The Shifty Environmentalist

 

Colin Woodard is author of Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas. He lives in Portland, Maine.

Click here to read the first article published by Colin Woodard for TomPaine.com on this subject, "The Tabloid Environmentalist."

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, claims the world's environment is getting better, rather than worse, and that the green movement has played fast and loose with the truth to build their case. But last week in his native Denmark, an official scientific review panel rebuked Lomborg for "scientific dishonesty."

The Jan. 7 ruling by a branch of the Danish Research Agency, Denmark's equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that The Skeptical Environmentalist (TSE) is "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice." In the decision, the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty endorsed a detailed criticism of the book by a group of the world's leading scientists published in Scientific American last year.

Greens hated Lomborg's book, of course. But so did many of the scientists whose work had been presented as evidence that concerns about biodiversity loss, global warming, population growth and other issues were overblown. And as the book became a bestseller with the help of a less-than-skeptical media, many of the world's most prominent scientists spoke out against its inaccuracies, including Pulitzer-prize winning naturalist Edward O. Wilson and Peter Raven, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Danish ruling is potentially embarrassing to the small army of journalists, reviewers, and editors who heaped praise on Lomborg and his book.

While many of TSE's flaws were promptly exposed by The New Scientist, The Times Higher Education Supplement, and other specialized publications in Britian, where it was first released in English, many mainstream papers gave it fawning attention. The Observer's environment correspondent, Anthony Browne, announced it had "demolished almost every... environmental claim with a barrage of official statistics." The Times Of London science correspondent, Mark Henderson, reported Lomborg's global warming claims in a story without other sources. On this side of the Atlantic, Nicholas Wade of The New York Times, called it "a substantial work of analysis" in his lengthy, softball profile of Lomborg. The Washington Post Book World pronounced it "a magnificent achievement," The Wall Street Journal praised it as "a superbly documented and readable book," while Business Week went so far as to name him one of their "50 stars of Europe."

But while the Post, The New York Times, and other papers have carried straight news stories on the recent ruling, Lomborg's most stalwart defenders have continued to rally behind him.

The Economist, which has given Lomborg glowing reviews, recently defended him by printing a 2500-word Lomborg essay and running an editorial entitled "Thought Control" that attacked the Danish ruling as "incompetent and shameful." Since Lomborg was not "conducting scientific research," the Economist declared, "what business is it of a panel concerned with scientific dishonesty?"

"This ruling offers nobody any reason to change their minds on Lomborg's books," says the editorial's author, Clive Crook, The Economist's deputy editor, who said the ruling had "a rather Stalinist ring."

"This committee doesn't produce a single instance of a factual error or a distortion," in Lomborg's work, Cook said by phone from London. "What they say is that the people who wrote the Scientific American article [which denounced Lomborg] are correct and Lomborg is wrong."

The editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, offered an even more forceful defense: "Until and unless someone comes up with evidence that Mr. Lomborg's statistics were erroneous or highly misleading, I will continue to support this outstanding statistical study," he said by e-mail. "No one has yet come up with any meaningful list of errors or of misleading claims." Other reviewers who had praised Lomborg's book were also unaltered by the Danish ruling, dismissing it as part of a cruel smear campaign against a maverick truth teller.

"The scientific establishment is trying to strike back at somebody they regard as an interloper," says Reginald Dale, editor of the journal European Affairs, who wrote a glowing column on TSE for The International Herald-Tribune. "They don't like his conclusions and they don't consider him one of their fraternity....They hate it that somebody other than an environmentalist should be allowed to have or express opinions on the environment."

"I think he's getting a very unfair rap from the media; they've been persecuting them for some time," said Katherine Kersten of the conservative Center of the American Experiment, who promoted Lomborg's book in her column in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. She said the media was "essentially reporting what the scientific community is doing" which boiled down to "unfairly charging Lomborg with scientific negligence."

"It's very difficult for him to find a forum," she said, apparently unaware of that Lomborg has received unusually friendly press coverage, is invited to speak at conservative forums around the world, and appears regularly on radio and television stations worldwide. "The Times and the Post are very one-sided in their coverage," she added. Cambridge University Press, which published Lomborg, did not return phone calls and e-mails requesting comment. The publisher's reputation has been tarnished in the eyes of many scientists who question how the book could ever have passed scientific peer-review.

"What's interesting with the Lomborg book is that it was published by a university press, so we assumed it would be subject to a level of critical scrutiny that other titles are not always," says Chris Lehmann, deputy editor of the Washington Post Book World, who says he's seen a clear drift in the publishing industry towards "potted books of polemic." Such books are becoming more common, Lehmann says, because publishers know they'll get media attention. "And sure enough -- they sell well, spark debate, and get attention," he says. "But then there is an epilogue where the air kinds goes out of the balloon and we're all left scratching our heads."


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Published: Jan 14 2003