Bjørn Lomborg

Bjørn Lomborg

Bjørn Lomborg (born January 6, 1965) is a political scientist and former director of the Institute for Environmental Assessment in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2001, he attained significant attention by penning The Skeptical Environmentalist, a controversial book whose main thesis is that many of the claims and dire predictions of environmentalists are exaggerated.

Lomborg is also director of the Copenhagen Consensus project.

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.

Lomborg was listed in the list of TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of 2004.

Biography

Bjørn Lomborg earned a Ph.D. at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, 1994. He was an associate professor, lecturing in statistics, in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus. In 1998 he published four lengthy articles about the state of our environment in the leading Danish newspaper Politiken, which "resulted in a firestorm debate spanning over 400 articles in major metropolitan newspapers."

In November 2001 he was selected "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum. In March 2002, the newly elected center-right prime minister appointed Lomborg to run Denmark's new Institute for Environmental Assessment [1].

Lomborg declared on the 22nd of June 2004 his decision that he would resign from his post to go back to the University of Aarhus, citing that his work in the institute was done, and that he better could service the public debate from the academic sector.

Controversies

Accusations of scientific dishonesty

Many people involved with environmental issues were so incensed by Lomborg's book that they made significant efforts to show that his book was wrong. During the first quarter of 2002, the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) received three complaints about Bjørn Lomborg [2].

In the complaints, Lomborg is accused of fabricating data, selectively and surreptitiously discarding unwanted results, deliberately misleading statistical methods, consciously distorting conclusions, plagiarism, and deliberate misrepresentation of others' results. In his replies, Lomborg dismisses practically all of the accusations.

The DCSD could not form a consensus as to whether the book The Skeptical Environmentalist is a scientific work and should be assessed in accordance with scientific standards. Some members instead regarded the book as a polemic designed to encourage debate.

After much qualification, the DSCD states:

...DCSD deems it to have been adequately substantiated that the defendant... based on customary scientific standards and in light of his systematic onesidedness in the choice of data and line of argument, has clearly acted at variance with good scientific practice.

Subject to the proviso that the book is to be evaluated as science, there has been such perversion of the scientific message in the form of systematically biased representation that the objective criteria for upholding scientific dishonesty — cf. Danish Order No. 533 of 15 December 1998 — have been met. In consideration of the extraordinarily wide-ranging scientific topics dealt with by the defendant without having any special scientific expertise, however, DCSD has not found — or felt able to procure — sufficient grounds to deem that the defendant has misled his readers deliberately or with gross negligence. [3]. And their actual ruling was:

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.

One of the people who brought the charges against Lomborg is Jeff Harvey, a former editor of the scientific journal Nature, who is currently a senior scientist at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. Harvey said,

It is unfortunate that I and many others felt it necessary to take Lomborg and his book to task for the veritable deluge of inaccuracies it contains, but Lomborg has veered well across the line that divides controversial, if not competent, science from unrepentant incompetence.

He also said

Lomborg has failed time and again to rectify the egregious distortions he makes, he has based his conclusions on cherry-picking the studies he likes, and he has seriously undermined the public's understanding of important contemporary scientific issues.

Among the supporters of the DCSD's decision regarding Lomborg are the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Jens Christian Skou, former University rector Kjeld Møllgård, and professor Poul Harremoës from the Technical University of Denmark.

Among Lomborg's supporters is The Economist news magazine and Patrick Moore, a founder and former director of Greenpeace Canada. Favorable comments have also appeared in Wired and other periodicals.

Lomborg says that the DCSD "does not give a single example to demonstrate their claim of a biased choice of data and arguments", nor did they offer Lomborg any chance to respond [4].

On December 17, 2003, the findings of the DCSD were remitted by the Danish government (which had appointed Lomborg on the strength of his book) and returned to the committee for reconsideration. The ministry concluded that the DCSD had not established that it had the authority to review the case, and that during the review they did not establish that scientific dishonesty had occurred, with respect to the normal standards of social science. Note that this is attacking a strawman, since the DCSD did not accuse Lomborg of being guilty of scientific dishonesty in the first place.

In 2004, the DCSD declined to reconsider their decision.

The Economist

The Economist defended Lomborg in this way:

The material assembled by the panel consists almost entirely of a synopsis of four articles published by Scientific American last year. (We criticised those articles and the editorial that ran with them in our issue of February 2nd 2002.) The panel seems to regard these pieces as disinterested science, rather than counter-advocacy from committed environmentalists. Incredibly, the complaints of these self-interested parties are blandly accepted at face value. Mr. Lomborg's line-by-line replies to the criticisms (see www.lomborg.com) are not reported. On its own behalf, the panel offers not one instance of inaccuracy or distortion in Mr. Lomborg's book: not its job, it says. [5]

Scientific American

An issue of Scientific American featured strong criticism of his book, which Lomborg rebutted on his website, quoting the Scientific American article at length. Lomborg removed his rebuttal from his website following Scientific American's threat of bringing a lawsuit over copyright infringement. The rebuttal has since been published in PDF format on Scientific American's website [6]. The magazine also printed a repsonse to the rebuttal [7].

Miscellaneous trivia

Lomborg is

• a vegetarian (although he is not a supporter of animal rights)
• openly gay
• known to wear jeans to formal business meetings.

He has claimed to have been a former member 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.

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, August 7, 2001.
• Stephen Schneider, John P. Holdren, John Bongaarts, Thomas Lovejoy: "Misleading Math about the Earth". Scientific American, January 2002.

External links

• Lomborg's personal website
• Kåre Fog's "Lomborg errors" website
• Wired magazine interviews Lomborg, June 2004 regarding the Copenhagen Consensus
• Grist magazine article featuring rebuttals from scientists working in the various fields his book makes claims about
• HAN detailed investigation of complaints made by lomborg critics Detailed investigation by a number of dutch scientists of the complaints made by lomborg critics
• Disinfopedia article