As a lifeguard, the last time Freeman Dyson went down to the bottom of the cliff to check on the rock pile was, well, never. He too has no background in climate science, having done no research whatever—ever—on atmospheric physics or on climate modelling. Even in theoretical physics, his area of expertise, his greatest contributions date to the late 1940s and early 1950s. So again, in a free society Dyson has every right to stand at the top of the cliff and shout, “Jump!” But it’s reasonable to wonder why the New York Times Magazine would give him the soapbox, especially when most of the time the magazine pays relatively little attention to this, the most urgent environmental issue humankind has ever faced.
Here’s another fairly current example: the Globe and Mail, Canada’s answer to the New York Times and arguably the most influential newspaper north of the 49th parallel, carried an opinion piece on April 16, 2009, by Bjørn Lomborg, the famously self-described Skeptical Environmentalist (per the title of his best-selling 2001 book). Under the headline “Forget the Scary Eco-Crunch: This Earth is Enough,” the article sets out to dismiss the concern that humans are currently consuming global resources at a pace that cannot be sustained.
Lomborg begins by criticizing the concept of an ecological footprint, in which scientists try to estimate actual human impact on the environment rather than counting only the land we cover with roads and houses. As Lomborg says, scientists working on behalf of the World Wildlife Foundation have calculated that when you add up all the land affected by human consumption habits—the land where we live, the land used to grow our food, the land that is destroyed by mining or polluted by industries that produce our consumables—“each American uses 9.4 hectares of the globe, each European 4.7 hectares, and those in low-income countries one hectare. Adding it all up, we collectively use 17.5 billion hectares. Unfortunately, there are only 13.4 billion hectares available. So, according to the W WF, we’re already living beyond Earth’s means, using around 30 percent too much.”
Complaining that these calculations oversimplify the situation and don’t factor in potential future changes, Lomborg goes on to say, “ . . . it is clear that areas we use for roads cannot be used for growing food, and that using areas to build our houses takes away from forests. This part of the ecological footprint is a convenient measure of our literal footprint on Earth. Here, we live far inside the available area, using some 60 percent of the world’s available space, and this proportion is likely to drop because the rate at which the Earth’s population is increasing is now slowing, while technological progress continues. So no ecological collapse.”
This logic is impenetrable. Lomborg implies, first of all, that we can disregard the ecological aspect of our footprint because it’s tricky to tally with absolute certainty. Then he says our literal footprint is actually going to get smaller because the population is rising, but at a slightly reduced rate. (Lomborg alone understands how more humans will take up less space.) Then, the skeptical environmentalist reassures us with this: “Due to technology, the individual demand on the planet has already dropped 35 percent over the past half-decade, and the collective requirement will reach its upper limit before 2020 without any overdraft.”
That’s wonderful, or it would be if it could be proven. But if Lomborg has some secret source of information for this contention, he is not sharing it with readers. Instead, he throws these assertions out without attribution or substantiation. He runs to the cliff, grabs the Globe and Mail megaphone, and shouts, “Jump!”
Again, that is his right. But why is Canada’s leading newspaper promoting this as a reliable viewpoint? Lomborg is not a scientist (his Ph.D., in political science, concentrated on game theory), and his previous work has been widely and publicly criticized for its inaccuracy. (See Chapter 10 for more on Lom-borg’s checkered track record.) Why, even under the guise of “opinion,” would a serious newspaper present this unsourced and inexpert argument as worthy of public attention?
It’s not as though the true state of the world’s environment is a mystery—or that it is left unstudied by leading and highly qualified scientists. For example, a collection of 1,360 such experts completed the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005. Those scientists, all leaders in their fields, concluded that, “over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.”
“Substantial and largely irreversible.” That sounds more dramatic than Lomborg’s reassuring promise of “no ecological collapse.” The whole Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report suggests very specifically that humankind is destroying the environment at a frightening pace. We are burning down forests, trashing the ocean, and changing global climate in a way that is making it extremely difficult for other species to survive—substantial and irreversible. In a way, we have to hope that Lomborg is right: we have to hope that this Earth is enough—and it may be, especially if humans pay attention to the warning signs and start behaving differently. But Lomborg is mounting a transparently fatuous argument to convince us that we don’t have to pay attention to our ecological footprint. While more than thirteen hundred of the world’s leading scientists try in good faith to back us away from the cliff, Lomborg grabs a soiled lifeguard T-shirt from a bin at the nearest thrift shop and tells us to keep jumping, ignore the risks. And the Globe and Mail cheers him on.
A third story broke in the early spring of 2009 that cast light on the weakness of modern lifeguard recruitment. On April 23, 2009, the New York Times’s excellent science writer Andrew Revkin reported on a now-defunct organization called the Global Climate Coalition, primarily a group of companies whose operations or products are heavy producers of greenhouse gases. For more than a decade, ending in 2002, the coalition spent millions of dollars on advertising and lobbying campaigns aimed at convincing public officials specifically and the public generally that climate change was not proven and that mitigating action was unnecessary. Yet, as Revkin reported, recently released court documents show that the Global Climate Coalition’s own scientists had said in their 1995 report Predicting Future Climate Change, “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”
It seems clear from the record that the Global Climate Coalition wasn’t really interested in the science of climate change. Revkin reports that someone within the organization deleted the above reference and, even then, never distributed the report. And the group didn’t actually invest in any climate change research. Instead it spent a fortune (the 1997 budget alone amounted to US$1.68 million) sowing confusion and lobbying against climate change policies, a gesture that, coincidentally or not, would serve the financial interests of the coalition’s major funders: ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum (now BP), Texaco, General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, the Aluminum Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and others.
To take the crowded-cliff analogy one step further, it was as if some of the lifeguards had been charging thrill-seekers money to jump into the water, and they didn’t want to give up the income. Not only did they pass up the opportunity to check the rocky bottom themselves, but when they hired someone to check, and that someone (in this case, a Mobil Corporation chemical engineer and climate expert named Leonard S. Bernstein) came back and said there was trouble below, they buried the report—and kept selling tickets.
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