[Reader-list] Profits of Doom

[Yazad Jal]

The last para talks about the costs of Kyoto.
-yazad

THE PROFITS OF DOOM
Matt Ridley celebrates Bjorn Lomborg, the environmentalist brave enough to
tell the truth - that the end is not nigh

By Matt Ridley

At the Christmas cabaret in the politics department of Aarhus University in
Denmark last year, the cast members joined together at the end to sing a
song about one of the associate professors. 'Bjorn, when will you come
back?' went the refrain. 'Don't just get lost out in the world.' (It was
better in Danish.)

Bjorn Lomborg - young, blond, piano-playing, but basically a statistics
nerd - may not be back soon. He has just succeeded Monsanto as the official
chief villain of the world environmental movement. In January Scientific
American devoted 11 pages to an unattractive attempt to attack his work. He
had a pie thrown in his face when he spoke in Oxford last September.

The great and the good of greendom are competing to find epithets for him:
'Wilful ignorance, selective quotations, destructive campaigning,' says E.O.
Wilson, guru of biodiversity. 'Lacks even a preliminary understanding of the
science in question,' says Norman Myers, guru of extinction. His book is
'nothing more than a diatribe', says Lester Brown, serial predictor of
imminent global famine. Stephen Schneider, high priest of global warming,
even berates Cambridge University Press for publishing it.

What can this mild statistician have said to annoy these great men so? In
1996 he published an obscure but brilliant article on game theory, which
earned him an invitation to a conference on 'computable economics' in Los
Angeles (and an offer of a job at the University of California). While
browsing in a bookshop there he came across a profile in Wired magazine of
the late Julian Simon, an economist, who claimed, with graphs, that on most
measures the environment was improving, not getting worse. Irritated,
Lomborg went back to Denmark and set his students the exercise of finding
the flaw in Simon's statistics.

They could find none. So Lomborg wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, which
not only endorses most of Simon's claims, but also goes further, providing
an immense compendium of factual evidence that the litany of environmental
gloom we hear is mostly either exaggerated (species extinction, global
warming) or wrong (population, air and water pollution, natural resources,
food and hunger, health and life-expectancy, waste, forest loss).

You might think that environmentalists would welcome such news. Having
argued that we should find a way to live sustainably on the planet, they
ought to be pleased that population growth is falling faster (in percentage
and absolute terms) than anybody predicted even ten years ago; that
per-capita food production is rising rapidly, even in the developing world;
that all measures of air pollution are falling almost everywhere; that oil,
gas and minerals are not running out nearly as fast as was predicted in the
1970s; and so on.

Instead they are beside themselves with fury. It cannot be Lomborg's
politics that annoy them. He is leftish, concerned about world poverty, and
no fan of big business. It cannot be his recommendations: in favour of
renewable energy and worried about the pollution that is getting worse.
Vegetarian, he rides a bicycle and approves of Denmark's punitive car taxes.
His sin - his heresy - is to be optimistic.

This is very threatening to lots of people's livelihoods. The environmental
movement raises most of its funds through direct mail, paid advertising and
news coverage. A steady supply of peril is essential fuel for all three.
H.L. Mencken said, 'The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the
populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it
with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.'

For instance, remember acid rain in the 1980s and sperm counts in the 1990s?
'There is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the
United States or Canada due to acid rain,' concluded the official
independent study of the subject. Sperm counts are not falling. If you do
not believe me, look up the statistics. Lomborg did.

The media, too, prefer pessimism. When the United Nations panel on global
warming produced new estimates of the rise in temperature by 2100, they gave
a range of 1.4 to 5.8°C. CNN, CBS, Time and the New York Times all quoted
only the high figure and omitted the low one.

An increasing number of scientists have vested interests in pessimism, too.
The study of global warming has brought them fame, funds, speaking fees and
room service. Lomborg's crime is to rain on their parade.

In the Scientific American critique, four leading environmental scientists
lambasted Lomborg. The magazine refused Lomborg the right to reply in the
same issue, refused to post his response on its website immediately, and
threatened him for infringement of copyright when he tried to reproduce
their articles, with his responses, on his own website.

Yet the Scientific American articles are devastating not to Lomborg, but to
his critics. Again and again, before insulting him, the critics concede,
through gritted teeth, that he has got his facts right. In two cases,
Stephen Schneider accuses Lomborg of misquoting sources and promptly does so
himself. In the first case, Schneider's response 'completely misunderstands
what we have done', according to Richard Lindzen, the original author of
work on the 'iris effect' and upper-level cirrus clouds. In the second,
Eigil Friis-Christensen says that Schneider 'makes three unsubstantiated
statements regarding our studies on the effect of cosmic rays on global
cloud cover'. Result: there are worse howlers in Schneider's short article
than in Lomborg's whole book.

By the end of 11 pages, the Scientific American critics have found two
certain errors in Lomborg's work. In one he uses the word 'catalyse' instead
of 'electrolyse'. In the other he refers to 20 per cent of energy use, when
he means 20 per cent of electricity generation. You get the drift.

