The Skeptical Environmentalist

-cman- writes: "The issue of human impact on the global environment is one -- if not the most --important and divisive issues of our generation. There are two key questions involved; is human activity having a major impact on the climate of the Earth? What, if anything should be done to minimize that impact? It is within the lifetimes of most of Slashdot's readers that we begin to get answers to these questions. We will either begin to make policy and economic changes to protect the environment or we won't. And towards the middle and end of this century we will begin to see real-time data to validate some of the predictions being bandied about by environmental scientists. Amid all the uncertainty that the above two questions generate comes a new book, The Skeptical Environmentalist; Measuring the Real State of the World.." Read on for the rest of -cman-'s review. The Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg pages 540 publisher Cambridge University Press rating 8 reviewer -cman- ISBN 0521010683 summary This book takes a careful look at existing environmental data, with some surprising conclusions and resulting controversy.

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.

You can purchase The Skeptical Environmentalist from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Comments

Point, Counterpoint

[skatedork]

As a non-fan of Mr. Lomborg, I'd like to offer up a few links:

Anti-Lomborg - Responses to Bjorn's environmental writing

Debunking Pseudo-Scholarship: Things a journalist should know about The Skeptical Environmentalist

Union of Concerned Scientists examine The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg

Re:Point, Counterpoint

[Alomex]

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).

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

[PHAEDRU5]

I subscribe to Mother Jones *and* the American Spectator, basically to see what the extremists at both ends are saying.

Since I became a subscriber I know, based on my junk mail, that my name has been sold to donor solicitation lists of the left and the right.

So, every month I get mail from Jerry Falwell, etc., about how the Homosexual/Abortion/Socialist lobbies are destroying the U.S. These compete with mail from NARAL, NOW, PFAW, etc., about how the Heterosexual/Anti-Abortion/Capitalist lobbies are destroying the U.S.

(Aside: now that I think about it, I do get a lot more mail from the left than from the right. More religious fervour, I guess.)

My point is that the only way these people can raise money is by scaring the bejesus out of those who can be scared.

The environmental lobby is no different: it scares to raise money.

What's great about this book is how it demonstrates the lies in the propaganda.

Of course, he'll never be forgiven for that. And my guess is, from a survey of my junk mail, that there will be a lot more people out to trash him than to support him. Poor sod.

Cheek, etc.

[gowen]

It is probably quite understandable that environmental scientists would take great umbrage at both Lomborg's cheek and his conclusions

Scientist don't take umbrage at his cheek or (directly) his conclusions. They take umbrage at his science. Basically, he isn't very good at it. His research is full of errors, (sometimes very basic ones. At one point he quotes an absolute figure as a percentage because he is unfamiliar with the different conventions for decimal places between the US and Europe). He selectively quotes (and misquotes) source material to support his claims. Frankly, he's a self publicist, and if his pseudoscience reduces the amount of research into the very real possibility of irreversible, catastrophic, climate change, a very dangerous one.

As an aside, lets just apply Occam's Razor. Here are the two possible alternatives:

1. Lomborg is wrong
2. There is a massive (indeed, worldwide) conspiracy of scientists, suppressing their real knowledge, intent only on scare mongering to preserve their funding

(Full Disclosure: I am a Geophysical Fluid Dynamicist, so I could be part of the conspiracy [TINC] myself)

Re:Cheek, etc.

[Alomex]

His research is full of errors,

This is an overstatement of the facts. Many rebuttals take shortcuts in what would otherwise be hard work: debating each of Lomborg points. Those rebuttals overemphasize minor gaffes that are bound to appear in a research piece encompasing such a large subject. (By that count The Evolution of the Species by Darwin has more errors per page than Lomborg).

Reality is the majority of the basic facts are right, it is the interpretation of those basic indicators that needs to be discussed.

Your average environmentalist assumes a priori that the environment is deteriorating. Lomborg accurately points out that prima facie the data is not there.

Btw. this would not be the first time that environmentalists were wrong in something that they took for granted, as they were when they predicted humanity would run out of oil by the mid 90s.

The interpretation of the facts requires further debate though.

first, do no harm...

[supernova87a]

OK, fine. As a scientist and reasonable person, I must admit the possibility that our activities are having absolutely no effect on the environment, and the measurements of climate change are just part of the small natural oscillations in our system. I must admit this possibility, because we don't have enough evidence yet, and to dogmatically cling to a belief without evidence does us no credit, and is the mark of a different ideology.

