Rating: 
Summary: pleasantly surprised
Review: Given the polarizing impact of this book, I was expecting a lot of strident rhetoric and distorted analysis. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find a balanced, careful analysis. Lomborg makes a very complete survey of all of the potential environmental problems associated with population growth and economic development. He then evaluates statistical indicators of the magnitude and direction of the problems. What he finds tends to be comforting. In some cases, indicators actually are improving. Food production is improving, and starvation is declining (albeit slowly, because of political problems). I was surprised to read that the supply of fish actually is increasing, once fish farming is included. Another environmental issue is water. Here, Lomborg shows that the rate of replenishment is adequate. The challenge is to improve access of the world's poor to potable water. I wish that more young people and policmakers would read this book. It makes an excellent textbook. It provides a useful starting point for thinking about environmental and economic policy going forward. Everyone who cares about the environment and the welfare of the world's people should read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Alas, all this book does is give skeptics a bad name.
Review: Skeptics bride themselves in their lack of blind faith. They look at the world around them with wonder, but with a copy of the scientific method tight in hand. Lomborg couldn't be more different. His intentional use of everything from misquotes to, brace yourself, poor statistical analysis (he's a statistician!!!) make this book a lopsided handbook to those who just want to make the enivronmental realities "go away". But don't take my word for it (who the hell am I?), how about taking the world's most respected scientists' word for it. While Amazon.com keeps deleting my link to a review, I believe I can mention without reprecussion that a recent science board in the Netherlands has found Lomborg GUILTY of scientific irresponsibility and dishonesty by writing this book. The board found that he consciously made the decision to ignore facts, twist statistics, and misrepresent the truth. This is, of course, what any educated reader would have concluded anyway... but for those of you who are just looking for a book to justify your way of life, I suggest you look elsewhere, this one has been debunked.
Rating: 
Summary: Methinks Dr. Lomborg's opponents. . .
Review: . . .do protest too much!! Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, a professor of Statistics, admitted member of the Left, and former member of Greenpeace, has done the unthinkable. He has presumed to tread on the sacred cows of the environmentalist movement by demonstrating, with hard-core numbers, that the world is not in quite the bad shape it is claimed to be. Kudos to Dr. Lomborg for having the courage and character to present an honest analysis behind a generation of faulty (albeit politically correct) thinking and reasoning. The response to Dr. Lomborg's book has been quite interesting. He has been attacked by many popular scientific journals and noted scientists -- but only very rarely ON HIS ACTUAL WORK! Rather, the attacks have been ad hominim in nature (and in one case, a cream pie in the face!) This tends to make me extremely suspicious of the motives of his critics. No student of the sciences or the humanities, regardless of discipline, can afford to ignore a seminal work like this one. Recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Remarkable Work
Review: I urge those interested in this text to read not only the book, but also the published criticisms. Many of the leading scholarly criticisms (e.g., Nature, Science and SA), resulting letters to the editor, and Lomborg's responses, can be found on Lomborg.com and anti-lomborg.com. After reading the book, published reviews, letters and his responses, it became clear to me that Lomborg's text is so strong that the critics are left with no choice but to attack him personally and highlight small errors (which Lomborg admits and corrects on his site) which make no difference to his overall thesis. The scientific experts are panicked b/c Lomborg has shown them for what they are--just another group of special interest lobbyists constantly screaming "disaster is near" in an effort to get funding. In the old days these seemingly strong but in reality marginal criticisms would have gone unanswered, or taken years of publications to "resolve." With the web, Lomborg can instantly describe the almost trivial nature of many such complaints. Simply an amazing book.
Rating:
Summary: Finally a look at the data
Review: This book is the first time I have seen the environmental data examined by someone who understands statistics and doesn't have a stake in grant money one way or the other. The documentation is thorough and the writing is clear. I understand why folks who are dependent on grant money are upset over this book but we as a country need this type of clear analysis of the data to prioritize what problems we will address.
Rating:
Summary: The Author screams, "Hellooooo!!! Reality Calling!!"
Review: Reading this book is like watching a LONG running play
in football. The receiver catches the kickoff at his own
one yard line. He skips aside to avoid the first rusher
from the other team. He avoids the four men on his own forty.
Then rushes past the big guy on the fifty. The carrier takes
a hit at the other thirty, but keeps going. Then he trips
on his own feet on the one and falls in for the touchdown.
Score! Six points! He made a set of small mistakes at the
end, but still did what he was supposed to do. Most of the so called literature from environmentalists are
hyperventalating doom sayers. Lomborg goes through each myth
and debunks it based on the solidest evidence he has. The life
expectancy for humans worldwide is now 67. Air polution is
way down. The rivers have never been cleaner. The number
of people dying of malnutrition per 100000 is way down, but
not zero. The people who ARE dying of starvation are dying
because of poor government, not because they cannot get food.
Most people in developed countries die of bad habits and poor
diet, but they die MUCH older than before. Lomborg also makes the point that the Litany that most
evironmentalists live by is full of nihilism and defeatism.
