September 5, 2001

Danish anti-environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg today received his just desserts courtesy of a fellow writer enraged at his "dangerous and misleading" statements on crucial green issues. A pie was thrown in his face at Borders Bookshop in Oxford just after 7pm this evening.

Lomborg's heavily-promoted new book 'The Skeptical Environmentalist' claims variously that consumer waste isn't a problem, that species loss is minimal, and that it is far too expensive to do anything about global warming.

Pie-man Mark Lynas said he was unable to ignore Lomborg's comments on climate change. "I wanted to put a Baked Alaska in his smug face," said Lynas, "in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska who are reporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice and worsening effects on animal and bird life."

Many countries in the Third World are also experiencing the effects of climate change. In Africa, Lake Chad is now a twentieth of the size it was in the 1950s, leaving millions potentially without water. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is planning the evacuation of its entire population as sea levels continue to rise.

"And yet despite all this evidence," comments Lynas, "Lomborg somehow contrives to argue that it is cheaper to go on burning fossil fuels than to switch to clean energy to prevent runaway global warming. This feeds right into the agenda of profiteering multinationals like Esso."

He continued: "I don't see why the environment should suffer every time some bored, obscure academic fancies an ego trip. This book is full of dangerous nonsense."

Lomborg's claims have already been discredited in his native Denmark, where several of his colleagues in Aarhus University have created a website dedicated to an articulate critique of his views. See www.au.dk/~cesamat/debate.html

Lomborg's background is as a statistician, a training which has left him well-equipped to tell lies by manipulating figures in order to jump on the anti-environmentalist bandwagon.

Lomborg’s stated intention is to use the statistical evidence to demolish what he calls the ‘litany’ of four big environmental fears - exhaustion of natural resources, overpopulation, extinction of species and worsening pollution.

It is odd that Lomborg should call himself an environmentalist, for it becomes apparent on reading his book that he has a poor understanding of ecology, environmental economics and environmental politics. In this review we concentrate mainly on his claims about climate change. For a critique of other areas of Lomborg’s analysis, the reader may wish to refer to the recent review in Nature (1) and reviews prepared by the Union of Concerned Scientists, including ones by eminent experts such as Peter H. Gleick, Edward O. Wilson, Tom Lovejoy, Stuart L. Pimm and Jeff Harvey.(2) The World Resources Institute has also prepared a critique.(3) These commentaries describe the litany of scientific error, misunderstanding, misrepresentation and misquotation that characterise the book.

In writing his book, Lomborg has delved into a number of highly specialized areas of study. Usually when academics stray from their areas of specialization, they adopt a degree of caution and humility. Most have learned from their own disciplines how easy it is for neophytes to make fools of themselves. Lomborg displays none of this humility but writes as if he is expert in many areas where he clearly has no real expertise. As a result, much of his analysis has an undergraduate quality to it, a quality that would be amusing or irritating if the subject matter were not so serious.

Lomborg on climate change science

For over a decade hundreds, indeed thousands, of the world’s climate scientists have been working on how best to estimate the likely effects on the Earth’s climate of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. Under the auspices of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) these scientists come together to carefully sift through and collate the mass of evidence and to respond to every credible scientific doubt that is raised about the research. After an exhaustive process that includes several stages of peer review, the IPCC publishes its conclusions about the likely extent of warming and associated effects on the world’s climate. The third and latest report of the IPCC appeared this year.

The scores of scientists of the IPCC will undoubtedly be grateful to the Danish statistician who has now pointed out some fundamental errors in their work. The thrust of Lomborg’s critique is that the IPCC scientists have failed to understand the effects of aerosols and water vapour on the climate. Nor, he argues, do they understand how clouds work.

Anyone who reads the reports of the IPCC will have noticed how cautious they are in their pronouncements, never hesitating to point to the uncertainties in the modelling of climate change and the projections of the future. Lomborg exploits this honesty; wherever a piece of research casts doubt on some part of the analysis Lomborg will take it up and work on it. But Lomborg is only interested in uncertainty that implies that the extent of climate change may be exaggerated, a debating trick employed unashamedly by the tiny band of climate change skeptics.(4) For those of us who are not climate scientists, we must decide whom to believe - the several hundred professional scientists whose work is thoroughly peer reviewed and published in the leading journals, or a handful of skeptics some of whom are funded by the fossil fuel lobby and whose arguments are inexpertly recycled by Bjorn Lomborg.

Lomborg on climate change economics

Lomborg claims to be an economist as well as a statistician.(5) We find this hard to believe. For example, his discussion of the ‘double dividend’ that may follow the imposition of environmental taxes (pp. 308-309), is so incoherent that it is impossible to know where a critique should begin. His review of parts of the double dividend literature wholly misunderstands the nature of the debate and the policy issues at stake, and seriously misrepresents the views of some of those he cites. It is impossible to pick out a wrong statement as the whole two pages in the book are gobbledygook.(6)

For us, one of the most bizarre features of Lomborg’s book is that he forensically examines the claims of environmental scientists to show that they are contradicted by ‘the facts’, yet he accepts uncritically the most exaggerated claims by economists of the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, after chapters stressing the uncertainties associated with climate science, he writes as if economic analysis of the costs of cutting emissions were gospel. The hard-headed skeptic dedicated to ‘measuring the real state of the world’ seems blind to a mass of information that suggests that the economic estimates of costs he quotes are marred by enormous uncertainty. The hard-headed skeptic who devotes himself to exposing the exaggerations of environmentalists has chosen to ignore a large literature that exposes the exaggerations of the economists.

A volume could be written on this subject but here we make only the following two or three points. Lomborg quotes the collective results of 13 different economic modelling studies of the costs of implementing the Kyoto Protocol (p. 303). The costs for industrialised countries in the year 2010 are estimated by these models to range from around US$75 billion to US$350 billion depending on assumptions about coverage and policy measures. On this basis, Lomborg concludes that the cost of reducing emissions would exceed the cost of climate change, and that therefore we should not attempt to cut emissions.

If Lomborg had applied his ‘skepticism’ to the economic models in the way he applied it to the science of climate change, he would have asked about the assumptions that are built into them, and how those assumptions affect the results.
He would have had to go no further than the author of the model review paper he uses, Stanford’s John Weyant, who has elsewhere noted the crucial influence of modellers’ assumption on model results:

"Cost projections can vary by a factor of two or four across models because of differences in the models’ representation of substitution and innovation processes. … differences in assumptions about the baseline, policy regime, and emission reduction benefits can easily lead to a factor of ten or more difference in the cost estimates."(7)

Lomborg on the role of technology

It is instructive to focus on just one of the several crucial assumptions built into these economic models - the treatment of technological change. The models assume that the only technological change that occurs is an annual fixed rate of improvement (usually around 1 per cent per annum) in the level of energy efficiency. Otherwise, the economy responds to a carbon constraint by switching between existing energy technologies. In other words, measures such as large carbon taxes do not result in any development of the technologies used to meet energy needs. The rapid technological changes that business people and market analysts expect in response to mandated measures to cut emissions can be found nowhere in the models. While this technological transformation will not be costless, the history of innovation suggests that it will dramatically reduce the costs of shifting from high to low-emission energy sources.

