Bjørn Lomborg

Bjørn Lomborg (Danish: [ˈpjɶɐ̯ˀn ˈlɔmˌpɒˀ]; born 6 January 1965) is a Danish author and the president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is the former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI) in Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001).

This book's claim that many environmental issues are overstated attracted criticism from the scientific community and brought Lomborg's popular media attention. In 2002, Lomborg and the Environmental Assessment Institute founded the Copenhagen Consensus. In 2004, he was listed as one of Time's 100 most influential people.

In his subsequent book, Cool It (2007), and its film adaptation, Lomborg outlined his views on global warming, many of which contradict the scientific consensus on climate change. These views include claiming that the negative impacts are overstated and that it is good to oppose climate change mitigation. Lomborg agrees that global warming is real and man-made and will have a serious impact but enumerates other disagreements with the scientific consensus. 

In 2009, Business Insider claimed that Lomborg was among the ten most-respected global warming skeptics. Lomborg's views and work have attracted scrutiny from the scientific community. The majority of scientists reacted negatively to The Skeptical Environmentalist, and he was formally accused of scientific misconduct over the book; the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty concluded in an evaluation of the book that "one couldn't prove that Lomborg had deliberately been scientifically dishonest, although he had broken the rules of scientific practice in that he interpreted results beyond the conclusions of the authors he cited." 

Experts have challenged his positions on climate change and characterized it as cherry-picking. Lomborg was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned an M.A. degree in political science at the University of Aarhus in 1991, and a Ph.D. degree in political science at the University of Copenhagen in 1994.

Lomborg lectured in statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus as an assistant professor (1994–1996) and associate professor (1997–2005). He left the university in February 2005 and, in May of that year, became an adjunct professor in Policy-making, Scientific Knowledge, and the Role of Experts at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School.

Early in his career, his professional areas of interest lay in the simulation of strategies in collective action dilemmas, the simulation of party behavior in proportional voting systems, and the use of surveys in public administration. In 1996, Lomborg's paper, "Nucleus and Shield: Evolution of Social Structure in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma," was published in the academic journal American Sociological Review.

Later, Lomborg's interests shifted to the use of statistics in the environmental arena. In 1998, Lomborg published four essays about the state of the environment in the leading Danish newspaper Politiken, which according to him, "resulted in a firestorm debate spanning over 400 articles in major metropolitan newspapers." This led to the Skeptical Environmentalist, whose English translation was published as a work in environmental economics by Cambridge University Press in 2001. 

The book brought him international prominence as an opponent of the scientific consensus on climate change. He later edited Global Crises, Global Solutions, which presented the first conclusions of the Copenhagen Consensus, published in 2004 by the Cambridge University Press. In 2007, he authored a book entitled Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming.

In March 2002, the newly elected center-right prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, appointed Lomborg to run Denmark's new Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI). On 22 June 2004, Lomborg announced his decision to resign from this post to return to the University of Aarhus, saying his work at the Institute was done and that he could better serve the public debate from the academic sector. As of 2020, Lomborg is a visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank.