Known reserves of fossil fuels and most metals have risen. In each case, he demonstrated that the doom and gloom is wildly exaggerated. Air and water are becoming ever more polluted.Species are becoming rapidly extinct, forests are vanishing and fish stocks are collapsing.The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat.One by one, he goes through the “litany”, as he calls it, of four big environmental fears:
Rather, he shows, most environmental indicators are stable or improving. As an instinctive green and a former member of Greenpeace, he was surprised to find that the world's environment is not, in fact, getting ever worse. Just the factsĬurious about the true state of the planet, the author-who makes no claims to expertise in environmental science, only to statistical expertise-has scrutinised reams of official data on everything from air pollution to energy availability to climate change. They are rattled not because, as they endlessly insist, Dr Lomborg lacks credentials as an environmental scientist and is of no account, but because his book is such a powerful and persuasive assault on the central tenets of the modern environmental movement. Dr Pimm, for one, railed against Dr Lomborg in Nature, while Scientific American recently devoted 11 pages to attacks from scientists known for their environmental activism.ĭr Lomborg's critics protest too much. Numerous heavyweights of science have penned damning articles and reviews in leading journals. In the weeks since the book's release, virtually every large environmental group has weighed in with a denunciation. Those contemptuous words from Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation biology at Columbia University, are fairly representative of the response from many environmental scientists and activists to Bjorn Lomborg's recent book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist”.
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