By Wolfgang SterrerMark Twain is famously credited with the quip that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Alas! That credit may be yet another lie, because the author apparently ‘borrowed’ it from the Victorian-era British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. It seems that truth, whether personal, historic or natural, is simply hard to come by. Most of what happens out there has so many variables, is so muddled by accident or design, is spread over such a multitude of events and travels such a tortuous path that truth, if at all, can only be approximated.

Even then, the outcome is usually far from clear-cut, continues to be hotly debated, and is often no more than an invitation for more diligent search. As if it were not tricky enough to understand the past, interpreting it to predict the future is infinitely more treacherous, frequently requiring a range of possible futures. (This has led to the image of the “two-handed scientist” who prefaces his testimony by saying that “on one hand, we can say that— but on the other, we have to take into account—”). All of which is further exacerbated when the public’s need to know is fed snappy sound bites such as “Pesticides cause cancer”, or “Global warming is one of the greatest threats to the planet.”

This, in a nutshell, is the predicament in which environmental science finds itself. Yet, as portrayed in the book “The Skeptical Environmentalist” by Bj|0xf8|rn Lomborg, a young Danish statistician and political scientist (critiqued by Gavin Shorto in two opinion pieces that appeared on this page, February 25 and March 4, 2002), environmental scientists come through as a Mafia of professional doomsayers, sworn to serving up the gloomiest forecasts because that’s what will keep grant money flowing.

Had Lomborg’s book (and Shorto’s opinions) simply redressed the balance between the most pessimistic claims of environmentalists and the most optimistic prophecies of some economists, it would have been a refreshing contribution to the environmental debate.

But this was not the case. Granted, Lomborg’s book is no less than a tour-de-force that gathers and analyses a wealth of data, from energy and other resource use to pollution, biodiversity, and global warming — which at first makes up for the book’s spotty coverage, lopsided choice of data, and lack of understanding of what the data mean. While it does a credible job debunking “our chemical fears”, by showing that there is no ‘cancer epidemic’ resulting from pesticides and the like, it devotes only 19 (of 515) pages to energy, concluding that “there is plenty of energy” (p. 135) — something few would dispute.

What Lomborg does not address is that we are running out of cheap oil, and of the environment’s capacity to deal with resource depletion and waste accumulation; the mounting side effects of our exorbitant energy use.

Or take global warming, where he reduces to just one prediction — the most optimistic one — the range of possible outcomes given in all original sources. The treacherousness of predictions based on weather and climate is common knowledge. Local and global climate patterns fluctuate on time scales that range from a day to tens of thousands of years (such as the ice ages) — but the data is often unequally reliable, only recent, and contradictory, leading to a wide range of possible predictions.

A wino and a teetotaler would probably disagree on what is newsworthy in a scientific report that describes the effects of alcohol consumption as ranging from mildly beneficial to catastrophic — yet this is exactly the range of effects that have been proposed for global warming. (Suffice it to say, Lomborg takes the wino’s view). Either global warming may not add up to much, because it will be neutralised by as yet unappreciated phenomena. Or it may raise global sea levels in this century no more than in the past century — about a foot.

Or sea levels may rise five times faster, or more. (Am I alarmist if I draw attention to our own backyard? At the Government Quarry we have good evidence that some 400,000 years ago the world’s sea level was 21 metres — 70 feet — higher than it is today. As Paul Hearty and colleagues suggest in the journal ‘Geology’ (27:375), such a drastic increase in the ocean’s volume could only have come about by the massive melting of much of the ice sequestered in Greenland and Antarctica, particularly the collapse of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet. As if to underline this possibility, The Royal Gazette <$>of March 20, 2002, reports that a floating ice shelf the size of Rhode Island, which had survived for at least 12,000 years, has just splintered into a flotilla of drifting icebergs—).

To ignore predictions about sea level rise means ignoring the increasing erosion of Bermuda’s coastlines, or the plight of 10,000 inhabitants of the Pacific island of Tuvalu who are now seeking asylum because their nation is literally disappearing beneath the waves. To belittle global biodiversity losses means to ignore what we have witnessed on our small island: the near-demise of cahows and cedars, both of which once populated Bermuda by the hundreds of thousands; the extirpation of sea turtles and several dozen fish species because of land reclamation and overfishing; the extinction of endemic insects and land snails because of introduced exotic species; and the relentless one-way conversion of nature into human habitats and artefacts.

We need only extrapolate from our small island, and arrive at enormous global biodiversity losses whose causes and consequences we should at least investigate. Lomborg’s main mistake is to define a healthy environment by the absence of whatever poisons, predators and pathogens may harm us, rather than by the presence<$> of the myriad life forms whose acting in concert makes human existence possible.

Much of the book rides roughshod over original data, and wastes energy on destroying straw men. To ridicule pioneers such as Rachel Carson (who in 1962 predicted a “Silent Spring” largely resulting from overuse of DDT and other pesticides) and Paul Ehrlich (who warned about the environmental consequences of “The Population Bomb”) makes as much sense as a cigarette smoker who has been told by his doctor he will not live another year unless he quits, and who — still alive when the year is out — concludes that the doctor is a quack, and cigarette commercials are gospel— (The global pervasiveness of DDT, incidentally, was documented by David Wingate who in 1968 showed it as the cause for reproductive failure in the Cahow).

Dismissing environmentalists’ concerns on the basis of the most dated or extreme predictions is like dismissing the women’s rights cause — and implicitly all of its achievements — as strident.

Yet the most alarming aspect of Lomborg’s view is the statistical improbability of good news wherever he looks, replacing the “alarmist bias” of environmentalists with universal complacency. “Children born today — in both the industrialised world and developing countries” he concludes, “will live longer and be healthier, they will get more food, a better education, a higher standard of living, more leisure time and far more possibilities <\m> without the global environment being destroyed.”

Wouldn’t that be just hunky-dory — we all lean back and see it happen. It would soon become apparent what is more self-serving, the warning of scientists or the soothsaying of those who assure us that resources will never diminish, and the quality of our environment will never deteriorate.

I’d rather side with science, as the most self-correcting enterprise there is — it thrives on competition that accepts only those facts that can be verified, and lets survive only those theories that best explain the facts. Science may not find eternal truths, but it sure leaves mistakes behind. Few people today would advocate a universe with a flat earth in its centre, and the sun circling around it. It is easy to forget that each time we throw a light switch, take a pill, or board an airplane, we prove science right as a way of understanding and using the world around us.

Yet the same science that has taken us to the moon also makes predictions — not always as accurate as we would wish, often not to our liking, but the best we have — about the earth’s resources, the quality of the environment, and nature’s fate and ours. Next to hope and faith, science may be our best bet for meeting the future.

So what if some of these claims sound just too outrageous? Well, I’d still rather pay attention to the late Jacques Cousteau, one of nature’s most charismatic defenders. He simply couldn’t go wrong when he declared that “the ocean is dying! ” — because had his prediction come true he would have said “I told you so”; but if it didn’t he would have said “Aren’t you glad I warned you, so you could do something about it?”