Best-selling scourge of the greens accused of 'dishonesty'

He has been the environmental movement's gadfly, irritating the greens beyond endurance, provoking some of them to spluttering rage. But now Bjørn Lomborg has been slapped down in a way that may leave him spluttering himself.

Eighteen months ago, the youthful Danish professor of statistics launched a widely publicised attack on the global green community's central and most cherished shibboleth, that the condition of the world is getting worse.

No, said Lomborg. Concerns about melting ice caps, deforestation and acid rain were exaggerated. They were "phantom problems", a false litany of messages of doom that the green movement had to proclaim to underpin its very reasons to exist.

In reality, he said in his hefty best-selling book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, hunger, poverty and disease were all on a downward trend. Air and water had not been so clean since before the industrial revolution, he added, fewer species were becoming extinct than was claimed, global warming was not so terrible and although the condition of the world was not yet good enough, it was vastly improved.

In steadily asserting the contrary, said the professor, environmentalists were playing fast and loose with the facts. He said: "Over the past few decades there has been an increasing fusion of truth and good intentions in the environmental debate."

Now this very accusation has been thrown back in his face by a senior committee of scientists in his home country who have labelled his work "scientifically dishonest".

The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty, a branch of the Danish Research Agency that draws together some of Denmark's most senior scientists, spent most of last year closely scrutinising Lomborg's work. Now it has condemned it.

The sound of greens rejoicing could be heard around the world last night, but such are the passions that have been evoked by the Lomborg debate, it is important to be precise.

The professor is not convicted of being deliberately misleading or negligent in argument himself; rather his work as a whole is regarded as a scientifically dishonest enterprise (if the distinction can be followed).

The committee's 6,640-word judgement concludes: "Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty. In view of the subjective requirements made in terms of intent or gross negligence, however, Bjørn Lomborg's publication cannot fall within the bounds of this characterisation. Conversely, the publication is deemed clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice."

Following up a series of detailed complaints to it from other scientists and environmentalists, the committee judged that Lomborg was guilty of presenting his work as science, instead of "a provocative debate-generating paper".

It was his bias that was unscientific, they said. "The defendant ... based on customary scientific standards and in light of his systematic one-sidedness in the choice of data and line of argument, has clearly acted at variance with good scientific practice."

Hans Henrik Brydensholt, the committee's chairman, said that Lomborg did not make "thorough searches for all available sources ... including what goes against one's supposition", alleging: "He used sources in favour of his own beliefs."

Last night Lomborg agreed that he may not have always quoted all available sources, but said the panel had failed to provide any examples of the alleged unfairness. "You can't say I am scientifically dishonest or in breach of good scientific conduct unless you point the finger and say this is the smoking gun," he said.

"It's like saying you committed murder but we won't tell you who you killed. It's impossible for me to defend myself."

The academic, 38, who has a doctorate in political science and formerly taught statistics at the University of Aarhus, said he had never tried to hide that he was not professionally an environment specialist, adding his book was meant to start a debate.

It certainly did. The green movement reacted with fury. One of the things that upset environmentalists so much was that although Lomborg presented himself as a green by conviction – he is a former member of Greenpeace – his thesis was eagerly seized on by the opponents of environmentalism in business and conservative politics, especially in the United States, to demonstrate that the environmental case held no water whatsoever. He was seen as a traitor.

Perhaps more than that, though, Lomborg touched a raw nerve with the greens. He went straight for the jugular, for the core of their case, in a way no one had quite done before, using a new weapon: precise statistical rigour.

To many environmentalists, his book is pure and simple heresy and entirely beyond the pale, but to any unbiased reader its undeniably impressive aspect, and the reason why it was taken so seriously – it has been translated into a dozen languages – is the scope of its sourcing. Lomborg takes assertion after assertion that the world is getting worse, with regard to forests, water, waste, energy supplies and other sectors, and attempts to demolish the statistical basis of each one.

You may agree with him or you may disagree with him, but what you can certainly do is follow his argument back to the original sources in each case. In the 500-page book they are precisely referenced – all 2,930 of them.

This was more than a rant, this was something of substance, and it was hailed in many quarters as a brilliant and overdue piece of iconoclasm.

But equally, senior scientists and academics as well as environmental campaigners took issue with Lomborg, saying his work was flawed by its bias. A group of US academics, headed by Edward O Wilson, acelebrated naturalist, wrote to his publisher, Cambridge University Press, saying: "We rarely see this type of careless and manipulative scholarship in the undergraduates we teach."

Eventually, the criticisms reached the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty as formal complaints.

One of the original complainants was Jeff Harvey, a former editor at the British scientific journal Nature and currently a senior scientist at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology.

He said yesterday: "It is unfortunate that I and many others felt it necessary to take Lomborg and his book to task for the veritable deluge of inaccuracies it contains, but he has veered well across the line that divides controversial, if not competent, science from unrepentant incompetence.

"Lomborg has failed time and again to rectify the egregious distortions he makes, he has based his conclusions on cherry-picking the studies he likes, and he has seriously undermined the public's understanding of important contemporary scientific issues.

"Scientists must be held accountable for serious transgressions that are committed without responsibility, and this judgement goes at least some way to underlining Lomborg's dishonesty."

In April last year Lomborg was appointed by Denmark's new right-wing government as director of the country's Institute for Environmental Valuation, but his position would not be threatened by the judgement against him, Danish government sources said.