[enviro-vlc] Profile: Bjorn Lomborg [well-known sceptic shifts positions]

[Vern Weitzel]

 From The Sunday Times
August 9, 2009
Profile: Bjorn Lomborg

The Danish scientist provoked fury with his scepticism over global warming. Now 
he’s whipping up a different storm

Single-handedly, Bjorn Lomborg caused global warming pundits to overheat beyond 
safety levels. The Danish heretic has been called a Nazi for his denial of the 
pundits’ cherished beliefs and his life has been threatened. But his latest 
crusade could make his own supporters explode.

The 44-year-old contrarian, who argues that spending billions on reducing CO2 
emissions is a waste of money, has thrown his weight behind a wheeze to create 
vast clouds that would reflect the sun’s energy back into space. The plan 
requires a wind-powered fleet of 1,900 ships that crisscross the oceans, sucking 
up sea water and spraying it from tall funnels.

It is something of a U-turn for Lomborg, hailed as a people’s hero by 
anti-climate-change groups after his 2001 bestseller, The Skeptical 
Environmentalist, contended that global warming was less important than other 
world problems. His admission now that the subject is pressing could be seen as 
a betrayal.

With typical insouciance, Lomborg said he could not care less: “If that 
disappoints people who are sceptics, I am not the least bit unhappy.” The image 
of a young revolutionary is one that the middle-aged statistician has cultivated 
with success, turning up for public debates and business conferences in jeans 
and a T-shirt. With his blond hair and fey manner, he could be mistaken for an 
ageing member of a boy band rather than a career academic.

Cloud-creating ships would have been dismissed as science fiction a decade ago, 
but the Royal Society is expected to endorse the idea and British and American 
scientists are seeking funds for sea trials of prototype vessels. Lomborg claims 
the fleet would cost £5.3 billion, a fraction of the $250 billion (£150 billion) 
that leading nations are thinking about spending each year to cut carbon emissions.

The concept was one of the innovative ideas espoused by the Copenhagen Consensus 
Centre, a think tank of which he is director. “We need to have a debate about 
all of the options, not just the politically correct one of reducing CO2,” he 
said. He is hosting a conference in Washington next month, at which Nobel 
laureates will vote on the most cost-effective solution, and is demanding a 
“global deal” on cheaper ways to reduce the earth’s temperature at a crucial 
global warming conference in Copenhagen in December.

There will be no shortage of those prepared to pour cold water on Lomborg’s 
latest passion. “There are several problems,” said Jonathan Leake, science 
editor of The Sunday Times. “By its experimental nature, we can’t be sure it 
would work. We would be committing ourselves to the recurring cost of 
maintaining an enormous fleet of boats in perpetuity.

“The idea also ignores the second main element of CO2 emissions. It doesn’t 
combat the problem of ocean acidification – what happens when the CO2 which we 
emit dissolves in the ocean and makes it more acidic. The oceans are changing so 
rapidly that in 50 or 60 years’ time there will be parts where shellfish can’t 
survive.”

Leake believes Lomborg serves a purpose in forcing environmentalists to focus on 
their arguments. “On the other hand, he’s a dangerous menace because instead of 
publishing peer review papers he goes in for publicity stunts.”

It was an environmentalist’s stunt that propelled Lomborg to fame. In 2001 the 
Danish academic was promoting The Skeptical Environmentalist at a bookshop in 
Oxford when a protester, Mark Lynas, thrust a cream-laden baked alaska pudding 
into his face. “Hitting him with a baked alaska seemed appropriate,” Lynas said. 
“Global warming is destroying one of the Earth’s last wildernesses and Lomborg 
is trying to pretend it doesn’t matter.”

Suddenly Lomborg was hot news. Journalists flocked to meet the renegade, who had 
to be protected by bodyguards in the hallowed sanctuary of the Royal Institution.

Everyone was gunning for him. Nature, the usually restrained scientific journal, 
printed a review comparing Lomborg with maverick academics who denied the 
Holocaust. Scientific American devoted 12 pages to an attack on his “egregious 
distortions”. Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, said: 
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Lomborg told The Sunday Times: “A lot of people really, really hate me.” His 
dismissive tone did not help. A pending fuel crisis? Hysteria, he said. World 
hunger? Baloney: food was increasing. Species extinction? Rubbish. Disappearing 
forests? Tosh: forest cover had increased. Indeed, he proclaimed, nearly every 
indicator demonstrated that man’s lot had vastly improved. “The world in decline 
is a litany we have heard so often that another repetition is almost 
reassuring,” he said. “There is just one problem: it does not seem to be backed 
up by the available evidence.”

