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THE GALLON
ENVIRONMENT LETTER
Canadian Institute for Business and the Environment Montreal, Quebec, Canada Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] Vol. 7, No. 1, January 11, 2003
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BJORN LOMBORG IS OFFICIALLY
DISCREDITED?
Dr. Bjørn Lomborg. A flash in the pan. A one-man scientific wrecking crew.
A self-proclaimed environmentalist, who is not. He was the darling of
governments and industries in Canada, the United States and around that world,
who wish to do little or nothing about climate change or environmental
protection. But now he has apparently been discredited by his own scientific
community in Denmark.
A statistician who thought he knew environment, Lomborg wrote a simple but
scientifically questionable book entitled, ""The Skeptical Environmentalist:
Measuring the Real State of the World", Cambridge University Press, 2001. It
became an immediate international hit amongst the anti-environment crowd.
Lomborg went on to write articles and give lectures around the world about
environment and resource mismanagement not being the serious problem other
scientists said they were. He was embraced by conservative governments like his
own. The new Conservative Government of Denmark made him, in March 2002,
Director of Denmark's Institute for Environmental Valuation. This is in spite of
the fact that he had very little formal environmental background. Lomborg is an
associate professor of statistics in the Department of Political Science at
Denmark's University of Aarhus.
The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), ruled January 7,
2003, that Bjorn Lomborg's scientific positions on the environment were, in many
cases, incorrect. DCSD is not an environment committee. It has no environmental
bias. The Committee is made up of scientists from all sectors, including
economics and statistics. It deals with complaints of pure scientific
dishonesty. The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty brings together some
of the most senior members of Denmark's scientific establishment. They spent
much of 2002 considering the evidence against Bjørn Lomborg, after several
formal complaints were lodged by other scientists. The Committee found Lomborg's
work less than honest. The DCSD concluded that Lomborg had, "clearly acted
at variance with good scientific practice". The Committee's ruling
continued: "There has been such perversion of the scientific message in the form
of systematically biased representation that the objective criteria for
upholding scientific dishonesty have been met." Even more damning is the
backhanded way the Committee tried to soften its ruling on Lomborg. The
Committee suggested that Lomborg may not have known the issues well enough and
therefore spoke and wrote from a position of ignorance. Although the Committee
did not feel able to conclude that Lomborg had misled his readers deliberately,
this was only because the scientists considering the case, felt that Lomborg
might simply have misunderstood the issues he was working on. Some are now
saying that Bjorn Lomborg is "damaged goods", stating that he may well be asked
to step down from the Director of Denmarks Institute of Environmental
Evaluation.
Hans Henrik Brydensholt, a Danish High Court judge who is chairman of the
DCSD, wrote in the panel's ruling, "On the basis of the material adduced by the
complainants, and particularly the assessment in "Scientific American," DCSD
deems it to have been adequately substantiated that the defendant, who has
himself insisted on presenting his publication in scientific form and not
allowing the book to assume the appearance of a provocative debate-generating
paper, based on customary scientific standards and in light of his systematic
one-sidedness in the choice of data and line of argument, has clearly acted at
variance with good scientific practice." Source, http://ens-news.com/ens/jan2003/2003-01-09-04.asp
.
See the complete official ruling by the Danish Committee on Scientific
Dishonesty at the website http://www.forsk.dk/uvvu/nyt/udtaldebat/bl_decision.htm
. For more information you can email [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Tel: + 45 3544 6200. See
Bjorn Lomborg's picture and personal website espousing his views at http://www.lomborg.com/ . Also see Bjørn
Lomborg's arguments at http://www.greenspirit.com/lomborg/ScientificAmericanBjørnLomborgAnswer.pdf
.
