Bjørn Lomborg
Based on Wikipedia: Bjørn Lomborg
In the crowded arena of climate change debate, few figures provoke quite as much fury as a Danish political scientist who agrees that global warming is real, agrees that humans caused it, and agrees it will have serious consequences—yet still manages to infuriate environmentalists worldwide.
Bjørn Lomborg occupies a peculiar position in the climate wars. He's not a denier. He accepts the basic science. But his arguments about what we should do about climate change have made him perhaps the most controversial figure in environmental policy for the past quarter century.
The Skeptical Environmentalist
Lomborg burst onto the international stage in 2001 with a book whose title alone was designed to provoke: The Skeptical Environmentalist. His central argument was provocatively simple—many of the most alarming environmental predictions were overblown, and the data, when examined carefully, painted a less catastrophic picture than activists claimed.
The reaction was volcanic.
Scientific American devoted eleven pages to a rebuttal. Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, published a scathing review. The Union of Concerned Scientists called the book "seriously flawed." Critics accused Lomborg of cherry-picking data, misrepresenting sources, and reaching conclusions that the evidence couldn't support.
But something curious happened alongside the scientific backlash: the book became a bestseller. Popular media embraced Lomborg. In 2004, Time magazine named him one of the world's hundred most influential people. The disconnect between his reception in scientific circles and his popularity in mainstream media would become a defining pattern of his career.
The Trial of Scientific Dishonesty
The scientific community's objections to Lomborg weren't merely expressed in critical reviews—they escalated to formal charges. Environmental scientists filed three separate complaints with the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation that adjudicates allegations of research misconduct.
Before the investigation could proceed, Lomborg faced a crucial choice. The committee asked him: was The Skeptical Environmentalist a "debate publication"—essentially an opinion piece—or was it a scientific work? If he chose the former, the committee would have no jurisdiction. Lomborg chose the latter, opening himself to formal scrutiny.
In January 2003, the committee delivered a verdict that satisfied no one. They found the book "scientifically dishonest" in its misrepresentation of scientific facts. But they declined to hold Lomborg personally guilty, citing his lack of expertise in the fields he was writing about.
Think about that finding for a moment. The committee essentially said: this book misleads readers about science, but we can't blame the author because he doesn't actually know much about the subjects he's presenting himself as an authority on.
Lomborg appealed. The Danish Ministry of Science reviewed the case and annulled the committee's decision on procedural grounds—they hadn't adequately documented which specific claims in the book were erroneous. When the committee reconsidered, they decided not to pursue the matter further, reasoning that they'd likely reach the same ambiguous conclusion anyway.
The affair revealed deep tensions in how societies handle scientific expertise in public debates. Two hundred eighty-seven Danish academics, mostly social scientists, signed a petition criticizing the committee for treating Lomborg's book as science when it was clearly opinion by a non-scientist. Meanwhile, over six hundred scientists from medical and natural sciences signed a counter-petition supporting the committee's role in maintaining scientific standards.
The Copenhagen Consensus
While battling accusations of scientific misconduct, Lomborg had already pivoted to a new project that would define his approach for decades to come: the Copenhagen Consensus.
The premise was elegant in its simplicity. Gather prominent economists—including Nobel laureates—and ask them to rank global problems by which interventions would deliver the most benefit per dollar spent. Use the rigorous methodology of welfare economics—a branch of economics that focuses on maximizing societal well-being—to determine how humanity should allocate its limited resources.
The newly elected center-right Danish government was enthusiastic. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen appointed Lomborg to run the new Environmental Assessment Institute in 2002, and the Copenhagen Consensus received significant government funding, with The Economist as a co-sponsor.
The results, however, consistently produced conclusions that critics found suspiciously convenient. Climate change mitigation—reducing greenhouse gas emissions—repeatedly ranked near the bottom of the priority list. Interventions like HIV prevention, malaria control, and nutritional supplements for children ranked near the top. The implicit message: we should address immediate human suffering rather than expensive long-term emissions reductions.
This framing infuriated climate scientists and environmentalists, who saw it as a false choice. Why couldn't we do both? Why accept the premise that resources were so constrained that fighting disease and addressing climate change were mutually exclusive? And wasn't there something circular about Lomborg's methodology—using present-day cost-benefit calculations that inevitably discounted future climate damages?
The Money Trail
The Copenhagen Consensus Center's funding history tells its own story about how controversial ideas find patrons.
Denmark withdrew its government funding in 2012. The center faced closure. Lomborg left the country and reconstituted the organization as a nonprofit in the United States—operating, according to reports, out of a neighborhood parcel shipping center in Lowell, Massachusetts, while Lomborg himself was based in Prague.
By 2015, Lomborg described the center's annual budget as "a little more than one million dollars from private donations." Of that amount, Lomborg personally received $775,000 in 2012—a compensation level that raised eyebrows among critics who questioned the center's nonprofit status and mission.
Then came Australia.
The Australian Saga
In 2014, the Australian government offered the University of Western Australia four million dollars to establish a "consensus centre" with Lomborg as director. The university accepted. What followed was a masterclass in academic resistance to top-down political intervention.
Faculty and students erupted in opposition. Climate scientists around the world joined the protest. When leaked documents revealed that the Australian government—specifically Prime Minister Tony Abbott's office—had approached the university with the funding offer (rather than the university seeking the funds), the political nature of the arrangement became impossible to ignore.
In May 2015, UWA cancelled the contract, declaring the proposed center "untenable" with insufficient academic support. The education minister vowed to find another university willing to host it.
