SOCIAL: Bjorn Lomberg, climate skeptic

[Kristina Pappas]

Exhaustive data courtesy of Hunter Lovins (I've tried to set different
articles apart for easier reading):

Sure, it is an interesting academic exercise to prioritize which disaster
you would rather face first: do we fail to act aggressively enough on global
warming in the next ten years and face what 99.9% of the world's
climatescientists are now calling "roasted world?" Do we fail to
deliver real
development to the 4.6 billion people living in the "Third World?" Or do we
allow the 6th big period of extinction to continue to impoverish our
biodiverstiy? Or do we focus the world's attention on AIDS?

This is, however, an example of dis-integrated thinking, quite the opposite
of whole systems thinking: use bad science to relegate the conclusion of the
overwhelming preponderance of the world's relevant scientists that global
warming is THE biggest problem facing humanity in its entire history to the
"bottom of the list." Then pick a problem that is appealing, but far less
threatening to the status quo and elevate it to crisis status - which it
certainly is for the individuals concerned, but not for survival for life,
as a whole, on earth. Then try to solve the top crisis in isolation, then
the next "priority" and so on.... By the time you reach the bottom of the
heap, time's up: we're roasted. And, incidentally, Lomborg's intellectual
sponsors are safely retired and have not had to divert from business as
usual.

Sure, in emergencies, one triages. If there's a bus-load of folk, 40 of whom
are hurt and CAN live if you intervene, someone who is gonna die anyway
won't get the heroic attention they would have gotten if they were the only
victim. So some people die who might not have, had they been given immediate
attention. One plays the odds.

Following Lomborg's advice is the equivalent of letting a screaming wife
distract rescuers from those who have a chance of living to attend to her
"circling the drain" husband. Or more accurately, to attend to her kid with
a broken leg (yeah, it hurts, but it can wait) when there are people with
sucking chest wounds: survivable with immediate attention, but if you wait,
you'll be working a core.

But behavior that serves in a one-time emergency is, again, bad logic when
applied to global policy.

Go back to the drivers of change that I present in the basic natural
capitalism rap: climate-constrained world, peak oil, loss of every major
ecosystem on earth, the vulnerabilities, the development challenges, and the
sustainability imperative (just to name a few.)

We have ten years to turn around climate change, to get the rate of growth
in emissions trending down, and to put in place the institutions that can
deliver us to 80 % reductions in green house gas emissions (not just
reductions in the rate of growth of emissions).

How can we meet this challenge in ways that also solve peak oil,
development, reduce vulnerabilities, and help birth this new economy,
civilization, and vision of life on earth?

Watch Lomborg if you enjoy fiction. But let's don't confuse it with dealing
with the world's biggest problems.

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To be precise Reuters reported, 27 Aug 2003 :

Scientific Panel Dismisses Reports from Danish Environmental Skeptic

Recent environmental reports produced by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish
environmental skeptic, were found to be unscientific and of dubious value
yesterday by a panel of independent Scandinavian scientists.

Lomborg created a stir with his controversial book "The Skeptical
Environmentalist," in which he dismissed a wide range of environmental
concerns as overblown.

Earlier this year, a prestigious Danish scientific committee charged Lomborg
with scientific dishonesty. The government then asked the independent panel
to review his reports. Now, with the panel's damning assessment in hand,
Danish politicians are calling for Lomborg's institute to be shut down.

Tom Burke, advisor to various European Secretaries of State stated,
"Professor Lomborg's book, sadly, is little more than a dishonest and
dishonourable smear on the many millions of professionals and volunteers
working to improve the environment."

***************************

Grist Magazine published a whole series debunking Lomborg, including:

* EXTINCTION: Biologist Dr. E.O. Wilson -- two-time Pulitzer prize winner,
discoverer of hundreds of new species, and one of the world's greatest
living scientists -- debunks Lomborg's analysis of extinction rates.

