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Mix-Ansicht- Bjorn Lomborg - The Sceptical Environmentalist - Revisited - Popeye, 02.03.2002, 07:21
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Bjorn Lomborg - The Sceptical Environmentalist - Revisited
The Skeptical Environmentalist”
The litany and the heretic
Jan 31st 2002
From The Economist print edition
Why has Bjorn Lomborg created such a stir among
environmentalists?
Get article background
“I'M AFRAID there isn't
much scientific
controversy about Mr
Lomborg. He occupies a
very junior position in
Denmark (an ‘associate
professor' does not
exactly mean the same
thing that it does in the
United States), he has
one possibly very flawed
paper in an international
journal on game theory,
no publications on environmental issues, and yet manages to
dismiss the science of dozens of the world's best scientists,
including Nobel laureates, Japan and Crawford prize-winners and
the like. As any sensible person would expect, his facts are usually
fallacies and his analysis is largely non-existent.”
Those contemptuous words from Stuart Pimm, a professor of
conservation biology at Columbia University, are fairly
representative of the response from many environmental scientists
and activists to Bjorn Lomborg's recent book, “The Skeptical
Environmentalist”. In the weeks since the book's release, virtually
every large environmental group has weighed in with a
denunciation. Numerous heavyweights of science have penned
damning articles and reviews in leading journals. Dr Pimm, for one,
railed against Dr Lomborg in Nature, while Scientific American
recently devoted 11 pages to attacks from scientists known for
their environmental activism.
Dr Lomborg's critics protest too much. They are rattled not
because, as they endlessly insist, Dr Lomborg lacks credentials as
an environmental scientist and is of no account, but because his
book is such a powerful and persuasive assault on the central
tenets of the modern environmental movement.
Just the facts
Curious about the true state of the planet, the author—who makes
no claims to expertise in environmental science, only to statistical
expertise—has scrutinised reams of official data on everything from
air pollution to energy availability to climate change. As an
instinctive green and a former member of Greenpeace, he was
surprised to find that the world's environment is not, in fact,
getting ever worse. Rather, he shows, most environmental
indicators are stable or improving.
One by one, he goes through the “litany”, as he calls it, of four big
environmental fears:
• Natural resources are running out.
• The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat.
• Species are becoming rapidly extinct, forests are vanishing and
fish stocks are collapsing.
• Air and water are becoming ever more polluted.
In each case, he demonstrated that the doom and gloom is wildly
exaggerated. Known reserves of fossil fuels and most metals have
risen. Agricultural production per head has risen; the numbers
facing starvation have declined. The threat of biodiversity loss is
real but exaggerated, as is the problem of tropical deforestation.
And pollution diminishes as countries grow richer and tackle it
energetically.
In other words, the planet is not in peril. There are problems, and
they deserve attention, but nothing remotely so dire as most of
the green movement keeps saying.
Nor is that all he shows. The book exposes—through hundreds of
detailed, meticulously footnoted examples—a pattern of
exaggeration and statistical manipulation, used by green groups to
advance their pet causes, and obligingly echoed through the
media. Bizarrely, one of Dr Lomborg's critics in Scientific American
criticises as an affectation the book's insistence on documenting
every statistic and every quotation with a reference to a published
source. But the complaint is not so bizarre when one works
through the references, because they so frequently expose
careless reporting and environmentalists' abuse of scientific
research.
The replies to Dr Lomborg in Scientific American and elsewhere
score remarkably few points of substance*. His large factual
claims about the current state of the world do not appear to be
under challenge—which is unsurprising since they draw on official
data. What is under challenge, chiefly, is his outrageous
presumption in starting a much-needed debate.
Some argue that scientists who favour stronger policies to improve
the environment must use the same tactics as any other political
lobby—from steel companies fighting for tariffs on imports to
farmers demanding more subsidies. The aim, after all, is to win
public favour and government support. Whether such a view is
consistent with the obligation science owes to the truth is
debatable, at best. If scientists want their views to be accorded
the respect due to science, then they must speak as scientists,
not as lobbyists.
Dr Lomborg's work has its flaws. He has made some errors in his
statistical analysis, as he acknowledges on his website. And there
are broader issues, especially to do with the aggregation of data
and the handling of uncertainty, where his book is open to
challenge. For instance, his approach of examining data at a global
level, while statistically sound, tends to mask local environmental
trends. Global marine productivity has indeed risen, as he
says—but this disguises collapses in particular species in particular
places. Dr Lomborg argues that such losses, seen in a long-term
perspective, do not matter much. Many would disagree, not least
the fishermen in the areas affected.
Allen Hammond of the World Resources Institute (WRI) makes a
related point. He accepts Dr Lomborg's optimistic assessment of
the environment, but says it holds only for the developed world.
The aggregate figures offered in the book mask worsening pollution
in the mega-cities of the poor world. Dr Lomborg agrees that there
are local and regional environmental pressures, and that these
matter a lot, but it is fair to point out that the book has little to
say about them, except to argue that rising incomes will help.
The book gives little credit to environmental policy as a cause of
environmental improvement. That is a defensible position, in fact,
but the book does not trouble to make the case. And another
important question is somewhat skated over: the possibility that
some environmental processes involve irreversible “triggers”,
which, once pulled, lead to sudden and disastrous deterioration.
Climate scientists believe, and Dr Lomborg does not deny, that too
much warming could lead to irreversible bad outcomes such as the
collapse of the mid-Atlantic “conveyor belt” (an ocean current
that warms Europe). The science here is thin: nobody knows what
level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would trigger such a
calamity. But the risk argues for caution.
Dr Lomborg's assessment of the science in this area leads him to
venture that warming is more likely to be at the low end of the
range expected by leading experts than at the high end. He argues
that the most-cited climate models misjudge factors such as the
effects of clouds, aerosols and the solar cycle. That is plausible,
and there is science to support it, but the conclusion is far from
certain. Again, it is reasonable to argue that such uncertainty
makes it better to err on the side of caution.
Sensible people will disagree about the course that policy should
take. Dr Lomborg—a courteous fellow—seems willing to talk calmly
to his opponents. For the most part, while claiming in some cases
to be men of science, his opponents do not return the compliment.
Homo ecologicus
Despite its limitations, “The Skeptical Environmentalist” delivers a
salutary warning to conventional thinking. Dr Lomborg reminds
militant greens, and the media that hang on their every
exaggerated word about environmental calamity, that
environmental policy should be judged against the same criteria as
other kinds of policy. Is there a problem? How bad is it? What will
it cost to fix? Is that the best way to spend those resources?
This is exactly what Tom Burke, a leading British environmentalist,
denied in a debate he had with Dr Lomborg in Prospect, a British
magazine. “What I find most egregious [in] your climate-change
argument, however, is the proposition that the world faces a
choice between spending money on mitigating climate change, and
providing access to clean drinking water and sanitation in the
developing world. We must and can do both. Such artificial choices
may be possible in an academic ivory tower where ideas can be
arranged to suit the prejudices of the occupant, but they are not
available in the real world and it is dishonest to suggest that they
are.”
On the contrary, Mr Burke. Only in an ivory tower could choices
such as these be called “artificial”. Democratic politics is about
nothing but choices of that sort. Green politics needs to learn that
resources are not unlimited.
* See the criticisms and Dr Lomborg's replies on his website, www.lomborg.org.
Last year, before “The Skeptical Environmentalist” came out, we ran a signed
article by Dr Lomborg summarising his views. See
www.economist.com/science/lomborg/
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