Rating: 
Summary: Why rational environmentalists need this book
Review: We like trees and other good environmental features. We're lucky to live (on purpose) in one of the most dedicated environment-preserving towns in the SF Bay Area. We belong to Sierra Club, give money to Open Space trusts, hike, travel, value a good environment, etc.Get this book, read it carefully, preferably with a Web browser handy as well as a printer, and make your own judgements. This book is (correctly) complicated and difficult to summarize well, but it has the sort of analysis and backup we need. People use "Pareto analysis" to measure the problems carefully, then focus their efforts on the more important problems first. It is simply impossible to do that very well without careful, realistic data. Of course, real data is often confusing, and a good feature of the book is its inclusion of caveats, contradictions, and more footnotes than I've seen before in one book. This book has a bimodal distribution of opinions: people love it or despise it. As I value skepticism, I checked out some of the negative reviews, chased URLs, reread the book ... and thought there were more errors in the reviews, and few pointers. I'd love to see more negative reviews if they only followed Lomborg in backing up comments with checkable references. To summarize this *review*, it is very difficult to summarize the *book*, as it it tries so hard to avoid over-simplification. As always in real science, there is noise in the data, incomplete data, differences in data measurements, etc. Still if you care about environmental quality, and care that your money is spent where it actually does the most good, you need the best numbers you can get. It is easy to have good goals, like "good environment and quality of life", but the real issue is balancing priorities dynamically as the real world requires. Managers are usually forced to understand this issue, or if you like computer games, try playing one of the "Civilization" or similar games. It's painful when your civilization fries due to global warming. Get this book, read it carefully, and make your own judgements, and (hopefully) support efficient environmental causes that make sense based on rational analysis, not random doom-saying.
Rating:
Summary: a fabulous book about a reality that many wish to avoid
Review: When Lomborg researched the material in Julian Simon's book on "the State of Humanity" he found that Simon was correct. To his immense credit, Lomborg suffered this shock of recognition with the grace of a statistician who had not invested his ego with the plausible uncertainties of the factually flexible environmental myths of the day, and with that emotional check in place he proceeded to write this book. The book contains over 2900 source references and a large bibliography. Lomborg methodically goes through each issue with a thoroughness one is unaccustomed to in today's world of hysterical word by word acceptance of any statement made by the various environmental groups, all of whom seem to have a Left leaning agenda. He believes in statistical checks of scientific pronouncements, but he has found to his chagrin that this does not play well with the socialistically inclined who masquerade their political beliefs behind a thin veil of environmental concern. He felt his findings would contribute to the debate, but instead found that the gut reaction of many environmental groups was one of complete denial. He thought that their initial refusal would give way to reflection based upon the massive amounts of supportive data he had assembled. He felt we could engage in a genuine reevaluation in our approach to the environment. Surprisingly, he found that many, even among his closest friends, had read only the critical commentaries on his work and had drawn the simple conclusion that he was wrong. They continued to believe that we should all go on comfortably believing in the various impending doomsday scenario's that are the popular fare. This suggested to Lomborg that doomsday-visions are very thoroughly anchored in our thinking. And, that is the message one ultimately has to take from this superb effort to set the environmental record straight. In that Lomborg is a politically Left, former member of Greenpeace he has the moral authority that Julian Simon has not been graced with. Perhaps this book will begin to instill a measure of sanity in the more rational among us. Perhaps even the media will be forced to acknowledge the error of their ways. What do you think?
