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In his book, The Sceptical Environmentalist, published in Britain last week by the Cambridge University Press, Professor Bjorn Lomborg delivers a 352-page, 2930-footnote tirade against the worlds environmentalists. Lomborgs book has been respectfully reviewed, serialised in the London Guardian, featured prominently in the Economist, and welcomed as a serious challenge to green orthodoxy all the more powerful as the work of a disillusioned insider.
In response, the Green Alliance has published a briefing by me on Professor Lomborgs book, which suggests ten considerations to be borne in mind by any properly sceptical reader. Ten Pinches of Salt is not a page-by-page rebuttal, but a critique of his intellectual methods. What follows here is a flavour of that critique.
Real world litany
Professor Lomborg holds environmentalists responsible for creating a widely held illusion that the environment is in poor shape here on Earth. They have accomplished this by the repetition of a series of false propositions he calls the Litany.
He sets out the Litany: The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planets species are becoming extinct in vast numbers we kill off more than 40,000 each year. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing and the coral reefs are dying.
We are defiling our Earth, the fertile topsoil is disappearing, we are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, decimating the biosphere, and will end up killing ourselves in the process. The worlds ecosystem is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limits of viability, and the limits to growth are becoming apparent.
The repetition of this Litany, in Professor Lomborgs view, is part of an implicit conspiracy by the tens of millions of professional and volunteer members of the environmental community who have colluded with the mass media to gull people into making unwanted, and unnecessary changes in their lifestyles in order to protect the environment.
There is indeed a litany, and it is a litany of tragedy. But it bears no resemblance to the one Professor Lomborg has invented. It reads: DDT, Bhopal, Torrey Canyon, thalidomide, CFCs, Seveso, Flixborough, Minamata, Exxon Valdez, Love Canal, Chernobyl
These are not words that people have written, but events that have happened. These events, and many more, were brought to the publics attention through the carelessness or ignorance of businesses and governments, not by environmentalists. In my thirty years as an environmentalist I have never, to my regret, had as much influence on public opinion. Journalists, environmentalists, and professors too, spend more time riding the waves of public opinion than making them.
The paradox of Professor Lomborgs book is that in making the case for a more rational debate on the environment he has committed all of the offences for which he attacks environmentalists. He exaggerates for effect, substitutes forceful assertion for weight of argument, sometimes makes sweeping generalisations from particular instances, veers between the uncertain and the inconsistent in his use of logic, presents false choices and is highly selective in his use of evidence and quotation.
Long view, short sight
Let me illustrate this by looking in a little more detail at two of the core issues Professor Lomborg tackles: food production and climate change.
Professor Lomborgs most excoriating criticisms are reserved for the publications of the Worldwatch Institute and in particular the views of its former President, Lester Brown. He identifies Mr Brown and Professor Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University ecologist, as the high priesthood of environmental doom. It is they who keep on telling us that food production is going down the tubes.
Professor Ehrlich did predict in his book, The Population Bomb, published 23 years ago, that in the course of the 1970s the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions hundreds of millions of people will starve to death. As we witnessed all too often from the comfort of our living rooms, he was right. They did starve although it might be difficult to give an exact count of how many millions actually died from hunger or hunger-related disease, since accurate record keeping was hardly a high priority at the time.
Lester Brown did write in 1965 that the food problem emerging in the less developing regions may be one of the most nearly insoluble problems facing man over the next few decades. This is an argument he has consistently advanced in subsequent years. And he, too, was right. It has been a nearly insoluble problem. In 1974, Henry Kissinger promised the World Food Conference that by 1984 no one would go to bed hungry. In 1996, governments at the World Food Summit in Rome cut this target in half and doubled the time they aimed to take to reach it. Three years later it was agreed that even this goal was unlikely to be achieved.
Professor Lomborg is correct to point out that food production has greatly increased and that the proportion of people starving has gone down. But the absolute number of people starving has remained almost constant because of population growth. Lester Browns point is that there are growing signs that the world may not be able in future to sustain such a high rate of growth in food production. What is at issue is whether the long-term trend, which Brown has frequently recognised, will continue. Brown and Lomborg disagree, but this is a legitimate difference of interpretation of the facts not a conspiracy to mislead. In any case, most of Browns key data sets cover four decades, raising the interesting question of when exactly a short term trend becomes long term.
False certitude by degrees
Professor Lomborg increased the number of pages devoted to climate change from 33 in the original Danish edition to the current 66. And it is climate change that he is most clearly arguing well beyond the boundaries of his professional competence. Of the 66 pages, almost two- thirds are devoted to an extended rehearsal of the widely recognised scientific difficulties of forecasting the future climate and the possible impacts of climate change on the human environment.
There has been no attempt by the scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process to duck the fact that on many of the most urgent issues there are currently only uncertain answers. This, too, is a normal part of the human condition and one that we are well used to dealing with. We do not postpone major economic decisions simply because economists disagree and economic models produce results that are uncertain. In these instances, judgement must be exercised, and democracy is the process by which we choose who should make those judgements. As Winston Churchill might have said, this is a far from reliable method, it is just better than all the others.
Lomborgs recitation of the science identifies in a clear and accessible way all the points where his judgement differs from that of the majority of climate scientists in the IPCC process. He is entitled to his opinion, just as we are entitled to wonder about its authority.
Where he is not on such firm ground is in the assertion that economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut carbon dioxide emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures. Our understanding of the impacts of climate change is limited not only by uncertainties about the climate, but also by the even larger uncertainties about ecological, social and political responses to those changes.
Uncertainties in this context mean that the errors could go either way things could be better or they could be worse. If we are not sure about what is going to happen (and about how we will react to what does happen), you have to be very brave or an economist to try and calculate costs and benefits. Frankly, no one is in a position to make a reliable estimate of the costs either of the temperature rises or of any adaptations that might be made to those rises. Calculating the true costs of things in the past is very difficult, as was pointed out in a widely read essay by William Nordhaus. Measuring future costs is even more so.
Playing with models
Furthermore, the whole art of economic modelling is, as yet, so immature as to make such estimates relatively useless as a guide to public policy. A World Resources Institute study, for example, found that different modellers using different assumptions estimated the impact of tackling climate change on the US economy as ranging from +3 per cent to 7 per cent of GDP. For all their well documented difficulties, models of the climate are like Rolls-Royces when compared to those of the economy.
Interestingly, Lomborgs entire economic argument relies heavily on the outputs of an economic model developed by the same William Nordhaus. The latters work has been widely criticised in the technical literature for exaggerating the costs and ignoring the benefits of acting on climate change something Lomborg omits to mention and which was pointed out to Professor Lomborg by his Danish colleagues some time ago. It is inconsistent to fail to apply the same test of intellectual rigour to one part of an argument but not to another.
The most egregious element of Professor Lomborgs climate change argument however, is the proposition that the world faces a choice between spending money on mitigating climate change and providing clean access to clean drinking water and sanitation. We must and can do both, and indeed, that is exactly where the worlds environmental community actually stands. Such artificial choices may be possible in an academic ivory tower where ideas can be arranged to suit the prejudices of the occupant, but they are not available in the real world and it is dishonest and dishonourable to suggest that they are.