Bjørn Lomborg

Bjørn Lomborg (born 1965 in Frederiksberg, Denmark) is a Danish writer, academic and commentator on environmental policy. Trained in political science rather than statistics, though he is often called a statistician because of his university posts, he became known internationally for challenging many of the environmental warnings that dominated the news. His name remains tied to debates about how environmental problems should be measured and which of them deserve the most attention.

Lomborg earned a master's degree in political science at Aarhus University in 1991 and a PhD at the University of Copenhagen in 1994. He then taught statistics at Aarhus for several years. In 1998 he published four essays on the state of the environment in the Danish newspaper Politiken, which sparked a long public dispute. To answer his critics, he went through data from bodies such as the United Nations, the FAO, the World Bank and the IPCC. The result was The Skeptical Environmentalist, published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. Scientific journals including Scientific American and Nature published harsh reviews, while The Economist defended the book. In 2003 a Danish committee on scientific dishonesty found the book objectively dishonest in its handling of data, but did not find Lomborg personally guilty, because he was not a specialist in the field. A final ruling in 2004 closed the case.

Between 2002 and 2004 he directed Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute, where he helped launch the Copenhagen Consensus, a project that ranks global problems by cost and benefit. In 2007 he published Cool It, arguing that global warming is real and man-made but that the most common climate policies are economically inefficient. His legacy lies less in winning agreement with his conclusions than in pushing parts of the climate debate, often framed in moral terms, toward questions of cost and priority.