Rating:
Summary: Excellent and comprehensive work
Review: Lomborg has done something quite rare. He has honestly analyzed his own opinions and found that they are unsupported by the facts. Then he has modified his views so that they agree with the evidence. That is the way it is should work in science and society but generally does not. This is an excellent text for students since it covers every major environmental issue and with great attention to accuracy and detail. It is also well worth a read by the intelligent person interested in the best current evidence about "the state of the world." I have only two objections to the book. Lomborg seems to look favorably on the Chinese government's coercive and immoral population control methods, though he amply demonstrates that overpopulation is not a great concern. He also seems to retain the naive view that hard core environmentalists will be persuaded by evidence when he demonstrates again and again that deceipt is their weapon of choice. These people no more respond to reason than do the Taliban. Both are driven by mystical fanaticism. It is odd that Lomborg still considers himself a leftist since this book is a lesson in the advantages of market-based approaches to environmental management. Those interested in this book should also read the works of Julian Simon, the economist whose opinions caused Lomborg to write this book. Simon was the master at debunking ecomyths and Amazon has a nice selection of his books.
Rating:
Summary: Congratulations Mr. Lomborg
Review: This is an extremely interesting and well-written book, which should appeal to anyone that has even a fleeting interest in the state of our planet. Don't be put off by the length of the book, the textbook format or the number of graphs. The book is so well written and the graphs so well explained that it is really not necessary to give the graphs more than a cursory glance, unless you have a special attraction to them. Good news is usually not newsworthy, that's why it is important to read this book. The author has gone to extraordinary lengths with his research. Thirty percent of the book is made up of notes and bibliography which is an open invitation for any reader to follow up and challenge the author's findings and conclusions.
Rating:
Summary: Real Science Triumphs Over Hype!
Review: Environmentalists of all stripes should welcome this important work, which irrefutably and thoroughly debunks most of the currently popular myths about the state of our environment and leaves the slate clean for the real and verifiable concerns to be addressed. Lomborg, himself a card-carrying green activist and professor of statistics, set out to disprove a critic of the movement, and discovered to his surprise that much of what we carelessly accept as "fact" is actually based on mistakes, misquotations, and junk science. It turned out that the critic was not only correct, he was actually reporting only the tip of the iceberg. There's good news and bad news here: The good news is that we're making real progress on many fronts, despite the professional doomsayers who depend on a steady supply of enviro-scares for their continued funding. The bad news is that, although plenty remains to be done, if we can't put a stop to those crying, "Wolf!" where none exists, we're going to quickly loose all credibility and exhaust the public's patience and support. Lomborg's book is MUST READING for anyone who claims to have a real concern for the environment. It is going to shake up a lot of people. Watch for two reactions from organizations active in the movement: 1) Some will excoriate it and will stoop to ANY level in an attempt to discredit the book, essentially calling for a green jihad against it, 2) since effectively discrediting it is going to be virtually impossible, a larger number will attempt to ignore it and to force others to do the same. Having exposed themselves by their reactions, the folks who fall into either of these categories may then be dismissed as serious players, as people who are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. REAL environmentalists need this book!
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Summary: The best "environment" book I have read
Review: Bjorn Lomborg, Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, has succeeded with this momumental work in stripping the myths from the environmental debate and presented the facts, in a way that is most enjoyable to read. He has accomplished this by keeping the fascinating narrative to 350 pages with around 150 pages of notes, bibliography and index. The book clearly spells out how these "environmental myths" which Professor Lomborg refers to as "the Litany" were born, evolved and spread by a willing and gullible media and the damage this has sadly created within the political process. The tide is turning however towards a "facts based' environmental debate and this book will be an enormous assistance in speeding this up. It is very pleasing to see that Lomborg has given well deserved recognition to the great economist Julian Simon, who he attempted to refute, but on researching, found he largely agreed with. While Simon had enormous influence within North America, unfortunately he had considerably less elsewhere. "The Skeptical Environmentalist will indeed have a wider reach. This book is a "must read" for everyone. Lets hope it is carefully read by the young in particular, so that they gain a sound perspective of the real issues we need to deal with and most importantly, built from this, a positive and realistic outlook of this wonderful world.
Rating:
Summary: The book resembles its free chapter.
Review: I purchased The Skeptical Environmentalist after reading
the free chapter that you can find on the web site of the
Cambridge University Press.
