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01/24/2003 Archived Entry: "Smearing a Skeptic"

LOMBORG DEFENDS HIMSELF: Bjorn Lomborg had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that formally responds to the Danish Committee for Scientific Dishonesty report accusing him of scientific dishonesty.

"I am Danish, liberal, vegetarian, a former member of Greenpeace; and I used to believe in the litany of our ever-deteriorating environment. You know, the doomsday message repeated by the media, as when Time magazine tells us that "everyone knows the planet is in bad shape." We're defiling our Earth, we're told. Our resources are running out. Our air and water are more and more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct, we're paving over nature, decimating the biosphere.

"The problem is that this litany doesn't seem to be backed up by facts. When I set out to check it against the data from reliable sources--the U.N., the World Bank, the OECD, etc.--a different picture emerged. We're not running out of energy or natural resources. There is ever more food, and fewer people are starving. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 30 years; today it is 67. We have reduced poverty more in the past 50 years than we did in the preceding 500. Air pollution in the industrialized world has declined--in London the air has never been cleaner since medieval times."

Your humble editor defended Lomborg as well in the pages of The American Prowler last week.