The Borking© of Bjorn Lomborg: Green rage at The Skeptical Environmentalist
Ridley, Matt
"The Borking© of Bjorn Lomborg GREENDOM'S GREAT AND ARE COMPETING TO FIND EPITHETS FOR THE AUTHOR BY MATT RIDLEY At the Christmas cabaret in the politics...
...if lower infant mortality leads to falling populations, not rising ones—then perhaps we need to think differently about what sustainability means...
...There is something rotten in the state of environmentalism...
...He rides a bicycle and approves of Den-mark's punitive car taxes...
...If you do not believe me, look up the statistics...
...When a decade later Simon won easily, Ehrlich refused a rematch and promptly called Simon an imbecile in a speech...
...Forty years ago this year, Rachel Carson alerted a complacent world to the dangers posed by pesticides.Vilified by the chemical industry, Carson was already dying of cancer when the book was published...
...In late February he was appointed by the Danish government to run a new institute for environmental economic assessment.This caused uproar among environmentalists, because Lomborg has now succeeded Monsanto as the official chief villain of the world environmental movement...
...He works as an independent scientist, undertaking research projects for the U.S...
...Irritated, Lomborg went back to Denmark and set his students to the exercise of finding the flaw in Simon's statistics...
...H. L. Mencken said: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed—and hence clamorous to be led to safety—by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary" Remember acid rain in the 1980s and declining sperm counts in the 1990s...
...The pessimists argue that Lomborg's good news might lead to complacency But Ehrlich's counsel of despair is far more dangerous...
...that oil, gas and minerals are not running out nearly as fast as was predicted in the 1970s, and so on...
...Lomborg is also criticized for his effrontery in challenging the widely accepted figure that 40,000 species go extinct every year...
...Priorities, anyone...
...Lomborg did...
...No data at all just a circular assumption: If 40,000 species go extinct a year, then 40,000 species go extinct a year...
...The study of global warming has brought them fame, funds, speaking fees and room service...
...In 1990 Simon won $576.07 in settlement of a wager from the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich...
...So Lomborg wrote a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which not only endorses most of Simon's claims, but goes further, providing an immense compendium of factual evidence that the litany of environmental gloom we hear is mostly either exaggerated (species extinction, global warming) or wrong (population, air and water pollution, natural resources, food and hunger, health and life expectancy, waste, forest loss...
...In two cases, Stephen Schneider accuses Lomborg of misquoting sources and promptly does so himself...
...Bjorn, when will you come back...
...This is very threatening to lots of people's livelihoods...
...Hopeless...
...While there, browsing in a bookshop, he came across a profile in hired magazine of the late Julian Simon, an economist who claimed, with graphs, that on most measures the environment was improving, not getting worse...
...Perhaps the most sustainable thing we can do is develop new technology, increase trade and spread affluence...
...Now look where this little trick of arithmetic has got Myers...
...You might think environmentalists would welcome such news...
...He is leftish, concerned about world poverty and no fan of big business...
...In the intervening years, the environmental movement has turned from David into Goliath...
...Consider the treatment meted out to the late Julian Simon for having the temerity to be right...
...Result: There are more howlers in Schneider's short article than in Lomborg's whole book...
...MARCH/APRIL 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53...
...Sperm counts are not falling...
...population growth is falling faster (in percentage and absolute terms) than anybody predicted even 10 years ago...
...went the refrain, "Don't just get lost out in the world...
...The editor of Scientific American, apparently without irony, condemns Lomborg for his "presumption" in challenging "investigators who have devoted their lives" to the subject, as if seniority defined truth...
...Myers's share of the Volvo prize was worth $130,000...
...Lomborg's crime is to rain on their parade...
...It is the bully now...
...In the other he said 20 percent of energy use, when he meant 20 percent of electricity generation...
...At the end of 11 pages, the Scienti icAmerican critics have found two certain errors in Lomborg's work...
...There is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United States or Canada due to acid rain," concluded the official, independent study of the subject...
...They could find none...
...The environmental movement raises most of its funds through direct mail, paid advertising and news coverage...
...He describes himself thus: "Norman Myers is an HonoraryVisiting Fellow of Oxford University...
...CNN, CBS, Time and The New York Times all quoted only the higher figure...
...It was better in Danish...
...That's it...
...Scienti icAmerican devoted 11 pages in January to an unattractive attempt to blacken his reputation...
...Having argued that we should find a way to live sustainably on the planet, they ought to be pleased that 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002 Bjorn Lomborg—young, blond, piano-playing, but basically a statistics nerd—may not be back soon...
...Q.E.D...
...Ehrlich, who in contrast won a "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation, is the man who argued in 1967 that, with the world on the brink of starvation, the West "should no longer send emergency aid to countries such as India, where sober analysis shows a hopeless imbalance between food production and population...
...National Research Council, the World Bank and United Nations agencies...
...The most arresting statistic Lomborg produces is this: It is well known that meeting the Kyoto treaty on carbon dioxide reduction will buy at most six years of delay to global warming by 2100.Yet the annual cost of that treaty, in each year of the century, would be the same as the cost—once—of installing clean drinking water and sanitation for every human being on the planet...
