From: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2015/4/24/lomborg-and-the-africans.html, Mike Jackson fired up in response to some jejune attacks on Lomborg:

OBA
Diddums.

The reason Lomborg is unpopular, as I explained to Golf Charlie elsewhere yesterday, is that The Skeptical Environmentalist punched a big hole in the enviro-activists' pessimism.

I had been dealing with these woemeisters for the best part of 30 years before Ms Rowling told me what they really were — dementors. They suck all happiness and hope out of being a human being. Everything they touch shrivels up and dies. They see nothing in the future but despair. Limits To Growth is one long complaint that humanity is doomed unless it adopts the path of despair and pessimism. Every human achievement, every scientific or technological advance, everything that makes modern life worth living (as well as one or two that don't) are merely steps on an ever-steeper slippery slope that will lead to the destruction of the planet.

The only possible route to salvation is to forego all the pleasures of the modern world and hand your lives (oh, and your money of course) over to them to run for you because they are in their own eyes the Elect and we peasants are as nothing without their malevolent paternalism.

They make the Wee Frees look like unrepentant hedonists.

And then along comes Lomborg, who claims that the world is not yet quite going to hell in the environmentalists' handcart, that peak this, that and the next thing are largely a figment of the overheated imagination of the Malthusian tendency whose ability to look beyond their own limited view of the world has always been non-existent and that while "Global warming is real – it is man-made and it is an important problem", it is not, at least on the evidence available at the time and even less so now, "the end of the world." And that really hurts the Climateers, doesn't it? Especially in the pocket and in the ego (I/m never sure which of those two is the bigger.) 

Let me, for your delectation, repeat the bones of a post I made on 'Unthreaded' the other day.

The question: "What is the biggest threat facing the world today?" was posed to war studies experts and they came up with the following:
• Russian and Chinese expansionism v Western disarmament
• Russia's revisionism
• China’s rise and power shifting in the Indo-Pacific
• Unfinished business in the Taiwan Strait
• Unbridled nuclear proliferation
• Political transition in the Middle East
• The rise of nationalism and other politics of identity
• Russian infiltration in Western politics
• Corruption 

Perhaps on the purely environmental front you could throw in a possible asteroid strike and the Yellowstone volcano.
Any or all of which could have a major impact on human civilisation within a very short period. Unlike climate change which may (but probably won't) have a minor impact which may (but probably won't) be detrimental to humanity unless we are stupid or arrogant enough to pretend there is something we can do to prevent it.

Lomborg has never claimed to be perfect and no doubt his work contains errors but in the field of statistics, where I suggest his expertise outshines considerably that of his critics, those "errors" are largely a matter of different interpretations of the same data and to be discussed and debated rationally.

But then the enviro-fanatics have never, ever, in all the years I have been dealing with them done discussion or debate, and certainly not rationality.

Apr 25, 2015 at 11:49 AM | Mike Jackson