“The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring The Real State of the World” by Bjorn Lomborg, Cambridge University Press, $28. 515 pages. “The Skeptical Environmentalist” is one of the more controversial books published this year. Bjorn Lomborg, an associate professor of statistics at the University of Denmark, proved – through mathematical theories applied to aspects of environmentalism – that many accepted theories of environmentalism are false. The book and its author have been verbally harpooned by devout environmentalists all over the world. The book’s premise originated when Lomborg (who previously harbored, in his own words, “left-wing Greenpeace views”) challenged the viewpoints of University of Maryland-based economist Julian Simon. The latter was preaching the policies now espoused in the book. To Lomborg’s surprise his research and mathematical conclusions upheld Simon’s viewpoints. Disputing the environmentalist theory that the world is running out of food, Lomborg writes, “We have seen that agriculture has produced more and more food and calories per capita in both the developed and the developing worlds since 1961.” He backs up that statement with data in graph form. Environmentalists also like to point out that the Earth’s water supply is insufficient and that deforestation is out of control. Again Lomborg disagrees. He points out, “…there is a fundamental problem when you only look at the total water sources and try to answer whether there are sufficient supplies of water. The trouble is that we do not necessarily know how and how wisely the water is used.” Regarding deforestation, Lomborg says, ” In global terms it is estimated that overall burning of biomass has grown by only 50 percent since 1880, despite the rapid population increase and an associated increase in the use of slash-and-burn agriculture.” The author does agree that global warming is a major problem. Regardless, environmentalists maintain that Lomborg is a statistician and not a scientist, and thus he fudged his data to justify his controversial viewpoints on environmentalism. In an issue of the science magazine Nature, Dr. Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservative biology at Columbia University, dismissed Lomborg’s findings. “…he has one possibly very flawed paper in an international journal on game theory, no publications on environmental issues, and yet manages to dismiss the science of dozens of the world’s best scientists…” Yet Lomborg’s book does bring to the forefront the concept that environmentalists and some university professors often produce doom-and-gloom statistics, and those forecasts are then relayed by the media. Lomborg places no blame for the information and bleak media reports. “We get primarily negative news not because the journalists have evil intentions, but because the news media are placed in an incentive structure that makes it profitable to focus on negative occurrences. So, we must get to grips with the fact that the stream of information we receive is inherently lopsided and compensate for it,” he writes. The conclusions in Lomborg’s book are positive and often contradictory to a pro-environmentalist agenda. He concludes that the severity of many forms of pollution have been exaggerated. One example he cites is London, England, where air pollution was at its worst in 1890 and has diminished ever since. In his book, Lomborg criticizes former Vice President Al Gore’s environmentalist views and policies. “Ironically, Al Gore’s dressing-down of our society is only possible because growth has liberated us (and him) sufficiently from our physical limitations to give us the possibility to choose – even if this choice is to turn one’s back on present-day society,” Lomborg writes. For the time being, Lomborg seems to have had the more popular political views on environmentalism.

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