"It’s the end of the world!!!" Is it?

The skeptical environmentalist

We are all familiar with environmentalist concerns. We are rapidly destroying our planet.Our resources are runing out. The population is growing exponencialy. Food is not suficient to all. Polution is omnipresent. Species are exitinguishing at a rate of 40000 for year. Forests are disapearing. Etc.

There's only one litle thing: Its not true!

It all began with Bjorn Lomborg, a Greenpeace activist and Statistics Professor at Aarhus University. After some right wing polititian said that the environmentalist concerns were a mith he decided to form a team and to scientificaly analise the oficial numbers of the UN, EU, FMI and its suborganizations responsible for individual subjects like WHO, IPCC, FAO,etc. , on environment. His conclusions were quite shocking! Here are some of them:

1-Population: the population growth is not out of control. Its growth rate had its peak in 1960 and is diminuishing; todays' value is 1/5 of the growth rate in 1960. UN estimates that world population will stabilize in 11.000.000.000 at 2100.

2- Hunger: Food is not becoming scarce. Acording to UN we produce 23% more of food per capita than in 1961. In the 3rd world countries, in the same period, the growth of ingested calories was 38% per capita. The subnutrition went from 35% of the world population to 18% and is expected to be 12% in 2010. There was 920 million people sufering from hunger in 1970 and now the number is 784 millions (Lets not forget that in this period the 3rd world population doubled). Furthermore the agricultural growth rate is 20 times the population growth so there is no inerent food shortage problem.

3- Forests: The foresteal area is not diminuishing. Since 1950 until 1994 it went to 30.04% to 30.89%. The desforestation rate is not 1.5% to 4.6% but one tenth of it. And this number doesn't count with the reforestation.

4- Energy: We don't have the danger of an energetic crisis. We have oil for more than 100 years. Besides oil there are alternatives such as schist oil which is 8 times more energetic than oil. Estimates say there is 242 times more schist oil than oil. Moroever, if solar energy technology continues to grow at the current rate, solar energy will become industrialy competitive in about 2030 and will substitute almost all other forms of energy in 2065. The actual world's energy demand would be satisfied if 2.6% of the Sahara desert was covered with solar pannels.

5- Biodiversity: the extinction rate is not the alarming 10%-100% in 50 years but "just" 0.7%.

6- Polution: Contrary to general beliefs, polution has decreased imensely in the last decades. In 3rd world countries though, polution is increasing but once the development is high enough (2500 dolars per capita) it will largely decrease. They are folowing the exact same patern as 1st world countries. There is no apocaliptical scenario here.

7- Acid rain: In the 80's was described as "environmental Hiroxima". A recent study decided this question: acid rain doesn't afect th tree's growth and development.

8- Ozone layer: The ozone concentration already reached its minimum. Now is slowly growing and will be normalised in 50 years. If you are worried with the radiation levels you recieve because of the ozone hole, let me give you an example: At what latitude, with the ozone layer intact, would correspond the actual levels of radiation in Washington DC? 180 Km South!


Of course the reactions to this were extreeme, similar to those of fundamentalist sects when their dogmas are questioned. The only critic that remains plausible (in my opinion) is that he oversimplified the global
warming issue.

What do you think of this?


PS: For more references see Lomborg's book "The sckeptical environmentalist" which is a scholarship work of reference  with 500 pages, 1800 bibliographic references and 3000 notes. If you are just curious see www.lomborg.org and www.anti-lomborg.com

 

Bird flu- could be catastrophic within next 5 years.

Biggest threat to the world as we know it in the short term, make no mistake.

Governments should be doing much, much more.

The world isn't ending but we're going through global climate change which could accelerate as certain areas of the Arctic warm up.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725124.500

Nobody mentioned the urbanisation, the expansion of deserts and the want of water.

What does "world" mean? Is it something like human civilisation and all what that it's about? Is it life, as we know it, or is it just human life? If those threats would be targeted strictly and directly against all life but human would we even bother about them? If ther are questions, what are the answers? Since we are the top predator, or species, or whatever of this planet, at this time let's check first for concerns, and then for answers.

1. Population.  The human population must grow. It can't reach a balance unless it solves it be itself. Population means more or less human society. Which is made of animals that are somewhat a little bit more selfconscious than lesser species. Most of the humans don't even bother about such a problem. On a very rough view, there are this kind of people:

• Those who don't want to have children/heirs
• Those who don't feel like needing an more than one or two children/heirs.
• Those who don't care of how many children they giving birth.
• Those who are urged to have as many offspring as they can.

The reason for their behaviour may be different in each case but it still leads to the idea that if no growth of the population is wanted, we need either to find a balance between this kind of people or resume to give birth to only one child for every dead person. Can human society reach this? I kind of doubt it.

2. Hunger. Hunger is not directly related to the developement level of any country or the quantity of food produced. It has more to do with the ability of people to get the food they need. "Food" is also not just quantity, it's also quality. One can't just eat only bread. He needs a diversified food. He might be able to get 6 breads a day, he can't even eat that much, but that will not save him for getting sick and dying of some disease only because he couldn't get some kind of food he needed. Hunger is not solved with just a full belly!

3. Forests. We're at war with them. We need them because we need oxygen. Since we weren't able to develop cost-effective means to produce oxygen we still need to rely on other producers of that stuff. We also need for a lot of other things. Some of these things lead us to encouragge forest conservation and growth, some don't. After all we couldn't gave up to use wood and we can produce it. Maybe is some kinky way of tying up with our ancestors! How many environmentalists have a chimney in their house?

