----- Original Message ----- From: "Harvey, Jeff" <harvey at cto.nioo.knaw.nl> To: <ecol-econ at csf.colorado.edu> Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 7:44 AM Subject: Lomborg
Hello everyone, I have been reading the thread of the Lomborg debate on your site, and I thought that I would make some points. First, I am a co-author (Jeff Harvey) of the critical review in Nature of Lomborg's book, and by association one of the targets of Ronald Bailey's attack in the right-wing think tank rag, "Reason Magazine". Bailey's bitter denunciation of Stuart Pimm and myself is hardly news, since Bailey has been promulgating anti-environmental crapola for years as adjunct shcolar in the Competetive Enterprise Institute and with the Reason Foundation, two fervently anti-environmental think tanks receiving generous dollops of corporate money. In a way, its a good thing that bonafide contrarians are rushing to Lomborg's aid, because it sheds a lot of light on the agenda-driven worldview the right are promoting through a variety of tactics all under the monicker of greenwash. I am sure that the readers and and contributors to this thread will have read the many scientific critiques of Lomborg's polemic, but in case you haven't, I have given an overview of the many appalling errors and misinterpretations which pervade the book below. I've read this brick twice and its chock full of value judgments, egregious errors in basic understandings of environmental science, an eliptical view of the empirical data, and plenty of straw men. You can read other excellent critiques in Scientific American, Grist Magazine, and via the Union of Concerned Scientists, where I also am a contributor. Most of the media has been utterly uncritical of the book, and accepts virtually everything Lomborg says at face value. In doing so, they have attempted to portray scientists as party-poopers who have been upstaged by [a naive] social scientist and have responded for purely political reasons. This is completely absurd, as Lomborg is plainly wrong in just about every aspect of his book.
The book, with its 2,900 footnotes and 2,000 references, gives the impression of balanced scholarship, but in reality what we get is a super selective inclusion of data ignoring reams of inconvenient studies. The whole thing parades as informed discussion, but some of the material is so badly researched and interpreted (e.g. biodiversity) that I would fail one of my undergraduate students if they were to write such trash. Importantly, the whole thing underlines how little Lomborg knows or understands of much about which he writes even though he does so as if he is an authority. He imagines that the ecosystems of the world exist solely to satisfy human desires (this is explicitly stated as early as on page 12) and that humanity can calculate best how to regulate natural systems of unimaginable complexity, arguments which not only reflect a staggering contempt of the natural world and our place in it, but also a staggering naievete and ignorance of systems we are only beginning to understand. Much of the book has an undergraduate quality to it, but is this surprising considering that ecology is the most complex of sciences and that Lomborg has never done a shred of work in the field? If I was an accountant and I wrote a book arguing that the sun revolves around the Earth, and it was similarly published without peer-review by astronomers in Nature or Science (this book was not peer reviewed by anyone with expertise in the relevant fields), I would find my scientific reputation in tatters. To be entirely honest, Lomborg deserves the same fate. He has shown a profound contempt for the comments of his peers and has repeatedly ignored comments from people with experience in environmental science who just so happen to think that many, if not most of his arguments are either not original, or are plainly wrong.
This brings me to the specific content of the book. The reason it is appalling (and not at all original) - like books by Gregg Easterbrook, Julian Simon etc. which preceded it, is that Lomborg, like the others, sees ecosystems simply as utilitarian sources, while dismissing (or clearly not understanding) the connection between ecosystem health and the prosperity of human society. Lomborg views ecosystems as nothing more than direct economic assets, so that an old growth forest is only useful in providing timber and a coral reef in generating tourist revenue. But the indirect value of preserving many of these ecosystems is clearly way over his head - as when he makes the ludicrous remark that protection of upland forests in China mitigating flooding has everything to do with economics and nothing to do with ecology. There is nothing at all in the book about the health of ecosystems which generate the underlying prosperity of all nation states.
