Bjørn Lomborg

About

Bjørn Lomborg is an Adjunct Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He has a Master's degree in political science from the University of Aarhus (Denmark; 1991) and a Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen (Denmark; 1994). He lectured in statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, as an assistant professor (1994 – 1996) and associate professor (1997 – 2005). He left the University of Aarhus in February 2005, and in May of that year became an Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School.

Global Warming

Lomborg has become internationally known for his criticisms of global warming theories, largely as expressed in his 1998 Danish book (translated into English in 2001) The Skeptical Environmentalist [W]. After the book's publication, members of the Danish and international scientific community accused Lomborg of scientific dishonesty. These allegations were investigated by appropriate arms of the Danish government and in the end, no official charges were left standing. However, many scientists – in particular climatologists – remain critical of Lomborg's work.

Quotes About

E.O. Wilson said, in On Bjorn Lomborg and extinction:

My greatest regret about the Lomborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expended to combat it in the media. We will always have contrarians like Lomborg whose sallies are characterized by willful ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication with genuine experts, and destructive campaigning to attract the attention of the media rather than scientists. They are the parasite load on scholars who earn success through the slow process of peer review and approval. The question is: How much load should be tolerated before a response is necessary? Lomborg is evidently over the threshold.

The article goes on to refute some of the specific claims made in The Skeptical Environmentalist [W].

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia
• RationalWiki "With respect to climate change mitigation, Lomborg presents the same false dichotomy in much of his output: There are limited resources, so we must choose between dealing with global warming or what Lomborg has decided are "more important problems". He considers AIDS and other diseases, starvation, malnutrition, and poverty to be more important problems than global warming, yet his framing of the issue treats global warming as a discrete issue, ignoring the fact that it will actually exacerbate the other problems he considers to be more important. Strangely, Lomborg spends most of his time and effort debunking these "unimportant" environmental concerns, writing tendentious books and setting up bullshit forums titled in such a way as to confuse the ignorant — he has done little to nothing to encourage greater spending on what he considers the really great problems."
• SourceWatch ""Lomborg is not a climate scientist or economist and has published little or no peer-reviewed research on environmental or climate policy. His extensive and extensively documented[2],[3] errors and misrepresentations, which are aimed at a lay audience, "follow a general pattern"[2] of minimizing the need to cut carbon emissions.""