A critique by the World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund of Bjørn Lomborg's controversial book.

A critique by the World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund of Bjørn Lomborg's controversial book.

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The Skeptical Environmentalist is a controversial new book by Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg, that claims the global environment is getting better, not worse, and that threats to our planet have been grossly overstated by environmental organizations and the media.

Among Lomborg's claims that have captured media attention [1]:

• forests are not disappearing;
• the rate of species extinction has been wildly exaggerated; and
• global warming is not worth addressing and indeed will be a benefit for many.

Lomborg assails what he calls "The Litany," a series of claims made by environmental groups about environmental decline that he believes are fundamentally misleading.

These include statements such as "the environment is in poor shape here on Earth … the air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers…forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing and coral reefs are dying." [2]

In assessing the validity of Lomborg's work, journalists should proceed with caution. Here are some points to keep in mind:

 

1. Pseudo-scholarship.

The Skeptical Environmentalist contains nearly 3,000 footnotes, implying careful research.

In fact these footnotes reveal numerous instances of highly selective quotation and often inaccurate sourcing that distort, directly contradict the original author or otherwise fail to provide support for Lomborg's claims. [3]

2. Confusing the issue.

The subtitle to Lomborg's book is "Measuring the Real State of the World," a lead-in to the author's premise that the state of the world is improving, not deteriorating as environmentalists claim.

In support, Lomborg presents evidence that humans are living longer and healthier lives, with rising levels of income and growing amounts of leisure time worldwide, and he dismisses evidence of global environmental degradation.

But the environmental issue facing society is not whether we are increasing our material wellbeing -- we are -- but whether we are prospering in ways that damage the natural environment.

Lomborg's book equates -- and confuses -- these two fundamentally different issues.

3. Statistical fallacies.

Lomborg furthers this confusion by mistaking association for causation, an unlikely error in a statistician.

Throughout the book, he attributes environmental improvements to increases in standard of living rather than to improved scientific understanding research or to firm environmental policy.

It was scientific research on ozone depletion that led to phasing out CFCs, stricter air pollution regulations that improved air quality in industrial countries, and the introduction of SO2 emissions trading that reduced the causes of acid rain in the United States.

Good science and political will, as well as wealth, led to these environmental improvements.

But Professor Lomborg asserts that, in heavily polluted developing countries, rising incomes will automatically lead to similar environmental improvements, and he implies that additional research or environmental policy efforts are therefore not needed.

4. The oceans.

Lomborg claims that "marine productivity has almost doubled since 1970" [4] -- a surprising statement given the well-documented declines of many commercial fish stocks.

What Lomborg actually means appears later in the book as a figure depicting an increase in total fish catch, plus production from fish farms. [5] Capture of wild fish from the sea has increased by 20 percent, not 100 percent since 1970.

And what humans are taking from the oceans and what the oceans are producing are of course fundamentally different matters.

Lomborg's equating of the two exemplifies how his book is fundamentally misleading.

By focusing on total production, Lomborg's graph conceals that stocks of cod, haddock, hake, flounder, swordfish, sardines, halibut, Atlantic Ocean perch, and many others have crashed.

5. The forests.

Lomborg's chapter on forests opens by challenging a statement by WWF's Director General Claude Martin that "the area and quality of the world's forests have continued to decline at a rapid rate." [6]

Lomborg states flatly that "there are no grounds for making such claims." In fact, the most recent and authoritative global forest assessment by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) backs the WWF claim and does so in virtually the same language: "[t]he world's natural forests continued to be converted to other land uses at a very high rate." [7]

Lomborg's claim to the contrary relies on his technique of expressing changes in forest area as a percentage of the total land area of the world, a technique that reduces changes of millions of hectares to fractions of one percent.

He also lumps together distinctly different types of forests (primary and secondary, tropical and boreal, plantation and natural) in a way that masks key trends. [8]

But the world's primary tropical forests -- the great harbors of natural life -- continue to disappear at an alarming rate. Re-growth of secondary temperate and boreal forests, and an increase in tree plantations, cannot hope to offset the ecological impacts, including species loss.

FAO's most recent forest assessment indicates that as much as 8.7% of the world's remaining natural tropical forest was converted permanently to other uses in the past decade alone [9], and even this figure understates the true extent of the ecological loss because it omits forests that were clear-cut or burned, but left to re-grow.

6. Species extinction.

Lomborg's relatively short chapter on biodiversity claims that environmentalists and the media have greatly exaggerated the rate of species extinction.

Although Lomborg concedes that species extinctions are likely occurring at 1500 times natural rates [10], he takes repeated issue with an estimate by Norman Myers that as many as 40,000 species may be going extinct each year.

But when annual species extinction is calculated with Lomborg's figure, using the number of living species Lomborg cites and the extinction-per-species ratios given by leading authorities in Lomborg's own footnotes, the Myers estimate is confirmed as sitting well within the range. [11]

7. The climate.

Lomborg's book makes two fundamental assertions about climate:

• that potential changes in the climate system are not large and
• that mitigation actions would be extravagantly expensive.

Lomborg challenges the accuracy of models on which climate scenarios are based, asserting that global warming will not cause more flooding because a richer world (in the future) will protect itself.

He selectively cites economic studies to conclude that "it is far more expensive to cut CO2 emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptations to the increased temperatures." [12]

Lomborg relies largely on one controversial economic model, and helps his case by representing the IPCC's calculation of the thirty-year cost of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations as a single year's cost.

While there can be no certainty in matters of future costs dependent on human decision-making, we can only note that an exhaustive study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences [13] and others [14] have come to very different conclusions from Lomborg's.

