The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World

Bjorn Lomborg started working on the issues that would eventually make up the content of his book by leading some of his statistics students into debunking some claims made by University of Maryland's professor Julian Simon. Julian Simon had claimed that things were actually getting better rather than worse, and that most negative environmental indicators were connected to poverty, violence and bad government rather than consumption or wealth. To their surprise (for he initially took Simon's claims as evidence of typical American arrogance), Lomborg and his students found that Simon was roughly right. It was true that things were getting better, and that many of the claims coming from environmental advocates were contradictory (for example they both dreaded global cooling in the 1970s and global warming in the 1990s as absolutely negative, although clearly both have benefits compared to each other, and neither is all bad), or tendentious (for example, advocates for particular causes often choose particular extreme years to show a negative tendency in a variable, while ignoring the long term trend), or simply shoddy (such as using a report on a tiny plot of slanting land in Belgium to extrapolate the global impact of erosion on land fertility). Lomborg published some articles discussing his findings on a left-leaning newspaper in Denmark, that greenest of countries, and was astonished at the public reaction. He decided to take upon himself a Gargantuan project, one that (I think) he couldn't possibly have thought through before embarking on it, or I predict he wouldn't have done it. He decided to review the state of the world from many, many angles, including humanity, all types of resources, animals and plants, as well as their interactions. The amount of work required to cover all these subjects, and to come up with data to back up his conclusions, must have been staggering. I have sometimes done this type of work, and I am in awe at Lomborg's achievement. It is truly a tour de force.

While I don't claim that everything Lomborg says makes perfect sense, or that all his data are correct (surely he won't deny his readers the right to apply skepticism to his own claims as well, and it is quite easy to use the WWW to check out his opponents' arguments), this is a rare book that attempts seriously to consider all facts from a variety of angles, which tries to answer objections or qualifications from opponents, and which carefully connects all the variables into a global picture, incorporating the temporal dimension both past and future. Lomborg is truly skeptical, in the sense of taking nothing for granted and approaching all the issues dispassionately. These are, as Descartes told us in his Discourse on the Method, some of the conditions for true knowledge. Reading Lomborg one sometimes feels like the light has been turned on or the mists have cleared on many topics. One is surprised to find many catastrophe-peddlers (such as Stanford's Dr. Erlich, who is unrepentant of the obvious failure of his predictions for the 1980s of widespread famine and scarce resources due to population growth) are still around and doing fairly well. At least Lomborg takes them to task, and finds them wanting in logic and veracity.

I predict (and it doesn't take Nostradamus to figure this out) that this book will be purchased by many people who normally wouldn't think of reading even a newspaper article on environmental concerns. Many of these probably won't make it through the entire book. In spite of Lomborg's great asides about his debates with WorldWatch and with Danish government ministers and his glee in demolishing yet another sophism, he is sometimes prolix, and there is a point were yet another chart showing that some metal's price has not gone up but down in the past hundred years is one too many. But let's not forget his calling (he is a statistician, although an unusually lively one), and let's not ask him from more than what he offers (which is a rational, dispassionate look at the environmentalist discourse). His chapter on global warming is both exhaustive and exhausting. I predict also that Mr. Lomborg will become a darling of the libertarian think tanks in the US and elsewhere, and a villain in the eyes of environmental organizations and their supporters. Both attitudes are mistaken. The only way to dismiss Mr. Lomborg is by showing that his data or his inferences from them are wrong. And, although roughly aligned with them on most issues, Mr. Lomborg is probably not of the libertarians' perspective (they should be scared if Mr. Lomborg decides to write a book testing many of the libertarian's claims, such as the trickle-down theory of economic development). Everything else is just taking things on faith, something Mr. Lomborg hasn't done. He is entitled to the same treatment.


