuscript did pass peer review. The reviewers unanimously recommended publication.) Scientific American asserted the book was "rife with careless mistakes." In eleven pages of vicious ad hominem attacks (e.g., comparing Lomborg to a Holocaust denier), the magazine came up with nine factual errors. When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page and a half. When he put the critics' essays on his webpage and answered in detail, Scientific American threatened him with copyright infringement.

So much for freedom of speech, scientific endeavor, tolerance, and so on...