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A 38-year-old Danish statistician last week found himself convicted of the ancient crime of heresy. Despite his vehement denials, a specially-convened committee tried him, and found him guilty of insisting that the End of the World is not Nigh.

Among environmentalists, Dr Bjorn Lomborg is the devil incarnate, an academic Beelzebub determined to convince us that, contrary to everything we have been told, our planet is not really on the brink of eco-disaster at all.

The evidence for his heresy is all there in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, published in 2001. He says that many of the claims made by activists about the state of the planet are just not borne out by the evidence: from pollution to poverty levels, infant mortality to life expectancy, many aspects of life on earth have improved dramatically in recent decades.

This might sound like the rose-tinted view of some puppet of the military-industrial complex, yet Lomborg describes himself as an "old Left-wing Greenpeace member". More extraordinary still, Lomborg cheerfully admits that he has done no original research to back his claims. Instead, like a good statistician, he has simply tracked down the latest data from independent and reputable sources, and let the evidence speak for itself.

Unfortunately for Lomborg, the environmental lobby does not like what it heard. For the past two years, it has pursued a campaign of vilification of him and his book, using everything from scathing reviews to ad hominem attacks - and custard pies in the face.

The culmination of the campaign came last week, with the publication of a report by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty - the state-funded watchdog of scientific ethics in Denmark. It declared that there had been "such perversion of the scientific message" in The Skeptical Environmentalist that the book was "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice".

The apparent humiliation of Dr Lomborg has been greeted with jubilation by environmentalists, who see it as pay-back time for someone hell-bent on humiliating them. The rest of us should be disturbed by the parallels between the treatment of Dr Lomborg and that meted out nearly 400 years ago to another scientific troublemaker.

Everyone thinks that they know the story of Galileo's persecution by the Catholic Church. Yet in reality, the villains of the piece were not the cardinals, but Galileo's fellow academics. As a vocal critic of the Aristotelian philosophy then being taught in universities, he threatened to undermine their professorial status and income. In a brilliantly orchestrated campaign, they compelled the Inquisition to investigate Galileo's "heretical" claims, and eventually got what they wanted: his silence.

In Lomborg's case, the campaign has been organised by self-serving environmentalists, whose complaints have been accepted without demur by the Orwellian Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty. While accusing Lomborg of "systematically-biased representation", the report consists chiefly of assertions by his critics lifted from the pages of a popular science magazine. The committee all but ignored Lomborg's own defence, along with the fact that his book was refereed by four independent experts - all of whom recommended publication.

Environmentalists hoping that last week's ruling will do for Lomborg what the Inquisition did for Galileo are likely to be disappointed. Far from winning his silence, they have given his devastating critique of eco-scaremongering yet more publicity - and shown what the scramble for grants and charitable donations is doing to the search for truth.

By Robert Matthews 12/01/2003

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Last modified: February 11, 2006