INFOTERRA: Fw: Bjorn Lomborg Discredited? The Gallon Environment Letter
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Gallon" <GGALLON@bak.rr.com>
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 4:35 AM
Subject: Bjorn Lomborg Discredited? The Gallon Environment Letter
THE GALLON ENVIRONMENT LETTER
Canadian Institute for Business and the
Environment
Montreal, Quebec,
Canada
Email
cibe@web.net
Vol. 7, No. 1, January
11, 2003
*********************************************
BJORN LOMBORG IS OFFICIALLY DISCREDITED?
Dr. Bjørn Lomborg. A flash in the pan. A one-man scientific wrecking crew. A
self-proclaimed environmentalist, who is not. He was the darling of
governments and industries in Canada, the United States and around that
world, who wish to do little or nothing about climate change or
environmental protection. But now he has apparently been discredited by his
own scientific community in Denmark.
A statistician who thought he knew environment, Lomborg wrote a simple but
scientifically questionable book entitled, ""The Skeptical Environmentalist:
Measuring the Real State of the World", Cambridge University Press, 2001. It
became an immediate international hit amongst the anti-environment crowd.
Lomborg went on to write articles and give lectures around the world about
environment and resource mismanagement not being the serious problem other
scientists said they were. He was embraced by conservative governments like
his own. The new Conservative Government of Denmark made him, in March 2002,
Director of Denmark's Institute for Environmental Valuation. This is in
spite of the fact that he had very little formal environmental background.
Lomborg is an associate professor of statistics in the Department of
Political Science at Denmark's University of Aarhus.
The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), ruled January 7, 2003,
that Bjorn Lomborg's scientific positions on the environment were, in many
cases, incorrect. DCSD is not an environment committee. It has no
environmental bias. The Committee is made up of scientists from all sectors,
including economics and statistics. It deals with complaints of pure
scientific dishonesty. The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty brings
together some of the most senior members of Denmark's scientific
establishment. They spent much of 2002 considering the evidence against
Bjørn Lomborg, after several formal complaints were lodged by other
scientists. The Committee found Lomborg's work less than honest. The DCSD
concluded that Lomborg had, "clearly acted at variance with good scientific
practice". The Committee's ruling continued: "There has been such
perversion of the scientific message in the form of systematically biased
representation that the objective criteria for upholding scientific
dishonesty have been met." Even more damning is the backhanded way the
Committee tried to soften its ruling on Lomborg. The Committee suggested
that Lomborg may not have known the issues well enough and therefore spoke
and wrote from a position of ignorance. Although the Committee did not feel
able to conclude that Lomborg had misled his readers deliberately, this was
only because the scientists considering the case, felt that Lomborg might
simply have misunderstood the issues he was working on. Some are now saying
that Bjorn Lomborg is "damaged goods", stating that he may well be asked to
step down from the Director of Denmarks Institute of Environmental
Evaluation.
Hans Henrik Brydensholt, a Danish High Court judge who is chairman of the
DCSD, wrote in the panel's ruling, "On the basis of the material adduced by
the complainants, and particularly the assessment in "Scientific American,"
DCSD deems it to have been adequately substantiated that the defendant, who
has himself insisted on presenting his publication in scientific form and
not allowing the book to assume the appearance of a provocative
debate-generating paper, based on customary scientific standards and in
light of his systematic one-sidedness in the choice of data and line of
argument, has clearly acted at variance with good scientific practice."
Source, http://ens-news.com/ens/jan2003/2003-01-09-04.asp .
See the complete official ruling by the Danish Committee on Scientific
Dishonesty at the website
http://www.forsk.dk/uvvu/nyt/udtaldebat/bl_decision.htm . For more
information you can email forsk@forsk.dk. Tel: + 45 3544 6200. See Bjorn
Lomborg's picture and personal website espousing his views at
http://www.lomborg.com/ . Also see Bjørn Lomborg's arguments at
http://www.greenspirit.com/lomborg/ScientificAmericanBjørnLomborgAnswer.pdf
.
