Green with Ideology

The hidden agenda behind the "scientific" attacks on Bjørn Lomborg's controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Ronald Bailey from the May 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

"We are all familiar with the Litany," he writes: "The environment is in poor shape here on earth. Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers -- we kill off more than 40,000 each year. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing, and the coral reefs are dying.

"We are defiling our Earth...and will end up killing ourselves in the process. The world's eco-system is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limit of viability, and the limits of growth are becoming apparent.

"We know the Litany," he adds, "and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring."

Lomborg wrote his book after reading about the economist Julian Simon, who argued that many environmental trends were in fact positive. Lomborg, steeped in the Litany, thought it would be a simple matter to refute Simon. As Lomborg delved further into the economic, demographic, and scientific evidence, however, what he found shocked him: The Litany was wrong. Lomborg discovered that "in terms of practically every measurable indicator...mankind's lot has vastly improved" (his emphasis).

This conclusion is, of course, anathema to the environmental ideologues, especially those whose organizations use scare campaigns to raise money. Thus it is not surprising that the World Wildlife Fund and the World Resources Institute would send out a Lomborg-bashing press release. The release, signed by WRI President Jonathan Lash, claims Lomborg's book is "riddled with misleading arguments and factual errors." It is accompanied by a document titled "Nine Things That Journalists Should Know About The Skeptical Environmentalist."

One of those things is that Lomborg allegedly engages in "pseudo-scholarship." As evidence, the document claims the book cites "articles that have not undergone scientific peer review." If this were enough to dismiss a book, it would sink several of the founding environmentalist books as well. The Population Bomb was sourced with 49 endnotes, only five of which were from peer-reviewed scientific journals. Of the 55 endnotes in The Limits to Growth, only three refer to peer-reviewed journals. More recently, in the Worldwatch Institute's State of the World 2002, the vast majority of endnotes are from newspapers, magazines, non-peer-reviewed books, government reports, and even activist pamphlets.

The Skeptical Environmentalist obviously should be held to high standards of accuracy, but to insist that it read like a scientific paper is both specious and disingenuous. The book is essentially a response to such popular environmentalist tracts as the State of the World report and the reams of misinformation disseminated by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Union of Concerned Scientists, The Ecologist, the Turning Point Project, Grist, Wild Earth, and the rest of the sprawling eco-media propaganda complex. In his endnotes, Lomborg cites the numerous non-peer-reviewed exaggerations, misleading statements, and outright falsehoods offered up by environmental activists and gullible reporters, then refutes them using peer-reviewed scientific studies. Furthermore, the book broadly surveys a series of ecological, economic, and demographic trends. When Lomborg compiles and summarizes the relevant information from scientific reports and papers and from government agencies, he is obviously using the same sources and information that are generally relied on by all participants in environmental debates.

One example the press release cites of a supposedly nonauthoritative source is work published recently by MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen's team suggesting that clouds in the tropics operate as an "iris." (Warmer sea temperatures in the tropics cause changes in the relative distribution of cumulus and cirrus cloud cover which allows heat to escape, helping to cool the planet.) The press release claims Lindzen's work didn't undergo peer review and belittles it by hinting that it was published in a mere "meteorological bulletin" instead of any "leading scientific journals."

The disparaged "meteorological bulletin" is the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Lindzen was astonished when I told him that the World Wildlife Fund and the World Resources Institute were claiming his work had not been peer-reviewed. The press release also initially claimed the article "had been rejected by at least one such [leading] journal." (This false claim later disappeared from the WWF/WRI anti-Lomborg Web site without acknowledgment.) Lindzen says his team submitted the article only to the Bulletin. New research reported in the February 1, 2002, issue of Science, while not confirming Lindzen's proposed iris effect, does find that the tropics are cooling the earth by expelling more heat than is being trapped by the greenhouse effect.

Against Nature

Well, that was just a press release. Surely scientific publications are safe from this sort of intellectual corruption -- or are they? Sadly, the journals Nature and Science both selected reviewers who, their scientific credentials notwithstanding, are committed ideological environmentalists.

The Nature reviewers, Stuart Pimm and Jeff Harvey, begin their November 8, 2001, piece by attacking me, asserting that Lomborg "rehashes books like Ronald Bailey's The True State of the Planet." Next, they slap Lomborg with the secondary-source red herring. "Like bad term papers," they write, "Lomborg's text relies heavily on secondary sources. Out of around 2,000 references, about 5% come from news sources and 30% from web downloads -- readily accessible, therefore, but frequently not peer reviewed." According to the Nature reviewers, "This bias towards non-peer-reviewed material over internationally reputable journals is sometimes incredible."

This charge is, again, misleading, irrelevant, and hypocritical. Pimm, for instance, has just published The World According to Pimm, an ideologically orthodox work, and a quick look at its 244 endnotes finds that at least half of his sources are from non-peer-reviewed material. There are reports from environmentalist groups such as WRI and the Audubon Society, and from international and government agencies; there are non-peer-reviewed books, such as Cadillac Desert and Guns, Germs and Steel; there are many secondary sources, including reports from The New York Times, Barron's, The Economist, Vanity Fair, and even the Encyclopedia Britannica. As for the "web downloads" Pimm disparages, most of Lomborg's Web references are reports by international and government organizations that collect and publish the environmental statistics that alarmists like Pimm use.

Nature's reviewers also try to refute Lomborg's claims by calling up people he cites and asking them if Lomborg is accurate. Specifically, Lomborg cites Paul Ehrlich and E.O. Wilson as supporting something called the Wildlands Project, which would reserve 50 percent of the North American continent as uninhabited wildlands. Pimm and Harvey asked Ehrlich if he supported such a plan. "I know of no such plan," replied Ehrlich. "If there were one, I wouldn't support it." Q.E.D.

Where could Lomborg have gotten such an idea? From the June 25, 1993, issue of Science. "The principles behind the Wildlands Project have garnered endorsements from such scientific luminaries as Edward O. Wilson of Harvard [and] Paul Ehrlich of Stanford (who describes himself as an 'enthusiastic supporter')," reported an article titled "The High Cost of Biodiversity."