The skeptical environmentalist [antikvár]

PrefaceThe idea for this book was born in a bookstore in Los Angeles in February 1997.1 was standing leafing through Wired Magazine and read an interview with the American economist Julian Simon, from the University of Maryland. He maintained that much of our traditional knowledge about the environment is quite simply based on preconceptions and poor statistics. Our doomsday conceptions of the environment are not correct. Simon stressed that he only used official statistics, which everyone has access to and can use to check his claims.I was provoked. I'm an old left-wing Greenpeace member and had for a long time been concerned about environmental questions. At the same time I teach statistics, and it should therefore be easy for me to check Simon's sources. Moreover, I always tell my students how statistics is one of science's best ways to check whether our venerable social beliefs stand up to scrutiny or turn out to be myths. Yet, I had never really questioned my own belief in an ever deteriorating environment - and here was Simon, telling me to put my beliefs under the statistical microscope.In the fall of 1997 I held a study group with ten of my sharpest students, where we tried to examine Simon thoroughly. Honestly, we expected to show that most of Simon's talk was simple, American right-wing propaganda. And yes, not everything he said was correct, but - contrary to our expectations - it turned out that a surprisingly large amount of his points stood up to scrutiny and conflicted with what we believed ourselves to know. The air in the developed world is becoming less, not more, polluted; people in the developingcountries are not starving more, but less, and so on.I asked myself why I was so definitely convinced that the environmental situation is bad and ever deteriorating. And if I was wrong in my beliefs about the environment, I was probably not the only one. Thus, I contacted one of the leading Danish newspapers, the centre-left, Guardian-like Politiken, and suggested to them that I write some articles about our understanding of various environmental problems. The outcome was four articles, that gave rise to one of the biggest Danish debates, spreading to all newspapers, and covering well over 400 articles, commentaries and critiques. Later, I tried to follow up on the debate with a book, covering a much wider area and attempting to address all our main worries.However, the entire debate seemed peculiarly incomplete. To begin with, I was surprised that the only reaction from many environmental groups was the gut reaction of complete denial. Sure, this had also been my initial response, but I would have thought as the debate progressed that refusal would give place to reflection on the massive amounts of supportive data I had presented, and lead to a genuine reevaluation of our approach to the environment. Surprisingly, I met many, even amongst my close friends, who had only read the critical commentaries and drawn the simple conclusion that I was wrong, and that we could comfortably go on believing in the impending doomsday. This suggested that doomsday-visions are very thoroughly anchored in our thinking.I teach statistics at the University of Aarhus and basically my skills consist in knowing how