CHURCHVILLE, VA Scientific American spends 11 pages of its latest (January) issue trashing a bold new critic, who says the “litany of eco-doom†that pervades the media (and the Scientific American) is largely wrong-headed.
“Bjorn Lomborg accuses a pessimistic and dishonest cabal of environmental groups, institutions and the media of distorting scientists’ actual findings,†says the magazine’s editor-in-chief, John Rennie.
Lomborg, a Danish professor and self-described leftist, has harvested huge swaths of newsprint on both side of the Atlantic by documenting the world’s largely positive current environmental trends. He recommends more science and more affluence—for the sake of the planet. His book is titled The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Rennie lets four noted scientific doomsayers pummel Lomborg in his magazine’s latest edition—but their critiques fail to dent Lomborg’s case.
There’s no question that for 40 years, eco-activists have been claiming the environment around us is doomed because people are raising too many babies and living too well. The activists have predicted massive famines, energy shortages, the destruction of the world’s forests, unprecedented soil erosion, and a global warming that will fry the world’s crops and wildlife even as it melts the Arctic ice cap and floods port cities like New York and Calcutta. None of these dire predictions are coming true.
The eco-activists are abetted by such “science activists†as Paul Ehrlich (who predicted America would starve in the 1970s) and Stephen Schneider, a climate scientist who first predicted a new Ice Age, then reversed himself to support the global warming scare.
In the Scientific American critique, John Bongaarts of the Population Council admits, “Environmentalists who predicted widespread famine and blamed rapid population growth for many of the world’s environmental, economic and social problems overstated their cases.†But Bongaarts then claims: “The historically unprecedented population expansion in the poorest parts of the world continues largely unabated.â€
Lomborg notes that births per woman in the Third World have dropped from 6.16 in 1950 to 2.8 today. That means the poor countries have come four-fifths of the way to population stability (2.1 births). Is that Bongaarts’ definition of “largely unabated�
Bongaart continues: “Lomborg correctly notes that poverty is the main cause of hunger and malnutrition, but he neglects the contribution of population growth to poverty.†Bongaarts ignores the reality that the poor areas of the world today were poor before modern medicine created their population surge. Moreover, such formerly poor countries as China and India are now getting affluent despite hugely increased populations.
John P. Holdren of Harvard and Berkeley agree with Lomborg: “the world’s energy resources—coal, oil shale, nuclear fuels and renewable energy—are immense.†Holdren believes, however, that using these fuels is creating dreadful air pollution, acid rain, water pollution, and global warming. Lomborg finds the First World’s air is clean and getting cleaner, acid rain is a minor problem for a few tree species in limited areas, the sea is clean, First World coastal waters are rapidly getting cleaner, and the nitrogen fertilizer which sometimes overfertilizes our streams has saved at least 25 percent of the world’s forests from being plowed for food.
On global warming, Scientific American offers us Stephen Schneider himself complaining about Lomborg’s assessment that the warming will be less than the world experienced in 1200 AD, during the Medieval Climate Optimum. Lomborg says it will have minimal effects on food production, sea level, storms and malaria. He recommends we adapt to warming instead of strangling the world’s economy with high-priced energy.
Lomborg says we’ve not had huge species extinctions. He notes that the United States cleared vast amounts of virgin forest in the late 19th century with few species losses, and virtually all the extinctions documented so far have been recorded on islands. Critic Thomas Lovejoy, a biodiversity advisor to the World Bank, claims there’s a “long-established relation†between habitat area and species numbers
Lovejoy then jumps to a profoundly false conclusion by claiming that pessimistic activists have created the current positive environmental trends, by identifying problems and triggering solutions. As the biggest example of his error, most of the world’s present wildlife species are alive only because of high-yield farming, which has saved millions of square miles of forest from low-yield crops. Both the eco-activists and the “science activists†have ardently opposed high-yield farming. Both demand organic farming, which would have to unleash another 8 billion chomping cattle to supply organic nitrogen for its crops.
Lovejoy even complains about plantation trees that can produce 20 times as much wood per acre, and thus sharply reduce the acres of wild forest logged to produce our timber and paper.
The best thing about the activists’ attack on The Skeptical Environmentalist is that they felt the need to launch it. Bjorn Lomborg’s book has begun to worry the “pessimistic and dishonest cabal of environmental groups, institutions and the media†who’ve profited by distorting real science.
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
