THE scientist who dared to challenge the establishment view on climate change has been subjected to a campaign of personal abuse, professional vilification and threats to his safety. Last year Bjorn Lomborg claimed in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist that many of mankind’s worst fears — such as mass extinction of species, climate change and population growth — were largely unfounded.
The book has provoked scientists and environmental groups into producing articles, websites and pamphlets rubbishing its author and his work.
One of the most hostile, in Nature magazine, likens him to apologists for the Nazis. He has been physically attacked and has had to employ bodyguards.
This weekend Lomborg repeated his claims. “My book seems to have hit a raw nerve. For years we have been hearing how the world is deteriorating. I thought that too and then I looked for the evidence and it just isn’t there. In fact, the history of the world is that things are getting better,” he said.
Lomborg, a Danish statistician and former Greenpeace member, thought the book was a controversial but academic work that might do well to sell a few thousand copies. Instead it has become a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. His arguments range across almost every area of environmental concern. They include claims that there is no evidence for the wholesale loss of species and that the world’s forest cover is increasing.
His arguments on climate change, however, have sparked the greatest reaction. Lomborg, a professor at Aarhus University, accepts that the world is getting warmer but says it would cost so much to stop that it is simply not worthwhile.
“It would cost the world trillions of dollars a year, money which could be spent on helping the developing world to improve education and hospitals,” he said.
The book was published by Cambridge University Press. Last autumn it sent Lomborg on a promotional tour of Britain and America, little realising the reaction that was building up.
It began when Lomborg was heckled and booed at a book-signing at Borders bookshop in Oxford. As he was speaking, one of the crowd rushed forward and pushed a cream-laden baked Alaska pie into his face.
Last week the protester, Mark Lynas, an environmentalist campaigning to save the Arctic from the effects of climate change, admitted the attack and said: “Hitting him with a baked Alaska seemed appropriate. Global warming is destroying one of the Earth’s last wildernesses and Lomborg is trying to pretend it doesn’t matter.”
Even respectable scientific venues are not safe for Lomborg. When he recently gave a lecture at London’s Royal Institution he was protected by four bodyguards, and threats were made against him when he addressed the London School of Economics.
The biggest shock came when Nature, the usually restrained scientific journal, printed a review comparing Lomborg to maverick academics who deny the Holocaust. The reviewers said Lomborg’s text “employs the strategy of those who argue that gay men are not dying of Aids, that Jews weren’t singled out by the Nazis and so on”.
Last week Scientific American, a respected popular science journal, devoted 11 pages to an attack in which Lomborg is accused of “egregious distortions” and of being “ignorant” and “muddled”.
Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, said: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
Some of the most powerful vitriol is on websites. On www.anti-Lomborg.com there is a picture of Lomborg that was taken as he was hit with a pie.
Lomborg has also clashed with Tom Burke, the former aide to John Gummer when he was environment secretary, at a presentation in Paris to finance ministers at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Burke, who spoke against him and is the author of a pamphlet attacking his work, said: “He is a cunning manipulator and a good communicator. He has a weak case but presents it so well that everyone switches off their crap detectors.”
