One of the most important and difficult skills needed for living sanely in a world that sometimes seems awash with nonsense is an ability to read between the lines.

Accepting everything on offer as the gospel truth is a foolishness exceeded only by accepting nothing as the truth.

A good memory helps steer a course between those two extremes. Knowing, for example, that the end of the world has been falsely predicted countless times in the past helps you come quickly to a reasonable conclusion the next time you hear someone say it’s going to happen next Friday, or whenever.

Here’s a quote that, remembered, might help people make good judgments about claims not so very far removed from end-of-the-world predictions:

“To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.”

He has probably kicked himself a thousand times since for saying that, but Dr. Stephen Schneider did get himself quoted to precisely that effect in Discover magazine back in October, 1989. Dr. Schneider is an environmentalist, a leading atmospheric scientist who has contributed greatly to the current climate change scare.

Remember how many times over the last few years we have been frightened half to death by apocalyptic predictions that, in the end, failed to come true? The cancer epidemic Rachel Carson predicted in ‘Silent Spring’ was one of them, Paul Ehrlich’s now thoroughly-discredited population forecasts in ‘The Population Bomb’ were another, and there have been similarly dire warnings of catastrophic droughts, acid rain, famines, tsunamis, disappearing forests, falling sperm counts and a dozen others.

No one should say these things don’t exist, or that the predictions of environmentalists are all untrue, or that reasonable people should not be concerned by them. But Stephen Schneider’s 1989 statement to Discover has a disturbing ring about it. Who can be blamed for wondering how much of a connection there is between the degree of hysteria scientists willing to exaggerate are able to whip up over a given danger and their ability to generate money to continue their work?

Cambridge University Press published a book last year called ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist — Measuring the Real State of the World’. It was written by a young Dane, Dr.. Bjorn Lomborg, who teaches statistics at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Dr. Lomborg describes himself as “an old left-wing Greenpeace member”. He read an interview with the American economist Julian Simon in 1997, in which Simon claimed that officially accepted statistics showed that almost all our major environmental fears were unfounded. Lomborg decided that he would analyse the data himself, on the assumption that doing so would expose Simon’s assertion as right-wing propaganda.

On the contrary, his analysis showed that Simon was substantially correct. ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist sets’ out his research in meticulous, exhaustive detail. The book is critical of the way many environmental organisations make “selective and misleading use of the scientific evidence”. Using statistical information from internationally recognised research institutes, it challenges widely-held beliefs that the environmental situation is getting worse and worse. Cambridge University Press calls the book “a non-partisan stocktaking that serves as a corrective to the alarmist accounts favoured by campaign groups and the media”.

Ultimately, the message of the book is this: children born today, in both the industrialised world and in developing countries, will live longer and healthier, they will get better food, a better education, a higher standard of living, more leisure time and far more possibilities than previous generations, without the global environment being destroyed. Mankind’s lot has vastly improved, he says, in every significant measurable field and is likely to continue to do so.

The claims in what Dr. Lomborg calls the Litany of our ever-deteriorating environment are largely false, he says, and unquestioned acceptance of this Litany is doing damage to public policy, particularly as it relates to the developing world. The four central, exaggerated fears of this Litany, he says, are: [bul] Natural resources are running out.

[bul] The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat.

[bul] Species are becoming rapidly extinct, forests are vanishing and fish stocks are collapsing.

[bul] Air and water are becoming ever more polluted.You would be right to guess that this is not a point of view warmly welcomed in Green ranks. It has taken them a little while to rev themselves up, but they are now in full voice.

Grist, a Green webzine that is published by Earth Day Network, led the charge in December, headlining its piece, painfully predictably: “Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark”.

In an article in Nature, Dr. Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation biology at Columbia University in New York, said there really wasn’t any controversy in serious scientific circles about Dr. Lomborg’s assertions. Having mocked his credentials as a mere associate professor of statistics, Dr. Pimm claimed: “As any sensible person would expect, his facts are usually fallacies and his analysis is largely non-existent.”

Scientific American devoted 11 pages to attacks from scientists known for their environmental activism — including the aforementioned Dr. Schneider. But the magazine’s coverage had the air of a deck that was being stacked. The headline on their piece read, in part: “Science defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist”, as if Dr. Lomborg were alone on one side of the argument, and all of the scientific world on the other.

When Lomborg was told of what Scientific American planned for its January issue, he asked to be able to comment. The magazine’s editor refused to allow him any right of reply, despite that being standard operating procedure in most reputable publications. When the issue was published, and Dr. Lomborg naturally took exception to it, Scientific American threatened to sue him if he quoted from their article in the extensive comments he posted on his website (http://www.lomborg.org, if you want to have a look). Since then, evidently, the editor has partly reconsidered his decisions, and has agreed to allow him, in the May issue, 800 words (Some 500 words fewer than this article contains) in which to deal with those 11 pages of criticism.

Even the Economist was taken aback. In their story of February 2 this year, they say: “Dr. Lomborg’s critics protest too much... The replies ... in Scientific American and elsewhere score remarkably few points of substance. His large factual claims about the current state of the world do not appear to be under challenge — which is unsurprising since they draw on official data. What is under challenge, chiefly, is his outrageous presumption in starting a much-needed debate.”

Dr. Lomborg is a statistician, not a scientist, and statisticians are obviously limited in their ability to analyse correctly by the quality of the raw data available. His book has been criticised for containing flaws ... one of them being what many accept as an underplaying of the issue of dwindling fish stocks.

But, the Economist judges: “Despite its limitations, The Skeptical Environmentalist delivers a salutary warning to conventional thinking. Dr. Lomborg reminds militant greens, and the media that hang on their every exaggerated word about environmental calamity, that environmental policy should be judged against the same criteria as other kinds of policy. Is there a problem? How bad is it? What will it cost to fix? Is that the best way to spend those resources?”

Dr. Lomborg’s critics are obviously concerned about what he says. But although they fairly rant about his lack of credentials as an environmental scientist, their real problem seems to be that he is exposing as false the underpinnings of their ability to scare people, and to attract money and converts to their cause.

The Skeptical Environmentalist is more than 500 pages long. It is obviously not possible to summarise it in a short article, but I will attempt next week to touch on some of Dr. Lomborg’s more interesting assertions.