The Lomborg roast

Ever since Danish statistician and political scientist Bjorn Lomborg wrote the best-selling The Skeptical Environmentalist, his metaphorical “Wanted” poster has adorned the walls of the environmental movement. It has been an edifying couple of years since the book came out.

Lomborg — genial, accessible, and a hard man to dislike — has become the chief bte noire of the green crowd by contending that fears of environmental disaster, when examined against any quantitative measure, are usually overblown and often downright wrong. That puts him on the wrong side of a lot of people’s firmly held beliefs and on the wrong side of a lucrative public policy industry.

There have been a number of intelligent, honest and factual criticisms of Lomborg’s methodology. He can be fairly accused of setting up straw men in some of his arguments (though whether he can be convicted of it is another matter). His assumptions can be questioned. But Lomborg hasn’t shrunk from debating those questions and answering those accusations.

The problem is that there have been bigoted, tendentious and false criticisms, too, along with some good old-fashioned defamation of character and at least one pie in the face. It is difficult to resist the thought that for some people, to question inevitable environmental doom is a dangerous and evil impiety. The result has been that debate about the book on its merits has been drowned out by a shouting match between people who have begun to look very much like the creatures of vested interest.

Now the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has overturned a ruling by its Committee on Scientific Dishonesty, which had ruled last January that The Skeptical Environmentalist was a scientifically dishonest piece of work. The Committee had held a year-long inquiry in response to three formal complaints about the book.

When the story of the Committee’s report first came out, we were a little taken aback even to find out that there was a Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty, having had it in mind that the Danes had proved mostly immune to the intrusive European model of government-by-minding-everyone-else’s-business. We were also intrigued by the composition of the panel, which included two people — a physician and an agronomist — who could be legitimately described as “scientists,” plus a lawyer, a political scientist, and a philosopher.

This is not to say that laymen or people outside a field of specialization can’t have something sensible to say about a scientific question. It does, however, make mincemeat out of one of the Committee’s principal criticisms of Lomborg: that he is not an environmental scientist.

The Committee’s report relied heavily on critiques of The Skeptical Environmentalist from four reviewers — the physicists Stephen Schneider and John Holdren, the demographer John Bongaarts, and the biologist Thomas Lovejoy — invited by the popular-science magazine Scientific American to comment on the book. It documents almost nothing that it did to investigate the substance of the complaints, merely stating that Lomborg’s “rebuttals are not accepted by the complainants.”

That was strange for a start, because some of the complainants are scientists whose detachment, given their enthusiasm for political activity, might not stand up to scrutiny. Similarly, the Committee accepted, virtually at face value, the work of the four Scientific American reviewers, at least one of whom, Schneider, is known for his highly charged views about the way science should be presented to the public.

The verdict of the Committee was twofold, and consequently ambiguous: that “objectively speaking,” Lomborg’s book was dishonest, the product of “systematically biased representation” — but the “subjective” standard of that dishonesty being the result of Lomborg’s “intent or gross negligence” had not been proved.

That seemed at the time to confuse almost everybody, with Lomborg’s supporters claiming he’d been cleared and his detractors claiming the Committee had put his head on a pike.

The Ministry of Science review, though, was more scathing about the Committee than the Committee ever thought about being about Lomborg. Its chief criticism was that the Committee hadn’t troubled itself to adduce any evidence supporting the complaints they had received about Lomborg’s book. It had procedural criticisms, too, including the Committee’s failure to hear a rebuttal from Lomborg, its treatment of the complainants as parties to the case, and its submission of the case to multiple sub-committees.

It is not possible to conclude that the Committee was simply the institutional structure that supported a kind of political vigilantism, though there are those who would love to make that case. But it seems fairly certain, on reading the Committee’s own decision, that they had little stomach for the arguments and counterarguments about Lomborg’s book, and settled instead for a ruling that would please the people that had howled the loudest. The Danish government proved to have a much better-developed sense of fairness.