Dr. Bjørn Lomborg (1965 – )
Danish political scientist

In 2001, Cambridge University Press published The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World by the Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg. The book triggered a firestorm of criticism, with many well-known scientists denouncing it as an effort to "confuse legislators and regulators, and poison the well of public environmental information." In January 2002, Scientific American published a series of articles by five distinguished environmental scientists contesting Lomborg's claims. To some observers, the ferocity of the attack was surprising. Why so much furor over a book that claims to have good news about our environmental condition?

Lomborg portrays himself as an "left-wing, vegetarian, Greenpeace member," but says he worries about the unrelenting "doom and gloom" of mainstream environmentalism . He describes what he regards as an all-pervasive ideology that says, among other things, "Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing, and coral reefs are dying." This ideology has pervaded the environmental debate so long, Lomborg says, "that blatantly false claims can be made again and again, without any references, and yet still be believed."

In fact, Lomborg tells us, these allegations of the collapse of ecosystems are "simply not in keeping with reality. We are not running out of energy or natural resources . There will be more and more food per head of the world's population. Fewer and fewer people are starving. In 1900 we lived for an average of 30 years; today we live 67. According to the UN we have reduced poverty more in the last 50 years than in the preceding 500, and it has been reduced in practically every country." He goes on to challenge conventional scientific assessment of global warming, forest losses, fresh water scarcity , energy shortages, and a host of other environmental problems. Is Lomborg being deliberately (and some would say, hypocritically) optimistic, or are others being unreasonably pessimistic? Is this simply a case of regarding the glass as half full versus half empty?

The inspiration to look at environmental statistics , Lomborg says, was a 1997 interview with the controversial economist Dr. Julian L. Simon in Wired magazine. Simon, who died in 1998, spent a good share of his career arguing that the "litany" of the Green movement—human overpopulation leading to starvation and resource shortages—was premeditated hyperbole and fear mongering. The truth, Simon, claimed is that the quality of human life is improving, not declining.

Lomborg felt sure that Simon's allegations were "simple American right-wing propaganda." It should be a simple matter, he thought, to gather evidence to show how wrong Simon was. Back at his university in Denmark, Lomborg set out with 10 of his sharpest students to study Simon's claims. To their surprise, the group found that while not everything Simon said was correct, his basic conclusions seemed sound. When Lomborg began to publish these findings in a series of newspaper articles in the London Guardian in 1998, he stirred up a hornet's nest. Some of his colleagues at the University of Aarhus set up a website to denounce the work. When the whole book came out, their fury only escalated. Altogether, between 1998 and 2002, more than 400 articles appeared in newspapers and popular magazines either attacking or defending Lomborg and his conclusions.

In general, the debate divides between mostly conservative supporters on one side and progressive, environmental activists and scientists on the other. The Wall Street Journal described the Skeptical Environmentalist as "superbly documented and readable." The Economist called it "a triumph." A review in the Daily Telegraph (London) declared it "the most important book on the environment ever written." A review in the Washington Post said it is a "richly informative, lucid book, a magnificent achievement." And, The Economist, which started the debate by publishing his first articles, announced that, "this is one of the most valuable books on public policy—not merely on environmental policy—to have been written in the past ten years."

Among most environmentalists and scientists, on the other hand, Lomborg has become an anathema. A widely circulated list of "Ten things you should know about the Skeptical Environmentalist" charged that the book is full of pseudo-scholarship, statistical fallacies, distorted quotations, inaccurate or misleading citations, misuse of data, interpretations that contradict well-established scientific work, and many other serious errors. This list accuses Lomborg of having no professional credentials or training—and having done no professional research—in ecology , climate science, resource economic, environmental policy , or other fields covered by his book. In essence, they complain, "Who is this guy, and how dare he say all this terrible stuff?"

Harvard University Professor E. O. Wilson , one of the world's most distinguished biologists, deplores what he calls "the Lomborg scam," and says that he and his kind "are the parasite load on scholars who earn success through the slow process of peer review and approval." It often seems that more scorn and hatred is focused on those, like Lomborg, who are viewed as a turncoats and heretics, than for those who are actually out despoiling the environment and squandering resources.

