The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World [Paperback]

Bjørn Lomborg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is one of the most valuable books on public policy - not merely on environmental policy - to have been written for the intelligent general reader in the past ten years. The Skeptical Environmentalist is a triumph." The Economist<br /><br />"...a superbly documented and readable book." Wall Street Journal<br /><br />"...it is a surprise to meet someone who calls himself an environmentalist but who asserts that things are getting better....Strange to say, the author of this happy thesis is not a steely-eyed economist at a conservative Washington think tank but a vegetarian, backpack-toting academic who was a member of Greenpeace for four years....The primary target of the books, a substantial work of analysis with almost 3.000 footnotes, are statements made by environemtal organizations like the Worldwatch Institute, the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. He refers to the persistently gloomy fate from these groups as the Litany, a collection of statements that he argues are exaggerations or outright myths." Science of the Times/New York Times<br /><br />"The Skeptical Environmentalist should be read by every environmentalist, so that the appalling errors of fact the environmental movement has made in the past are not repeated. A brilliant and powerful book." Matt Ridley, Author of Genome<br /><br />"Lomborg pulls off the remarkable feat of welding the techno-optimism of the Internet age with a lefty's concern for the fate of the planet." Rolling Stone<br /><br />"Bjørn Lomborg is an outstanding representative of the "new breed" of political scientists --The Wall Street Journal

Book Description

Challenges widely held beliefs that the environmental situation is getting worse and worse. Making use of the best available statistical information, Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental problems that feature prominently in global headline news. His arguments are presented in non-technical, accessible language and are carefully backed up by over 2500 footnotes allowing readers to check sources for themselves. The Skeptical Environmentalist offers readers a non-partisan stocktaking exercises that serves as a useful corrective to the more alarmist accounts favored by campaign groups and the media.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 540 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; Reprint edition (September 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521010683
• ISBN-13: 978-0521010689
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 1.4 x 9.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (354 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #66,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #34 in Books > Computers & Technology > Internet & Web Culture > Future of Computing

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

578 of 642 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Staggering research boiled into all the key information September 24, 2001

By Antonio

Format:Paperback

Worthy causes, whether religious, political or moral tend to see themselves as above the duty to provide evidence to substantiate both their claims about reality and the suitability of their proposed measures to improve said reality. To their believers, the state of the world is obvious (usually bad), and they are genuinely astonished to find that most people are unconcerned about the grave issues that drive them. Their natural reaction is to become even more feverish about their respective causes and to step up efforts to proselytise and convert the benighted masses.

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.

65 of 70 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Read the author's debate with Scientific American July 30, 2004

By S. D Young

Format:Paperback

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.

123 of 141 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A politically incorrect analysis of the Earth August 2, 2002

By Cesare Spadoni

Format:Paperback

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.