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LOMBORG IGNORED KEY ISSUES AND SET
UP STRAW MEN AND KNOCKED THEM DOWN
It was ingenious. Bjørn Lomborg argued with environmental positions not put
forward by most environmentalists. He established a short list of a
"litany" of environmental issues and did battle with them, while ignoring other
key environmental issues. He tossed out climate change as an issue because it
was too big a problem and too expensive to fix, citing vague economic costs and
benefits. He used gross economic numbers to mask serious species loss problems,
for example, in proclaiming that world fisheries were not declining because the
gross world annual catch was up. Professor Lomborg focussed his most
excoriating criticisms on the publications of the Worldwatch Institute, and in
particular on the views of its former President, Lester Brown. He identified Mr
Brown, and Professor Paul Erhlich, a Stanford University ecologist, as the high
priesthood of environmental doom. The following are some of the key issues where
Bjorn Lomborg was just wrong: See http://www.gristmagazine.com/books/lomborg121201.asp
The Danish Ecological Council felt a more thorough response to
Lomborg's book was needed. They therefore gathered a group of twelve Danish
scientists - from science as well as economics and social science - publishing
a critique (in Danish) in 1999. As of end June 2002, there is an English
version of their work available. See the Danish scientists critique of Lomborg
at the website http://www.ecocouncil.dk/index_eng.html
. Also see the Environment News Service (ENS) story about his problem at http://ens-news.com/ens/jan2003/2003-01-08-03.asp
.
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WORLD'S FORESTS NOT UNDER THREAT:
WRONG
In his book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist", Bjørn Lomborg wrote that,
"basically, the world's forests are not under threat." A charitable reader could
attribute this flawed conclusion to errors of omission and ignorance; perhaps
the author simply doesn't know the sources well enough to interpret them
properly. Less charitably, Emily Matthews suggests that, "one might reasonably
conclude that Lomborg intentionally selects his data and citations to distort or
even reverse the truth." Lomborg confusingly contrasts net loss of forest cover
(that is, his figure of loss of natural forest offset by regrowth and new
plantations) with loss of original forest (WWF's figure). Another claim by
Lomborg – that global forest cover has remained remarkably stable over the past
50 years -- is based on two acts of statistical conjuring. First, he expresses
changes in forest cover as a percentage of the total land area of the world, a
technique that reduces changes of millions of hectares to fractions of one
percent. Second, he cobbles together a variety of different data sources
compiled using different definitions of forest and different methodologies.
These different data sets cannot be strung together to form a consistent time
series.
Again Lomborg is acting as a pure statistician and fails to recognize the
complexities of the ecosystem. There is a massive decline in old growth forests
both in the tropic and temperate zones. These forests support some of the
greatest biodiversity in plants and animals. They also contain some of the most
valuable trees for human use and consumption, like teak and mahogany from the
tropics and cedar and white and red pine from the temperate forests. If you fly
over the massive clearcuts in Canada you will see large commercial stands of
cedar, white and red pine virtually gone, or severely diminished. You will find
them replaced by swaying stands of low quality non-commercial new-growth trees
like alder and birch. Many saw mills have had to close. Many species of animals
have had to leave the destroyed habitat. But that is hard to interpret from
aerial photos showing new forest cover of junk trees. Lomborg could investigate
the plight of the villagers in Africa and Asia that have had to resort to
burning animal dung, because they have cut down all of the cuttable trees around
them for miles. He should have talked to the Chipko Movement in India and the
villagers in China, that have suffered severe landslides due to the loss of
forests and forest-protected watersheds around their villages. He should have
talked to Dr. Wangari Maathai and the National Council of Women of Kenya who for
the last 20 years have been planting millions of trees in an effort to reverse
the terrible loss of forests due to over-cutting.
Emily Matthews states that, "Lomborg's interpretation of global forest cover and Indonesian forest fires are just two examples of the incomplete and superficial analyses that underpin too much of his book." Emily Matthews is a senior associate at the World Resources Institute. She is the lead author of the Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems: Forest Ecosystems (WRI, 2000) and Understanding the Forest Resources Assessment 2000 (WRI, 2001). See her comments at http://www.gristmagazine.com/books/matthews121201.asp . ********************************************************************
MASSIVE INDONESIAN FOREST FIRES ARE
COMMON AND NOT A PROBLEM: WRONG
Lomborg, while acknowledging that the Indonesia forest fires of 1997-1998,
were serious, claimed that they were not out of the ordinary. Wrong. If he had
read "The Gallon Environment Letter" and the Jakarta Post in 1997 and 1998, he
would have learned that the fires were extraordinary and caused major economic,
forest, and ecological losses. He would have learned that airports and the
commerce and tourism they support in Indonesia and Malaysia were shut down for
weeks by the massive smoke clouds. He would have learned that the fires were
amongst the largest human-made fires to ever blight Indonesia and southeast
Asia, for that matter.
