Bjørn Lomborg - Skeptical Environmentalist

Transport economist Gabiel Roth reviewsThe Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg, Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark. The book was controversially published by the Cambridge University Press in 2001. ISBN: hardback 0 521 80447 7 paperback 0 521 01068 3

Bjørn Lomborg teaches statistics at the University of Aarhus. The idea for this book arose from his attempt to disprove the unorthodox findings of University of Maryland Professor Julian Simon (1932-1998), who challenged many of the conclusions of the environmental community. For example, in 1980, Simon (a personal friend of the reviewer in the Washington DC area) bet environmentalists Paul Ehrlich and two Stanford colleagues $10,000 that a basket of raw materials would decline in value over a 10 year period. Simon won his bet when each of the basket components - all selected by his Stanford opponents - dropped in price.

Professor Lomborg, with ten of his "sharpest students", started their examination of Simon's work in 1997. They expected to disprove Simon's conclusions but, to their surprise, found that '... a surprisingly large amount of his points stood up to scrutiny' and conflicted with conventional wisdom. Lomborg described some of his findings in four articles in the Danish newspaper Politiken, and the resulting debate spawned over 400 articles in the Danish press.

Lomborg decided he would follow-up the debate with a book. The result was The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, a book containing more than 500 pages, 173 figures, 2,930 end-notes, and some 1,600 bibliographical entries. The sub-title - Measuring the Real State of the World - is, of course, a play on the Worldwatch Institute's annual publication The State of the World, which has sold over a million copies since it was first issued in 1984.

The Skeptical Environmentalist is made up of six parts:

• Part I: The Litany, reviews, and questions, claims that people on planet earth are becoming worse off, and considers why good news gets less publicity than bad.
• Part II: Human welfare, discusses measures of human welfare, life expectancy and health, food, and prosperity, and concludes that we live in an era of unprecedented human prosperity.
• Part III: Can human prosperity continue, asks whether we have enough food, water, energy, and other vital resources, and concludes that prosperity is likely to continue.
• Part VI: Pollution: does it undercut human prosperity, looks at the pollution of air, water, and other factors, and concludes that the pollution burden is diminishing, not increasing.
• Part V: Tomorrow's problems, discusses "chemical fears" (pesticides, cancer), biodiversity and "Global warming", and concludes that the magnitudes of these problems have been exaggerated.
• Part VI: The Real State of the World, summarizes '... the problems and consequences of our biased view of the world', estimates the costs of saving lives in different ways, and concludes that society has to "prioritize" its use of resources, and that environmental improvements have to be judged against other ways of improving life on planet earth.

To see the relevance of the book to my work as a transport economist, I looked at Lomborg's treatment of three questions:

• Is the earth warming?
• If so, to what extent is the warming due to human activity?
• Would significant global warming do more harm than good?

Is the earth warming? Global warming is discussed on pages 258 to 324. Average temperatures in the last hundred years have risen about 0.6 degrees, two thirds of the increase occurring before 1940. On page 259 Lomborg '... accepts the reality of man-made global warming but questions the way at which future scenarios have been arrived at and finds that forecasts of climate change of 6 degrees by the end of the century are not plausible'. He concludes that money spent now, on reducing global warming in the future, could be better spent on reducing immediate hunger and poverty.

What is the extent to which global warming could be due to human activity? Lomborg mentions on pages 276 to 278 the possibility that the earth's warming cycles are associated with solar activity, such as sunspots. There is much less discussion of earthly warming phenomena, such as those related to volcanic activity, methane, and other factors not connected with human activity.

Would significant global warming do more harm than good? Plausible effects of global warming are discussed in pages 287 to 300. Both positive and negative effects are described. If, as seems to be the case, most of the observed warming takes place at night and in the winter, and in the Polar Regions, the effects on agriculture could, in general, be helpful. Lomborg concludes that catastrophic losses from global warming are unlikely to occur.

All the predictions of climate change depend on sophisticated mathematical computer-driven models, and Lomborg warns readers of the problems and uncertainties associated with them. There are frequent mentions of the size and complexity of the models, but Lomborg does not test them by comparing predictions to measurable changes, such as those that occurred in the last twenty years. Lomborg does show, however, that Worldwatch predictions of resource depletion have, like those of Paul Ehrlich and his Stanford colleagues, proved groundless.

Lomborg's attempt to apply statistical analysis to claims made in The State of the World has been received with less than enthusiasm by the "environmental community". This is a pity, as the book is clearly written, and its findings should be of special interest to truth-seeking environmentalists, who could either disprove them or absorb them.

The book can be criticized for having been misnamed, as it might have been more appropriate to call it "The Skeptical Statistician". In the Preface page xx, Lomborg writes that he is not '... an expert as regards environmental problems' and that his objective is to apply the skills of his trade - statistics - to '... the environmental debate', to help all parties know "the real state of the world". This he does admirably.

However a true "skeptical environmentalist" would have gone deeper, and questioned the basic tenets of environmentalism - for example that the world is warming substantially and that such warming is harmful. These matters are discussed in the book, and readers are warned that the conventional answers might be misleading; but the author does not himself dig into the basic tenets.

Maybe he left that investigation for his next book, which this reviewer eagerly awaits. Gabriel Roth 9 September 2003

Gabriel Roth is a transport consultant interested in the commercialisation and privatisation of roads. He is the author of Paying for Roads: The Economics of Traffic Congestion (Penguin Special, 1966); The Private Provision of Public Services in Developing Countries (World Bank, 1987); and Roads in a Market Economy (Ashgate, 1996).

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