Bjørn Lomborg

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Bjørn Lomborg (born January 6, 1965) is a Danish political scientist and former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He is most known for his best-selling controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist, and the allegations of scientific dishonesty that followed it. He is now an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School.

Lomborg is also a vegetarian (although he is not a supporter of animal rights), and known to wear jeans to formal business meetings.

According to an interview published in 2005 by the San Francisco Examiner, the book he would most liked to have written is Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Society, by Jared Diamond.

Academic career

Bjørn Lomborg spent one year as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned a Master's in political science at the University of Aarhus in 1991, and earned a Ph.D. at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, 1994.

He lectured in statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, as an assistant professor (1994–1996) and associate professor (1997–2001). Because of this activity, he has often been described as a statistician, though he is more accurately referred to as a political scientist as his education is in this field.

In 1996, Lomborg's paper, "Nucleus and Shield: Evolution of Social Structure in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma", was published in the academic journal, American Sociological Review (vol. 61(2):278-307). This was followed by his most famous book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, whose English translation was published as a peer-reviewed work in environmental economics by Cambridge University Press in 2001. He later edited Global Crises, Global Solutions, which presented the first conclusions of the Copenhagen Consensus, published in 2004 by the Cambridge University Press.

His professional areas of interest include the simulation of strategies in collective action dilemmas, simulation of party behavior in proportional voting systems, use of surveys in public administration, and use of statistics in the environmental arena.

The Skeptical Environmentalist

Main article: The Skeptical Environmentalist

In 1998, Lomborg published four articles about the state of the environment in the leading Danish newspaper Politiken, which according to him "resulted in a firestorm debate spanning over 400 articles in major metropolitan newspapers."^[1]

In 2001, he attained significant attention by publishing The Skeptical Environmentalist, a controversial book whose main thesis is that most of the most-publicized claims and dire predictions of environmentalists are exaggerated.

He has in this context claimed to have been a supporter of Greenpeace. When challenged that Greenpeace had no record of him ever being a member or supporter, he stated that he had given money to Greenpeace collectors. Greenpeace has no card carrying membership.

Copenhagen Consensus

Main article: Copenhagen Consensus

In 2002, Lomborg and the Environmental Assessment Institute founded the Copenhagen Consensus, which sought to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics. A panel of prominent economists was assembled to evaluate and rank a series of problems. The project was funded largely by the Danish government, and co-sponsored by The Economist. A book summarizing the conclusions, Global Crises, Global Solutions, edited by Lomborg, was published in October 2004 by Cambridge University Press.

Later activities

In March 2002, the newly elected center-right prime minister appointed Lomborg to run Denmark's new Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI).

On June 22 2004, Lomborg announced his decision to resign from his post at the EAI to go back to the University of Aarhus, stating that his work at the Institute was done and that he could better serve the public debate from the academic sector; he left the University on February 1, 2005.

Recognitions and awards

In November 2001, Lomborg was selected "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum.

In June 2002, BusinessWeek named Lomborg one of the "50 Stars of Europe" (June 17), in the category of Agenda Setters. The magazine credentialed him as "statistician" and noted, "No matter what they think of his views, nobody denies that Bjorn [sic] Lomborg has shaken the environmental movement to its core."^[2]

Lomborg was selected as one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people of 2004.

Accusations of scientific dishonesty

After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was accused of scientific misconduct. Several environmental scientists brought a total of three complaints against Lomborg to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The charges claimed that The Skeptical Environmentalist contained deliberately misleading data and flawed conclusions. Due to the similarity of the complaints, the DCSD decided to proceed on the three cases under one investigation.

On January 6, 2003 the DCSD reached a decision in the complaints. The ruling was a mixed message, finding that the book was scientifically dishonest, but Lomborg himself not guilty by virtue of lack of expertise in the fields in question.^[3] Specifically, they cited TSE for:

1. Fabrication of data;
2. Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation);
3. Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods;
4. Distorted interpretation of conclusions;
5. Plagiarism;
6. Deliberate misinterpretation of others' results.

The wording of the ruling left no doubt that the DCSD, while not finding Lomborg guilty, was not exonerating him either:

Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty. ... In view of the subjective requirements made in terms of intent or gross negligence, however, Bjørn Lomborg's publication cannot fall within the bounds of this characterization. Conversely, the publication is deemed clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.

On February 13, 2003, Lomborg filed a complaint with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation against the DCSD's decision.

On December 17, 2003, the Ministry found that the DCSD had made a number of procedural errors, including:

• The DCSD did not use a precise standard for deciding "good scientific practice" in the social sciences;
• The DCSD's definition of "objective scientific dishonesty" was not clear about whether "distortion of statistical data" had to be deliberate or not;
• The DCSD had not properly documented that The Skeptical Environmentalist was a scientific publication on which they had the right to intervene in the first place;
• The DCSD did not provide specific statements on actual errors.

