Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist, continues to get the Galileo treatment from the environmental community. Most recently he was smeared by a politically charged attack from a Danish scientific governmental committee. The committee's review included no specific citations of specific criticisms of the book, but it did cite popular publications like Time magazine at length.
I have personally done a point by point review of Lomborg's book and of the criticisms of the book I've been able to find. If you list the topics of fact in the book and the major conclusions that Lomborg makes, then go back and strike out all the topics of fact and conclusions contested by his critics, then at the end you find that 97% of Lomborg's book is not even touched by the critics. In the other 3% Lomborg is probably right, too.
I invite anyone who is seriously concerned about the environment to do the same analysis, because you are never going to get the truth from environmentalists.
(By the way, Galileo was not persecuted by the Church per se, but by his fellow scientists, who were jealous of him and resentful of his innovations such as using mathematics in physical sciences. These scientific enemies of Galileo used the Church to attack him. In the same way Lomborg's scientific enemies use the quasi-religion, the popular environmental movement, with its wigged out, drooling, druggified, moronic tree hugging zealots and its left leaning, luddite journalists, to attack Lomborg.)
I am Danish, liberal, vegetarian, a former member of Greenpeace; and I used to believe in the litany of our ever-deteriorating environment. You know, the doomsday message repeated by the media, as when Time magazine tells us that "everyone knows the planet is in bad shape." We're defiling our Earth, we're told. Our resources are running out. Our air and water are more and more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct, we're paving over nature, decimating the biosphere.
The problem is that this litany doesn't seem to be backed up by facts. When I set out to check it against the data from reliable sources -- the U.N., the World Bank, the OECD, etc. -- a different picture emerged. We're not running out of energy or natural resources. There is ever more food, and fewer people are starving. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 30 years; today it is 67. We have reduced poverty more in the past 50 years than we did in the preceding 500. Air pollution in the industrialized world has declined -- in London the air has never been cleaner since medieval times.
This information needs to reach a broader audience, because it concerns our basic priorities...