GCN Guest Opinion

The Green Inquisition
When Environmentalists Savaged Danish Statistician Bjorn Lomborg, They Did So In A Bid To Keep The Public’s Trust. Their Real Accomplishment Was To Expose Their True Nature.

Part Two

By Perry Hicks

Heresy: Pollution Had Been Dropping Long Before The Environmental Movement Began

“The one thing the earth will never run out of is imbeciles.” Paul Ehrlich, author, The Population Bomb, speaking to Julian Simon’s idea that the world’s resources are not running out.

Exactly what was Bjorn Lomborg saying that aroused such anger in the environmentalist establishment?  Lomborg, like his predecessor, Julian Simon, had the audacity to expose how environmentalists distort or even ignore data that doesn’t support their predisposed views, and how they actually lie about the true state of the environment.  Lomborg insists that the environment is not getting worse, it is actually getting better, and data proves this unequivocally.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml

http://www.globalclimate.org/climscience/01-0802-Lomborg.htm

Lomborg calls the environmental left’s singular pessimistic voice predicting all manner of dire outcomes, an “Environmental Litany.”  Lomborg rattled off this litany in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, thusly: 

“The environment is in poor shape here on earth. Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet’s species are becoming extinct in vast numbers -- we kill off more than 40,000 each year. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing, and the coral reefs are dying.

“We are defiling our Earth...and will end up killing ourselves in the process. The world’s eco-system is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limit of viability, and the limits of growth are becoming apparent.”

While there is certainly plenty more room for improvement, the litany is simply a gross overstatement of the true state of the world. 

Even more infuriating to the environmental left was the argument Lomborg made that expending vast sums to combat global warming would actually cause the global situation to worsen.  The best cause of action, Lomborg claimed, is to fight poverty because only affluent societies have the resources and the will to clean up the environment.

Even the most cursory survey of the economic and ecological state of the world does in fact show that Simon and Lomborg are correct. Few third-world nations today are not better off than they were just 30 years ago.  The ones that aren’t better off are suffering because of governmental corruption and civil war.

Take India for example. Back in 1967, environmental icon, Paul Ehrlich, asserted that it was futile to send food to India in order to save her teaming millions because “…a sober analysis shows a hopeless imbalance between food production and population.”  Besides, he contended elsewhere, a new ice age was going to inflict mass starvation on the world, anyway.

Today, India’s population has more than doubled and, owing to advanced farming technologies imported from the west, her food production is so abundant India can now actually export food.

http://reason.com/0005/fe.rb.earth.shtml

Ehrlich’s faulty prediction was no fluke.  A, winner of a 1990 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship grant (often referred to as a “genius award”) precisely for his career built upon fantastic apocalyptic predictions such as this one he made to Johnny Carson on The Tonite Show during the first Arab oil embargo:

"If I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Of course, Ehrlich was not alone in his pessimism. Another environmental giant and Bjorn Lomborg critic, Dr. Stephen Schneider, formerly of National Center for Atmospheric Research and now at Stanford University, flatly stated in 1971 that  "…as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, the rate of temperature increase is proportionally less and less, and the increase eventually levels off.   If CO2 is augmented by another 10 percent in the next 30 years, the increase in the global temperature may be as small as 0.18° F.”  In other words, Schneider thought that man was not producing enough CO2 to offset the cooling effect of dust and other airborne substances we call aerosols.

As of late, the left has attempted to counter their elite’s deeply embarrassing statements by offering up studies showing no research program ever predicted a new ice age. And some of the elite will even admit that the earth’s resources are indeed not running out.  However, all of these claims are made quietly while the cataclysmic predictions in both the press and even entertainment mediums go unabated. Furthermore, what they would like us to forget is how mainstream newspapers and magazines almost exclusively quoted reports and statements made by “credible scientists” predicting wide-spread famine, resource depletion, and mass extinctions of wildlife and flora that would occur as early as the 1970s.

Needless to say, none of these dire predictions have ever come true.  The world’s resources haven’t run out and pollution has actually been getting better long before the modern environmental movement began.  For example, London’s notorious air pollution (so bad that the term “smog” was coined there) actually has been improving since about 1890.

http://www.globalclimate.org/climscience/01-0802-Lomborg.htm

Neither Scientific Nor American

There's nothing wrong with balance in principle. Balance is a very important thing to have in stories, in the same way that you want to have fairness, and - heaven forbid - accuracy.

