And again

Salon is at it again, peddling nonsense about Bjorn Lomborg.   This time they're not even pretending to disagree with Lomborg's science, except in the most unfalsifiable way.  Take this, a quote from originally Scientific American, but one that the author clearly agrees with:

"a political scientist who wades into the vastly complex, unsettled literature of environmental science, scrutinizes a fraction of what is to be found there, and emerges confident that the simple summary he has developed is a fair and accurate representation of the science -- notwithstanding the warnings of experts in the disciplines he skims that he is mistaken."

I shall step lightly over the comment that the science is "vastly complex" and "unsettled", not terms we usually hear.  The point is that this quote is, as we say in science, 'not even wrong'.  What warnings?  By which experts?  No answer is given.  Lomborg works closely with the IPCC report, probably the distillation of scientific consensus on this matter (you can read the entire article and not find this non negligible detail).

  And there's this:

the viewer is likely to come away with the impression that he was fully exonerated of intellectual fraud when the real record is a fair bit murkier than that.

Actually, no, no it isn't.  Lomborg is not guilty of scientific fraud, and the attempt to prosecute him on these grounds was political hackwork of the worst kind.  As, for that matter, this article is.

  There's a reference to Sharon Begley's article.  I've gone through her charges with a fine-tooth comb.  Every single one of them is wrong, and not just slightly wrong, but completely wrong.  As in, claiming-that-Lomborg-omits-references-from-his-book-that-are-included wrong.  This is also the article that a certain bearded puffball took seriously.

Then there's this little gem:

I say "quasi-scientific" because Lomborg was trained as a political scientist and statistician, and has no background in the complex array of hard-science disciplines underlining climate-change research. 

I'm currently reading a scholarly account of genuine academic fraud, Timothy Evans's Lying About Hitler.  Before flaying David Irving, Evans writes: "Irving could not be dismissed just because he lacked formal qualifications."  Quite.  Francis Crick was trained as a physicist, and taught himself X-ray crystallography, not to mention biology.  Whinging that Lomborg has no formal training in climate science is not even the constituent of an argument against his work.

  But in fact, the point is moot, because Lomborg isn't like, say, Climate Audit.  His claim is that he works straight from the published literature of the best available climate scientists.  The question is whether he accurately cites his sources.  The cretinous Ms. Begley to the contrary, he does.

Okay, so what?  This is one more instance of the Superfluous making a nuisance of themselves, one more instance of the flies of the marketplace.  Here's so-what: I'm used to this garbage from media twits, and the great herd of independent minds.  I really, really hate seeing it from scientists.  The fact that the crew of Science Blogs thinks its acceptable to throw out accusations of scientific fraud based on trial-by-media.  Note: not scientific error but of scientific fraud.

This is just too disgusting for words.  What's next?  We judge evolutionary biology by articles in World Net Daily?