LOMBORG-ERRORS | Home | |||||||||||
General issues | ||||||||||||
COMMON MISUNDERSTANDINGS | Quotes | |||||||||||
"Lomborg is/was a professor at Aarhus University"
This is a misunderstanding. Lomborg used to have a
position at Aarhus University as a
"lecturer", which is also called "associate
professor". This is certainly not the same as
"professor". He was on leave from the university
since February 2002, because he was appointed as the director of
the Institute of Environmental Assessment, which was established
on Lomborg´s initiative. He returned to position as "lecturer" at
Aarhus University from August 2004 to January 2005.
From June 2005, he has held a part-time position as
a kind of "attached professor" at Copenhagen Business School. This
title has been given also to other people such as a former prime
minister, an editor in-chief of a large Danish newspaper, and an
actress, i.e. it does not imply scientific merit. From January 2006,
Lomborg´s position at the Copenhagen Business School has become
the position as director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
"Lomborg is a statistician"
This is a misunderstanding. He was educated and employed at the department of political science at Aarhus University, where he taught statistics to the students. But he has not been educated as a statistician, and his books witness a strange lack of respect for ordinary statistical concepts. For instance, he uses the concept of significance only in a few cases when it is an advantage to him. He demonstrates no understanding for the concept of a power function for a test, i.e. the probability of rejecting a false hypothesis, and when he finds that his hypothesis is "plausible", he does not discuss if the alternative hypothesis might be just as "plausible".
"Lomborg was a greenpeace activist"
This is a misunderstanding. Lomborg has - allegedly - paid contributions to Greenpeace, but he has never been a member of Greenpeace, and he has never worked actively in the organization.
"Lomborg was not allowed to defend himself vis-a-vis Scientific American"
This is a misunderstanding. When Lomborg defends himself, he often does this at a great length, quoting long pieces of text. It is quite unrealistic that Scientific American should print such a defense. However, his defense, which encompasses 32 pages, was placed on the S.A. web site in February 2002 and may be read there, together with the responses by John P. Holdren and S. A. editor John Rennie.
"The
plaintiffs sent hundreds of
pages to the DCSD that I was not allowed to reply to"
(Quote: Lomborg in "Politiken", 4th June
2005)
This is not true. He was
given fair opportunities to defend himself, and he used them. His
defenses may be read at the Documents
page. It is true that he was up against rather short deadlines, but so
were the plaintiffs.
"Lomborg was cleared of all charges by the Danish ministry of Research in December 2003"
This is a misunderstanding. The ministry decided that the Danish committees on scientific dishonesty (DCSD) had made a number of formal errors when they issued their verdict, and that the verdict is therefore not valid. The ministry did not, however, comment upon wether Lomborg was dishonest or not; they were not warranted to comment on this.
"300 Danish professors have signed a petition supporting Lomborg´s work"
This is a misunderstanding. The petition was a criticism that the Danish committees on scientific dishonesty (DCSD) had not treated the complaint against Lomborg satisfactorily. It stated that DCSD had not properly treated any single item of complaint against Lomborg (which is correct) and had omitted Lomborg´s response on the raised criticism (which is not correct). The signed declaration did not comment on Lomborg´s views and thus did not express agreement with Lomborg. It was signed by 287 scientists, mostly social scientists, of which about 111 were professors. It was published on 18./1. 2003.
As a counterbalance to this declaration, another declaration in support of DCSD was signed by more than 600 scientists, mainly in the fields of medical and natural scientists. Out of these 600, more than half were professors.
"The expert panel at the Copenhagen Consensus conference ranked projects according to their benefit/cost ratio"
This is the impression that we are given, but it is not quite true. The expert panel themselves did not list the benefit/cost ratios. If one makes an overview of the ratios, it appears that the ranking was not based on these. Instead, the ranking was subjective, based on the panel experts´ own opinions on the world´s problems. Read more about this in a paper by Thorkil Casse."The
European Environmental Agency
(EEA) has asked Lomborg to participate actively in the ranking of
projects in the EU environmental policy"
"The
United Nations Development
Programme is making plans to hire Lomborg in a project where UN
ambassadors will be ranking projects along lines similar to those of
Copenhagen consensus"