* CLIMATE: Dr. Stephen H. Schneider, one of the foremost climate scientists
in the United States, discredits Lomborg on global climate change and takes
Cambridge University Press and the media to task for publishing and praising
a polemic.

* SPECIES DIVERSITY: Dr. Norman Myers, an Honorary Visiting Fellow of Oxford
University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of the Sciences, and a
recipient of several of the world's most prestigious environmental awards,
looks at Lomborg on biodiversity and concludes that he lacks even "a
preliminary understanding of the science in question."

* POPULATION: Lester R. Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the
Earth Policy Institute, reviews Lomborg on population and concludes that his
analysis is so "fundamentally flawed" that other professionals would do well
to disassociate themselves from his work.

* FORESTS: Emily Matthews, a forest expert and senior associate with the
World Resources Institute, shows that Lomborg reaches wildly inaccurate
conclusions about deforestation by fudging data or failing to interpret it
correctly.

* ENERGY: Energy expert David Nemtzow, president of the Alliance to Save
Energy, says Lomborg wastes his time battling a straw man: Virtually no one
in the contemporary environmental movement disputes that fossil fuels are
abundant, Nemtzow argues; in fact, it's precisely their abundance and their
impact on our ecosystems that's the trouble.

* STATISTICS: Al Hammond, senior scientist at World Resources Institute,
criticizes Lomborg for mischaracterizing the contemporary environmental
movement and committing precisely the sins for which he attacks
environmentalists: exaggeration, sweeping generalizations, the presentation
of false choices, selective use of data, and outright errors of fact.

***************************

The New York Times described the situation thusly:
Danish Science Panel Rips Lomborg For "Scientific Dishonesty"
January 8, 2003

Environment and Science: Danes Rebuke a 'Skeptic'
By Andrew C. Revkin

"A branch of the Danish Research Agency has concluded that Prof. Bjorn
Lomborg, an author whose upbeat analysis fo environmental trends has been
embraced by conservatives, displayed 'scientific dishonesty' in his popular
book, 'The Skeptical Environmentalist.'

The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, after a six-month review
following several complaints filed by scientists, issued a 17-page report
yesterday concluding that the book displayed 'systematic one-sidedness.'

'Objectively speaking, the committees found, 'the publication o the work
under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific
dishonesty,' as defined by Danish rules for science integrity

The committee ...concluded, 'The publication is deemed clearly contrary to
the standards of good scientific practice.'

'The environment is a field where, when people do some light calculations
like Lomborg did, it's easy to argue for a happy-times kind of conclusion,'
said Dr. Peter H. Raven, the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and
president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

But such findings should not be portrayed as science, he said, adding 'This
is a just outcome that ought to bring his credibility to a halt except for
those who desperately want to believe what he says.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/08/international/europe/08SKEP.html

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On Lomborg's climate material referenced in the parent post, Dr. Eban
Goodstein, Professor, and organizer of Focus the Nation wrote the following
review of Cool It in Salon:

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2007/08/29/cool_it/
Hot air

Global warming is not as bad as it's made out to be, argues Bjørn Lomborg.
But he cherry-picks evidence to manufacture a scientific and economic
consensus that doesn't exist.

By Eban Goodstein

Aug. 29, 2007 | The place is somewhere in Turkey, 5,200 years ago. Noah has
just gotten word about an upcoming episode of abrupt climate change, and he
and his family are hard at work building an ark. The plan is to take on
board mating pairs of every living thing of all flesh, every creeping thing
of the ground, in order, as God put it, to keep them alive.

Up walks a man who introduces himself as an adjunct professor at the
Copenhagen Business School. He says, "Noah, you have to stop. We've run the
numbers and they don't add up. I agree that there may be a few days of rain,
but if you really want to help future generations, don't build the ark. Grow
the economy!"

In "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," that
Copenhagen Business School professor, Bjørn Lomborg, is at it again,
preaching the gospel of benefit-cost analysis. His message: Don't take any
serious action to stop global warming pollution because doing so will slow
down economic growth that poor people need, and anyway, it's really not
going to rain that hard.

