Ronald Bailey, Reason.com
Wednesday, April 17, 2002

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5 percent come from news sources and 30 percent from web downloads -- readily accessible, therefore, but frequently not peer reviewed."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."

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.

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