But again, as a statistician with no formal ecological background, Lomborg,
couldn't have known. And as a statistician with an apparent bias, Lomborg
selectively chose to accept the low forest burn numbers offered by the
Government of Indonesia: 520,000 hectares. The low number given by the
government was questionable and not backed by solid research. Indonesia, already
embarrassed by the fires, accepted the estimates of forests burned from the
local Indonesian land owners and palm plantation managers who did not want to
reveal the full extent to which the fires had burned. Without further research
and using the questionable Indonesian numbers, Lomborg attacked the World
Wildlife Fund satellite estimates of 2 million hectares burned. He noted that
the WWF estimate included both forest and non-forestland, but did not point out
that the official Indonesian estimate he quoted was for forest land only. He
then claimed, citing a 1999 United Nations Environment Programme report, that
subsequent "satellite-aided counting" indicated that upwards of 1.3 million
hectares of forest and timberlands may have burned. The German-supported
Integrated Forest Fires Management Project, which, using satellite data and
ground checks, produced convincing evidence that the Indonesian fires had
actually burned some 5.2 million hectares in 1998 alone -- 10 times the
Indonesian government's estimate.
Regarding estimates of how much forest actually burned, Lomborg cites a
UNEP report, which in turn refers to an analysis, "A Study of the 1997 Fires in
Southeast Asia Using SPOT Quicklook Mosaics," that was based on 766 satellite
images. These images covered the islands of Kalimantan and Sumatra only, for
just August to December 1997. The study did not examine burn areas for 1998, nor
did it take into account fires on other islands. The UNEP report states that
this estimate represents "only a lower limit estimate of the area burned,"
although Lomborg's readers are not so informed.
An analysis by the Singapore Centre of Remote Imaging, Sensing, and
Processing using the same satellite images yielded a total burn area estimate
for 1997 and 1998 of nearly 8 million hectares. In 1999, a technical team funded
by the Asian Development Bank and working through the Indonesian National
Development Planning Agency aggregated and analyzed all available data sources
and estimated that the area burned during 1997-1998 totalled more than 9.7
million hectares, of which some 4.6 million hectares were forest. Source,
http://www.gristmagazine.com/grist/books/matthews121201.asp
.
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ENVIRONMENTALISTS CLAIM THERE IS AN
"ENERGY CRISIS": WRONG
One of the environmental litanies set up as a straw man by Lomborg is that
he states that environmentalists feel that there is an "Energy Crisis". Wrong.
Major environmental groups do not believe that there is a crisis of a shortage
of energy. He spends pages in his book showing that there is no energy crisis.
The environmental groups couldn't agree more. Rather the environmental groups
are concerned about improper energy use and consumption inequities. They are
concerned about the severe environmental impacts of coal-power, nuclear energy,
and the burning of fuelwood (creating desertification) in developing countries.
They are concerned about the serious impacts of oil spills around the world
resulting from shady corporations and bad engineering practices. They are
concerned about the United States declining conventional oil reserves and its
increasing dependence (53%) on imported oil. To support his Litany assertion
that the environmental movement believes there is an energy crisis, Bjorn
Lomborg cites a CNN report and an article in the "E- Magazine" - no one else,
not Friends of the Earth, not Greenpeace, and not WWF. He does not cite an
environmental organisation or even a leading environmental personality as
believing in an energy resource crisis. See the website http://www.wri.org/press/mk_lomborg_09_things.html
.
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ENVIRONMENTALISTS CLAIM NATURAL
RESOURCES ARE RUNNING OUT: WRONG
Lomborg laid out another Litany, setting up a straw man by alleging that
the environmentalists say that the world is running out of natural resources.
Wrong. Major environmental organizations do not believe the world is running out
of natural resources. They believe there is resource wastage, regional
shortages, and serious resource access imbalances. It is true that 30 years ago,
in 1972, the Club of Rome, in its seminal book, "Limits to Growth", and Dr. Paul
Erhlich in his 1968 book, "The Population Bomb" expressed concern about the
coming age of resource scarcity. But by 1978, it was clear to the environmental
groups that we were not going to run out of natural resources as such. Instead,
they focussed on the mismanagement of natural resources and the selective
reduction of available resources, such as the collapse of the cod fisheries off
the Grand Banks of eastern Canada from over-fishing; the loss of topsoil and
resulting desertification of foodlands: and, the declining ability of
conventional oil in countries like the United States to meet their growing fuel
requirements, forcing the U.S. to rely on terrorist-infested oil, 53 per cent
from OPEC and other imported sources.
