Debunker of global warming found guilty of scientific dishonesty

Paul Brown – Environment correspondent – The Guardian

Thursday January 9, 2003

Bjorn Lomborg – the director of Denmark’s Environmental Assessment Institute and a leading would-be debunker of mainstream scientific opinion on issues like global warming and overuse of natural resources – has been found guilty by a Danish government committee of “scientific dishonesty”.

Professor Lomborg, whose work has been championed in the international press, was subject to a year-long investigation by the Danish committee on scientific dishonesty.

The committee, made up of eminent scientists, concluded: “Based on customary scientific standards and in light of his systematic one-sidedness in the choice of data and line of argument, [he] has clearly acted at variance with good scientific practice.”

On his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, published in 2001, it said: “Subject to the proviso that the book is to be evaluated as science, there has been such perversion of the scientific message in the form of systematically biased representation that the objective criteria for upholding scientific dishonesty have been met.”

Prof Lomborg’s contrarian views made him a favourite of the rightwing establishment after the book’s publication.

On its election in March last year, Denmark’s rightwing government made him the director of its Environmental Assessment Institute.

The committee was appointed to look at four complaints against

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,871320,00.html