*********************************************************************
LOMBORG IGNORED KEY ISSUES AND SET UP STRAW MEN AND KNOCKED THEM DOWN
It was ingenious. Bjørn Lomborg argued with environmental positions not put
forward by most environmentalists. He established a short list of a
"litany" of environmental issues and did battle with them, while ignoring
other key environmental issues. He tossed out climate change as an issue
because it was too big a problem and too expensive to fix, citing vague
economic costs and benefits. He used gross economic numbers to mask serious
species loss problems, for example, in proclaiming that world fisheries were
not declining because the gross world annual catch was up. Professor Lomborg
focussed his most excoriating criticisms on the publications of the
Worldwatch Institute, and in particular on the views of its former
President, Lester Brown. He identified Mr Brown, and Professor Paul Erhlich,
a Stanford University ecologist, as the high priesthood of environmental
doom. The following are some of the key issues where Bjorn Lomborg was just
wrong: See http://www.gristmagazine.com/books/lomborg121201.asp
The Danish Ecological Council felt a more thorough response to Lomborg's
book was needed. They therefore gathered a group of twelve Danish
scientists - from science as well as economics and social science -
publishing a critique (in Danish) in 1999. As of end June 2002, there is an
English version of their work available. See the Danish scientists critique
of Lomborg at the website http://www.ecocouncil.dk/index_eng.html . Also
see the Environment News Service (ENS) story about his problem at
http://ens-news.com/ens/jan2003/2003-01-08-03.asp .
*******************************************************************
WORLD'S FORESTS NOT UNDER THREAT: WRONG
In his book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist", Bjørn Lomborg wrote that,
"basically, the world's forests are not under threat." A charitable reader
could attribute this flawed conclusion to errors of omission and ignorance;
perhaps the author simply doesn't know the sources well enough to interpret
them properly. Less charitably, Emily Matthews suggests that, "one might
reasonably conclude that Lomborg intentionally selects his data and
citations to distort or even reverse the truth." Lomborg confusingly
contrasts net loss of forest cover (that is, his figure of loss of natural
forest offset by regrowth and new plantations) with loss of original forest
(WWF's figure). Another claim by Lomborg - that global forest cover has
remained remarkably stable over the past 50 years -- is based on two acts of
statistical conjuring. First, he expresses changes in forest cover as a
percentage of the total land area of the world, a technique that reduces
changes of millions of hectares to fractions of one percent. Second, he
cobbles together a variety of different data sources compiled using
different definitions of forest and different methodologies. These different
data sets cannot be strung together to form a consistent time series.
Again Lomborg is acting as a pure statistician and fails to recognize the
complexities of the ecosystem. There is a massive decline in old growth
forests both in the tropic and temperate zones. These forests support some
of the greatest biodiversity in plants and animals. They also contain some
of the most valuable trees for human use and consumption, like teak and
mahogany from the tropics and cedar and white and red pine from the
temperate forests. If you fly over the massive clearcuts in Canada you will
see large commercial stands of cedar, white and red pine virtually gone, or
severely diminished. You will find them replaced by swaying stands of low
quality non-commercial new-growth trees like alder and birch. Many saw mills
have had to close. Many species of animals have had to leave the destroyed
habitat. But that is hard to interpret from aerial photos showing new forest
cover of junk trees. Lomborg could investigate the plight of the villagers
in Africa and Asia that have had to resort to burning animal dung, because
they have cut down all of the cuttable trees around them for miles. He
should have talked to the Chipko Movement in India and the villagers in
China, that have suffered severe landslides due to the loss of forests and
forest-protected watersheds around their villages. He should have talked to
Dr. Wangari Maathai and the National Council of Women of Kenya who for the
last 20 years have been planting millions of trees in an effort to reverse
the terrible loss of forests due to over-cutting.
Emily Matthews states that, "Lomborg's interpretation of global forest cover
and Indonesian forest fires are just two examples of the incomplete and
superficial analyses that underpin too much of his book." Emily Matthews is
a senior associate at the World Resources Institute. She is the lead author
of the Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems: Forest Ecosystems (WRI, 2000)
and Understanding the Forest Resources Assessment 2000 (WRI, 2001). See her
comments at http://www.gristmagazine.com/books/matthews121201.asp .
********************************************************************
MASSIVE INDONESIAN FOREST FIRES ARE COMMON AND NOT A PROBLEM: WRONG
Lomborg, while acknowledging that the Indonesia forest fires of 1997-1998,
were serious, claimed that they were not out of the ordinary. Wrong. If he
had read "The Gallon Environment Letter" and the Jakarta Post in 1997 and
1998, he would have learned that the fires were extraordinary and caused
major economic, forest, and ecological losses. He would have learned that
airports and the commerce and tourism they support in Indonesia and Malaysia
were shut down for weeks by the massive smoke clouds. He would have learned
that the fires were amongst the largest human-made fires to ever blight
Indonesia and southeast Asia, for that matter.
