A Vindication of Bjorn Lomborg

Lomborg’s experience shows what happens when a researcher challenges a powerful narrative with inconvenient numbers.

When the Danish scholar Bjorn Lomborg published The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001, the reaction from the environmental establishment was not debate but an attempted excommunication. Scientific American devoted a special package to attacking the book as biased and error-ridden. Union of Concerned Scientists accused him of misrepresenting science and overstating good news.

In Denmark the response went further. The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty decided that The Skeptical Environmentalist was “clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice” and “objectively” fell within the concept of scientific dishonesty. Disgracefully, the Committees based their finding on biased third-party critiques, presented no documentation of errors, and engaged in rank anti-Americanism, such as alluding to “powerful interests in the USA bound up with increasing energy consumption and with the belief in free-market forces.”

The case generated international headlines and was treated as a formal stain on Lomborg’s integrity. A year later Denmark’s Ministry of Science threw out the initial decision on numerous counts. They found the original decision “dissatisfactory” and “emotional,” but most importantly the Ministry invalidated the decision because it was “not documented” and it was “completely void of argumentation” — something which a legally valid decision needs according to Danish law. The Ministry sent the case back to the Committees, which declined to reopen it.

The substance of Lomborg’s crime was simple. He took the environmental litany of doom and gloom and checked it against long-run data from the UN, the World Bank, and other official sources. He concluded that on most indicators human welfare had improved, many environmental trends were not as catastrophic as advertised, and that resources devoted to some flagship green causes would save more lives if redirected to basic health, nutrition and economic development. He accepted that global warming is real and largely man-made but argued that the standard policy mix of aggressive near-term emissions cuts was a poor investment compared with targeted adaptation, innovation and poverty reduction.

Lomborg did not claim private revelation. Inspired by the late Cato Institute Senior Fellow Julian Simon, he spent years compiling statistics and trend lines, ultimately drawing on some 3,000 mostly secondary sources. His method was explicit: quantify problems, rank them by costs and benefits, and ask where each extra dollar does the most good. The Copenhagen Consensus project that Lomborg leads extended this logic by convening economists to compare policies ranging from HIV prevention to trade liberalisation to climate mitigation, again with the aim of maximising welfare per dollar spent.

For this, he was branded a “denier,” portrayed as a tool of fossil fuel interests, and treated as someone whose views lay outside polite discussion. DeSmog today still amusingly describes him as a “climate crisis denier” and campaigns against funders that support his work. Scientific critiques often slid into attempts to discredit him personally, and one law review article documents how even his attempts to reply in detail were met with legal threats from critics rather than open exchange in the same pages.

Two decades later, the world looks more like Lomborg’s spreadsheets than like the early-2000s apocalypse rhetoric. Emissions are rising more slowly than feared, climate-related disaster deaths have fallen, and poor countries still face more immediate threats from malaria, malnutrition and lack of basic infrastructure. Into this landscape, Bill Gates has recently stepped with a climate memo that reads uncannily like a Lomborg column.

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On 28 October 2025, ahead of the COP30 summit in Brazil, Gates published “Three tough truths about climate” on his Gates Notes site. There he argues that although climate change will have serious consequences, “it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” and that people “will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.” He warns that an obsessive focus on near-term emissions targets has crowded out more effective ways to help people and calls for “a strategic pivot” toward improving lives, particularly in poor countries.

The key line could have been lifted from a Copenhagen Consensus report: “The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been,” and limited resources should go to interventions that deliver the greatest gains for the most vulnerable. That is Lomborg’s central thesis restated by one of the most influential philanthropists on the planet.

There is more than rhetorical convergence. The Gates Foundation has long supported the Copenhagen Consensus’ focus on development. It has donated over $3.5 million to partially fund policy prioritisations in the two Indian states of Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, a report of Best Buys for Africa for the African Academy of Sciences, and a stock-taking prioritisation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Such endeavours resulted in peer-reviewed economic research showing the 12 best investments for humanity. These 12 policies are described at length in Lomborg et al.’s book Best Things First, which was picked as one of the best books of 2023 by both Financial Times and The Economist. In other words, Gates has not only started to sound like Lomborg on climate and development; he has been funding Lomborg’s basic approach to global problem-solving for years.

Gates’ memo has sparked outrage among climate activists for soft-pedaling catastrophe, for questioning temperature as the main metric of success, and for insisting that health and prosperity are the best defences against a warmer world. Yet these are precisely the points Lomborg made when he argued that rich countries should not block poor ones from using reliable energy, that adaptation and growth can greatly reduce harm, and that chasing ever more expensive emissions cuts while neglecting cheap life-saving interventions is bad ethics as well as bad economics.

Lomborg’s vindication does not rest on perfection in every graph or forecast. (I have always argued that Lomborg ought to be trusted not because he gets everything right, but because—constantly checked by thousands of critics who wanted him to fail—he had every incentive to make fewer mistakes than those living in the epistemic bubble of environmental catastrophising.) It rests on three elements that his opponents tried to delegitimise but have failed to overturn.

First, he insisted on measuring long-run trends rather than reacting to headlines. That is why The Skeptical Environmentalist spent so many pages on fertility, food production, air and water quality, resource prices and disaster statistics. The message was that human ingenuity and market-driven growth had solved or mitigated many of the problems that earlier generations thought insoluble, and that policy should build on that record instead of assuming inevitable decline.

Second, he treated climate change as one serious problem among many, not as a singular moral crusade that trumps all other goals. His later book Cool It argued that some highly touted climate policies failed basic cost-benefit tests and that a mix of modest carbon pricing, technological innovation and targeted adaptation would do more good at lower cost. Gates now echoes this logic when he calls for innovation, cheap clean energy and continued investment in health and development, rather than pouring every available dollar into symbolic emissions cuts.

Third, Lomborg approached priorities as an empirical question, not as an expression of moral purity. The Copenhagen Consensus exercises rank policies by expected benefit per dollar, often putting vaccines, nutrition and basic education ahead of grand climate targets. That framework is nothing more than applied welfare economics. It is closer to the ethos of evidence-based public health than to the emotional politics that have dominated the climate debate.

That is what it means to say that Lomborg was driven by science rather than dogma or emotion. He did not deny problems. He asked how big they are, how fast they are changing, and what works best if we care about human flourishing. His opponents often responded not with better data but with attempts to brand him as illegitimate, to sic committees on him, and to deter others from asking similar questions.

The appearance of Bill Gates on Lomborg’s side of the argument underscores how fragile that strategy was. If climate change is not the end of the world but people will actually thrive, if poverty and disease remain the main killers, and if policy should be judged by lives improved rather than tons of carbon alone, then the core of Lomborg’s message stands.

There is a broader lesson. Modern societies claim to revere science, but too often turn scientific disputes into moral battles in which heretics must be shamed or silenced. Lomborg’s experience shows what happens when a researcher challenges a powerful narrative with inconvenient numbers. The attempt to punish him did not change the data. It only delayed a necessary conversation about trade-offs, priorities and the best use of scarce resources.

That conversation is now unavoidable. Gates has effectively cemented Lomborg’s main points, even as activists denounce them. Instead of pretending that never happened, we should recognise it for what it is: a belated vindication of the skeptical environmentalist who asked the right questions first.

This article was originally published in Quillette on 11/20/2025.