Rating: 
Summary: The Way Science Should Be
Review: Lomborg did not set out to write a polemic. He was not trying to advance an ideology. Lomborg looked into the science of current environmental woes and discovered... things are a lot different (and a lot better) than we've been led to believe.What makes Lomborg's book refreshing and valuable is that it is NOT politically motivated. He is no apologist for industry; rather, Lomborg embarked on an objective examination and learned that the real ecological situation is markedly different from what those who make a living preaching eco-doom want you to think. All sides of the issue will find much to be angry with here. But if they're honest, they'll find a lot of truth, too. It's proof of Lomborg's even-handedness.
Rating: 
Summary: Is the environmental storm over?
Review: Is the environment getting worse? Is overpopulation endangering the world's economies? Are we losing forests and fish? Are we all in danger from acid rain, water pollution, chemicals, global warming, air pollution?
That is part of 'the Litany,' fears that Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, says are based on faulty information. The heavily-documented, best-selling book challenges the basic assumptions, methods and mathmatical models which underlie much of the gloom and doom we read today.
He thoroughly punctures most environmentalist groups' major theories, which they often present as facts, or future horrifying scenarios. A statistics professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, he didn't believe the optimism of the late economist Julian Simon who analyzed environmental trends.
Lomborg, a self-described "old left-wing Greenpeace member" and concerned environmentalist, set out to challenge Simon's view of the future. But, he found out Simon was right.
With the scorn and anger of one betrayed, Lomborg criticizes some famous environmental spokesmen, whom he believes misuse data to deceive the public into supporting their causes. And he shows news stories taking the worst of the predictions and expanding on them. He accepts that man-made global warming is real, but shows that forecasts of drastic climate change "are not plausible."
"Well, what's so wrong with that?" some might say. "We have to get people's attention. If it saves one fish, it's worth it."
Lomborg disagrees and has a compelling argument about what is wrong with that attitude.
"The constant repetition of the Litany and the often heard environmental exaggerations [have] serious consequences," he writes. "It makes us scared and it makes us more likely to spend our resources and attention solving phantom problems while ignoring real and pressing (possibly non-environmental) issues."
We have an example of that from Oregon, in this year of grief and bankruptcy which followed the government's decision to shut off irrigation water in the Klamath Basin. Turns out the shutoff was unnecessary.
In a just-released report, a National Academy of Sciences review committee concluded, "there is presently no sound scientific basis for" cutting off the water. The committee found the government's underlying scientific assumptions and methodology lacking.
No one in Klamath Falls was surprised, just as they weren't surprised when they heard charges that government workers faked lynx presence in Washington forests.
Lomborg wouldn't have been surprised either. A problem he notes among those pushing the Litany is that they pick and choose figures they want to use, selecting for example, the two or three downward trending years in a decades long upward trend. Examples are world grain yields and world exports of goods.
The 'crises' that have enriched so many scientists and researchers living on government and foundation grants disappear under his analysis. He suggests that the only reasonable way to create accurate public perceptions is to use worldwide figures to account for both positive and negative trends for any given issue.
"Whether we are talking about food, raw materials or energy, no shortages of resources seem to be forthcoming, no serious problems for the continued growth of production and welfare are in the offing," Lomborg writes.
Now, don't you feel better?
Rating:
Summary: I have to admit it's getting better (still much to be done!)
