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.

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?