Charles Clover, the environmental writer, characterises Lomborg as “a good bit 
of grit in the oyster” who has “ratcheted back” on his scepticism and occupies a 
place in the broad church of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
rather than outside: “But there’s definitely a glint in his eye. It’s either 
madness or mischief, depending on your point of view.”

Lomborg was born in Copenhagen on January 6, 1965, the only child of a 
schoolteacher mother and a father who was a musician and a priest in the liberal 
Catholic church. “From a fairly early age I was used to being a little unusual,” 
he recalled. “Denmark is a fiercely nonreligious country. But I would be a mass 
boy every Sunday. I was brought up slightly weird, but I got used to the idea 
that just because you’re different doesn’t necessarily break you.”

He grew up in Aalborg, northern Jutland, as a “very academic teenager, clever in 
a slightly nerdy way, awkward, the kind of guy who would always be picked last 
for the football team”. It is an image he appears to have corrected with weight 
training, but other aspects of his upbringing have left their mark. Like his 
parents he is a vegetarian, doesn’t drive, smoke or drink, and retains his 
religious conviction: “I have this deep sense that there probably is a meaning 
and there probably is a God. But it’s not a big thing. It’s not as important as 
being a good person and a humanist.”

He owes his idiomatic English and American accent to a gap year at the 
University of Georgia, where he studied political science. It was there he 
accepted his homosexuality and underwent a political awakening. Worried about 
nuclear weapons, he was caught up in the peace movement’s protests against Nato. 
After taking a PhD, he became an associate professor of statistics at Aarhus 
University in Denmark and would have been “happy to have spent the rest of my 
career doing obscure work that was read by about 50 people”.

Instead, he experienced an epiphany one day in February 1997 as he flicked 
through Wired magazine in a Los Angeles bookshop. His eye was caught by an 
interview with Julian Simon, the American economist, who trashed the 
eco-catastrophists. Lomborg went back to Denmark and with his statistics 
students set about demolishing Simon’s claims. “We honestly believed we were 
going to prove him wrong. But we suddenly realised he had a lot of correct 
points.” Lomborg felt cheated because “something I had spent my life believing” 
turned out to be at least partially untrue. Worse, he was a Greenpeace supporter 
who voted for a left-wing Danish party.

The result was The Skeptical Environmentalist and the vilification of Lomborg 
began. It reached its nadir in 2003 when the Danish committee on scientific 
dishonesty accused him of “perversion of the scientific message” and 
“systematically biased representation”. The charges were later withdrawn.

Lomborg confessed he was “stunned” by the onslaught, although his momentum 
proved irresistible. In 2001 the World Economic Forum had nominated him as one 
of the global leaders of tomorrow; in 2004 Time magazine named him one of the 
world’s 100 most influ-ential people; and last year The Guardian described him 
as one of the “50 people who could save the planet”.

Saving the planet became Lomborg’s job description in 2002, when he was 
appointed director of the Danish national environmental assessment institute, 
tasked with “getting the most environment for the money”. In 2004 his panel of 
economists infuriated many environmentalists by ranking climate change near the 
bottom of the world’s biggest problems.

In 2007 his book Cool It acknowledged that man-made global warming was a problem 
but challenged the notion that it was the biggest threat to human wellbeing. His 
recent interviews suggest an undiminished desire to provoke. He maintains most 
estimates put sea level rises at about 1ft – not the 20ft rise predicted by Al 
Gore, the former US vice-president and Nobel laureate. A warmer Earth will be a 
greener Earth, in which fewer people will die, he claims: “While warming will 
mean about 400,000 more heat-related deaths globally, it will mean 1.8m fewer 
cold-related deaths.”

Lomborg is an optimist, a believer in human progress and adaptability. Some hope 
he has had his day. But he won’t pipe down because he was taught that a good 
case should be pounded home. “If you have a bad case, you should pound the 
table” – something he says his opponents love to indulge in.