But again, as a statistician with no formal ecological background, Lomborg,
couldn't have known. And as a statistician with an apparent bias, Lomborg
selectively chose to accept the low forest burn numbers offered by the
Government of Indonesia: 520,000 hectares. The low number given by the
government was questionable and not backed by solid research. Indonesia,
already embarrassed by the fires, accepted the estimates of forests burned
from the local Indonesian land owners and palm plantation managers who did
not want to reveal the full extent to which the fires had burned. Without
further research and using the questionable Indonesian numbers, Lomborg
attacked the World Wildlife Fund satellite estimates of 2 million hectares
burned. He noted that the WWF estimate included both forest and
non-forestland, but did not point out that the official Indonesian estimate
he quoted was for forest land only. He then claimed, citing a 1999 United
Nations Environment Programme report, that subsequent "satellite-aided
counting" indicated that upwards of 1.3 million hectares of forest and
timberlands may have burned. The German-supported Integrated Forest Fires
Management Project, which, using satellite data and ground checks, produced
convincing evidence that the Indonesian fires had actually burned some 5.2
million hectares in 1998 alone -- 10 times the Indonesian government's
estimate.
Regarding estimates of how much forest actually burned, Lomborg cites a UNEP
report, which in turn refers to an analysis, "A Study of the 1997 Fires in
Southeast Asia Using SPOT Quicklook Mosaics," that was based on 766
satellite images. These images covered the islands of Kalimantan and Sumatra
only, for just August to December 1997. The study did not examine burn areas
for 1998, nor did it take into account fires on other islands. The UNEP
report states that this estimate represents "only a lower limit estimate of
the area burned," although Lomborg's readers are not so informed.
An analysis by the Singapore Centre of Remote Imaging, Sensing, and
Processing using the same satellite images yielded a total burn area
estimate for 1997 and 1998 of nearly 8 million hectares. In 1999, a
technical team funded by the Asian Development Bank and working through the
Indonesian National Development Planning Agency aggregated and analyzed all
available data sources and estimated that the area burned during 1997-1998
totalled more than 9.7 million hectares, of which some 4.6 million hectares
were forest. Source,
http://www.gristmagazine.com/grist/books/matthews121201.asp .
*******************************************************************
ENVIRONMENTALISTS CLAIM THERE IS AN "ENERGY CRISIS": WRONG
One of the environmental litanies set up as a straw man by Lomborg is that
he states that environmentalists feel that there is an "Energy Crisis".
Wrong. Major environmental groups do not believe that there is a crisis of a
shortage of energy. He spends pages in his book showing that there is no
energy crisis. The environmental groups couldn't agree more. Rather the
environmental groups are concerned about improper energy use and consumption
inequities. They are concerned about the severe environmental impacts of
coal-power, nuclear energy, and the burning of fuelwood (creating
desertification) in developing countries. They are concerned about the
serious impacts of oil spills around the world resulting from shady
corporations and bad engineering practices. They are concerned about the
United States declining conventional oil reserves and its increasing
dependence (53%) on imported oil. To support his Litany assertion that the
environmental movement believes there is an energy crisis, Bjorn Lomborg
cites a CNN report and an article in the "E- Magazine" - no one else, not
Friends of the Earth, not Greenpeace, and not WWF. He does not cite an
environmental organisation or even a leading environmental personality as
believing in an energy resource crisis. See the website
http://www.wri.org/press/mk_lomborg_09_things.html .
******************************************************************
ENVIRONMENTALISTS CLAIM NATURAL RESOURCES ARE RUNNING OUT: WRONG
Lomborg laid out another Litany, setting up a straw man by alleging that the
environmentalists say that the world is running out of natural resources.
Wrong. Major environmental organizations do not believe the world is running
out of natural resources. They believe there is resource wastage, regional
shortages, and serious resource access imbalances. It is true that 30 years
ago, in 1972, the Club of Rome, in its seminal book, "Limits to Growth", and
Dr. Paul Erhlich in his 1968 book, "The Population Bomb" expressed concern
about the coming age of resource scarcity. But by 1978, it was clear to the
environmental groups that we were not going to run out of natural resources
as such. Instead, they focussed on the mismanagement of natural resources
and the selective reduction of available resources, such as the collapse of
the cod fisheries off the Grand Banks of eastern Canada from over-fishing;
the loss of topsoil and resulting desertification of foodlands: and, the
declining ability of conventional oil in countries like the United States to
meet their growing fuel requirements, forcing the U.S. to rely on
terrorist-infested oil, 53 per cent from OPEC and other imported sources.
