| Lomborg misunderstands, or misrepresents, the work of environmental scientists. A particularly egregious example concerns my own work, though no doubt other examples can be found. In writings going back more than a decade, I have pointed to the lack of access to clean water and sanitation services as a particularly disturbing problem, affecting billions of people. In my 1993 book, Water in Crisis, I note the connection between population growth and lack of water services, showing that between 1990 and 2000, nearly 900 million more people would be born in the regions where this lack is the greatest. In presenting these data, I describe them as the "total additional population requiring service by 2000: (Gleick 1993, Table C.4, p. 189). Lomborg misinterprets and misrepresents my work as a prediction that every one of these 900 million people would fail to get access to water and sanitation (Lomborg 2001, p. 21) -- a ridiculous interpretation. Had he looked at the actual data I provided and read the explicit description of those data, he would have seen that they were properly labeled. Lomborg's misrepresentation indicates either shoddy analysis or intentional misrepresentation. He also misreads official UN statistics on this issue. Indeed, today, the best UN estimate is that the number of people without access to improved sanitation in over 2.4 billion -- an absolute increase in recent years.6 |