Without a technological response the costs of cutting greenhouse gases will be higher, perhaps even as high as the models suggest (although relaxing any one of several other assumptions can also bring the cost estimates down substantially). Yet the market has always demonstrated that it is more responsive than the economic models allow, and there is an irony in the fact that environmentalists have more faith in the ability of the market to meet emission constraints than neoclassical economists.

This technological hole in the economic models will undoubtedly come as a shock to Lomborg because elsewhere in his elaborately constructed argument he himself has given great prominence to the powers of technological change. In order to attack the IPCC’s projections of growth in CO2 concentrations and associated warming, Lomborg argues that the market, unconstrained by emission cuts demanded by the Kyoto Protocol, will see a natural transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy simply because the unit costs of solar technologies will continue to decline. Thus if we leave the market to itself,

"global warming is not an ever worsening problem. In fact under any reasonable scenario of technological change and without policy intervention, carbon emissions will not reach the levels of A1F1 [the IPCC’s worst case] and they will decline towards the end of the century, as we move towards ever cheaper renewable energy sources" (pp. 283-84).

If more evidence of Lomborg’s bias were needed, then here it is. He simultaneously argues that technological change will save the day without any intervention, but reports uncritically economic models that show intervention will be too costly when those models ignore technological change. We are left to conclude that technology will save us if we do nothing, but that if we attempt to cut emissions the absence of technological change will mean it is too costly.

Ever the prisoner of economic dogma, Lomborg also reproduces the old economists’ refrain that there is no such thing as a free lunch (p. 311). In practice this means that there is no such thing as energy efficiency because if firms could save money from reducing energy consumption they would already be doing so.(8)

This is an article of faith of neoclassical economists - it’s in every textbook - and the ‘profit maximising’ assumption is built into the economic models. Profit maximization is there not just as an assumption; in most models it is built into the very algorithms that are used to solve them.

Yet if Lomborg were really interested in the ‘truth’ and had searched a little further he would have come across dozens of studies by engineers and energy experts showing that, in countries such as the USA and Australia, energy consumption and associated emissions could be cut by 20-40% at no net cost, enough to meet Kyoto targets and quite a bit more.(9)

Lomborg on environmental policy and politics

For someone who claims to be a political scientist(10), Lomborg displays an astonishing ignorance of how the world works. He argues, for instance, that the Kyoto Protocol will have such a small impact on global emissions that it ‘merely buys the world six years’, for the world will reach the same concentration of greenhouse gas emissions in 2106 instead of 2100 if the Kyoto protocol is implemented.

It is difficult to understand how anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of the process leading to the Kyoto Protocol can make such an absurd claim. Everyone knows that the Kyoto Protocol is merely a first small step on the path towards a low-emission world. Lomborg’s argument is equivalent to saying: “It is pointless walking to your front gate because it will only get you one hundredth of the way to the shops. So don’t bother.”

Lomborg’s political naivety is most apparent in his discussion of pollution. He makes the observation that:

"Most forms of environmental pollution either appear to have been exaggerated, or are transient—associated with the early phases of industrialisation and therefore best cured not by restricting economic growth, but by accelerating it" (The Economist, 2 August 2001).

This is perhaps the central claim of Lomborg’s book, yet there are so many problems with it that it is hard to know where to start. Firstly, there are several forms of pollution and waste that have continued to increase and whose effects cannot be said to be exaggerated or transient. High-level nuclear waste, plastic wastes and greenhouse gas emissions are perhaps the most obvious. But it is true that many forms of pollution have indeed been cleaned up in industrialised countries. Factories can no longer dump toxic wastes into the rivers (although some still do and their owners find themselves in court). Urban air pollution in most major cities is not as bad as it was 20 or 30 years ago.

However, these improvements have not come about because countries have become richer. They have occurred because environment groups and citizens have insisted on them and have forced legislators to pass laws banning many forms of pollution and requiring factories and cars to have pollution reduction equipment. In other words, a country’s political system, rather than its wealth, determines its response to environmental threats. By noting the association between improvements in some forms of pollution and high incomes, Lomborg has confused correlation with causation, an unforgivable error for a statistician.

Just as higher national incomes are not the cause of environmental improvements, more growth will not induce further gains. In fact, keeping pollution and toxic wastes relatively low and reducing them further requires an unceasing battle against the effects of economic growth.(11) For example, while dangerous vehicle emissions in our cities have been declining   due to laws requiring all cars to have catalytic converters and requiring fuels to have lower levels of lead and sulphur   most experts believe that the sheer growth in the volume of cars is now starting to offset the benefits of better technology. As a result, urban air pollution is expected to begin to increase. At least, things will become worse unless environmentalists and citizens collectively insist on even tougher standards. It will not just happen as incomes rise, not least because tougher standards will be met with vigorous opposition from corporate interests. In Australia, for example, some oil companies are strenuously resisting the tougher fuel and engine standards that the Federal Government wants to introduce and in the USA the Bush Administration is winding back some of the environmental improvements introduced by the Clinton Administration.

Lomborg’s claim that economic growth will alone solve our environmental problems has been thoroughly investigated in the literature in the debate over the ‘environmental Kuznets curve’, a literature that is central to Lomborg’s argument but to which he does not refer.(12) The hypothesis is that as countries begin to industrialise pollution and waste become worse, perhaps much worse, but as they become richer, environmental problems are ameliorated and there is a general improvement in the state of the natural world. The hypothesis that there is a causal relationship between income levels of environmental quality is difficult to sustain. Some countries become industrialised yet the environment continues to deteriorate, while others do much better. The reason that the Soviet system had such an appalling environmental record is simple: there were no environmental organisations to campaign against the government and the industries causing the problems.

If today in rich countries we enjoy cleaner air and water, use less persistent and toxic agricultural chemicals, have improved safety regulations for the use of nuclear power and so on, there is no guarantee that things will continue to improve. We have already noted that air quality in some cities is expected to begin to deteriorate. We know that even a small step on the path to reducing greenhouse gases has been fought tooth and nail by powerful vested interests. The governments of some very rich countries, notably the USA and Australia, have done all they can to sabotage any agreement. Would Lomborg like to nominate the future level of per capita GDP at which he expects the USA to abandon its opposition to the Kyoto Protocol?

