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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.