April 6, 2002

OPTIMISTIC PROPHET SEES ENVIRONMENT'S PROGRESS

Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg used to believe what he now calls "the Litany" about the deteriorating environment of the earth. How could he not? He's an old left-wing Greenpeace vegetarian, if he does say so himself.

You know the Litany: resources running out, a growing population growing ever hungrier, air and water more polluted, forests disappearing, species going extinct in unprecedented numbers, topsoil blowing away, wilderness vanishing.

We've heard it so often, Lomborg says, that yet another repetition is almost reassuring.

As a believer who saw the Litany challenged in a Wired interview with economist Julian Simon, he set out to prove Simon wrong. Instead, he concluded Simon was mostly right, and in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World he lays out the data that demonstrate doomsday is not upon us.

For which good news, he has been savagely attacked. But then, so was Simon.

In one way the attack is odd, however, because it stresses not so much that Lomborg is wrong but that even if he's right, he shouldn't be saying these things. The magazine Scientific American published an 11-page manifesto in January titled "Misleading Math about the Earth" for which they solicited four scientists to write about "Lomborg's misrepresentation of their fields," as editor John Rennie described it. Rennie introduced the section with his own reaction to "Lomborg's presumption" that he understands the science better than researchers who have devoted their lives to it.

As it happens, that is not Lomborg's point; he uses the same scientific information that everybody uses. His quarrel is with the groups that hype supposed environmental disaster to boost their own fortunes, and their credulous enablers in the media.

Rennie goes on to say "it is equally curious that he finds the same contrarian good news lurking in every diverse area of environmental science." But it's no more curious than that the Worldwatch Institute, say, finds bad news everywhere -- though often it takes some really diligent searching. What's more interesting is why good news should be contrarian.

The Economist magazine, which has championed Lomborg's book, unearthed one reason in the work of Stephen Schenider, one of Scientific American's "anti-Lomborgians." Schneider told Discover magazine in 1989 that in order to capture the public's imagination, "we (scientists) have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have."

Tell necessary lies, that is. As The Economist concluded, "Science needs no defending from Mr. Lomborg. It may well need defending form champions like Mr. Schneider."

Is it that the critics are worried that Lomborg's optimism will translate into complacency? Lomborg is not complacent. But he makes a useful distinction between "vastly improved" and "good enough." The first, he says, refers to what the world does look like, and the second to what it ought to look like.

No one ought to starve, but in 1970 35 percent of the population of developing countries was starving (receiving no more than the minimum calories needed to survive). "In 1996, it was 18 percent and the United Nations expects that the figure will have fallen to 12 percent by 2010," Lomborg writes.

Even in absolute terms, the number of people starving has fallen by 237 million. But because population in the developing world has soared in the past 30 years, the number of people who are getting enough to eat has grown by 2 billion in the same time.

It really matters whether people are optimistic or pessimistic about these things. If food supplies are generally improving, then agricultural practices and policies are likely more right than wrong, and we should continue in the same direction. If they're getting catastrophically worse, maybe we should stop what we're doing and try something else.

I picked food as one topic out of many. The first chapter of the book, which summarizes its conclusions, is available on the author's Web site, lomborg.org. The Scientific American critique would be there too, but the magazine threatened to sue him if he didn't take it down.

Lomborg says that a realistic understanding of environmental data is necessary in order to ensure that money spent on improving the environment is directed to the most effective uses. Now his ideas are in for a real-world test. Denmark's recently elected prime minister, Andreas Fogh Rasmussen, has named him head of the country's new Institute for Environmental Assessment, to predictable dismay from Denmark's green lobby. I bet they're wrong.