In 1999, Danish professor Bjorn Lomborg published The Skeptical Environmentalist. The book provided an upbeat assessment on global warming and other environmental issues so dear to leftists and their friends in the national media. In his preface, Lomborg admits that he set out to prove that the leftists’ pessimistic pronouncements were accurate. To his surprise, however, he found himself debunking their most cherished beliefs.

He concluded that the developed world is becoming less, not more polluted; that global warming fears have been greatly over-blown; and that, on the whole, both the developed and developing worlds have experienced unprecedented prosperity, Al Gore and his friends to the contrary. Lomborg is a statistician and his book is packed with charts, graphs, and tables. The remarkable thing about his work was that he relied on the findings of official data and published science to draw his conclusions. He was just much more scrupulous in how he used that data than Gore and other enviro-activists.

The Skeptical Environmentalist was popularized on the Internet and favorably reviewed in the Economist and even in the Washington Post Book World. The latter called it "a magnificent achievement." Not surprisingly, the enviro-activists and their leftist friends went after Lomborg with a vengeance. They used journals like Nature, Science, and particularly Scientific American to attack him. Scientific American published a particularly vicious review in January 2002. The Economist later dismissed that review as strong on sneer and contempt, but weak on substance.

Protestors have thrown pies and Internet web sites are devoted to attacking him. Now the Danish Research Academy’s Committees on Scientific Dishonesty has denounced Lomborg’s work as "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice." The committees ignored Lomborg’s replies to their criticisms.

Predictably, the New York Times and Washington Post both read the Danish Research Academy’s finding as a denunciation of his book and a rebuke to him personally. The Times’ Andrew Revkin wrote that the book wasn’t a "runaway best seller" and was only popular among conservatives and opponents of strict environmental regulations. Ironically, AIM invited Revkin to debate global warming at its annual conference, but he declined citing the "time commitment" required for him to prepare for such a debate. The Post did acknowledge that Lomborg’s book was a best-seller.

All this is timely because congress is back in session and pressing for global warming legislation. Democrats and their Republican allies, like John McCain, don’t really care that the science doesn’t support all the gloomy forecasts of impending doom. McCain, for example, wants to impose energy rationing that could cost billions of dollars and lower American living standards dramatically. He doesn’t want to wait for the science. He doesn’t have to, because Lomborg and others have already shown that such forecasts are wrong. That’s why Lomborg has to be smeared and discredited.

Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org