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 One

By Perry Hicks - Special to GulfCoastNews.com

To use a graphical metaphor, the course of history is seldom driven by a solitary human event but instead is impacted by any number of trend lines converging on a single, sometimes all important, point in time. It is my view that we are at one of those critical moments where not only is our personal freedom at stake, but our entire way of life hangs in the balance.

One of those trend lines menacing our liberty is the deceit of “anthropogenic global warming.” While CO2 may have some effect on average planetary temperature, it certainly hasn’t been proven to be the only, nor even a major, factor. However, since carbon is a principle chemical component of nearly all viable sources of industrial energy, socialists can use environmental mandates to circumvent normal democratic political processes.

It is my belief that global warming is being used as a pretense to completely restructure earth’s political topography. Hence, little mention is made of the other more dominant factors in climate change. The constant drum beat from the environmental left is that industry, through its attendant consumption of raw materials, is threatening the environment and is the presumptive force driving catastrophic global warming. Specifically, prosperity and “inappropriate levels of technology” are labeled the chief culprits in ecological destruction. Hence, these two factors are targeted for social change. To meet his objective, considerable propaganda will be necessary to convince the public that a decent into poverty will be in their best interest.

If the environmental left has their way, the industrialized world would be thrust into a technological dark age with its attendant poverty, crowding, hunger, desperation, shortened life span, and higher birth rates. The resulting overpopulation would cheapen life and enable authorities to employ euthanasia when people are no longer found to be useful to society.

In short, the left’s solution is to intentionally destroy the very nations that have the wealth and technology to insure a clean and healthy environment. Of course, the center-piece of this plan is the discontinuance of the United States of America- at least as we know it.

Former president Ronald Regan may have thought that winning the Cold War had relegated communism to the ash heap of history, but the far left has yet to accept the collapse of the old Soviet Union. Undaunted, socialism strives on to realize their dream of subjugating the entire globe, this time using the environment and, as Lenin once referred to them, “useful idiots,” to impose servitude.

An Environmental Inquisition

"…we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination…getting loads of media coverage….we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”

Dr. Stephen Schneider - Former climate researcher for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado; now faculty at Stanford University, as quoted in “Trashing the Planet,” by Dixy Lee Ray, HarperPerennial, 1990....(For Scheider's full quote, Click Here - Editor)

If you listen to the environmental left, there is never a doubt in their mind that anthropogenic CO2 is driving the world toward a climatological catastrophe. They pound this theme home over and over again in press releases hailing ever newer and supposedly more convincing studies; their self-sanctifying claim is that the majority of credible scientists subscribe to the theory of global warming. To do otherwise, as Scripp’s Institution of Oceanography researcher, Tim Barnett, has asserted, is simply not rational.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1490248,00.html

Despite Barnett’s claims otherwise, rational people not only do, but should raise questions particularly when cataclysmic claims do not add up- or more importantly- ever come to pass. To put it more bluntly, it is quite rational to question the assertions of those who, despite their claims to be the sole possessors of “good science,” push remedies that could have sinister consequences.

As would be expected, questioning the environmental left can be quite dangerous. Case in point is the savaging a self-described liberal and altruistic environmentalist, Danish university professor, Bjorn Lomborg, took at the hands of the environmental elite.

What could the former Greenpeace member have done to deserve such a public thrashing? He had the temerity to assert that counter to activist’s claims the state of the environment is not getting worse; it is actually getting better.

Back in 1997, Lomborg had an epiphany when he set out to disprove the assertions of the late American political economist, Julian Simon (1932-1998). Try as he might, Lomborg couldn’t find fault with Simon conclusions ultimately leading to his 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge University Press.)

Lomborg’s logical analysis of hard data initially made him a favorite of the elite press, such as Britain’s conservative Economist and socialist Guardian and America’s liberal New York Times and Washington Post. All of these publications gushed over Lomborg’s common sense approach to targeting poverty as the real cause of the world’s environmental woes.

However, the environmental left was not going allow this kind of apostasy to stand so Lomborg did not have long to wait for attacks on this credibility to begin. For his departure from what he calls the environmental “litany,” Lomborg reaped the special derision and scorn especially reserved for what Jim Peron in a Liberal Values dot org piece calls “heretics;” those who were once believers but had come to loose their faith.

Punishing Heresy

We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels. -- Carl Amery, a founding father in the German green movement.

By December, 2001, the environmental magazine, Grist, had devoted a special issue to Lomborg with six leading environmentalists, Norman Myers, Lester Brown, Emily Mathews, Al Hammond, Devra Davis, David Nemzow, and one of Grist’s own editors, Kathryn Schultz, excoriating Lomborg.

In particular, Schulz ostracizes Lomborg as being “unqualified” to comment on environmental matters although her own credentials qualifying her to critique Lomborg are not listed. A direct inquiry to Schulz returned the following bio:

“Kathryn Schulz is the editor at large and former managing editor of the online environmental magazine Grist. Prior to joining the staff, she was a reporter and editor for The Santiago Times, Chile's English-language newspaper, where she covered environmental, labor, and human rights issues. In 2004, she was one of the recipients of the Pew International Journalism Fellowships. Her freelance work, on topics ranging from global climate change to Augusto Pinochet, has appeared in publications from Rolling Stone to The New York Times Magazine. She graduated from Brown University in 1996 with a bachelor's degree in history and currently lives in Brooklyn.”

