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The Skeptical Environmentalist
The book has caused quite a stir in the circles of environmental activism. Bjorn Lomborg, coming from a green background, has thoroughly reviewed much of the work in the field and raised some concerns about the quality of the consensus analysis and conclusions. Sample chapters and further defense of his work can be found at www.lomborg.com
Disclosure Statement: I am a small 'g' green. I am a member of the Viridian Design Movement if not of the Green Party USA. I hold as a matter of fact that dependence on hydrocarbons is unsustainable for both the developed world and as a path to long-term growth for the developing world. I strongly believe that it is a moral imperative for humanity to preserve as much of the planet's natural beauty and habitat as possible. My general impression with the state of climate studies is that human activity is probably having an effect on the global climate. To what extent is a matter still open for debate in my opinion. But hey, its OUR PLANET we're talking about, so why take chances? That said, I also consider myself to be just as rabid an empiricist. I detest being led about by phony data or false conclusions, and I will not support any cause that cannot bring itself to tell the truth to the public about its data and agenda. If the current data does not fit my model of how life should be, I know that I shouldn't blame the data or the messenger. So, I am trying to be as objective as possible here, but I am coming from the green end and analyzing this work in that light.
Lomborg is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Aarhaus in Denmark. His specialty, indeed his only other major academic paper, is in the field of game theory. Lomborg -- once upon a time a deep green himself -- set out in 1997 to debunk the claims of economist Julian Simon, a environmental degradation doubter. He found that much of the data had a tendency to support Simon. This lead him to a thorough review of much of the major scientific work in four major areas of "the environmental litany" (Lomborg's words).
- We are depleting a finite supply of natural resources.
- The human population continues to grow, threatening our ability to feed the teeming billions.
- Species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate, deforestation is accelerating and fish stocks are collapsing.
- The air and water are becoming ever more polluted.
The result was The Skeptical Environmentalist. In each of these areas, Lomborg looks at a broad swath of the scientific work done to date to support these claims and finds them wanting. He gets very specific and points out numerous errors of omission as well as slanting of the data and just plain making up results to fit the hypothesis. Lomborg accuses environmental scientists of behaving more like lobbyists trying to put the best possible spin on an issue by manipulating the facts. He also takes to task a credulous media for swallowing this tripe hook, line, and sinker, as it were. Sadly, in some key areas Lomborg has -- either through ignorance or purposefully -- committed errors of omission and selective data use to make some of the same mistakes in analysis, and this very much reduces his credibility.
The first thing that sets the book apart from almost all nonacademic works in the area is the completeness and openness of the research. The book is copiously footnoted. Because of this it is clear from some of the attacks on Lomborg that his critics have been unable to muster the stomach to give it a thorough read, as many make totally false claims about Lomborg's inclusion or reference to specific studies and specific cases. If for no other reason, this completeness makes The Skeptical Environmentalist a valuable resource for anyone interested in environmental science. It is a very complete bibliography of the current work in the field. There are over 2,900 end notes in this 500 page book.
The thing that makes the environment such a slippery public policy subject is its uncertainty. Although the state of our understanding of climate and ecological complexity grows each year, it is still unable to predict with any certainty future events. The only thing that will prove a particular set of data is the future. At which time, of course, it is impossible to take preventative action.
It is probably quite understandable that environmental scientists would take great umbrage at both Lomborg's cheek and his conclusions; seeing how they pose a threat to a consensus of opinion about the state of the global environment and the degree of risk human activity poses. These are people with years of interest vested in their research and in using that research to try and get through to public and politicians who show a lot of reluctance to take on the problems and potential threats of human impact on the environment.
