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Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish statistician and writer. Author of
The Skeptical Environmentalist, he has been described as the
"the world's most high-profile climate change sceptic".
Lomborg has consistently subscribed to the view that climate
change is happening and caused by humans, but argues that the
impacts have been exaggerated and the proposed policy solutions are
misplaced. He is a prominent media commentator. On climate change,
the Wall Street Journal and New York Times respectively described
him as "the
practical middle" and "the
pragmatic center". He has been
named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time;
"one of the
50 people who could save the planet" by the Guardian; and "one
of the top 100 public intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and
Prospect. Lomborg's writing on environmental science and
policy has however never been published in peer-reviewed journals
and his work has been widely criticised as selective and erroneous
by leading scientists.
Lomborg has had connections with conservative thinktanks in
the USA including
the Hoover Institution, the Exxon Mobil funded
Heartland Institute and the
Competitive Enterprise Institute. In 2007, The Fraser Institute
sponsored his
Canadian book tour. He
recently resigned from the editorial advisory board of the journal
Energy and Environment, apparently not wishing to be closely
associated with its continued promotion of climate scepticism.
The Skeptical Environmentalist
Lomborg's first major publication,
The Skeptical Environmentalist, argued that environmentalists
and politically motivated scientists have exaggerated environmental
problems. In his book, Lomborg argues that the world's forests were
barely declining, few animals had become extinct lately and that
money spent on mitigating climate change would be better spent on
other causes. The Skeptical Environmentalist was a bestseller in
2001/2 and made Lomborg's name as an environmental commentator. It
received extensive media coverage, with the Washington Post,
amongst many other positive reviews, describing it as "
a magnificent achievement".
From scientists however the book came in for heavy criticism. In
a document subtitled "Science defends itself against the sceptical
environmentalist",
Scientific American published a set of four essays by
distinguished scientists from different fields criticising
Lomborg's analysis and conclusions. The document said "Lomborg
accuses a pessimistic and dishonest cabal of environmental groups,
institutions and the media of distorting scientists' actual
findings…The problem with Lomborg's conclusion is that the
scientists themselves disavow it."Science
called Lomborg's analysis "curiously selective" and
Nature labelled it "a mass of poorly digested material, deeply
flawed in its selection of examples and analysis".
Among the
key criticisms were misreadings and misunderstandings of
statistical data; elementary mathematical mistakes that "no
self-respecting statistician ought to commit" and that most of the
nearly 3,000 citations came from secondary literature and media
articles rather than peer-reviewed science. Criticisms came from
amongst many others biologists EO Wilson and
Norman
Myers and eminent climate scientist
Stephen Schneider.
The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty
In response to several complaints from scientists, the
Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty investigated The
Skeptical Environmentalist.
At the beginning of 2003 the Committee concluded that "there
has been such perversion of the scientific message…that the
objective criteria for upholding scientific dishonesty...have been
met" although due to Lomborg's lack of scientific qualifications he
was not found to have misled his readers deliberately or with gross
negligence. At this time Lomborg was head of the Danish
government's
Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI), having been appointed
by the newly elected conservative prime minister in March 2002. The
judgement by the Committee was subsequently
overruled by the Danish government on the grounds of various
procedural errors, including that the treatment of the case was
"emotional".
The Copenhagen Consensus
The 2004 "
Copenhagen Consensus Conference" which Lomborg initiated,
placed climate change mitigation at the bottom of a global spending
priority list.
The aim of the project was to prioritise the different problems
the world faces through evaluation by a panel of economists. The
project was also criticised, for example in
Nature.
Cool It
Lomborg's third book
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global
Warming, was published in 2007. The book criticised what
Lomborg described as "alarmist" climate change warnings, arguing
that climate change will not be catastrophic, will have
unacknowledged benefits, and that cutting carbon emissions will be
too expensive.
Journalist Howard Friel subsequently wrote a book entitled
The Lomborg Deception, which examined every reference in Cool
It. Friel's investigation found a common "pattern of nonexistent
footnoted support" for "highly substantive claim[s]". Friel
concluded Lomborg is essentially "a performance artist disguised as
an academic". Newsweek's Sharon Begley
replicated Friel's fact-checking of Lomborg's book on three
topics - polar bear populations' resilience; alleviated cold deaths
outweighing increased heat deaths; and the Larsen B ice shelf
breakup's independence of global warming -
she concluded these are "contentions that Friel pretty much blows
out of the water".
Lomborg challenged Friel's critique, and
Friel then responded in turn.
In October 2010
Lomborg made headlines through an apparent u-turn in his
position on climate change, announcing that climate change is
"undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today". In
November 2010 he released a new film, Cool It, which argues that
climate change is a problem and promotes technical solutions like
energy technology and geoengineering. The film has
received positive reviews, but has again been
criticised in some quarters.
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