**********************************************************************
WASTE MANAGEMENT IS NOT A PROBLEM: WRONG
Bjorn Lomborg paid scant attention to municipal, industrial, nuclear, and ha
zardous wastes. He wrote only four pages in his 300-page plus book about
wastes. Tom Burke states that, "Lomborg fails to mention of toxic or
hazardous wastes, nothing is said about industrial wastes or the problems of
large volume wastes from the mining industry. Radioactive wastes do not get
a mention, nor do agricultural wastes." Burke added that, "the rest of the
world seems to have no waste management problems at all, for all the
attention they get." The environmental critique of waste management policies
has been primarily about the wastage of resources that go into producing
such large volumes of municipal wastes, and the nature of many of our
industrial wastes and their impact on the environment and, in the case of
radioactive wastes, human health for millennia to come."
Source,
http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/Documents/Reports/ten%20pinches%20of%20salt
.pdf
***********************************************************************
ECONOMIC GROWTH AND PROSPERITY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES WILL ALLEVIATE AIR
POLLUTION THERE: WRONG
Bjorn Lomborg asserts that air pollution is not as big a problem as the
environmentalists make it out to be, because OECD countries have already
reduced their air pollution and it is no longer a serious problem. He adds
that developing countries don't have to directly address the issues as the
environmentalists hype them to do, because economic growth and prosperity
there will automatically result in air pollution clean up. Wrong.
First, air pollution remains a serious problem in high population density
pockets of OECD countries. Secondly, because the rich newly industrialized
countries like Mexico, India, China, Indonesia and Egypt, are ignoring the
solutions and letting corruption eat into any economic gains that might be
diverted to air pollution control. Tom Burke states that, "air pollution in
the rest of the world, where two thirds of humanity live, need not be
considered, in Professor Lomborg's view, because this will cease
automatically as they get richer. This confuses cause and correlation, not a
mistake you would expect from a statistician. Although national wealth and
the state of a nation's environment are observably associated to some
extent, the relationships are complex and not at all well understood." To
set Lomborg's simple assumption in context, it is worth considering the
following comment about the Asia-Pacific region by the somewhat conservative
Asia Development Bank which stated that, "Environmental degradation in the
region is pervasive, accelerating, and unabated. At risk are people's health
and livelihoods, the survival of species and ecosystem services that are the
basis for long-term economic development. Economic development and poverty
reduction are increasingly constrained by environmental concerns, including
degradation of forestry and fisheries, scarcity of freshwater, and poor
human health as a result of air and water pollution." Tom Burke CBE is a
member of the Executive Committee of Green Alliance. Currently an
environmental adviser to Rio Tinto and BP and a member of the Council of
English Nature, he was previously special adviser to successive Secretaries
of State for the Environment. He is a former director of Green Alliance, and
of Friends of the Earth. Burke's critique of Bjorn Lomborg's position can be
found at
http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/Documents/Reports/ten%20pinches%20of%20salt
.pdf .
Jamie Page with the U.K. Cancer Prevention Society wrote that, "Bjorn
Lomborg argues that the state of the environment is getting better. What
about the cost of cancer? Cancer was a rare disease in pre-industrial
societies and age-corrected incidence figures have been rising steadily for
many decades. Currently one person in three will get cancer and this figure
will rise. The idea that cancer is due to poor lifestyle, bad genes or
viruses is being increasingly discredited. The massive increase in cancer in
industrialised nations is partially due to the release of 100,000 synthetic
chemicals into the environment, their concentration in the food chain, and
their bioaccumulation in humans. Each of us carries between 300 and 500
man-made chemicals in our body. It is impossible to quantify the costs of
this, but one can assume they run into billions of pounds."