Lomborg quite correctly points out in his chapter on pollution that the worst pollution effects are the results of the early and middle stages of industrial development. Here he states that things are getting better in the developed world and as technology advances, the environmental impact of human activity will be reduced. He acknowledges that something must be done to help the developing world find a different path of development than that already taken by the developed nations. Lomborg takes the green movement to task here for trying to do everything at once; forcing developing nations to spend on "clean" technologies while spending on health and economic development for the poor nations. After wading through what must have been a mind-numbing torrent of cost-benefit analysis data, Lomborg says that choices must be made, political and financial resources are finite and some levels of protection cost more than they are worth. However, one must deeply fault Lomborg's cost-benefit analysis for not making a good attempt to elucidate the cost of environmental degradation per se but instead focusing on pure human property and health costs. What price does one put on the stability of the Gulf Stream currents? What is the actual opportunity cost of one barrel of oil considering it comes from finite supply for which the actual amount is unknown and the burning of which causes environmental costs we can only approximate? These questions have vexed economists for decades, but the answers are surely not zero.
Lomborg's big picture of the general shape of the global climate and of biodiversity is one that debunks most of the more extreme forecasts. In this he has produced valuable analysis. But by his own admission he has skipped over local trends and impacts that have profound social and economic implications. For example, while stating that the actual rate of species extinction over the next 50 years is more likely to be 0.7% rather than the 20-50% numbers bandied about by the World Wildlife Fund et. al., he misses the threat of local species crashes such as that of Atlantic Cod that nearly ruined the fishing industry Eastern North America and Northern Europe in the 1980s and the resulting threat to previously unfished stocks as industrial fishing operations switched to roughy and so on.
The big picture and long-term focus also misses the boat on another key issue. Recent analysis of deep-ice core samples at the poles and in Greenland have shown that in the past, the climate has changed very sharply and very rapidly; on the order of several degrees of average temperature in a decade or less. These changes are probably due to snap changes in the ocean currents caused by salinity levels and minute temperature deviations that, when they go over a certain level "trigger" such events as the mini-Ice Age of the 1500s to mid-1800s. Lomborg completely bypasses addressing the fact that even the minimal human environmental impact he says the data supports could be enough to tip the balance in these areas. And should such evens occur, even Lomborg would admit they would be economically and politically devastating. Perhaps it is his rigid attention to what is measurable that prevented him from addressing this issue. There is too much uncertainty involved to begin to assess whether or not we even can prevent such "trigger" events and thus begin to make cost-benefit analysis of preventative measures.
The most shocking thing about The Skeptical Environmentalist is not its heretical views (in the eyes of greens) however, but the reception it has received among the environmental movement. Instead of praising its depth and using its own errors to show the way forward the community has -- in the grand tradition of the left eating its young -- gone after Dr. Lomborg with a furious anger. Recently, when Dr. Lomborg showed up at Oxford university, the author of an environmental study with a competing view shoved a pie in his face. In its January 2002 issue, Scientific American devoted 11 pages (electronic copies are US$5.00) to attacking the book, its author and his conclusions.
Not surprisingly, the free-market loving Economist has taken up the defense of Dr. Lomborg with both a lead opinion piece and a feature in the February 6th issue. In addition, the magazine had Lomborg pen a "by invitation" piece in August, 2001, a rare honor. The New York Times has also come to his defense with a "Scientist At Work" puff piece in November, 2001.
But by attacking the book and the author so shrilly, the environmental community risks its own hard-won credibility. It acts just as Lomborg accuses it, like lobbyists with an axe to grind, not cold-eyed, empirically-minded scientists. Lomborg's study has its flaws, as does any environmental study. But those flaws should be attacked on their merits alone. At its worst, The Skeptical Environmentalist merely muddies the waters of scientific and public consensus on global human environmental impact. At its best it provides a crucial reality check for those who seek profound social and economic changes in the name of preserving environmental sustainability.
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This is interesting... apparently The Skeptical Environmentalist was published in Danish four years ago, and had already been shredded.w MQiTS9HjQC: www.au.dk/~cesamat/debate.html+&hl=en
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Also here are other rebuttals,
http://www.ucsusa.org/environment/lom
I've read rebuttals from four different sources, and rebuttals for the same section focus on different, but equally devastating flaws.
