-Caveat Lector-
Many of the claims here are wrong. I wonder who is behind this?
Steve
On 31 Aug 01, at 0:35, Euphorian wrote:
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> ------- Forwarded message follows -------
>
>
> From
> http://www.booksonline.co.uk/booksol?ac=003384410226887&rtmo=fwasaow
> s&atmo=rrrrrrvs&pg=/01/8/25/bogren25.html
>
> }}>Begin
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> The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World
>
> Bj�rn Lomborg
>
> History, General
> Matt Ridley
> 27 August 2001
> CUP
> 27 August 2001
> Hardback
> 0521010683
> The Greens have got it wrong
>
> Matt Ridley considers this to be 'probably the most important book on the
> environment ever written'
> EACH DECADE sees its new environmental obsessions. In the 1960s it was
> pesticides and the population explosion. In the 1970s there was the oil
> crisis, the imminent failure of the food supply and the fear of nuclear power.
> In the 1980s the deserts were advancing, acid rain was killing trees, the ozone
> layer was thinning and the elephant was on the brink of extinction. In the 1990s
> we had retreating rain forests, falling sperm counts, plagues of new diseases,
> genetically modified crops and, of course, climate change. How many of these
> came true? If you take the trouble to examine the facts, you will find a
> remarkable thing. On all but the most recent scares, where the jury is still
> out, the alarmists were badly wrong. There has been no rise in cancer caused by
> chemicals, population growth slowed rather than accelerated, oil reserves grew
> rather than fell, food production per head increased even in poor countries,
> nuclear accidents were few and minor, deserts did not advance, acid rain killed
> no forests, the damage to the ozone layer was minimal, the elephant was never in
> danger of extinction, rain forests are still 80 per cent intact, sperm counts
> did not fall. The extreme greens have been so wrong for so long that you would
> think somebody might have noticed. One American, Julian Simon, did try to point
> this out in a series of books, but nobody wanted to listen. The temptation of
> indulging in environmental guilt was too strong; repeating its message was
> almost reassuring: the planet is in ever greater pain and it is all our fault.
> Bj�rn Lomborg, a Danish statistics professor, came across Simon's argument and
> set out to prove it wrong. Instead he ended up proving Simon right in almost
> every respect. Four years later he has put his conclusions in a remarkable book,
> probably the most important book on the environment ever written. Its importance
> lies partly in its relentless statistics. With 173 charts, nine tables and a
> staggering 2,930 footnotes, The Skeptical Environmentalist will be a source of
> reference for years to come. But it is also a readable, accessible and simple
> account of the state of the world, told as much in the illuminating charts as in
> the text itself. And it is a fascinating polemic, too. Lomborg exposes the fibs,
> half-truths and sleights of hand that have been used to sustain the
> ultra-pessimism that so effectively gets us all reaching for our cheque books.
> There is the 'evidence' for falling food supplies consisting of three bad years
> but ignoring 50 good ones on either side. There is the widely cited soil erosion
> statistic that turns out to be based on one study of a 0.11-hectare sloping plot
> of Belgian farmland. There is the much-quoted figure of 40,000 species going
> extinct each year, which started as an assumption for argument's sake and then
> became a "fact". There is the endless citation by the press of worst-case
> figures for global warming, rather than most likely. Does it matter? Perhaps
> excessive alarmism alerts us to the fact that there is indeed a serious problem.
> Lomborg argues that instead it leads us in the wrong direction. Greens from Al
> Gore to George Monbiot are perpetually urging that we abandon consumerism so
> that we can avoid eco-catastrophe. But actually it is by investing and inventing
> that we avoid it. We replace copper wires with glass fibres, coal power stations
> with gas, and wild with farmed salmon. Technology, not regulation, is the
> solution to environmental problems. Lomborg is confident that cheapening solar
> power will make fossil fuels and their emissions redundant long before they run
> out or cause damaging global warming. He points out that then it would only
> require 2.6 per cent of the Sahara desert to supply all our power needs. A
> counsel of despair is wrong for other reasons, too. In the 1960s the best-
> selling environmentalist Paul Ehrlich suggested that India should be denied
> Western emergency aid because it was in such environmental straits: "sober
> analysis shows a hopeless imbalance between food production and population".
> Within years of his appalling claim, Western pesticides, fertilisers and new
> ("terminator") hybrid seeds had transformed Indian agriculture so that it now
> supports twice as many people on one-third more calories per head. Thank
> goodness we ignored Ehrlich. With many such dud forecasts coming home to roost
> at the Millennium, global warming came as a godsend to alarmists. It will be a
> century before we know if the alarmists are right, so they can paint doomsday
> futures to their hearts' content and rely on a compliant press to repeat them.
> Lomborg concedes that mankind probably is adding to natural warming trends by
> producing greenhouse gases. But he is scathing about the exaggerated claims and
> mistaken remedies offered by the environmental movement, and argues cogently
> that we should be spending money now on improving the lot of the developing
> world, rather than trying to limit carbon dioxide emissions by regulation.
> "Global warming is not anywhere near the most important problem facing the
> world". The Big Green organisations will not like it. They will accuse Lomborg
> of defending Big Business, no doubt, as they did Julian Simon. But the charge
> cannot stick. He has an impeccably Leftish background and a transparent
> independence of mind. And he is not complacent: "By far the majority of
> indicators show that mankind's lot has vastly improved. This does not, however,
> mean that everything is good enough". Matt Ridley is the author of 'Genome'
> (Fourth Estate).
>
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> End<{{
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