Enviro-Controversy By Donnel Jones, May 10, 2003

Bound to be controversial, James K. Glassmann, writing for Tech Central Station, claims that the "greehouse effect" mantra of the environmentalists and their lobbies may not be all it is cracked up to be.

Glassman, who is reviewing a review, by Freeman Dyson, of a book by Vaclav Smil, The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics and Change, questions some orthodoxies on the science behind the environmental movement. Dyson claims that we really don't have enough data as yet to determine to what degree human beings are effecting climate change and biodiversity, and if that effect, if sizeable, actually hurts the environment. For him, Smil "emphasizes the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations, the superficiality of our theories."

Dyson sums up things quite neatly, if, that is, one agrees with his implied analogy: "when we are trying to take care of a planet, just as when we are taking care of a human patient, diseases must be diagnosed before they can be cured."

Environmentalists break down into two distincts classes: naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe [a]ny gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. The humanists believe "the greatest evils . . . are war and poverty, underdevelopment and unemployment, disease and hunger".

Which side are you on?