London Telegraph

Bjorn Lomborg, a former member of Greenpeace, has been branded a traitor by the international environmental movement. His crime? He debunked almost all of its claims about the earth's perilous state. Now, he is a marked man.

Bjorn Lomborg does not look like a dangerous revolutionary. When the 37-year-old political science professor from Aarhus University in Denmark slipped into London on Friday afternoon, he was wearing trainers, jeans, a brightly coloured cagoule and a knapsack just like any other skinny, blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian backpacker.

But to the nabobs of the international environmental movement - the researchers, bureaucrats, politicians and protesters whose most passionate beliefs and professional livelihoods are staked on the near-religious conviction that the world is confronting imminent environmental catastrophe - Lomborg is the anti-Christ. This former ecological activist and member of Greenpeace has had the temerity to suggest the world is not coming to an end. And the result, as he revealed last week, is that he has become a marked man.

It all began last August when he published the book The Sceptical Environmentalist, which reported in painstaking statistical detail that the world's resources were not running out, its species were not rushing to extinction and global warming might not turn out to be quite so disastrous after all.

As Lomborg puts it: "It's unrealistic to say that everything is getting better. But we need to get a sense of priority. For example, the level of pollutants is dropping dramatically in the developed world. The air in London is cleaner today than at any time since 1585.

The average person in London was much worse off in the past than today.

"It is worrying that the rain forest is shrinking. But the fact that people are cutting down trees doesn't mean that the world is coming to an end. Even by the most pessimistic scenarios, people in the developing world will be richer in 100 years time than we are now. So, by then, a Bangladeshi would also be concerned about the environment and able to afford to set aside land and regrow forest. It's a temporary problem. We won't lose the rainforest forever."

For daring to utter such eco-heresies, Lomborg has received threats from enraged environmentalists and now opens mail with extreme care for fear of what parcels might contain.

From the moment that Lomborg first published his ideas as a series of articles in the Danish newspaper Politiken, campaigners have been lining up to assault him as an intellectual fraudster who is motivated by a fascistic desire to discredit the environmental left. The Danish environment minister even sent Lomborg's articles to 2,500 civil servants, instructing them to report any mistakes they could find.

Lomborg reports ruefully: "A lot of my left-wing friends had a hard time with me being so 'immoral' as to say that the environment was actually getting better. There's a presumption that I'd be out there felling rain forests if I could."

The science magazine Nature went so far as to declare that Lomborg "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." The accusation was particularly tasteless since Lomborg happens to be gay.

But then nothing infuriates ideologues more than a traitor to the cause. And, to ecologists, that is just what Lomborg is.

"I was a comfortable, left-wing, worried kind of a guy. If you'd asked me in 1980, I could not have imagined that we wouldn't be running out of resources by now. I'd go to rallies and marches, but nothing where I could get arrested. I'm way too suburban and academic for that."

But then, in 1997, he read an article about a renegade American professor called Julian Simon who had for decades been using official U.S. Government statistics to disprove claims made by environmentalists.

In the late 1960s, eco-evangelists such as the best selling author Paul Erlich stated: "In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite any crash programs embarked on now ... Before 1985, mankind will enter a stage of scarcity in which accessible supplies of many kinds of minerals will be nearing depletion."

Simon argued the opposite: that resources would become more abundant and cheaper, and events proved him right. Even so, when Lomborg read about Simon's work summed up in a 1995 book called The State of Humanity, he still held the orthodox ecological world view. "I was totally sure Simon was wrong," he says.

"I thought: 'It should be easy to showed he's wrong, and it'll be fun debunking him.' So I got my students to go through a chapter of his book each to check his statistics.

Lomborg gives one simple example of the deviance between theory and practice; the conservationists' claim that the world is losing up top 40,000 species of animals and plants to extinction every year and is heading towards the loss of 50 per cent of all species. this estimate is based, Lomborg claims, not on observation, but extrapolation from theoretical equations.

'The theory says that if you cut down 90 per cent of a forest, you lose 50 per cent of the species it contains. But that doesn't seem to be confirmed if you look at specific examples."

The Brazilian Atlantic rain forest was almost entirely cut down, mainly in the 19th century. By now, many of its species should be extinct.

But, as it turns out, the Brazilian Zoological Society and the World Conservation Union compiled a list of 300 species of indigenous mammals, birds and plants, and not one of them had become extinct.

It would be OK for the theory if only 45 per cent of species had become extinct. But if you find nought per cent extinct, that seriously questions that whole idea because it's dramatically not true."

Lomborg's essential thesis is not anti-environmental at all. He doesn't want to pillage the planet. He simply argues that environmental protection should be based on rational analysis and sensible risk assessment rather than scare mongering and ideology.

"The underlying belief behind a lot of recycling policy is that we are running out of resources," he says. "It's a spectacular example of a case where old style environmentalists were simply wrong. But many people still believe it. Recycling makes sense to a certain extent, but we shouldn't do it religiously.

"We're not going to run out of resources and we are not going to run out of space to put our garbage.

"Even if the US increased the amount of garbage produced per head by 15% a year, and doubled its population, the total amount of garbage produced by the US in the 21st century could be put in a 100-foot-high pile covering a 28-by-28-km square. In the context of North America, it would be nothing.

"Garbage siting is a political problem - no one wants it in their back yard. But it's not a space problem."

For all our many problems, he says, the world's inhabitants are on average, richer, healthier, longer-living and better-fed than at any time in the history of humanity.

"In 20 years time," says Lomborg, "we'll look back and wonder why we worried so much. Environmentalism won't be a religion anymore, it'll just be good common sense."

For all the demonization he has faced, Lomborg still seems remarkably upbeat. His book has sold well on both sides of the Atlantic, although he insists that, "you don't make a lot of money, not compared to the hours you put in."

And he has become a minor celebrity. That, though, is not what gives him the most satisfaction. "It's not fun being famous," he says, and then grins, "but it is fun being right."