Doomsday is not nigh, according to the data

'Pollution of the air by particulates is at its lowest level for the past 100 years'

I have some suspicions about the environmental movement. This was increased when I recently reviewed Playing Safe: Science and the Environment by Jonathan Porritt. He claims that modern science is not in a fit state, either philosophically or methodologically, to meet the challenge of sustainability. I concluded that he is a fundamentalist, in the environmental sense; what understanding does he have of science?

So when Cambridge University Press sent me the proofs of The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg I was impressed by his emphasis on a scientific approach to environmental problems, and gave the book a positive puff for the back cover.

A few weeks ago Lomborg was in London and to have a debate on his views with the editor of The Ecologist magazine, Edward Goldsmith. The theatre at the Royal Institution was full, but no Goldsmith or any other environmental fundamentalists, like Greenpeace, came to have a formal debate. So instead Lomborg gave us a lecture followed by a vigorous response from the audience.

His key message is that doomsday is not nigh, and as a statistician he uses data and science to justify his claims. He is fully aware that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. But his data show that worldwide, almost everything has got better. For example, the average number of calories per individual consumed each day has increased significantly in both the developed and developing world. (This is not to say that there are not people who are short of food.)

Pollution of the air by particulates has fallen and is at its lowest level for the past 100 years. Resources, contrary to current fears, are not running out in the reasonable future – there is enough oil for the next 1,000 years and new technologies will make us much less dependent on such resources.

One of his most striking points was that if the Kyoto agreement was put into effect, the result would by the year 2100 only have delayed the inevitable warming by six years. Is it thus sensible to annually expend on this project three times the aid given each year to developing countries? Would it not be much better to spend the money on clean water and related projects in developing countries? In more general terms the cost of saving human lives by investing in the environment is at least 100 times more expensive than if the money is put into health, like medical services.

Not doing so, and investing such sums on the environment, is in effect killing thousands of innocent people whose lives could so easily have been saved, he argued. The need to prioritise is obvious but neglected, because of the emotive nature of environmental fundamentalism. Cost-benefit analyses are essential for the correct decisions to be made.

Some in the audience responded very positively to his analysis; some opposed him with excessive vigour. A gentleman who denied any association with any organisation called it all drivel and said it was absurd to predict the future on the basis of graphs and figures; in his view Lomborg's claims were a disgrace and should never have found there way into a book. Others questioned the reliability of his data, for example that from the US geological service.

I cannot judge the arguments as I do not know or understand the basic data, but Lomborg has, at last, tried to put science into the debate, which thus far has been largely led by emotion. Who would claim that they do not care about the environment! I like the story about a rural group of people who claimed they were getting ill because of a local trial of a genetically modified crop. They destroyed it and all got better. But in court it became clear that the plants had no pollen and that they had destroyed the wrong crop.

Science may tell the public things about the environment they do not want to hear – for example that the loss of animal species may be much less than publicised. But that is the nature of a democracy: openness and reliable information is all if the right political decisions are to be made.

Lewis Wolpert is professor of biology as applied to medicine at University College, London