Who is Bjorn Lomborg?

There seems to be a lot of controversy surrounding him.

Here's a pdf file of his argument in the guardian a few years ago.
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2001/08/14/intro.pdf

Here's some responses to his article. Hope it's ok to post letters to the editor like this. I don't have the URL, but it may still be on the Guardian website:

Monday August 20, 2001
The Guardian

? Lomborg's contrarian attack on greens is part of a well-funded backlash against environmentalists. You should have informed your readers what his Danish colleagues say about him. For instance, Henning Sørensen, former president of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, calls him "untrue" and "dangerous". Jon Fjelds, Professor of the Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen, says his facts are "absurd" and "irrelevant". You also forgot to mention that Lomborg is a statistician. You know what they say about lies, damn lies and statistics.

Andy Rowell
Author, Green Backlash
Andy@dirtrack.demon.co.uk

? Bjorn Lomborg seeks to persuade us that the warnings of environmental collapse are fantasies of agencies which feed directly from prophesies of disaster. It is difficult to see how this theory could apply to Munich Reinsurance, one of the world's largest insurance companies, which last year announced that climate-related disasters have doubled every decade from £30bn in the 60s, when there were 16 disasters, to nearly £270bn in the past 10 years, when there were 70.

Kate Macintosh
Winchester, Hants

I saw him in the recent Time magazine.

here is his website http://www.lomborg.com/

Who are we?

This site was started by a bunch of environmental writers, academics and activists in Oxford, England, who were mildly irritated by the publication in The Guardian newspaper of a series of 'green wash' articles written by Bjorn Lomborg.

Lomborg is author of the much criticised tome 'The Skeptical Environmentalist' (Cambridge University Press 2001) which claims that many of society's concerns about the environment are "phantom problems" created and perpetuated by the environmental movement for its own ends.

On this web site we hope to present our alternative views on the deteriorating state of our environment. We do not wish to personally attack Lomborg - but we do wish to show how some of his analyses are flawed.

http://www.mylinkspage.com/lomborg.html

TomPaine.com ran a good article on him a couple of years back, exposing his arguments for being based in "junk science", without anything substantial to back them up.

As Mark Twain told us, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

Lomborg is proficient in the third.

Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark

A skeptical look at The Skeptical Environmentalist


http://www.gristmagazine.com/books/lomborg121201.asp

A "Skepper" is a blowhard who uses the rhetoric of Skepticism -- the modern movement, not the intellectual process -- to support arguments that may be blatently false, unfalsifiable, or "pseudoscientific".

Skeppers are easily recognized by their propensity to use the word "debunk" as a synonym for "(to) criticize something I don't like."

Also see Skep, v.i., to engage in the process of skepping.

--bkl
Skep me, Daddy-O, eight to the bar!

this site should give you a good start on this fellow
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC5880000