...Instead, are they beside themselves with fury...
...If 6 billion people have both more food and more forest than their 3 billion parents did...
...Lomborg's book is "nothing more than a diatribe," says Lester Brown, serial predictor of imminent global famine...
...if renewable resources such as whales are more easily exhausted than nonrenewables such as coal...
...If 6 billion people went back to nature, nature would be in desperate trouble...
...What the affair reveals is how far environmentalists now are the establishment, accustomed to doing the criticizing, not being criticized...
...You get the drift...
...Yet the Scienti ficAmerican articles are devastating, not to Lomborg, but to his critics...
...that per capita food production is rising rapidly even in the developing world...
...The great and the good of greendom are competing to find epithets for him: "willful ignorance, selective quotations, destructive campaigning," says E. O. Wilson, guru of biodiversity...
...The number was first used in 1979 by the British scientist Norman Myers.Yet what was the evidence for it...
...With huge advertising budgets and ready access to the media, it can dominate the news, terrify multinational companies and expect to be invited into policy discussions at the highest levels...
...It cannot be Lomborg's politics that annoys them...
...Simon had bet him that the prices of metals would fall during the 1980s, and Ehrlich accepted "Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in...
...When the United Nations panel on global warming produced new estimates of the rise in temperature by 2100, they gave a range of 1.4 degrees to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit...
...In the second, Eigil Friis-Christensen, Director of the Danish Space Research Institute, says that Schneider "makes three unsubstantiated statements regarding our studies on the effect of cosmic rays on global cloud cover...
...What can this mild statistician have said to annoy these great men so...
...National Academy of Sciences...
...published an obscure but brilliant article on game theory, which earned him an invitation to a conference on "computable economics" in Los Angeles (and an offer of a job at the University of California...
...Here is what Myers actually said: "Let us suppose that, as a consequence of this man-handling of the natural environments, the final one-quarter of this century witnesses the elimination of one million species, a far from unlikely prospect.This would work out, during the course of 25 years, at an average rate of 40,000 species per year...
...In the first case, Schneider's response "completely misunderstands what we have done," according to Harvard meteorologist Richard Lindzen, the original author of work on the "iris effect" and upper level cirrus clouds...
...An increasing number of scientists have vested interests in pessimism, too...
...Since then, India has doubled its population, more than doubled its food production, increased its cultivated land acreage by only 5 percent and begun to export food...
...For all three, a steady supply of peril is essential fuel...
...Again and again, before insulting him, the critics concede through gritted teeth that he has got his facts right...
...His sin—his heresy is to be optimistic...
...He has served asVisiting Professor at universities from Harvard to Stanford and is a foreign member of the U.S...
...if there are 20 times more carcinogens in three cups of organic coffee than in daily dietary exposure to the worst pesticide both before and after the DDT ban...
...that all measures of air pollution are falling almost everywhere...
...He had a pie thrown in his face when he spoke in Oxford last September...
...Stan-ford University's Stephen Schneider, high priest of global warming, even berates Cam-bridge University Press for publishing it...
...It lies not just in the petty factual dishonesty that is rife within the movement (Stephen Schneider once said, "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have"), but in the very philosophy that lies at the heart of greenery, the belief in constraint and retreat...
...Many people now work to improve the environment at a local level with optimism that they can make the world a better place.To be constantly told by the high priests in the big pressure groups that all is doom and gloom is no help...
...In 1996, he Matt Ridley is the author of Genome and other books.A version of this story first appeared in The Spectator of London...
...if the prices of copper, wheat and natural gas are going down, not up...
...Nor will it do to claim that these successes came from green pressure...
...Lomborg does not own a car...
...The media, too, prefers pessimism...
...In one he used the word catalyze instead of electrolyze...
...The magazine refused Lomborg the right to reply in the same issue, refused to post his response on its Web site SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN immediately, and threatened him for infringement of copyright when he tried to repro-duce their articles, with his responses, on his own Web site...
...THE DORKING©OF BJORN LOMBO GREENDOM'S GREAT AND 0000 ARE COMPETING TO FIND EPITHETS FOR THE AUTHOR OF INfTMIPIIG!lfNVIAONMfNIAlW1 B Y MATT R I D L E Y At the Christmas cabaret in the politics department of Aarhus University in Denmark last year, all the cast members joined together at the end to sing a song about one of the associate professors...
...In the Scientific American critique, four leading environmental scientists lam-basted Lomborg...
...He has received the UNEP Environment Prize, the Volvo Environment Prize, and, most recently, the 2001 Blue Planet Prize...
...It cannot be his recommendations in favor of renewable energy and worried about pollution...
...Lacks even a preliminary understanding of the science in question," says Norman Myers, guru of extinction...
...See "That's Life," page 54...
...The reason so many environmental trends are benign is not because of legislation, let alone protest.Apart from the ozone layer and city smogs, where campaigns probably did accelerate change, most improvements have been brought about more by innovation, development and growth than by government action...
Vol. 35 • March 2002 • No. 2
