The BBC reports to us on a new scientific paper suggesting,
Human use exhausts Earth. Famed environmental scholar and co-author of the report, Dr. Norman Myers, is quoted prominently throughout the piece . BBC's 'environment correspondent', Alex Kirby writes,
Humans are making more demands on the Earth than it can cope with, scientists believe. They say humanity's footprint on the planet has increased by half in under 40 years. Their analysis suggests that by 1999 the human economy was absorbing 120% of the Earth's productive capacity.
Buried conveniently in the last three paragraphs, however, are these refutations,
But Julian Morris, of the UK's Institute of Economic Affairs, told BBC News Online that the PNAS paper was flawed. "The study attempts to do too much in too little space with too many assumptions and too little data," he said. "The claim that we have overshot the biosphere's regenerative capacity is a fiction based on inappropriate assumptions and poor data. The study is of little value either as an assessment of humanity's impact on the environment, or as a guide to action."
Who's speaking the truth?
Matt Ridley, from The Spectator, wrote on the subject of gloom-and-doom environmentalism back in February of this year. He found a number of startling details which offer some perspective on these 'scientific' findings. Consider this tale of scientific integrity...
Bjorn Lomborg - young, blond, piano-playing, but basically a statistics nerd - may not be back soon. He has just succeeded Monsanto as the official chief villain of the world environmental movement. In January Scientific American devoted 11 pages to an unattractive attempt to attack his work. He had a pie thrown in his face when he spoke in Oxford last September. What can this mild statistician have said to annoy these great men so? In 1996 he published an obscure but brilliant article on game theory, which earned him an invitation to a conference on 'computable economics' in Los Angeles (and an offer of a job at the University of California). While browsing in a bookshop there he came across a profile in Wired magazine of the late Julian Simon, an economist, who claimed, with graphs, that on most measures the environment was improving, not getting worse. Irritated, Lomborg went back to Denmark and set his students the exercise of finding the flaw in Simon's statistics.
They could find none. So Lomborg wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, which not only endorses most of Simon's claims, but also goes further, providing an immense compendium of factual evidence that the litany of environmental gloom we hear is mostly either exaggerated (species extinction, global warming) or wrong (population, air and water pollution, natural resources, food and hunger, health and life-expectancy, waste, forest loss).
Ridley goes on to point out that Lomborg's politics have nothing to do with the backlash...
He is leftish, concerned about world poverty, and no fan of big business. It cannot be his recommendations: in favour of renewable energy and worried about the pollution that is getting worse. Vegetarian, he rides a bicycle and approves of Denmark's punitive car taxes. His sin - his heresy - is to be optimistic.
There it is. The backlash Lomborg has received from these, so-called, scientists all stem from the fact that he has reported an optimistic finding.
This is very threatening to lots of people's livelihoods. The environmental movement raises most of its funds through direct mail, paid advertising and news coverage. A steady supply of peril is essential fuel for all three. For instance, remember acid rain in the 1980s and sperm counts in the 1990s? 'There is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United States or Canada due to acid rain,' concluded the official independent study of the subject. Sperm counts are not falling. If you do not believe me, look up the statistics. Lomborg did. The media, too, prefer pessimism. When the United Nations panel on global warming produced new estimates of the rise in temperature by 2100, they gave a range of 1.4 to 5.8°C. CNN, CBS, Time and the New York Times all quoted only the high figure and omitted the low one. An increasing number of scientists have vested interests in pessimism, too. The study of global warming has brought them fame, funds, speaking fees and room service. Lomborg's crime is to rain on their parade.
Let it pour. In the case of the scientists who are responsible for the piece reported in the BBC, the names are all-too-familiar. Ridley offers this with regard to Dr. Norman Myers,
Lomborg is also criticized for his effrontery in challenging the widely accepted figure that 40,000 species become extinct every year. The number was first used in 1979 by the British scientist Norman Myers. Yet what was the evidence for it? Here is what Myers actually said: 'Let us suppose that, as a consequence of this manhandling of the natural environments, the final one-quarter of this century witnesses the elimination of one million species, a far from unlikely prospect. This would work out, during the course of 25 years, at an average rate of 40,000 species per year.' That's it. No data at all; just a circular assumption: if 40,000 species go extinct a year, then 40,000 species go extinct a year. QED.
For his part, Dr. Myers is on record as having said that Lomborg, "lacks even a preliminary understanding of the science in question." Scientific American printed a critique offered by four leading environmental scientists, then denied Lomborg the courtesy of responding to the criticism in the same issue. Furthermore, they threatened him with legal action if he posted the critical comments on his own website for purpose of rebuttal. In the end, as Ridley points out, the evidence is clearly in Lomborg's favor.
Again and again, before insulting him, the critics concede, through gritted teeth, that he has got his facts right. In two cases, Stephen Schneider accuses Lomborg of misquoting sources and promptly does so himself. In the first case, Schneider's response 'completely misunderstands what we have done', according to Richard Lindzen, the original author of work on the 'iris effect' and upper-level cirrus clouds. In the second, Eigil Friis-Christensen says that Schneider 'makes three unsubstantiated statements regarding our studies on the effect of cosmic rays on global cloud cover'. Result: there are worse howlers in Schneider's short article than in Lomborg's whole book. By the end of 11 pages, the Scientific American critics have found two certain errors in Lomborg's work. In one he uses the word 'catalyse' instead of 'electrolyse'. In the other he refers to 20 per cent of energy use, when he means 20 per cent of electricity generation. You get the drift.
Perhaps the most amusing, if not fitting, demonstration of proof came in the form of a wager between Julian Simon, the economist behind the original study, and noted environmentalist, Paul Ehrlich.
Consider the treatment meted out to Julian Simon for having the temerity to be right. In 1990 Simon won $1000 in settlement of a wager from the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. Simon had bet him that the prices of metals would fall during the 1980s and Ehrlich accepted 'Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in'. When, a decade later, Simon won easily, Ehrlich refused a rematch and called Simon an imbecile in a speech. Ehrlich, who, in contrast, won a 'genius award' from the MacArthur Foundation, is the man who argued in 1967 that with the world on the brink of starvation the West 'should no longer send emergency aid to countries such as India where sober analysis shows a hopeless imbalance between food production and population'. Since then India has doubled its population, more than doubled its food production, increased its cultivated land acreage by only 5 per cent and begun to export food. Hopeless?
Pessimistic predictions of global doom have become more than commonplace, these days. They are the conventional wisdom. Julian Simon, in his economic model, set the scientific community on it's ear with evidence proving they were wrong. Researchers who would obscure the truth for personal reasons are guilty of gross scientific misconduct. Considering the evidence, those who would listen to them are foolhardy to do so. There is little room for subjectivity in science; we'd be wise to remember that. For Julian Simon's response to the scientific community in detailed format,
click here.