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WASTE MANAGEMENT IS NOT A PROBLEM:
WRONG
Bjorn Lomborg paid scant attention to municipal, industrial, nuclear, and
hazardous wastes. He wrote only four pages in his 300-page plus book about
wastes. Tom Burke states that, "Lomborg fails to mention of toxic or hazardous
wastes, nothing is said about industrial wastes or the problems of large volume
wastes from the mining industry. Radioactive wastes do not get a mention, nor do
agricultural wastes." Burke added that, "the rest of the world seems to have no
waste management problems at all, for all the attention they get." The
environmental critique of waste management policies has been primarily about the
wastage of resources that go into producing such large volumes of municipal
wastes, and the nature of many of our industrial wastes and their impact on the
environment and, in the case of radioactive wastes, human health for millennia
to come."
Source, http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/Documents/Reports/ten%20pinches%20of%20salt.pdf ***********************************************************************
ECONOMIC GROWTH AND PROSPERITY IN
DEVELOPING COUNTRIES WILL ALLEVIATE AIR POLLUTION THERE:
WRONG
Bjorn Lomborg asserts that air pollution is not as big a problem as the
environmentalists make it out to be, because OECD countries have already reduced
their air pollution and it is no longer a serious problem. He adds that
developing countries don't have to directly address the issues as the
environmentalists hype them to do, because economic growth and prosperity there
will automatically result in air pollution clean up. Wrong.
First, air pollution remains a serious problem in high population density
pockets of OECD countries. Secondly, because the rich newly industrialized
countries like Mexico, India, China, Indonesia and Egypt, are ignoring the
solutions and letting corruption eat into any economic gains that might be
diverted to air pollution control. Tom Burke states that, "air pollution in the
rest of the world, where two thirds of humanity live, need not be considered, in
Professor Lomborg's view, because this will cease automatically as they get
richer. This confuses cause and correlation, not a mistake you would expect from
a statistician. Although national wealth and the state of a nation's environment
are observably associated to some extent, the relationships are complex and not
at all well understood." To set Lomborg's simple assumption in context, it is
worth considering the following comment about the Asia-Pacific region by the
somewhat conservative Asia Development Bank which stated that, "Environmental
degradation in the region is pervasive, accelerating, and unabated. At risk are
people's health and livelihoods, the survival of species and ecosystem services
that are the basis for long-term economic development. Economic development and
poverty reduction are increasingly constrained by environmental concerns,
including degradation of forestry and fisheries, scarcity of freshwater, and
poor human health as a result of air and water pollution." Tom Burke CBE is a
member of the Executive Committee of Green Alliance. Currently an environmental
adviser to Rio Tinto and BP and a member of the Council of English Nature, he
was previously special adviser to successive Secretaries of State for the
Environment. He is a former director of Green Alliance, and of Friends of the
Earth. Burke's critique of Bjorn Lomborg's position can be found at http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/Documents/Reports/ten%20pinches%20of%20salt.pdf
.
Jamie Page with the U.K. Cancer Prevention Society wrote that, "Bjorn
Lomborg argues that the state of the environment is getting better. What about
the cost of cancer? Cancer was a rare disease in pre-industrial societies and
age-corrected incidence figures have been rising steadily for many decades.
Currently one person in three will get cancer and this figure will rise. The
idea that cancer is due to poor lifestyle, bad genes or viruses is being
increasingly discredited. The massive increase in cancer in industrialised
nations is partially due to the release of 100,000 synthetic chemicals into the
environment, their concentration in the food chain, and their bioaccumulation in
humans. Each of us carries between 300 and 500 man-made chemicals in our body.
It is impossible to quantify the costs of this, but one can assume they run into
billions of pounds."
***********************************************************************
ACID GAS EMISSION IMPACTS ARE
MINIMAL: WRONG
Bjorn Lomborg indicated that impacts from acid gas emissions, had little
impact on the environment. Wrong. Thomas Lovejoy states that Lomborg's "research
is so shallow that almost no citation from the peer-reviewed literature appears.
