-Caveat Lector- <http://www.austin360.com/statesman/editions/sunday/insight_3.html> Surprise! The Earth may be OK after all By Nicholas Wade The New York Times Sunday, August 19, 2001 The news from environmental organizations is almost always bleak. The climate is out of whack. Insidious chemicals taint food and drink. Tropical forests are disappearing. Species are perishing en masse. Industrial poisons pollute air, earth and water. Ecosystems are being stressed to the breaking point by the greedy, wasteful consumption of the Western lifestyle and its would-be imitators. So it is a surprise to meet someone who calls himself an environmentalist but who asserts that things are getting better, that the rate of human population growth is past its peak, that agriculture is sustainable and pollution is ebbing, that forests are not disappearing, that there is no wholesale destruction of plant and animal species and that even global warming is not as serious as commonly portrayed. The author of this happy thesis is not a steely-eyed conservative economist but a vegetarian, backpack-toting academic who was a member of Greenpeace for four years. He is Bjorn Lomborg, a 36-year-old political scientist and professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. Lomborg arrived at this position, much to his own astonishment, through a journey that began in a Los Angeles bookshop in February 1997. Lomborg was leafing through an issue of Wired magazine and started reading an interview with Julian Simon, a University of Maryland economist who argued in several books that population was unlikely to outrun natural resources. Simon, who died in 1998, is more widely known for his solution to the airline overbooking problem (having airlines pay passengers to take a later flight) and for a 1980 bet with Paul Ehrlich, president of Stanford University's Center for Conservation Biology. Simon bet that any five metals chosen by Ehrlich would be cheaper in 1990; Ehrlich lost on all five. Lomborg felt sure that Simon's arguments were "simple American right-wing propaganda." Back in Aarhus, he started nightly study sessions with his statistics students to debunk Simon's contentions, using figures drawn from reports of the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the International Panel on Climate Change and other gatherers of official facts. "Three months into the project, we were convinced that we were being debunked instead," Lomborg said. "Not everything he said is right. He has a definite right-wing slant. But most of the important things were actually correct." Lomborg has presented his findings in "The Skeptical Environmentalist," to be published in September by Cambridge University Press. The primary targets of the book, a substantial work of analysis with almost 3,000 footnotes, are statements made by environmental organizations like the Worldwatch Institute, the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. He refers to the persistently gloomy fare from these groups as the Litany, a collection of statements that he argues are exaggerations or outright myths. Lomborg also chides journalists, saying they uncritically spread the Litany, and he accuses the public of an unfounded readiness to believe the worst. "The Litany has pervaded the debate so deeply and so long," Lomborg writes, "that blatantly false claims can be made again and again, without any references, and yet still be believed." Lomborg says it is necessary to look at long-term global trends that tell more of the whole story. For example, the Worldwatch Institute, in its 1998 "State of the World" report, said, "The world's forest estate has declined significantly in both area and quality in recent decades." But the longest data series of annual figures available from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization shows that global forest cover has increased, to 30.89 percent in 1994 from 30.04 percent of global land cover in 1950. The Worldwatch report goes on to claim that because of soaring demand for paper, "Canada is losing some 200,000 hectares of forest a year." The cited reference, however, says that "in fact Canada grew 174,600 more hectares of forest each year," Lomborg writes. Janet Abramovitz, Worldwatch's forest expert, said the world forest cover had shrunk significantly in the past 20 years. She based that contention on a different, shorter series of Food and Agriculture Organization statistics but declined to cite a percentage. The institute's figure on Canadian forest loss was an error, she said. In its report for 2000, the Worldwatch Institute cited the dangers it had foreseen in 1984 -- "record rates of population growth, soaring oil prices, debilitating levels of international debt and extensive damage to forests from the new phenomenon of acid rain" -- and lamented that "we are about to enter a new century having solved few of these problems." But in his book, Lomborg cites figures from the Census Bureau, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Environment Agency to show that the rate of world population growth has been dropping sharply since 1964; the level of international debt decreased slightly from 1984 to 1999; the price of oil, adjusted for inflation, is half what it was in the early 1980s; and the sulfur emissions that generate acid rain (which has turned out to do little if any damage to forests, though some to lakes) have been cut substantially since 1984. Warming forecasts Lomborg also takes issue with some global warming predictions. In assessing how waste gases could warm the world's climate, he says, there are four wild cards that affect computer models of climate change: the effects of clouds, aerosols and the sunspot cycle, and the multiplier effect of carbon dioxide. As carbon dioxide heats the atmosphere a little, the air can hold more water, and that heats the atmosphere a lot more. How much more is in question, but Lomborg cites satellite and weather balloon data that seem to weaken the case for a strong multiplier effect. He believes that the International Panel on Climate Change deals all four wild cards in a way that exaggerates the effect of greenhouse gases. Moreover, he contends that the internationally agreed Kyoto targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions will impose vast costs for little result. A more effective approach, according to Lomborg, would be to increase research on alternative sources of energy, such as solar and fusion. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said new satellite data were likely to point toward a strong multiplier effect for carbon dioxide. And while Michael Oppenheimer, an expert on global warming at Environmental Defense, agrees that clouds and aerosols are weak points in the climate models, he says Lomborg's contention on the effects of the sunspot cycle is not widely accepted. "The Skeptical Environmentalist" portrays several other elements of the Litany as little more than urban myths. One is the prediction that the world's forests and a large number of species are headed for catastrophe. Lomborg believes that forest loss has been less serious than is often described -- only 20 percent since the dawn of agriculture, not 67 percent, as stated by the World Wildlife Fund. He also puts the present annual rate of loss at 0.46 percent, as calculated by the Food and Agriculture Organization, rather than at 2 percent or more, the figure cited by many environmentalists. Counting lost species Given that the forests are not doing that badly, he is skeptical of claims that the world is about to lose half or more of its species. The often quoted figure that 40,000 species are lost every year comes from a 1979 article by Norman Myers, an ecologist at Oxford University. But this figure, Lomborg says, was not based on evidence but on Myers' conjecture that 1 million species might be lost from 1975 to 2000, which works out to be 40,000 species a year. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which maintains the Red Book of endangered species, concluded in 1992 that the extinction figures for mammals and birds were "very small" and that the total extinction rate, assuming 30 million species, was probably 2,300 species a year. Lomborg says Myers repeated his estimate in 1999 with a warning that "we are into the opening stages of a human-caused biotic holocaust." Myers confirmed in an interview that the figure of 40,000 extinctions a year had come from his estimate but said that it was an illustration used to make his argument clear. Lomborg believes that the environment must be protected and that regulation is often necessary. But exaggerating problems distorts society's priorities, he says, and makes it hard for society to make wise choices about whether to devote resources to the environment or, say, the easing of child poverty. Though no longer a member of Greenpeace, Lomborg still counts himself as an environmentalist and portrays his critique as based on the outlook of a leftist. "I'm a left-wing guy," he says, "and a vegetarian because I don't want to kill animals -- you can't play the `He's right-wing so he's wrong' argument." ================================================================ Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: *Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends ================================================================ <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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