Bjørn Lomborg

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Bjørn Lomborg (born January 6, 1965) is an Adjunct Professor at the Copenhagen Business School and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He became internationally-known for his best-selling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist. After the book's publication, members of the Danish and international scientific community accused Lomborg of "scientific dishonesty", although Lomborg is not a trained scientist, and does not claim to be.^[1] These allegations were investigated by appropriate arms of the Danish government and in the end, no official charges were left standing. However, many scientists^[2] — in particular climatologists — remain critical of Lomborg's work.

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.

Contents 1 Academic career 2 The Skeptical Environmentalist 3 Accusations of scientific dishonesty 3.1 DCSD investigation 3.2 MSTI review 3.3 DCSD response 3.4 Response of the scientific community 4 Continued debate and criticism 4.1 Kåre Fog 5 Appointment to Environmental Assessment Institute 6 Copenhagen Consensus 7 Recognitions and awards 8 Discussions in the media 9 Trivia 10 References 11 See also 12 External links

[edit] Academic career

Bjørn Lomborg spent a year as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned a Master's degree in political science at the University of Aarhus in 1991, and a Ph.D. at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen in 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 (1997–2005). He left the University of Aarhus in February 2005 and in May of that year, became an Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School.

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.

[edit] 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."^[3]

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

He has claimed to have been a supporter of Greenpeace. When challenged that Greenpeace had no record of his ever being a member or supporter, he stated that he had given money to Greenpeace collectors.

[edit] Accusations of scientific dishonesty

After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was accused of scientific dishonesty. 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.

[edit] DCSD investigation

On January 6, 2003 the DCSD reached a decision on the complaints. The ruling was a mixed message, deciding the book to be scientifically dishonest, but Lomborg himself not guilty because of lack of expertise in the fields in question:^[4]

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.

The DCSD cited The Skeptical Environmentalist 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.

[edit] MSTI review

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

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;^{[citation needed]}
• The DCSD's definition of "objective scientific dishonesty" was not clear about whether "distortion of statistical data" had to be deliberate or not;^{[citation needed]}
• 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. In doing so the Ministry indicated that it regarded the DCSD's previous findings of scientific dishonesty in regard to the book as invalid [1][2]. The Ministry also instructed the DCSD to decide whether to reinvestigate.

[edit] DCSD response

On March 12, 2004, the Committee formally decided not to act further on the complaints, reasoning that renewed scrutiny would, in all likelihood, result in the same conclusion [3].

[edit] Response of the scientific community

The original DCSD decision about Lomborg provoked a petition^[5] among Danish academics. 308 scientists, many of them from the social sciences, criticised the DCSD's methods in the case.

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.^[6]

[edit] Continued debate and criticism

The rulings of the Danish authorities in 2003-2004 left Lomborg's critics frustrated. Lomborg was jubilant, claiming vindication as a result of MSTI's decision to set aside the original finding of DCSD. But critics pointed out that Lomborg's work had not been declared scientifically valid, it merely had not been declared invalid.

A Dutch think tank, HAN, Heidelberg Appeal the Netherlands, published a report in which they claimed 25 out of 27 accusations against Lomborg to be unsubstantiated or not to the point.^[7] A group of scientists with relation to this think tank also published an article in 2005 in the Journal of Information Ethics,^[8] in which they concluded that most criticism against Lomborg was unjustified, and that the scientific community misused their authority to suppress Lomborg.

[edit] Kåre Fog

The claim that the accusations against Lomborg were unjustified was challenged in the next issue of Journal of Information Ethics^[9] by Kåre Fog, one of the original plaintiffs. Fog reasserted his contention that, despite the ministry's decision, most of the accusations against Lomborg were valid. He also rejected what he called "the Galileo hypothesis", which he describes as the conception that Lomborg is just a brave young man confronting old-fashioned opposition.

Kåre Fog has established a catalogue of criticisms against Lomborg on the Lomborg-errors web site. Fog maintains the catalogue, which includes a section for each page in each chapter in The Skeptical Environmentalist. In each section, Fog lists what he believes to be flaws and errors in Lomborg's work. Each alleged flaw is described in detail; furthermore, Fog explicitly indicates if there are any details which he believes support the interpretation that the particular error may have been made deliberately by Lomborg, in order to mislead. Lomborg has never stepped forward to refute any of Fog's accusations from the website, nor has he publically even commented on the existence of Fog's website. According to Mr. Fog, since none of his accusations of errors on Lomborg's part have been proven false, the suspicion that Lomborg has misled deliberately is maintained. Lomborg's supporters point out that responses to a small number of the 300 items have been put forward in other connections, and can be found at Mr. Lomborg's website at http://www.lomborg.com/critique.htm.

[edit] Appointment to Environmental Assessment Institute

In March 2002, the newly elected center-right prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, appointed Lomborg to run Denmark's new Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI). On June 22 2004, Lomborg announced his decision to resign from this post to go back to the University of Aarhus, saying his work at the Institute was done and that he could better serve the public debate from the academic sector.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 noted, "No matter what they think of his views, nobody denies that Bjorn Lomborg has shaken the environmental movement to its core."^[10] Lomborg was selected as one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people of 2004.

[edit] Discussions in the media

After 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 both attacked and defended. 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 Lomborg had become an international celebrity, with frequent appearances on radio, TV and print media around the world.^[11]

• 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.^[12] The magazine also printed a response to the rebuttal.^[13]

• The Economist defended Lomborg, claiming the panel of experts that had criticised Lomborg in Scientific American was both biased and did not actually counter 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.^[14]

• Penn & Teller: Bullshit! - the US Showtime program featured an episode entitled "Environmental Hysteria" in which Lomborg criticised what he claimed was environmentalists' refusal to accept a cost-benefit analysis of environmental questions, and stressed the need to prioritise some issues above others.^[15] Rolling Stone stated, "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."^[16]

• 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.^[17] 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. But by this argument, any scientist criticized by name in a book would no longer be justified to criticize the factual contents of that book.

[edit] Trivia

• 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] See also

• The Skeptical Environmentalist
• Environmentalism
• Environmental skepticism
• Global warming
• Systemic bias
• Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty

[edit] 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.
• Lomborg discusses, Global Crisis, Global Solutions, at the Carnegie Council
• 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 scientific correspondent of The Economist.
• Vanishing Point: On Lomborg and Extinction, a criticism of Lomborg, from Edward O. Wilson.
• Watch or download a Bjorn Lomborg lecture at the 2005 TED Conference.