Lomborg asserts that big-city pollution has nothing to do with acid rain, when
it is fact that nitrogen compounds (NOx) from traffic are a major source. His
reference to a study showing that acid rain had no effect on the seedlings of
three tree species neglects to mention that the study did not include conifer
species such as red spruce, which are very sensitive." Lovejoy added that,
"there is no acknowledgment of the delayed effects from acid rain leaching soil
nutrients, particularly key cations. He confounds tree damage from air pollution
30 to 60 years ago with subsequent acid rain damage and makes an Alice-in-
Wonderland statement that the only reason we worry about foliage loss is
"because we have started monitoring this loss." It is simply untrue that "there
is no case of forest decline in which acidic deposition is known to be a
predominant cause." Two clear-cut examples are red spruce in the Adirondacks and
sugar maple in Pennsylvania." Thomas Lovejoy is chief biodiversity adviser to
the president of the World Bank and senior adviser to the president of the
United Nations Foundation. See his full comments in the Scientific American
at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC5880000
**********************************************************************
THE WORLD'S FISHERIES REMAIN HEALTHY
AND GROWING: WRONG
Lomborg tells the environmentalists to stop their belly-aching about the
world's fisheries decline. It just isn't happening, he says. Wrong. Lomborg
claims that "marine productivity has almost doubled since 1970." In the
strictest sense as a statistician, Lomborg is numerically correct. But from a
regional and a fish varietal perspective, he is wrong. Between unsustainable
growth in fishing technology and large-net fishing, and commercial fish farms,
we humans have been able to scour the oceans for more and more fish.
However, because of his lack of ecological and fish resource knowledge, he
failed to report on the series of collapses of fisheries for high end fish like
flounder, cod, and crab. The Beluga Sturgeon (caviar) is all but fished out. One
of the richest and most productive fish regions in the world, the Grand Banks
off of eastern Canada has been fished out, except for junk fish that nobody
wanted before. Twelve thousand jobs were lost and eastern Canada suffered a
severe economic setback when the cod fishery had to be closed in the 1990's.
Many of the rich crab fisheries around Alaska have been closed in a desperate
effort to revive the crab stocks. The European Union is considering limiting or
closing the cod fisheries around its coasts to avoid the same fate that hit
Canada. The wild and diversified salmon fisheries on North America's West Coast,
from Alaska to BC to Washington State, is suffering tremendous over-fishing
pressures. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), "what Lomborg
actually means appears later in the book as a figure depicting an increase in
total fish catch, plus production from fish farms. Capture of wild fish from the
sea has increased by 20 percent, not 100 percent since 1970. And what humans are
taking from the oceans and what the oceans are producing are of course
fundamentally different matters." WRI goes on to state that, "Lomborg's equating
of the two exemplifies how his book is fundamentally misleading. By focussing on
total production, Lomborg's graph conceals that stocks of cod, haddock, hake,
flounder, swordfish, sardines, halibut, Atlantic Ocean perch, and many others
have crashed." See the WRI website on Lomborg at http://www.wri.org/press/mk_lomborg_10_things.html
. Read about the Canadian cod fisheries collapse at http://www.unesco.org/courier/1998_08/uk/dossier/txt24.htm
. Read WRI's world fisheries under pressure http://www.wri.org/trends/fishloss.html
. Read the Gallon Letter about fisheries conflict in the US State of Georgia
at http://csf.colorado.edu/bioregional/2002/msg00137.html
.
**********************************************************************
POPULATION GROW NO LONGER A PROBLEM:
WRONG
Lomborg's view that "the number of people is not the problem" is simply
wrong. His selective use of statistics gives the reader the impression that the
population problem is largely behind us. The global population growth rate has
indeed declined slowly, but absolute growth in human beings on earth is enormous
and remains close to the very high levels observed in recent decades, because
the population base keeps expanding. World population today stands at six
billion, three billion more than in 1960. According to U.N. projections, another
three billion will likely be added by 2050, and population size will eventually
reach about 10 billion. This is according to demographer, Dr. John Bongaarts,
Vice President of the U.S. Population Council's Policy Research Division,
and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the
Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, as well. Bongaarts adds that, "Lomborg
dismisses concerns about this issue based on a simplistic and misleading
calculation of density as the ratio of people to all land. Clearly, a more
useful and accurate indicator of density would be based on the land that remains
after excluding areas unsuited for human habitation or agriculture, such as
deserts and inaccessible mountains. For example, according to his simple
calculation, the population density of Egypt equals a manageable 68 persons per
square kilometer, but if the unirrigated Egyptian deserts are excluded, density
is an extraordinary 2,000 people per square livable kilometer," not the 68
posited by Lomborg that he thinks have all the inhospitable deserts to live in.
