| Arguments that don't hold water In a provocative three-day series of essays in G2 last week, Bjorn Lomborg argued against the general consensus that man is destroying the planet. Here, three leading environmental thinkers dispute his theories Global warming Monday August 20, 2001 from: The Guardian Resources Tom Burke There is no consensus among environmentalists that "natural resources" are running out. There has been no such unqualified statement from major environmental organisations individually or collectively, nor, as far as I can recall in any influential book or journal, in the past 20 years. The Club of Rome did make this argument in 1972, but had begun to modulate its position by 1974. Paul Erlich did make, and lose, his famous wager with Julian Simon, which tells you that while Erlich knew a lot about ecology, he knew less about economics, a fault he has in common with much of the human race. It is hard to envisage what is gained in 2001 by resurrecting a long-dead argument only to kill it all over again. What remains an influential idea is that there are limits to the extent to which we can degrade biological systems and still benefit from what they offer. This finds its contemporary expression in the wide consensus that the ecological foundations of the economy are being degraded in an increasing number of places beyond the point at which it is economically or biologically possible to replace that lost productivity with inputs of fossil fuels or non-fossil minerals. This is why there is such a broad agreement, stretching far wider than among environmentalists, that the world must make a transition to sustainable development. Were Lomborg a natural scientist rather than a political economist, he would understand that it is either ignorant or sloppy exaggeration to claim that even these natural resources have become "more abundant", when what he means is that our knowledge of the availability of such resources, and our ability to extract them, have grown. It is inconsistent to accuse others of lack of rigour and then to be quite so cavalier with the laws of conservation of mass and energy. The environmental community hasn't argued about global energy shortages for about 30 years, almost since before Lomborg was born. In recent times, the only people who have are the Bush administration and its allies. There have been a number of well-developed arguments about the lack of access to affordable energy resources in many parts of the world, and the declining availability of only one energy resource - firewood. Lomborg's case on forestry is confined to one sentence, in which he simply says that an assertion by person or persons unspecified that tropical forests are being lost at a rate of 2.4% per annum is in fact wrong, as the "latest UN figures" indicate a loss of less than 0.5%. He may or may not be right, but this is not a compelling case. It is notoriously difficult to estimate the area of tropical forest, not least because there is a very wide range of different types of forest that are classified as "tropical", and not all classifiers agree on what should be counted. Nor is there agreement on what counts as "loss". The one resource crunch that Lomborg neglects to mention is the availability of water. Water is undoubtedly a natural resource that is essential for people, the economy and the maintenance of ecosystem viability. It is also, together with fish, the resource that many environmentalists have consistently warned is most likely to be the first to become indisputably under threat. Lomborg's argument on pollution is again guilty of many of the very same faults he is decrying in environmentalists. It is true that emissions of sulphur dioxide in the developed world have declined in recent years, but as the current debates in the US make clear, these declines in emissions still leave a very great many cities and tens of millions of people with air quality that does not meet legal standards, especially with regard to particulates and aromatic hydrocarbons. To set Lomborg's extraordinarily callow opinions in context, it is worth considering the following comment about the Asia-Pacific region, which contains about two-thirds of the world's people. "Environmental degradation in the region is pervasive, accelerating and unabated. At risk are people's health and livelihoods, the survival of species and ecosystem services that are the basis for long-term economic development. Economic development and poverty reduction are increasingly constrained by degradation of forestry and fisheries, scarcity of freshwater, and poor human health as a result of air and water pollution." The wild-eyed, irresponsible, environmental exaggerator making this judgment is the Asian Development Bank, and the judgment was published this year, not 30 years ago. Professor Lomborg has waged a powerful attack on a position no one in the environmental community is holding. This guarantees his success in terms of book sales and exposure, but it leaves his purpose a mystery. � Tom Burke is environmental adviser at Rio Tinto Zinc and a former director of Friends of the Earth Climate change Charles Secrett Here are the places, on their long retreat, at which sceptics about climate change have chosen to stand and fight. First, they denied that climate change was happening at all. Then, they claimed there were "uncertainties" in the science (true) and that these were sufficient to remove the case for action (false). Today, the sceptics belatedly admit that something probably should have been done, but claim that it is now too late to do anything but adapt to the consequences. Lomborg is firing mostly from this third line of defence, although he likes to aim the occasional shot on the uncertainty front as well. To do this he uses a simplistic model of costs and benefits, makes some dubious assertions about the range of possibilities set out by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and makes some flatly untrue statements about the likely impact of climate change on weather patterns and human populations. Lomborg suggests