The consensus view of thousands of reputable scientists around the world is that human activities have clearly changed the composition of the atmosphere, have already resulted in detectable change in climate and biological resources, and are likely to result in much more rapid changes in climate than have been seen in the last ten thousand years.

Lomborg dismisses this entire body of research, but it is far from clear why we should accept his own work as more reliable.

8. Limited credentials.

Bjørn Lomborg is an Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark.

His prior publications are in game theory and computer simulations. He has no professional training -- and has done no professional research -- in ecology, climate science, resource economics, environmental policy, or other fields covered by his new book. Lomborg says the book grew out of a class project for his students.

The author has every right to venture into new territory and express his personal views, but equally his audience has the right to question the authority of his judgments.

9. The headline: Proceed with caution.

The World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund will post on a new Web site (linked to both their home pages) further documentation of the distorted quotations, inaccurate or misleading citations, misuse of data, interpretations that contradict well-established scientific work, and many other serious errors in Lomborg's book.

Lomborg is guilty of precisely the charges he levels at environmental organizations and environmental journalists. He has an ax to grind, and he is grinding it in the fine tradition of polemical literature.

Readers should approach the book with caution and check its statements with reliable authorities. Journalists should advise their readers and editors to do likewise.

Notes

1. See, e.g., The Economist, 4 August 2001; The Daily Telegraph, 13 June 2001.

2. Lomborg, Bjørn. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, United Kingdom) p. 4.

3. In challenging a WWF analysis that found nearly 2/3 of the world's original forests, dating to the pre-agricultural period (defined as 6000 BC), had at one time been cut, Lomborg's text at p.16 counters that "most sources estimate about 20%." Here Lomborg has confused net loss of forest cover (his figure) with loss of original forest (WWF's figure). Even so, sources in Lomborg's footnote 103 do not support the proposition for which he cites them. The first, a 1993 college textbook by Andrew Goudie, indeed gives a figure of 20% net loss in forest cover since pre-agricultural times, although its author provides no reference or authority for this number. The second source, by Michael Williams, is stated in the footnote as giving the (amazingly) low figure of 7.5 percent loss, but a review of the source itself reveals that Lomborg has misread 7,449 thousand square kilometers as though it were a percent. And the last two sources, which give figures of 19% and 20%, are for recent 300 and 140 year periods only, and thus on their face do not purport to measure forest loss during the entire 8,000 year period for which Lomborg cites them. To the contrary, these two sources cover only tiny fractions (less than 4% and 2%, respectively) of the relevant time period, and even so each registers roughly 20% loss of forest.

4. Lomborg, Bjørn. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, United Kingdom) p. 17.

5. Lomborg, Bjørn. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, United Kingdom) Figure 57 at p. 107.

6. Lomborg, Bjørn. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, United Kingdom) p. 110.

7. FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000; Summary Findings. Available on-line as http://www.fao.org/forestry/fo/fra/.

8. Throughout his chapter on forests, Lomborg cites to a variety of conflicting FAO forest data without distinguishing among them for the reader or indicating which are most reliable. His opening graph on forests (Figure 60 at p. 111), for example, prominently features an FAO data series generated for agricultural purposes and since discontinued by FAO precisely because it considered them unreliable for assessing forests. FAO forestry data are difficult to understand, as Lomborg's notes make amusingly clear. In Note 767, he defines closed forest as 20 percent of forest cover rather than forest where the tree canopy covers 20 percent or more of the ground. More seriously, he claims that the UN carried out two global forest surveys in 1995 and 1997 (p.111). In fact, the UN surveys forests only once per decade. The 1990 survey was updated with a mathematical model to 1995 and these results were published in the 1997 State of the Forest report.

9. The FRA 2000 Summary Findings state that during the 1990s about 161 million hectares of natural forest were lost, of which the great majority (152 million hectares or about 94%) was in tropical forests. The FRA 2000 puts total global forest cover at about 3.9 billion hectares, 95% of which is "natural forest", yielding a figure of about 3.7 billion hectares natural forest, 47% of which, or 1.74 billion hectares, is in the tropics. The 152 million hectares of natural tropical forests lost during the 1990s, stated as a percentage of the 1.74 billion hectares, is 8.7%.

10. Lomborg, Bjørn. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, United Kingdom) p. 255.

11. Estimates of the number of species becoming extinct each year derive from three variables: the number of species living, a natural extinction rate expressed as extinctions/million species/year, and an estimate of the elevated rate of extinction. Lomborg at p. 250 cites 10-80 million as a best estimate for the number of living species, and at p. 255 states that extinctions are occurring at 1500 times background rates. May et al., whose seminal work in Lawton and May's Extinction Rates which Lomborg cites at footnote 2027, put the natural extinction rate at 1 species extinction/1-10 million species/year. Together these figures yield extinction rates ranging from an improbably low 1500 species per year (assuming only 10 million species exist, and a natural rate of 1 extinction/10 million species/year) all the way to a high of 120,000 species per year (assuming 80 million species exist, and a natural extinction rate of 1 extinction/million species/year). Norman Myers's estimate of 40,000 extinctions per year, which Lomborg repeatedly assails, is actually well within the range derived solely from Lomborg's own figures and authorities.

12. Lomborg, Bjørn. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, United Kingdom) p. 317-318.

13. Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, Panel on Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming: Mitigation, Adaptation, and the Science Base. National Academy Press, 1992, Washington. D.C.

14. See for example R. Repetto and Duncan Austin. 1997. The Costs of Climate Protection: A Guide for the Perplexed (World Resources Institute: Washington, D.C.).