The Skeptical Environmentalist. (Books in Brief).

The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjom Lomborg (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 515 pages, paperback, $28.00.

By now everyone knows, or thinks that they know, that humanity is destroying the environment. We are running out of fresh water; agricultural crops have reached the limits of productivity; the forests are being clear-cut; the human population is exploding; the ozone hole threatens everyone with cancer; and mankind's use of fossil fuels has pumped the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases causing runaway global warming. This is what everyone thinks they know. This is what Danish political scientist and statistician Bjorn Lomborg thought he knew too. That is until he read a Wired magazine interview of Julian Simon in which the late University of Maryland economist argued that environmental doomsday predictions were incorrect and based on faulty statistics.

Simon's statements provoked Lomborg into investigating the economist's claims. A self-described "old left-wing Greenpeace member," Lomborg and some of his best students gathered to examine several sets of environmental data that Simon said suggested environmental conditions were improving. Much to their surprise, they found that Simon's claims held up under scrutiny. The group concluded that "the air in the developed world is becoming less, not more, polluted; people in the developing countries are not starving more, but less, and so on."

From this beginning in the fall of 1997, Lomborg proceeded to examine thoroughly the state of the world's environment. The resulting book, The Skeptical Enviromnentalist, is notable not just for exhaustively using data and rigorously adhering to sound methodology but because the evidence it presents flies in the face of all the doom and gloom spread about by the environmental orthodoxy. So much so that, while making an appearance at an Oxford book store, Lomborg took a pie in the face from one Mark Lynas, a radical environmentalist angered by the book's conclusions.

Lomborg reached those conclusions after closely examining several indicators of the environment's health. Among the areas reviewed by the author is human welfare. It may seem strange to find information usually confined to economics discussed in a book on the environment. But Lomborg focuses on economic indicators stemming directly from human interaction with nature. For instance, the author probes statistics relating to food supply and how it relates to human population.

Much like the 18th-century economist Thomas Malthus, most environmentalists today believe that, agriculturally, humanity is consuming more than it is producing. Restated in environmentalist terms, this means that the human population is exceeding the earth's carrying capacity. Such a belief gained great currency in the late 1960s with the publication of Paul Ehrlich's influential book, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich argued that "the battle to feed humanity is over...," and that humanity had lost. Though this has remained a popular myth on the political left, Lomborg correctly points out that more food is available now than ever before.

Environmentalists have also succeeded in provoking widespread concern about water scarcity. The Worldwatch Institute thinks that drought will likely be "a source of international conflicts and major shifts in national economies," and Time magazine has worried that wells will run dry. Here too, Lomborg finds the dire predictions to be baseless. After reviewing a number of statistics relating to water scarcity, Lomborg concludes that "more than 96 percent of all nations have at present sufficient water resources. On all continents, water accessibility has increased per person, and at the same time an ever higher proportion of people have gained access to clean drinking water and sanitation."

As good as this book is, it is not perfect. For example, in his section on global warming, the author writes, "This chapter accepts the reality of man-made global warming...." This, even though many climate scientists, including some leaders in the field, have debunked the prevailing global warming myth. Moreover, in his chapter on the topic, Lomborg focuses largely on the work done by the UN's IPCC panel on global warming. While examining the IPCC's work is useful and interesting, Lomborg would have enhanced his book by including data from a more unbiased source. Further, while this problem is most pronounced in the chapter on global warming, to a lesser extent it affects the book as a whole. Throughout the book, Lomborg refers to, and draws conclusions from, UN data. But the UN, having a political agenda of its own, is not a disinterested party.

The Skeptical Environmentalist is formatted like a text book. It is heavily laden with charts and illustrations and features several sidebars. The text itself runs in two columns for the length of the book. The format, as well as the heft of the book, will discourage those who prefer to read from cover to cover. Nevertheless, the book is a superb research tool. It is logically arranged, well indexed, and has a thorough table of contents. Because of this, and despite its problems, The Skeptical Environmentalist would make a worthy addition to the library of anyone truly wishing to understand the real state of the world's environment.