Bjørn Lomborg (Danish: [ˈpjɶɐ̯ˀn ˈlɔmˌpɒˀ]) is a Danish political scientist and climate change sceptic. He is the former director of the defunct Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI) in Copenhagen, now the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank.
He became internationally known for his best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). In 2002, Lomborg and the Environmental Assessment Institute founded the Copenhagen Consensus. In his subsequent book, Cool It (2007), and its film adaptation, Lomborg outlined his views on global warming, many of which contradict the scientific consensus on climate change. These views include the claim that the negative impacts are overstated and the opinion that too much emphasis is put on climate change mitigation at the expense of climate change adaptation. Lomborg agrees that global warming is real and man-made and will have a serious impact.
In 2004, he was listed as one of Time's 100 most influential people.
Lomborg's views and work have attracted scrutiny from the scientific community. He was formally accused of scientific misconduct over the book The Skeptical Environmentalist, but in 2008 the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DSCD) concluded in an evaluation of the book that "one couldn't prove that Lomborg had deliberately been scientifically dishonest, although he had broken the rules of scientific practice in that he interpreted results beyond the conclusions of the authors he cited". The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation criticised the procedural aspects of the DCSD investigation. His positions on climate change have been challenged by experts and characterised as cherry picking.
Lomborg was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned an M.A. degree in political science at the Aarhus University in 1991, and a PhD degree in political science at the University of Copenhagen in 1994.
Lomborg lectured in statistics in the Department of Political Science at the Aarhus University as an assistant professor (1994–1996) and associate professor (1997–2005). He left the university in February 2005 and in May of that year became an adjunct professor in Policy-making, Scientific Knowledge and the Role of Experts at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School.
Early in his career, his professional areas of interest lay in the simulation of strategies in collective action dilemmas, simulation of party behavior in proportional voting systems, and the use of surveys in public administration. 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.
Later, Lomborg's interests shifted to the use of statistics in the environmental arena. In 1998, Lomborg published four essays 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." This led to the Skeptical Environmentalist, whose English translation was published as a work in environmental economics by Cambridge University Press in 2001. The book brought him international prominence as an opponent of the scientific consensus on climate change. He later edited Global Crises, Global Solutions, which presented the first conclusions of the Copenhagen Consensus, published in 2004 by the Cambridge University Press. In 2007, he authored a book entitled Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming.
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 22 June 2004, he resigned from this post to go back to the Aarhus University, saying his work at the institute was done and that he could better serve the public debate from the academic sector. As of 2020, Lomborg is a visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank. In 2023 he was a mainstage speaker at the inaugural Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
The Skeptical Environmentalist
In 2001, he published The Skeptical Environmentalist, whose main thesis is that many of the most-publicized claims and predictions on environmental issues are wrong. The book received negative reviews among the scientific community, including from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Nature and Scientific American, with many scientists criticising its assertions as poorly supported, selectively using data and misrepresenting sources. However, it was well received in popular media and brought Lomborg to international attention.
Formal accusations of scientific dishonesty
After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was formally accused of scientific dishonesty by a group of environmental scientists, who brought a total of three complaints against him to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MSTI). Lomborg was asked whether he regarded the book as a "debate" publication, and thereby not under the purview of the DCSD, or as a scientific work; he chose the latter, clearing the way for the inquiry that followed. 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.
In January 2003, the DCSD released a ruling that sent a mixed message, finding the book to be scientifically dishonest through misrepresentation of scientific facts, but Lomborg himself not guilty due to his lack of expertise in the fields in question. That February, Lomborg filed a complaint against the decision with the MSTI, which had oversight over the DCSD. In December, 2003, the Ministry annulled the DCSD decision, citing procedural errors, including lack of documentation of errors in the book, and asked the DCSD to re-examine the case. In March 2004, the DCSD formally decided not to act further on the complaints, reasoning that renewed scrutiny would, in all likelihood, result in the same conclusion.
The original DCSD decision about Lomborg provoked a petition signed by 287 Danish academics, primarily social scientists, who criticized the DCSD for evaluating the book as a work of science, whereas the petitioners considered it clearly an opinion piece by a non-scientist. The Danish Minister of Science, Technology, and Innovation then asked the Danish Research Agency (DRA) to form an independent working group to review DCSD practices. In response to this, another group of Danish scientists collected over 600 signatures, primarily from the medical and natural sciences community, to support the continued existence of the DCSD and presented their petition to the DRA.
Lomborg's follow-up to The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, was published in 2007. In it, Lomborg expanded on his views of climate change. Lomborg starts with the premise "Global warming is real and man-made. It will have a serious impact on humans and the environment toward the end of this century." Lomborg argues at length that warming will result in reducing total deaths from extreme temperatures, due to warming in cold climates. The main theme is that then-current approaches for addressing climate change, such as the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, were not economically cost-effective.
The Lomborg Deception, a 2010 Yale University Press book by Howard Friel, analyzed the ways in which Lomborg has "selectively used (and sometimes distorted) the available evidence", and alleged that the sources Lomborg provided in the footnotes did not support and, in some cases directly contradicted, Lomborg's assertions in the text of the book. Lomborg denied those claims in a 27-page argument-by-argument response. Friel wrote a reply to that response, in which he admitted two errors but otherwise rejected Lomborg's arguments.