profits of doom, The

Spectator, The, Feb 23, 2002 by Ridley, Matt

Matt Ridley celebrates Bjorn Lomborg, the environmentalist brave enough to tell the truth - that the end is not nigh

AT the Christmas cabaret in the politics department of Aarhus University in Denmark last year, the cast members joined together at the end to sing a song about one of the associate professors. `Bjorn, when will you come back?' went the refrain. `Don't just get lost out in the world.' (It was better in Danish.)

Bjorn Lomborg - young, blond, pianoplaying, but basically a statistics nerd - may not be back soon. He has just succeeded Monsanto as the official chief villain of the world environmental movement. In January Scientific American devoted 11 pages to an unattractive attempt to attack his work. He had a pie thrown in his face when he spoke in Oxford last September.

The great and the good of greendom are competing to find epithets for him: `Wilful ignorance, selective quotations, destructive campaigning,' says E.O. Wilson, guru of biodiversity. `Lacks even a preliminary understanding of the science in question,' says Norman Myers, guru of extinction. His book is `nothing more than a diatribe', says Lester Brown, serial predictor of imminent global famine. Stephen Schneider, high priest of global warming, even berates Cambridge University Press for publishing it.

What can this mild statistician have said to annoy these great men so? In 1996 he published an obscure but brilliant article on game theory, which earned him an invitation to a conference on `computable economics' in Los Angeles (and an offer of a job at the University of California). While browsing in a bookshop there he came across a profile in Wired magazine of the late Julian Simon, an economist, who claimed, with graphs, that on most measures the environment was improving, not getting worse. Irritated, Lomborg went back to Denmark and set his students the exercise of finding the flaw in Simon's statistics.

They could find none. So Lomborg wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, which not only endorses most of Simon's claims, but also goes further, providing an immense compendium of factual evidence that the litany of environmental gloom we hear is mostly either exaggerated (species extinction, global warming) or wrong (population, air and water pollution, natural resources, food and hunger, health and life-expectancy, waste, forest loss).

You might think that environmentalists would welcome such news. Having argued that we should find a way to live sustainably on the planet, they ought to be pleased that population growth is falling faster (in percentage and absolute terms) than anybody predicted even ten years ago; that per-capita food production is rising rapidly, even in the developing world; that all measures of air pollution are falling almost everywhere; that oil, gas and minerals are not running out nearly as fast as was predicted in the 1970s; and so on.

Instead they are beside themselves with fury. It cannot be Lomborg's politics that annoy them. He is leftish, concerned about world poverty, and no fan of big business. It cannot be his recommendations: in favour of renewable energy and worried about the pollution that is getting worse. Vegetarian, he rides a bicycle and approves of Denmark's punitive car taxes. His sin his heresy - is to be optimistic.

This is very threatening to lots of people's livelihoods. The environmental movement raises most of its funds through direct mail, paid advertising and news coverage. A steady supply of peril is essential fuel for all three. H.L. Mencken said, `The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.'

For instance, remember acid rain in the 1980s and sperm counts in the 1990s? `There is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United States or Canada due to acid rain,' concluded the official independent study of the subject. Sperm counts are not falling. If you do not believe me, look up the statistics. Lomborg did.

The media, too, prefer pessimism. When the United Nations panel on global warming produced new estimates of the rise in temperature by 2100, they gave a range of 1.4 to 5.8C. CNN, CBS, Time and the New York Times all quoted only the high figure and omitted the low one.

An increasing number of scientists have vested interests in pessimism, too. The study of global warming has brought them fame, funds, speaking fees and room service. Lomborg's crime is to rain on their parade.

In the Scientific American critique, four leading environmental scientists lambasted Lomborg. The magazine refused Lomborg the right to reply in the same issue, refused to post his response on its website immediately, and threatened him for infringement of copyright when he tried to reproduce their articles, with his responses, on his own website.

Yet the Scientific American articles are devastating not to Lomborg, but to his critics. Again and again, before insulting him, the critics concede, through gritted teeth, that he has got his facts right. In two cases, Stephen Schneider accuses Lomborg of misquoting sources and promptly does so himself. In the first case, Schneider's response `completely misunderstands what we have done', according to Richard Lindzen, the original author of work on the `iris effect' and upper-level cirrus clouds. In the second, Eigil Friis-Christensen says that Schneider `makes three unsubstantiated statements regarding our studies on the effect of cosmic rays on global cloud cover'. Result: there are worse howlers in Schneider's short article than in Lomborg's whole book.