Lomborg's first effort, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," made a splash in
2001 with a mixture of polemics targeted at scare-mongering
environmentalists. With its voluminous footnotes, Lomborg appeared to have
done his homework. But on closer examination, some of the facts were not so
well supported and Lomborg was widely accused of cherry-picking to support
his arguments. Eminent Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson called the work a
"sordid mess."

In "Cool It," Lomborg has three messages. First, the planet will warm up no
more than 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit this century, and on balance, this will be
bad, but not too bad. Second, all benefit-cost models show that serious
limits on global warming emissions are too costly, and therefore we should
pollute with virtual impunity. And -- surprisingly -- we should invest a
decent amount ($25 billion per year) in clean energy technologies now so
that, starting in a few decades, we will have tools to slow down global
warming just a little bit through 2100.

How much is a 4.7 degree warming? During the last ice age, a period of time
during which much of North America was covered with hundreds of meters of
ice, the world was only 9 degrees colder than it is today. Lomborg's world
in 2100 -- what he calls the "standard" estimate from the U.N.'s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- is already halfway to a shift
in temperatures of ice age magnitude, only hotter not colder, within our
children's lifetimes.

To make his case that this "moderate" warming won't do too much harm,
Lomborg puts much weight on the argument that as the world heats up,
reductions in deaths from cold might significantly outweigh increased heat
deaths. But as Frank Ackerman at Tufts has shown, such a conclusion holds
only if one incorrectly assumes that people do not adapt to what Lomborg
insists will be very gradual temperature changes. Here as elsewhere, Lomborg
presents scientific and economic debates as much more settled than they are.

But this really is not the point. The glaring error in "Cool It," and the
one that disqualifies the book from making a serious contribution, is that
Lomborg ignores the main concern driving the debate. Incredibly, he never
mentions even the possibility that the world might heat up more than 4.7
degrees. Although he claims IPCC science as gospel, in fact the scientific
body gives no single "standard" estimate as its official forecast for this
century's warming. Instead, the IPCC provides a range of up to 10.5 degrees
-- more than double the number on which Lomborg bases his entire argument.

The global warming "alarmism" that Lomborg finds so distasteful is motivated
by a serious, science-driven concern that hidden within our global
climatesystem are powerful positive feedback loops. So that as we inch
up from 3 to
4 and then 4 to 5 degrees of warming, we may very well cross some
temperature threshold that would trigger a couple of degrees of further
warming, causing a catastrophic upward spiral in global temperatures.

For example, if the Amazon heats up and dries out too much, much of it could
burn down, flipping to savannah, and releasing tens of billions of tons of
CO2 into the atmosphere. Similarly, as the permafrost in the Arctic melts, a
huge pulse of methane may be released. The science is clear that,
interacting, these and other biophysical and socioeconomic factors could
drive planetary temperatures far beyond the range that Lomborg addresses. By
ignoring the vast uncertainty underlying these forecasts, and every
alternative outcome except his preferred "moderate" warming scenario, "Cool
It" reduces to an uninteresting discussion of why folks alive today should
choose 4.7 degrees of warming rather than 4.4 as the optimal outcome for our
grandkids.

On sea level rise, Lomborg assures us, with serene confidence, that it will
stop at a serious but manageable one foot by the end of the century. The
book omits any reference to Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA Goddard's Space
Research Institute at Columbia University. A growing body of research led
Hansen to declare earlier this year that Lomborg's favored business-as-usual
scenario "would guarantee future disintegration of West Antarctica and parts
of Greenland." This in turn would guarantee a long-run, irreversible sea
level rise of 20 feet or more, with the potential for a several-foot
increase this century.

Given Hansen's recent work, Lomborg's insistence that "all models clearly
show both Greenland and Antarctica making small contributions [to sea level
rise] over the next century" is silly. Similarly quaint is his claim that
Antarctica is a region where "little or no surface melting occurs." Earlier
this year, NASA found that California-size lakes formed on the continent's
surface in 2005.

