Media Sheep: How did The Skeptical Environmentalist pull the wool over the eyes of so many editors?

• Author: Bell, Richard C.
• Position: Commentary

Last summer, a now-infamous book called The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World caused a great splash in the media. Written by a young Danish statistician, it was presented as a shocking reexamination of the "facts" about the world's great environmental issues--it claimed that environmental scientists and organizations were falsely alarming the public about such problems as global warming, deforestation, and pollution. The gist of the book, echoing a now-familiar claim of the late Julian Simon and such right-wing organizations as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, was that whatever environmental problems exist will solve themselves, and no interventions by governments are needed.

Serious environmental scientists who looked into the book to find out how the author had come to such conclusions quickly dismissed it as a foolish polemic written by a non-scientist, and did not bother to respond to it. Much to their dismay, however, editors at the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the New York Times all published glowing reviews by writers who were apparently unfamiliar (whether willfully or through lack of reading) with what peer-reviewed scientists say. Taking Lomborg's words at face value, the world's media jumped on the bandwagon, issuing a plethora of derivative stories "revealing" that Lomborg had exposed environmentalists as wrong about virtually everything they were saying.

These stories took environmental scientists by surprise (most had never been asked by the reporters for their views), and months passed before the scientists realized they would have to respond--or else watch Lomborg's claims confuse legislators and regulators, and poison the well of public environmental information.

But respond they did, demonstrating in field after field that it is Lomborg's book, not the work of tens of thousands of their colleagues, that has duped the public. On these three pages, we have summarized just a few of the main claims Lomborg makes, and what the experts have to say about them. The summaries are followed by some brief comments about how such a fraud could have occurred, and what dangers it signals about how environmental information is being disseminated to the public in today's media.

Lomborg's Claims--and the Scientists' Responses On Forest Cover

Lomborg writes that according to what he calls "the longest data series" available, forest cover has expanded since 1950. To make this claim, he uses an agricultural data series that the U.N. discontinued in 1994 because of inaccuracies, according to the head of the U.N.'s Forest...