| A misquoting of a FAO publication |
| This page was created by me, Jeff Opal, and was last updated 9SEP-2003 |
| On page 13 Lomborg accuses the Worldwatch Institute of issuing publications with many false claims about the world's forests. Here are some exact words of Lomborg's on this page: |
| Blatant errors are also made with unfortu- nate frequency. Worldwatch Institute claims that "the soaring demand for paper is contrib-uting to deforestation, particularly in the northern temperate zone. Canada is losing some 200,000 hectares of forest a year." 77 Reference is made to the FAO's State of the World's Forests 1997, but if you refer to the source you will see that in fact Canada grew 174,600 more hectares of forest each year. 78 |
| I found both the Worldwatch Institute publication cited by Lomborg in endnote 77 and the FAO publication cited in endnote 78. I found that he accurately quoted text from page 9 of the WI publication. However, |
| when I found the FAO publication Lomborg cited I discovered that he altered the FAO estimate. Rather than a 174,600 hectare increase in Canada's forests, the actual estimate given was a 175,000 hectare increase. Lomborg reduced the actual number by 400 hectares. Why would he do this if it moved the number in the direction of the WI figure? The 400 hectare shift constitutes only a .1066 percent reduction of the actual number (400/[175,000+200,000] = .001066). However, Lomborg's alteration adds another digit of precision to the FAO number, thereby suggesting that FAO has more confidence in the precision of their numbers than what the actual estimate suggests. Lomborg's desire to attribute high reliability to the FAO numbers is indicated by his choice of words in the above quote from page 13, when he said "...in fact Canada grew...". These words imply that the numbers given by FAO aren't even estimates -- as if the numbers were produced by some kind of error-free method for measuring forest cover. |
| Note: Lomborg's small alteration of the FAO number serves as distracting bait for critics investigating these claims. Someone critical of Lomborg who finds the FAO publication first (without having found the WI publication) and seeing that alteration would be tempted to stop there, because it gives them something to gripe to their associates about. I also noticed that endnote 78 has nonsensical abbreviations. This is how the note appears on page 335: |
| 78. 873,000a ha in the latest assessed period 1990-5 (FAO 1997c:189). |
| The number 873,000 should be followed by one of two abbreviations for land area measures: either "a" (for acre) or "ha" (for hectare -- 100 ares, equal to 2.471 acres). But Lomborg has both! |