>From today's Guardian newspaper
The environmental Litany and data By Bjørn Lomborg, Ph.D., associate professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Pls. Note that this is a first (un-edited) version, with references.
We are all familiar with the Litany of our ever deteriorating environment.1 This is incessantly repeated doomsday message from the media, as when Time magazine tell us how “everyone knows the planet is in bad shape,”2 and when New Scientist title their environmental overview with “Selfdestruct.”3 The general message of the Litany is that the environment is in poor shape here on Earth.4 Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and the water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet’s species are becoming extinct is vast numbers – we kill off more than 40,000 each year. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing and the coral reefs are dying. We are defiling our Earth, the fertile topsoil is disappearing, we are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, decimating the biosphere, and will end up killing ourselves in the process. The world’s ecosystem is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limit of viability, and the limits of growth are becoming apparent.5 We know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring. There is, however, one problem: it does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence. This is what we will look at throughout this series of articles.6 We are not running out of energy or natural resources. There will be more and more food per head of the world’s population. Fewer and fewer people are starving. In 1900 we lived for an average of 30 years; today we live for 67.7 According to the UN we have reduced poverty more in the last 50 years than we did in the preceding 500, and it has been reduced in practically every country.8 Global warming, though its size and future projections are rather unrealistically pessimistic, is probably taking place, but the typical cure of early and radical fossil fuel cutbacks is way worse than the original affliction, and moreover its total impact will not pose a devastating problem for our future. Nor will we lose 25-50 percent of all species in our lifetime – in fact we are losing probably 0.7 percent. Acid rain does not kill the forests, and the air and water around us are becoming less and less polluted (see sidebar). Mankind’s lot has actually improved in terms of practically every measurable indicator. But note carefully what I am saying here: that by far the majority of indicators show that mankind’s lot as vastly improved.
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents /2001/08/14/intro.pdf -- James Heartfield