The world of environmental science begins to resemble the Catholic Church before the Reformation. Anyone who challenges its grim orthodoxies can expect the latter-day equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition. Two years ago, the former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg published a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he comprehensively deconstructed the doctrines to which he had previously been attracted. It is not true, he argued, that the world is heading for environmental armageddon: the dangers to mankind from pollution and overconsumption of resources have been hugely overstated in order to promote the interests of environmental scientists.
As if deliberately to prove his point, the scientists recently fought back, in the shape of a Danish government body, the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD). This Kafkaesque outfit ‘tried’ Lomborg in absentia and declared him guilty of ‘scientific dishonesty’. The DCSD declared that Lomborg, a statistician at the University of Aarhus, had quoted other scientific works only when they ‘support his rose-coloured point of view’ and had acted in areas outside of his expertise.
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