Putting the Heat on Lomborg

Kudos to Amanda Witherell at the San Francisco Bay Guardian for her long article on Lomborg and Cool It. She raises a question that always comes up around discussing a politician or a position with whom you disagree. Are we giving unnecessary publicity to this person by taking on his/her arguments in public forums like this website, or should we spending our time instead on positive alternatives. In the final sentence of the piece, Witherell concludes that:

"... Cool It becomes more of a distraction than a contribution at a time when environmentalists
should be busy promoting solutions, not debunking the carefully crafted fables of Lomborg's dollar-driven theses." 

It's a good question, especially for this site! If only ignoring the arguments of fabulists like Lomborg were sufficient to make them go away, to prevent them from getting their message in front of people. As a matter of grand strategy, it would be a mistake to assume that every attack has to be met with a massive counterattack. There are times when it's better to let sleeping dogs lie, or least to wait a bit and see if the dogs bother to get up off the porch and start heading for the yard.

But in a 24/7 media world, the waiting-to-respond strategy has a nasty way of turning around and biting you. False claims move as quickly as true ones: to quote an old adage attributed to Churchill (and he didn't have the Internet!):

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." 

How can you tell when a lie is gaining traction? It was harder in Churchill's day. Now you can just pull up Amazon and see exactly how well a book like Cool It is doing. At 1:04 PM EDT today, Lomborg's book was at #108 overall on Amazon, and continued to lead Amazon's rankings for books on Public Policy, Climate Changes, and Conservation.

As to Witherell's point about solutions, you can do both. Just because you're raising questions about what Steven Colbert so aptly calls the "truthiness" of a book like Cool It doesn't mean you can't promote solid information and real solutions--see the Climate Change Resources section for an expanding list of books, DVDs, and websites that treat climate change as a very serious problem that we can solve if we get started quickly. (BTW, "truthiness" was Merriam-Webster's 2006 "Word of the Year.")