Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 26-30 of 333
 Read what the fuss is all about February 20, 2007
Steven Sabin (Lake Tahoe, NV USA)
23 out of 25 found this review helpful
What do you get when an admitted environmentalist, political liberal, and expert in statistics decides to examine the science behind many of the mantras in the environmental movement? Very provocative reading, as Lomborg has been the subject of much rebuttal in magazines such as "Science." A quasi scientific organization in Denmark even attempted the equivalent of "disbarring" him - which should lead one to believe that he's perhaps touched a raw nerve that was in dire need of scrutiny instead of just swallowing everything we're told about how precarious the state of the earth is at present.
I got this book precisely because I wanted to get a view from someone who would normally be biased towards a sympathetic interpretation of the data supporting numerous environmental causes. I figured that if HE found the data less than compelling in many cases, that I would be wise to pay attention. After all, he can't be dismissed with haughty sniffs of, "Big Oil" "Right Wing Hack" "Profit Over Planet" and the usual parade of other predictable snubbs.
I have sometimes seen Lomborg dismissed as someone who analyzes gambling because he has expertise in "Game Theory" but those who make such assertions do not have the slightest notion of what Game Theory is all about. For convenience, here's the short definition courtesy of wikipedia:
"Game theory is often described as a branch of applied mathematics and economics that studies situations where players choose different actions in an attempt to maximize their returns. The essential feature, however, is that it provides a formal modelling approach to social situations in which decision makers interact with other minds. Game theory extends the simpler optimization approach developed in neoclassical economics."
In other words, Lomborg's expertise is in evaluating not only statistics, but the economic consequences of various choices related to social policy. This is particularly important for environmental issues because for things like global warming, potentially trillions of dollars can be spent on actions that might make people "feel" they are doing something positive, but which has very limited benefit. Kind of like LBJ's war on poverty - trillions spent and things are actually worse today, not better. Let's not make the same mistakes with the environment.
Consequently, I think it is inappropriate to dismiss Lomborg as not having the appropriate "specialization" to embark upon a book of this nature. He took the available data from published reports (such as the IPCC's reports on Global Warming), analyzed it, and presented sound conclusions about whether the earth is really "on the brink" as many would have us believe or if the world is actually a vastly better planet than it was even 150 years ago.
I enjoyed the book and encourage you to read it. You may not agree with every conclusion, but it is an alternative and - I think - rational viewpoint that is becoming increasingly harder to find in today's climate of highly politicized science.
The book is an ambitious undertaking with over 2000 citations in the bibliogrophy, hundreds of diagrams, and a scholarly approach throughout.
Mr. Lomborg is to be commended for an outstanding book that injects reality into the situation and let's us know that perhaps things are not so bad as Al Gore and his fellow alarmists would lead us to believe.
 Priorities are the key February 19, 2007
R Weaver
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
It's hard to believe that at some level everyone is not an environmentalist to a degree. The problem is that the hype surrounding the various environmental issues turns people like me off. Some of the claims are clearly fiction and it's hard to sort it all out.
This book does a great job of cutting through the hype and getting to the facts to that we can make good choices about the environment. Choices based on facts not hype.
One of the first things that Lomborg shows is that everyone has a horse in this race - there are no unbiased observers. Scientists and environmental organizations make $millions by scaring people oil companies make $millions selling products that produce pollution. They both are biased.
If you really care about the environment you should read this book.
`Gore Wars' / analysis of the skeptical environmentalist (tse) January 18, 2007
Gerald T. Westbrook (Texas)
19 out of 24 found this review helpful
I first became aware of tse late in 2001 and have read many parts of it. However, this will not be my review of this book, but rather will focus on a rather important and unique commentary that may not have been covered here. This 2002 commentary, entitled `Gore Wars', is by Judge Alex Kozinski. Judge Kozinski sits on the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. This 27 page essay can be found by a Google search: "Alex Kozinski" "Gore Wars". In his introduction one learns that the `Gore Wars' is in reality, a review of tse. I don't know if Kozinski chose to couch his essay in the spirit of Star Wars because so many of the claims and predictions of the environmental crowd come across as science fiction, but it is possible. Kozinski bemoans the long chronology of doomsday edicts that started with The Limits to Growth in the early `70s. He calls this tome "a bunch of hooey." He notes the most recent addition to this alarmist chronology is on global warming. At the end of his introduction Kozinski wondered whether anyone would ever write a book thoroughly analyzing the huge number of environmental scares and explaining how much was legitimate and how much was hype. That book is now here, namely tse by Bjørn Lomborg (BL), a Danish, environmental statistician.
The first section in this commentary is entitled: I. The Phantom Menace. He notes that BL challenges "The Litany" -- namely the "list of hazards that environmental groups present as plaguing mankind." After much analysis BL reaches "different conclusions from the environmentalists about the kind, degree, pace and method of change that we should pursue." Kozinski continues "we should not be smugly satisfied with the current state of the world. "It suggests, rather, that we must be very careful about the type of changes we bring about, lest we undermine the very values that we seek to promote." Global warming is surely the number one area that we need to be very careful on what we do.
The second section in this commentary is entitled: II. The Attack of the Clones. Kozinski notes this part of tse is where BL examines the state of the world in those many areas that have been the subject of alarmist predictions by the Clones. Kozinski notes that BL "paints a picture of a world where human welfare is dramatically improving in just about every way one might measure it." Yes, there are many ways things can be improved, but "all measurable trends point in a positive direction."