Lomborg’s moral compass

By reproducing uncritically the results of the economic models to argue that it would be too expensive to tackle climate change, Lomborg also endorses the moral viewpoint on which the models are built. The perversity of this view is perhaps obscure to the statistician, but most other people can see it. Put simply, it is the distinction between economic values and ethical values, and the impossibility of reducing the latter to the former.

The models he relies on, and the whole tenor of his argument, assume that the value of an ancient forest is measured by its timber yield, the value of the Great Barrier Reef is measured by the tourist revenue it generates and the value of a species is no more than its potential contribution to medicine. The value of life is measured by forgone income. It is as if we value our children by the life insurance premiums we pay. In fact, the models do not even go that far. Despite the accumulated evidence that many lives, perhaps millions, will be lost and ecosystems the world over may be severely damaged by climate change, the models are only interested in the impacts on the ‘economy’, that is goods and services whose values can be found in the national accounts.

Lomborg writes that it will be cheaper for ‘the world’ to adapt to climate change rather than reduce emissions (p. 318). Adaptation will include shifting populations from low-lying islands. Perhaps as part of his next world tour Lomborg could visit Tuvalu and the Maldives and inform the citizens of those sinking lands that, instead of cutting their greenhouse gas emissions, it is cheaper for the rich countries to shift them away from their ancestral homes to somewhere else on the planet. Perhaps Lomborg could visit Pakistan or the Sahel and tell the citizens that, although their crop yields are expected to decline by 30%, the rich countries would find it cheaper to ‘compensate’ them rather than reduce their consumption of fossil fuels.

In Lomborg’s moral universe, on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis humanity can decide how much to adjust the global thermostat and transform the climate system of the Earth. To imagine that the Earth exists to satisfy human desire and that humanity can calculate how best to regulate natural systems of unimaginable complexity is not just an expression of breath-taking hubris, but reflects a contempt for the natural world and the place of humans in it. These are precisely the attitudes that environmentalism exists to oppose.

References

1 Nature, Vol. 414, 8 November 2001, pp. 149-150.

2 See the website of the Union of Concerned Scientists, http://www.ucsusa.org/environment/lomborg.html.

3 Available on the World Resources Institute’s website, http://www.wri.org/wri/press/mk_lomborg.html.

4 Lomborg himself is guilty of gross overstatement of the end-of-the-world variety. For example: “this would require a complete cessation of all carbon emissions by 2035, essentially shutting down the world as we know it” (p. 309), and “it is likely that much of the carbon-intensive production will merely move to the developing countries” (p. 304), an absurd exaggeration that not even the economic models support.

5 A claim he made in a debate on Australia’s ABC Radio National on 13 th October 2001.

6 For a clear and balanced discussion of the issues, see OECD, Environmentally Related Taxes in OECD Countries: Issues and Strategies (OECD 2001).

7 John Weyant, ‘An Introduction to the Economics of Climate Change Policy’, Prepared for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, July 2000, p. iv.

8 Lomborg claims that “several analyses suggest that the acclaimed tremendous reduction potentials are mirages” (p. 311), but does not cite any references.

9 For Australia, see G. Wilkenfeld, Energy Efficiency Programs in the Residential Sector. In WJ Bouma, GI Pearman & M Manning (eds) Greenhouse: Coping With Climate Change, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne, 1996.

10 See Note 5 above.

11 There are many such studies. See, for example, Clive Hamilton and Hal Turton, ‘Determinants of Emissions Growth in OECD Countries’, Energy Policy, January 2002.

12 Lomborg actually refers to two sources that contradict his thesis in a footnote (number 1280) but dismisses them, preferring to rely on two studies that are 8-10 years out of date. For recent, balanced views see, for example, T. Cavlovic et al., ‘A meta-analysis of environmental Kuznets curve studies’, Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, Vol. 29 (2000), pp. 32-42, T. Panayotou, ‘Demystifying the environmental Kuznets curve: turning a black box into a policy tool’, Environmental and Development Economics, Vol. 2 (1997), pp. 465-484, and C. Tisdell, ‘Globalisation and sustainability: environmental Kuznets curve and the WTO’, Ecological Economics, Vol. 39 (2001) pp. 185-196.

Summary: The book, The Skeptical Environmentalist has environmentalists and scientists from around the world fuming. Danish author, Bjorn Lomborg, accuses the environmental movement of making false claims about the state of the world, which he calls the 'litany'. Earthbeat brings Bjorn Lomborg face to face with outspoken critics from three continents, in an extended debate.

Alexandra de Blas: Climate change led the way as the environment entered the Federal election campaign this week. On Tuesday, Opposition leader, Kim Beazley, announced that Labor would ratify the Kyoto Protocol next year. But Environment Minister, Senator Hill says this would be irresponsible, as it’s impossible to assess the cost to the Australian economy before the rules of the Protocol are finalised.

Earthbeat will bring you an in-depth analysis of the key environmental policies as we move closer to polling day. But now, to a climate change controversy of a different kind: The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Alexandra de Blas: Well very few books have raised the ire of environmentalists as much as Bjorn Lomborg’s recent book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The media love it, and it’s had major write-ups in The Economist, The Guardian and The New York Times. But scientists across the globe are passionately refuting its claims and emails from an extraordinary list of who’s who in the environment movement have been darting back and forth across the planet.

Professor Lomborg accuses the environment movement of making false claims about the state of the world, which he calls ‘the litany’. Claims like the population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat, that forests are disappearing and species are rapidly becoming extinct.

Lomborg argues that the environment is actually improving, more people are better fed and that there are more pressing issues to spend our money on than mitigating climate change.

To find out more about The Skeptical Environmentalist I’ve invited the author, Bjorn Lomborg, and critics from three continents to discuss the book with me now.

Alexandra de Blas:  Bjorn Lomborg is an Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and he’s joining me from Los Angeles where he’s currently promoting his book.

Welcome Bjorn Lomborg.

Bjorn Lomborg: Thank you.

Alexandra de Blas: Also in California, Stephen Schneider is a world authority on climate change and Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change with the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. Welcome, Stephen Schneider.

Stephen Schneider: Thank you, glad to be here.

Alexandra de Blas: Dr Tom Burke is in our London studios and he is a member of the Executive Committee of Green Alliance, one of the leading environmental organisations in the UK. He’s also a former Director of Friends of the Earth and is currently an environmental adviser to Rio Tinto and BP. Thanks for joining us, Tom.

Tom Burke: Hello.

Alexandra de Blas: And here in Australia, Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University. He was the inaugural winner of the Prime Minister’s Environment Prize last year. He chaired the Advisory Council that produced the first National State of the Environment Report and he’s a former head of the Commission for the Future.

Welcome to you all, and thanks for joining me on Earthbeat today. Bjorn Lomborg, you’re a Professor of Statistics in Denmark; what led you to write a book that fundamentally challenges the state of the world as environmentalists know it?

