TheAgitator.com
Bjorn in the NYT
Monday, August 26th, 2002A brilliant piece of work today by Bjorn Lomborg. Lomborg, you may recall, was at one time a lefty environmentalist. Upon researching a book however, he began to, egad!, look at actual environmental data. Slowly, surely, the data he studied (on ozone depletion, global warming, etc.) led Lomborg to begin to draw conclusions anathematic to his environmentalist principles. The tone and tenor of his book took a dramatic reversal, and the result, The Skeptical Environmentalist was a runaway success. Lomborg brought a credibility to environmentalist debunking that his detractors have had a hard time undermining.
Today, Lumborg tackles the UN conference on sustainable development in Johannesburg, and deconstructs its premises with ease. A wonderful piece, and the NYT should get props from the blogosphere for publishing it.
An excerpt:
Why does the developed world worry so much about sustainability? Because we constantly hear a litany of how the environment is in poor shape. Natural resources are running out. Population is growing, leaving less and less to eat. Species are becoming extinct in vast numbers. Forests are disappearing. The planet’s air and water are getting ever more polluted. Human activity is, in short, defiling the earth â?? and as it does so, humanity may end up killing itself.There is, however, one problem: this litany is not supported by the evidence. Energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so. More food is now produced per capita than at any time in the world’s history. Fewer people are starving. Species are, it is true, becoming extinct. But only about 0.7 percent of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not the 20 percent to 50 percent that some have predicted. Most forms of environmental pollution look as though they have either been exaggerated or are transient â?? associated with the early phases of industrialization. They are best cured not by restricting economic growth but by accelerating it.
Emphasis mine. Amen.
Sustainable development? Well, remember that among other things, a well-received rant at the conference said that no more electricity should be made available to developing countries… So how are they to develop? No word on that yet…
I figured out a few years ago that solar-energy panels to support Providence RI (where I live – not exactly a major city) would have to cover the rest of the state and part of another.
The Long Island electric utility is trying to get someone to put up wind-power stations. The proposal would use 348 square miles of windmills to power 1K homes: the utility has 1,100K customers; if no customers are hospitals, fctories, offices, etc. then wind power would only need about 384K square miles… How big is LI?
Vanishing Point
On Bjorn Lomborg and extinction
by E.O. Wilson
My greatest regret about the Lomborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expended to combat it in the media. We will always have contrarians like Lomborg whose sallies are characterized by willful ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication with genuine experts, and destructive campaigning to attract the attention of the media rather than scientists. They are the parasite load on scholars who earn success through the slow process of peer review and approval. The question is: How much load should be tolerated before a response is necessary? Lomborg is evidently over the threshold.
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On Bjorn Lomborg and climate change
by Stephen H. Schneider
Bjorn Lomborg’s chapter on global climate change is a clever polemic; it seems like a sober and well-researched presentation of balanced information, whereas in fact it makes use of selective inattention to inconvenient literature and overemphasis of work that supports his lopsided views. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and other honest assessments don’t have the luxury of using such tactics, given the hundreds of external reviewers and dozens of review editors.
It would take several pages to document how Lomborg lines up his citations to diminish the seriousness of climate effects while ignoring most literature that would stress the seriousness. (For that kind of documentation, see a review by my colleagues and me in the forthcoming January 2002 issue of Scientific American or Stuart Pimm and Jeff Harvey’s review in the Nov. 8, 2001 issue of Nature.) Lomborg does acknowledge an aggregate $5 trillion benefit of controlling and minimizing climate change, but then contrasts this to an estimated cost of controlling global warming of “from $3 to $33 trillion.”
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On Bjorn Lomborg and species diversity
by Norman Myers
Bjorn Lomborg opens his chapter on biodiversity by citing my 1979 estimate of 40,000 species lost per year. He gets a lot of mileage out of that estimate throughout the chapter, although he does not cite any of my subsequent writings except for a single mention of a 1983 paper and a 1999 paper, neither of which deals much with extinction rates. Why doesn’t he refer to the 80-plus papers I have published on biodiversity and mass extinction during the 20-year interim?
Lomborg is equally sloppy in his analyses of the utilitarian benefits of species and their genetic resources — for example, “aspirin from willow trees, heart medicine from foxgloves.” It is simply not true, as Lomborg claims, that, “Most of this medicine is now produced synthetically.” In several instances, scientists have tried for decades to synthesize plant-derived alkaloids and other biocompounds in the laboratory, investing huge amounts of money in the effort, to little or no avail. Yet Lomborg goes on to assert, “But so long as we do not even have any practical means of analyzing even a fraction of those plants already known to us, this cannot be used as a general argument for the protection of all species, for example in the rain forest.” He might check with the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., where scientists have demonstrated that certain families of plants appear to be sound bets for medical breakthroughs.
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