• Paperback with "warm"looking scenery and landscape

Bjørn Lomborg, a former member of Greenpeace, challenges widely held beliefs that the world environmental situation is getting worse and worse in his new book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Using statistical information from internationally recognized research institutes, Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental issues that feature prominently in headline news around the world, including pollution, biodiversity, fear of chemicals, and the greenhouse effect, and documents that the world has actually improved. He supports his arguments with over 2500 footnotes, allowing readers to check his sources. Lomborg criticizes the way many environmental organizations make selective and misleading use of scientific evidence and argues that we are making decisions about the use of our limited resources based on inaccurate or incomplete information. Concluding that there are more reasons for optimism than pessimism, he stresses the need for clear-headed prioritization of resources to tackle real, not imagined, problems. The Skeptical Environmentalist offers readers a non-partisan evaluation that serves as a useful corrective to the more alarmist accounts favored by campaign groups and the media. Bjørn Lomborg is an associate professor of statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus. When he started to investigate the statistics behind the current gloomy view of the environment, he was genuinely surprised. He published four lengthy articles in the leading Danish newspaper, including statistics documenting an ever-improving world, and unleashed the biggest post-war debate with more than 400 articles in all the major papers. Since then, Lomborg has been a frequent participant in the European debate on environmentalism on television, radio, and in newspapers.

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.

45 of 48 found the following review helpful:


Read the author's debate with Scientific American  Jul 30, 2004 By S. D Young "funky3563"
Lomborg has read through an impressive amount of scientific research and attempted to reach general conclusions about the state of the environment. Most of what he says in the book is true, but keep in mind that he has an agenda. He is trying to convince us not to worry so much about the environment. Whenever possible, he prefers to put a positive spin on the numbers.

Skip this book, and go straight to the online debates that followed. Specifically, what you want to read is Scientific American's angry 11 page reply to this book. Then read Lomborg's equally angry reply to Scientific American. You can find both of these on Google. Lomborg no longer posts Scientific American's original reply, but a group called Greenspirit has it up.

After you've done that, go to the Scientific American website and search for their follow up replies, which are in response to Lomborg's response to them.

If you read all of these, you'll have a pretty good idea of what the environmentalists and the anti-environmentalists agree on, and what they disagree on.

A lot of the debate boils down to "Is the glass half full, or half empty?" In his book, Lomborg essentially said at one point, "The environmentalists lied about endangered species! Only 0.7% of species are expected to go extinct over the next 50 years." Then Scientific American said, "Lomborg is trying to trick you! Thousands of species will go extinct over the next 50 years!" But, if you kept reading the debates, eventually you learned that , since there are millions of species, the numbers Lomborg was using meant the same thing as Scientific American's numbers. The only difference was, Lomborg represented the numbers in a way designed to make them seem good, but Scientific American prefered to write them in the way that made them seem bad.

117 of 134 found the following review helpful:


A politically incorrect analysis of the Earth  Aug 02, 2002 By Cesare Spadoni
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.

44 of 48 found the following review helpful:


Danish Ministry of Science Vindicates Lomborg-Dec.17, 2003  Jan 01, 2004 By Fabian Boudville
It is true that Lomborg's book does contain some errors. And that is why I am giving it only 4 Stars. But Lomborg has freely admitted them; More importantly, however, these minor mistakes do not undermine his main conclusion that the Earth's Environment is improving, rather than declining. We have had predictions of mass famine in the 1960's too due to the growing world population but the subsequent Green Revolution boosted crop production and supported the increased population. My point here is that Scientists and Prognosticators cannot predict the future. Personally, I do think that we should do more to curb Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions and increase Fuel Economy Standards in both Canada and the US. Having a higher gas or electric bill tends to focus one's mind on buying energy saving devices, light bulbs, etc. Having said that, we should equally NOT Demonise individuals such as Bjorn Lomborg who argue that the Earth's Environment is gradually improving rather than going to hell in a hand basket. Rather we should rationally examine the scientific facts first and then form a conclusion as Lomborg attempts to do in his book.

Some critics of Dr. Lomborg have referred to the January 2003 report by the Danish Commitee on Scientific Dishonesty(DCSD) as essentially discrediting the entire basis of The Skeptical Environmentalist. But, in fact, many lay people have pointed out serious flaws in the Methadology of DCSD's conclusions and on its refusal to give Lomborg prior to the release of their critical report. The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has now(December 2003) intervened to harshly criticised the DCSD's methadology and to repudiated their findings on Lomborg's book. Among the points cited is that firstly, the DCSD failed to substantiate its case against Lomborg's book and did not state where exactly Lomborg committed his alleged mistakes. In such a situation, Lomborg could not be expected to respond to the DCSD's critiques--which some have said merely copy Scientific American's previous criticisms of Lomborg's work.

Secondly, while DCSD emphasised that all scientific work should go through a peer review, they omitted to examine whether such a procedure had been done in Lomborg's case. In fact, Lomborg's book had, in fact, been reviewed by 4 recognised scientists prior to its publication by the Cambridge University Press. Thirdly, the Danish Ministry of Scienace, Technology and Innovation criticised the language and tone of DCSD's report as being highly emotional and error prone--in other words, somewhat unprofessional for a scholarly Committee.

Fourthly, DCSD's procedure of presenting Lomborg's case before 3 separate scientific Committees instead of the usual one was quite irregular and procedurally incorrect. Moreover with this new situation, a ruling which was issued by the Individual Committee within whose area of study Lomborg worked could be overturned by the 2 other Commitees. Fifthly, it was "clearly wrong" to deny Dr. Lomborg an opportunity to first defend his book before the Danish Commitee of Scientific Dishonesty prior to the Committee's release of its judgement. Finally, the Chairman of the Sub-committee in the Lomborg case came from the Health Sciences, rather than from the Social Sciences Department, which is Dr. Lomborg's field. I thought it was quite funny that this was the case--it wld be like asking a Biologist to study the work of Chemist and makes no sense at all!

In summary, the Janury 2003 DCSD ruling seems to have been intended as a hatchet job on Lomborg's work. Perhaps it was an attempt to discredit the views of those who don't subscribe to the Environmentalist viewpoint. But fortunately, there is some justice to this world and the DCSD report has now been publicly repudiated by the DCSD's own superiors. As Lomborg states after the release of the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation's report: "It has been hard, but I am happy that we now have confirmation that freedom of speech extends to Environmental debate. Now that this distraction is behind us, we can concentrate our efforts on matters of importance--namely how to prioritize our effort for the earth." I think he couldn't have said it better. One should let the scientific facts on the ground--rather than the angry rhetoric and threats emanating from Environmental groups and their supporters against both Lomborg or his publisher, Cambridge University Press--to control the debate over how to preserve the Earth's Environment for the benefit of our future generations. These actions strike me as an attempt to suppress dissent on such an important topic.

Thank You.

38 of 41 found the following review helpful:


"I haven't read the book. I don't need to." Interesting.  Oct 10, 2004 By debeehr "debeehr"
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.

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