Bjorn Lomborg: Well Alexandra, let me just give you the short story. Basically I read a claim by the now late Julian Simon, an economist at Maryland, where he claimed that things were actually getting better, and I said, ‘No way.’ I’m an old Greenpeace member and I thought that can’t be true, but he said one thing which I always tell my students in statistics. He also said, ‘Well, go check your data for yourself.’

And I figured that would be worth actually challenging, so I got some of my best students together and we decided we were going to debunk him, just showing this as right-wing American propaganda. As it turned out, a lot of what he said was actually true, not all of it, but a lot of it was true, and that was what really led me first to write some articles in Denmark and it turned into a big discussion in Denmark, which led to the Danish book and now this international book.

Alexandra de Blas: Well you’re not an environmental scientist, and you haven’t done any work in the field; what’s the basis for your argument that the environment is actually getting better?

Bjorn Lomborg: Basically I try to ask the different question. A lot of people in the environmental movement will tell us what is the problem in this issue, which is fine, that’s what we want science to do, to make society aware of where are the problems.

So what I do is try to take the best statistical evidence that we have and actually ask the question, So overall, on all the major important issues in the world, how are things going, are they going in the right direction or in the wrong direction? That’s typically not the question that’s being asked. And of course when we start to say ‘Well maybe things are actually going better’. Then we can also start to ask the other very important question which is the political science economics question, namely, ‘So, of all the different problems that still remain, which ones are the most important, which ones are the ones we should actually deal with first?’ We need to have a prioritisation, there’s lots of stuff to do out there, but we need to deal with first things first.

Alexandra de Blas: OK, well I’d like to now go to our other guests, and for you to give me a brief assessment of the book. Tom Burke in London, you’ve criticised Bjorn Lomborg in The Guardian newspaper, you’ve also written a damning paper called ‘Ten Pinches of Salt’; what are you main concerns with the publication?

Tom Burke: Well one of my first concerns I should pick up, I’ve actually talked to Greenpeace, and they are very clear that they have no record of Bjorn Lomborg as a member, as an activist member. Now he may have contributed money to Greenpeace, lots of people have, but you know, before you call yourself an environmentalist you have to do a little bit more than contribute money.

I say that because it’s quite important here to establish the test of people’s veracity. And Professor Lomborg is really challenging the veracity not just of a few members of environmental groups but of really a vast array of scientists around the world, and the issue is, who’s telling the truth? He sets out in his book the claim to be telling you the real truth about the environment, by implication everybody else is telling falsehoods.

Alexandra de Blas: So Bjorn Lomborg, you say you’ve been a paid-up member of Greenpeace?

Bjorn Lomborg: I’ve been a member, I’ve never been out in a rubber boat, I’m a suburban kind of Greenpeace member, your stereotypical person who contributes and nothing else.

Tom Burke: That doesn’t make you an environmentalist Bjorn, I mean that would make me a statistician because I’ve done some calculations.

Alexandra de Blas: OK, well Stephen Schneider at Stanford, you’ve written extensively in the field of climate change and this book’s got you and your colleagues red hot under the collar. What are you so upset about?

Stephen Schneider: Well for those of us who in my case have spent about three decades working with thousands of scientists and policy analysts and others, trying to figure out something about whether the future that we face, not just environmentally but also a whole range of other issues that we call sustainable environmental development, we end up with a maddening degree of uncertainty. We end up with scenarios which, if we’re lucky, give us mild outcomes and we end up with scenarios that, if we’re unlucky, give us catastrophic outcomes.

We fight amongst ourselves bitterly about the relative likelihoods of these, and have virtually no agreement and now all of a sudden I see in The Skeptical Environmentalist, the sub-title: ‘Measuring the Real State of the World’, and the person who’s a non-contributor to the debate has selected largely out of context the happier news. He’s very confident that we’re not going to get the more serious outcomes, a confidence that’s not based on any significant analysis by him, or any properly balanced citation from the literature.

Alexandra de Blas: Ian Lowe here in Australia where both farmers and environmentalists agree that we need to spend $65-billion in the next decade to repair the country, how do you see Bjorn Lomborg’s thesis that the environment is in fact getting better?

Ian Lowe: Well I think Bjorn is correct to remind us that some environmentalists, like some politicians or some industrialists or some economists, sometimes select sources to make a political argument, and he is right to point out that some indicators of environmental quality are getting better.

But I think the unfortunate thing is that the book appears to sweep on from that to argue that all environmental indicators are getting better when most of the major problems are getting worse. Population is increasing, water tables are falling, soils are eroding, wetlands are disappearing, rangelands are deteriorating, temperatures are rising, plant and animal species are disappearing.

And most fundamentally I think, I was very annoyed with his conclusion that essentially it’s imperative that we focus primarily on the economy, a sort of environmental version of the trickle-down effect, that if only we get rich enough, all the problems will automatically be solved, whereas what we know to our cost in Australia is that some of the things we’ve done in the past to get rich, have produced irreversible deterioration of the natural environment.

Alexandra de Blas: Well Bjorn Lomborg, how do you feel about the fact that many of the world’s leading environmental experts think that your work is inconsistent, inaccurate at times, and guilty of the very flaws that you criticise others for?

Bjorn Lomborg: Well I can only say I’m happy for the discussion, and I really think that it’s all important, and I think we can take some of these issues up in this forum.

Of course, this has to be a work based on facts. On the other hand, I also have to say, when Stephen Schneider tells us there’s a maddening degree of uncertainty. Well the point is here, that no matter what kind of model you take, when we talk about global warming, we have a situation where what we can do is dramatically little, however at a very high cost, and that cost, I argue, we could spend much, much better, and that’s the main point.

Now that is not a question which Stephen Schneider is particularly well-founded at discussing. This is not a science issue on global warming, this is the issue of economics of global warming, which the IPCC has now actually decided not to take any more. So in that sense, it really is an important issue and it seems to me to be an issue which is rather uncontroversial, that we need to think about. Is it actually a good idea to do something where the cure will be more costly than the original affliction?

Tom Burke: Stephen Schneider has quite correctly pointed out that we have a lot of difficulty modelling the climate.

Compared to modelling the economy, modelling the climate is fairly straightforward, and compared to our models of the climate, our models of the economy are far less reliable guides to public policy. At least we can go out there with our model of the climate and make some tests and some attempts to validate it empirically. Our models of the economy are all over the place.

Ian Lowe: I wanted to make a similar point, Alexandra, that when you compare models that attempt to work out the cost of climate change, they vary hugely, depending on what assumptions they make. But most of the models that Bjorn has accepted uncritically, make no attempt to quantify the benefits of responding to climate change, they only calculate the costs, and indeed in his book, he airily dismisses the idea that there could be ‘no regrets measures’ quoting Nordhaus, comparing it with a restaurant where you paid to eat.

