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

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In a particularly breathtaking rhetorical maneuver, Nature's reviewers resort to argumentum ad Hitlerum, likening Lomborg's discussion of extinction rates to the hateful propaganda propounded by Holocaust deniers. "The text employs the strategy of those who, for example, argue that gay men aren't dying of AIDS, that Jews weren't singled out by Nazis for extermination and so on," Pimm and Harvey write. "'Name those who have died!' demands a hypothetical critic, who then scorns the discrepancy between those few we know by name and the unnamed millions we infer." Their assertion is false: Lomborg plainly states that the number of known extinctions is an "underestimate" of actual extinctions because the process of documenting them scientifically is so stringent. In any event, calling someone the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier is hardly intended to encourage reasoned dialogue. It suggests the desperation of Lomborg's critics.

Blinded by Science

The review of Lomborg's book in the November 9, 2001, issue of Science begins well. It's written by Michael Grubb, a professor of climate change and energy policy at Imperial College in London, who acknowledges that "through much of the first half of the book, [Lomborg] offers a detailed and well-developed antidote to environmental doom-mongering. He establishes a convincing case that, in general, humanity is better off today than it has ever been in terms of standard welfare measures and of many environmental indicators." Grubb comments, "To any modern professional it is no news at all that the 1972 Limits to Growth study was mostly wrong or that Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown have perennially exaggerated the problems of food supply."

Yet Grubb accuses Lomborg of "a stunning lack of attention to cause and effect," claiming he ignores the fact that improvements "have been driven by environmental concerns and the resulting policies." Grubb cites the passage of air pollution control legislation in Britain in 1956 as an example of how environmental policies have had a "dramatic impact."

In fact, it is Grubb who confuses cause with effect. The Skeptical Environmentalist cites many studies that show the rate of improvement in air quality in both Britain and the U.S. did not change with the adoption of such laws. Lomborg demonstrates a different correlation: As average per capita income goes up, environmental measures begin to improve. This is partly because consumers can afford to switch to cleaner technologies -- the source for heating and cooking, for example, moves from wood and dung to coal, then gas, then electricity. As important, wealthier consumers demand that polluters clean up their acts.

Grubb also asserts that Lomborg's book "reaches its nadir when Lomborg turns to climate economics and the Kyoto Protocol." Lomborg argues that the cost of the effort to slow global warming through drastic cuts in the use of fossil fuels -- aimed at reducing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere -- likely will far outweigh any benefit.

Unfortunately for Grubb, his review appeared in the same issue of Science as "Global Warming Economics," in which Yale economist William Nordhaus presents calculations that generally back Lomborg's position. Nordhaus calculates that had George W. Bush not withdrawn from the Kyoto-Bonn Protocol, implementing it would have cost the United States a total of $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years. Even without American participation, the treaty will cost Kyoto signatories more than $600 billion over the same period. "The Kyoto-Bonn Accord will make little progress in slowing global warming while incurring a substantial cost," Nordhaus concludes.

Not So Warm

Perhaps the most disturbing attack on Lomborg appeared in the popular journal Scientific American in its January 2002 issue. The subhead of the review section, "Science defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist," gives the show away: Religious and political views need to defend themselves against criticism, but science is supposed to be a process for determining the facts. Scientific American selected four of Lomborg's chapters -- on global warming, energy, population, and biodiversity -- for separate, detailed review. The package was clearly intended to demolish Lomborg's credibility comprehensively.

Stephen Schneider critiqued Lomborg's treatment of global warming. Schneider is a distinguished climate scientist at Stanford University; he is also a fierce environmental ideologue. His first book, The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival (1976), offered a sweeping plan to reorganize global governance and the world's economy to meet the purported threats of catastrophic climate change and overpopulation.

Schneider's piece is remarkable for its dishonesty. He first deploys the familiar red herring that "most of his nearly 3,000 citations are to secondary literature and media articles." Lomborg's chapter on global warming features more than 600 endnotes. Nearly half refer to publications from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and most of the rest refer to studies from such agencies as the World Meteorological Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and to peer-reviewed articles from Science, Nature, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and the like.

True, IPCC publications are "secondary literature," but Schneider himself calls the IPCC "the most credible international assessment body" dealing with climate change. (Needless to say, Schneider has not followed his own stringent rule about citing only peer-reviewed articles when discussing scientific issues and public policy. In The Genesis Strategy, 80 percent of the endnotes refer to newspaper and magazine articles, government reports, and other secondary sources.)

Schneider makes some more substantive claims. For brevity, let's deal with three of them: that Lomborg gets the basic climate science wrong, that he botches global warming cost-benefit analyses, and that he misrepresents the Kyoto Protocol.

Interestingly, Schneider admits his own "lingering frustration" over the scientific "uncertainties" that surround projections of future global temperatures. In any case, Lomborg does not deny global climate change. As he puts it, he "accepts the reality of man-made global warming" but questions claims such as Greenpeace's assertion that it is "one of the greatest threats to the planet." To support his skepticism, Lomborg analyzes a lot of controversial scientific information and concludes that future global warming is likely to be at the low end of the projections made by the IPCC for the next century. Lomborg agrees with those climatologists who think the earth is more likely to warm only 1.4 degrees Celsius during the next century rather than the 5.8 degrees predicted by the highest projections. He points to research suggesting that computer models that project high temperatures by 2100 do not take proper account of a number of negative feedbacks, such as clouds that tend to cool climate.

Lomborg also makes a persuasive case that due to technological improvements, the amount of greenhouse gases humanity will add to the atmosphere will likely be at the low end of the emissions scenarios put forward by the IPCC. Less greenhouse gases means lower future temperatures.