permaculture

["keller" <ak.and.ak@on-line.de>]

From: Claude Genest <genest@together.net>
To: permaculture <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 11:07 PM
Subject: Re: Guardian article on Lomborg

> Seems that Lomborg's book is an expression of the general public's having
> had enought with ( what they perceive to be) environmental doomsaying.

I'm not sure this is so. I think the people who did not like the
environmntal movement have always been there as well as the supporters.

I think part of the problem is that there is a lot of unclear thinking in
the environmental movement. Some people mix it up with pseudoscientific woo
woo stuff or take unproven theories just because they please them and so
make it easy to attack them. Some people in the environmental movement are
actually antiscientific, and I think that is a big mistake.

However, it looks like Lomborg's writings are not scientifically sound
either. The people who wrote about him in Scientific American (January 2002)
really take him appart. It looks like if one throws hard science at him he
will break. He is plain wrong with a lot of what he is saying. Stephen
Schneider says about him (page 61: "Lomborg admits. 'I am not myself an
expert as regards environmental problems' - truer words are not found in the
rest of the book").

This guy has done a lot of damage, and it is very important to develop a
sound line of argument against him. It is just bad one hase to waste time on
such a nutcase. Here is the bottom line of one of the reviews (Steven
Schneider: "Global Warming, Neglecting the Complexities):

"For such an interdisciciplinary topic, the publisher would have been wise
to ask natural scientists as well as social scientists to review the
manuscript, which was published by the social science side of the house.
It's not surprising that the reviwers failed to spot Lomborg's unbalanced
presentation of the natural science, given the complexity of the many
intertwinning fields. But that the natural scientists weren't asked is a
serous omission for a sepectable publisher such as Cambridge University
Press.
Unfortunately, angry reviews such as this one will be the result. Worse
still, many laypeople and policymakers won't see the reviews and could well
be tricked into thinking thousands of citations and hundreds of pages
constitue balanced sholarship. A berrer rule of thumb is to see who talks in
ranges and subjective probabilities and to beware of the myth busters and
'truth tellers'."

The botom line of the next article  (page 63, by John P. Holdren) is titled:
"Energy: Asking the wrong questions" reads like this:

"Of course, much of what is most problematic in the global energy picture is
covered by Lomborg not in his erngy chapter but in those that deal with air
pollution, acid rain, water pollution and global warming. The lais id
devastatingly critiqued by Stephen Schneider on page 60. There is no space
to deal with the other energy-related chapters; suffice to say that I found
their level of superficiality, selectivity and misunderstanding roughly
consistent with that of the energy chapter reviewd here. This is a shame.
Lomborg is giving scepticism - and statisticians - a bad name."

This is the resume of Thomas Lovejoy's article (page 67) titled:
"Biodiversity: Dismissing Scientific Process":
"... Biased Language, such as "admits" in the instance, permeated the book.
In Addition to errors of bias,the text is rife with careless mistakes. Time
and again I sought to track references from the text to the footnotes to the
bibliography to find ba a mirage in the desert.
Far worse, Lomborg seems quite ignorant of how environmental science
proceeds: researchers identify a potential problem, scientific examinations
tests the various hypotheses, understanding ot the problem often becomes
more complex, researchers suggest remedial policies - and _then_ the
situation improves. By choosing to highlight the initial step and skip to
the outcome, he implies incorrectly that all environmentalists do is
exaggerate. The pint is that things improve _because_ of the efforts of
environmentalists to fllag a particular problem, investigat it and suggest
policies to remedy it. Sadly, the author seems not to reciprocate the
respect biologists have for statisticans."

>
>  I just find it so frustrating: What I want to talk about with people
>  (mom/dad brother/friends) is Permaculture.
>  But I can't do that till I define our "other way of seeing".
>  And I can't do that till I convince people that it's worth taking the
time
> to consider an ecological perspective, and I can't do that till I convince
> them that something's broken and needs fixing, and I can't do that till I
> wade through their objections which include things like
> "you're too negative and seeing the glass as half empty - stats/facts
reveal
> that things aren't getting worse, they're getting better !"