But we know that there are any number of examples of ‘no regrets measures’, or measures that are revenue positive. Dupont have halved their emissions and improved their profitability; BP Amoco in Australia are proposing to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% by measures that are revenue positive.

The point is that there are a huge number of cost effective things to do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and of course we should be doing those before we undertake hugely expensive things, but the modelling that Bjorn quotes simply takes no account of those ‘no regrets measures’.

Bjorn Lomborg: But naturally I do say that there are those ‘no regret measures’, and naturally we should do those. However most economists are very wary of the argument that there should be free lunches lying around which companies are not currently picking up.

And we also have to realise, even just to do Kyoto, we need to cut our emissions about 30% from what they would otherwise have been, and that is not just a small amount. Dramatic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions are just simply not validated by the integrated models.

Stephen Schneider: Let me comment on this, since I was also characterised as not being involved in the economic modelling which is actually false.

I’ve been going to the Energy Modelling Forum for the last ten years, I’ve published dozens of papers in this area. I don’t want to get into that and I work for it in IPCC. What I want to do is show you that, not only does Bjorn Lomborg not know my credentials which is irrelevant to your listeners, but the modelling that he does is elliptical and out of balance with the community.

Because, he cites one set, which is the neo classical growth economist’s, and ignores the wide range of their critics, both in economics and at the same time, the engineering studies. This is a religious argument.

So when he cites in his book on page 318 of the costs of the economy of climate policies between $3-trillion and $33-trillion he’s giving the range that comes from these simple economic models that are not well validated and which the community admits has neglected many things. Even worse, he cites the costs of climate change as something on the order of $5-trillion and says, ‘Well compare that to the $3-trillion to $33-trillion of the costs of trying to fix it, it looks like you’re not ahead in the cost benefit ratio’.

It is inconceivable that anybody who has a balanced position could cite a range of costs of the economy of intervening to slow it down and then give one number for the benefits of stopping climate change and not citing that range, makes me entirely suspicious that anything you have to say about economics and policy, Bjorn, is coloured and biased in order to reach a conclusion this is a non-problem.

Alexandra de Blas: Well Bjorn Lomborg, would you like to respond?

Bjorn Lomborg: Yes, I’d like to ask Stephen, I mean isn’t it true though, that we did have an experiment where we tried to raise taxes, namely when the oil exporting countries, the OPEC actually raised the price of oil back in ’73, and in the early ‘80s again? We had actually a situation where we saw what happened then, we’d got a dramatic decrease in economic growth, and that is exactly what we need to do if we actually want to cut carbon emissions dramatically, and that is what those macro-economic studies say.

No matter what the cost is, as long as what we do with Kyoto has simply postponed warming for six years, then it changes almost nothing. Primarily what it simply does, Kyoto, is postponing the problems for six years, and that’s…(interrupted loudly by other panellists)…

Alexandra de Blas: OK, OK Tom Burke.

Tom Burke: Well first of all, that’s just a distortion of Kyoto. That says what would happen if you extended - what Bjorn’s just said - If you extended the first commitment period forward indefinitely into the future.

But the reason why the Kyoto process has broken up into a series of commitment periods is that everybody realised that what you would first need to agree to, would not be enough and therefore there would be a second commitment period because it was widely recognised by all of the policymakers that you had to learn as you walked through this process, and you do things step by step, precisely to avoid the kind of economic consequences that Bjorn is talking about.

So he’s misrepresenting the Kyoto process. He’s simply extrapolating from one element of it, and coming to a false conclusion. Now he does that all the time, and may I make a comment on Nordhaus, and on this debate about the economics. The idea that anybody can come up with a number that will tell us what the costs, either of climate change will be, or of adapting or mitigating climate change in the current state of economic analysis, is simply farcical.

Bjorn Lomborg: Tom, it actually seems a little bit to me that you would like not to have this figure out in the open. But naturally if we are making a bad policy decision, then we need to know so, and just saying that Kyoto is only a first step, and that’s true, a lot of people have started saying it’s just a symbolic act, is quite unusual really because if the first step is a bad decision, then possibly, and I mean it would be quite likely, that the other steps would also be bad decisions. And indeed that is what the cost benefit analyses indicate. So why is it that we so religiously believe that Kyoto is just simply a good thing - that we need to do something about global warming, when there’s so many other obvious issues that would be better dealt with.

Tom Burke: Because Bjorn, we don’t live in an academic ivory tower where you can take the results of abstract cost benefit analyses as policymakers, and decide that you’re going to shift money around. It’s one of the faults of economists, that they think all outcomes are fungible. In the real world, all outcomes aren’t fungible. You simply can’t take money out of a pocket for addressing climate change and put it into a pocket for addressing some other problem. Good policy allows us both to feed the hungry and to deal with climate change. In fact, if we don’t deal with climate change, we won’t be able to feed the hungry in any case.

Bjorn Lomborg: Yes, but I think it’s still important to point out that fulfilling Kyoto for just one year probably is the equivalent of solving the single biggest problem in the world, giving clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth.

If we realise that there are more important problems that could be solved at a much less cost, then maybe we would want to redirect that. Politics is also about steering the world, and actually making good moral choices. So in that sense we need to ask those questions, and just simply saying that there’s money for both of it, is very disingenuous. I mean basically the point is that there is an incredible array of other issues that we could solve first and then perhaps get to climate change at the end. We have to ask that question, and we certainly have to be daring enough to ask it.

Alexandra de Blas: Stephen Schneider, what do you think would happen if we followed the advice of Bjorn Lomborg here?

Stephen Schneider: I think that we’d be looking at a significant extinction crisis where I don’t know what the number is, it’s impossible to say, this is punctuated by tremendous uncertainty. But certainly tens of percent of potential loss of species, if we had climate change more than 3-degrees say. That’s precisely the kind of advice that his ‘Everything’s-OK-be-happy-Julian-Simonesque’ views lead us to.

I also think that we’d be missing the opportunity to help the developing world with sustainable development, because right now one of the few international mechanisms that’s available to get the kinds of global co-operation (and here I agree with Bjorn that we need to work on the sustainable development problem) is go to get started through the climate process.

Kyoto isn’t a thing, it’s a process of negotiations among nations to try to deal with the common problems of the world, and it actually helps us to get towards the very goals you said by setting up the capacity for us to talk to each other, which eventually, as people learn to trust each other, might lead to the larger transfers of resources that are necessary to deal with the problems you suggested.

Alexandra de Blas: Well you were just hearing from Stephen Schneider, who is a US climatologist. Also joining me is Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. In Australia we have energy expert Ian Lowe and Tom Burke from the Green Alliance is joining us in the UK.

Tom, I’d like to bring you in again here. You’ve all been very critical of this book, but isn’t part of its power that there’s actually some truth in it and that’s why it hits a raw nerve?