The third section in this commentary is entitled III. The Empire Strikes Back. It should surprise no one that the Clones despise tse and BL and have launched a furious, almost desperate, counter attack. Hundreds, possibly even into the thousands of Clones have challenged BL. Two examples of critiques are by E. O. Wilson and John Holden, but BL defended his work against these inputs. The volume of attacks, however, has been so large that some have compared this to the Gallileo inquisition.
The fourth section in this commentary is entitled IV. Return of the Luddi. Kozinski noted that as "poverty recedes - - and it surely has over the course of human history, despite increases in population - - the problems we fear have tended to be ameliorated or disappear, not get worse." He asks why "then do we hear so much bad news about the environment?" The answer to this question "is because environmental activists often lie, in big ways and small, in order to create the false impression that we are going from one environmental crisis to another." And Lomborg brilliantly "demonstrates the ways in which professional environmentalists play fast and loose with the truth." In short "Environmentalists manipulate data, so as to create a false picture about the state of the world.
This is a very short summary of his review of tse. Go to Google and look up this essay.
 A real hawk scares the Chicken Littles November 2, 2006
Harry Eagar (Maui)
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
Bjorn Lomborg, a mild-mannered professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, has got the green lobby running scared. Since the Danish version of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" was published in 1998, an international smear campaign has been mounted against him.
All he said was that most of the "Litany" fails to withstand scrutiny under statistical analysis. The Litany is the green creed that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, that soon we will not have enough food or fuel or space, that we are busy killing off most of the other animals and plants, that we are sickening ourselves with pesticides and pollution, and that, to top it all off, we are cooking the planet.
Problems face us, Lomborg admits, but the answer is not to abandon wealth but to make the developing world -- where most of these problems are most acute -- as rich as the developed world.
Others, like Peter Huber in 'Hard Green.' have said the same, but they were not rewarded with an intercontinental counterattack.
The reason, presumably, is that Lomborg and his 10 students have backed up their version of the past and vision of the future much more capably than previous critics of greenness.
There can be no question that Lomborg is right about the past. His hundreds of graphs -- all based on the common fund of data from the United Nations and similar open sources -- prove that, for example, the number of poor people in the world with access to safe drinking water has grown from 30 percent to 80 percent since 1970. "Not good enough," Lomborg says, but clearly whatever we have been doing was on the right track.
"Poverty and not the environment is the primary limitation for solutions to our problems," he writes, which is no different from Huber's remark that a starving peasant hunched over a dung fire is not green, just poor. Who could argue with that?
Lots of people. The counterattack has taken a weird form. First, the critics say Lomborg is lambasting the environmental cassandras of 30 years ago, but that those statements no longer represent green thinking. The critics seem not to understand that this complaint concedes that we shouldn't have been listening to the Chicken Littles of a generation ago.
Be that as it may, the complaint is false. As Lomborg says, thanks to the Internet he was able to update his book with statements published as recently as a few months before the 2001 publication date of the English edition.
And his text proves it. It turns out, in fact, that the preposterous statements made by the likes of Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown in 1970 -- predictions that, for example, the population of the United States would have been reduced by famine to 22.5 million by now --are still being made by new Chicken Littles. (The old ones haven't shut up, either.)
Pick just about anything you have been told to worry about in the last decade, and you will find the situation graphed in "The Skeptical Environmentalist."
Epidemic of breast cancer? Adjusted for age, down 18 percent. Mass extinctions, running at 40,000 species per year? Actual rate unknown but at least a thousand times slower. Destruction of the rainforest? The biggest one, in Brazil, is still 86 percent intact.
However, numbers don't tell the whole story. At current rates of reduction, the Brazilian forest will be much smaller within a generation or two. And, unlike temperate forests, which in North America have been cut down in some places three times and today fool people into thinking they are primeval, rain forests, once destroyed, tend to lose their soils and not to come back -- or not come back the way they were. (I live in a rain forest; this is happening in my backyard.)
On the other hand, Lomborg's finding that there is plenty of iron ore left (contra the Litany) is actually too pessimistic. The United States made 100 million tons of steel a year for 100 years -- 10 billion tons. Some is tied up in the Brooklyn Bridge, but there is plenty to recycle. The need for mining more ore is very small, and Lomborg's estimates of how many years' supply remain are too small by a huge factor.
Lomborg says if you don't understand what the problems are, you won't know how to deploy scarce resources to fix them. In particular, the precautionary principle, which says that if you are not absolutely certain you will not cause harm, you must do nothing, will prevent human progress.
Lomborg's assault against the precautionary principle is subtle, but he is not shy about the conclusion: "A lack of prioritization, backed by however many good intentions, can in the final analysis result in the statistical murder of thousands of people."
Most of the book is easier to follow than the argument against the precautionary principle. "Many of our deeply engrained beliefs from the Litany are not supported by the facts," writes Lomborg, and the numbers back him up.
This will not come as news to those who have read such analyses as Aaron Wildavsky's "But Is It True?" That was the first substantial critique for non-scientists of green doomsaying. Lomborg raises the critique to new levels, and the screams of his targets show that his arrows are hitting them where they live.
Science & Facts Beat Anecdotes Any Day of the Week August 12, 2006
Rocks For Jocks (La Crescent, MN)
20 out of 22 found this review helpful
Lomborg has compiled an amazing amount of data and presents it thoughtfully and thoroughly. He brings a scientific mindset to the environmentalist movement. If you find that fear mongering and factually challenged arguments aren't cutting it anymore, this is the book for you. The scope of his work is stunning. The Skeptical Environmentalist is a must have for anyone who is frustrated when anecdotal evidence is presented as science in the media.
Showing reviews 26-30 of 333
|