It is hardly news that some environmental indicators have shown an improvement over time, but what Lomborg and his ilk have constantly ignored is the deteriorating conditions of ecosystems underlying these indicators. Thus, Lomborg ignores the wealth of data which shows the fraying nature of foodwebs and ecological communities, as demonstrated by the loss of coral reefs, wetlands, and eutrophication of aquatic ecosystems, while overlooking the effects of habitat fragmentation and invasive species on the health and functioning of ecosystems over variable spatial and temporal scales. I honestly believe that Lomborg just does not understand the processes embodied by the term "ecosystem services" so he glosses over them. However, in doing so his entire book is undermined - and what we get is a quantitative quagmire of "how much of this" and "how much of that" without much in the way qualitiative analyses. Thus, we get extended coverage of mineral resources, water, and prosperity but nothing on the health of ecosystems which scientists now know are better indicators of environmental (and human) well-being. Furthermore, the book is full of value judgments (such as "we have only lost 30% of global forest cover" and "per capita increases in garbage production represent only 45% since 1966"). This is strange considering the fact that early in his book Lomborg states that value judgments should not cloud our understanding of environmental problems. If these trends were to be statistically analysed (by a qualified statistician no doubt) the results would be highly significant, yet Lomborg downplays them. This underlines his Julian Simonesque bias - he is hardly measuring the "real state of the world" but in reality what we get is "a polemic's clearly biased and myopic view of the world".
Lomborg is also super-selective in the way he handles data. Thus, where global trends support his arguments, he highlights them, whereas when these are less favourable, he switches to regional trends. This is clearly evident with regards to food production and the per capita yield of certain crops. Moreover, he excludes studies which would clearly offset the claims he wishes to make. For example, in his biodiversity chapter, which is remarkably based on a chapter in a book by two economists (Julian Simon and Aaron Wildavsky, neither of whom understands anything about ecology), Lomborg ignores papers by many experts in the field which point to higher extinction rates than appear from his confused calculations. Recent papers by the likes of Pimm, Brooks, Balmford, Olsen, Lovejoy and others which paint a very different picture from Lomborg's are omitted in favor of older, discredited studies. In the chapter on acid rain, Lomborg's assertion that "it does not harm forests" is based on extrapolating a single graph from a book by Julian Simon. ONE FIGURE! Yet at the same time, hundreds of other studies reporting opposite trends are curiously ommitted. This trick is repeated throughout TSE; for instance, in the chapter on global warming, Lomborg very clearly is biased, because the IPCC has clearly stated that all scenarios of climate change - from more moderate ends of the scale [1.8 C] to severe ends of the scale [5.8 C] occur with EQUAL probability. There is just not enough certainty to say that climate change will be moderate or severe, and this conclusion was reached by 2,000 of the world's senior climate scientists in reports that went through three rounds of peer review and then each chapter was scrutinized by 12 review editors. Lomborg's book was not peer reviewed by life-scientists and he had the luxury of avoiding this criticism; thus, he sets about "proving" that climate change will "probably" be moderate, based on not a shred of scientific evidence. He constantly makes subjective judgments as if they are absolute, and this garbage is presented as sound science in his book. For instance, Lomborg cites several papers which project lower rates of temperature increase even though some of them suggest that their models are no more accurate than studies projecting higher temperatures (which he fails to disclose, proving that his view of the world is decidedly elliptical). He also fails to include papers which argue that IPCC doesn't go far enough in its projections. If Lomborg was the "hard-headed skeptic" he claims to be, he would have spared us a book filled with distortions but would instead have presented both sides in equal measure. However, although there is plenty of contrarian nonsense out there, he ignores this and focusses his jaded book on undermining environmental exaggerations.
Lomborg also accuses the IPCC of being politically motivated by failing to calculate the costs of failing to intervene on climate change, but this is precisely because many of the most severe costs will be on ecosystems and the species they contain, and which will have to adapt to rapidly changing conditions in already stressed systems (from a range of anthropogenic processes). Since damage to ecosystems is externalized in economics, it is hard to put any kind of price tag on their destruction, except to say that the costs for humanity could be staggering if climate change leads to large-scale disruptions in cycles of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and this further leads to the collpase of ecosystems. Lomborg continually dismisses ecosystems as providers of services upon which humanity depends for our survival, and instead claculates costs solely on such problems as rising sea levels and more extreme forms of weather. In his response to a critique (provided below) by top climate scientists, Stephen Schneider, Lomborg goes so far as to state that he ignores the effects of climate change on ecosystems because "I present the book from a human perspective", as if somehow our fate is not connected to the health of ecosystems. Lomborg does not have a clue about ecology, and to reiterate what I said above this undermines just about everything he says in his appalling book.