The free chapter gives a very good indication of the contents
of the book. As you'll see in the free chapter he shows
that environmentalists often overstate their case.
From his book itself I find that he takes very seriously
the threat of global warming. His lengthy chapter on this topic is
not so breezy as the other chapters as he digs into a complex area.
He takes the threat as real but considers proposed
solutions as too costly. He proposes alternatives.
Rating:
Summary: Staggering research boiled into all the key information
Review: Worthy causes, whether religious, political or moral tend to see themselves as above the duty to provide evidence to substantiate both their claims about reality and the suitability of their proposed measures to improve said reality. To their believers, the state of the world is obvious (usually bad), and they are genuinely astonished to find that most people are unconcerned about the grave issues that drive them. Their natural reaction is to become even more feverish about their respective causes and to step up efforts to proselytise and convert the benighted masses. Bjorn Lomborg started working on the issues that would eventually make up the content of his book by leading some of his statistics students into debunking some claims made by University of Maryland's professor Julian Simon. Julian Simon had claimed that things were actually getting better rather than worse, and that most negative environmental indicators were connected to poverty, violence and bad government rather than consumption or wealth. To their surprise (for he initially took Simon's claims as evidence of typical American arrogance), Lomborg and his students found that Simon was roughly right. It was true that things were getting better, and that many of the claims coming from environmental advocates were contradictory (for example they both dreaded global cooling in the 1970s and global warming in the 1990s as absolutely negative, although clearly both have benefits compared to each other, and neither is all bad), or tendentious (for example, advocates for particular causes often choose particular extreme years to show a negative tendency in a variable, while ignoring the long term trend), or simply shoddy (such as using a report on a tiny plot of slanting land in Belgium to extrapolate the global impact of erosion on land fertility). Lomborg published some articles discussing his findings on a left-leaning newspaper in Denmark, that greenest of countries, and was astonished at the public reaction. He decided to take upon himself a Gargantuan project, one that (I think) he couldn't possibly have thought through before embarking on it, or I predict he wouldn't have done it. He decided to review the state of the world from many, many angles, including humanity, all types of resources, animals and plants, as well as their interactions. The amount of work required to cover all these subjects, and to come up with data to back up his conclusions, must have been staggering. I have sometimes done this type of work, and I am in awe at Lomborg's achievement. It is truly a tour de force. While I don't claim that everything Lomborg says makes perfect sense, or that all his data are correct (surely he won't deny his readers the right to apply skepticism to his own claims as well, and it is quite easy to use the WWW to check out his opponents' arguments), this is a rare book that attempts seriously to consider all facts from a variety of angles, which tries to answer objections or qualifications from opponents, and which carefully connects all the variables into a global picture, incorporating the temporal dimension both past and future. Lomborg is truly skeptical, in the sense of taking nothing for granted and approaching all the issues dispassionately. These are, as Descartes told us in his Discourse on the Method, some of the conditions for true knowledge. Reading Lomborg one sometimes feels like the light has been turned on or the mists have cleared on many topics. One is surprised to find many catastrophe-peddlers (such as Stanford's Dr. Erlich, who is unrepentant of the obvious failure of his predictions for the 1980s of widespread famine and scarce resources due to population growth) are still around and doing fairly well. At least Lomborg takes them to task, and finds them wanting in logic and veracity. I predict (and it doesn't take Nostradamus to figure this out) that this book will be purchased by many people who normally wouldn't think of reading even a newspaper article on environmental concerns. Many of these probably won't make it through the entire book. In spite of Lomborg's great asides about his debates with WorldWatch and with Danish government ministers and his glee in demolishing yet another sophism, he is sometimes prolix, and there is a point were yet another chart showing that some metal's price has not gone up but down in the past hundred years is one too many. But let's not forget his calling (he is a statistician, although an unusually lively one), and let's not ask him from more than what he offers (which is a rational, dispassionate look at the environmentalist discourse). His chapter on global warming is both exhaustive and exhausting. I predict also that Mr. Lomborg will become a darling of the libertarian think tanks in the US and elsewhere, and a villain in the eyes of environmental organizations and their supporters. Both attitudes are mistaken. The only way to dismiss Mr. Lomborg is by showing that his data or his inferences from them are wrong. And, although roughly aligned with them on most issues, Mr. Lomborg is probably not of the libertarians' perspective (they should be scared if Mr. Lomborg decides to write a book testing many of the libertarian's claims, such as the trickle-down theory of economic development). Everything else is just taking things on faith, something Mr. Lomborg hasn't done. He is entitled to the same treatment.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't throw this book in the garbage...