Environmentalists are saying the sky is going to fall in, but the environment is getting better on many fronts. There are more national parks, air quality in many cities is better; rivers like the Mersey and the Rhine have got fish in them. Modern agriculture has made incredible gains in productivity, so proportionately fewer people are going hungry. Isn’t this a message whose time has come?

Tom Burke: Well it’s not a new message, Alexandra, I don’t think there’s anything new in saying that the story on the environment is mixed. The gains are all tactical and the losses are all strategic.

So we have made some gains in river quality in Europe, nobody’s argued about that. We’ve made some gains in air quality, nobody’s argued about that. Of course we’ve made gains and they’re welcome. Partly of course we’ve made those gains because people in the environmental community have raised the alarm.

Now have people, when they’ve been raising the alarm, sometimes exaggerated? Yes, of course they have. So attacking people for exaggeration misses the point. The argument with Bjorn’s book is not that he raises some points, most of which are not very new, but that he goes on to say that he’s telling you the real truth. Well he’s not telling you the real truth, he’s telling you his view of what he’s assembled from all of this. Now most of the people who’ve actually spent their lives working on these things don’t agree with his view.

Now what I do share with Bjorn is the idea that people want to go on getting better off. The point is, that the 6-billion of us who are now getting better off are getting better off in ways that we can’t sustain indefinitely into the future. I don’t believe that we’re in a zero sum game. I believe we can meet the needs of not just six but the 9-billion of us who’ll soon be on the planet, for resources to support a decent standard of life, but not if we go on doing it in the ways that we’re currently doing it. That’s the thrust of the environmentalist argument, not a sort of abstract question of whether there is or isn’t a problem.

Bjorn Lomborg: Why is that we can’t go on? Why is it that we’re not going to be able to sustain our way of life?

Tom Burke: Because the current ways of doing things undermine the productivity of croplands, rangelands, forest lands, fresh waters, oceans and the atmosphere which are the underpinning of our whole economy. Everything in our economy that does not come from fossil fuels and non-fossil minerals, comes out of those goods and services supplied by those six biogeophysical systems. We’re degrading at an increasing rate the productivity of those systems. Very simple proposition: if you degrade the productivity of those systems then you undermine the productivity of the economy.

Ian Lowe: That was the point of the Global Change Science conference in Amsterdam which I spoke to you about three months ago, and this wasn’t a group of economists or environmentalists, it was 1700 of the world’s top scientists working on global change issues. And, they concluded that we’re engaged in a dangerous experiment, that things are clearly getting worse, and that we need to change our policies or we’re in danger of producing irreversible changes to the world’s natural systems.

Alexandra de Blas: Well Bjorn Lomborg, how do you respond to a grouping of scientists like the one who put forward the Amsterdam Declaration?

Bjorn Lomborg: Well basically you have to look at, which is what I try to do, look at the facts, and look at the best models we have, predicting what is actually going to happen into the future. And we hear about ‘Oh, we’re polluting the oceans’. Well actually we don’t seem to be doing so. The UN Declaration is that they’re still so vast that we haven’t even, I mean we can find trace amounts of pollutions, but they don’t actually affect the oceans, and we actually are fishing close to the maximal limit of what we can do from the oceans. Yes, we could press out a little more, and we should get better regulations, no doubt about that, but we need to get a feel for how big is that problem.

Well it’s probably around 1%, or 0.1% actually of the total outcome that we get from agriculture. So it’s a very small problem, whereas in agriculture we actually seem to be able to feed ever more people, ever better. And it does not seem as if soil erosion is going to be this big problem that people would like to make it into.

So we have to ask, ‘Why is it we can’t live this way?’ We’ve been told that we keep on polluting both the soil and the atmosphere and the ocean and also the coastal waters, what we have to ask, ‘What kind of size of these problems is this?’ I try to go through that in the book, and say again, well take for instance, food. It does not seem as if we would not be able to feed ever more people, despite the fact that ‘Yes’, we will be trying to get more yields out of every single hectare.

Stephen Schneider: We’re not arguing whether the world is incapable of producing enough food to feed people, I think that we probably could make a strong argument that it is. But the question is, what does it do to the ecological base of the planet in the process of doing that, and will we be distributing the food in a way that gets to the people?

There is already enough food produced on the planet to prevent starvation and yet there are many people living perhaps a billion what we would consider reasonable nutritional levels. This has to do with politics in a sense, more than other things, but degraded environments add to that problem. And when you add the degradation of the environment on top of an already difficult social and political problem, it makes it worse.

So we cannot look at global aggregate numbers for food and come away happy any more than we can look at global aggregate numbers for ocean pollution, because the biggest problems are in coastal reefs and other areas, so you can’t just average every cubic metre in and say the average load is low, you’ve got to look at the hotspots and the pressure points. And that’s the main thing that those of us in environmental science focus on so that we can avoid the catastrophic potential that comes when those hotspots are degraded.

Bjorn Lomborg: And naturally, the question here is, ‘So where should we focus?’ Experience tells us what really matters is if you give private property rights and if you give people enough money, then they actually do have time and care to worry about it. If they have an empty stomach they don’t care about the future, and there’s good reason to believe that we will be able to feed those people in the future, even the most pessimistic's ambition is a developing world as rich or even richer than we are today in 2100. Then naturally they will also be inclined to be protective of the environment when we get there. Should we get people there or should we go in and say 'No, we’d rather have more butterflies than fewer hungry children in Ethiopia'. And that is a real trade-off.

Alexandra de Blas: Ian Lowe.

Ian Lowe: I just wanted to make the point that to say the problems will be solved by greater wealth and private property rights is economic dogma, that’s not science.

There’s no convincing evidence that greater wealth necessarily leads to environmental improvement. Even Bjorn’s figures show that in some cases greater wealth makes the environment better, in others it clearly makes it worse, it all depends on the starting point and what options people have. It’s just not true that you solve the problem by privatising it and by making people wealthier.

Alexandra de Blas: Stephen Schneider, you were very disappointed with Cambridge University Press for publishing The Skeptical Environmentalist, isn’t that just a case of the Old Boys’ Club getting their nose out of joint because there’s a new voice with a very different message?

Stephen Schneider: Well if it were a new voice with a very different message, then I think that would be a valid criticism.

What we resent is having him cite, often out of context, the very caveats that are written by the people who write the papers that he attacks, and then recycles them as if he invented them. And that’s the thing we resent.

And, why I was angry at Cambridge University Press for, wasn’t just the publication of the book, but the way it was done. It was published from the social and political science part of the shop, yet this book requires a tremendous amount of natural science, physical and biological sciences, upon which a lot of these conclusions about social science are based. And what Cambridge should have done, in my opinion, and I’ve held them they’re quite derelict for this, they should have reviewers across all three of their groups, the physical, biological and social, so they could have found out whether the grounding in the various other disciplines was a balanced treatment - which I would argue was not even remotely, on the natural science. And I think had they done that, they would have made a very different conclusion about publishing this book.