The Ministry remitted the case to the DCSD, which invalidated the previous findings of scientific dishonesty in regard to the book. The Minstry also instructed the DCSD to decide whether to reinvestigate.

On March 12, 2004, the Committee formally decided not to act further on the complaints, reasoning that they had already found Lomborg not guilty. This effectively closed the case. ^[4] Two days later a complaint was issued by Kåre Fog, a freelance ecologist who maintains an anti-Lomborg website. Fog reports that this complaint was rejected on 27th Dec. 2004.^[5]

The DCSD decision about Lomborg provoked a petition^[6] among Danish academics. 308 scientists, many of them from the social sciences, criticised the DCSD's methods in the case. A Dutch science-based think tank, Heidelberg Appeal the Netherlands, published a report in which they claim that 25 out of 27 accusations against Lomborg to be unsubstantiated or not to the point.^[7]

In reaction to the pro-Lomborg petition, another group of Danish scientists collected signatures in support of the DCSD. The 640 signatures in this second petition came almost exclusively from the medical and natural sciences, and included Jens Christian Skou (a Nobel laureate for chemistry), former university rector Kjeld Møllgård, and professor Poul Harremoës from the Technical University of Denmark.^[8]

Discussions in the media

Since the release of The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001, Lomborg was subjected to intense scrutiny and criticism in the media, where his scientific qualifications and integrity were attacked and defended from time to time. The verdict of the Danish Committees for Scientific Dishonesty fueled this debate and brought it into the spotlight of international mass media. By the end of 2003, The Skeptical Environmentalist had been translated into 12 languages, and Lomborg had become an international celebrity, with frequent appearances in radio, TV and print media around the world.^[4]

• Scientific American published strong criticism of Lomborg's book. Lomborg rebutted on his own website, quoting the article at such length that Scientific American threatened to sue for copyright infringement. Lomborg eventually removed the rebuttal from his website; it was later published in PDF format on Scientific American's site.^[9]

The magazine also printed a response to the rebuttal.^[10]

• The Economist defended Lomborg, claiming that the panel of experts that had criticised Lomborg in Scientific American was both biased and not actually countering Lomborg's book. The Economist argued that the panel's opinion had come under no scrutiny at all, and that Lomborg's responses had not been reported.^[11]

• Entertainment media took notice. The US Showtime program Bullshit! featured an episode entitled "Environmental Hysteria" in which Lomborg criticised environmentalists' refusal to accept a cost-benefit analysis of environmental questions, and stressed the need to prioritise some issues above others.^[12]

Rolling Stone noted, "Lomborg pulls off the remarkable feat of welding the techno-optimism of the Internet age with a lefty's concern for the fate of the planet."^[13]

• On the Web, the Union of Concerned Scientists strongly criticised The Skeptical Environmentalist, claiming it to be "seriously flawed and fail[ing] to meet basic standards of credible scientific analysis", accusing Lomborg of presenting data in a fraudulent way, using flawed logic and selectively citing non-peer-reviewed literature.^[14]

Lomborg countered that some of the scientists involved in this report were also named and criticised in The Skeptical Environmentalist, and thus had a vested interest in discrediting it and its author.

Lomborg's pivotal involvement in the Copenhagen Consensus and the book that followed served to keep him in the media eye through 2004-2005.

References

• Bjørn Lomborg: The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Cambridge University Press 2001 (ISBN 0521010683).
• Nichola Wade: "From an Unlikely Quarter, Eco-Optimism". The New York Times, 7 August 2001.
• Stephen Schneider, John P. Holdren, John Bongaarts, Thomas Lovejoy: "Misleading Math about the Earth". Scientific American, January 2002.

See also

• The Skeptical Environmentalist
• Environmentalism
• Environmental skepticism
• Global warming
• Bias (statistics)

External links

• Lomborg's personal website, with own articles, links to related broadcasts on radio and TV, and Lomborg's opinion on the issues with the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty.
• Kåre Fog's "Lomborg errors" website contains a catalogue of claims of errors in Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, Fog's opinion on Lomborg and his career.
• Wired magazine interviews Lomborg, June 2004, regarding the Copenhagen Consensus.
• Article on Bjørn Lomborg in the online edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The article was written by Michael Allaby, author of many (although not peer-reviewed) books on climate, who had previously expressed ideas similar to Lomborg. If you cannot access the full text, click the first link in this Google search.
• Grist magazine article Rebuttals from scientists working in the various fields his book makes claims about.
• HAN investigation of complaints made by Lomborg critics, by a number of Dutch scientists of the complaints made by Lomborg critics.
• Article about Bjørn Lomborg on Sourcewatch, a project similar to Wikipedia.
• Correcting myths from Bjørn Lomborg, extensive collection of criticisms of Lomborg, with replies.
• Skeptical About The Skeptical Environmentalist, Richard M. Fisher's review of The Skeptical Environmentalist, in "The Skeptical Inquirer".
• Letter in Support of Lomborg in Scientific American, a defense of Lomborg's work, from the eminent geneticist Matt Ridley, former editor of The Economist.