I know these problems and understand completely. But I think now one must
throw one's seeds where they have a chance to grow. Instead of trying an
uphill battle to convert people who don't want to hear it, I think it is
more effective to search for people who are ready to make the next step. For
example, my impression is that at the moment I can achieve more in Cameroon
than in Germany, so that is where I put my energy.

> I guess this Lomborg stuff is a little like the Canadian in Alberta a few
> years back who made headlines saying that the Holocaust had never
happened.
> What can you say to that ? "yes it did" ?!

Generally I belive it is impossible to change people if they don't want to
change.

> As Thomas Pynchon says in "Gravity's Rainbow" "If they get you asking the
> wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers".... What a
> catch-22 this Lomborg puts us in ....

Next time somebody throws Lomborg at you in a discussion, just get out
Scientific American and cite these sections I have cited above. That might
suffice to silence them. Do not delve into a discussion of details. Just
make clear the man does not know what he is writing about. If somebody
insists on discussing details, point to the essence of these reviews. They
say that Lomborg does not have the expert knowledge required to write about
these things. So don't you and that somebody, so why waste time on such
discussions. The experts have reviewd the book very negatively. Scientists
have marked the book off. So discussing it would be a waste of time. Use the
fact that Scientific American has a good reputation. A book must indeed be
terribly bad if such a Journal devotes eleven pages to a negative review -
starting with an introduction by the Editor in Chief.. That might be a
record for the Guinness Book (the longest slating book review ever published
in that (maybe: in any) journal). It starts with an introduction by the
Editor in Chief, John Rennie:

"Science defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist"
Misleading Math about Earth
Critical thinking and hard data are cornerstones of al good science. Because
environmental sciences are so keenly important to both our biological and
economic survival - causes that are often seen to be in conflict - they
deserve full scrutiny. -with that in mind, the book The Skeptical
Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press), by Bjorn Lomborg, a
statistician and political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark,
should be a welcome audit. And yet it isn't.
As the book's subtitle - Measuring the Real State of the World - indicates,
Lomborg's intention was to reanalyze environmental data so taht the public
might make policy decisions based on the truest understanding of what
science has determined. His conclusion, which he writes surprised even him,
was that contrary tothe gloomy predictions of degradation he calls "the
litany," everything it sgetting better. Not that all is rosy, but the future
for the environment is less dire than is supposed. Instead Lomborg accuses a
pessimistic and dishonest cabal of environmental groups, institutions and
the media of distorting scientists' actual findings [A copy of the book's
first chapter can be found at www.lomborg.org]
The problem with Lomborg's conclusion is that the scientists themselves
desavow it. Many spoke to us at Scientific American about their frustration
ath what they described as Lomborg's misinterpretation of their fields. His
seemingly dispassionate outsider's view, they told us, is often marred by an
incomplete use tof the data or a misunderstanding of the underlying science.
Even where his statistical analyses are valid, his interpretations are
frequently off the mark - literally not seeing the state of the forests for
the number of the trees, for example. And it is hard not to be struck by
Lomborg's presumption that he has seen into the heart of scince more
faithfully than have investigators who have devoted their lives to it; it is
equally curious that he finds the same contrarian good news lurking in every
diverse area of environmental science.
We asked for leading experts to critique Lomborg's treatments of their
areas - global warming, energy, population and biodiversity - so readers
could understand whay the book provokes so much disagreement. Lomborg's
assessment that conditions on earth are generally improving for human
welfare may hold some truth. The errors described here, however, show that
in iths purpose of describing the real state of the world, the book is a
failure."

...nuff said.

I admit that my former love affair with Scientific American has faded away
long since, but sometimes I am happy I have not canceled the subsrciption
yet.

Andreas