Lomborg's focus on a single, midrange number for global temperature increase
is paralleled by his insistence that Kyoto-level controls, with the U.S.
participating, would have cost the world $180 billion per year. Kyoto
mandated a 7 percent reduction in emissions by 2010, and the European
countries that are complying with the treaty have done so by placing a cap
on emissions from cars and power plants. To get under the cap, industries
have to invest in new, cleaner technologies, and to the extent that this
increases the cost of travel or power, these higher prices can generate a
reduction in the rate of economic growth. This in turn might lead to a small
percentage drop in the level of global GDP at the end of each year --
Lomborg's measured cost of Kyoto.

Yet here again he imagines a consensus that does not exist. Yale economist
Robert Repetto's well-known review of 16 cost studies concluded that the
estimated GDP impact of Kyoto-level controls ranged from the relatively
small negative effects that concern Lomborg, to results that were also
small, but positive. Reducing emissions might actually spur economic growth
by, among other reasons, increasing global energy efficiency.

Lomborg manufactures yet another alleged consensus among economists
regarding benefit-cost analyses of carbon controls: "all macroeconomic
models show they are poor investments." This is wrong. Several benefit-cost
analyses -- including those of William Cline and Frank Ackerman -- have
supported serious near-term caps on carbon.

Lomborg is forced to acknowledge, and try to debunk, the most recent
counterexample: the high-profile Stern report from the U.K. Lomborg refers
frequently to four economic Nobel laureates who agree with his position that
carbon controls are too expensive. But professional opinion is far from
monolithic. Stern's analysis is part of an ongoing debate among economists
-- particularly on the choice of discount rate, a critical parameter that
drives the results of all the benefit-cost models. The discount rate
determines how much weight the models give to benefits (whether higher GDP
or lower global temperatures) that occur in the future.

Lomborg's preferred models choose a high discount rate of 6 percent. This
favors reaping GDP benefits soon, while paying surprisingly little attention
to long-run climate damages. The reasoning? Those early GDP increases can be
productively reinvested and enrich future generations. By contrast, Stern
picks a low discount rate of 1.4 percent, asserting on moral grounds that
any early GDP gains should be weighed against later climate damages more or
less equally. His model worries less about foregone investment and growth
opportunities, should climate control efforts noticeably lower GDP over the
next few decades.

In his review of the Stern report, Harvard's Marty Weitzman shows that --
irrespective of the moral case -- both Stern's and Lomborg's preferred
discount rate can be well justified on theoretical grounds. In the end, both
Weitzman and Nobel laureate Ken Arrow argue that Stern might be right
(though for the wrong reasons). And two other Nobel winners, Joseph Stiglitz
and George Akerlof, and dozens of serious researchers support strong,
near-term caps on global warming pollution.

One glaring example: Lomborg frequently cites the Kyoto cost estimates of
Yale economist William Nordhaus. And yet, writing in Science, Nordhaus
supported Kyoto as a global insurance policy, calling it a "useful if
expensive guinea pig." He continued: "It is hard to see why the United
States should not join with other countries" in pursuing this important
experiment in building the international institutions that can deal with
global warming.

As in his previous book, Lomborg cherry-picks the evidence to manufacture
both a scientific and economic consensus that does not exist. By focusing
exclusively on a single moderate warming scenario, "Cool It" fails to
grapple with the real economic rationale for cutting carbon now: to buy
insurance against the possibility of catastrophic outcomes.

Harvard's Weitzman puts the current concerns of many economists clearly.
Based on the findings of the U.N. climate panel, he notes that with roughly
3 percent probability, "we will [live in] a terra incognita biosphere within
a hundred years whose mass species extinctions, radical alterations of
natural environments, and other extreme outdoor consequences of a different
planet will have been triggered by a geologically-instantaneous temperature
change that is significantly larger than what separates us now from past ice
ages." Facing uncomfortably high probabilities for these kind of
catastrophic consequences, leading economists like Weitzman are advocating a
"gradualist climate-policy ramp of ever-tighter greenhouse gas reductions"
that will give our kids options: options for deep cuts if needed, and
options emerging from the new technologies that will be driven by steadily
tightening pollution caps.

