Doomsday Predictions Bunk, Ex-Greenpeace Scholar Says
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2001
The sky is not falling, the earth is improving, and we are not all going to die as a result of any environmental disaster, according to scholars who set out to prove exactly the opposite.
"In 1997, a young Danish statistician named Bjorn Lomborg read an interview with Julian Simon, an American economist who argued that much of our knowledge about the environment was based on preconceptions and poor statistics," wrote sociologist the Rev. Andrew Greeley in the Chicago Sun-Times. "According to Simon the doomsday conventional wisdom about the environment was wrong."
Simon's claims stuck Lomberg as wrongheaded and false.
A leftist, vegetarian environmentalist and a onetime Greenpeace member, Lomberg was determined to prove that Simon was dead wrong. Putting together a team of the best statistical students at his university, he launched a massive study designed to disprove Simon's claims and was amazed after intensive research to discover that he was, for the most part, right on.
In a new 500-page book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," boasting 70 pages of bibliography and nearly 3,000 notes, Lomberg and his team "trashes the conventional wisdom," Greeley wrote.
The author attacks what he calls the "Litany" - the bible of the environmentalists, which counts off their worries, none of which he declares are true:
The world is running out of resources.
Air and water are getting dirtier and dirtier.
The population of the world is ballooning out of control, and we will eventually run out of food as a result.
Forty thousand species are following the dinosaurs into extinction every year.
Pesticide use has set off an epidemic of cancer.
Forests and arable land are vanishing. Topsoil is eroding.
The world is quickly running out of water.
The supply of fish is vastly diminishing.
Acid rain is ravishing the world's forests.
The world's ecosystem is collapsing.
Earth is approaching the limits of viability, and "global warming" is an enormous threat unless we radically alter our way of life.
In his meticulously researched study, Lomberg demolishes each of these fables that constitute the environmentalist's articles of faith, showing that every one of these claims is refuted by the evidence.
"Global warming," Lomberg insists, is anything but a serious problem but one, if it exists, that is entirely manageable. He explains that the Kyoto Protocol so cherished by the environmentalists would at best delay any alleged warming by at the most six years.
Mankind, he adds, faces far more serious problems and the $150 billion-a-year cost of implementing Kyoto could be better spent addressing them. Just half of that amount a year, for example, would give the peoples of the Third World access to the basics of living - education, health, clean water and sanitation.
"The Kyoto agreement," Greeley wrote, "is, in fact, a sop to the environmentalist movement that will lessen the sense of doom of environmentalists (like Al Gore), but it will not prevent a single death in Africa that could be prevented by pure water and improved sanitation."
In concluding his book, Lomborg cites quotes Simon approvingly: "The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards. ... However, many people will continue to think and to say that the conditions of life are getting worse."
"Simon was the hero of the environmental controversy, while false prophets such as Paul Erlich and Lester Brown have sold the media and the public on predictions about the decline of the health of the world that time and time again have proved false," Greeley charged. "They have helped create a new religion whose devotees are compelled to accept false prophecy as unquestionable truth."
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