The Daily Telegraph, January 5, 2004.

Eco-warriors of the science labs can't see the truth

by Barbara Amiel.

Last December 17, the Guardian published its Eco gongs. The author of The Sceptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg, won an award that cited his "scientific dishonesty" and described his book as "not comprehending science"; That citation came from a report on Lomborg's book by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD). Their condemnation followed an 11-page trashing of Lomborg's book in the influential Scientific American.

In one of those coincidences that all journalists dread, the Guardian published its put-down of Lomborg on the very day that the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation heavily criticised the DCSD's negative verdict as "completely void of argumentation". Unsurprisingly, the Guardian did not publish the news of Lomborg's reprieve.

Some topics leave readers somnambulant. Environmentalism is one such topic for me although nature is not. The disappearance of hedgerows has left a permanent sense of loss, a chronic pain as acute as an old bereavement. A field of wild flowers with crimson poppies, or a solitary walk in winter woods, are oxygen for the soul. Without some perfect peace, the best part of oneself dies. But environmentalism, by and large, has nothing to do with the science or aesthetics of nature any more. It has been elevated to a faith. You either recite the creed or are excommunicated.

Lomborg's book analysed the science on which such articles of faith as the dangers of global warming are based. He questioned the value of the Kyoto treaty. He had come to these issues originally not as a critic but as a believer. His motive was to understand environmental issues all the better to see off their critics. But, he had found the critics more often right than wrong.

In writing his book, Lomborg, a paid-up Left-winger and member of Greenpeace, committed a heresy and was duly apostatised by the environmentalist movement. There is little doubt that factors such as human population growth and industrialisation harm the natural environment in which all living beings have to exist.

Concern about this is totally legitimate, but by the time this concern became a "movement", its issues had already been hijacked by socio-political ideologies. These ideologies ranged from Leftist and anti-capitalist to the anti-humanist (people in the extremes of the animal rights movement for whom making our own species the measure and pinnacle of creation is seen as a fundamental error). It is no coincidence that when one collides with committed environmentalists they very often wear anti-war buttons, for saving Saddam's regime has featured as prominently in their agendas, if not more so, than the saving of rainforests.

From the beginning, the environmentalist movement attracted the sort of people who preferred a Marxist or in any event a dirigiste system. They are instinctive commissars, which made the UN their natural ally. They want to tell you how to organise your rubbish, what to consume and which aesthetic responses are correct. They see nothing wrong in the belief that your lifestyle choices should correspond with theirs. Many of the American Sierra Club's various campaigns to stop snowmobiles or cross-country motor bikes from having trails in the huge American wilderness even when all precautions are taken, seem based only on the notion that another person's concept of outdo or enjoyment would interfere with the Sierra member's idea of the correct outdoor experience.

In order to legitimise far-reaching socio-political agendas (including transfer of financial resources to the Third World and the weakening of capitalism) the Environmental Movement needed to be based en an apocalyptic vision. Doomsday scenarios were the natural route. In a classic of its sort, Leonardo DiCaprio's interview with President Clinton, just after Earth Day 2000, summed up the environmental movement's line on what would occur if we did not all change our ways according to their vision. Said Clinton: "...The polar ice caps will melt more rapidly; sea levels will rise; you will have the danger of flooding in places like... the sugar cane fields of Louisiana; island nations could literally be buried... there will be a lot of very bad, more dramatic weather events... there will be more public health crisis...".

Doubtless President Clinton believed what he was saying. He must have heard it from scientists with very genuine qualifications.

The scientists that dismissed Lomborg's book had qualifications, too. The editor-in-chief of Scientific American has a science degree, but he continues to give speeches on "the carefully packaged misrepresentations of real science (like global warming scepticism)".

This may make one wonder: how can the hard facts of science be distorted to feed an ideology? And why? There is no Stalin to hand out an Order of Lenin to today's Lysenko.

But if scientists are only human, so is science. In his book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler argues that our belief that scientists proceed from hard figures and measurements and are therefore free from prejudice and emotion is a "blatant, popular fallacy... No discovery has ever been made by logical deduction... the emotive game of the unconscious" plays its role. The scientific mind, he contends, has "the unavoidable component of competitiveness, jealousy, and, self-righteousness in its complex motivational drive." Science and its practitioners can be as selective as history and historians. This applies not only to the environmental scientists, of course, but to their scientific critics as well. Each may try to support their positions with bits of scientific scaffolding. But once you realise the need to bring the same scepticism to science as to a political or theological argument, you are halfway to a more Informed decision.

Koestler raises another problem: the impenetrability of today's scientific papers and reasoning. Who can actually read the evidence about global warming and make an informed judgment? We live in a world of "two cultures". The ordinary man is reluctant to admit that a work of art is beyond his comprehension but proud to assert his complete inability to understand the forces that make the stars go around or the principles behind the turning on of a light switch. "By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it," Koestler writes, man "leads the life of an urban barbarian."

In part this is because the current fashion is deliberately to make science as dry, difficult and in-grown as possible. Galileo, Kepler, Pasteur and Darwin were accomplished stylists who wanted the world to read their treatises. Today's scientists have no such ambitions. The more technical the jargon, the more accomplished they appear. Add the insanely torturous language of the bureaucrat and schemes such as the Kyoto Protocol are unreadable. It is no wonder that most people judge the value of Kyoto not on its merits but according to their feelings about George Bush.

"I wandered lonely as a cloud," wrote Wordsworth. Not if he were a modern environmentalist. He'd wander through his modalities and processes pertinent, to find his daffodils figuring out their systematic response strategies in Annexe Five. And then he'd get a rotten review in Scientific American.