But on the other hand, look at the problem from a practical perspective. Suppose that global warming is "false" (ie. we're not causing it). Then our actions now have no effect and by reducing emissions, curbing pollution, we do nothing (except improve our own cities, etc. a little bit). But if the phenomenon is real, and our actions now make it better or worse, then by continuing on our present course, we are making the problem worse.

Given these choices, in the absence of information, isn't it more logical to bet on the second? Isn't it safer to assume the worst case scenario? I.e. let's stop doing the things that people suggest may be harming the environment, because if they actually do, we'll be screwed in 50 years? And if they're not harming the environment, we did no harm anyway?

Do some people not understand this logic??

Re:first, do no harm...

[mesocyclone]

supernova87a states: "Given these choices, in the absence of information, isn't it more logical to bet on the second? Isn't it safer to assume the worst case scenario? I.e. let's stop doing the things that people suggest may be harming the environment, because if they actually do, we'll be screwed in 50 years? And if they're not harming the environment, we did no harm anyway?"

In fact, this principle is starting to be used by environmentalist to justify all sorts of policies that they otherwise cannot support with evidence.

The problem with this principal is that in an uncertain, complex system, your actions to mitigate harm may themselves cause harm. Environmentalists have a narrow definition of harm - for example they rarely recognize that their actions may harm or even result in the death of those people who are at the edge of existence economically. The banning of DDT is one example - with the death rate from maliaria around a million a year now, when it was much lower before. Did anybody do a "least harm" analysis there?

Furthermore, it is unscientific in the sense that it is really saying "We don't have proof of X, but we are going to act as if X is true, and take actions that force people to change their behavior as a result."

For example, if in fact the costs of CO2 mitigation are high, they may lead to significant damage to third world economies. This would lead to increased environmental damage in the third world areas as those people are more desperate and less able to import what they need... so they strip more forests, overfish more fish, etc. They also have more kids - the greater the uncertainty of survival of kids, the more kids people have. The result: population growth.

The correct thing to do is do a cost benefit analysis (a phrase detested by environmentalists), and to account for these uncertainties.

The other important thing to realize is that we have greatly reduced the amount of most pollutants (with the exception of CO2 if one buys the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis). But environmentalists are pushing for zero pollution (which means zero technology which means zero population).

The biggest problem with the environmental movement is that it is not satisfied with success. You don't need to go to "The Skeptical Environmentalist" to find out that pollution in many areas is vastly decreased from previous levels. Another problem is that the environmental movement invariable sees progress and capitalism as the villain. As a result it is blind to the fact that increased prosperity leads to decreased birth rate (one of the main goals of environmentlaists), and that it leaves society with the option of considering environmental choices without killing people in the process

Another problem with the environmentalist movement is that much of it has been hijacked by extremists who use it as a weapon against capitalism. Thus we have every project obstructed by these "environmentalists." For example, here in Arizona there was a project to build a toxic waste incinerator (a *good* thing for the environment since it would destroy most of the toxicity). Greenpeace sent agitators down to block the project, and it was ultimately shelved. That incinerator would have been out in the middle of the Sonoran Desert ( a *good* place - far from people).

Finally, I would comment that most environmentalists in this day and age cannot do a good job of answering the question of "why preserve the environment?" Or more directly, "why preserve this particular aspect of the environment?" One tends to get answers that imply that it is an absolute good (essentially in a religious sense) to preserve the environment. But that sort of reasoning gives no guidance as to how to do that (other than the mass elimination of the human race - also advocated by some environmentalists). Also, the *good* that can come from environmental change is always discounted. I have friends who research the beneficial effects of increased CO2 on plants. They have trouble getting funding due to the politicization of the global warming issue. Nobody wants to find good outcomes!

Nor can they define what a desirable environment is. Some want us to go back to the hunter gatherer days (ignoring the fact that those hunter gatherers caused major species extinctions and major environmental change). Some simply want us to freeze and preserve the current environment in whatever state it is (ignoring Darwin essentially). Others want man to have no impact on the environment. A few want to preserve the environment for the future (I would call the more reasonable of these "conservationists" as opposed to environmentalists).

Almost none recognize that man *is* part of the environment and the actions of *man* are by definition "natural." Recognizing that allows more rational choices to be considered. It leads us to force a definition of goals for the environment, and that can allow us to do benefit/harm analysis (called cost-benefit analysis technically but that term is hated by many environmentalists, probably because of both their anti-capitalist feelings and their absolutism).

