To list of chapters                                                                         Previous page


Evaluation in Denmark of The Skeptical Environmentalist
    The first protest book against Lomborg, "Fremtidens Pris", was written in Danish. The editorial board behind this book decided that an English version should also be produced, and work on this started in the autumn of 2002. It soon turned out that there were so many differences of detail between Lomborg´s Danish and English books that a simple translation of the protest book was not relevant. Every chapter had to be carefully worked over. Of the original 18 authors, 12 agreed to revise their chapters and have them translated.
    I (Kåre Fog) used a great part of the winter 2001/2002 revising my contributions to the protest book. In so doing, I had the opportunity to study to what extent Lomborg had responded to the criticism that had been advanced. It turned out that he had learned very little. When he published his text for the first time in Denmark, the errors and flaws might have been due to ignorance and random selection of sources. Many relevant corrections and references that he should have consulted had been pointed out to him in 1999. Nevertheless, when he produced the English version of his text in 2001, he continued to publish most of his errors and flaws, even though he must then have known that his text was biased. By that time it was therefore beyond doubt that his bias was deliberate.
    One of the chapters that I revised was on deforestation. Lomborg had consulted a new, authoritative report on the state of the world´s forests, published by FAO in the spring of 2001. This FAO report stated with much greater certainty than before that the global forest area was declining. Although Lomborg had read this, he did not change his original text, and still claimed that the global forest area is not declining, so that he could still present WWF as an unreliable institution. More than anything else, this proved to me that Lomborg was guilty of deliberate and malicious manipulation.
    The English version of the protest book was called "Sceptical Questions and Sustainable Answers". Like the Danish version, it was published by the Danish Ecological Council. Only a few hard copies were printed, but the book was placed on the Council's website (www.ecocouncil.dk), from where it can be downloaded in full. It was available from June 2002.
    Unfortunately, it has received little attention so far. It is strange to me that Lomborg´s book, which is full of errors and flaws and not reliable, is sold in large numbers throughout the world, whereas a book that corrects the errors and gives a more balanced view of the same topics, is nearly completely ignored.

Next page