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To: Noel de Leon who wrote (65482)	1/11/2003 10:31:27 PM
From: mistermj	Respond to of 281500

re:The Skeptical Scientist sciam.com April 15, 2002 Letters to the Editor The January article "Misleading Math about the Earth" drew abundant reader mail, some of which is featured in the May issue. Here is a selection of additional responses. I object in the strongest terms to your heading "Science defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist." You have no intellectual warrant whatsoever to divide the world into two camps—"science," including the Lomborg critics you publish, plus their allies, Paul Ehrlich et al., and, apparently, "nonscience," including Lomborg, Matt Ridley, Lewis Wolpert and his many other allies. If you wanted to say "Environmentalism (or The Green Movement) defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist," that would be acceptable. But there is no question that Lomborg and his allies are within science. DENIS DUTTON Editor, Philosophy and Literature University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The generally accurate essay by John Bongaarts, "Population: Ignoring Its Impact," may perpetuate one common misperception. Bongaarts says that in North America growth is near zero. In fact, the U.S. population is currently growing by about 3.2 million people a year. About 40 percent of this is from natural increase; the rest is from immigration. The Census Bureau projects that the U.S. population will grow from the current 286 million to 400 million by 2050. Even without immigration, the population would continue to grow considerably—by 16 percent within that period, according to one estimate. This trend makes a very substantial contribution to the world’s environmental problems. Readers ought not to be left with the impression that the U.S. is exempt either as a cause or recipient of these population-related problems. WILLEM VANDEN BROEK Ann Arbor, Mich. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If this is an example of how "science defends itself," then woe betide science. Science rests above all on rigorous use of evidence and logic. Unfortunately, some scientists have apparently come to believe that the political cause of environmentalism is so important that they need not worry about the normal rules of evidence and logic. This was the essence of Lomborg’s critique, and Thomas Lovejoy’s "Biodiversity: Dismissing Scientific Process" only confirms the indictment. Most remarkable is the defense Lovejoy offers for Norman Myers's completely unsubtantiated 1979 assertion that 40,000 species are being lost every year to extinction. Myers, Lovejoy says, "deserves credit for being the first to say that the number was large and for doing so at a time when it was difficult to make more accurate calculations." But shoddy methodology is shoddy methodology, whether it gives the result one is after or not. In fact, the "more accurate calculations" that Lovejoy and others have advanced in the years since are hardly any more scientific than Myers’s original guess. They are based on the naive and simplistic assumption that numbers of species are solely and mechanistically determined by habitat area—an assumption that the definitive review article in the literature has shown to be without merit. (The authors, E. F. Connor and E. D. McCoy, concluded that even as a descriptive tool, the species-area relation is merely "a correlation … without a functional relationship.") Lovejoy admits that hundreds of thousands of species that should already be extinct according to his and Myers’s calculations are not extinct but explains this away by insisting that they will be extinct. But this is pure circular logic, in which one unsubstantiated assertion is invoked to prop up another. The question of species loss and the other issues addressed by Lomborg are complex ones. It is disappointing that in replying to Lomborg, your authors and editor chose to engage in selective use of evidence, unsubstantiated assertions, lapses of logic, and ad hominem attacks disparaging Lomborg’s presumption in questioning the "experts." These are the tactics of demagogues and rabble-rousers, not scientists. STEPHEN BUDIANSKY Leesburg, Va. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen Schneider’s "Global Warming: Neglecting the Complexities" entirely missed the point of Lomborg’s views on global warming and the Kyoto Protocol. A low-end (1.5 degree Celsius) 21st-century warming is the logical projection of the most inclusive collection of climate models and data that can currently be assembled. 1 2 3 next »

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (65482)	1/12/2003 1:30:14 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The main problem with the developing world is population growth, conveniently discounted by Lomborg. Is it? Is it, really the main problem? I have no position at all on Lomberg and his foes but I'd ask, if in South America, or in many countries in East Asia and South Asia if population growth is the major problem. So many of these countries have been extremely badly run and many have had civil wars. Civil war usually means citizens will suffer great hardship as systems of all kinds, national and local, break down. Some very densely populated countries don't have citizens suffering enormous hardship, despite few resources. Other countries with great resources have many citizens suffering hardship. I don't know if anyone can provide much in the way of reliable figures but I should think in some African countries the problem is loss of population. In any case, I seem to remember reading not long ago that world population growth is plateauing. nature.com This doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't argue that there be fewer of us. But if you look at (eg) Nigeria, its pretty clear they need decent government before they need birth control.