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2001/12/12/infamous/index.html

The remaining writers did not hesitate to criticize Lomborg in a very pejorative way; such as when Devra Davis calls The Skeptical Environmentalist a “big and infuriating book” by a “self-described former environmentalist with no training in science.” Davis goes on to admit that the facts Lomborg states are correct but complains that he only chose “good” environmental news.

Without realizing it, Davis leaves the reader to conclude that environmentalists themselves willfully select bad news. Even more fantastic is how she concedes that some environmentalists have indeed made “bona fide mistakes.”

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2001/12/12/unhealthy/index.html

E.O. Wilson opined that environmentalism has to put up with “contrarians” like Lomborg who are a “parasite load” on genuine scientists who have to expend energy combating scurrilous anti-environmental assertions in the media. Wilson accuses Lomborg of “willful ignorance, selective quotations,” and failing to communicate with “genuine experts.”

As to specificity, Wilson details how Lomborg’s stated species extinction rate of 0.7% over the next 50 years (.014%) is at odds with “the most conservative species extinction rates by authorities in the field.” Wilson specifies that “before humans existed” the extinction rate was “.0001 percent” and today “most (estimates) hover around 1000 times” that or 0.1% per year.

The problem with Wilson’s argument is that despite his claims to precision, no one actually knows the percentage of extinction because no one knows the total number of species. In order to calculate a percentage, one must know the whole. The arithmetic for percentages is proof in itself.

Consider the formula:

% Extinctions = (# extinctions / total # of Species) X 100

The numbers environmentalists use to determine species loss is based on an estimated species per land area curve that may work well with small island observations but fails for obvious reasons with large land masses. The Skeptical Environmentalist takes a wrecking ball to this presumptive process of proclaiming species estimates to be “hard facts.”

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2001/12/12/point

Allen Hammond was particularly vexed by Lomborg’s thesis that “environmental quality is improving” and that “environmental community is not admitting to those improvements for its own cynical reasons.” Even more perturbing to Hammond is that Lomborg’s book had captured an “outpouring of media coverage.”

Hammond then scoffs at Lomborg’s citation of an environmental “litany” and criticizes the use of what Hammond characterizes as “mistaken views widely held 30 years ago.” He also laughingly supports some of his positions by citing himself.

While Hammond’s candor denying infallibility is refreshing, the problem with his criticism here is that many of these “mistaken views” are still widely espoused (as we will see later) and continue to be propagated throughout the mainstream press and popular culture.

Hammond does make a valid point that industry does work more with environmental groups to reduce ecological impact than the media admits. However, it isn’t because governments and special interest groups have turned away from what Hammond calls “command and control” (read coercion.) In my view, the threat of litigation, negative public exposure, and additional regulation is more than enough to keep many corporations cowed.

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2001/12/12/hammond-argument

Lester Brown’s critique is particularly personal in tone and content. He makes a point of stating that Lomborg had never published a scientific paper. Brown suggests snidely, “There may be a reason for that.”

Sure is Mr. Brown: Bjorn Lomborg is not nor has he ever claimed to be a scientist. Lomborg is a statistician. His specialty is not acquiring data but analyzing it; his credentials for which make him imminently qualified. Brown not only leaves this simple fact out but quite dishonestly implies that Lomborg is a presumptive scientist whose colleagues have had to disassociate themselves.

True, Lomborg has been under attack, but not because he is an errant scientist, but because his analysis does not support the socialist belief system of the environmental left. Lomborg makes a clear argument that raising the third-world out of poverty will lessen their birth rates and give them the prosperity to clean up their own environment.

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2001/12/12/bjorn

Emily Mathews quite arrogantly charges that in regard to global deforestation, Lomborg “doesn’t know his sources well enough to interpret them properly.”

In his book, Lomborg challenges the World Wildlife Fund’s estimate that 2/3rds of the pre-agricultural forests, as defined to having existed since before 6000 B.C. without having been cut at least one time, have been “lost.” Mathews chides Lomborg for confusing various categories of forestation, particularly failing to differentiate between total forestation and “old growth.”

Mathew’s argument reminds me of a disagreement I once had with an environmentalist over whether or not we had more trees today than in the time of George Washington. My former friend told me that to the effect that no credible environmentalist would say the entire biomass of trees today exceeded that of over 200 years ago. While a “credible environmentalist” probably would not say that, this does not necessarily make it true.

This “old growth” definition is a specious one in that it implies that the trees therein have lived for thousands upon thousands of years and this unbroken continuance is somehow more than just imperative, it is actually holy.

While trees do live a very long time, they continually die and new seedlings reemerge. As trees age, they become susceptible to disease, storms, and forest fires. Plants, insects and wildlife can and do quickly reenter all but the most blackened wastelands created by forest fires. As we have seen in Central America and Southeast Asia, a jungle (rain forest in environmental parlance) can even retake mighty cities.

Note that environmentalists themselves have asserted that red maples live about 80 to 250 years and white oaks 300-600. While there are some examples of very, very old trees, such as Bristlecones and Sequoias living for several thousand years, the averages are actually much lower. The National Resources Defense Council states the Redwoods “typically live 500 years” with only some living “to more than 2000.”

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2001/12/12/for

http://www.nrdc.org/land/use/pl/plredw.asp

In Part Two, we will see how Scientific American enjoined the effort to discredit Lomborg only to expose the falsehoods in their position and the weakness of their character.

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