A&(WO)L

Robert Butler notes (20 Sep) Bill McKibben's review (along with Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger's Break Through and Kerry Emmanuel's What We Know About Climate Change) of Bjørn Lomborg's Cool It, and asks "Will Arts & Letters link to it?...Or does it, bizarrely, only link to articles that praise this peculiar book?"

We briefly discussed A&L's track record on climate change. Robert Butler said:

I think that Arts & Letters is committing a category mistake (to use the term loosely). It treats the issue as if it exists in the republic of letters and everyone has an equal claim to the truth. But in this area the opinion of a clever journalist is irrelevant when compared with the research done by [thousands] of scientists. What annoys me in particular about the Arts & Letters position (and the BBC is guilty of this too) is that it establishes some critical distance between itself and the majority opinion of scientists, without at any point offering justification for the existence of that gap.

See also Dasgupta on Lomborg's muddled concreteness.