Lomborg makes many unsubstantiated statments in TSE. For example, he states "And finally, it is worth pointing out that today's world is much less vulnerable, precisely because trade and transport effectively act to reduce local risks". This is an absurd generalization. Globalization sustains the illusion among the rich nations that the limits to material growth have been permanently abolished, because developed nations can extend their destructive ecological footprints into less developed nations, while doing less damage within their own territories. Furthermore, the energy expended (and pollution generated) of transporting goods over long distances is not factored into Lomborg's argument. Lomborg: "And the worse they [the environmental NGO"s] can make this state [of the environment] appear, the easier it is to convince us we need to spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, kindergartens etc.". This statement could only be made by a wealthy, self assured academic living in his ivory tower. As several others have pointed out, such choices to not actually exist, and it is completely dishonest and dishonorable to suggest that they do. I could just as easily say that money from George W. Bush's 60 billion dollar son of star wars program, or the literally billions of dollars spent by business to lobby congress or buy political favor could be diverted to such causes. Lomborg reiterates this theme throughout the book.
Later in the book, Lomborg quotes the collective results of 13 different economic modelling studies of the costs of implementing the Kyoto Protocol (he puts them into a single overview). The models all share one crucical assumption - they assume that the only technological change that occurs is an annual fixed rate of improvement (about 1% per annum). Otherwise, the economy responds to carbon constraint by switching between existing energy technologies. What this means is that measures such as large carbon taxes are not concomitant with any of the technologies used to meet energy needs. Thus the models collectively ignore the technological changes that would be expected to be developed in response to mandated cuts in emissions. Yet, if we needed any more evidence of Lomborg's bias, it occurs on pages 283-284: "Global warming is not an ever worsening problem. In fact, under any reasonable scenario of technological change and without policy intervention, carbon emissions will not reach the A1F1 [the IPCC's worst case] and they will decline towards the end of the century, as we move towards ever cheaper renewable energy sources". Thus, Lomborg simultaneously argues that technological change will save the day without intervention, but is entirely uncritical of models that ignore technological change which show that intervention will be too costly to implement.
On extinction rates, where he is plainly wrong (if you have bothered to read and properly understand our Nature review, we dissect Lomborg's rhetoric). I won't go on at length except to say that Loborg's figure of 0.7% per 50 years is obtained by juxtaposing the known numbers of extinct and endangered species against those for which we have no information at all (which may represent 90% of all extant species, since more than 10 million species may exist). This estimate totally contradicts the 10-40% of well-known species that are already on the brink of extinction, and is 15-40 times less than the predictions of scientists who study them. For example: 12.5% of plants, 11% or birds, 34% of fish and 25% of mammals are currently threatened or endangered (see WRI report 2000; the scientists contributiong to this volume also believe this is a profound underestimate).
On acid rain, Lomborg bases his conclusion on a single graph (page 179, Fig. 98) from the politically-influenced National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP). The graph was never published in a peer-reviewed journal, but in a chapter of a book by Julian Simon (The Ultimate Resource). A recent published study in Canada on the effects of acid rain reported: "On soils sensitive to acidic deposition, tree health deteriorated as soil pH and exchangeable aluminum levels increased". Many studies report similar trends, and are ignored by Lomborg.
I don't have time to go into the thousands of other errors in the book, but his lack of caution and humility startles me - Lomborg speaks as if he is a sage of wisdom who has discovered the truth, which is hardly the fact. He lectures scientists in areas in which he is a veritable neophyte and writes in a sanctimonious fashion. If Lomborg is a modern day Galileo, that means just about everyone has been duped by all the Nobel Prize winners, Crafoord Laureates (winners of the Nobel equivalent in fields like ecology where Nobel prizes are not awarded) and other senior scientists, like myself, who vehemently disagree with Lomborg in just about every area. Lomborg is a statistician and not a scientist, and he has published only 1 peer-reviewed paper in his entire academic career. Doesn't this ring some alarm bells? It ought to.