Alexandra de Blas: Bjorn Lomborg?

Bjorn Lomborg: Well I’m glad to say that he thinks he hears nothing new, and I don’t understand why he would actually say that I claimed that I’d invented it. No, I only cite all the other statistics and I cite the basic statistics from the best places we have on earth.

Yes, I’m a political scientist, economist, statistician. Yes we do actually look at things in a different way. I asked the question which is fundamental to democracy and to our prioritisation process, ‘So overall, how are things going?’

A lot of these people would really like to sit on the debate and say ‘We have the right answer’. Well no, they have the right understanding in many of those models, but the basic question of what should we do, how are things basically going, needs also to come out there, and that I think has not been coming out from science. But certainly we need to get that overview of the world and that is what I’ve tried to provide.

Alexandra de Blas: On that note, I’d like to bring the discussion to a close. I’ve been speaking with Bjorn Lomborg, Professor of Statistics at Aarhus University, and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Stephen Schneider is Professor of Biology and Global Change at Stanford University in California; Tom Burke is with the Green Alliance in the United Kingdom, and he’s an adviser to BP and Rio Tinto and he was in London. And Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University, and he’s been speaking to us from Perth today.

Well thank you all very much for joining me on Earthbeat today.

All: Thank you.

Alexandra de Blas: Today’s program was produced by Natasha Mitchell with John Diamond behind the studio controls. I’m Alexandra de Blas, thanks for your company.

Guests on this program:

Bjorn Lomborg
Associate Professor of Statistics,
Department of Political Science
University of Aarhus
Denmark
[email protected]

Ian Lowe
Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society
Griffith University
[email protected]

Stephen Schneider
Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change
Department of Biological Sciences
Gilbert Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305-5020

Tom Burke
Green Alliance
and environmental advisor to Rio Tinto and BP
[email protected]

Publications:

The Skeptical Environmentalist
Author: Bjorn Lomborg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2001
http://uk.cambridge.org/economics/lomborg/

Warming the World: Economic Models of Global Warming
Author: William D. Nordhaus and Joseph Boyer
Publisher: The MIT Press, 2000
http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/books/warming_wdn.htm

Managing the Global Commons
Author: William D. Nordhaus
Publisher: The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1994
http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/homepage.htm
Further information:

Bjorn Lomborg's website
http://www.ps.au.dk/Lomborg/

Green Alliance (UK)
http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/

Ten Pinches of Salt
Critique of The Skeptical Environmentalist by Tom Burke (UK). Also available in PDF format on the Green Alliance website. http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/document_details.asp?DocID=609&CatID=94

Professor Stephen Schneider's website
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/biology/faculty/schneider.html

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
http://www.ipcc.ch

Kyoto Protocol (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change)
http://www.unfccc.de/resource/convkp.html

The Amsterdam Declaration on Global Climate Change
Declaration signed by international scientists attending the "Challenges of a Changing Earth" conference, July 2001.
http://www.sciconf.igbp.kva.se/fr.html

www.Anti-Lomborg.com
An anti Bjorn Lomborg website
http://www.anti-lomborg.com

Bjorn Lomborg's new book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, brings us glorious news. The world's environment is getting better, not worse. Contrary to what the experts have been telling you, forests are spreading, air and water pollution are improving, global warming will have mild effects, and there won't be any food shortages as the world's population grows. And there's no need to worry about the ozone hole, species extinction, or acid rain; all those pesky environmentalists have just been exaggerating to try to scare you.

If this sounds too good to be true, that's because it is.

The Skeptical Environmentalist presents itself as a work of impartial scholarship, an attempt to test the validity of various environmental concerns through a careful analysis of the evidence. In fact, it's a polemic, an intellectually dishonest tract filled with glaring omissions, appalling errors of fact and analysis, and inaccurate characterizations of contrary arguments.

There are some valid points as well -- Greenpeace and other advocacy groups have distorted scientific information for their own ends -- but Lomborg must be read with a very skeptical eye.

Unfortunately, the media reaction has been surprisingly un-skeptical. The book has become a runaway hit on both sides of the Atlantic following a wave of credulous features, book reviews, and Lomborg guest essays published in many of the English-speaking world's most respected newspapers and magazines.

Before the book was even available in the Britain, newspapers were signing its praises. The London Observer's environment correspondent, Anthony Browne, announced it had "demolished almost every ... environmental claim with a barrage of official statistics." The London Times science correspondent reported Lomborg's global warming claims in a story without other sources. The Economist gave a glowing review and invited Lomborg to write a 2,500 word essay, while the more liberal Guardian published a three-part series. Time International opined that "Of all the sacred cows, only global warming remains unslain" by Lomborg.

The coverage quickly generated a maelstrom of criticism from leading scientists -- including Lomborg's own colleagues at the University of Aarhus. Many of his claims were publicly discredited, but you'd never know that from reading the subsequent coverage in this country. The New York Times carried a sympathetic 2,000 word feature on the book, calling it "a substantial work of analysis." The Washington Post Book World was gushing in its praise, calling it "a magnificent achievement" and "the most significant work on the environment since ... Silent Spring." The Post reviewer, Dennis Dutton, a philosopher in New Zealand who lectures on "the dangers of pseudoscience" even decreed that the book "is now the place from which environmental policy decisions must be argued."

How did the supposedly skeptical media get so taken in? Weren't there clues that should have cast suspicion on Lomborg's motives and analysis? Well, yes and no.

At first glance, Lomborg looks credible. Unlike past anti-green polemicists, Lomborg is a tenured professor at the environmental studies institute of a prestigious university. He's a self-declared "environmentalist ... former Greenpeace member [and] left-wing sympathizer" who doesn't eat meat because he doesn't want to kill animals.

Lomborg isn't an environmental scientist and has never published a scientific paper on climate change, ecology, atmospheric pollution, or any other topic he takes on in his book.

More importantly, his book is published by Cambridge University Press, an academic publisher that supposedly peer reviews manuscripts prior to publication.

"He's a tenured professor at a major university published by an important press," says Bruce Lewenstein, who teaches science communications at Cornell University, after looking over Lomborg's bio. "If someone with some credentials is questioning the conventional wisdom, that's a story."

It may be a story, but it's one that smells fishy from the very first sniff.

Lomborg isn't an environmental scientist and has never published a scientific paper on climate change, ecology, atmospheric pollution, or any other topic he takes on in his book. That's because he's not even a natural scientist, but rather a political scientist with a background in statistics and game theory.