This isn't the right book

[uncadonna]

It would be a good idea if someone were to write a book on the excesses and gullibility of the environmental "movement" but this isn't it. Rather this book actually tends to attack legitimate environmental science.

In the area where I have the most background, climate change, it takes the usual corporate apologists' position, that the outcome will be at the (IPCC = Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) consensus level or more benign, and then piles up evidence on the more benign side.

Well, the thing about the consensus opinion is that it is based on the entire pile of evidence, not just half of it. By the definition of best estimate, for each piece of evidence showing a more benign outcome there is a less benign outcome.

Now here's the sticky part - the consensus is the median estimate of physical changes due to human alterations of the environment. It's not an average and it's certainly not a cost-weighted average. As I used to try to argue endlessly on sci.environment, the right policy is based on the economic risk, which is weighted toward worst-case scenarios. Cost increases nonlinearly with perturbation, and small perturbations may have negligible costs. This means that the sound and economically valid response should be weighted more heavily toward more pessimistic scenarios. It's simple cost/benefit risk analysis.

When I make this argument, "environmentalists" don't buy it because risk analysis often doesn't match their preconceptions. They have come to the point where they distrust basing any decisions on statistical analysis of evidence, which of course is a completely idiotic position. On the other hand the "wisdom of the free market" forces don't buy a risk analysis of climate change because, well, it inconveniently argues to interventionist policies, and they have a preconception (equally idiotic) that no rational analysis can ever point to government intervention in the marketplace, so there has to be something wrong with the rational argument since it reaches the wrong conclusion.

The point here isn't that there is no book to be written about political correctness, sheepish credulity and factual wrongheadedness among environmentalists. There is one, just as there is another to be written about their opponents. Politics is not science, though, and apparently political books sell better than science books that threaten preconceptions on all sides.

The problem is that this book appears to be just one more piece of trash on the vast heap of conclusion-first polemics, not a cure for it.

Re:This isn't the right book

[mesocyclone]

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.

Re:Lombord has been thoroughly rebuttaled

[Phanatic1a]

The rebuttals posted at that site aren't really very good. The ones I read before I gave up in disgust were mostly arguments by assertion, with little concrete evidence given to support them, no footnotes or references to studies or data that I could see, and laced with a strong flavor of ad hominem, as in Devra Davis's "rebuttal," which she leads off by saying:

"You know what they say about people who become statisticians? They lacked the personality to become accountants."

That's not the dispassionate and unbiased practitioner of science speaking; that's someone with an axe to grind.

I'm not defending Lomborg's research; indeed, I haven't read the book. But what's utterly disgusting is the means by which the established viewpoints have chosen to attack it. Scientific American even went so far as to claim it was "defending science" against Lomborg's claim.

That's a repugnant attitude to take. Science is a method, a process of determining what is true, and if Lomborg's arguments are faulty, his analysis shoddy, and his conclusions flawed, than the proper application of science will demonstrate that and we will all be the better off for it.

But if, as Scientific American seems to think, science is something that takes a position of advocacy on complex issues, then science is far less likely to be useful as a process for examining that issue, and everybody loses.

Shame on SA. The Spectator has a nice piece on the controversy at:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table =old& section=current&issue=2002-02-23&id=1602

The Planet's Fine, We're At Risk.

[Genus Marmota]

Picture humanity as a group of monkeys sitting on a high tree branch, with a hungry lion waiting paitiently below. A small group of monkeys is sawing furiously away at the branch they all sit on. "We need more lumber!" they shout. Another other group is in a state of panic, shouting "Save the tree! Save the tree!" But most of the monkeys are doing what monkeys generally do: scratching, having sex and looking around for food, completely uninterested in the other two groups.

Sigh.

On my office cube I have a graph of the ice core data from Vostok, Antarctica. The graph of mean planetary temperature change looks like a roller coaster. Goddess sure does like to mix it up. What's striking about it is that for the last 12,000 years or so, we've had an anomalously stable and warm trend. Just about the time humans figured out how to grow wheat and live in villages.

Did humans cause global warming? Well, I don't think there were that many campfires back in the paleolithic. How bout the other way round? Maybe the stable, warmer temperatures made possiblee the "stupid human trick" of huge cities based on domesticated crops?

My unscientific take on it is that the climate is a big 'ol complicated chaotic system. If you're betting your civilization on linear trends persisting very long in any direction, then you're lookin to get spanked. And you haven't looked very hard at the data. I'm as green as the next bumper-sticker-sporting, recycling vegetarian. But I think we're just clever monkeys in the end.

A frightening thought...