They feel guilty about being so well off to such an extent
that they have convinced themselves that they are living
on borrowed time and the enviroment will collapse real soon
now. The bottom line is that the author is pushing the point that
we need to be deploying our resources to defeat REAL problems,
not ones that we scare ourselves with. The only way to do
that is to work from real science instead of media driven
junk science that scares and entertains, but does not allow
for a solution that will stick. The only quibbles I have with the book is that Lomborg still
embraces the global warming myth as fact. He acknowledges
that the theory is WAY flawed but still will not go that extra
step to debunk it. There is also his endorsement of second
hand smoke as a health hazard and small particles in the air
as hazards. At the end though Lomborg makes the correct call. The
developing world can become a better place by open markets,
growth in GDP, and better education. The money spent on
the environmental causes is not getting the bang per buck
that improvements in these areas would give. In the devoloped
world we have to get control of our bad habits to live longer.
Rating:
Summary: Exceedingly important book
Review: OK, so your I.Q. is far above that of a garden pea, or of Al Gore. You have already figured out that the environmental lobby is a very poor source of information about the true state of the earth. You already know that the scientists quoted by the press gomers are motivated by a desire for more research funds, rather than a desire to spread the truth, and that those who disagree with them remain silent for fear of vilification and ostracization by those of their peers who fear the loss of those funds. Unlike the Green Party pinheads, you already know that all actions have consequences, and that the only intelligent way of deciding on a course of action is to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of any interventions. So what can you learn from this book? The answer is plenty. First, there is a danger of dismissing all warnings about a subject after being exposed to a succession of false warnings by the usual sources of these warnings. Second, the state of the world is a very important subject, despite the fact that there are so many charlatans peddling their snake oil in the area. This book helps you to pull the signal out of all the noise. Third, it returns some much-needed rationality to the debate about the environment. Finally, it puts the human desires regarding the environment in the context of all other human desires, and acknowledges that not all human desires can be fulfilled.
Those gullible people who need to believe every report that the sky is falling will not like this book, however, nor will those who are in the business of scaremongering. So Al Gore and his ilk do not need to worry. The same cretins will still pull their lever every election day.
Rating: 
Summary: factually incorrect and demolished in Science, Nature
Review: Actually distinguished scientists (rather than dilettante statisticians like Lomborg) such as E.O. Wilson are up in arms over this book. Why? Not because it treads on their indefensible sacred cows, but because it is a fine example of bad science by a non-scientist. Corrective features have been run in peer-reviewed journals like Science and Nature. This book, despite the alleged standard practice of its publisher, does not seem to have been peer reviewed. The quotations in the book are selective and misleading. This is as bald a bad-science lie to be published in years, ranking with Behe's "work."
Rating:
Summary: Scepticism is a virtue in science.
Review: Professor Lomborg's book has received the sort of excessive criticism that makes one wonder if the criticism is not motivated by something other than a love for the truth. Real science is always sceptical. Some environmental activists apparently have decided that since they know the truth they can dispense with rigorous examination of the facts. Such an attitude produces a form of activism that has more in common with political and religious extremism than with science. Lomborg may be correct, or maybe not, but the only way to know for sure will be through rigorous science, not through smear tactics. The critics should dig into the data and his arguments with rigor, not with dismissive ad-hominem statements.
Rating:
Summary: A noble effort
Review: Lomborg's book is a noble attempt to assess the state of the world through the use of long term indicators of factors that affect human welfare and the quality of the environment, such as food production, disease incidence, life expectancy, forest loss, access to clean drinking water, infant mortality, air quality, cancer incidence, water quality, and hundreds of other measures. For its success in this area alone, it deserves a five star rating, as it succeeds in dispelling many myths, places environmental risks in context, and makes a strong case for the need to prioritize environmental policy. But where Lomborg goes astray is in the few chapters where he deviates from concentrating on outcome data, and tries to assess the extremely complex underlying science behind projected trends in biodiversity and global warming. In this, he is out of his league, and many of his conclusions have been attacked by scientific experts in these fields. He is also showing a degree of selectivity in his skepticism here, as he tends to accept, with little skepticism, official estimates on environmental issues where the trends are positive, but starts looking for holes when official estimates show negative trends. As an example, the IPCC estimates on temperature change are put through the wringer over dozens of pages, but economic estimates on the costs and benefits of global warming abatement are taken almost without question, when these estimates are *at least* as fuzzy as anything coming out of the IPCC as they require projecting the costs of technologies that don't exist yet. This sort of selectivity damages Lomborg's credibility and leaves him vulnerable to legitimate attacks from environmental scientists. Unfortunately, outside of Lomborg's comments on global warming and biodiversity, which include hundreds of pages on population growth, food production, deforestation, human welfare, pollution, chemical fears, and the like, few of those attacks have been legitimate. My recommendation: read the book, but with the skepticism that Lomborg recommends. The world is better off than you probably think, but not necessarily as well as off as Lomborg seems to think (although it should be noted that despite the claims of his critics, Lomborg is no Pollyanna, and recognizes many serious environmental problems in the book).
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