Review: When I read this book, I was amazed. Based on what I had heard I had thoroughly convinced myself that our environment is getting worse and worse. And then there is this Danish associate professor Bjorn Lomborg, who writes a book describing, among other things, how: 1. The world population is not growing at a record rate; the growth rate has been steadily declining since 1964. The world's population is expected to stabilize just short of 11 billion. 2. There is more and more food per head of the world's population. This is largely caused by the success of the so-called 'Green Revolution' (high-yield crops, irrigation and controlled water supply, fertilisers and pesticides, and farmers' management skills). The number of people starving is decreasing (although the numbers are still frighteningly high!) 3. Our lives and health have improved dramatically over the past couple of hundred years due to better standards of living, better hygiene and water supplies and better medical therapy. And over the past 50 years poverty has fallen more than in the previous 500. Also in the developing world a fantastic progress has been made (although there is still a long way to go!). Furthermore, over the past three decades, inequality between countries has not been increasing but decreasing. This trend is expected to continue throughout much of the century. 4. We are not headed for a major energy crisis, nor are we likely to experience any significant scarcity of raw materials. The earth is not running out of energy or natural recourses. 5. We need to manage and price water more carefully but we are not facing insurmountable water shortages. 6. Overall, the pollution burden has diminished dramatically in the developed world. Air pollution has dramatically decreased over the past decades in the Western world while at the same time there has been a dramatic economic growth. It would be a mistake to believe that economic growth is in the process of destroying the earth. Economy and ecology complement each other. 7. Global warming is almost certainly taking place, but 1) probably less devastating than often claimed, 2) radical fuel cutbacks are worse than the original affliction 8. Biodiversity-reduction and deforestation do exist but to a much lesser extent than often thought and claimed. Lomborg describes all of this very transparantly, uses clear statistics, uses excellent references and argues very logically, intelligently and subtly. He constantly keeps on explaining and reminding throughout the book that the fact that things are getting better does not mean everything is OK. He clearly points at the necessity to keep on focusing on solving all of the real problems we still face. Also he acknowledges that the fact that things are getting better overall does not mean that there are no places or times were things get worse. The author says for instance: "A lot still needs to be done to improve conditions in Africa, not only in the context of AIDS prevention but also for food availability and economic production. I think this is a brave and terrific book. I was surprised by how ferociously it was attached by some authoritative scientists, for instance in Scientific American. These scientists treat the book literally as if it were an attack on science. I read many of the criticisms and Lomborg's response to them. And according to me, Lomborg wins by knock out. The criticisms are full of irrelevant personal attacks, misquotations and unsubstantiated attacks. Lomborg's replies are factual and to the point. I am not an expert at all in this field and I can't know how right Lomborg is. But if he's right, it wouldn't be the first time that established scientists deny a truthful new message and try to isolate the messenger.
Rating:
Summary: Factual on what has been made known.
Review: I enjoyed this, however the basic premise of this book is in serious error. The real state of the world is far from being openly known, even in countries such as Mexico there are extremely well hidden sites and actions of destruction and pollution, that goes for a large part of the world. I am a traveler, I see the inside as I live in places for at least a year at a time. In my research, not one of these sites has ever been reported, I know uncounted permanantly polluted sites exist that do have world effect. This and other occurances of destruction are in fact in overwhelming numbers that would shock every American. I will give two examples, in a country that has excess reserves of gasoline, cannot sell it by accounting deadline dates, trucks the fuel by tanker to desert sites and dumps millions of gallons monthly. Another country, Mexico has a similar problem, in 1992 the top authorities of Guadalajara had excess gasoline showing as sold. The government auditors informed them they were to be audited in one week. They took every tanker they had and filled them will gas and dumped the millions of gallons in the cities storm drains, the gas ignited the next day blowing the streets out and killed thousands. It was covered up and whitewashed that this had been going on for more than forty years. So much more takes place worldwide on much grander scales. This is the grand error, we do not get information of what really takes place outside the USA. This book bases it's research on governmental statistics, that is something none of us can rely on as so much is whitewashed.
This is definitely a good book outside of it's misnomer of factual stats. It covers a great deal more than pollution. Our technology, quality of living, education, and desire for a direction of survival. I do recommend buying it as it is a serious effort in the right direction of what we all fundamentally need to understand.
I recommend a book which offers solutions that is similar in its effort, takes a broad approach in a realistic account, covers the acts of terrorism, its general worldwide effects and change, cultural difference showing deaf ears, pollution, economic policies, war, calculates a threshold, or a point of no return, SB 1 or God By Karl Mark Maddox, very good.