[rcs1000]

There is no doubt that the Skeptical Environmentalist contains many errors. But it contains a lot that is useful, and it does not pretend to be a book about science. It is a book about the statistics used by certain people to support certain arguments.

Sometimes the stastics used are dubious: the Economist themselves ran a story on how the world's figures on fish production were flawed because of massive misrepesentation from China. (http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_I D=885936) As a result of this, one whole chapter of the book is glaringly wrong.

*BUT*

The reaction to the book does the environmentalists great disservice. Rather than rationally approaching it from the point of view of the statistics, and admitting that - in a few cases - statistics used to back up a points were wrong, the environmental movement has reacted hysterically. Normally sensible people have attacked Lomberg as an agent of big business, the oil companies, etc.

This is wrong. Attack Lomberg for his errors, do not get caught up in some hysterical conspiracy theory.

And talk about statistics. The book is about statistics, not about global warming. It may well be that global warming is worse than expected, but attacking him for having a different point of view (and that alone) is wrong.

Just my $0.05...

*r

Re:TANSTAAFL (was: Re:C'mon

[revscat]

TANSTAFFL applies equally to energy use: We don't get to spit out carbon emissions 24 hours/day for ~70 years without an associated cost. The question is which costs more: cutting emissions now, or cleaning up later. (Or, for some, whether anything needs to be done whatsoever; I personally reject this viewpoint as being Pollyanna-ish.)

One libertarian's perspective

[dada21]

My views on the environment are fairly anti-libertarian in many ways, but I believe 100% that the libertarian solution carries the only solution to it.

When land is owned publicly, it is treated badly. When you want to find the worst perpetrators of the environment, you'll find commercial businesses polluting on public land that they lease.

By taking the libertarian road, and privatizing all land, you're now give businesses and people a vested interest in keeping the value of the land high, not low. Just like a renter of an apartment takes generally worse care of the place than a condo owner, the same is true of a company or an individual who may one day want to sell the land for its value.

If everyone owns their land rather than leasing it from a public entity, you now have civil protection against someone polluting your land. Some big industry pumps poisons into their river that end up in your groundwater? Now you can sue. Currently, when a business pollutes on leased government land, who do you sue? The government? These are the same guys that leave loopholes in the law so that their buddies CAN pollute.

The people who think that there is no way that pro-environmental scientists aren't harboring a conspiracy are nuts. Every science I've had the ability to witness has some "global" conspiracies that are used in order to keep people "needed" that business. The environment is no different.

The worst polluters in the world are socialist governments. That's a fact. The most pristine forests in the world are on private land. That's a fact. Some of the forest preserves in Central American that are privately owned are so much cleaner than the public land residing next door to them that its scary that people really want our government running the forest preserve system.

If you want to protect or preserve some land, find others who agree with you, and set up a private land trust. Its happening more and more around the world, AND IT WORKS.

If you want the air cleaner, then get government out of the air regulation. End the EPA. If a business is pumping chemicals into the air, its up to the third party watchdog groups to monitor it, and let people know. When there is legal evidence that a company is harming land or individuals off of their property, then a civil lawsuit can entail. End of story.

Sure, there are flaws in my "world," but the flaws in today's world are obvious: environmental protection laws hurt small individual landowners, as the large business either lease their land from government, or get such amazing loopholes granting to them in the laws, that they actually can pollute more, not less.

Lomborg charged with "scientific dishonesty"

[Kraft]

... yesterday (in Danish).

According to the article, Lomborg was charged with (directly translated) "scientific dishonesty*", which means "acts or ommissions whereby there in the research happens forgery or alteration of the scientific message or gross deception of a person's contribution in the research".

The charges fell the same day Lomborg is applying for the position of director of the newly founded Institute for Environmental evaluation in Denmark, by the council concerning scientific dishonesty.

*dishonesty is not really the correct word in English. It's more "dis-HONOUR" than "dis-sincerety".

Interesting disparity

[streetlawyer]

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.

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?

Well meaning but deadly

[SysKoll]

Even if we AREN'T damaging things as badly as some say, it cant HURT us to be more eco-friendly.

Oh yes, it can. C'mon yourself. Don't you remember at least some of the recent debacles?

• Benzene-based gasoline additives as a lead substiture, only (a) the lead in environment comes mostly from incinerators, not gas, and (b) the new additives are carcinogenic, but hey, (c)
• Replacement of freon with untested, unstable, toxic compounds, but hey, the substitutes are patented and so much more profitable!

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.

-- SysKoll

Re:Scientific American review shredded it.

[Juda_ben_Maci]

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.

Re:Lombord has been thoroughly rebuttaled

[Phanatic1a]

They simply published a series of rebuttals by experts that pointed out factual and analytical errors in the book.


The rebuttals published by SA pretty uniformly acknowledged that Lomborg had his facts right; they attacked his person and questioned his conclusions.

Then SA refused to publish Lomborg's answers to those criticisms. Then when Lomborg posted his answers to those criticisms on his web site, SA threatened to sue him for violating its copyrights because he reproduced the criticisms in his answers.

Again: Shame on SA.

Wrong

[SimonK]

Go and read the book. Now. Or at least look at it. Creation scientists are basically at odds with the whole edefice of scientific naturalism. Lomborg is just saying that some of the claims often made about the environment are wrong. In most fields he is not contradicting the scientific consensus at all, just pointing out how it has been misrepresented. On some occasions, he does point out that claims made by scientists (biologists get a hard time) are not supported by empirical evidence, but you do not need to be a specialist to make such a judgement. Indeed, as a statistician, he has the qualifications required.

He is also eminently reasonable. If you go and read his website, you'll see several admissioms to errors in SE (seen Henry Morris do that ? thought not), and several serious efforts to answer his critics.

Now stop propogating slanders and go an learn what you're talking about.

Responses

[SimonK]

That error is covered on Lomborg's website at www.lomborg.com in the "corrections" section. There is also a complete rebuttal of the WRI/WWF critique under "criticism/responses". To summarise: they are selective, and they misrepresent.

Re: Errr, thats easy...

[NullPointer]

OK, I'll bite, how about Sagan's prediction after the Gulf war:

Shortly after the first oil wells began to burn, Carl Sagan appeared on ABC's Nightline and predicted that " the net effects would be similar to the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815, which resulted in the year 1816 being known as the year without a summer" (p. 37,
1992).

Or, how about the great frozen earth from 1975:

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects

Or, what about the great earthquakes that were predicted in The Jupiter Effect:

Such was the forecast of a scholarly and well-documented book entitied The Jupiter Effect, coauthored in 1974 by Cambridge astrophysicists John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann. The book targeted 1982 as a time when meteorological and geological activity would build up and become intensely magnified thanks to a variety, of physical mechanisms operating simultaneously. Highlighting the forecast was a massive and disastrous earthquake on the southern section of the San Andreas Fault near Los Angeles.

Should I go on...

completely wrong - being eco-friendly can KILL

[Preposterous Coward]

Yes, it absolutely CAN hurt us to be eco-friendly. In some cases it can literally kill us.

Consider malaria. Malaria infects 300-500 million people annually and kills around 2 million of them. (source) The single most effective way to kill mosquitos and to reduce the incidence of malaria is DDT. Unfortunately, DDT has potent negative effects on the environment, so your naive "it can't hurt us" position would argue that we should totally ban DDT. Unfortunately, that's literally a death sentence for thousands if not millions of people living in tropical nations.

This is a somewhat dramatic example, but my point is that eco-friendliness DOES have very real consequences in some cases, and we need to be careful about weighing those consequences against the benefits. If we're talking about recycling paper and plastic in a developed country, well, yeah, the benefits are reasonably large and the consequences are probably trivial. But don't assume that's true for every environmental problem the world faces.

More information here.

Great! Now privatize the atmosphere.

[hey!]

Given a certain discount rate (that is to say assumptions about the time value of money), it is often economically rational to liquidate the land, for example in many kinds of mining operations. Likewise, farming or fishing practices that may not be sustainable over a twenty year or longer horizon may be economically rational based on their increased immediate productivity to the individuals making the decisions about how to exploit a resource.

In theory, as land is degraded, the marginal value of the remaining undespoiled land goes up, providing a disincentive from despoilation. Except that there may not be any mechanism for a land owner to recoup this value. The land owner rationally bases his exploitation decisions based on excludable benefits and costs -- that is how he will benefit as an individual and pay as an individual -- no matter how affected he his by the costs of exploitation and benefits of preservation on a global scale.

The tragedy of the commons shows that, in absence of an effective means of rational cooperation between people, private ownership and exploitation is more productive and sustainable. However, in many respects the commons is inescapable: we live on one planet, in one biosphere, dependent on one hydrosphere, drawing all our our biological wealth from a common pools of biota and environmental systems. So, duly considered and democratically adopted limitations on the exploitation of these common resources would be good thing.