What the affair reveals is how much environmentalists are now the
establishment, accustomed to doing the criticising, not being criticised.
The editor of Scientific American, apparently without irony, condemns
Lomborg for his 'presumption' in challenging 'investigators who have devoted
their lives' to the subject, as if seniority defined truth.

Lomborg is also criticised for his effrontery in challenging the widely
accepted figure that 40,000 species become extinct every year. The number
was first used in 1979 by the British scientist Norman Myers. Yet what was
the evidence for it? Here is what Myers actually said: 'Let us suppose that,
as a consequence of this manhandling of the natural environments, the final
one-quarter of this century witnesses the elimination of one million
species, a far from unlikely prospect. This would work out, during the
course of 25 years, at an average rate of 40,000 species per year.' That's
it. No data at all; just a circular assumption: if 40,000 species go extinct
a year, then 40,000 species go extinct a year. QED.

Now look where this little trick of arithmetic has got Myers. He describes
himself thus: 'Norman Myers is an Honorary Visiting Fellow of Oxford
University. He has served as visiting professor at universities from Harvard
to Stanford, and is a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
He works as an independent scientist, undertaking research projects for the
US National Research Council, the World Bank and United Nations agencies. He
has received the UNEP environment prize, the Volvo environment prize and,
most recently, the 2001 Blue Planet prize.' (Myers's share of the Volvo
prize was worth $130,000; Lomborg does not own a car.)

Lomborg does not deny that species are becoming extinct at an unnaturally
high rate, but he cites a far from conservative calculation that this rate
may reach about 0.7 per cent in 50 years, not the 25 to 75 per cent implied
by Myers, and calls it 'not a catastrophe but a problem - one of many that
mankind still needs to solve'. Greens are trying to portray Lomborg as a
sort of Pollyanna Pangloss with her head in the sand. But Lomborg does not
dispute the need to save the planet, only the assertion that this is
impossibly difficult and the particular priorities foisted on us by the big
environmental pressure groups.

Forty years ago this year, Rachel Carson, in her book Silent Spring, alerted
a complacent world to the dangers posed by pesticides. Vilified by the
chemical industry, Carson was already dying of cancer when the book was
published. In the intervening years the environmental movement has turned
from David into Goliath. With huge advertising budgets and ready access to
the media, it can dominate the news, terrify multinational companies and
expect to be invited to policy discussions at the highest levels. It is the
bully now.

Consider the treatment meted out to Julian Simon for having the temerity to
be right. In 1990 Simon won $576.07 in settlement of a wager from the
environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. Simon had bet him that the prices of metals
would fall during the 1980s and Ehrlich accepted 'Simon's astonishing offer
before other greedy people jump in'.

When, a decade later, Simon won easily, Ehrlich refused a rematch and called
Simon an imbecile in a speech. Ehrlich, who, in contrast, won a 'genius
award' from the MacArthur Foundation, is the man who argued in 1967 that
with the world on the brink of starvation the West 'should no longer send
emergency aid to countries such as India where sober analysis shows a
hopeless imbalance between food production and population'. Since then India
has doubled its population, more than doubled its food production, increased
its cultivated land acreage by only 5 per cent and begun to export food.
Hopeless?

The pessimists argue that Lomborg's good news might lead to complacency. But
Ehrlich's counsel of despair is far more dangerous. Many people now work to
improve the environment at a local level with optimism that they can make
the world a better place. To be constantly told by the big pressure groups
that all is doom and gloom is no help. There is something rotten in the
state of environmentalism. It lies not just in the petty factual dishonesty
that is rife within the movement - Stephen Schneider once said, 'We have to
offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make
little mention of any doubts we might have' - but in the very philosophy
that lies at the heart of greenery: the belief in constraint and retreat.

If six billion people have both more food and more forest than their three
billion parents did; if the prices of copper, wheat and natural gas are
going down, not up; if there are 20 times more carcinogens in three cups of
organic coffee than in daily dietary exposure to the worst pesticide both
before and after the DDT ban; if renewable resources such as whales are more
easily exhausted than non-renewables such as coal; if lower infant mortality
leads to falling populations, not rising ones, then perhaps we need to think
differently about what sustainability means. Perhaps the most sustainable
thing we can do is develop new technology, increase trade and spread
affluence.

Nor will it do to claim that these successes have come from green pressure.
The reason so many environmental trends are benign is not because of
legislation, let alone protest. Apart from the ozone layer and city smogs,
where campaigns probably did accelerate change, most improvements have been
brought about more by innovation, development and growth than by government
action. If six billion people went back to nature, nature would be in
desperate trouble.

The most arresting statistic that Lomborg produces is this. It is well known
that meeting the Kyoto treaty on carbon-dioxide reduction will delay global
warming by six years at most by 2100. Yet the annual cost of that treaty, in
each year of the century, will be the same as the cost - once - of
installing clean drinking water and sanitation for every human being on the
planet. Priorities, anyone?

(c)2001 The Spectator.co.uk