John Rennie, editor-in-chief, Scientific American, to NPR

In their January 2002 issue, Scientific American launched a broadside at Lomborg dedicating eleven pages to four leading environmentalists. While SA did extend the courtesy of sending Lomborg an advance draft of the hit piece, according to Lomborg, SA denied him the opportunity to defend his book in the same issue. In addition, SA editor John Rennie, piled on with his own arguments ranting on for an equivalent of 19 pages or 9570 words.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00040A72-A95C-1CDA-B4A8809EC588EEDF

Bjorn Lomborg countered by opening his own web page featuring a reproduction of the SA pages interlaced with his rebuttals.  SA threatened to sue for copyright infringement so Lomborg removed the offending site and SA then posted Lomborg’s detailed 32-page pdf format point-by-point rebuttal on one of its own web pages.  Even then, editor John Rennie could not resist tacking on his own second page-and-a- half response. Lomborg’s rebuttal did not see print publication until the May issue.

Like Grist, SA relied on 4 icons of the modern environmental movement: Stephen Schneider, John Holdren, John Bongaarts, and Thomas Lovejoy. The difference with Grist was that 2 of SA’s stars had been specifically criticized by Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist.  And, like Schneider and Ehrlich, Holdren, and Lovejoy have a checkered past.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/pnas;100/23/13125

Bongaarts was originally seduced into the environmental movement by Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and the Club of Rome Limits to Growth .  While Bongaarts is generally more level headed than the others, he still has a tendency to hang on to the precepts of Ehrlich and Holdren and argued against Lomborg even while admitting that Lomborg’s data was correct. Bongaarts, vice president of the Policy Research Division at the Population Council, himself uses statistical analysis to “help developing countries develop population policy options.”

Back in 1980 Lovejoy had claimed that upward of 20% of the world’s species would be extinct by 2000, and Holdren asserted that many of the earth’s resources were about to be exhausted.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/pnas;100/23/13125

In the 1980s, Holdren, along with two other big environmental guns, Ehrlich and John Harte, were so confident their doom-and-gloom predictions, they accepted political economist Julian Simon’s $10,000 bet that any raw material they picked would be cheaper, and therefore more plentiful, just 1 year later. The bet came to encompass 5 commodities, chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten chosen by Holdren, Harte, and Ehrlich.  However, the eco-triumvirate hedged their bets by setting a timeframe of 10 years instead of the single 1.  To their chagrin, they still lost big.

SA offered up pretty much the same kind of smarmy critiques as Grist’s.  Schneider questioned Lomborg’s credentials and his use of secondary sources even though the cited articles are, as Lomborg points out, also widely cited by the various agencies of the UN, World Bank, and World Watch Institute- just to name a few.

Of course, Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb only had 3 peer-reviewed citations out of 55. Furthermore, World Watch Institute’s own State of the World 2002 extensively cited popular media such as newspapers and magazines, books that have not undergone peer review, government reports, and environmentalist pamphlets.

http://www.reason.com/0205/fe.rb.green.shtml

Another critique back-fired on Schneider when he apparently misunderstood one of Lomborg’s citations concerning a theoretical phenomenon known as the “iris effect.”  The author of the cited work, Richard Lindzen, questioned Schneider’s understanding of the disputed work.  In a letter to SA he wrote: “One small point of personal interest to me illustrates the bizarre nature of these attacks….. (Schneider) presents an absurdly incomprehensible analogy to positive feedbacks from mid-continent ice melts in spring…. Schneider… completely misunderstand what we have done.”

Holdren attempted to parry Lomborg’s assertion that energy is not running out by agreeing that environmentalists do not believe so, either.  While this is a nice try, Holdren withholds from the reader claims from the 1970s that the world’s oil supply was nearly exhausted and that a crisis was imminent. Even as late as the 1980s, Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) predicted rising oil prices as oil became more scarce- something that Holdren asserted even in the early 2000s.

Least the reader believes that the present high price for a barrel of oil is due to a “shortage,” Consider that environmental activism has not only limited domestic U.S. exploration, it has also completely stopped the domestic construction of oil refineries.  Thus, as the Chinese and Indian economies have rapidly gained affluence, if there is any temporary a squeeze on supply, it is mostly because of limited processing capacity.

http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read.html?id=3398

Bongaarts goes after Lomborg on population as if Lomborg had asserted that there is no population explosion which is not the case. Lomborg merely points out that it isn’t population density that is the problem but poverty. According to Lomborg, Ohio and Denmark are more densely populated than Southeast Asia without the attendant misery. Like the other SA writers, Bongaarts criticizes Lomborg while actually admitting that Lomborg’s data showing a roll-off in population increases is accurate.

Lovejoy took exception that Lomborg would even question the need for biodiversity much less the methods used to count “lost species.”  The environmentalist approved method is to correlate species to land area. Thus, if land area is lost, so must a number of species.  The problem with this technique is that it doesn’t work.  Lomborg points out that while 90% of the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest (formerly known as jungle) has been cut down, the Brazilian Society of Zoology could not find a single species that had gone extinct.

http://www.sciam.com/media/pdf/lomborgrebuttal.pdf

Vicious Attacks Closer To Home

Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

Dr. Stephen Schneider, clarifying a famous miss-quote to APS News On-line

Back at home, in January 2003, the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty, DCSD, judged Lomborg to have published using systematically biased choice of data; the very complaint lodged against Lomborg in Scientific American.  Lomborg did not hesitate to file a complaint that February with the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation.