that the total cost of climate change could be about $5 trillion, while the cost of action to fight it would be much higher. He relies for his figures on a model by Professor Nordhaus of Yale University, described by other economists in the field as "almost worthless" as a basis for climate policy-making. Nordhaus assumes, for example, that none of the revenue from his carbon tax is recycled as lower labour taxes or higher social benefits. No wonder it's expensive! Lomborg blandly asserts that the higher estimates of the IPCC are "plainly unlikely", which will come as news to most climatologists. In fact, the IPCC, which represents the consensus view of climate scientists from around the world, recently concluded that climate change will probably happen at a faster rate than was previously believed. Lomborg says that climate change "probably will not increase storminess", although the IPCC's latest report (which he claims to "basically accept") concludes that tropical cyclones and monsoons will increase in frequency, though uncertainties remain between different models in respect of other types of storm. In summary, Lomborg chooses a bad economic model, which overestimates the cost of action and underestimates the costs of inaction, makes unjustified assumptions about the IPCC's forecasts, and then misrepresents evidence which does not fit his case. How ironic that he should be contemptuous of the intellectual rigour of environmentalists. His slippery way with facts and arguments has already been well exposed by his academic colleagues in Denmark (see the Aarhus University website www.au.dk/cesam), but contrarians tend to lack a sense of shame. Frankly, insistence on definitive figures for the likely cost of climate change as a necessary precursor to action is essentially fatuous. If, for example, climate change leads to mass human migrations, what will be the long-term costs - or benefits - of that?The whole project is about as reliable and valuable as trying to work out the long-term cost of the second world war in an attempt to decide whether it was worth fighting. Politics is about decision-making in conditions of uncertainty. It is about making judgments. Every government - with the sad exception of the Bush administration - has now judged that man-made climate change is a real and present danger and does require urgent action. They are supported by almost every qualified scientist on Earth. When such conservative folk reach drastic conclusions, it is time to check the flood defences. Climate change will require action sooner or later; the longer we leave it, the greater the cost. There is a place for serious intellectual analysis of environmentalist arguments. Some greens do speak of the current era in tones of doom and gloom, without considering whether humanity is worse off today. But Lomborg's work is not serious enough. He has turned a proper scepticism about green claims into a slapdash attempt to dismiss all environmental arguments. This may help him sell books and secure column inches. But it fatally undermines his claim to be taken seriously. � Charles Secrett is executive director of Friends of the Earth Sustainability Tony McMichael It would be surprising if a uniquely clever species such as ourselves had not been able to extract more "carrying capacity" out of the world's environment, but yes, as Bjorn Lomborg argues, there is much to celebrate about our environmental achievements. The question we face today, however - one not faced by Malthus and others whose reasoning Lomborg faults - is: at what future environmental price have these gains been made? Markets and most economists dislike future prices: they are hard to estimate, and anyway, the economic orthodoxy is to discount the future, lest we overspend on its behalf. Such discounting underlies Lomborg's spurious comparison between seemingly efficient healthcare interventions and inefficient environmental protective actions to extend lifetimes. He fails to note that the former intervention, but not the latter, must be repeated in every generation. Lomborg argues that the world's environment is basically doing fine, despite the growing human pressures, which is true. But it is also true that these gains have partly been made by eroding natural environmental capital; by mortgaging the future. Here, his analysis is at its weakest. He displays little understanding of the consequences of perturbing the cycles and rhythms of the biosphere and fails to explore the more troubling consequences of disrupting the Earth's ecological, climatic and other natural systems. Lomborg's simple arithmetic, bottom-line tallies and linear projections of trends represents a deficient analysis. That simplistic approach to environmental issues is an unfortunate legacy of 20th-century schooling. The newer ideas of ecology encompass complex interactive systems, non-linear processes and chaotic shifts between "attractor" states. These ideas do not fit comfortably with the traditional Newtonian model of the world. Likewise, the full weight of human economic activity no longer fits comfortably within the confines of the biosphere. That is why the past quarter-century has witnessed the depletion of stratospheric ozone and ocean fisheries, greenhouse gas accumulation, regional tensions over freshwater supplies and widespread land degradation. Humankind, for the first time in its 200,000-year history, has begun to overload the environment at a global level. Lomborg's reasoning might have sufficed three decades ago, but today a less sceptical, better-informed assessment would include the risks posed to a secure and healthy human future by the disruption of life-supporting natural systems. This is the essence of the "sustainability" debate. � Tony McMichael is professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.To order a copy of his book, Human Frontiers, Environments and Disease: Past Patterns, Uncertain Futures, for �12.95 (Cambridge University Press, �14.95) plus p&p, call Guardian CultureShop on 0870 066 7979 |
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