LetterRip
The truth of the matter is, climatology, geology, etc. do not have the luxury that physics, molecular biology, and other "benchtop" sciences have in that, in the latter fields, it is mostly possible to construct the systems in question in the lab and probe them. However, testing most major hypotheses in climatology is simply not possible as they would require altering the climate in a deliberate manner which is neither possible nor desireable.
Personally, I am of the opinion that we need to enforce much stricter emission, land development, and recycling standards not because I believe that these activities are damaging the environment, but because they indisputably might be damaging the environment.
Most of the resources you point to are hatchet jobs much like the pie-in-the-face that proudly adorns one of them.
I have not yet Lomborg's book, but have followed the debate in science journals (as well as the Economist). While some scientists have engaged him on intellectual terms, the majority of the opinions have been nothing of the sort, stoopoing down to the questioning of his credentials (which nobody would question if he had just published a pro-global warming article).
Yes it can "hurt" in the sense that almost all environmental protection activities have some money cost associated with them.
For example, one figure I've seen thrown about (which may or may not be true, but it illustrates my point) is that the cost of implementing the Kyoto Agreement (on controlling carbon emissions) would be about the same as the cost of providing a source of clean drinking water to every person on earth that doesn't have one (which is, shamefully, a lot of people).
That's not to say that if we scrap Kyoto we would spend the money saved usefully elsewhere, but the point is that environmentalism does cost.
So it's fair to do cost/benefit analysis of all proposals (but very hard to get agreement on those costs and benefits...)
But ... but ... why doesn't Lomborg risk his credibility for attacking the environmentalists so shrilly? Could it be that there's one rule of debate if you're saying things that appeal to the people who own the media which decide who has "credibility" and one rule if you're saying things they don't like?
You certainly can't tell me that Lomborg is unfailingly polite in his attacks on environmentalists because he's not.
That's why he got a pie in the face by the way; not for authoring a "rival study", but because he had basically accused this guy of saying things he knew to be untrue in order to get government grants. If you accuse people of what amounts to fraud in public, you have to expect some comebacks, and you shouldn't pretend that people are only attacking you back because they can't handle your message.
In any case, this article is mis-sectioned. What kind of a "book review" spends about two thirds of its length ranting on unrelated political issues related to other peoples' views about the book and half that much tlaking about the book itself?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Oh yes, it can. C'mon yourself. Don't you remember at least some of the recent debacles?
Greenies are certainly well-meaning, if sometimes undiscerning. Unfortunately, their irrational attitude and lack of scientific training often make them easy to manipulate. As a result, large corporations have been using the legitimate concerns of misinformed green activists to push their own agendas. Said agendas are generally meant for profitability, not environment preservation. The two only meet accidentally.
In short: Emotional action without fact checking or a reality feedback loop almost invariably produces either a random disaster, or the exact opposite of the intended action. Environmentalism is no exception.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
A recent review, by James Glassman, that was in essential agreement with this one about the merits of the book and the reaction of the green community addressed the Scientific American article (which I had read previously) in more detail. Of particular interest to me was background information he supplied on one of the four critics Scientific American selected for the review, Stephan Schneider.
Kassman includes the following quote by professor Stephan Schneider, a bioligist from Standford.
"[We] are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place. . . . To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media cov-erage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dra-matic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. . . . Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
When I read the Scientific American review I remember thinking that the tone of the artical was much more rhetorical and less substantive then I would have hoped/expected from the magazine. While I never doubted that there were individuals and groups who used 'science' to further political agendas it is very dissipointing that an institute whose focus is not even environmental science would publish such a questionable article.
In the previous comment, I meant to add: (c) MTBE was profitable to sell, and now it's profitable to remove
Sorry for the incomplete post.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
when land is owned publicly, it is treated badly there is no evidence for this claim as a general one about human society. you have perhaps heard of the book "the tragedy of the commons", which was one of the first to expound this idea, and suggest that private ownership of land resulted in better caretaking. unfortunately, the book was wrong, and even the author now acknowledges that he did not do enough cross-cultural or a deep enough historical review before writing the book. there are hundreds of examples from human cultures throughout history where public ownership of land has resulted in better treatment of the land and its resources. what typically goes wrong is when there is a breakdown in the cultural traditions that ensure proper stewardship, and nothing to replace them. a google search for "tragedy of the commons" will provide many links to the anthropological and historical research to support what i have said here.