Review: This is a thick book dense with various statistics covering many issues in a contentious way. How can a person decide whether it is worth the effort? Read reviews and you will get conflicting opinions. My method then was to sample the material by opening the book at random and evaluating the quality of what turned up.
What I came across was a discussion of the garbage problem. The preoccupation of the author was to prove that we shouldn't worry about garbage, because in fact there is enough physical space on the planet to hold what we produce. He goes through various statistics and simple calculations to arrive at the conclusion that, for example, every US state could solve its garbage problem for the next century at least, by merely putting aside a square landfill site 2.5 miles long on each side, and 100 feet high. Or, the problem could be solved nationally for that time period by making a single landfill 14-18 miles long on each side, and 100 feet high. The conclusion then is, don't worry, for what the author considers to be a very long time to come (i.e., past his own lifetime, and that of his children, if he has any), we will not run out of physical space to put our garbage. Since the title of the book is "The Skeptical Environmentalist", I presume the author does consider himself an environmentalist after all. Why then does he waste trees and the reader's time on an entirely pointless argument? No need for any calculations, maps, or graphs: we already know we will never run out of physical space to put our garbage, because there already was room for it in the first place, before it became garbage. The process of making garbage is, in terms of physical space, and leaving aside the details, just one of moving stuff from one place to another. As long as we are not importing junk from other planets or other extra-terrestrial sources, everything began here on Earth and will stay here on Earth. What a pseudo-issue! What is not a pseudo-issue, and which the author ignores in this chapter, is what else the garbage process entails: making valuable resources, which were once in an accessible form, much less accessible, or even for all practical purposes inaccessible; and also typically, putting them into an extremely unpleasant and inconvenient form. A new landfill 2.5 miles on each side, 100 feet high, in every state? Is the author out of his mind? Has he actually thought about what this entails? Doubtful, judging from the fact that he has explicitly not thought about what will happen after the ego-centric timeframe that he considers has expired. This is the kind of proposal one expects from someone locked in an ivory tower, far removed from the messy details of real life, or even from common sense. It is one thing to slog through statistics about garbage, but before pontificating about the subject, the author would have done well to have spent a little time trying to slog through the real thing. On this basis I put the book back on the shelf. If you already have bought it and are wondering what to do with it: don't throw it in the garbage- put it into the recycling bin.
Rating: 
Summary: There is nothing to be skeptical about
Review: This book shows concern for the earth's environment, but at the same time refutes catastrophic ecological events and processes. It's clear that both sides (environmentalists vs. everyone else) have their own agendas, which is why they argue their viewpoints as they do. So many biases based on innumerable experiences, ideologies, faiths, etc. come into play when discussing environmental issues that any debate is futile unless certain standards are set. In my view, this book is used best for studying the data provided, and making a conclusion based on your own educated reasoning - of course not until you have read the same data as interpreted by true blue 'environmentalists'. Data can be manipulated in countless ways to accommodate many viewpoints, so instead of looking at numbers in order to prove their point, I would say it's time to use some common sense, and perhaps some plain old human emotion to determine our environmental policy stances. The book itself is well written, interesting, and informative, but I wouldn't use it as a sole basis for determining an environmental viewpoint.
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