http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/columnist/0,1886,56-178851,00.html
MARCH 23, 2003 Book Review Greenies see red over book
By Andy Ho SENIOR CORRESPONDENT
SAVING the environment has become such a religion that some of its practitioners have become quite fanatical.
Recently, the Danish Research Agency called upon Cambridge University Press to suppress the publication of a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, declaring its author, Dr Bjorn Lomborg, to be 'scientifically dishonest'.
Indeed, the storm of protests over Dr Lomborg's book provoked Dr Deepak Lal, the James Coleman Professor of International Development at the University of California, Los Angeles, to write to the Financial Times, calling such fervour eco-fundamentalism, and the action a 'fatwa against Mr Lomborg, like Ayatollah Komeini's against Salman Rushdie...'
Such 'venomous, ad hominem condemnation of the heretic' must mean one thing, said another FT reader, wryly. It suggests 'what any fighter pilot knows: when you start receiving flak, you're right over the target.'
Dr Lomborg's target - environmental data on which much public policy the world over is based - deserves closer scrutiny. As a statistician, he does this with panache, taking a stab at 'measuring the real state of the world', as the book's subtitle declares.
The hugely successful book, which has gone through at least seven printings, examines several green issues such as climate change, population and biodiversity, to conclude that the future of the world's environment is not as dire as the greenies would have us believe.
Irked environmentalists have come out hurling invective, among them the reputable magazine, Scientific American, which invited, for example, The World Bank's chief biodiversity adviser, Mr Thomas Lovejoy, to refute Dr Lomborg on biodiversity and deforestation.
Barely concealing his disgust, Mr Lovejoy begins his critique by calling it 'disconcerting' that Dr Lomborg even dared to ask if biodiversity was important.
But that is a legitimate question, for even if you believe that many species of flora and fauna are disappearing quickly, the value judgment remains whether that loss matters - to you.
Greenies also assume that a reduction in natural habitats invariably means a proportional loss in species; Mr Lovejoy is upset when Dr Lomborg disputes this.
Citing the World Conservation Union's own reservations about this notion, Dr Lomborg points out that models used by environmentalists would suggest that since Brazil's Atlantic rainforest, for example, has been reduced by 90 per cent, half of all its species should have gone extinct.
Yet when the Brazilian Society of Zoology analysed a group of 300 animals, they could not find a single species that had died out. Likewise, not one species of plants had gone extinct.
Incredibly, Mr Lovejoy's repartee is that there may not be enough good biologists in Brazil to ascertain if any species have indeed gone extinct. He ventures that many species must be barely hanging on.
Yet these forests were cleared in the 1800s so such 'living dead' species have had over a century to die out - but have not.
Still, Mr Lovejoy repeats the mantra that biodiversity loss can only get worse.
This 'tsunami of extinction' already translates into a monetary loss of US$11 trillion (S$19.3 trillion), according to the environmental group World Worldlife Fund, which Lovejoy headed from 1987 to 1998.
In contrast, the United Nations predicts a 0.1-1.0 per cent species loss over the next 50 years rather than Mr Lovejoy's projection in 1980 that 15-20 per cent of species would be extinct by 2000.
Dr Lomborg also points out that the UN climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), projects in all its scenarios, save one, that there will be more, not less, forested areas by 2100.
In his website, he elucidates how his many critics resort to mischaracterising his arguments.
For example, Mr Lovejoy insinuates that Dr Lomborg ignores completely the fact that seven out of 60 species of birds unique to Puerto Rico were lost when its primary forests were reduced by 99 per cent over the last 400 years. The book, in fact, says: 'Only seven out of 60 species of birds had become extinct although the island is today home to 97 species of birds.'
So also with Prof Stephen Schneider, a Stanford biology professor, who critiques Dr Lomborg's discussion about global warning for the Scientific American.
Prof Schneider, for example, laments that most of Dr Lomborg's 2930 'citations are to secondary literature (whereas) IPCC authors, by contrast, were subjected to three rounds of review by hundreds of outside experts.'
What Prof Schneider, who authored several IPCC chapters himself, neglects to mention is that a third of the 646 endnotes in Dr Lomborg's chapter on global warming cite IPCC reports, which are themselves secondary reports - like many issued by the IMF, World Bank, WHO and FAO.
It would be too inefficient in discussing a global scale problem not to use the vast amounts of data offered by secondary sources - you cannot be collecting data yourself for every problem you want to comment on.
Such reports are probably the best summaries of how scientists currently understand climate science, for instance.
Despite his arguments, and these barbs, you would be wrong to think the myth buster is against environmentalism. In fact, Dr Lomborg, a backpacking, former Sierra Club member, does advocate dealing with environmental problems but on a sound basis and with correct priorities.
As a first cut at slicing the problem of prioritising environmental woes, his hefty 515-page book is a worthwhile read - as long as you are not an eco-fundamentalist.
(Andy Ho is a senior writer with The Straits Times.)