A politically incorrect analysis of the Earth   August 2, 2002
Cesare Spadoni (Budapest, Hungary)
114 out of 130 found this review helpful

Whatever your views about the state of the Earth are, they are bound to be shaken by "The Skeptical Environmentalist".
This book will challenge you to think that the world is not getting more and more polluted but, rather, the opposite, that world population is not growing out of control, that we are getting healthier and richer, that fewer people die of starvation every year, that deforestation is not happening on an alarming scale and that the extent of global warming may have been grossly overestimated.
Surely these statements will raise quite a few eyebrows among most of us since we are regularly told by the environmental organisations that our modern lifestyle is endangering the life of the planet.
The irony of this book is that Lomborg originally started his investigation with the aim of challenging the views of Julian Simon, an economist critic of the green movement. Lomborg, a former Greenpeace activist, set off to prove him wrong using the sources commonly quoted by environmental activists. Much to his surprise he came to the conclusion that Simon was right on most issues. Lomborg thus turned himself into a "skeptical environmentalist".
While some scientists have praised Lomborg's effort to put environmental issues through a tough scrutiny, many more have accused him of distorting the truth and misleading the public.
Most of these accusations are unfair. Lomborg may be wrong on some issues. He may also forget that if the world is not in such a bad state, it is also thanks to the efforts of the environmental organisations which warned of the dangers a few decades ago. "The Skeptical Environmentalist", however, deserves attention since it is well documented and Lomborg's writing does not lack clarity and enthusiasm.
Furthermore, the progress of science cannot avoid the confrontation of ideas, particularly when these are highly controversial and provocative.


Liberals Like Myself -- Please Read This Wonderful Book!   April 8, 2003
Murkle Vandergorb (Brooklyn, NY United States)
53 out of 59 found this review helpful

I especially recommend this book to liberals like myself. Lomborg, predictably, is under attack from the left, and his defenders tend to be people who enjoy reading Ann Coulter. This is grossly unfortunate because Lomborg is not a conservative, and his book is not a right-wing political screed but a measured, balanced, thoughtful appraisal of data that's available to anyone. To me, it appears that the attacks on Lomborg are because, after examining the evidence, he failed to come to the politically correct conclusion. It makes me look upon my liberal brothers and sisters in a colder light, and that makes me sad.

No one should want to be a knee-jerk anything. Dare to be wrong! Examine the evidence! Listen to opposing points of view before drawing conclusions!

That's the end of _my_ screed.


"I haven't read the book. I don't need to." Interesting.   October 10, 2004
debeehr (Illinois, USA)
34 out of 37 found this review helpful

Well, unlike my esteemed reviewer below, I *haven't* read the correspondence between Lomborg and Scientific American, so instead of commenting on that, what I will comment on here is the *book* at the top of this page, to wit THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST.

The environment is one of those areas like religion where it has become practically impossible to have a rational, reasonable debate or even a conversation, because there's so much rancor on both sides. (People commenting on the book without bothering to read it demonstrate the point: this subject is *so* emotional that there's an unwillingness to give an honest, open-minded look at the arguments being presented--on either side.) However, in this contentious area, Lomborg does two things that immediately got my attention: a.) he cites the hell out of his book (71 pages of sources) and b.) he hammers home the point that EVERYTHING IS A TRADE-OFF. *Nothing is for free.* Increased spending on the environment must come at the expense of other areas, including areas such as anti-poverty spending that most people--including environmentalists--would consider to be worthy goals. And given that we don't have unlimited resources, it is best to focus our resources where they will do the most good. (2000+ sources don't make for an unbiased book? I'd be curious to know, then, what exactly does...particularly as Lomborg pulled many of his figures and statistics from UN sources. And as for this book allegedly not having gone through peer review, I'd be interested to know whether prominent environmental tomes like EARTH IN THE BALANCE have gone through peer review.)

