A leading international environmentalist, Professor Bjçrn Lomborg, has been found guilty of scientific dishonesty by the Danish government committees that investigate scientific fraud and misconduct.
But the ruling has sparked a furore, with questions raised about the basis on which the decision has been reached, and has forced the Danish Research Agency to issue a disclaimer about its intentions.
This week the Danish parliament will debate whether the country's national Environmental Assessment Institute, of which Professor Lomborg was appointed director last February, should also be investigated.
Professor Lomborg, who is an associate professor of statistics in the Department of Political Science at Denmark's University of Aarhus, provoked fierce debate among environmental scientists with the publication in 2001 of his book The Skeptical Environmentalist.
The book attracted international attention and acclaim for presenting an optimistic view of the future and contradicting current gloomy predictions about global resources, biodiversity, and the size of the world's population. Professor Lomborg outlined his views in the BMJ last month (21-28 December, p 1461).
Professor Lomborg dismissed his critics and made what were considered to be personal attacks on sectors of the research community.
Three complaints were brought against Professor Lomborg last spring, followed by a further complaint in November, all of which hinged on the scientific validity of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
The accusations ranged across data fabrication, distortion, plagiarism, and deliberate misrepresentation of others' results. Evidence was also taken from critiques of the book by four leading experts, published in Scientific American in January last year.
The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty of the Danish Research Agency began its deliberations in June, and took the view that “based on customary scientific standards and in light of his systematic onesidedness in the choice of data and line of argument, [Professor Lomborg] has clearly acted at variance with good scientific practice.”
They concluded that The Skeptical Environmentalist was intended to be evaluated as science, and as such, the scientific message had been sufficiently perverted to warrant the author guilty of scientific dishonesty, although not guilty of deliberate intention to mislead or of gross negligence.
Figure.
Professor Bjørn Lomborg