Rating:
Summary: Just the Facts, Ma'am
Review: I participated as a speaker at my first Earth Day teach-in in 1970. I have spent my adult lifetime --- say, the past 30 years or so--- seeing one doomsday prediction after another proved wrongheaded, exaggerated, or false. In Lomborg's well-written, meticulously researched and documented book, we finally have just what was needed: a compendium of correction. I'm glad this was written by a evenhanded and even rather polite person--- one who is still committed to protecting the environment--- rather than by some strident Rush Limbaugh type. Lomborg's calm reasonableness makes it possible to actually discuss important global issues without a snarling partisan tone. Although some of his critics evidently need lessons in this sort of dialogue. This would be a rgeat gift to your bright college freshman just beginning to be exposed to the popular apocalyptic environmentalism. It might save him or her 30 years of misplaced anxiety. Hey, Bjorn! Are you planning an abridged adaptation for middle- and high-schoolers? Maybe I'll write it myself.
Rating:
Summary: Environment is better today
Review: Growing up in the industrial Midwest, I remember the environment was terrible. You could see pollution everywhere. Lakes were oily. The air smelled like coal. Over the next forty years, things got a lot better. I saw an even more dramatic change when I lived in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism. With a free market and economic progess came much a cleaner environment. In North American and Europe (the places I lived) my observations told me that the environment had improved yet I kept on reading about things only getting worse. This book confirms with statistical evidence what I and many other people have observed during our lives. I know environmental problems remain, but pessimism won't help us solve them. A book like this courageously challenges the doomsday establishment and will help clean the environment, since the only way forward is through better use of technology, not returning to an earlier age. Most primitive technologies were environmentally friendly only because they supported such small populations. With the populations already on the earth, we can't go back. If the current American population tried to live like hunter gatherers of the past, we would destroy the environment within days.
Rating:
Summary: A Needed Corrective
Review: What most critics of this book seem to overlook is that the vast majority of the literature on the environment comes from a certain apocalyptic vein. Even the ex-vice-president's book was so bleak and negative-I'm surprised it didn't come back to haunt him in the campaign (Earth in the Balance-Gore). The truth is the trends are favorable, and almost all the predictions by the fanatics have been proven false, and furthermore, it has been an increase in wealth and affluence that spurs this trend, not a return to cave-dwelling! And if the truth were told, most environmentalist have their own personal fiefdoms they chose to protect, and are not interested in what we may or may not leave to "future generations"! This book will help us get back to a rational evaluation of environmental issues, and away from the religious fervour that groups like Greenpeace display. Read it and give it to a college student!
Rating: 
Summary: Nothing less than a polemic
Review: Let me just say that I ... co-reviewed the book for an "eminent scientific journal" in the UK ... and for another "scientific organization" in the US ... Given the space limitation, I can only highlight the more appalling errors in the polemic; the book is literally full of straw men, egregious errors in interpretation, and a selective inclusion and understanding of the empirical data. What undermines TSE is the fact that provides the reader with only half of a very complex story; we are informed that people are living longer, that food production per capita is still increasing, that the Asian tiger economies are catching up with the developed nations, and that many (though not all) forms of pollution are in decline. In perspective, this is good news, but what is missing from Lomborg's opus is the second, and perhaps more important part of the story. TSE completely disregards the link between environmental indicators and human welfare indices and the underlying condition of ecological systems; these systems represent the infrastructure which makes consumption possible and upon which the prosperity of all nation states depends. In TSE, there is nothing on wetland loss and eutrophication, fraying food webs, the loss of coral reefs and a general transformation of marine ecosystems worldwide, the effects of invasive species on communities and ecosystem functioning etc. In evaluating the condition of the biosphere, scientists have known for some time that indices of human welfare must be weighed against the underlying conditon of our ecological life support systems. Yet, in TSE, Lomborg dismisses these systems entirely, and claims to write "from a human perspective", as if our fate is somehow independent from the health of the biosphere. Such a fatal omission allows him to dispense with thousands of peer-reviewed studies published in the past 10 years which examine in detail such ongoing processes as climate change, habitat