Last month, The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation severely repudiated a board which, a year ago, had judged The Skeptical Environmentalist, the best-selling book by Bjorn Lomborg, “objectively dishonest” and “clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.”
Lomborg’s book — with 2,930 footnotes, 1,800 bibliographical references, 173 figures and nine tables — powerfully challenged the conventional wisdom that the world’s environment was going to hell. When it was published in English in 2001, the book, published by the distinguished Cambridge University Press, was praised in The Washington Post, The Economist and elsewhere.
That reception provoked panic among radical greens. In early 2002, The Economist reported that “Mr. Lomborg is being called a liar, a fraud and worse. People are refusing to share a platform with him. He turns up in Oxford to talk about this book, and the author
