"The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish professor of statistics and former member of Greenpeace who evaluates the facts on various environmental issues. It is a great read and I'm glad I'm doing it but it is rather long.
Most of this sounds good. The last seems less so. Lomborg makes occasionally valid points but the book is in many ways an exercise in motivated cognition.
Have you read the book? The entire premise was that he was debunking claims and ended up being persuaded by them; this seems like the opposite of motivated cognition.
I won't deny that it seems fairly one sided but it does seem like taking opposing views would be difficult, since he uses the same citations as groups he disagrees with and presumably is better with statistics as a statistics professor; I don't mean to say that one should be totally convinced by his arguments, but more convinced than I should be by all the arguments without statistics I've heard before which were about 50 times as much motivated cognition.
This is the fifth bimonthly What Are You Working On? thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:
What are you working on?
Here are some guidelines: