The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World

Well, unlike my esteemed reviewer below, I *haven't* read the correspondence between Lomborg and Scientific American, so instead of commenting on that, what I will comment on here is the *book* at the top of this page, to wit THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST. The environment is one of those areas like religion where it has become practically impossible to have a rational, reasonable debate or even a conversation, because there's so much rancor on both sides. (People commenting on the book without bothering to read it demonstrate the point: this subject is *so* emotional that there's an unwillingness to give an honest, open-minded look at the arguments being presented--on either side.) However, in this contentious area, Lomborg does two things that immediately got my attention: a.) he cites the hell out of his book (71 pages of sources) and b.) he hammers home the point that EVERYTHING IS A TRADE-OFF. *Nothing is for free.* Increased spending on the environment must come at the expense of other areas, including areas such as anti-poverty spending that most people--including environmentalists--would consider to be worthy goals. And given that we don't have unlimited resources, it is best to focus our resources where they will do the most good. (2000+ sources don't make for an unbiased book? I'd be curious to know, then, what exactly does...particularly as Lomborg pulled many of his figures and statistics from UN sources. And as for this book allegedly not having gone through peer review, I'd be interested to know whether prominent environmental tomes like EARTH IN THE BALANCE have gone through peer review.) Lomborg also leans on the point that long-term forecasting is an incredibly tricky business (which it is--chaos theory, anyone?) and comments that today's computer models are not complex enough to carry this out accurately, which I find thoroughly plausible (in fact I would find it unrealistic to argue otherwise! the idea that we understand everything about the environment--or indeed, *any* subject under the sun--smacks of hubris to me.) He asserts that natural climate change probably plays a large part in global warming while not denying that humans are having an effect and that restriction of greenhouse gases is an important part of the strategy to deal with it (in fact, his position is that current efforts, including the Kyoto treaty, are too lax to have much effect), but also states that serious efforts must include imposing more penalties on the developing world and our resources might be better spent attempting to assist them. In fact, the second point he hammers home throughout his work--that it would probably be best from a cost-benefit analysis for us to spend our resources alleviating poverty, in particular Third-World poverty--hardly enshrines him in the first rank of Evil Capitalists. Are there problems with this book? Sure. Lomborg's assertions that we will continue to find new deposits of natural resources in the futur

Whatever your views about the state of the Earth are, they are bound to be shaken by "The Skeptical Environmentalist". This book will challenge you to think that the world is not getting more and more polluted but, rather, the opposite, that world population is not growing out of control, that we are getting healthier and richer, that fewer people die of starvation every year, that deforestation is not happening on an alarming scale and that the extent of global warming may have been grossly overestimated.Surely these statements will raise quite a few eyebrows among most of us since we are regularly told by the environmental organisations that our modern lifestyle is endangering the life of the planet.The irony of this book is that Lomborg originally started his investigation with the aim of challenging the views of Julian Simon, an economist critic of the green movement. Lomborg, a former Greenpeace activist, set off to prove him wrong using the sources commonly quoted by environmental activists. Much to his surprise he came to the conclusion that Simon was right on most issues. Lomborg thus turned himself into a "skeptical environmentalist".While some scientists have praised Lomborg's effort to put environmental issues through a tough scrutiny, many more have accused him of distorting the truth and misleading the public.Most of these accusations are unfair. Lomborg may be wrong on some issues. He may also forget that if the world is not in such a bad state, it is also thanks to the efforts of the environmental organisations which warned of the dangers a few decades ago. "The Skeptical Environmentalist", however, deserves attention since it is well documented and Lomborg's writing does not lack clarity and enthusiasm.Furthermore, the progress of science cannot avoid the confrontation of ideas, particularly when these are highly controversial and provocative.

Lomborg's book is a noble attempt to assess the state of the world through the use of long term indicators of factors that affect human welfare and the quality of the environment, such as food production, disease incidence, life expectancy, forest loss, access to clean drinking water, infant mortality, air quality, cancer incidence, water quality, and hundreds of other measures. For its success in this area alone, it deserves a five star rating, as it succeeds in dispelling many myths, places environmental risks in context, and makes a strong case for the need to prioritize environmental policy.But where Lomborg goes astray is in the few chapters where he deviates from concentrating on outcome data, and tries to assess the extremely complex underlying science behind projected trends in biodiversity and global warming. In this, he is out of his league, and many of his conclusions have been attacked by scientific experts in these fields. He is also showing a degree of selectivity in his skepticism here, as he tends to accept, with little skepticism, official estimates on environmental issues where the trends are positive, but starts looking for holes when official estimates show negative trends. As an example, the IPCC estimates on temperature change are put through the wringer over dozens of pages, but economic estimates on the costs and benefits of global warming abatement are taken almost without question, when these estimates are *at least* as fuzzy as anything coming out of the IPCC as they require projecting the costs of technologies that don't exist yet. This sort of selectivity damages Lomborg's credibility and leaves him vulnerable to legitimate attacks from environmental scientists.Unfortunately, outside of Lomborg's comments on global warming and biodiversity, which include hundreds of pages on population growth, food production, deforestation, human welfare, pollution, chemical fears, and the like, few of those attacks have been legitimate. My recommendation: read the book, but with the skepticism that Lomborg recommends. The world is better off than you probably think, but not necessarily as well as off as Lomborg seems to think (although it should be noted that despite the claims of his critics, Lomborg is no Pollyanna, and recognizes many serious environmental problems in the book).