4. Energy. It's just like food, even worse! How many of the people you know care to turn off the lights? How many of you would walk instead of driving their own car? If I come at work usin rollerblades people will think I'm nuts! And manufacturing rollerblades is still energy consuming? Can human society reach a level of education when each and every person would look at every drop of energy as if it was the last one available? I think not?

5. Biodiversity. To have common people really understand that this is necessary! Either they will be afraid to kill a mosquito or would eat the last green turtle. There's no going to extremes and we still don't know how to measure biodiversity in terms of neccessity. *Whaddya sa'd matey? Dolphins? Whoo care 'bout those phish? I 'ad to kill down two of 'hem. Tangled my net you know, 'ese durn phish!"

6. Polution. Yeah, right! Everybody's scared but nobody really knows what's about. "Don't eat that, it's full of E-s!". "Oh my God! Thank you, I'll take that one."."No, No, you fool, it's got W-s!"."Oh, I forgot that! I'll have a bottle of beer."."But..."."Yeah, I know, it might not be ozone friendly or the CO2 released would increase the hothouse effect... Listen, do you want me to starve, or what? Go back to your nuclear plant and let me have my lunch!". And there are some natural phenomena, like volcanos, that can generate such an ammount of polution ... And us, humans, are still far from being so allmighty to dictate what a volcano would do. Can we stop the Earth from growing a pimple? What about a dirty comet? Not a "Deep Impact" one but one that would be breaking into zillions tiny fragments of ice freezed poisonous gasses that would eventually fall on our planet?  Polution is, I think, one of the least threats. Actually, our ecosystem is the result of some tiny organisms starting to polute the atmosphere with oxygen

7. Acid rain. This is redundand. Is not acid rain directly tied up with polution? O where there always acid rains and only now we noticed them. Well, like I said before, polution is natural.

8. Ozone layer. Now, that's something that everybody understands! Of course environmentalists wouldn't like somethin like "ozone concentration". Someone would come up with something like "ozone in concentration of 1.3 parts in a million is a lethally toxic". It's also redundant, as it is the result of polution. And it's about UV rays. Wow, that is also funny! "Look babe, I love your tane, but is full of UV's out there, the ozone layer is thin!". "UV-s? Who are they?"."I..I don't really know, but they are said to be dangerous. They're some kind of X rays of the sun!."."Oh, c'mon hon! Look, I got my sunglasses and my lotion. 100% proof against UV's."."So ... you know what they are?"."No, but if I get hurt I will sue those who sold me these products. We'll win a fortune, and we won't be needing to bother again about UV's. Let's go and don't turn off the air conditioner, I want to cool myself a little when we get back".

And forget about these. Think of what some guy who put all his faith in God (not necessary Chritian) would say:

• "There's nothing to worry, I have faith that God will show me/us/some of us/to those He will chose   the way out of it"
• "God is watching us and will let nothing to happen to us"
• "It is God will, He is punishing us for our sins!. Only those who embrace Him might survive!"
• "It is imaterial, God never spoke of such things!"
• .........

*We're not dead, we're just not dead yet!

Originally posted by jfmff One last couriosity regarding the rise of temperatures in the poles. If you put an ice cube in a glass of water, when it defrosts it doesn't add one milimiter to the level of the water. in the same way, all the icebergs can defrost and it will make no diference.

Uhh, most of the polar ice is on top of land (Antarctica and Greenland). So yeah, if it defrosts, it will be a huge difference!

Day after tomorrow is way out from a climatologists perspective. But new ice ages aren't out of the question.

Well, think about it: the Antarctic ice cap is about 15 million square kilometers with an average thickness of 2 km or so. That means about 30 million cube kilometers of ice, or about 3e10 tons of water.

The surface of the oceans is 361 million square kilometers. The water from the melting of the Antarctic ice cap would therefore raise the level by about 83 meters, according to these calculations (you'd get about .083 cube km of ice per each square km of ocean). I've seen figures of 2.3 km for the Antarctic cap  average thickness, which would mean about 90 meters. Add to that the volume in the Artic ice cap and you get pretty much 100 meters.

I've always wanted to go to the pole. So if the pole comes to me that would be great. I'm already looking forward to it, long live the CO2 emission!

Instead of we arguing about this I will provide arguments against Lomborg's conclusions that are made by scientists and therefore are more autoritative on these subjects; see:

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2001/12/12/of/

This subject is for experts. However I will make some final observations.

One of the topics (and of course the most important one) is statistics: he is acused of selective use of data, exageration, etc. , i.e., he is acused of scientifical dishonesty. Well the comission against scientifical dishonesty droped their charges against him because of lack of proofs. See http://www.imv.dk/Default.aspx?ID=233 for a better understanding and also the links on the bottom of the website. This means that the main critic against Lomborg is wrong and not based on scientific evidence. This is Lomborg's biggest victory since it show's that the environmentalist's comunity hasn't got science and objective truth as its main concern. This said there can only be two options: he is incompetent or he is wright on what he says. However I never heard about his incompetence anywere... (except on the topic of global warming). Anyhow, only scientific evidence will decide this and since I'm not a scientist I will remain neutral.


PS: Maju see this before  falsely claiming that fusion in lab is nothing more than formulas...   http://www.jet.efda.org/