The Ministry not only judged the DCSD to be at fault for not only failing to evaluate their own authority to rule on Lomborg’s work, DCSD failed to document how Lomborg dishonestly selected his data. The judgment was effectively ruled invalid, and by April, DCSD itself rejected the original complaints as invalid and dropped the case.

http://www.lomborg.com/files/Scientific%20Dishonesty%20case%20closed%20-%20Lomborg%20cleared.pdf

Failing To Prove Rush Wrong

In between Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg is Professor Jack Stauder of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. One day Stauder heard radio talk-show legend, Rush Limbaugh, claim:

·        Mankind was not destroying the earth, not causing global warming through the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere, and certainly not destroying the ozone layer.

·        The spotted owl is not an endangered species.

·        The Alar apple scare was a hoax.

·        Dioxin was not a danger at Times Beach, Missouri.

·        Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are good (specifically, DDT was a boon to mankind.

·        Acid rain, if a problem at all, is minor and correctable.

·        In the United States, we have more trees today than in the time of George Washington.

Stauder set out to prove Rush wrong. However, just as Lomborg could not disprove Julian Simon’s claims, Stauder could not disprove Limbaugh’s. This lead to Stauder’s 1995 article, “Rush Could Be Right: Teaching Both Sides Of Environmental Issues.”

Limbaugh acquired his notions from the 1990 book, Trashing The Planet, by environmentalist and former Governor of Washington State, Dixie Lee Ray. Stauder’s plan was to research Ray’s footnotes, citations, and the references the cited articles gave. Soon, Stuader found himself “awash” in “complex and contradictory data.”

Stauder also had to come to grips with former Vice President Al Gore’s claim that 98% of scientists buy into the conventional global warming scenario. Stauder contacted the Gallup organization and found that contrary to Al Gore’s claims, a poll they did in 1992 did not show a majority of scientists had found global warming to be caused by human activity.

Prof. Stauder recently told GCN, “I still hold the same views. The article did upset some of the liberals around me, chained as they are to their conventional opinions about things of which they know little.  But I'm super-tenured, so did not feel threatened.”

http://www.ecotopics.com/articles/teaching.htm

Environment Endangered By Poverty

Like Lomborg, I believe the real threat to the environment is poverty. Impoverishment means there is no way to finance ways to create energy without polluting the air, and no way to treat waste before it can find its way into our water.  Poverty drives up birth rates to the point that even a greatly shortened human life span is overwhelmed by the need to create large families and so population then grows out of control.

Of course, with denser population comes an ever greater need for efficient techniques for producing food. The absence of modern farming methods leads to low crop yields requiring even more land under the till.  This of course leads to the destruction of even more forest land.  Ecologically speaking, poverty causes a rapid downward spiral in almost every measure of environmental quality.

http://www.worldvision.com.au/resources/files/povertyenviront_9810.pdf

Amazingly, the environmental left actually puts their emphasis not on creating wealth, but on artificially destroying it! They also seem to no longer place their energies on reducing toxic pollution, but instead, target what used to be considered a benign gas, CO2. In order to get the public to accept this notion, and ultimately submit to the requisite draconian solutions, the left has adopted a mantra of predicting pandemic disasters, demonizing dissidents, and laying all blame at the feet of the western industrialized nations.  The side benefit, of course, is that a terrified public donates large sums of money to environmental organizations in the hope that they will save the planet.

Hmmm. Could Lomborg’s real sin has been to threaten this veritable money machine?

Could be.  Think about it.

http://www.sacbee.com/static/archive/news/projects/environment/20010503.html

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/071500-01.htm

http://utfb.fb.org/News/july03/July%20'03%20on%20Turner%20Foundation.htm

The Green Inquisition: Part 1 - Global Environmentalist Reveal True Nature

Related: "The Green Gun" - Environmentalism & Global Governance Pose Threat To Freedom and National Sovereignty - a Series by Perry Hicks a GCN Exclusive

Website of Bjorn Lomborg

About the Author.....

Perry Hicks is a former Mississippi Coast resident and was a correspondent for the old Gulfport Star Journal. He has appeared on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor.” Perry has also hosted his own radio talk show on the auto industry with a mix of politics. Perry is a former college professor and a frequent contributor to GCN writing on stories of national importance with local interests. His articles can be found in the GCN Archive.

Contact the Author: arielsquarefour@hotmail.com