Flinders University appeared to be the next target. In July 2015, senior management began "quietly canvassing" staff about hosting a renamed "Lomborg Consensus Centre." The approach was remarkably clumsy—the story leaked on Twitter before the university could manage the announcement, with initial media coverage describing it as "academic conversations" without mentioning Lomborg's involvement.
Staff and students at Flinders mounted the same resistance that had succeeded at UWA, citing Lomborg's "lack of scientific credibility," his "lack of academic legitimacy," and the political nature of the entire process. Environmental groups launched a national campaign supporting the opposition.
By October 2015, the education minister announced the funding had been withdrawn entirely. The Australian Consensus Centre would never exist.
The Substance of His Arguments
What exactly does Lomborg believe? His position requires careful parsing because it's designed to resist easy categorization.
He accepts that climate change is real. He accepts that humans are causing it. He accepts it will have serious impacts. This puts him well outside the camp of outright deniers. But his conclusions about policy diverge sharply from mainstream climate science and economics.
Lomborg argues that warming will actually reduce total deaths from extreme temperatures, because cold weather kills more people than heat, and a warmer world will have less cold. He argues that the economic costs of climate mitigation—reducing emissions—exceed the economic costs of simply adapting to a changed climate. He argues that resources spent on emissions reduction would be better invested in fighting malaria, improving nutrition, or developing new technologies.
He opposes solar panels, calling them "inefficient" and noting that they require subsidies to compete—though critics point out that fossil fuels also receive massive subsidies. He opposed the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international agreement that set binding emissions targets for developed countries. He has called the Paris Agreement—the 2015 accord that set more ambitious global goals—a "charade."
When journalists and scientists have fact-checked Lomborg's articles, the assessments have been consistently harsh. Climate Feedback, a worldwide network of scientists who evaluate climate coverage, reviewed several of his op-eds in outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Telegraph. Their verdict ranged from "low" to "very low" scientific credibility, citing cherry-picking of evidence and misrepresentation of studies.
Howard Friel, in a 2010 book titled The Lomborg Deception, went further. Published by Yale University Press, the book systematically analyzed Lomborg's footnotes, alleging that the sources he cited often didn't support his claims and sometimes directly contradicted them. Lomborg published a 27-page rebuttal. Friel responded by admitting two errors while rejecting the rest of Lomborg's objections.
Cool It
Lomborg's 2007 book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming expanded his climate arguments, and in 2010 was adapted into a documentary film that explicitly challenged Al Gore's Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth.
The film received lukewarm reviews—51 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes, 61 on Metacritic. Neither a hit nor a disaster, it represented the broader pattern of Lomborg's career: perpetually controversial, perpetually generating attention, perpetually somewhere between mainstream acceptance and scientific rejection.
The Institutional Home
Today Lomborg is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank based at Stanford University. In 2023, he was a mainstage speaker at the inaugural Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, a new organization founded by the controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson.
His journey through institutions is itself revealing. From a lectureship in statistics at Aarhus University. To director of Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute. To founder of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. To American nonprofit operator working from shipping centers while living in Prague. To visiting fellow at Hoover. Each transition marks a shift in his base of support—from Danish academia, to Danish government, to American private funding, to the ecosystem of conservative think tanks.
The Paradox of Partial Agreement
What makes Lomborg so maddening to his critics is precisely that he's not wrong about everything.
Climate adaptation—preparing for a changed climate rather than just trying to prevent it—is indeed essential. Development aid for immediate problems like malaria and malnutrition does save lives right now. Cost-benefit analysis can inform policy decisions. The most ambitious emissions targets are genuinely expensive. Some environmental predictions have indeed been exaggerated.
But critics argue that Lomborg weaponizes these partial truths in service of a conclusion—that we should dramatically scale back climate mitigation—that the evidence doesn't support. They accuse him of constructing elaborate frameworks that give academic veneer to what is essentially a political position: that aggressive action on climate change isn't worth the cost.
The developing world, where climate impacts will hit hardest, has largely rejected his views. As Reuters noted, many nations see Lomborg's argument that technology investment alone can address climate change as dangerously inadequate.
The Evolution of a Position
Lomborg's career arc offers a case study in how controversial intellectual positions find institutional homes and funding sources when mainstream academia rejects them.
Start with a provocative book that challenges scientific consensus. Weather the storm of criticism. Find government patrons sympathetic to your message. When that government funding dries up, reconstitute as a nonprofit. Seek new government patrons elsewhere. When academic institutions reject you, find think tanks that welcome heterodox voices. Maintain a steady stream of op-eds in sympathetic outlets. Cultivate a public profile as a reasonable moderate unfairly attacked by extremists.
Whether you see this as the resilience of an important dissenting voice or the persistence of a well-funded campaign to delay climate action depends largely on where you started on these questions.
The Unanswerable Question
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the Lomborg controversy is how difficult it is to resolve definitively.
His critics can point to scientific consensus, fact-checker verdicts, and the formal finding of "scientific dishonesty" (however procedurally flawed). His defenders can point to the annulment of that finding, his acceptance of basic climate science, and the legitimate questions he raises about policy priorities.
Both sides can point to the same facts—his consistent funding from conservative sources, his personal compensation from his nonprofit, his rejection by academic institutions—and draw opposite conclusions. Is he a grifter who found a lucrative niche telling wealthy interests what they want to hear? Or is he a brave iconoclast whose career was destroyed for challenging orthodoxy?
The honest answer is that certainty is elusive. What's clear is that Lomborg has spent a quarter century in the climate debate's most contested territory—accepting the science while rejecting the implications, agreeing with the diagnosis while disputing the treatment. It's a position designed to be difficult to dismiss and impossible to fully embrace.
And perhaps that's the point.