A RAFT of assessments by Denmark’s environmental evaluation institute could face investigation following last week’s damning ruling on Bjørn Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg is the institute’s director, and the investigation could have far-reaching implications for environmental policy across the European Union.
Denmark’s Committee on Scientific Dishonesty found Lomborg’s book, published in 2001, to be “clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice” and accused the statistician based at the University of Aarhus of “systematic one-sidedness in the choice of data and line of argument”.
Lomborg’s book examines what he calls the “litany” of pessimistic predictions for the Earth’s environment. “We consistently believe that things in the environment are worse than they are,” Lomborg told 91av. He says that when he examined data behind issues such as climate change, pollution, deforestation and extinction, things looked much better.
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But some scientists charge this was because Lomborg only included results that support his rosy view. Last year some of them took their complaints to the Danish research council’s committee, charged with judging issues of scientific fraud. Lomborg issued a detailed reply refuting the charges, but the committee last week upheld the complaints (see “Call off the witch-hunt”).
The problem, say committee members, is that Lomborg claimed to have looked at all the facts and found the experts wrong, when he clearly hadn’t. “We cannot say if his conclusions are right,” says Hans Henrik Brydensholt, who heads the committee. “By accident, they might be.” But, says Brydensholt, Lomborg failed to support them scientifically, although the committee did not conclude this was deliberate. Lomborg rejects the committee’s decision, saying it failed to document examples of his supposed wrongdoing.
In its defence, the committee cites articles in Scientific American last year, which listed many cases of selective use of environmental data in Lomborg’s book.
The Danish parliament is now calling for an investigation into eight environmental analyses conducted by Lomborg’s Institute for Environmental Evaluation. One found that the country’s recycling scheme for cans and bottles cost considerably more than incineration for marginal benefit.