Perhaps the most withering criticism of Lomborg comes from his reporting of statistics and research results. Stephen Schneider, a distinguished climate scientist from Stanford University, for instance, writes in Scientific American "most of [Lomborg's] nearly 3,000 citations are to secondary literature and media articles. Moreover, even when cited, the peer-reviewed articles come elliptically from those studies that support his rosy view that only the low end of the uncertainty ranges [of climate change] will be plausible. IPCC authors, in contrast, were subjected to three rounds of review by hundreds of outside experts. They didn't have the luxury of reporting primarily from the part of the community that agrees with their individual views."

Lomborg also criticizes extinction rate estimates as much too large, citing evidence from places like Brazil's Atlantic Forest, where about 90% of the forest has been cleared without large numbers of recorded extinctions. Thomas Lovejoy, chief biodiversity adviser to the World Bank , responds, "First, this is a region with very few field biologists to record either species or their extinction. Second, there is abundant evidence that if the Atlantic forest remains as reduced and fragmented as it is, will lose a sizable fraction of the species that at the moment are able to hang on."

Part of the problem is that Lomborg is unabashedly anthropocentric. He dismisses the value of biodiversity, for example. As long as there are plants and animals to supply human needs, what does it matter if a few non-essential species go extinct? In Lomborg's opinion, poverty, hunger, and human health problems are much more important problems than endangered species or possible climate change. He isn't opposed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, but argues that rather than spend billions of dollars per year to try to meet Kyoto standards, we could provide a healthy diet, clean water, and basic medical services to everyone in the world, thereby saving far more lives than we might do by reducing global climate change. Furthermore, Lomborg believes, solar energy will probably replace fossil fuels within 50 years anyway, making worries about increasing CO₂ concentrations moot.

Lomborg infuriates many environmentalists by being intentionally optimistic, cheerfully predicting that progress in population control, use of renewable energy , and unlimited water supplies from desalination technology will spread to the whole world, thus avoiding crises in resource supplies and human impacts on our environment. Others, particularly Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute and Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, according to Lomborg, seem to deliberately adopt worst-case scenarios.

Protagonists on both sides of this debate use statistics selectively and engage in deliberate exaggeration to make their points. As Stephen Schneider, one of the most prominent anti-Lomborgians, said in an interview in Discover in 1989, "[We] are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

As is often the case in complex social issues, there are both truth and error on both sides in this debate. It takes good critical thinking skills to make sense out of the flurry of charges and counter charges. In the end, what you believe depends on your perspective and your values. Future events will show us whether Bjørn Lomborg or his critics are correct in their interpretations and predictions. In the meantime, it's probably healthy to have the vigorous debate engendered by strongly held beliefs and articulate partisans from many different perspectives.

In November 2001, Lomborg was selected Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum, and in February 2002, he was named director of Denmark's national Environmental Assessment Institute. In addition to the use of statistics in environmental issues, his professional interests are simulation of strategies in collective action dilemmas, simulation of party behavior in proportional voting systems, and use of surveys in public administration.

[William Cunningham Ph.D. ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Lomborg, Bjorn. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

PERIODICALS

Bell, Richard C. "Media Sheep: How did The Skeptical Environmentalist Pull the Wool over the Eyes of so Many Editors?" Worldwatch 15, no. 2 (2002): 11–13.

Dutton, Denis. "Greener than you think." Washington Post, October 21, 2001.

Schneider, Stephen. "Global Warming: Neglecting the Complexities." Scientific American 286 (2002): 62–65.

Wade, Nicholas. "Bjørn Lomborg: A Chipper Environmentalist." The New York Times, August 7, 2001.

OTHER

Anti-Lomborgian Web Site. December 2001 [cited July 9, 2002]. <http://www.anti-lomborg.com>.

Bjørn Lomborg Home Page. 2002 [cited July 9, 2002]. <http://www.lomborg.com>.

Regis, Ed. "The Doomslayer: The environment is going to hell, and human life is doomed to only get worse, right? Wrong. Conventional wisdom, meet Julian Simon, the Doomslayer." February 1997. Wired. [cited July 9, 2002]. <http://www.wired.com>.

Wilson, E. O. "Vanishing Point: On Bjørn Lomborg and Extinction." Grist December 12, 2001 [cited July 9, 2002]. <http://www.gristmagazine.com/books/wilson121201.asp>.

World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund. Ten Things Environmental Educators Should Know About The Skeptical Environmentalist. January 2002 [cited July 9, 2002]. <http://www.wri.org/press/mk_lomborg_10_things.html>.