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A Danish “court” has just released an extraordinary ruling. Bjorn Lomborg, the statistician who recently wrote the best seller “The Skeptical Environmentalist” opposing the environmental lobby, has been found guilty of scientific dishonesty. Click here to read the verdict. Greens are jubilant, but serious scientists should be
ashamed. The verdict is not
what it seems. The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty was created
by the Danish Medical Research Council and is part of the Danish Research
Councils. I.e. it is
government-funded. Its
members have no special scientific expertise‚ on the relevant issues.
They were Nils Axelsen, a medical doctor, Finn Collin, a philosopher, Jorgen
Dalberg-Larsen, a lawyer, Arne Helwig, an agronomist and Margareta Jarvinen, a
political scientist. It is strange that a committee on scientific dishonesty
should be judging Lomborg at all. Lomborg
never claimed to be doing any original science.
His book was political. In
it he had examined what he called the litany of environmental alarmism and
compared it with publicly available data. The
vast majority of environmental scares were unsupported by the data.
Of course things might suddenly get worse in future.
Lomborg never claimed to be predicting the future.
He simply looked at claims that things had been getting worse in the
recent past and checked them against the facts.
The only real point of scientific dispute between him and the
environmentalists was over factual errors, the time periods he chose to examine,
and the sources he chose to use. Lomborg corrects factual errors as soon as they are
drawn to his attention. He
uses the most authoritative sources available and the longest time periods for
which data are available. The committee appears to have reached its verdict on the
basis of its disagreement with Lomborg’s interpretation of his results rather
than on accusing him of misquoting any facts. It is difficult to judge these since the committee
gives no specific examples of scientific dishonesty.
However, it appears to base these on a series of articles by his
opponents published in Scientific American last year. It ignores Lomborg’s detailed rebuttal of these criticisms
and offers no new information itself to help judge who is correct. The verdict is extraordinary. Political opponents attack a political book.
A panel of government scientists then take it upon themselves to believe
the opponents without further ado and convict the original author of scientific
dishonesty. Orwellian?
More like the Spanish Inquisition!
Danish scientists should hang their heads in shame. Jim Thornton, Nottingham 12 Jan 2003 We reprint a number of comments on the controversy on related pages. See above.
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