***********************************************************************
ACID GAS EMISSION IMPACTS ARE MINIMAL: WRONG
Bjorn Lomborg indicated that impacts from acid gas emissions, had little
impact on the environment. Wrong. Thomas Lovejoy states that Lomborg's
"research is so shallow that almost no citation from the peer-reviewed
literature appears. Lomborg asserts that big-city pollution has nothing to
do with acid rain, when it is fact that nitrogen compounds (NOx) from
traffic are a major source. His reference to a study showing that acid rain
had no effect on the seedlings of three tree species neglects to mention
that the study did not include conifer species such as red spruce, which are
very sensitive." Lovejoy added that, "there is no acknowledgment of the
delayed effects from acid rain leaching soil nutrients, particularly key
cations. He confounds tree damage from air pollution 30 to 60 years ago with
subsequent acid rain damage and makes an Alice-in- Wonderland statement that
the only reason we worry about foliage loss is "because we have started
monitoring this loss." It is simply untrue that "there is no case of forest
decline in which acidic deposition is known to be a predominant cause." Two
clear-cut examples are red spruce in the Adirondacks and sugar maple in
Pennsylvania." Thomas Lovejoy is chief biodiversity adviser to the president
of the World Bank and senior adviser to the president of the United Nations
Foundation. See his full comments in the Scientific American at
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC58800
00
**********************************************************************
THE WORLD'S FISHERIES REMAIN HEALTHY AND GROWING: WRONG
Lomborg tells the environmentalists to stop their belly-aching about the
world's fisheries decline. It just isn't happening, he says. Wrong. Lomborg
claims that "marine productivity has almost doubled since 1970." In the
strictest sense as a statistician, Lomborg is numerically correct. But from
a regional and a fish varietal perspective, he is wrong. Between
unsustainable growth in fishing technology and large-net fishing, and
commercial fish farms, we humans have been able to scour the oceans for
more and more fish. However, because of his lack of ecological and fish
resource knowledge, he failed to report on the series of collapses of
fisheries for high end fish like flounder, cod, and crab. The Beluga
Sturgeon (caviar) is all but fished out. One of the richest and most
productive fish regions in the world, the Grand Banks off of eastern Canada
has been fished out, except for junk fish that nobody wanted before. Twelve
thousand jobs were lost and eastern Canada suffered a severe economic
setback when the cod fishery had to be closed in the 1990's. Many of the
rich crab fisheries around Alaska have been closed in a desperate effort to
revive the crab stocks. The European Union is considering limiting or
closing the cod fisheries around its coasts to avoid the same fate that hit
Canada. The wild and diversified salmon fisheries on North America's West
Coast, from Alaska to BC to Washington State, is suffering tremendous
over-fishing pressures. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI),
"what Lomborg actually means appears later in the book as a figure depicting
an increase in total fish catch, plus production from fish farms. Capture of
wild fish from the sea has increased by 20 percent, not 100 percent since
1970. And what humans are taking from the oceans and what the oceans are
producing are of course fundamentally different matters." WRI goes on to
state that, "Lomborg's equating of the two exemplifies how his book is
fundamentally misleading. By focussing on total production, Lomborg's graph
conceals that stocks of cod, haddock, hake, flounder, swordfish, sardines,
halibut, Atlantic Ocean perch, and many others have crashed." See the WRI
website on Lomborg at http://www.wri.org/press/mk_lomborg_10_things.html .
Read about the Canadian cod fisheries collapse at
http://www.unesco.org/courier/1998_08/uk/dossier/txt24.htm . Read WRI's
world fisheries under pressure http://www.wri.org/trends/fishloss.html .
Read the Gallon Letter about fisheries conflict in the US State of Georgia
at http://csf.colorado.edu/bioregional/2002/msg00137.html .
**********************************************************************
POPULATION GROW NO LONGER A PROBLEM: WRONG
Lomborg's view that "the number of people is not the problem" is simply
wrong. His selective use of statistics gives the reader the impression that
the population problem is largely behind us. The global population growth
rate has indeed declined slowly, but absolute growth in human beings on
earth is enormous and remains close to the very high levels observed in
recent decades, because the population base keeps expanding. World
population today stands at six billion, three billion more than in 1960.
According to U.N. projections, another three billion will likely be added by
2050, and population size will eventually reach about 10 billion. This is
according to demographer, Dr. John Bongaarts, Vice President of the U.S.
Population Council's Policy Research Division, and a member of the U.S.