Lomborg correctly notes that poverty is the main cause of hunger and
malnutrition, but he neglects the contribution of population growth to poverty.
For a full discussion visit the Scientific American website at
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC5880000 ********************************************************************* CLIMATE CHANGE NOT A PROBLEM WORTH
FULLY SOLVING: WRONG
Lomborg asserts that climate change is an issue to large and too expensive
to fix. He says "let's spend our money elsewhere. Wrong. Charles Secrett,
Executive Director of Friends of the Earth England, wrote in U.K.'s The Guardian
newspaper that, "Lomborg chooses a bad economic model, which overestimates the
cost of action and underestimates the costs of inaction, makes unjustified
assumptions about the IPCC's forecasts on GHG impacts, and then misrepresents
evidence which does not fit his case. How ironic that he should be contemptuous
of the intellectual rigour of environmentalists. His slippery way with facts and
arguments has already been well exposed by his academic colleagues in Denmark
(see the Aarhus University website www.au.dk/cesam), but contrarians tend to lack
a sense of shame." Lomborg asserts that the higher estimates of the IPCC are
"plainly unlikely", which will come as news to most climatologists. In fact, the
IPCC, which represents the consensus view of climate scientists from around the
world, recently concluded that climate change will probably happen at a faster
rate than was previously believed. Source, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4241934,00.html
.
Lomborg asserts that if implemented the Kyoto Protocol GHG emission cuts
will have almost no quick positive effect on the man-made global warming gases
now circling the earth (mainly put there by the United States, Europe, Canada,
Japan, and the other OECD nations). Environmental groups knew that already,
which is why they have criticised Kyoto as being too little, too late. So far,
Lomborg and the environmentalists are on side. But his analysis is to do little
and spend the money elsewhere. Whereas, the environmentalists are saying, "if
there is a growing problem and it is going to harm the economies of nations -
fix it." Since the Kyoto Protocol is all the governments would agree to, it is
seen by environmental organizations as a start, and is accepted by them as such.
They feel that even greater GHG emission cuts will be agreed to in Kyoto II,
especially as the negative impacts continue to pile up. "Since greater
cuts, involving more countries, are likely to be agreed to take effect during
the second compliance period after 2012, Lomborg's exercise of calculating
Kyoto's effect on the climate by 2100 is at best irrelevant and at worst
intentionally misleading," said Mark Lynas. Source, Mark Lynas, bottom of the
website http://www.anti-lomborg.com .
Lomborg asserts that cost-benefit calculations show that although the
benefits of avoiding climate change could be substantial ($5 trillion is the
single figure Lomborg cites), this is not worth the cost to the economy of
trying to constrain fossil-fuel emissions (a $3-trillion to $33-trillion range
he pulls from the economics literature). However, Lomborg fails to use simple
science, asymmetrically, to provide a range potential economic damages caused by
climate change. Even more puzzling is his failure to discuss ecological impacts
in general, focusing instead on the human health impacts and the agriculture
sector, sectors he thinks won't be much harmed by climate change of the
minuscule amount he predicts. See the full argument at the website http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4241934,00.html
.
Also see http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC5880000 *************************************************************************
ENVIRONMENTALISTS DON'T FIX
PROBLEMS, THEY HYPE ISSUES: WRONG
Bjorn Lomborg criticizes environmental groups for hyping issues and blowing
them out of proportion - kind of like "chicken little's the sky is falling". He
asserts that environmental problems have been fixed through growth and economic
activity. Wrong. The environmental movement, begun in 1968, and the citizens
that support the movement, forced their governments and industries to clean up
and to put in place systems to improve the environment. The very hype Lomborg
criticizes is the hype that pressured decision-makers into action. Thomas
Lovejoy put it this way: "Far worse, Lomborg seems quite ignorant of how
environmental science proceeds: researchers identify a potential problem,
scientific examination tests the various hypotheses, understanding of the
problem often becomes more complex, researchers suggest remedial policies--and
then the situation improves. By choosing to highlight the initial step and skip
to the outcome, he implies incorrectly that all environmentalists do is
exaggerate. The point is that things improve because of the efforts of
environmentalists to flag a particular problem, investigate it and suggest
policies to remedy it. Sadly, the author seems not to reciprocate the respect
biologists have for statisticians." See http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC5880000
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