fragmentation, the disruption of biogeochemical and hydrological cycles, and extinction as they affect the structure, function and ultimately health of communties and ecosystems. Furthermore, if Lomborg is the "hard-headed skeptic" he claims to be, he would have dedicated as much of his book debunking the veritable tsunami of anti-environmental distortions as he does countering distortions from environmentalists and environmental organizations. In his chapter on biodiversity, for example, which he admittedly bases on a chapter in a book by Julian Simon, Lomborg selectively omits a wealth of studies by scientists like Brooks, Balmford, Pimm, Olsen, Woodruff and others which are more recent than the sources he uses but provide a different perspective. Why would an allegedly "objective" writer omit such research from his thesis? By intentionally avoiding these important studies, it seems obvious that Lomborg is not seeking the "truth" (an elusive concept in science anyway, but one he harps on about throughout the book) but instead these omissions reflect Lomborg's own agenda. I also found it rather amusing that a statistician can state that "hidden value judgments should not cloud our understanding of environmental problems", a correct statement and one I agree with, and then go on to fill the pages of TSE with one hidden value judgment after another. "The per capita amount of garbage produced has ONLY increased 45% since 1966". "We have ONLY lost 30% of the world's forests". "ONLY 14% of Amazon forests have been lost". Similarly, on water resources, hidden value judgments crop up over and over again. It is as if these percentages do not constitute a problem, which one cannot correctly estimate on the basis of a simple overview. Furthermore, Lomborg is long on quantitative data but short on the equally important area of qualitative evaluation. Which forests are being lost? What kind of biomes do they constitute? Where are they located? What kind of forest is replacing them, and so on and so forth. For my part, and in spite of the time expended, it is imperative that scientists continue to counter the nonsense contained in books like TSE which attempt to explain away complex problems. I fear that, so long as powerful conservative forces wish to disseminate a "business-as-usual" message, that there will be "new Lomborg's" emerging from the background long after TSE has been consigned to the scrap heap, but at least this episode has evoked a strong scientific response, and is making us better prepared.
Rating:
Summary: Lies, damned lies, and statisticians
Review: This was very disappointing. It would have been very useful to see a
coherent review of data, without adherence to political ideology --
which is what this book bills itself as, but fails to be. Lomborg has
carefully cherrypicked the sources of his information, generally
ignoring actual peer-reviewed research data in favor of repackaged
media clips, in order to give a uniformly rosy view of the world. He
presents things as clear-cut and simplistic that are uniformly more
complex (for instance, confusing issues between coal and oil reserves
that *exist*, and those that are *recoverable*; and in his chapter on
population, calculating population per total landmass rather than
population per *usable* landmass -- his calculations look much better,
but are not realistic when viewed against the fact that the Sahara
Desert, the Antarctic, and similar regions are in the main not
conducive to supporting a human population). And throughout the book
he conveniently ignores data that contradicts what he has chosen to
quote, something that peer-reviewed scientists are not allowed to get
away with. And that brings us to the further level of deception
involved in this book -- it is, indeed, "peer-reviewed", but those
peers were chosen from the fields of the social sciences, primarily
psychology. This was not reviewed by a single environmental,
biological, climate or even agricultural scientist before publication
-- quite possibly because they would have made him go back and rewrite
the thing.
Rating:
Summary: counselled reading in the name of Descartes
Review: Before I bought Lomborg's book I spent time reading many a comment about his work, and the implications and consequences of what he writes. They were either positive or negative, with these latter in the greatest share, I would say overwhelmingly outnumbering Lomborg's pros. And I strongly feel this is a very good point in buying and reading The Skeptical Environmentalist with the highest attention. There must be a reason if so many authors, and so many organizations, have been compelled to stigmatize Lomborg's ideas. Isn't it because they just felt someone had stripped them off and left them exposed in all their lies?
Reading this book sure makes you wondering about all you know about environment and ecology: maybe Lomborg is wrong, maybe his thesis are unscientifical, but he surely has many a strong point to support them.
Anyway, I can't see no reason why we can proceed on rewriting the world's more recent history (from WWII on) but we cannot revisit environmental theories: neither WWF nor WI nor any other known environmentalist organization can claim to be depository of the truth. And Lomborg does make this clear.
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