Lomborg also leans on the point that long-term forecasting is an incredibly tricky business (which it is--chaos theory, anyone?) and comments that today's computer models are not complex enough to carry this out accurately, which I find thoroughly plausible (in fact I would find it unrealistic to argue otherwise! the idea that we understand everything about the environment--or indeed, *any* subject under the sun--smacks of hubris to me.) He asserts that natural climate change probably plays a large part in global warming while not denying that humans are having an effect and that restriction of greenhouse gases is an important part of the strategy to deal with it (in fact, his position is that current efforts, including the Kyoto treaty, are too lax to have much effect), but also states that serious efforts must include imposing more penalties on the developing world and our resources might be better spent attempting to assist them. In fact, the second point he hammers home throughout his work--that it would probably be best from a cost-benefit analysis for us to spend our resources alleviating poverty, in particular Third-World poverty--hardly enshrines him in the first rank of Evil Capitalists.

Are there problems with this book? Sure. Lomborg's assertions that we will continue to find new deposits of natural resources in the future seem just a tad too blithe to me, for one (although he is right in pointing out that we can probably find new and more efficient ways to extract resources from less-desirable sources, should we have to) and he doesn't address that there might be other considerations as to whether we use the ones we have. For example, I'm originally from Michigan. The Great Lakes represent a rich and varied ecosystem, as well as a tremendous tourist resource and state symbol, and I think I speak for most Michiganders when I say that I would not like to see the Great Lakes drained to provide drinking and irrigation water. Not that Lomborg suggests this, understand, but this is an example of one of the problems with access to this type of resource that he doesn't really discuss. I would also like to have seen more of an examination of the ways in which various types of environmental effects might "stack" with each other--for example (not increased population, since the "population bomb" has apparently fizzled--another example of the difficulties of long-term forecasting) but water usage with land usage, for instance. From a literary/historical standpoint, I think he could have tied the popularity of the "Litany" and "sky-is-falling" scenarios into a long tradition in Western thought of viewing the world as in a state of decline and degeneration (for example the ancient Greeks with their ideals of the Golden Age down through to the Iron Age, and medieval Christianity viewing the world as having degenerated from the days of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden--primarily as a punishment for human sinfulness. Hmmm. But that's more of a literary criticism.) His deconstruction of the tone of press releases and of some of the motives behind environmental claims was interesting and on-target, and I would have liked to see more. And I certainly intend to do some snooping through the sources he provides, primarily to check for context, especially of some of the quotes he pulls out. But the fact that he provides these sources at all is a huge mark in his favor, as is his cool-eyed appraisal of a very heated subject.


Why rational environmentalists need this book   November 2, 2001
John Mashey (Portola Valley, CA United States)
115 out of 136 found this review helpful

We like trees and other good environmental features. We're lucky to live (on purpose) in one of the most dedicated environment-preserving towns in the SF Bay Area. We belong to Sierra Club, give money to Open Space trusts, hike, travel, value a good environment, etc.

Get this book, read it carefully, preferably with a Web browser handy as well as a printer, and make your own judgements. This book is (correctly) complicated and difficult to summarize well, but it has the sort of analysis and backup we need.

People use "Pareto analysis" to measure the problems carefully, then focus their efforts on the more important problems first. It is simply impossible to do that very well without careful, realistic data. Of course, real data is often confusing, and a good feature of the book is its inclusion of caveats, contradictions, and more footnotes than I've seen before in one book.

This book has a bimodal distribution of opinions: people love it or despise it. As I value skepticism, I checked out some of the negative reviews, chased URLs, reread the book ... and thought there were more errors in the reviews, and few pointers. I'd love to see more negative reviews if they only followed Lomborg in backing up comments with checkable references.

To summarize this *review*, it is very difficult to summarize the *book*, as it it tries so hard to avoid over-simplification. As always in real science, there is noise in the data, incomplete data, differences in data measurements, etc. Still if you care about environmental quality, and care that your money is spent where it actually does the most good, you need the best numbers you can get. It is easy to have good goals, like "good environment and quality of life", but the real issue is balancing priorities dynamically as the real world requires. Managers are usually forced to understand this issue, or if you like computer games, try playing one of the "Civilization" or similar games. It's painful when your civilization fries due to global warming.

Get this book, read it carefully, and make your own judgements, and (hopefully) support efficient environmental causes that make sense based on rational analysis, not random doom-saying.