The truth is this - the entire credibility of TSE hinges on Lomborg's status as a "reformed environmentalist", but a few years of passive membership in Greenpeace two decades ago hardly qualifies him for this title. But if his book were more aptly titled, "The Skeptical Statistician", nobody would buy it. And why isn't the media rushing to defend the reputations of scientists, including Nobel Prize winners and recipients of the Craaford Prize (awarded in fields outside those awarded by Nobel), whose reputations are trashed by Lomborg in TSE? It seems clear to me that the media is largely supporting Lomborg because his message, as scientifically fraudulent as it is, bolsters the arguments of those on the political right and lends weight to a corporate-driven political agenda; many of these transnational are corporate sponsers and advertisers in the media, and one of the most hostile is that of the Murdoch empire, which owns the rabidly conservative anti-environmental FOX media chain in the US and the Times, Sunday Times and Sun group network in the UK. Mr. leake, you are therefore just exposing your own political bias, even if its crapola. I am also sure that CEO's in boardrooms all over the world are toasting their "new hero", irrespective of the fact that his book contains little useful material and contradicts the scientific consensus in just about every conceivable area.
Finally, Lomborg claims he is not "hurt" by the criticisms, and argues that scientists who "should agree with him" are filled with indignation because of the "political consequences". First, Lomborg is annoyed because he viciously attacked Stuart Pimm and I in the Danish media; he also wrote to Paul Ehrlich to ask Professor Ehrlich if he had wrongly attributed a quotation to him, which appears in our Nature review. Both Paul and E.O. Wilson were labelled by Lomborg as "enthusiastic supporters of an ambitious plan, the Wildlands project, which aims to relocate most people from US cities to isolated city islands to create wildlife corridors". This incredible statement was written by two noted anti-environmental writers (Mann and Plummer) in Science, without actually interviewing Wilson or Ehrlich. Mann and Plummer, along with Wise Use and other right wing groups in the US have been trying for years to discredit the Wildlands Project, and nowhere in the project (of which I have much information) is there a desire to relocate people from cities; the founder, Dr. Michael Soule, says that the aim of the project is actually to work with landowners to protect wildlife habitat. Lomborg did not contact either Wilson or Ehrlich but instead relied a third party (the mediocre Mann and Plummer article) for information about the Wildlands Project (which shows how shallow he must be), and, after our review was published, wrote personally to Ehrlich to get his opinion. Ehrlich and E.O. Wilson both replied personally to Lomborg. Here are their actual responses:
Dear Mr. Lomborg
The Pimm/Harvey review, which was much too kind to your book, is absolutely correct. As with most of the other issues you covered, you misread or misinterpreted Mann and Plummer's mediocre article, failed to go to original sources, and generally bungled the story. I suggest you spend the next few years studying elementary environmental science, publish some papers on it in the refereed literature, and then join the debate in any area where you have achieved at least basic competence, if you can. You might also flunk the undergraduates who wrote your book.
Paul R. Ehrlich
And here is Professor E.O. Wilson's reply:
Dear Mr. Lomborg:
Paul Ehrlich, in his November 28 response to you, speaks for me as well, and, in general tone and terms, for every environmental scientist I know who is acquainted with the sordid mess created by your book. The greatest regret I have about it all is the time wasted by scientists correcting the misinformation you created.
Sincerely,
Prof. E.O. Wilson
The second point is to say the scientific community is almost unanimously filled with indignation because Lomborg's shallow book has done considerable harm to the public's perception of environmental issues. The political right loves the book because it implies that there are no limits to material growth, but as I have said above the book is garbage simply because Lomborg has failed to examine the deteriorating condition of ecological systems which provide the infrastructure for this continued growth. The book is a polemic and will end up on the scrap heap of history like its predecessors, but the damage it has done to credible science is hard to calculate, although it is likely to be significant. I am just sad that many in the media have distorted facts to produce a "story". The Lomborg story is hardly new, but it is gaining so much attention around the world because it strikes a chord for those with vested interests.
Dr. Jeffrey A. Harvey, Senior Scientist, Department of Multitrophic Interactions, Netherlands institute of Ecology, Centre for Terrestrial Ecology, PO Box 40, 6666 ZG Heteren, The Netherlands
Tel: 026 4791 306