The general principal which you advocate is valid, and I wish environmental advocates would use it (but they won't, because it conflicts with their real agenda).
However...
The problem with the IPCC data as fuel to your approach is that the weighted average itself is biased. For one thing, the field has been largely led by climate modelers, even though the validity of the models is highly questionable. Climate models, like weather models, have a lot of "tweak factors" which are used to adjust for factors that the model cannot incorporate. This means that models are tweaked to produce a match to history, and then their forecast is used.
But the historic timeline is too short for statistical valid matching, and as some paleoclimatologist friends of mine have shown, full of very dubious data. On top of that, this approach is based on the same fallacy as that of a successful mutual fund manager: chance predicts that some models will have good historical track records (as it does for mutual fund managers). Selection (publication selection) leads those models to be included as the best forecasters (fund managers are given more money if they have good track records). And yet the underlying physical model (trading theories for the fund managers) are unlikely to be very accurate, and the outcome may be strictly a result of the operations of chance (See Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb for an odd but insightful look at this).
This is one reason that the IPCC consensus estimate changes significantly (and not in a convergent direction) from one report to the next.
When we add to this the politicization of the field, and the resulting funding and publication bias, the situation gets even worse.
Thus, the weighting factors are very hard to get right.
In addition, a cost/benefit analysis requires a good analysis of the cost of remediation. In the environmental area, most analysis goes towards the "benefit" (degrees of avoided warming per century, or in your case, avoided economic losses from pessimistic outcomes). But little focus is given to the cost (economic impact with trickle-down costs). Since the economic system seems to be as hard to predict as the climate, this means that we need to take the most pessimistic views of the economic cost of remediation into our cost benefit analysis also!
BTW... most of the better arguments I have seen against CO2 reductions are not by free market extremists, and I think you mischaracterize those of us who end up siding with the corporations. All but a very few free market advocates understand that there are externalities - costs which are passed outside the market system with no corresponding cost inside the system, and that the market does not deal well with externalities (unless they can be internalized). Thus we know that invoking the wisdom of the market to solve some economic goals is just as silly as invoking the wisdom of environmental absolutism.
BTW... it might surprise you to know that there is a lot of big corporate support for CO2 remediation. For example, Enron tried to get the bush administration to *support* the Kyoto Protocol (fortunately they got nothing for their money). Other companies have done the same. The reason is simple self interest - they see an advantage for themselves in the post-Kyoto environment. In the case of Enron, they wanted to trade in emissions credits, which Kyoto would greatly increase. They also had lower carbon fuels in their inventory than many competitors, which gave them a competitive advantage.
An acquaintance of mine, who stopped researcher and started business as a Global Warming consultant to business, recently was lamenting that nobody wanted to hear his anti-Kyoto message any more becaus they had figured out how to profit from Kyoto. So those who imagine that big business is killing Kyoto in the US are not well informed.
There are ways in which the market can help, however. For example, privately owned forest land is definitely treated better than public forest land, because the owner has a long term investment in it. This is a market "solution" to some environmental issues (not including biodiversity on that land). Likewise, both sides have recognized that tradeable emission rights are a good way to reduce emissions if reducing emissions is really worth the cost of the program.
On a side note, most environmentalists do not get up in arms against farming unless it is "corporate farming" or uses "nasty chemicals." And yet, farming has transformed the landscape of the northern hemisphere more than any other act of man, and smaller farms requires more land per amount of crop produced than the more-efficient larger (often corporate) farms! Framing has destroyed (transformed?) huge swaths of environment. This bias shows the marxist viewpoint of much of the environmental movement.
The only good weather is bad weather.