Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 21:22, 23 October 2005

Bjørn Lomborg (born January 6, 1965) is a Danish political scientist and former director of the Institute for Environmental Assessment in Copenhagen. 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 later founded and acted as director of the Copenhagen Consensus project, and served as editor of the resulting book, Global Crises, Global Solutions (2004).

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 selected as one of TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of 2004.

Biography

Bjørn Lomborg spent one year as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned a Masters 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 taught as an associate professor, lecturing in statistics, in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus.

In 1996, his only scientific paper subject to peer review to date was published in the American Sociological Review, Evolution of Social Structure in the Interated Prisoner's Dilemma (vol. 61(2):278-307).

In 1998, he published four lengthy articles about the state of our environment in the leading Danish newspaper Politiken, which according to him "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.

Lomborg declared on the 22nd of June 2004 his decision to 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. But he left the University on February 1, 2005. He is now an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.

Accusations of scientific dishonesty

After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg was accused of scientific misconduct by the established academic environment. He received most critic from academics in the natural sciences, and support from academics in the social sciences.

Complaint to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty

Several environmental scientists brought a complaint to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, because they considered The Skeptical Environmentalist to be a book containing deliberately misleading data and flawed conclusions.

On January 6, 2003 the Committees reach a decision in the complaint against Lomborg’s book. They state that, from an objective point of view, the book constitutes scientific dishonesty on the part of Lomborg. Specifically, they judged Lomborg guilty of:

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.

On February 13, 2003, Lomborg files a complaint with the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation against the Committees' decision.

On December 17, 2003, The Ministry finds that the Committees had made a number of procedural errors, namely:

• The Committees did not use a precise standard for deciding "good scientific practice" in the social sciences;
• The Committees' definition of "objective scientific dishonesty" was not clear about whether "distortion of statistical data" had to be deliberate or not;
• The Committees 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 Committees did not provide specific statements on actual errors.

The Ministry, therefore, remitted the case to the Committees. Furthermore, the Ministry’s decision states that it is up to the Committees to determine whether to re-examine the case. The Ministry explained, at a later date, that the decision of the Ministry implied that the Committees' previous verdict was invalid.

On March 12, 2004, The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty rested their case and decided not to start a new investigation, as they did not expect it to lead to different results.

However, Kåre Fog lodged another complaint two days later, still pending.

Reactions among Academics

The Committees' decision about Lomborg provoked a petition among Danish academics. 308 scientists, many of whom from the social sciences, criticised the Commitees' methods in the case.

In reaction to this, another group of Danish scientists collected signatures in support of the Committees. The 640 signatures in this second petition came almost exclusively from the medical and natural sciences, and included Nobel Prize for chemistry Jens Christian Skou, former university rector Kjeld Møllgård, and professor Poul Harremoës from the Technical University of Denmark.

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.

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 Danisd Committees for Scientific Dishonesty fuelled this debate and brought it into the spotlight of international mass media.

• Scientific American published strong criticism of Lomborg's book. Lomborg rebutted on his own website, quoting the Scientific American article at lengths that were judged copyright infringement by Scientific American. Lomborg eventually removed his rebuttal from his website, following Scientific American's threat of a lawsuit. The rebuttal has since been published in PDF format on Scientific American's website. The magazine also printed a response to the rebuttal.

• 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.

• On Showtime's Penn and Teller's BS, episode entitled "Environmental Hysteria", Lomborg criticised the environmentalists' refusal of accepting a cost-benefit analysis in environmental questions, and stressed the need to prioritise some issues above others.

• The Union of Concerned Scientists strongly criticised The Skeptical Environmentalist, claiming it to be "seriously flawed and fail to meet basic standards of credible scientific analysis", accusing Lomborg of presenting data in a fraudolent way, using flawed logic and selectively citing non-peer-reviewed literature. Lomborg countered that some of the scientists involved in this report were also named and criticised in The Skeptical Environmentalist, and had a vested interest in discrediting it and its author.

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.

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.

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.

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 Rebuttals from scientists working in the various fields his book makes claims about
• HAN selection of complaints made by Lomborg critics, a selection by Heidelberg Appeal Nederland, supporting Lomborg.
• Disinfopedia article
• Correcting myths from Bjørn Lomborg, extensive collection of criticisms of Lomborg, with replies.

• 1965 births
• Danish political scientists
• Danish writers
• Global warming skeptics
• Danish environment
• Prospect - Foreign Policy Top 100 Public Intellectuals