Thought control

Jan 9th 2003
From The Economist print edition

The scourge of the greens is accused of dishonesty

THE Bjorn Lomborg saga took a decidedly Orwellian turn this week. Readers will recall that Mr Lomborg, a statistician and director of Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute, is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist", which attacks the environmental lobby for systematically exaggerated pessimism. Environmentalists have risen as one in furious condemnation of Mr Lomborg's presumption in challenging their claims, partly no doubt because he did it so tellingly. This week, to the delight of greens everywhere, Denmark's Committees on Scientific Dishonesty ruled on the book as follows: "Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty."

How odd. Why, in the first place, is a panel with a name such as this investigating complaints against a book which makes no claim to be a scientific treatise? "The Skeptical Environmentalist" is explicitly not concerned with conducting scientific research. Rather, it measures the "litany" of environmental alarm that is constantly fed to the public against a range of largely uncontested data about the state of the planet. The litany comes off very badly from the comparison. The environmental movement was right to find the book a severe embarrassment. But since the book was not conducting scientific research, what business is it of a panel concerned with scientific dishonesty?

One might expect to find the answer to this question in the arguments and data supporting the ruling-but there aren't any. The material assembled by the panel consists almost entirely of a synopsis of four articles published by Scientific American last year. (We criticised those articles and the editorial that ran with them in our issue of February 2nd 2002.) The panel seems to regard these pieces as disinterested science, rather than counter-advocacy from committed environmentalists. Incredibly, the complaints of these self-interested parties are blandly accepted at face value. Mr Lomborg's line-by-line replies to the criticisms (see www.lomborg.com) are not reported. On its own behalf, the panel offers not one instance of inaccuracy or distortion in Mr Lomborg's book: not its job, it says. On this basis it finds Mr Lomborg guilty of dishonesty.

The panel's ruling-objectively speaking-is incompetent and shameful.

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