We like trees and other good environmental features. We're lucky to live (on purpose) in one of the most dedicated environment-preserving towns in the SF Bay Area. We belong to Sierra Club, give money to Open Space trusts, hike, travel, value a good environment, etc.Get this book, read it carefully, preferably with a Web browser handy as well as a printer, and make your own judgements. This book is (correctly) complicated and difficult to summarize well, but it has the sort of analysis and backup we need.People use "Pareto analysis" to measure the problems carefully, then focus their efforts on the more important problems first. It is simply impossible to do that very well without careful, realistic data. Of course, real data is often confusing, and a good feature of the book is its inclusion of caveats, contradictions, and more footnotes than I've seen before in one book.This book has a bimodal distribution of opinions: people love it or despise it. As I value skepticism, I checked out some of the negative reviews, chased URLs, reread the book ... and thought there were more errors in the reviews, and few pointers. I'd love to see more negative reviews if they only followed Lomborg in backing up comments with checkable references. To summarize this *review*, it is very difficult to summarize the *book*, as it it tries so hard to avoid over-simplification. As always in real science, there is noise in the data, incomplete data, differences in data measurements, etc. Still if you care about environmental quality, and care that your money is spent where it actually does the most good, you need the best numbers you can get. It is easy to have good goals, like "good environment and quality of life", but the real issue is balancing priorities dynamically as the real world requires. Managers are usually forced to understand this issue, or if you like computer games, try playing one of the "Civilization" or similar games. It's painful when your civilization fries due to global warming.Get this book, read it carefully, and make your own judgements, and (hopefully) support efficient environmental causes that make sense based on rational analysis, not random doom-saying.

Worthy causes, whether religious, political or moral tend to see themselves as above the duty to provide evidence to substantiate both their claims about reality and the suitability of their proposed measures to improve said reality. To their believers, the state of the world is obvious (usually bad), and they are genuinely astonished to find that most people are unconcerned about the grave issues that drive them. Their natural reaction is to become even more feverish about their respective causes and to step up efforts to proselytise and convert the benighted masses.Bjorn Lomborg started working on the issues that would eventually make up the content of his book by leading some of his statistics students into debunking some claims made by University of Maryland's professor Julian Simon. Julian Simon had claimed that things were actually getting better rather than worse, and that most negative environmental indicators were connected to poverty, violence and bad government rather than consumption or wealth. To their surprise (for he initially took Simon's claims as evidence of typical American arrogance), Lomborg and his students found that Simon was roughly right. It was true that things were getting better, and that many of the claims coming from environmental advocates were contradictory (for example they both dreaded global cooling in the 1970s and global warming in the 1990s as absolutely negative, although clearly both have benefits compared to each other, and neither is all bad), or tendentious (for example, advocates for particular causes often choose particular extreme years to show a negative tendency in a variable, while ignoring the long term trend), or simply shoddy (such as using a report on a tiny plot of slanting land in Belgium to extrapolate the global impact of erosion on land fertility). Lomborg published some articles discussing his findings on a left-leaning newspaper in Denmark, that greenest of countries, and was astonished at the public reaction. He decided to take upon himself a Gargantuan project, one that (I think) he couldn't possibly have thought through before embarking on it, or I predict he wouldn't have done it. He decided to review the state of the world from many, many angles, including humanity, all types of resources, animals and plants, as well as their interactions. The amount of work required to cover all these subjects, and to come up with data to back up his conclusions, must have been staggering. I have sometimes done this type of work, and I am in awe at Lomborg's achievement. It is truly a tour de force.While I don't claim that everything Lomborg says makes perfect sense, or that all his data are correct (surely he won't deny his readers the right to apply skepticism to his own claims as well, and it is quite easy to use the WWW to check out his opponents' arguments), this is a rare book that attempts seriously to consider all facts from a variety of angles, which tries to answer objections or qualific