While "Cool It" misses the central issue in the debate, the book does show
an interesting evolution in Lomborg's thinking. In a departure from his
earlier work, and surprisingly, given his downplaying the impacts of global
warming, Lomborg calls for an ambitious public investment program in clean
energy technologies. I could not agree more. When my 19-year-old daughter
reaches my age, her generation will have to cut global warming pollution
10-20 percent per decade. Their mission will be to rewire the entire planet
with low-cost, clean energy technologies, creating tens of millions of jobs,
stabilizing the climate, and laying the foundation for a prosperous and
sustainable future. But if we don't invest today in fuel cells, solar
arrays, and biofuel technologies, she simply won't have the affordable tools
to do for her kids what she will need to.

Lomborg, however, focuses exclusively on public investment, dismissing in
one sentence the sound economic argument that a cap on carbon, by raising
the price of dirty fuels, will be a critical spur to private investment in
clean technologies. To foster the kind of technology revolution that can
stabilize global warming pollution, significant government support will be
necessary, but far from sufficient.

Lomborg considers himself a friend of the world's poor. A table in his book
shows all the good things that we could do with the hypothetical $180
billion he argues Kyoto would have cost. But faith, hope and charity are not
zero-sum goods. A world brought together around a common agenda of
stabilizing the climate will be more, not less likely, to tackle other
common projects.

At the end of the day, Lomborg believes in the morality of benefit-cost
analysis: No god but GDP. Funds diverted into capping global warming
pollution means fewer "schools and hospitals" (as well as fewer Hummers and
McMansions). For the half of the world's population still living in poverty,
economic growth as conventionally measured remains an important priority.
For the 2 billion of us living in relative comfort, however, slightly slower
GDP growth would sacrifice little if any additional happiness. And as
Lomborg acknowledges, most of the benefits of a moderately warmer
climate(longer growing seasons, reduced cold days) accrue to the
global North,
while most of the costs (impacts on tropical agriculture, hotter summers,
vulnerability to extreme weather) fall on the poor in the global South.

But give Lomborg his whole argument. Suppose, as he believes, that
Kyoto-level controls will cost a cumulative $5 trillion over the next 100
years. That is about two years' worth of increase in global output. Suppose
also that we ignore Lomborg's advice and in the next few years freeze global
warming pollution in the rich countries. That would mean that a century
hence, our descendants, living in a much richer world, would have to wait an
additional two years -- until 2109 -- until a growing global economy left
them as rich as they otherwise would have been in 2107.

Will they thank us? Stabilizing emissions now will open the door for deeper
reductions should our kids need to make them, and send powerful signals to
the marketplace about future demand for the low-carbon, low-cost
technologies that will be critical to stabilize the climate by the end of
the century. Continued pollution closes off those options. And unchecked, in
the year 2107, over a third of the terrestrial creatures on the planet could
be locked into extinction from habitat destruction due to global warming.

Noah, build that ark.

Eban Goodstein is a professor of economics at Lewis & Clark College. He
directs a national educational initiative on global warming solutions, Focus
the Nation. His latest book is "Fighting for Love in the Century of
Extinction: How Passion and Politics Can Change the Future."

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*The following is one article until the end of the email.*

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 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 at 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<http://www.greenspirit.com/lomborg/ScientificAmericanBj%C3%B8rnLomborgAnswer.pdf>.

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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 .

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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 .

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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
hazardous 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-93F6809EC5880000

**********************************************************************

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-93F6809EC5880000

*********************************************************************

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
climateby 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-93F6809EC5880000

*************************************************************************

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 was begun in 1968. 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. Dr. 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-93F6809EC5880000
-- 
Kristina Pappas
MBA, Sustainable Management - 2008
415.812.3128
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinapappas
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