National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of
Sciences, as well. Bongaarts adds that, "Lomborg dismisses concerns about
this issue based on a simplistic and misleading calculation of density as
the ratio of people to all land. Clearly, a more useful and accurate
indicator of density would be based on the land that remains after excluding
areas unsuited for human habitation or agriculture, such as deserts and
inaccessible mountains. For example, according to his simple calculation,
the population density of Egypt equals a manageable 68 persons per square
kilometer, but if the unirrigated Egyptian deserts are excluded, density is
an extraordinary 2,000 people per square livable kilometer," not the 68
posited by Lomborg that he thinks have all the inhospitable deserts to live
in. Lomborg correctly notes that poverty is the main cause of hunger and
malnutrition, but he neglects the contribution of population growth to
poverty. For a full discussion visit the Scientific American website at
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC58800
00
*********************************************************************
CLIMATE CHANGE NOT A PROBLEM WORTH FULLY SOLVING: WRONG
Lomborg asserts that climate change is an issue to large and too expensive
to fix. He says "let's spend our money elsewhere. Wrong. Charles Secrett,
Executive Director of Friends of the Earth England, wrote in U.K.'s The
Guardian newspaper that, "Lomborg chooses a bad economic model, which
overestimates the cost of action and underestimates the costs of inaction,
makes unjustified assumptions about the IPCC's forecasts on GHG impacts, and
then misrepresents evidence which does not fit his case. How ironic that he
should be contemptuous of the intellectual rigour of environmentalists. His
slippery way with facts and arguments has already been well exposed by his
academic colleagues in Denmark (see the Aarhus University website
www.au.dk/cesam), but contrarians tend to lack a sense of shame." Lomborg
asserts that the higher estimates of the IPCC are "plainly unlikely", which
will come as news to most climatologists. In fact, the IPCC, which
represents the consensus view of climate scientists from around the world,
recently concluded that climate change will probably happen at a faster rate
than was previously believed. Source,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4241934,00.html .
Lomborg asserts that if implemented the Kyoto Protocol GHG emission cuts
will have almost no quick positive effect on the man-made global warming
gases now circling the earth (mainly put there by the United States, Europe,
Canada, Japan, and the other OECD nations). Environmental groups knew that
already, which is why they have criticised Kyoto as being too little, too
late. So far, Lomborg and the environmentalists are on side. But his
analysis is to do little and spend the money elsewhere. Whereas, the
environmentalists are saying, "if there is a growing problem and it is going
to harm the economies of nations - fix it." Since the Kyoto Protocol is all
the governments would agree to, it is seen by environmental organizations as
a start, and is accepted by them as such. They feel that even greater GHG
emission cuts will be agreed to in Kyoto II, especially as the negative
impacts continue to pile up. "Since greater cuts, involving more countries,
are likely to be agreed to take effect during the second compliance period
after 2012, Lomborg's exercise of calculating Kyoto's effect on the climate
by 2100 is at best irrelevant and at worst intentionally misleading," said
Mark Lynas. Source, Mark Lynas, bottom of the website
http://www.anti-lomborg.com .
Lomborg asserts that cost-benefit calculations show that although the
benefits of avoiding climate change could be substantial ($5 trillion is the
single figure Lomborg cites), this is not worth the cost to the economy of
trying to constrain fossil-fuel emissions (a $3-trillion to $33-trillion
range he pulls from the economics literature). However, Lomborg fails to use
simple science, asymmetrically, to provide a range potential economic
damages caused by climate change. Even more puzzling is his failure to
discuss ecological impacts in general, focusing instead on the human health
impacts and the agriculture sector, sectors he thinks won't be much harmed
by climate change of the minuscule amount he predicts. See the full argument
at the website
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4241934,00.html .
Also see
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC58800
00
*************************************************************************
ENVIRONMENTALISTS DON'T FIX PROBLEMS, THEY HYPE ISSUES: WRONG
Bjorn Lomborg criticizes environmental groups for hyping issues and blowing
them out of proportion - kind of like "chicken little's the sky is falling".
He asserts that environmental problems have been fixed through growth and
economic activity. Wrong. The environmental movement, begun in 1968, and the
citizens that support the movement, forced their governments and industries
to clean up and to put in place systems to improve the environment. The very
hype Lomborg criticizes is the hype that pressured decision-makers into
action. Thomas Lovejoy put it this way: "Far worse, Lomborg seems quite
ignorant of how environmental science proceeds: researchers identify a
potential problem, scientific examination tests the various hypotheses,
understanding of the problem often becomes more complex, researchers suggest
remedial policies--and then the situation improves. By choosing to highlight
the initial step and skip to the outcome, he implies incorrectly that all
environmentalists do is exaggerate. The point is that things improve because
of the efforts of environmentalists to flag a particular problem,
investigate it and suggest policies to remedy it. Sadly, the author seems
not to reciprocate the respect biologists have for statisticians." See
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC58800
00
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Copyright (c) 2003
Canadian Institute for
Business and the
Environment,
Montreal & Toronto
All
rights reserved.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
----
This message was sent by INFOTERRA@CEDAR.AT
To signoff from the list, send an email to majordomo@cedar.at
the message body should read "unsubscribe infoterra" (without quotes).
Visit http://www.cedar.at/unep/infoterra/index.html
for more info, list commands, and mail archives (searchable).
----