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Reality trumps enviro fantasies
Barry Cooper
Calgary Herald
December 30, 2003
The best year-end news was not that Saddam Hussein had been captured nor even that he was spilling the beans on the operational procedures of his former colleagues. From the start of the American-led invasion of Iraq last spring, it was just a matter of time until he was caught or killed, and tyrants have a congenital habit of singing like birds to postpone the inevitable in exchange for a few more days of existence.
Of course, Saddam's endgame was welcome, but the really good (and entirely unexpected) news was an event of the pen, not of the sword: The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation repudiated the findings of the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. This Committee had previously found a book by Bjorn Lomborg, called The Skeptical Environmentalist, to have been "objectively dishonest" and "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice." Along with noting a number of procedural mistakes and injustices, the Ministry pointed out that the assessment by the Committee was not backed up by documentation, was "completely void of argumentation," and was "emotional."
The news from Denmark vindicates a political scientist, which is always to be welcomed. Lomborg had the temerity to challenge a gaggle of radical environmentalists on their own turf. In his book and in his response to its reception, Lomborg showed beyond question that his critics were mostly ideological fanatics hiding behind their professional credentials as biologists and health scientists. The Ministry agreed. Their decision should be studied at length by the environmental alarmists in this country.
Lomborg wrote his book because he was provoked by the words of an economist, Julian Simon, who in 1997 declared that "the material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely." Being, Lomborg says, "an old left-wing Greenpeace member," as well as a handsome vegetarian, he was devoted to the fundamental dogma of radical environmentalism, namely that the global environment was deteriorating. Like all truly pious environmentalists, he was shocked at Simon's heresy.
Lomborg is a statistician as well as a political scientist. He knew that quantitative analysis would show quickly enough that the economist was a right-wing propagandist and the old lefties in Greenpeace were right. Now, the great problem in politics as well as in political science is not what we know but what we think we know that ain't so. And Lomborg found out that what he thought he knew about environmental deterioration was untrue. The book that reports the details of his discovery is more than 500 pages long, includes 2,930 footnotes, and was published (after extensive peer review) by Cambridge University Press, one of the great academic publishing houses of the world. In short, the envirofanatics could neither ignore nor refute Lomborg's work so they were compelled to discredit it.
Two year's ago Scientific American commissioned several authors, each greener than the next, to trash the book. They attacked Lomborg's scientific credibility -- he was just a political scientist after all, and had no standing in the greenie priesthood. They criticized his findings as well, even though he had used public, reputable, and official data to show, for example, that the world's forests were not disappearing, that energy and food will be indefinitely available, that air and water supplies are not growing more polluted, and that implementing the Kyoto agreement would be a colossal waste of money. Lomborg replied to this attack with a 32-page refutation. The magazine found space for a page and a half.
What seems to have offended the biologists and ecologists, to say nothing of the lawyers, editors, politicians and other radical environmentalists was Lomborg's insistence that there are trade-offs between such grandiose fantasies as Kyoto and providing clean drinking water in poor countries. This is basic economics. It is also commonsense: You can only spend a dollar once.
The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty was clearly impressed by the attack in Scientific American, and dutifully summarized it in their report. They were in receipt of Lomborg's long response to it and noted its existence in a line and a half. You don't have to be a member of a Danish government committee to smell something rotten.
Lomborg's vindication by his government is good news for the scientific discussion of climate change. Canadians, who have grown suspicious of the junk science invoked by greenies over everything from grizzly extinction to the perils of farmed salmon, can take courage that commonsense has not yet been extinguished, which in the long term is more important than the passing of another tyrant.
© National Post 2003
Copyright © 2003 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp. All rights reserved.
Optimized for browser versions 4.0 and higher.
Enjoy full access to this nationalpost.com story during our trial period. After January 24th, 2004, complete access will be limited to registered 6-day National Post print subscribers.
Reality trumps enviro fantasies
Barry Cooper
Calgary Herald
December 30, 2003
The best year-end news was not that Saddam Hussein had been captured nor even that he was spilling the beans on the operational procedures of his former colleagues. From the start of the American-led invasion of Iraq last spring, it was just a matter of time until he was caught or killed, and tyrants have a congenital habit of singing like birds to postpone the inevitable in exchange for a few more days of existence.
Of course, Saddam's endgame was welcome, but the really good (and entirely unexpected) news was an event of the pen, not of the sword: The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation repudiated the findings of the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. This Committee had previously found a book by Bjorn Lomborg, called The Skeptical Environmentalist, to have been "objectively dishonest" and "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice." Along with noting a number of procedural mistakes and injustices, the Ministry pointed out that the assessment by the Committee was not backed up by documentation, was "completely void of argumentation," and was "emotional."
The news from Denmark vindicates a political scientist, which is always to be welcomed. Lomborg had the temerity to challenge a gaggle of radical environmentalists on their own turf. In his book and in his response to its reception, Lomborg showed beyond question that his critics were mostly ideological fanatics hiding behind their professional credentials as biologists and health scientists. The Ministry agreed. Their decision should be studied at length by the environmental alarmists in this country.
Lomborg wrote his book because he was provoked by the words of an economist, Julian Simon, who in 1997 declared that "the material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely." Being, Lomborg says, "an old left-wing Greenpeace member," as well as a handsome vegetarian, he was devoted to the fundamental dogma of radical environmentalism, namely that the global environment was deteriorating. Like all truly pious environmentalists, he was shocked at Simon's heresy.
Lomborg is a statistician as well as a political scientist. He knew that quantitative analysis would show quickly enough that the economist was a right-wing propagandist and the old lefties in Greenpeace were right. Now, the great problem in politics as well as in political science is not what we know but what we think we know that ain't so. And Lomborg found out that what he thought he knew about environmental deterioration was untrue. The book that reports the details of his discovery is more than 500 pages long, includes 2,930 footnotes, and was published (after extensive peer review) by Cambridge University Press, one of the great academic publishing houses of the world. In short, the envirofanatics could neither ignore nor refute Lomborg's work so they were compelled to discredit it.
Two year's ago Scientific American commissioned several authors, each greener than the next, to trash the book. They attacked Lomborg's scientific credibility -- he was just a political scientist after all, and had no standing in the greenie priesthood. They criticized his findings as well, even though he had used public, reputable, and official data to show, for example, that the world's forests were not disappearing, that energy and food will be indefinitely available, that air and water supplies are not growing more polluted, and that implementing the Kyoto agreement would be a colossal waste of money. Lomborg replied to this attack with a 32-page refutation. The magazine found space for a page and a half.
What seems to have offended the biologists and ecologists, to say nothing of the lawyers, editors, politicians and other radical environmentalists was Lomborg's insistence that there are trade-offs between such grandiose fantasies as Kyoto and providing clean drinking water in poor countries. This is basic economics. It is also commonsense: You can only spend a dollar once.
The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty was clearly impressed by the attack in Scientific American, and dutifully summarized it in their report. They were in receipt of Lomborg's long response to it and noted its existence in a line and a half. You don't have to be a member of a Danish government committee to smell something rotten.
Lomborg's vindication by his government is good news for the scientific discussion of climate change. Canadians, who have grown suspicious of the junk science invoked by greenies over everything from grizzly extinction to the perils of farmed salmon, can take courage that commonsense has not yet been extinguished, which in the long term is more important than the passing of another tyrant.
© National Post 2003
Copyright © 2003 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp. All rights reserved.
Optimized for browser versions 4.0 and higher.