"Here's one guy taking on a whole spectrum of issues who has never written a paper on any of them and is in opposition to absolutely everyone in the field, Nobel prize-winners and all," says Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Columbia University who says virtually all of Lomborg's facts on biodiversity are simply wrong. "It ought to have raised some red flags." Political reporters often follow the money; science reporters should follow the data. Those that did discovered that many of the book's 2,500 footnotes led not to hard data, but to newspaper stories, Web pages, and magazine interviews with rival scientists. Some stunning assertions -- that "our oceans have not become defiled" for instance -- aren't substantiated by any research at all.

"He asserts with no analysis that only the mildest [climate change] impacts will happen and that the dangerous ones won't happen," says Stanford University's Stephen H. Schneider, lead author of several chapters of the International Panel on Climate Change's reports. "That the media sucked it up is really incredible."

"Journalists feel they need to give equal emphasis to a single skeptic on one side and, say, the scientific consensus of several thousand of the world's scientists on the other."

Part of the problem is the media's propensity to treat scientific disagreements as they might a political one: quote both sides and let the reader decide on their own. But, as most science writers know, such an approach is entirely inadequate for reporting on science and technology issues. It's important to report on bold, unorthodox theories, because some hold true and lead to new discoveries. But the science journalist has a duty to place them in their proper context: the shared, established opinion of dozens or hundreds of experts in the field does in fact carry more weight than that of a single dissenter.

"Journalists feel they need to give equal emphasis to a single skeptic on one side and, say, the scientific consensus of several thousand of the world's scientists on the other," as in the debate over climate change, says Lisa Sorensen, staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. "This leads readers and viewers to think these opinions have equal weight when, in fact, they do not."

Not everyone sees it this way. Anthony Browne, whose articles in the London Observer first brought attention to the English-language edition of The Skeptical Environmentalist, says most environmental journalists spend most of their time "acting as publicists to those who have a vested interest in scaring people about the state of the environment." He said that when somebody like himself airs the views of skeptics, "those who believe with a passion that we are all doomed heap anger and contempt on them." Browne says journalists shouldn't test "the validity of certain bits of science," but simply judge if someone appears credible and give them an airing to foster debate.

The editor in chief of The Economist, Bill Emmott, stands behind Lomborg's book and denies that it has been given a free ride by the media. "The real problem for the critics is that as far as we can see his data is incontrovertible. That is awkward for those who have made claims in the past that the data flatly contradicts," Emmott says. He said that in all the debate, he had yet to see a critic establish that the book contains "egregious" errors. "He has wiped the floor with his opponents, which is probably why he has created such ire." Grist Magazine has compiled a series of articles from leading scholars that illustrate how wrong Lomborg and Emmott are.

Several scientists interviewed for this article were dumbfounded that with all the scientific and environmental expertise available in the United States, the Washington Post's book review assigned the book to a philosophy professor in New Zealand with no more expertise to assess the arguments than the Post's own science reporters. The reviewer, Dennis Dutton, was chosen because of his "neutrality, remove, record ... and his interest in the environment," according to the paper's Book World editor, Marie Arana. She said that assigning the book had been the subject of an unusually wide-ranging debate, which resulted in a decision not to assign the book within the newsroom.

Dutton, whose popular Arts and Letters Web site includes a paean to the late environmental skeptic Julian Simon in its list of classic articles, declined to comment for this article. "It is the accuracy or inaccuracy of the book that is at issue, as far as I am concerned," he wrote by e-mail. "If you think the book is factually wrong, and if reviewers have been misled, I'd be keen to learn how."

But many of Lomborg's most troubling deceptions don't require scientific training to detect, and should have been obvious to any editor with even a passing interest in the environmental debate. Much of the book is deliberately misleading.

Lomborg devotes entire chapters to "revealing" that we are not running out of oil or metals, although virtually nobody in the environmental movement has claimed otherwise in the past twenty years. He also marshals statistics to prove that human life expectancy and the global Gross Domestic Product have improved over the past two centuries and that the green revolution increased agricultural production, as if anyone is arguing the contrary. Lomborg shows the Kyoto agreement will have only a slight impact on global warming, apparently unaware that the treaty is indeed conceived as a "down payment" on reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Conservatives love Lomborg's message because it suggests that the status quo is pretty good. The Cooler Heads Coalition -- a group spearheaded by the Competitive Enterprise Institute which seeks to "dispel the myths of global warming" -- helped kick-off The Skeptical Environmentalist's U.S. release by sponsoring Lomborg's very own Capitol Hill briefing on October 4th. Not surprisingly, conservative columnists have heaped praise on the book. Katherine Kersten, senior fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, told her Minneapolis Star-Tribune readers not to be taken in by "environmental fearmongering" and that "celebration, not despair, is in order." Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune questioned how environmentalists have "resisted the impulse to carry Lomborg off on their shoulders, wildly celebrating all the achievements of our era." The reason: environmentalists take "a solemn vow of melancholy."

Asked about how he assessed Lomborg's work, Chapman said that he didn't pretend to be a scientist and might change his opinion of the book if it were shown to be fraudulent. "All a layman like myself can do is try to learn about a subject by listening to what scientists on either side say and make a judgment of who is right," he said. "We do the same thing with non-scientists like economists and military people, whose knowledge is far deeper than our own."

Much of the media -- conservative and liberal alike -- were duped by the imprimatur of Cambridge University Press, whose reputation has been damaged by the publication of Lomborg's book. "Despite the sales that have been generated, CUP's credibility and reputation will suffer," says Jane Lubchenco, distinguished professor of zoology at Oregon State University and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "Many of us have inquired of our Cambridge contacts how they could have published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review."

The book was acquired by CUP's social science group, rather than its natural science division. Editor Chris Harrison declined to comment on rumors that natural science editors had been kept in the dark about the book until a very late date. He said by e-mail that he had been very skeptical about the book when it first landed on his desk, and was surprised when all four of the scientific "referees" who reviewed the English manuscript recommended it for publication. He said referees always remain anonymous, but that all four were "senior figures … from leading departments on both sides of the Atlantic" and included two from "environmental science departments, one from climate science, and one from a social science department."

Harrison said he had no regrets about publishing the book and that Cambridge University Press prided itself on publishing a variety of voices. "The book has been noticed and debated and that is surely a valuable contribution to public and academic debate in an open society," he said, adding that he himself was a "green tinted liberal" and not part of some conservative agenda.

Others dispute that The Skeptical Environmentalist's contribution will be positive.

"This book is going to be misused terribly by interests opposed to a clean energy policy," says Ms. Sorensen of Union of Concerned Scientists, whose organization is publishing a series of scientific critiques of Lomborg's science. "Hopefully that will help counter the claims and minimize the damage that could be done by a book like this."

Grist Magazine.com also commissioned a series of reviews, "Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark", by prominent scientists from the fields that Lomborg tackled in his book.

Colin Woodard is the author of "Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas." He currently lives in Port Isabel, Texas.