Dropping a bombshell on greenery

By PAULA OLIVER

Bjorn Lomborg's boyish good looks hide what must surely be a thick skin.

The casual Dane, known for his uniform of jeans and a polo shirt, has stirred up enough controversy in his 39 years to last several lifetimes.

His latest endeavour to rank the world's biggest problems and try to influence global political spending comes hot on the heels of a book that could have been titled "Bombshell".

Dr Lomborg, a formerly inconspicuous statistician and associate professor of political science at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, instead chose to call his book The Sceptical Environmentalist.

Within its pages he put forth radical arguments for global warming being not as bad as everyone thought.

The powerful reaction that greeted its release continues today.

Since 2002 Dr Lomborg has been the director of Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI), a government-funded organisation which retains a strictly independent structure.

Its brief is to inform the environmental debate and ensure that decisions in that field are well-founded.

But the institute is seen by anti-Lomborg environmentalists as a political instrument designed to help the Danish government reduce spending in the area. Its future is uncertain if there is a change of government.

Critics of the EAI are the same people who lambasted its latest endeavour, the Copenhagen Consensus conference.

Dr Lomborg's idea of getting a panel of top economists to prioritise world spending on the top 10 global challenges was simply a way of him pushing his own anti-Kyoto Protocol agenda, they claimed. They felt sure that climate change would rank at the bottom of the conference's final list.

In the end it did. But Dr Lomborg was unimpressed by the criticism.

"I think that's vastly unfair, in that we have taken time to amass the best available evidence," he told the Herald. "I can understand why some might think that I want to get everything away from the environment. But that's not what I'm about. It's about doing things that have effect."

Get a sense of proportion, Dr Lomborg urges his critics. If you don't have food in your stomach then you don't worry about global warming so much.

"It's the rich countries that are saying 'Kyoto, Kyoto'. Yes, I come from that debate, but I in no way tampered with the process."

Despite working long days to get the conference up and running, he shows no sign of wanting to walk away from the media - or even cycle away as he does at the end of each day.

Dr Lomborg has polarised his homeland - he is revered by his students but many of the general public openly express a dislike of him.

Local media coverage of the Copenhagen Consensus tended to focus on anti-Lomborg sentiment.

His status is perhaps related to an unofficial Danish social code known as Yante Law.

A variant of the Tall Poppy Syndrome, its edicts include: "you shall not think you know more than us", and "you shall not think you are more important than us".

The concept was created by Danish author Aksel Sandemose in a 1930s novel - and it is surprising how many Danes can quickly recite the commandments without prompting.

Dr Lomborg's reception would not have been helped by Timemagazine which named him as one of its 100 most influential people. He remains concerned that people miss what he calls the second part of his message. It was recently reported that US President George W. Bush's election campaign might draw on Dr Lomborg's book as backing for the refusal to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol.

For a self-confessed left-winger that might hurt.

"My problem with George Bush is that he doesn't hear the second part of my argument," he said. "The first part is that Kyoto is bad. But the second part is 'let's do something that's better'."

Unfortunately, he said, environmentalists didn't hear that part of his argument either.

There is no sign yet that the years of controversy have worn him down. But he is open about his desire to return to academia.

His students will be happy to hear it.